Blues for Ukraine

Friday’s disastrous Oval Office meeting, where Donald Trump harangued Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, felt like the closing of a circle. I’d already been sitting in one country when a president inflicted a devastating blow to spirited, independent Ukraine. Last week, the second instance unfolded as farce, yet remained just as painful to watch.

It wasn’t lost on me that so much of the current drama for each man began with the other. Trump failed to corrupt Zelenskyy to his own ends back in 2019, faced impeachment at home as a result of what he’d done, and has been seeking revenge ever since.

Even without that incident, Trump’s support for Vladimir Putin would likely put Zelenskyy in his crosshairs today. Zelenskyy is the biggest thorn in Putin’s side, therefore he’s likewise opposed by Trump, who deeply admires the Russian leader. Today, I’ll write about how what the U.S. president did last week reveals as much about the current domestic situation in America as it does about the Russia-inflicted tragedy still unfolding in Ukraine.

Putin tries to take Kyiv

When Russian tanks invaded Ukraine three years ago, I was asleep in a friend’s guest room in Moscow. I had just visited another friend in St. Petersburg, doing research for a book on a long-ago Arctic voyage that had ended in disaster.

I’d headed to Russia to finish that research, because I believed that the invasion was imminent, and I thought Putin would spend the week after the Olympics bombing Ukraine before sending tanks across the border. Unable to prevent the war, I wanted to finish reporting for the book I’d worked on over a year and say goodbye to friends who had welcomed me into their homes and helped me on multiple projects—people I might never see again.

I’d traveled to Russia for the first time in 2011, in the midst of reporting my book about Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. During the decade that followed, I’d sailed on two expeditions high in the Russian Arctic.

In 2011 that country had been less on edge, with Putin still in control but out of the presidency for a little longer. It was his return to that office the following year that would unleash even worse demons on his country (and others’).

Putin had made appearances in both the books I’d written by then. But during my visits, I’d experienced only small glimpses of the police state in action. People built in extra time on planned events or getting permits in order to accommodate officials who would throw their weight around with threats and might need to be placated. Bossism was rampant. Occasionally someone with whom I got along well would be put in the position of bullying me on orders from a superior (which they would explain later, privately). At an airport, I was once taken into a separate room and questioned by law enforcement, but only for moments, over a matter quickly resolved. Later I would think of Brittney Griner, and how I passed through the same airport within days of her questioning and detention there.

Despite my relative safety, the threat of worse things hung over everyday life. One Moscow acquaintance joked about how even those who would say that everything was fine in Russia knew perfectly well how impossible it would be to stand on a crate and read the country’s own constitution aloud on the streetcorner without being arrested.

While some of my Russian friends stayed well informed, others didn’t have much idea about what was happening in the world. People had to make an effort to know things, and by slowly suffocating independent media, Putin made that harder and harder. Even for those who made that effort, it could be hard to pin down reality, because there was so much garbage clogging the information arteries of the nation.

A low-grade corruption permeated everything. Extremely sophisticated people could sometimes spout conspiracy theories out of the blue. Bizarre ideas about secret machinations sat alongside facts and even incorporated them occasionally. For the subset of friends and acquaintances who’d been captured by them, it was often impossible to unravel the knot into which their thinking processes had been tied.

Smashed in real time

Ahead of my trip to Russia in February 2022, I’d told friends that I was coming to see them but would have to leave a few days after the Olympics ended. I explained that I would need to leave before the invasion began. One or two of the people I knew there had serious worries as well, but most were confident there was nothing to worry about. One Moscow friend mocked me affectionately, saying, “You have been watching too much U.S. news.”

My guess about the timing of the invasion was a few days off, and the morning I woke up in Moscow to the sound of a television showing tanks crossing the border was grim. In part because Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union for much of the twentieth century, several Russian acquaintances also had Ukrainian grandparents or cousins. Whatever illusions they had left about their country got smashed in real time. We scrambled to consider the best, quickest way for me to leave the country. When the time came, they all headed to the airport with me in a van, understanding that some goodbyes are permanent.

I was soon thinking of a Ukrainian whale scientist these Russians had introduced me to. Her hometown of Kharkiv lay just 15 miles across the border with Russia. I didn’t know it yet, but she’d left her Moscow apartment and gone to see her mother the day before. I would soon learn that she was in her hometown with only a backpack, with no way or intention of returning to Russia. Her apartment, her belongings, her friends, her position and work as a global expert on whales—all of it had all been erased overnight. As distressed as my friends were to find their country incontrovertibly the aggressor in an invasion causing untold harm to their neighbors, it’s Ukraine that has suffered far more and whose existence is now at stake.

