Russia attacks Ukraine

Putin sends soldiers and missiles into Ukraine and Instagram users rush to display the Ukrainian flag. The Yemeni wonder when people will start caring about them after years of genocide.

Xi Jinping (left), congratulates Vladimir Putin (right) for winning the asshole of the year award for launching a war on Ukraine, an award Xi had locked up every year for the past few years. Although it's only March, the Board of Assholes decided the likelihood of a bigger asshole to arise was little to none. // photo from the Kremlin

KGB will always be KGB at heart. Vladimir Putin, the imperial dictator of Russia, actually did it. He invaded Ukraine. Uh. Again.

It's tough not to reflect back upon the suffering the Ukrainians suffered during the Holodomor, the famine-genocide in the World War II-era that seems to be forgotten in the sands of time. The Holodomor killed millions of Ukrainians as Soviet Russia confiscated large amounts of crop yields to support the industrialization in the motherland, with Stalin likely targeting Ukraine to quell their independence movement. At the same time, the Russian government went to great lengths to suppress knowledge of what it was doing, aided by certain people in the West, in no small part by Walter Duranty representing The New York Times. It is not difficult to understand why Ukraine would want to maintain independence from Russia.

Michael Moynihan on The Fifth Column podcast talked about how, whereas Nazi leaders in Germany were shamed, scorned, and ridiculed after their fall, Soviet Russian leaders have not, nor have they accepted any kind of blame or responsibility for anything, particularly the Holodomor. Russia had gone from dictatorial powers in the Soviet era to something sort of resembling some version of democracy but has been reverting back to its dictatorial state. This is also certainly true in the sphere of public opinion. There is effectively nobody in the United States that holds favorable views of Nazi Germany or fascism in general. Any Holocaust deniers are rightfully shamed and put into the fringes of society. But there is a contingent of people that sympathize with Soviet Russia and back the symbols of communism, despite having murdered far more people than the Nazis, and many probably haven't even heard of the Holodomor.

Although Putin claims his actions against Ukraine are in self-defense, it is unclear how exactly Ukraine specifically is threatening him and his claims of such are rather absurd, given that Ukraine has posed no military threat to Russia. Russian troops have also specifically targeted civilian infrastructure such as water supply, the electrical grid, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and apartment blocks with cluster bombs and missile strikes. In an unbelievable move, Russian forces even attacked and seized a nuclear power plant, setting it on fire, though reports are no radiation had been released, foiling Putin's hope for a Chernobyl sequel on HBO. These attacks have drawn the ire of the International Criminal Court and Amnesty International, promising to open an investigation on Putin for war crimes.

Already, within one week of this war, Ukrainian officials claim that over 2,000 civilians have died at the hands of the murderous head of state, with nearly a million people fleeing Ukraine. Putin had also put his nuclear team on "special alert" in response to "aggressive statements" by the West.

Still, Putin may have bitten off a piece a bit too big for him to chew, as Ukrainians have put up a fight against the much larger and better equipped Russian army, scoring a victory in Kharkiv. Russian soldiers are demoralized with many deployed to Ukraine thinking it was a training mission with no real plan of attack. Many were told that Ukrainians were held captive by fascists and would be welcome with hugs and flowers but instead, reality met them with bullets and Molotov cocktails. It's also having the opposite intended effect as the move had unified NATO and some countries such as Kosovo are asking for NATO membership as well as a permanent US military base on their soil, which I'm sure will ultimately be footed by US taxpayers, not Kosovo taxpayers.

Although Putin has clearly been the aggressor, the United States and NATO have not been completely blameless. The secretary of state under George HW Bush assured Gorbachev that NATO would not expand "one inch eastward". This assurance was the basis of Gorbachev allowing German reunification. Although some contest the NATO expansion promise was made strictly concerning German reunification, the declassified documents linked above say otherwise.

Only one president later, Clinton decided to expand NATO eastward to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Maybe Clinton thought those three countries were only half an inch eastward.

The expansion continued well into the new millennium, all the way up to Russia's doorstep with the addition of Estonia and Latvia in 2004. George W Bush supported Ukraine's admission into NATO in 2008 and Barack Obama inserted US interests in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. Though the popular thought on Donald Trump in certain circles was that he's a puppet of Putin, following the lies spread by the Clinton campaign, he added and upheld sanctions against Russia and approved arms sales to Ukraine to fight Russian separatists in the Donbas region, which angered Putin to no end. The United States has been setting up military bases and missiles in Europe for decades now, that Russian leaders see as a threat.

Decades ago, the United States nearly entered a nuclear war when the Soviet Union deployed ballistic missiles in Cuba because we saw this as a threat of aggression, by bringing military forces to our doorstep. Is it really that much of a stretch to think that Russian leaders would not react in the same fashion when the roles are reversed?

None of this justifies Putin taking out all his anger on innocent Ukrainian citizens or even Ukrainian armed forces, of course. We may never know if Putin would do what he's doing now if the US and NATO didn't take these actions, but we should at least be able to acknowledge that continually poking a tiger would cause a response. It didn't cause the tiger to bite the United States or other NATO countries, because that's too big an animal for them to fight, but it may have caused them to bite a smaller, more vulnerable animal.

