A critical look at the Ukrainian crisis, and what we can do to stop it
Many of us in the west have resigned ourselves to helplessly watching the violence in Ukraine unfold on our televisions screens, as we try to responsibly vet which Ukrainian charities to support directly. If you are like me and could desperately use a dose of optimistic realism right now — know that you can do more than merely send a few of your dollars overseas, especially if you live in a country with as much political leverage as the United States.
Here is what you, as an American, can do to maximize your aid to Ukraine:
Call your friends, family, neighbors and coworkers, and start organizing a general strike/mass protest, until the US government does what it should, which is broker a diplomatic meeting with the Kremlin to put an immediate cessation to the ground warfare and further invasion of Ukraine, and bring the west to start negotiating new political, economic and military relations with Russia.
These negotiations would almost certainly include Ukraine maintaining neutrality with regard to NATO, and possibly part of the Donbas region being peacefully annexed to Russia as a means to stop the bloodshed and guarantee no further expansion of Russia into Ukraine. In return, both NATO and Russia would issue good faith steps of border disarmament and make legible, material promises to continue on paths of general nuclear disarmament. The west doesn’t have to disband NATO — it just has to stop pushing it further and further eastward, as we repeatedly assured we would not do during diplomatic negotiations in 1990.
Every conflict ends in some kind of negotiation, so let’s skip the prolonged bloodletting, save countless lives and get to it, already.
But why would we need to mass protest to bring our government to act as a peace broker in the first place? Plus, couldn’t the Kremlin view an immediate attempt to negotiate as a weakness to be exploited? Sadly, yes — and that is why our government will sit by for as long as it possibly can as the bodies of innocents pile higher and higher in Ukraine.
As a first step to understanding the conflict in Ukraine, I have to underline the importance of understanding a materialist conception of history, as it is the only way to outgrow grade school-level, largely rhetorical arguments. Many of us make admirable struggles to understand complicated geopolitical events, only to fall into platitudes about “good and evil” countries. I can hardly blame people for doing it — it’s exactly the type of grainy analysis one would expect to see from citizens of a country which dumps billions into advertising and public relations campaigns (we generally call this ‘propaganda’ when other nations do it), and then disseminates that propaganda via increasingly sophisticated media platforms that use all of our sensitive data to ceaselessly atomize, delude and distract us.
Put simply, a materialist understanding of the world starts with the acknowledgement that practically every nation-state in the world — largely following the coercive lead of the nuclear arms-backed superpower, the United States (and the cherished neoliberal debt-enforcing mechanisms it helps create, like the IMF) — has organized the entire project of humanity around the privatization of as much of the material world as possible for an increasingly small, incredibly wealthy minority. When a state decides not to support this project — say, when its people democratically elect a government that decides to put its own citizens interest ahead of the United States’— that nation is sanctioned, destroyed or overthrown in favor of a regime that will support the interests of a hegemonic minority.
There’s a few reasons why the US’s current reaction to the crisis — namely the current path of harsh multilateral sanctions against Russia — is not going to work the way the David Frums of the world think it will.
Firstly, the economies of Europe, Russia, the US, China, Latin America, etc, are all closely linked, as Americans are about to find out; the US cannot issue broad sanctions against Russia without also hurting itself, hurting the EU, and strengthening the position of rival nations like China. That is an entire essay in itself — the Caspian Report has a thoughtful, broad-level and easy to digest analysis of how the current Ukraine crisis can affect the entire world. Part of the reason our sanctions will be ineffective lies in the fact that we’ve refused to invest in renewable energy infrastructure for decades — depending on oil imports from countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia, as it turns out, significantly weakens our leverage in geopolitical crises such as this one. (Perhaps bills like Citizens United — which allowed American billionaire tycoons to drown out the interests of working class Americans, and keep us all enthralled to infrastructural systems that were inherently both finite in supply and privately controlled — were bad all along?)
Secondly, these myopic stopgap measures to redress territorial violence will never be able to reconcile with the root causes of large geopolitical conflicts, like this one. We shouldn’t be in this position to begin with.
In case I’ve ever been misunderstood on this point (I tend to focus my criticisms toward the actions of my own government) — Putin is a tyrannical, oligarchical fascist who serves the extreme elite of Russia at the expense of everyone else — but he is not an idiot. Frankly, as someone who has never underestimated Putin’s intelligence, I was astounded that he would employ such a reckless display of aggression. It’s not only opened him up to easy and widespread media criticism, it’s opened his country to heavy international economic sanctions and potential military conflict. He has put himself in a position where the west could respond in virtually any way imaginable, and the public would uncritically support it.
Without apologizing for the grotesque acts of violence being committed in Ukraine, I think it’s important for us in the west to contextualize why this is happening, if not simply to educate ourselves on world affairs, but as a starting point to properly aid Ukraine in the present moment.
