Special Edition Dispatch: Bear witness to Ukraine's suffering, and remember the apologists
Special Edition Dispatch: Bear witness to Ukraine's suffering, and remember the apologists
We're seeing a crucial distinction between a professional army and a gang of undisciplined conscripts led by an autocrat.
Your Line editors had a column about the Canadian budget planned for today, but after spending too many hours seeing pictures we can never unsee of the atrocities on display in Ukraine — and atrocities we must call them — it became impossible to write about anything else. The reports are preliminary, of course, and not all may be substantiated. But the scale of the violence, which is being confirmed by those Western news teams that have been able to reach the area, make the facts clear. A crime of enormous proportions has been committed. We do not yet know its scale. We may never.
First, a warning: if you have not already done so, we must caution our readers about spending too much time digging up the horror reels now coming out of Ukraine. By no means do we discourage it, exactly. To some extent, we have a moral duty to bear witness to what is happening there, even from a distance. But the degree to which that demand bears on each individual is a fraught question. There are pictures and testimonies there that can't be forgotten: dead civilians with their hands tied behind their backs, bodies tossed casually into mass graves, reports of rape and torture, entire families murdered along with their pets.
War is vicious and brutal and ugly, which is why we must do everything possible to avoid it. However, what is on display here is one of the crucial distinctions between a professional army and a gang of undisciplined conscripts led by an autocrat. The armies of the West have committed their fair share of crimes and evils, no sane person would challenge this fact. War draws the worst of human nature like poison from the boil and even the best of us is still burdened by that nature. But, on the whole, our militaries are professional forces, thoroughly trained and subject to regimentation, hierarchy, and accountability. We have professional, long-serving NCOs — sergeants and petty officers — and well trained officers. This has the effect of lessening (although nothing can totally eliminate) the subsidiary violence of conflict: rape, looting, torture and murder. Nothing can zero out the tragic abuses of civilians during wartime, but it’s long been clear what can be done to at least put a lid on the worst of the violence. We generally do those things.
The Russians don’t even try. As if the logistics failures of the Russian army did not already demonstrate this fact, their soldiers are comparatively amateurish and poorly trained. As recounted here in Paul Wells’ interview with Canadian Army Lt. Col. Melanie Lake last week, the Russians keep losing generals and other senior officers because those relatively rare professional soldiers have to operate much closer to the front if they want to effectively command the semi-trained rabble that makes up most of the invading forces. The Russian military is overwhelmingly composed of short-term conscripts who’ve received the minimum training necessary to accomplish their assigned tasks, and that’s about it. When they can't get ahead using conventional military tactics, they resort to shelling softer targets like apartment blocks; and when a city or town falls to them, they have a long-established habit of turning back into something more akin to a mob than an army. Especially when faced with local resistance.
We have no real doubt that the Russian leadership is implicitly or explicitly approving these campaigns of atrocities because it serves their own strategic end. These are campaigns of terror, and not at all dissimilar from what Russians have meted out elsewhere in other recent conflicts. These aren’t just the excesses of a badly trained and led army, though that’s part of it. This is also, bluntly, part of the Russian plan. This is how they choose to wage war.
Witnessing this brutality, so nakedly on display, is stirring the conscience in some quarters. To quote one:
How many "Never Agains" must we all endure before it becomes blindingly, incontrovertibly obvious that of course, of course, these were just words? How many genocides and civil wars and refugee crises and ethnic cleansings must we write about before we come to terms with the fact that the "responsibility to protect" doctrine lies in ashes in the dirt of our shared values? The West will choose to intervene — or not — based on its real or perceived interests. The rest is public relations.
Right now, the West's interest in avoiding a nuclear exchange far outweighs whatever values it claimed to possess in the wake of the Holocaust. To quote journalist Neil Hauer: "the West will fight Russia. To the last drop of Ukrainian blood."
We don't like it. But nor will we pretend to be surprised by it.
As for the Russians themselves, as alluded to above, any reading of history, long or recent, could have prepared you for what is now unfolding in Ukraine. Yes, the Red Army played a pivotal role in defeating the Nazis — and the people living in the lands they liberated paid for that aid by enduring a well-documented period of organized looting, wanton violence and mass rape. The armies of the West were not composed of saints, certainly, but Russian soldiers suddenly confronted by the comparative wealth of their enemies and allies abroad were particularly notorious for taking and doing as they pleased. What was true in 1945 remains true in 2022. And in recent years, in Chechnya or Syria.
We would like to pretend that the blame for this could be left at the feet of Vladimir Putin alone, but this would not be true. The political system in which Russia operates promotes hard brittle men like Putin, and as long as that system exists, his replacements will ultimately be of the same cut and trim. Until Russians are free, no one in Europe will rest easy.
And there isn’t much we can do about this. We’ve already sent the Ukrainians about all the Canadian Armed Forces can spare from its own arsenals. To the extent we’re able, we should continue to send those weapons, as should our other allies, especially those better able to help. Canada should also prioritize humanitarian relief and resettlement of displaced Ukrainians here in Canada, for as long as they need safe harbour. Even these acts, which are entirely unobjectionable and not in the least bit politically fraught in this country, are proving painfully beyond the capabilities of our slow and sclerotic government, which have grown fat and complacent on peace, prosperity, and performative partisanship.
Beyond that, all we can do is note and condemn the Western apologists and useful idiots who will look at the atrocities in Ukraine and do everything possible to minimize them or justify or will them away. We can only mock the solipsistic fools who, even this week, fell prey to arguments like "NATO made Russia do it," or that this was necessary to "denazify" a country that was not run by Nazis. Go look at those images. Look at those pictures of dead children and read the accounts of women raped in front of their families and then explain, again, what NATO made Russia do.
There is an ugly and horrific alliance forming between the reactionary right — which sees Putin as an anti-woke strongman who will stand against Western decadence — and the anti-imperial left that cannot help but align itself with a right-wing autocrat. The right-wing nuts we wrote off years ago. But if there is any hope for the fringier leftist set, we beg you: stop allowing your painfully naïve and misguided historical allegiance to a long-dead Soviet Union blind you. Whatever hatred or justified animosity you may hold to the West or its militaries cannot camouflage the obvious evils now unfolding before us.
We may not be able to do much for Ukraine, but at the very least, we can confront the truth.
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