Crime and Punishment
When evil is done, it's easy to condemn the wickedness of others, but braver and more useful to examine our own complicity
Imagine a ghastly news story: A local woman has shot her husband!
The media eagerly feed our outrage. They tell us nightly of the husband’s suffering from his injuries. They spend months digging into the wife’s evil plans, her nasty personality, her sordid past. Why, they say, she was even planning to try to kill others in the neighborhood!
But as more information comes out, the picture is less clear. It turns out that the wife had some cause; not enough to justify attempted murder, perhaps, but enough to mitigate some of our preachy condemnation. The suggestion she was “planning to kill others,” never plausible, seems ever-more ridiculous and shrill. (That doesn’t stop the news media from endlessly repeating it.) And there is a new twist to the story: Apparently, she had been seeking help from the authorities for years, only to be scoffed at.
In the weeks before the crime, she had even openly warned the prosecutor’s office, including in writing, of how she would resort to vigilantism and violence if no one took her seriously. She made a public show of buying a gun. She told the chief prosecutor flatly that she would use this gun if the authorities would do nothing to provide her relief. The chief prosecutor had spoken with her twice by telephone. In the end, he had laughed at her, and told her: “We don’t think your concerns are serious, we think you sound like a big crybaby. If you commit this act of violence, we will prosecute you mercilessly. But otherwise, we aren’t going to talk to you anymore.” (Mind you, this is the same chief prosecutor who, in the wake of the shooting, never stopped grandstanding smugly and piously about that awful crime and its evil perpetrator.)
You and I are citizens in this hypothetical. As we watch it all unfold, where should we focus our time, our energy, our passion?
I suspect most of us would agree: On the hypocrisy and failures of the prosecutor.
That doesn’t mean we excuse the crime itself, or that we absolve the one who committed it. But it does mean that we have a right — a citizen’s obligation, in fact — to expect more from our authorities.
The arrogance and moral idiocy of Washington D.C.
I’m still waiting with dread for the Ukraine war to end. But I often think back to how it began. It was like my hypothetical above, with the wife pointedly buying a gun while begging the authorities for relief, only to be scorned.
More than three years ago, in the months before the Russian military invasion, the Kremlin offered our White House drafts of a proposed treaty — similar to ones that Russia had repeatedly offered over the past 12 years or so — to re-design the world’s security architecture. Moscow insistently asked for formal talks. They also warned they would resort to violence and vigilantism, if we continued to maintain an enormous, hostile, CIA-guided presence in Ukraine.
This was obvious and easily inferred at the time, both from the public record and from Russian and independent expert commentary, and it was confirmed several months ago by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invad[ing] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that. … [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”
You can watch his remarks below (downloaded from the NATO website).
Stoltenberg was not quite right when he said that Russia’s “precondition for not invading Ukraine” was that we accept and sign a new treaty.
We only had to be willing to talk politely about it.
In other words, in the countdown to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin told President Biden that war could be avoided — and all President Biden had to do was agree to a dialog, a true, honest dialog, about Russian unease with NATO encirclement.
Apparently, our reply was to condescendingly refuse — to say something like: “We don’t think your concerns are serious, we think you sound like a big crybaby. If you want to invade Ukraine to make your point, go right ahead, and we will prosecute you mercilessly. But otherwise, we aren’t going to talk to you anymore.”
Remember when President Joe Biden was suddenly the first to loudly predict the war? He told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a long phone call that Kyiv could be “sacked”, and he should “Prepare for impact!”
Zelensky did not believe Biden. Why would Russia invade? It made no sense! But Biden knew what Zelensky did not: that he and his White House had all-but invited the attack, with their diplomatic raised middle finger.
Ukrainian officials told CNN back then that the call with Biden “did not go well,” and immediately after, Zelensky publicly asked America to stop whipping up “panic” and insisted war was unlikely.
“I’m the president of Ukraine and I’m based here and I think I know the details better here,” Zelensky said crossly then.
