My interest and concern regarding the war in Ukraine come naturally. My mother was born in Ukraine, and her story of harrowing flight from her village with her mother and brother in the middle of a snowstorm in the dead of night, pursued by a squad of White Russians and Ukrainian irregulars, remains fresh in my mind.
My father was born in the Russian oblast (administrative division) of Georgia near the border of South Ossetia, Stalin’s home region, and was the spitting image of the Russian tyrant — short, muscular, with a heavy mustache, a tendency to violence, and, like Stalin, played the piano. A racketeer who had the mayor of Montreal in his pay, he kept an enemies list and occasionally acted on it. In some sense, a domestic version of the Russia-Ukraine conflict occurred in my own home.
Of course, the political story of the last decade or so is far weightier and more complex. Authentic scholars and political researchers can introduce us to historical realities and intricacies going back centuries, helping us to arrive at partially informed conclusions. As the Cato Institute explains with respect to the modern era, “Washington has meddled in the political affairs of dozens of countries—including many democracies. An egregious example occurred in Ukraine during the Euromaidan Revolution of 2014 [which began on Nov. 21, 2013, involving the subversion of the elected government of the country]. As Ukraine’s political crisis deepened, the extent of the Obama administration’s meddling in Ukraine’s politics was breathtaking.”
Secretary of State for Political Affairs at the time Victoria Nuland, who pronounces “the Ukrainians” as “the Ukrainions,” as if she were observing an episode of Star Trek, engaged in an infamous telephone call with U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt in which they discussed their preferences for specific personnel changes in the post-Yanukovych government.
“It is no wonder that Russia reacted badly to the unconstitutional ouster of an elected, pro-Russian government—an ouster that occurred not only with Washington’s blessing but apparently with its assistance. One can legitimately condemn some aspects of Moscow’s behavior,” concludes the Institute’s analysis, “but the force of America’s moral outrage is vitiated by the stench of U.S. hypocrisy.”
In the current situation, there are a number of salient issues we have to get straight as negotiations begin. It needs to be understood that Zelenskyy has always been a fraud, a two-bit vaudevillian in military fatigues who was the beneficiary by incremental steps of the earlier Democrat-sponsored coup under Obama and Nuland and promoted by an equally corrupt Biden. Despite the adulation in which he is held by the Left, Zelensky is not a serious actor. Big on bravado, he has little leverage.
As for Putin, the Russian dictator may be a bloody-minded autocrat but feels that he is on a mission to restore the grandeur of and international respect for his country. Steven Rosefielde in "The Kremlin Strikes Back" gives a graded and balanced account of the Russian calculation, which is intent on securing its borders along with the recovery of portions of lost territory which, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it believes remain inherently Russian. These are aspects of the political equation that need to be addressed.
Putin had already given adequate warning that he would not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO, which would have brought an aggressively audacious Europe into Russia’s sphere of influence to hover on the nation’s borders. We recall that both Obama and Biden had promised Ukraine eventual membership in NATO, a geopolitical error of monumental proportions.
In a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker, University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer argues that “There is a three-prong strategy at play here, E.U. expansion, NATO expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” Russian fear of Western power projection on its intimate borders is, for Mearsheimer, the crucial issue. This is something that Trump perfectly understands, stating categorically that the European encroachment was a triggering casus bellum, as was Zelensky’s expressed desire to join NATO.
Like it or not, Putin has operational control over considerable territory and enjoys a very strong arbitration position from which he will not be easily dislodged. It is only his putative desire to end the war, his respect for Trump, and his deep knowledge of Russian history that can lead to a settlement. This brings us to the atrocity of the 1932/33 Great Famine, or Holodomor (from the Ukrainian holod, hunger, and mor, extermination), a deliberately engineered, mass slaughter to confiscate private property, commandeer food stocks, and annihilate vast swaths of the population in order to collectivize the agricultural production of the region. The death toll is estimated at between 5-7 million. The Russian sense of guilt for the Holodomor, a continuing embarrassment tainted by the real implication of genocide, may possibly lead Putin to soften his negotiating stance.
As Jonathan Bowden points out in "The Cultured Thug," “This causes a headache for Russia,” which denied the existence of the famine until 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Indeed, the first Russian leader to attend the Holodomor Victims Memorial in Kyiv was Dmitry Medvedev in a gesture of moderate atonement. The Russian exculpatory view regarded the Holodomor not as an essentially Russian crime but as the nefarious project of the Communist Party under the sway of the psychopathic Stalin, in other words, as something distinct from the soul of the Russian nation. It is a convenient exemption. Nevertheless, writes Bowden, the Holodomor “remains a sort of albatross around the Greater Russian neck.”
Even Robert Conquest, whose "The Harvest of Sorrow" is the definitive exploration of the Great Famine, is nuanced in his condemnations, stating in a 2006 interview, “I think there are guilty people, but they aren't the Russian nation or anybody else. They're a particular group of particularly horrible people,” associated with the Communist Party and dominated by one of the most evil human beings in the modern history of the world, Josef Stalin. Conquest does not regard him “as a modern man, a terrestrial man, an Earth man. He sounds like a monster from some strange planet.” The current attitude toward Stalin in Russia is apparently ambivalent, but it is telling that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s "The Gulag Archipelago" is readily available in the country.
I believe it is the fact of the Holodomor that may constitute one of Donald Trump’s and his delegation’s crucial bargaining chips in the current negotiations to bring the war to an end. No one can doubt Putin’s love and pride for his country, his scholarly and authoritative possession of the facts of Russian history from earliest times to the present, as Tucker Carlson’s interview with the Russian leader made clear, and his restoration of the Orthodox Church to its original national prominence. Taras Kuzio’s recently published "Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War" is not kind to Putin but acknowledges that Russia’s historical and cultural essence affirms its status as a special and unique community that must be consolidated.
Scott Pinsker at PJ Media alleges that “Putin is not a mindless zealot or a warmongering ideologue; he’s an immoral, Machiavellian, pro-Russian pragmatist. That might not make him a good person, but it probably does make him someone we can negotiate with.” I suspect Putin may have a rudimentary conscience as well a genuine belief in the spirit of his land and people—and that, while recognizing the realpolitik of battlefield gains, which he will no doubt try to advance prior to a freeze in hostilities, he may be willing in light of the Holodomor to make certain concessions to the once-again suffering people of Ukraine.
It is, in my estimation, an issue that should be tactfully raised, a way of putting the atrocities of the past to rest in a cessation of further bloodshed. Territorial losses and armistice provisions will have to be accepted by the Ukrainian leadership. This is no time for corncobbing, for the truth is that the Ukrainian people have endured enough of the consequences of U.S. misconceptions, European misjudgment, NATO expansionism, internal grift, and Russian ferocity.
There is no point in trying to disambiguate a tangled needlepoint of causes or convoluted hatchwork of ambiguities. It is, rather, important to remind Putin of Medvedev’s redemptive gambit. A resolution to the conflict would be in everyone’s interests, but it is also, given a cruel and sanguinary history, a Russian obligation. It is time to exorcise the ghosts of the past and end the Holodomor of the Russia-Ukraine war.
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