Russo-Ukrainian conflict is a long, historically complex discussion, and I’ll be the first to admit I’m not fit to educate anyone on that topic. Everyone in the West seems to suddenly be an expert in Ukrainian politics and history — it’s incredibly annoying and I don’t want to be that guy. However, notwithstanding one’s incomplete knowledge of the rich and complex history of the UA/RU that goes back hundreds and even a thousand years (predating the modern nation-states and going back to Kievan Rus’), I think its safe to say that we can understand the majority of the unfolding geopolitical situation through a lens that focuses on events of the last 30 years. In that sense, one obvious part of this conflict involves the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO, a multi-national military alliance that was effectively meant to check the military power of the Soviet Union, which dissolved in December of 1991.
If it were somehow to pass, Ukraine officially joining NATO would mean that, suddenly, there would be an imminent prospect of supersonic missiles, supplied by the US and its allies, 5 minutes away from the capital city of Moscow — literally right on the Russian border.
Consider for a moment a hypothetical situation in which one of our neighbor states decided to join a military alliance with our arch rival, who happened to be a nuclear superpower. How would the United States respond? Fortunately, we don’t have to wonder all that hard, because there’s a country called Cuba.
In the late 1950's, Cuba decided to nationalize and redistribute land to the peasantry who worked it instead of continuing to sell it to US corporate food moguls like United Fruit, which prompted crippling economic threats from the US, which in turn prompted Cuba deciding to start an exclusive trade agreement with the Soviet Union instead of us, wherein we finally responded by using the biggest military arsenal in world history to blockade, sanction and starve one of the smallest countries in the world, which has continued for generations, including decades after the Soviet Union’s dissolution. The United States also responded by openly invading Cuba, violating it’s right to sovereignty, and the CIA attempted to assassinate their democratically elected president, Fidel Castro.
Now, rather than falling into a materialist contextualization of history that becomes American “what-aboutism,” I submit that acknowledging our history of self-interestedness — and the fact that Putin is acting in a way that looks pretty similar to what a US president would historically do — only needs to be construed as apologia if you can’t bring yourself to criticize war crimes regardless of who is committing them.
Am I trying to be contrarian? No. I don’t believe in war, and I’m taking the time to type this out because I honestly believe that: until we recognize the rather obvious fact that Putin is a self-interested and rational actor closer to HW Bush than he is to Adolf Hitler, the sooner we can put this geopolitical conflict into perspective, and the sooner we can move toward a diplomatic solution, and a future of disarmament, equity and peace.
As someone with extended family living in Ukraine, I appreciate everyone’s messages of solidarity with the innocent people caught in this war. That’s why I would encourage anyone who wants to further help to focus your direct action on a) pressuring our western governments — particularly the US government — to negotiate a diplomatic end to this conflict as swiftly as humanly possible, rather than accelerate into a prolonged armed conflict, and; b) charitable donations focused on providing much needed medical resources, as a large amount of “lethal aid” is going straight to arming the Azov Nazi paramilitary groups in Ukraine, whom you can find ample footage of online not just committing brutal war crimes against Russians, but terrorizing and shooting their own Ukrainian civilians as well.
Again — our paths of direct action as responsible citizens only start with charitable donations. There is so much more you and I can do.
As we condemn the horrifying violence in Ukraine, I also hope that we notice the contrast between our outcry for the people of Ukraine, and our comparative silence on limitless other instances of state-sanctioned violence, which we support through our indifference. Granted — it’s easy to condemn violence when you’ve been brought up from birth to believe a certain country is inherently evil, and then that country decides to attack a sovereign neighbor. Perhaps the horror of war is being elucidated for us westerners in a useful way right now. Usually, there is a multi-billion dollar media apparatus working against us — there is a highly sophisticated military and political apparatus to ensure that the US never has to expose itself to its citizens the way Russia is being exposed right now. It instead chooses covert operations, drone warfare, and all manner of political subterfuge to maim, expropriate and starve anyone it considers to be a rival; there is an active genocide being committed against the Palestinians by our government’s closest ally, Israel, to name a single example.
Our obligation to Ukraine and to the rest of the world starts with us taking off the shades of nationalism, and taking a fresh, unbiased and critical look at our foreign policy, our military, our leaders, ourselves, and starting a discussion about the kind of future we want. As Noam Chomsky famously pointed out in his televised debate with William F. Buckley re: US terrorism in Vietnam in the 1960s, “We are responsible for what we do,” so let’s send a loud and clear message to the administration we elected — who ostensibly exist to serve our interests (if liberal democracy means anything) — to use the United State’s status as a global hegemon to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible.
