News from the Russia-Ukraine front is disheartening. Despite clear moral high ground owned by Ukraine, struggling under merciless bombardment ordered by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, stark battlefield heroism from the Ukrainians is not lacking.
The broad, historically polyglot sweep of lands from eastern Europe to the North Pacific holds more tales of wars, genocides and enslavements than would fit in a thick history codex, each outrage driven by a would-be Mongol, Tatar, Viking, Slavic or Teutonic war lord lusting for his own glory.
It does not escape me that no tales of vicious women leaders remain extant. Somebody has to clean up the blood. Despite centuries of generational savagery, not all of north Eurasia’s warlords were crude or uneducated.
Church scholars had visited, and several royal courts nearer Scandinavia and Constantinople were literate. 1000 years ago, Russia’s first Tsar, Vladimir Monomakh, left a letter of instruction to his children on how best – and ethically! – to survive in their cold, brutal country, to avoid the fate of their opponents.
Monomakh, a horseman and hunter, seems to have gripped these Slavic/Asian people in his fists and forced them into joint existence. On balance he is considered a decent man. Before and after him, warring nomads rode the vast steppes across Asia, snatching tribute in treasure, slaves and territory which produced rivers of suffering. By the time of his death, Monomakh was triumphant, victor after years of struggle, often against his own brothers. Is he watching?
When men and women fight for their homelands and the right to live there in freedom, the world should take notice; rumbles of dissent in client states, including several of the ‘Stans, give notice that Kremln-worship is not unanimous; old historic Russia was governed from the city of Kyiv and its people then called themselves the Kievan Rus (!).”
This sticks in Putin’s craw, making him determined that HIS will alone will create a new, glorious empire, defying the West and ruled by him and his heirs from within the high stone walls of the Kremlin fortress in Moscow.
Putin’s version of absolutist government, coercive autocracy, and death to dissenters has become starkly ascendant, and not in a vacuum. Russian people WANT HIM THERE. For his rule to continue, all he requires is for enough of them to remain intimidated and scared, and for western nations - who see clearly what he is about - to tiptoe softly and do absolutely nothing. Putin and his apparatchiks scheme and plot on, calling up thousands of unwilling army recruits to war and hurling them like sacks of body parts onto Ukraine’s rocket-blasted cities and people.
In the first months of aggression, Russian wounded were left on the field to die. Countless many have died since, and Putin now seems to be planning an actual confrontation with NATO. The west – old Europe, the U.S. and its allies – including the brilliant Macron of France, who says he will actually DO something (!) - daily backpedals and fears to stand up to him.
He is unreluctant to thumb his nose at free nations, mocking their administrations which – incredibly! – are falling over themselves NOT to provoke this vicious, evil man. (??) He and his adherents have no reticence about defying western defense-treatied governments, which have accomplished zero deterrence to his brutality. Sound familiar? Ask great-grandma: it is.
Our piddling, slow supply of arms to Ukraine has made this aging ghoul tickled with glee, enjoying his success in making powerful countries which could vaporize his, cow down. News media serves a drumbeat of atrocities and pain inflicted on innocent civilians in Ukraine, every hour. For our reluctant, slow and unreliable promise of arms, we are more than complicit in these murders: we are guilty.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
