Crisis 22
Apples
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Like Gogol’s Chichikov in Dead Souls, and like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Putin commits a primal error — in this case a primal sin of international law: the violent invasion of a sovereign country. Yet unlike the other two Russian characters, Putin doesn’t repent. Rather, he doubles down, making apple sauce from forbidden fruit.
In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Crime and Punishment, David McDuff quotes from Dostoevsky’s friend, the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. The subject of the quote is the protagonist Raskolnikov, who at the start of Dostoevsky’s novel initially thinks himself above morality. As if to prove this to himself, he cold-bloodedly kills two defenceless women. Yet Raskolnikov eventually sees the proverbial light above him on the road to Damascus, and changes his ways.
[Raskolnikov] is a representative of that view of things according to which every strong man is his own master, and all is permitted to him. In the name of his personal superiority, in the name of his belief that he is a force, he considers himself entitled to commit murder and does in fact do so. But then suddenly the deed he thought was merely a violation of a senseless outer law and a bold challenge to the prejudice of society turns out, for his own conscience, to be something much more than this – it turns out to be a sin, a violation of inner moral justice. His violation of the outer law meets its lawful retribution from without in exile and penal servitude, but his inward sin of pride that has separated the strong man from humanity and has led him to commit murder – that inward sin of self-idolatry can only be redeemed by an inner moral act of self-renunciation. His boundless self-confidence must disappear in the face of that which is greater than himself, and his self-fabricated justification must humble itself before the higher justice of God that lives in those very same simple, weak folk whom the strong man viewed as paltry insects.
We can only hope that at some point the Kremlin does the same, realizing that the Budapest Memorandum that Russia signed with Ukraine is deeper than ink and paper, deeper even than the Slavic blood they share, blood that has been deeply intermingled over the centuries. We can only hope that everything Solovyov says about Raskolnikov will one day apply to Putin, Lavrov, and Peskov, and to everyone else in the Kremlin and in the Russian media who think that Russians are above the laws and moral codes that they once agreed upon with their Ukrainian brothers.
We can see this agreement in the first two articles of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, officially called, “Memorandum on security assurances in connection with Ukraine's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Budapest, 5 December 1994”:
Because Russia’s war is clearly not in self-defence, Russia is going against this extremely crucial signed memorandum of understanding. This is doubly so since Russia threatens to use the very nuclear weapons that it got as a result of its solemn guarantee not to invade Ukraine.
To say that Russia is acting in accordance with the Budapest Memorandum because it’s acting in self defense of the Russian speakers in Ukraine is flawed in several key ways: ❧ Many Ukrainians whose first language is Russian (such as Zelensky) are against Russia’s invasion. ❧ The Russian speakers in the Donbas and Crimea were not in the type of danger that requires self-defence. Perhaps an adjustment of language laws (as happens in places like Quebec), but not an invasion. ❧ The very notion of self-defence is rendered meaningless if the definition of self is ambiguous or distorted: Russia can defend itself in self-defence but it can’t defend another country (or part of that country) in self-defence. The self in this memorandum is clearly a national self. ❧ Invading part of a country to free it or change it is against the international order, which rests on the notion of nation. If the Turkic countries of Central Asia decided to make Uigurs or ethnic Turks in Russia part of their definition of self, then they too could claim the right to invade China or Russia. It doesn’t take long to see where this type of illogic leads. One place it leads in the Ukraine context is to Russia’s use of the term military operation, which attempts to downplay what is in fact a full-scale invasion of a sovereign state.
Perhaps Ukraine ought to have been more generous in allowing use of the Russian language in the Donbas. Yet even if we take some mistreatment here as a given for the sake of argument, this doesn’t give Russia the license to take over the Donbas, let alone Ukraine.
Let’s follow the logic. Russia, having mistreated Ukraine throughout history, complains that Ukraine is mistreating the language or culture of the ethnic Russian minority within its borders. At the time of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was within the borders of Russia, even though Ukraine was called a Soviet Socialist Republic. During that time Ukraine was denied its cultural identity and persecuted to the point of being starved to death in the Holodomor. Once the Berlin wall fell, Russia promised to accept Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving back to Russia the nuclear weapons within its borders. Russia took the nukes and agreed to the borders of Ukraine, but now it says that those borders are illegitimate and that the Ukrainian people are really just misguided Russians. So, on the basis of what they perceive to be a cultural injustice, they invade a sovereign country, completely forgetting that they mistreated the Ukrainians far worse than the Ukrainians allegedly mistreated the ethnic Russian minority in Ukraine.
Putin’s argument that Russia did everything according to the UN Charter is also deeply flawed. He says that the Russian speakers in the Donbas were being persecuted, that Russia helped them to gain some autonomy, that the people in the Donbas held a referendum and signed a self-defence agreement with Russia, and that Russia was therefore obligated to undertake a special military operation to ensure their safety.
The problem with Russia’s integration of the Donbas into its convenient policy of ethnic self-defence is easy to see if one applies the scheme elsewhere. If a Turkic state in Central Asia gave military assistance to a breakaway part of Xinjiang, held a referendum, and signed a mutual self-defence pact, would Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan be justified in attacking China? Would this mean they could send a line of tanks to Urumchi and Beijing, and drop glide bombs on hospitals in Xi’an?
Like the American actions in Vietnam and Iraq, the Russian actions have their internal logic, yet when this logic is externalized, seen in terms of parallel scenarios, it no longer makes sense.
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Next: 🍎 The Road to Damascus