What We've Lost In Ukraine

Slava Ukraini

Before February 2022, I had spent just as little time thinking about Ukraine as any other red-blooded American. Let’s see, what did I know? I knew that women wore hair in rings around their head and were famed for their beauty. I knew that a surprising number of Russian hitmen in American TV shows turned out on closer inspection to be Ukrainian and were very surly about the misidentification. I knew that there was a certain amount of ill-will in American Jewish communities left over from mistreatment between the pogroms and the Second World War — a Bat Mitzvah had once broken up in confusion when the grandfather of the Bat Mitzvahee had used his time at the mic to denounce Poles and Ukrainians for their complicity in einsatzgruppen round-ups; and my college counselor, running into me at Absolute Bagels at the time of the Crimea occupation, had said, “I don’t have a dog in this fight,” meaning that the Russians had acquitted themselves better than the Ukrainians during the war. I had read Quiet Flows The Don and Odessa Stories. I had a general notion that Anatevka might well be in Ukraine. In my high school Russian class, my teacher had had a very particular look on his face when he told us that, in Russian, Ukraine means “the end of the earth.”

Not Russian. Ukrainian.

But then Russia invaded and it was such an offense to everything that was important to me. From my perspective it didn’t have that much to do with Ukraine itself, but it was a complete violation of the international order; of the principle of state sovereignty that the Russians had spent the last two decades nattering on about; of the agreements that Ukraine had signed in the ‘90s voluntarily giving up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees; of the basic idea of the nation-state. I was trying to keep the hysterical side of my brain from comparing everything to 1938 or ’39 but it seemed impossible to avoid the thought. Putin was obviously expansionary. It had been Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, the Donbas. Now it was all of Ukraine and next would be who knew what.

In the context of that moment, it didn’t seem like a particularly big deal to go to Ukraine. I was working on a documentary about military veterans and their PTSD. Every one of the sad veterans I was talking to had fantasies about saddling up and supporting the Ukrainians — mostly just to give some exercise to their itchy trigger fingers. We chose one, essentially an old army buddy of the director’s, and followed him through to his joining up with a Ukrainian unit as a combat medic. It was an educational experience in all sorts of ways — choosing dehydrated meals from REI so that we would be able to feed ourselves while we were there; learning how to put on a gas mask (the trick apparently is to be completely shaved so that gas can’t pass through the cracks created by facial hair); and, maybe most importantly, getting into the state of mind of being in a country at war, feeling how one’s horizons tightened, how one got into the frame of mind of always only putting one foot in front of the another, how instinctually one looked to trust whoever was around (I’ve written about all this here and here) — but, in the end, it was certainly less dramatic than I thought it would be when the three of us with the film boarded our plane in Minneapolis to fly to Krakow and then try to cross the border from there. Lviv turned out to be maybe the single nicest city I had ever been to — old, with soul, and a great coffee culture. There was one missile strike when we were there, hitting a fuel depot on the outskirts of town, and a great cry of “Slava Ukraini” went up on the street right after the blast and our vet, who worked as a firefighter in Minnesota, went running off ahead of the film crew with the evident intention of putting out the fire all by himself. After several days of wandering around and his trying to find some way to be useful, we made the jump to Kyiv — which seemed like a big deal at the time — but it turned out that the Russians were in the midst of a regrouping, had pulled back from Kyiv and from the surrounding towns like Bucha, and were now concentrating their attack in the east. And Kyiv turned out to be maybe even nicer than Bucha. I tried escargot for the first time, developed a taste for Georgian food, became a familiar face in the bar, which I thought of as the Star Wars cantina where these different International Legion roughnecks and soldier-of-fortune types tried to connect to Ukrainian units.

War is hell

In terms of filming, our project was largely a bust. Our film wasn’t really about Ukraine, it was about veterans, the vet we were following wasn’t very charismatic and quickly got tired of being filmed. He connected with a unit that was training in a hotel and, essentially, we dropped him off there. When his leave from his fire department ran out, he returned to Minnesota. The last time I saw him his wife was giving him grief for having turned over his helmet to a pretty young information officer connected to the unit who said that she would forward it to her boyfriend on the front lines.

But I was nothing if not impressed with the Ukrainians. It really was one of the few moments in life where everything is as it appears to be. The Ukrainians I met were intensely patriotic, they had a pro-Western perspective, and they were shocked and horrified (if not entirely surprised) by what Putin had done. “This is just so terrible,” said Victoria Murovona, a children’s television producer, at a humanitarian aid station in Lviv. “Russia is just like ‘you don’t want to live in shit with Putin like us, how dare you!’” said Artem Kyriienko, a musician I met at a cafe. Certainly, the attack hadn’t come out of nowhere. For a decade, Russian state media had been awash in propaganda against Ukraine, tales of crucifixions and just about anything you could think of. “Like every fucking day for eight years,” said Anton Okhmhush, who worked with me as a driver in Kyiv.

