Like most of the world, I have spent the last several days watching with fascinated horror as the cartoonishly evil Vladimir Putin has used Ukraine’s aspiration to join a purely defensive alliance as an excuse to further invade yet another sovereign nation. It’s been a surreal experience. If publicly reported assessments from US intelligence officials are correct, Kyiv could fall within days. In the history books, that will be properly reported as a war prosecuted with brutal efficiency. Through the lens of 24-hour cable news, though, I have felt the nightmarish experience of watching a disaster unfold in painfully slow motion.
The speed at which Russia is conquering Ukrainian territory puts the lie to its ridiculous claim that Ukraine posed some kind of threat to Russian sovereignty. And of course it was a lie–Putin and the Russian government are bullies. They saw something that they wanted, and they invented a pretext (indeed, several pretexts) to take it.
I don’t have a grand philosophy of foreign policy. It’s an area in which I have no training, no experience. I haven’t read broadly in it or thought deeply about it. What I know is that I don’t like bullies, and that when one encounters them, one ought to stand up to them.
That’s why I’ve been so taken with the story of the thirteen Ukrainian border guards who were killed in a naval bombardment by a Russian ship. The guards, charged with defending a small island in the Black Sea, were warned by the ship that they would be bombed if they did not “lay down [their] weapons and surrender.” In response, the guards transmitted a defiant message: “Russian ship, go fuck yourself.” The Russians bombarded the island; all thirteen guards were killed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posthumously awarded them the title Hero of Ukraine.
By all appearances, the guards had no means of defending the island against the ship. They had no means of surviving a bombardment. They knew that defiance meant certain death. There would have been no shame in surrendering, in living to fight another day. Nevertheless, they refused to lay down their weapons.
Sometimes, the face of overwhelming force, defiance is all one has. Even though the bully can easily take your lunch money, you don’t hand it over to him. You force him to take it from you, and in taking it, revealing himself to the world. At great personal cost, we can not only force bullies to exert effort, we can also force the world to confront the reality of the bullying. By refusing to surrender to the invading Russian forces, the Ukrainian border guards made clear to the world that their country is being savaged by murderous thugs who will do whatever it takes to achieve their ends. There is great heroism in refusing to be complicit in one’s own victimization.
It is now for the rest of the world to ensure that the guards’ sacrifice was not in vain. We know what Putin and his gang of hoodlums are. We must react appropriately.
“Go fuck yourself,” indeed.
UPDATE: It appears that the border guards were ultimately captured, not killed. I have elected to keep the post as originally written because I believe the broader point stands and is easier to understand in its original context. May as many combatants as possible make it through this war alive.
Chauvinisms 