It wasn’t geopolitics or ideology that determined world reaction to what happened in Ukraine this week, it was normal human feeling. An army of tanks and troops violently invades a border country populated by its cousins—a country a third its size with a tenth its might—and people watched and thought: That’s not right.
If it works, if Vladimir Putin gets what he wants, we go back to a world red in tooth and claw, with old restraining rules melted away. That’s not right.
An amazing aspect of the crisis is that something reminded the West it’s the West—more than a geographic entity but a certain shared history and political traditions, a certain shared human experience, even some shared commitments. So they stood together—a unified Europe. Who would have guessed that would happen? Not Mr. Putin. And maybe not a lot of Westerners.
The reaction is international, and you know this not only from the United Nations General Assembly vote condemning Russia, with only four other dissenters. A friend, an immigrant from Central America, a working woman here 20 years, said wonderingly, “I can’t stop watching.” She meant the video from Ukraine of the explosions, the refugees. She was a child when the Cold War ended, has no special investment in European history, no ties to Ukraine, yet the story has wholly engaged her, and she knows who the bad guy is.
All immigrants understand what it is to flee, to be in the crowded conveyance with the kids crying. And we are a world of immigrants.
But also maybe what’s different in this story is a lot of people would be taken aback that we all still have normal human emotions. Most of the forces of modern life tend toward the synthetic, the presentational—virtual feelings and enactments. And yet here we are, feeling something.
Some people, not all of them dimwitted, ask the secret of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “communication skills.” Is it a heavy use of verbs? But what we are seeing isn’t “communication skills.” A brave man stands and tells you what he is doing—staying, fighting, leading. It’s straight and clear because he is, but also because he doesn’t have time for “eloquence.” Crisis is an editor, it removes the cheap and extraneous and keeps the essential. “I need ammunition, not a ride.” That’s not something clever you thought up, it’s the simple expression of a human predicament. And a universal one. At some point in your life you’ll have to stand and fight. You too will need ammo and not a ride.
In week two, things will get meaner, more brutal.
The extremely demanding task for the U.S. and the West: Keep cool, stay committed, don’t waver, continue to speak in one voice, save Ukraine. At the same time, look for any opportunity to de-escalate, maybe, against the odds, to talk the madman holding the baby off the ledge.
It was right that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin canceled a long-scheduled test of the Minuteman III ballistic missile at California’s Vandenburg Air Force Base this week. Why give Mr. Putin something he could seize on as a supposed provocation? GOP senators were wrong to protest: Grrrr, grrrr, now’s the time to be tough. Now’s the time to be careful.
Mr. Putin has lost his old reputation as a cool and cunning player, a calculator; now he’s grouped with Hitler and Stalin, and this for him will never change. His legacy is in ruins, his invasion a historic blunder, his threat to use nuclear weapons a moral and strategic mistake. Among other things it underscores that the weakness of his conventional weapons has been exposed.
I spoke with some diplomats this week, including one veteran of politics and high strategy I’ll call the Wise Old Hound. All agreed: Keep up lines of communication with the Russian government, no matter how seemingly futile. Create and maintain lines of communication to Russian elites, people and military. Talking doesn’t necessarily solve anything, but it can at least lower the odds of miscalculation, and it might unexpectedly help.
The first week of the invasion shattered the Russian army’s mystique. These aren’t Siege of Leningrad killers; these aren’t fur-hatted Cossacks 15 feet tall on their nimble steeds; these are modern, slouchy 20-year-olds who play videogames.
“He’s afraid his military isn’t cutting it,” the Wise Old Hound said of Mr. Putin. “Something is going on there. There may be some question, is he gonna dump his military or is his military gonna dump him? They’ve got to be disillusioned with his commands and orders, and I suspect the disillusionment is a two-way street.”
This unfolds within a highly “unpredictable and dangerous” context. “This is not just two giants standing off against each other. We’re in a cyber race, and midgets get to be in the game.” When a nation goes on nuclear alert, as Russia has, “you’re setting up more risk of a false warning in which Russia is wrongly told it’s undergoing some kind of attack. Some third-party states would love to see a nuclear exchange. If Russia’s warning system goes haywire—if our warning system goes haywire . . .” He didn’t complete the sentence.
More than ever back-channel communication is crucial, “military to military, top military leaders talking to each other.”
Along with that, “I think we have to have much broader outreach in the long run directly to the people of Russia,” he said. “Putin is in trouble with his elites, and has to be worried about public opinion.”
Another diplomat said it’s important to speak to the Russian people, who not only are suffering economically, with long lines at the ATM, and the value of their savings and salaries falling with the ruble, but will suffer politically. “You don’t get to do a move like Ukraine, with all its oppression, without increasing oppression at home.”
Thousands have gone into the streets to protest the war and Mr. Putin’s dictatorship. Reuters reported Sunday that 5,500 people had been arrested, 2,000 that day alone.
Mr. Putin will crack down, hard. Russians will suffer in another way. The past 30 years their lives have materially expanded—they are more prosperous, have more options, go on vacations, have children at colleges in Europe. As the diplomat said: “They shop at Ikea.” (The Swedish furniture chain shut its Russia stores Thursday.) Under Mr. Putin they didn’t have freedom at home but they became integrated into the world, which was its own kind of freedom.
They don’t want to be the pariah people of a pariah state. They want to be proud of themselves and their country. Most Russians don’t like the oligarchs and the hard men around Mr. Putin any more than we do.
We should find every way to tell the people of Russia the facts of the war as it unfolds, what the West is trying to do and why. Tell it as straight and clear as Mr. Zelensky. They should be told that the world has lost respect for Mr. Putin but not for the Russian people. Urge them to see Ukraine for what it is, and Mr. Putin for who he is.