Piano in Kyiv, 2022

The Ukrainian perspective, any way I squinted at it, was very straightforward. Ukraine had had a really very unfortunate history. “There have been like twenty Russian-Ukraine wars,” Artem said — and the absolute lack of natural defenses did in fact make Ukraine extraordinary vulnerable to outside forces, whether Mongols, Turks, Poles, Hungarians, Nazis, or Russians. Ukraine had been intertwined enough with the Russian Empire that there was no real question of national independence during the great wave of 19th century nationalism, but at the first opportunity, in 1917, Ukraine did in fact declare itself an independent state. In 1991, Ukraine again declared its independence together with 15 former Soviet republics. The first years of independence had been rocky and Ukraine had been swerving between pro-Russian and pro-Western vectors, above all in the fratricidal 2004 presidential contest between Yukoschenko and Yanukovych. But, in 2014, with Maidan and then with Putin’s seizure of the Crimea and attack on Donbas, Ukraine had taken a staunchly pro-Western position — as is the right of any nation-state to choose its foreign policy. What the Ukrainians wanted was, as far as I could tell, really extraordinarily reasonable — membership in the EU, self-determination, the right to speak Ukrainian.

As I went deeper into my education on Ukraine, I found myself — above all on the long car ride from Lviv to Kyiv — reading Timothy Snyder on Ukraine’s unfortunate history. Ukraine — this was Snyder’s main contention — wasn’t the end of anybody’s earth. Its history tended to be told from the perspective of the European capitals, and from Moscow, but just shift one’s orientation slightly and Ukraine becomes the center of the conversation. For one thing, Ukraine really shouldn’t have been anybody’s “satellite” or part of anybody’s “sphere of influence.” Ukraine had a population of 40 million, about the size of Argentina or Canada. Ukraine had had its own language for many centuries. The relative absence of a Ukrainian independence movement in the 19th century was only an indication of how thoroughly it was dominated by Russia (with, for instance, Ukrainian banned in schools). And Ukraine paid an enormous, unspeakable price for that domination. As Snyder writes, “Between 1933 and 1945, Soviet and Nazi colonialism made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world.” In the 1930s, eager to export grain to elsewhere in the Soviet Union Stalin simply starved eastern Ukraine — killing around 5 million in the Holodomor. Ukraine became the primary battlefield of the Second World War, with around 8 million deaths occurring on Ukrainian soil and with both German and Soviet forces launching multiple attacks that fell hardest on the Ukrainian civilian population. In this context, the development of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism — the crowds that greeted Hitler as a liberator in 1942, the Banderite movement, even the Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS — are if not exactly forgivable (certainly the Russians have never been able to let the Ukrainians forget it) then understandable. Stalin’s Soviet Union had been unimaginably brutal to the Ukrainians in particular; by 1942, ‘the enemy of my enemy’ logic must have seemed very compelling to many Ukrainians.

Starvation in Kharkiv during the Holodomor, 1933

And after all these vicissitudes, all these historical traumas, a democratically elected Ukrainian government had chosen to align itself with the West, had requested membership in the EU, had fought back ferociously against a Russian invasion, and had asked for Western military support — what else could the liberal West possibly do but honor that desire? And the more I read about Ukrainian history, the more struck I was by a statement that Johann Gottfried Herder, the father of nationalism, had made in 1769. On a visit to Ukraine, he wrote, “Someday will awaken there a cultured nation whose influence will spread throughout the world.” Herder wasn’t in any way an important figure to me, but I couldn’t help but be moved by the consonance. Ukraine, it turned out, wasn’t some appendage to the project of liberal nationalism (this was Putin’s primary contention — that the Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian national identity, were a made-up concept, sort of as if somebody had decided, say, in the American Southwest to declare the Republic of Spanglia with Spanglish as its official language) but was at the very genesis, even the inspiration, for liberal nationalism.

Shattered tanks in Bucha. The sign means “people.”

Even Vladimir Putin — in his “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” his schoolboy’s essay that doubled as a virtual declaration of war, was compelled to acknowledge the essential justice of the Ukrainian position. “Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development…can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. How should we to treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!” he wrote — before then immediately stating that that logic, as it so happened, didn’t apply in this case, because of the deep historical ties between Russia and Ukraine, because of the prophecy of Oleg the Prophet in the 10th century (long preceding any old Herder) that Kiev and Moscow would never be sundered, and because the simple, stupid Ukrainians had fallen for a bit of Western propaganda.