A paradox of evil

Over time, none of my Russian friends but some acquaintances came to the view that this escalation and invasion were the fault of the United States. Other friends in Estonia or America announced after the horrors of Bucha that Russians were simply brutes and monsters, and that what we were seeing was just the core Russian character made plain.

Those latter beliefs are similar to ones I encountered often while writing my history of concentration camps, One Long Night. Each time a party or a government wanted to create camps for the mass detention of civilians without any real trial based on identity, this was the argument they used. They would explain how those other camps in other countries had been bad, but then argue that this particular group in our country was so dangerous that more extreme measures were required—that one particular group of people were truly subhuman and deserving of removal from society.

In the case of my research, authoritarian voices and propagandists had been condemning those who would be victims of the camps. But if you flip the tables and say it about aggressors, it still confirms the idea of inherent badness in one group of people as a whole. If we accept that, then it leaves open the possibility of it being true about other groups, those who could be the victims in a different scenario.

It’s either true or it’s not. And across more than a century of camps I studied, it was never true. Not once. Whole collectives of people—whether they’re divided along racial or ethnic, political or religious lines—are people, with the same capacity for doing evil or helping others. Culture can encourage compassion or atrocity, institutions can prod people toward rapaciousness or restraint, but humans are humans.

Moral bankruptcy in action

What’s more, believing Russians are inherently bad leads to a false comfort—that some fundamental difference exists between us and them. But I believe that delusion of difference keeps us from seeing the ways that we are capable of the same kind of violence. And tens of millions of Americans are equally ignorant, equally captured by disinformation, and just as prone to cheering on horrors that their president has claimed are for the good of the country. Under Trump, the stench of corruption increases noticeably day by day, mimicking the kind of self-dealing that has long been the subject of jokes about Russia.

Which brings me back to Zelenskyy, Trump, and Vance at the White House last week. Trump and Vance broke with past foreign policy to belittle and taunt Zelenskyy. The event was ostensibly a meeting of heads of states, of leaders who are peers. But it was clear that what was intended by the current elected officials of the U.S. government was a ritualized hazing of someone with lesser power, a public humiliation of a country in need.

Belittling Zelenskyy did two things. It reinforced the current Republican idea of power as entirely zero sum—they idea that if I take something from you, it makes me more powerful—an idea that is often not true. It also served Trump’s drive to realign U.S. foreign policy in ways better suited to his own personal grifts and those of Elon Musk, and ones more amenable to Putin.

The idea of Ukraine as the aggressor in this war isn’t one that the majority of Republicans now serving Trump actually believe. We know this from the extensive footage of people like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham—people now allied with him who have not only said in the past that Trump is a grifter and a danger to the country, but who have also explained in recent years how critical defending Ukraine is to global security.

Their willingness to go along with Trump now is a sign of moral bankruptcy, but to say they were born evil is to excuse them. They’re choosing to do these criminal acts for the advantages of the moment. We need to create a system that makes these choices less possible and punishes them more consistently.

Mirror worlds

We also need to create a system in which disinformation doesn’t allow competitive authoritarianism to thrive. The U.S. is now far more like Russia than when I first visited in 2011, but we’ve long been on a similar trajectory. We’ve had four decades of capitalism on steroids promoting business interests and expanding income inequality, pauperizing whole sections of the population and destroying faith in government. We have a superrich class of people who seem to live outside legal accountability. We have disinformation on a massive scale that promotes collective amnesia, along with the idea that nothing can be done, so it’s better to lie low and keep from provoking any response that might disrupt your job or trigger actual violence. These are the kinds of fears that allow figures like Trump to come to power, and despots like Putin to arrange better ways to keep it.

While Trump has admired Putin for a long time, he didn’t need Putin’s encouragement to aspire to running a modern, brutal mafia state. When you cook the same ingredients up, you end up with variations on a similar dish. And now we’re seeing attempts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to smash neutral evaluation of scientific discoveries and medical devices, and to devastate the national weather service, the very definition of critical, public knowledge that establishes our common reality.

There’s a reason the Putin fans in Russia are cheering on what happened in the Oval Office on Friday. Trump and Elon Musk don’t need Putin to tell them what to do—they already want the same things. They’re trying to create the same kind of society: one that is too ignorant to see clearly what’s happening in time to stop it, and so afraid that people are willing to believe there’s no point in even trying.