Just mentioning these things seems to upset some people. Jamie Kirchick appeared on The Fifth Column podcast and lamented that libertarians, in our quest to be antiwar, end up taking the side of Putin. But of course, that's not what we're doing. No libertarian I know is saying Putin's invasion is justified on any level. In Robby Soave's article talking about NATO's role in this, for example, he went through great pains to make clear that Putin is solely to blame for the invasion and that the article is to provide context for how the two biggest nuclear powers got to this point. I can only assume that when Kirchick specifically called out Ron Paul, he was talking about Ron Paul's Liberty Report, but I do not recall Paul ever saying that Putin's actions were defensible.

If someone at a bar incessantly hits on a guy's wife, despite being asked to stop, eventually the guy might get up and punch him in the mouth. It doesn't mean it's okay to escalate the situation to physical violence, but it's not a worthless endeavor to examine why hitting on someone's wife is probably not a good idea.

And that is the point. We need to understand why Putin invaded so we can craft a more coherent foreign policy that avoids pressuring heads of state to lash out. That's not justifying Putin's actions. That's not excusing Putin's actions. That's trying to maintain peace between nations. And as American libertarians, that is what we have the power to do. We have zero control over what Putin does, but we at least have a shot at influencing American foreign policy. 

There is no point to glom on and on about how bad Putin is. Everybody already knows this. Everybody already agrees with this. What many don't seem to know is the context of the United States and NATO in the bigger picture. We suppress the latter at our own peril and yet many seem intent to do just that. Just take a look at the disgusting and inherently incurious replies to Tulsi Gabbard's tweet on exactly this. People that respond in this fashion could not give two shits about Ukrainians outside of using them as pawns to get their support for their war-mongering. If they did, they wouldn't be so hostile to people even just talking about the history and all the possible ways to avert war.

Whatever would or would not have happened with different policies in the past, we are here now. Though there are voices that urge military intervention, they thankfully appear to be in the minority despite the lack of understanding of context, at least for now. Biden does not appear interested in military intervention and several dozen Congresspeople signed a letter to remind him that the power to declare war rests solely within Congress. Not that it matters for what the US military will do, but public support for a "major role" in the situation stands at 26%, according to an AP poll. More importantly, thousands of civilians took to the streets in Moscow and St. Petersburg to protest the invasion of Ukraine, leading to over 1,700 arrests, likely many of them taken as political prisoners instead of for some actual crime committed. Ukrainians have also taken to the streets but armed with firearms and Molotov cocktails, not signs, as the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy broadly stated he would hand out guns to any civilian that wants to stand up to Russia, with even Biden sending small arms to Ukrainians, in an interesting admission that yes, guns are indeed a deterrent to standing armies.

Some, however, like Stephen King, think that the United States has a role to stop playground bullies by stepping in and joining the fight to stop the big kid punching the little kid. It's easy to think this way. I did, a decade and a half ago, myself. But Connor Mortell at Antiwar makes a great point of scale. Sure, on a playground, if you stand up to the bully, you might get bruised. The bully might get a black eye. But if you have a gun and intervene, you've escalated a likely worst outcome to someone getting shot and dying. Now think about two countries fighting a war, like the United States in Afghanistan. You end up with hundreds of thousands of people dead along with millions of refugees and extreme cases of poverty, ultimately with the "bully" getting even stronger as the tide of public opinion turns against you. Now escalate it to a war between the two largest nuclear-armed countries in the world. You are now looking at a case of near-human extinction. It's a little bit riskier than throwing some punches on a playground. 

What most of us learned as kids on the playground: You don't stand by while a big kid beats up a little kid. You might take a punch or two making the big kid stop, but that's the right thing to do.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) February 24, 2022

I know King writes scary novels, but I don't know if he has written a single piece of fiction any more potentially catastrophic than the risk he is pushing in reality.

In addition, this fist-flailing of pressuring companies to cease operations in Russia are emotional moves that largely hurts its citizens and not its government. Weirder yet, certain boycotts and government decrees have been launched against companies like vodka producers, that have some Russian branding but are actually made and based out of other countries. Take, that, Latvia and Luxembourg! This entire line of thinking is rather confounding, considering many of the companies severing ties with Russia over the attack on Ukraine still line up to kiss Xi Jinping's blood-soaked boots despite the Uyghur cultural genocide, violence in Hong Kong, oppression in Tibet, threats on Taiwan, and military conflicts in India. I also seem to be able to still make Paypal transactions despite the United States attacking Middle Eastern countries, piling up innocent bodies in the thousands, not to mention funding the genocide in Yemen. It's almost as if these corporations are selective in their moral outrage.

