Graying the Black-and-White Narratives of Ukraine and Russia
Written by Maren Morgan
One week ago, as everyone surely knows, Russia invaded Ukraine, after recognizing the Russian-separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, which form the Donbas region of Ukraine. For 8 years, since the 2014 revolution unseated President Viktor Yanucovych and the annexation of Crimea, a war between Ukraine and these Russian-backed separatists has waged at the cost of 14,000 people’s lives. Putin has declared that this war is a “humanitarian” effort to “denazify” the country and liberate these separatists.
After weeks of reporting from mainstream news media that Russia was definitely going to invade Ukraine, foiled by independent media’s skepticism and distrust in MSM’s connection to arms dealers, I found myself feeling conflicted about the direction this would go. I had an uneasy feeling for days, and the night before the invasion was launched, I even had a dream where a woman was screaming that Russia had attacked Ukraine, and that we would be next. The latter premonition remains to be seen, but it had indeed turned out that my trusted news sources, such as Matt Taibbi and Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti of Breaking Points made the wrong call about this one, which they have all since admitted to. Their bewilderment, oddly, and corrective and highly informative reporting, has been comforting and I am always grateful for their integrity and conciseness.
The response from the Western leaders has ranged from hawkish to performative, none of which seem to be altogether helpful in a literal game of “nuclear chicken”, as Robert Parry warned of seven years ago. Dan Carlin, in his podcast addressing the crisis, put it plainly: Putin has “reestablished the Cold War overnight.” I am cautiously optimistic that in his State of the Union Address, Joe Biden assured the American people that if nothing else, the US will not escalate aggressions militarily, yet it’s also important to consider the ramifications of escalation through financial warfare. As Krystal Ball explained Breaking Points, due to Wall Street’s (imperial) influence, our ability to sanction Russia in a way that actually counts (i.e. hitting the wallets of the oligarchs responsible for the war) has been “neutered” by “economic royalists” and that we have lost “the ideal tools” that “would exact the most pain on Russia’s political and financial elites without devastating ordinary Russians who are not to blame for Putin’s war.” She warns that declaring economic war on ordinary Russians is “not only immoral, it is dangerous” given that starving out a people who seem to be uneasy or outright against this war will likely only stoke the flames of an anti-Western sentiment, and therefore a justification for the war.
“Whataboutism” seems somehow both necessary and distracting, with totally justified criticisms of the imperial West and the racist-tinged reporting serving to complexify the greater context of this issue in a very productive way, yet there’s also a sense that some people are purposefully adding gasoline to an already bewildering inferno.
Russell Brand said it best: “Does anyone have the moral rectitude or clarity to cast themselves as heroes in a conflict with this degree of complexity?” remarking that we are “beyond the era of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ – there are just ‘baddies’ now.”
He also talks about the “dislocation” and the struggle of feeling like he must “decode” every piece of information he sees. I couldn’t agree more. From what I can tell, the task of decoding propaganda, conflicting narratives, repurposing of old photographs, has left most people in such a state of dislocation that the easiest position to hold is that of towing one party line or the other, which generally means great portions of the truth must be omitted in favor of convenient and terrifying slogans like #NoFlyZone. It is indeed a fact that much of the footage we’re getting out of Ukraine is old footage repurposed as propaganda. It is also indeed a fact that virtue-signaling cringe is at an all-time high. It’s also a fact that there are some incredibly moving things happening on the ground in Ukraine right now.
I wish it was true that we lived in a world that things were reported truthfully, 100% of the time, considering all possible context and biases, and that we all had time to truly sift through the information presented to us. Unfortunately, that world does not exist, and we somehow have to field all of this information, which means looking at this issue from as many angles as possible.
Staring down a browser window with three dozen open tabs, I’ve come to one primary conclusion: we’ve got to attempt to gray this black-and-white view of the war.