Here at home

I’ve traveled enough in Russia that I’ve met people in different settings, some of them strangers, some friends or acquaintances of friends. Some of them made clear how little interest they had in current events; others talked about how they’d deliberately cut themselves off from following politics of any kind, because it was a waste of time.

I met a propagandist who’d relocated from North America to Russia for a nice paycheck and who seemed to herself believe the lies she spouted on Russian media. I met people who were under sixty and not mentally disabled who praised Stalin and made detailed arguments for his accomplishments as a great leader. Others outlined complex international conspiracy theories that made no sense to me, even though some of them used information from familiar Fox News stories to try to prove their point. Before February 2022, I met ardent defenders of Putin who believed that a “strong leader” above all guaranteed that Russia would remain steady.

Oddly enough, seeing it all at a remove, outside my own culture, has helped me to accept my own acquaintances and relatives who have been captured by propaganda in parallel ways. It’s one thing to conclude after historical research into concentration camps that people are people, and vulnerable to propaganda, social pressure, and weak institutions that fail to protect society from the worst public figures. It’s another to see it in action in real time, abroad and then in my own country. Now Trump is doing his level best to ally us with Russia. Now the bad guys are us.

I surely have my own blind spots, so I’m not invoking any kind of superiority as a human being. And anyone who knows even a little domestic or international history could easily list ways in which the U.S. has been the bad guy in different ways for centuries. From Native American genocide to slavery and Jim Crow, to covert operations in Central and South America in the second half of the twentieth century to unquestioning delivery of weapons to the Israeli government as it killed countless civilians in Gaza, the United States has had a hand in monstrous wrongs as long as it has existed.

We have to address those wrongs, too. Yet when our country takes a step to introduce new and significant harms, it’s important to call attention to those harms and, where possible, to stop them. Last week’s betrayal of Ukraine and the current administration’s attempt to destroy longstanding U.S.-European alliances fall into this category.

A way forward

What does this mean going forward and what can we do about it? First, at the heart of all this is that the most vulnerable people are the ones who pay the price. And in this scenario, Ukrainians have lost so much already: homes, their safety, and most horrifically, tens of thousands of lives, including both civilians and soldiers.

It’s critical to balance two dire needs, both of which we can do something about. The first is to support Ukraine, both to do what is still possible to protect the country as the war there continues and to foil what appears to be a common wish by Trump and Musk to see it defeated. The second is to take responsibility for our own country and to stop politicians who have become both a domestic and an international threat.

In terms of helping Ukraine, showing public support is easy. Fly a Ukrainian flag. Show up at demonstrations nationwide supporting Ukrainians, like the ones that took place over the weekend. I spoke to Ukrainians who saw how JD Vance was treated in Vermont on his ski trip and celebrated everyday Americans’ rejection of the vice president’s tantrum in the White House. These kinds of actions provide moral support.

You can call your governor, representative, and senator, whether they are Republicans or Democrats. If they support Ukraine, praise them for it. If they don’t, tell them they ought to. Seventeen governors came out in support of Ukraine after the Oval Office incident. So in the case of your governors, ask what state initiatives they’ll spearhead to offer Ukraine other kinds of support outside munitions that are still possible, despite Trump’s actions.

For now at least, you can still donate for various relief and supply efforts in Ukraine. I would encourage people to give soon, while it is still straightforward and legal to do so. One way you can help is to support the war effort through contributing to the work of Olga Shpak, the Ukrainian whale scientist I mentioned earlier in this post. Shpak stayed in Kharkiv to become a key figure with Assist-Ukraine, a U.S.-based nonprofit founded to support front-line needs. For the last three years, I’ve been partnering with her to raise money and awareness.

The other half of what needs to be done is harder. As I’ve mentioned before, we have to change the kind of ignorance we have here—a direct parallel to the disinformation I saw in Russia. That will require new information networks that are more effective than legacy journalism is now. It will also require the public and politicians to put forth a new vision that stands not for mealy-mouthed accommodations to the hatred and resentment that Trump takes advantage of, but instead offers a real future and better lives for all Americans. It’s critical that this happens sooner than later, before the economy and democratic institutions are further stripped for parts and before the more violent aspects of a police state have time to grow in the vacuum created by their loss.

We have a lot to do, but we are capable of it, and unlike so many countries that have fallen to authoritarianism, we have the freedom and the means to act. Every action matters. Pick one thing and do it.

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