One of the most dismaying aspects stemming from the DEFCON 1 levels of shrieking following the Trump-Russia collusion fabrication was the insane escalation of anti-Russia sentiment. Trump was so loathed by certain circles that this collusion put the opinion of Russia way out of scale with normalcy which ended up adding "Russian agent" as an epithet alongside "Nazi". Think back to 2015. Was anyone really talking about Russia? Maybe some lingering talk about the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, but it didn't really penetrate the public stream of consciousness that was more focused on Subway spokesman Jared going to jail for child pornography. Trump had talked about his desire to improve relations with Russia, one of the few things I agreed with him on, as did Tulsi Gabbard, but the Clinton campaign made this all but impossible for Trump to do, politically. So Trump had to pivot, issue sanctions against Russia and Putin while trumpeting that he was way tougher on Russia than any other president. Open up any forum, Twitter thread, Disqus thread, or Steven Colbert's mouth, with any number of Democrats on them, and watch them deride Trump for being too soft on Russia, no matter what Trump did.

I'm not saying they caused Putin to invade Ukraine, but it sure as shit didn't help. And now some of them want to engage in an all-out war against Russia. Maybe it's time to sideline these people on your RSS feeds, or whatever you kids use these days, because it's rather obvious they will run toward human annihilation on the account that it will give them good feelz.

Given that a war between the United States and another nuclear power is probably the single most disastrous thing that can happen, avoiding this should be our number one priority. While it is tempting to march into Moscow to punch Putin in the nose for starting this war, it would be the most reckless and irresponsible course of action to take. 

Instead of just calling Putin crazy and irrational, we need to understand his grievances. Because if we don't, it's a high-stakes game of hoping one side collapses because otherwise, the tensions will continue to ratchet until something apocalyptically snaps. A good first step would be to simply acknowledge this and truly open diplomatic relations so we can at least start speaking and listening to each other. This costs nothing except for swallowing some pride for some people and can be done in no time at all for individuals. What we're doing now is like what a Democrat and a Republican do on Twitter, yelling past each other, never bothering to understand each other, except here, we are pointing guns and nuclear weapons at each other.

For individuals, in the next microsecond, after we accept that reality is more complicated than a Marvel movie, we should support charities that are attempting to help suffering Ukrainians like Doctors Without Borders. The US government should immediately start accepting Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.

The next good move would be to draw up a treaty to stop the continual expansion toward Russia in return for Russia to cease armed conflicts immediately and prevent any aggression toward a European country. This would stop the bloodshed, improve relations, and deescalate tensions. Nobody loses, here, except for the sociopaths that want to wield the vice-grip of a major world power to be able to steamroll other countries, as well as the pocketbooks of major defense contractors. To hell with them. If you don't care that a cold-blooded murderer is hurt, you shouldn't care that someone with orders of magnitude more bodies to their name is hurt in the name of peace.

This last one is a big one, and one that will piss off a lot of people. But we need to leave NATO and better yet, dissolve it. Trump, the self-described "dealmaker" that probably thought his show The Apprentice was a documentary, looked at NATO as a bad deal, as the United States footed the largest portion of the bill, among all the member countries. Well, okay, but there is a far greater evil underneath it. NATO has increasingly become more entrenched in warfare in the Middle East. NATO also ratchets up the tension into the tens. It backs Russia into a corner which results in an animal ready to lash out in fear. These large defensive pacts, while it may prevent small-scale wars in the near future (all Russian attacks since NATO have been against non-NATO countries), greatly increase the chance of World War III.

Unfortunately, everybody, particularly those in power, is likely to learn exactly the wrong lessons from Russia-Ukraine and NATO will probably get strengthened as a result. Although full-scale nuclear war is still unlikely, NATO's aggression still makes that chance far higher than I'd like it to be.

And in case you forgot how this article started, if Russian citizens strap Putin to the hull of a nuclear submarine for a deep-sea Arctic Ocean expedition, I wouldn't shed a single tear.

Further reading and resources:

If you're looking for updates on what's happening in Ukraine day by day, just read the newspapers and watch the news. If you want a deeper understanding of the conflict, the following shed good light that you probably won't read in the newspaper and on cable news as readily.

Glenn Greenwald talked about the war as it erupted on an episode of System Update, beautifully excoriating those that accuse people of being traitors for just discussing the nuances of the Ukraine situation and the United States and NATO's role in it.

Scott Horton talked at the Utah Libertarian Party state convention and posted a lengthy recap on Antiwar which provided mountains of information.

Dave Smith, on his podcast Part of the Problem, spoke with Scott Horton on the war and in a subsequent episode, recapped what brave libertarians like Ron Paul and Harry Browne said soon after 9/11, drawing parallels to today.

Tom Woods interviews Gilbert Doctorow who explains the history of Russia and Ukraine.

Matt Taibbi appeared on The Fifth Column podcast to discuss the war among other things (podcast starts off with Ukraine). An interesting tidbit he mentioned was that Farida Rustamova revealed that sources in the Kremlin mentioned top Russian government officials didn't know there would be an invasion on Ukraine until the day before, casting some doubt that the CIA really did know beforehand that an invasion would really happen. If this was the case, then this was perhaps just another psyop by the American spying apparatus, but just stumbled into being correct. Hey, when you lie so much, you're bound to just coincidentally be right once every few decades.