The responsibility we have, as helpless citizens in this intense global conflict, is a simple one: we must refrain at all costs from nebulous or myopic narratives of this crisis that seek to elicit an emotional and ideological reaction. Unfortunately, there are journalists who are pugilistically towing a very pro-Russian and historically exclusionary line. Unfortunately, these are the types acerbic journalists that you might hope to share posts with a little more nuance and clarity rather than sardonic commentary that would have people believe with certainty that a country with a Jewish president is running a Nazi regime.
Somehow justifying the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of random citizens, many of these left-leaning journalists are continuing to pump out this information that just baffles my innate sensibilities, which is unfortunate, because some of what they’re posting/reposting has truth in it, or takes a very reasonable stance. The question remains, in what world will ballistic warfare “denazify” a country? Had Putin “liberated” Donbas and stopped there, the story might be different, but given that Ukraine is utterly surrounded, we have to ask ourselves if the Azov battalion, a neo-Nazi faction of the Ukrainian National Guard (which in 2017 was numbered at 2,500) really represents the interests of a country with a population of 44 million.
I don’t find these pro-Russian journalists to be any more helpful in breaking the patterns of disinformation and propaganda than those on the other side who unironically make statements like Condoleezza Rice.
I think they’re adding to the noise — over-simplifying a conflict between two countries with an extensive, complex, and oftentimes atrocious history. A fixation on recent history is important, but not at the expense of a broader view. After all, there still may be people living in the Ukraine today that remember the Holodomor. There may be people alive today that remember the Nazi invasion and the murder of nearly 1 million Jews during the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.
As one can see in the video above, being perceived strategically as the entryway to Russia, as well as the land of the “black earth” (incredibly rich soils known as chernozem), Ukraine has been exploited and passed between despots for hundreds of years. Since globalization, the situation has complexified further in the form of oil pipelines, natural gas reserves, and other resources. The point is, Ukraine has been exploited and denied sovereignty for a very, very long time. Dan Carlin reflects on the 20th century “PTSD” felt by Russians, but makes the important point that the historical PTSD felt by Ukrainians is in large part due to the abuses of Moscow’s leaders for the past century and beyond. This potent historical memory cannot be minimized.
I do find it to be more helpful, in these moments, to try to reflect back on the history of Ukraine with as much empathy as analysis. It’s easy to call people Nazis and call for their extermination. What people really despise is having to actually look at what causes these impulses, because then we’re forced to understand our enemies rather than merely condemn them. Yet, it disheartens me greatly to hear my countrymen or others who I’d otherwise align with espouse utopian ideals without a willingness to do the hard work necessary to reach them.
Framing fascism as a character flaw or evidence of a latent evil in human nature is as convenient as it is ahistorical. Fascism is almost always provoked, often by characters who wish to over-emphasize our tribalistic origins in pursuit of power, and always under the guise of liberation and unity in the face of oppression, humiliation, or disenfranchisement. These characters inflame public discourse into a myopic nationalism and conveniently scapegoat one identity group or another to create an us vs. them understanding of the world, and in this case, the enemy of these far-right battalions does seem to be ethnic Russians. The problem remains, however, that the pro-Russian 180-characters-on-Twitter narratives we’re seeing now, however, certainly do a good job of making it seem like this ideology manifests out of thin air. These narratives don’t take into consideration the historical precedents, and therefore do nothing to actually resolve their cause, which one would assume is anti-Nazism. In my view, their siding with Russia’s invasion will only serve to inflame whatever far-right nationalism exists in Ukraine.
On the flip-side, Western pundits are baffled as to why this crisis seemed to manifest out of thin air, seemingly unprovoked, as well. As for “poking the Russian bear,” it would be ignorant for anyone to suggest that NATO expansion wasn’t a legitimate factor in this invasion. The minimization of this reality on the pro-NATO side is, frankly, ahistorical. When viewed through the context of the United States actions during the Cold War, it seems to be a pretty legitimate concern when an opposing power positions military might within miles of a border, as the Soviets did sending nukes to Cuba. The United States was reasonably upset by this.
