Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is sending negotiators to meet with a Russian delegation at a site on the banks of the Pripyat River, near the Belarusian border. “I do not really believe in the outcome of this meeting,” Zelensky said, “but let them try so that later not a single citizen of Ukraine has any doubt that I, as President, tried to stop the war, when there was even a small, but still a chance.”
Russian tanks have almost encircled Kyiv and although Ukrainian officials report that the enemy has been beaten back from Kharkiv that city remains under threat. Vladimir Putin’s soldiers have fired Kalibr missiles against Kyiv and loosed barrages of unguided thermobaric rockets against Ukrainian troops and military installations. Meanwhile Zelensky’s government is issuing assault rifles to citizen volunteers and Kyivans gather to manufacture Molotov cocktails for the expected last-ditch defense of their city and homeland.
“The night was hard” President Zelensky said in a speech this morning. “The people rose to defend their state and they showed their true faces. This is terror… They are going to bomb our Ukrainian cities even more… They are going to kill our children even more insidiously. This is an evil that has come to our land and must be destroyed.”
The Ukrainian leader has made no secret of his disappointment at Europe’s and America’s unwillingness to commit troops to the defense of his beleaguered country. It is a legitimate criticism, and is even more pointed as NATO assembles troops to defend Poland and the Baltic states. Yet, at the same time, the danger that a Western military intervention could escalate into a nuclear world war is real. Putin warned the West that intervention would “will lead you to such consequences that you have never faced in your history.” He raised Russia’s nuclear alert level earlier today just to emphasize that point.
It is a threat that that strikes deep into the darkest reaches of our most primal fears. There is a recurring nightmare that I had over and over again throughout my childhood in Canada during the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s. Almost everyone I grew up with had some version of that nightmare, reinforced by the post-apocalyptic fiction of our youth, like Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Alas, Babylon, and movies-of-the-week like Testament and The Day After. Our fears cooled in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, and a whole generation has grown up without the fear of imminent incineration… But the nightmare is back. I had it again last week, and friends, both young and old have reported similar night terrors of their own.
We found security in the belief that no one, neither the leader of post-Soviet Russia, not his American counterpart, would be so foolhardy as to initiate an exchange of weapons that could conceivably exterminate all life on earth or at the very least, snuff-out human civilization. But that was before the would-be world conqueror in the Kremlin launched an all-out invasion on Ukraine that the smart money had said we would not be so reckless to do. Here we are. All bets are off.
President Zelensky is justifiably frustrated as he leads his country in a war for its very existence and we – in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and around the world – seem to sit on our hands, unable to do anything to aid Ukraine in its heroic defense. There are even some wags in public life, in politics, and in social media who have opined that it best to wash our hands of Ukraine altogether and allow the bear to savor his supper.
That is the wrong lesson. If we cannot launch a frontal assault on Putin for fear of Armageddon, we can contain him and cage him like a rabid animal, and isolate Russia economically and culturally until it is no longer a threat.
I was initially skeptical of the sanctions imposed by Washington, London, Berlin, and other countries in the early hours of the war. It seemed like such near-beer next to the courage and suffering of the people of Ukraine. But, as the days have gone on and the sanction grew, so has my confidence in our collective eagerness to wage an economic war against Russia. As I write, the airspace of Canada and much of Europe is closed to Russian commercial air traffic, and governments are seizing Russian assets and freezing the overseas wealth of the oligarchs who prop up Putin’s regime; Russian banks have been shut out of the SWIFT system, even corporations like BP are divesting their Russian holdings.
Perhaps more catastrophic for a country whose leader has gone to war in an egotistical attempt to establish his personal and national status as the regional, indeed continental top dog, is the damage to Russian international prestige. Concert halls have cancelled their contracts with conductor and Putin-booster Valery Gergiev, and his agent dropped him as a client just this afternoon; Russia’s invitation to the Eurovision Song Contest has been withdrawn, and as many as 180 million viewers will take notice of the country’s conspicuous absence from the broadcast in May; UEFA announced that it was moving the European Champions League final from Saint Petersburg to Paris.
FIFA, the governing body of international soccer, is adamant that it will not disinvite Russia from this year’s World Cup in Qatar, but with Czech and Polish teams refusing to play the Russians, and demands for a ban from football powers like France, that could soon change.
It must go further. Russia must be isolated, whether that means barring Russian athletes from the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon this summer, and from the World Figure Skating Championships in Montpelier this spring (it would take no more than the cancellation of athlete visas), or shunning celebrities and oligarchs, Russia must become the very definition of persona or patria non grata. Make no mistake, Russians are sensitive to world opinion, and many are horrified by the war to which their president has led them. They will not gladly suffer a leader whose reckless hunger for prestige has led to their global ostracism and humiliation.
Tens of thousands of Russians have already risked arrest, and more than 3,000 have been arrested, marching in peace demonstrations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, in a country where public protest is all-but illegal; 664 Russian scientists published an open letter in the French daily newspaper La Monde demanding “an immediate end to the acts of war directed against Ukraine” by their own government. In an age of transparent digital internationalism, many Russians – young, educated, and urbane Russians, in any event – know that the whole world is watching, and they want their demand for peace to be seen and heard.
Even dictators rely on the consent of the governed to maintain their rule, even if it is bullied and resentful, and less than a week into the war, Russians’ resentment has grown to levels unprecedented since the fall of the Soviet Union. Popular resistance to unpopular wars has overthrown Russian state power twice before, in 1917 and 1991, and regime change in Moscow might only need a tiny spark to end the war, and to free Europe and Central Asia from the imperial ambitions of a would-be Tsar.
Russia’s war has just begun, and there is still much to do, not only not only to achieve peace, end the bloodshed and ensure the security of Ukraine and its people, but to force Russia back from the territories it has illegally occupied in the Crimea since 2014. Perhaps we should take a page from the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement (though it has been curiously silent since the war began*) and organize in labor unions, colleges, churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues to demand the complete isolation of the aggressor until the freedom and security of Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Central Asia – indeed the world – is guaranteed.
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* The Palestinian BDS National Committee has made no statements on the situation in Ukraine and has not responded to The Typescript’s requests for comment. No public figures associated with the BDS movement have released statements regarding the Russian invasion.