At that time there were more than 100,000 Russian troops just over the Ukrainian border. But as Zelensky pointed out, the Russians had amassed troops on the border before ahead of diplomatic negotiations, then drawn them down. If a desperate woman shows the prosecutors the gun she has bought, it doesn’t mean she’ll use it. It does represent an opportunity to intervene — before the violence.
We declined to intervene, because we — meaning, our defense contractor-controlled politicians — preferred the violence.
This is such important context to remember today.
Simply promising that Ukraine would not be absorbed into NATO (which, by the way, was a legitimate and popular position in Ukraine itself) would have defused the crisis and prevented the war. This would also have been reaffirming the Barack Obama foreign policy — something we might have expected Obama’s former vice president-turned president to favor.
Instead, Biden’s White House greenlit the Russian invasion, with a wolfish grin of anticipation, and the Russians foolishly and criminally obliged.
They had instant buyer’s remorse. The war was barely two weeks old when the Kremlin spokesman said Russia would cease military operations “in a moment” if only Ukraine would declare neutrality — meaning, no NATO memberships — and also grant autonomy to the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk (of note, Russia was pointedly not annexing those regions at that time). Zelensky immediately welcomed this. He said he’d “cooled down” on joining NATO, and as to the fate of Donbas territories like Luhansk and Donetsk, “we can discuss and find a compromise on how these territories will live on.” Peace was more important.
Moscow and Kyiv reached for conciliation after just two weeks of war? Our media all-but censored that, focusing instead on the criminal known as Russia, with her evil plans, her nasty personality, her sordid past. And behind the scenes, our politicians and foreign policy “experts” worked frantically to undermine any progress toward peace.
After just 21 days of war, Kyiv and Moscow nevertheless had a working draft of a peace treaty, and in just a few weeks more, there was a signed-and-agreed deal.
This, too, was scuttled at American insistence. That fact has been testified to now by many participants and insiders, including top Ukrainian officials involved, U.S. foreign policy scholars, former U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder, and former Israeli prime minister Neftali Bennet, to name but a few. (The New York Times has also published draft documents of some of those peace agreements, although under an absurd headline asserting the peace talks “fizzled,” when actually they were shut down by Washington itself.)
Three years on, a new presidential administration is, at least rhetorically, advocating for peace. Yet the war grinds on. The only thing that seems certain is that whatever result is eventually reached, it will never be as favorable for Ukraine as were those earlier peace proposals.
And it all could have been avoided in the first place.
This commentary, while thoughtful and instructive, misses another "off-ramp" that could have avoided this tragedy.
After the Maidan coup and after Yanukovich was driven from office, his offer to submit to a new election rejected by the mob, the newly empowered western Ukrainians had the option of reaching out in accommodation, if not friendship, to their Ethnic Russian Ukrainian partners. Instead, they resorted to violence and to suppressive legislation directed against "separatists". What followed was a bitter civil war, with 15,000 killed.
The same bad brew is being enacted in Estonia, where ethnic Russians are being robbed of their civil rights while NATO/US, as with Ukraine, moves its military into the region.
It's comfortable here in the West to assign the term "criminal" to Russia's reaction. We need to do more thinking about this and measure Russia's reaction not as criminal but as expected in response to our own aggression.
Matt
I recall some very ugly conversations with Russian friends over NATO expansion when I worked with you at the Moscow Times; ugly because I had just come out of my own military service and still believed American foreign policy was basically well intentioned & that NATO was a force for good.
The memory of those conversations and pretty much every subsequent event in Ukraine woke me up to one set of very important facts that have reshaped my views on national security:
Every nation has its own security needs. The more powerful a nation is, the greater it’s FELT security needs — and the more its weaker neighbors’ ACTUAL security depends on that powerful nation’s SENSE of security.
The ultimate (peace-seeking) task of powerful rivals & weak neighbors is to persuade powerful nations that they are secure.
Willful disregard — or innocent neglect — of that reality is destabilizing.