Indeed, the only historical analogue that can come close to being compared to the tensions we face now was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, an event that only approximately 10% of the population on Earth could possibly meaningfully remember (as in, were alive and actually old enough to remember the event). Following those terrifying two weeks, and despite the lack of cessation of the arms race, nuclear tensions went down as Khrushchev and Kennedy realized the true temperature of the fire they were playing with. This, I think, after all of my research, leads to my ultimate point.
The simple truth is that in the face of nuclear war, we have got to be more careful than we are being.
Robert McNamera, US Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis reflected in 2003 that it was mainly “luck” that the world didn’t implode into nuclear armageddon. He said:
“It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals; Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.”
One might find it useful, as Caitlin Johnstone pointed out in a recent article, to reflect upon Vasili Arkhipov, to whom we all owe our lives. It was him and him alone who diverted nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis, under the intense pressure of their Soviet submarine being attacked, communications failed and the other officers aboard thought WWIII had begun and that it was time to strike with nuclear force. Three senior officers were required to make the decision, and Arkhipov’s hesitation alone prevented the extinction of all life on Earth.
Johnstone writes, “the primary risk of nuclear war is not that anyone will choose to start one, it’s that one could be triggered by any combination of miscommunication, miscalculation, misunderstanding or technical malfunction amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions.”
It is imperative that, while tensions are as high as they are, we are doing our best to understand this issue from every angle. Oliver Stone’s documentary may lean more in support of the pro-Russia narrative, whereas this film declares that it is the telling of Ukraine’s history by Ukrainian’s, not their occupiers, which invariably adds bias. My sense is that there is truth in both of these films.
There is also truth in the uncomfortable stance of “Russia was baited into war but that does not absolve its criminal act of aggression” as Chris Hedges explains in his article, highlighting how often the West betrayed Putin, backed out on promises, and threatened his nation. The most important take-away of our discernment on this issue must be that, as Hedges says, “To understand is not to condone.” It doesn’t make you a traitor to acknowledge historical nuance and confront reality, no matter what side you’re assessing. Only authoritarians would expect us to think in such absolutes. I think it’s ultimately fair to say that in an instance like this, no one person is even capable of holding the absolute truth. There is a dizzying level of complexity, and the truth is that many of the people with the loudest opinions wouldn’t even be able to find Ukraine on a map a week ago. Nearly all of us are coming into this with some level of baseline ignorance.
Instead of finite conclusions and absolutes, we must make a clumsy amalgam and hopefully create some sort of discernible mosaic image.
The bottom line here is, the tangled relationship between governments, plutocrats, arms dealers, and globalization has left us in a position where a handful of elite leaders are flirting with decisions that could truly destroy our world in an instant. As a de facto environmentalist, and also a living being with a desire to persist beyond 25 years of age, the idea of nuclear holocausts hurts on a million different levels and must be avoided.
We have to remember that these are unprecedented times and stop pretending that since we’ve been through worse in the past, that we’ve somehow learned enough to not devolve into horror. This sort of fictitious triumphalism is nothing more than a myth which has been propagandized to each and every one of us in the West since Hitler shot himself, and has in fact never been true for the majority of the world from which we extract and exploit resources to maintain our illusion of earned abundance. The dissemination of the myth that Western civilization’s persistence is the only natural teleology for the human race is possible only through the ignorance of history and ecology. We’re reaching the natural limits of this civilizational structure, and facing the subsequent crises associated with it: ecocide, genocide, climate change, and civil unrest.
I fear that right now, a handful of men have their finger on a button that will destroy any chance we might have to figure this all out, before it’s too late.
Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for our next podcast and collaborative Substack publication. Please share this piece if you found it helpful. If you’d like to stay more up-to-date on the film, the project as a whole, and us, join our Patreon for as little as $1 a month to get access to our Discord community.