I’ve been negligent on this blog, again, as I travel (in Ukraine right now; I’ll be at the Knyzhkovyi Arsenal book festival in Kyïv this coming weekend).
Meanwhile, three of the worst nights of bombardment just passed this last weekend, with a total of 903 drones and 92 ballistic missiles raining down on Ukrainian cities from Friday through Sunday nights. (These are figures provided by the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which are pretty verifiable, including by the physical experience of Ukrainians.)
Kyïv experienced a total of 20 hours and 42 minutes of air raid alerts over those three nights. I have to admit that the thought of bombs and drone débris raining down on people, who’ve become so numbed to the air raid alerts that many now sleep through them, remind me of the scenes of the comic-futurist television series Max Headroom when people would wear metal umbrellas to protect themselves from the periodic satellite débris showers that would rain down on them from the stratosphere. You can get used to anything.
Of course, the Ukrainian reality is hardly the stuff of comedy. Ukrainian-American artist and translator Larissa Babij has been keeping a Substack diary of her visceral experience of living in Ukraine at a Kind of Refugee; her latest piece, “This is War,” is worth reading.
Meanwhile, I still sometimes get curmudgeonly responses from leftist friends about NATO blah blah blah. The Kyiv Independent’s Andrea Januta summarizes the wrongness of those responses in her piece of yesterday, “Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Debunking Putin’s ‘root causes’ claims.”
Essentially, the argument is that anyone claiming that NATO’s expansion was the, or an important, cause of the Russian war on Ukraine should be reminded that
(1) Putin said almost nothing about the Baltic countries joining NATO in 2004, or about Finland, its next largest bordering European country, joining it in 2023; and that
(2) before Russia’s 2014 invasion, less than 20% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO; today that number is 85%.
The root cause is simply Russia’s desire to maintain control over Ukraine. That root cause should be eliminated at its root, which is Russian imperialism, an imperialism with centuries of barely questioned history (barely questioned by Russians or most westerners) backed by the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal, and by a geographically massive klepto-capitalist authoritarian petro-state regime, which today spouts ethno-fascist rhetoric to keep its Russian population in tow behind it (and that continues to subject its non-Russian peoples the way it has for centuries). Repeating its claims is indeed nothing but “useful idiotism” for imperialism.
More in the coming days.
Quick update: It seems the Max Headroom scenes were actually of a “Sky Clearance Festival,” so a bit more celebratory and less predictable than I had recalled… Here’s a clip (others have been taken down by the copyright holders, so I’ll leave a screen-shot below it in case this comes down, too):
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