Like a good, crochety political commentator, I’ve spent the last two years diligently looking for holes in the Ukrainian narrative, but so far I haven’t found any. I’ve watched John Mearsheimer’s talks on the war, I’ve read different éxposé accounts of how American involvement in Ukraine was greater than had been reported in February 2022, but nothing has shaken my bedrock belief in the Ukrainian cause — or my conviction that, in a time when liberalism was losing confidence in itself all over the Western world, the example of Ukraine offered a critical demonstration of the values that we had to believe in, of the best kind of patriotism, of the need to fight (and if necessary to die) for our truths.

Mearsheimer was interesting from the perspective of grand strategy. His argument was that the United States had made a strategic mistake in the ‘90s, pushing NATO eastward and committing to defend a belt of Eastern European states that were, essentially, indefensible; and had compounded the error by tacitly committing to Ukraine. It was a reasonable, hard-headed analysis, but nowhere in it was there any recognition that Ukraine, as a nation of 40 million, might get to have a say in shaping its own destiny; or that there was any higher law in politics than terms being dictated by whomever happened to have nuclear weapons. And I read with alarm various éxposés on the US’ conduct in Ukraine. It was a shock to me then, as it is now, that US intelligence early in the fighting had teed up the locations of Russian generals for the Ukrainians to execute — which did seem to be a remarkable escalation in the New Cold War. And The New York Times’ account of how US intelligence agencies had turned Ukraine into a “listening post” in the decade before the 2022 invasion certainly somewhat bolstered Putin’s case for war, that Ukraine could reasonably be interpreted not as an innocent, independent state seeking its own national identity but as an enabler of US imperialism and on Russia’s very doorstep. And my belief, based on oral accounts I’ve heard, is that the extent of US training of Ukrainian troops between 2014 and 2022 still hasn’t been fully reported.

But, in the end, none of that really swayed me. All of these partnerships had been, at least to a great extent, from Ukraine’s initiative — the Ukrainians had an acute sense, from hundreds of years of suffering, of what being part of the Russian imperium was like and were eager to reshape their alliances. As much as I tried to be cynical about US foreign policy, I couldn’t see what was so unethical in the US honoring that evident desire of the Ukrainian government.

Dog. Bucha.

The conflict seemed then, as it does now, to be very simple — an independent nation-state protecting its own borders and seeking the help of any and all allies who would come to its aid. What mattered here weren’t tangled questions about the scope of NATO but bedrock principles of the nation-state system. And, almost immediately after arriving in Ukraine, I understood that it would be very, very difficult for the Western democracies to keep their focus even in a matter where right and wrong were as clear-cut as this. At the time I got on the plane, there were Ukrainian flags flying all over the place; coffeeshops in the small Minnesota towns where I was getting ready for my trip were covered with work by local Ukrainian artists. Within a week or so of my being in Ukraine, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars and suddenly that was the only thing that people online could talk about. There were raging battles on social media about whether Americans would be equally outraged if a Middle Eastern or African country were being invaded; the chief villain of the moment seemed to be a CBS correspondent who said that Ukraine was more “civilized” than Iraq or Afghanistan. The Ukrainians were almost preternaturally focused and united — they felt that they were fighting for survival. The Russians were very focused — “the propaganda works perfectly,” a Ukrainian colonel told me ruefully — and were in it for the long haul. But the weak link in the chain was the Western democracies’ inability to focus on anything for a long period of time. There were elections, and there was the quick-twitch news cycle, and then there was the unquenchable need the media had to be contrarian. “Starting in February 2024, it started to be claimed in the papers, on the internet, and basically everywhere you looked, that Ukrainian forces were on the point of collapse….The narratives were nonsense but they did great damage,” Phillips O’Brien recently wrote on Substack. The entire time I was in Ukraine, with the misfits and lost boys of the International Legion, I could feel the air going out of the tires. Nothing had really changed on the ground — the Ukrainian cause was as just as it had been a month earlier, the Russians were simply regrouping for a grinding, slogging offensive that they have spent the last three years executing, but, fundamentally, after the first round of flag-waving, the American public couldn’t be bothered to give a shit. I’ve had my own deep guilt about this — should I have stayed on even without the documentary? done what

Tim Mak

did and dedicate myself to reporting from Ukraine? I’ve definitely thought about it since then. But of course it goes beyond that, and is deeper than the actions of any specific individuals. We have all failed here. Ukraine was a golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to remember ourselves, remember our values, and stick up for them — and we squandered it.