It was coming up on five a.m. and we were still at the casino. Our hotel in Lviv boasted a basement filled with card tables, slot machines, and a full-sized roulette wheel, which is where my friend and I sat, waiting out that morning’s air raid. On our first night we had commented on the absurdity of sitting through an air raid at a roulette wheel. Now, exhausted from yet another night of interrupted sleep, we silently watched the news on an enormous flat screen. In better times this television had broadcast horse races, soccer, boxing; any other contest on which a person might gamble. Today, it was the news. Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian journalist who’d interrupted a government sponsored broadcast to hold up a sign protesting the war in Ukraine, was the lead. In the hour I watched, three or four hopeful segments mentioned Marina Ovsyannikova. Then the air raid app on our phones squelched the all-clear. Sluggishly, we climbed the stairs to our rooms.
Matt, a serial entrepreneur and my companion on this trip, had started businesses in Turkey, Syria, and Afghanistan, and he had recently finished a stint at Yale’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs. A one-time collegiate rower, he had driven a trailer from Germany to Iraq at the height of that country’s war to deliver sculls to the Iraqi rowing team. A Farsi speaker, he’d also studied in an exchange program at Tehran University, which he failed to complete after the Iranian authorities accused him of espionage and imprisoned him for 41 days in 2015. He was released as a concession to the Obama Administration during negotiations around the nuclear deal. After the air raid, Matt suggested we meet Andrii, a tech entrepreneur and friend, so we stepped around the corner from our hotel for a coffee.
Andrii appeared haggard. Like a parent with a newborn, he calculated the days since he’d enjoyed an uninterrupted night’s sleep. He settled on a number around twenty as we reached the front of the line. Andrii ordered coffee as we settled at our table while Matt—who speaks decent Russian—confessed his fear that if he tried to order with the little Ukrainian he knew he might fumble and inject an unappreciated Russian word or phrase. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, Matt could certainly pass for Russian and, with Ukrainians actively hunting for Russian saboteurs, I could understand his concern.
“If you get in trouble,” Andrii explained, “just say: palyanytsia. Whoever is bothering you should then leave you alone.” He repeated this, carefully annunciating each syllable. He explained that a correct pronunciation would always bedevil the native Russian tongue. Both Matt and I tried, but Andrii remained unconvinced. “Perhaps English is best for you guys.” When I asked what palyanytsia meant, Andrii explained it was a kind of flat bread and very tasty, too.
I laughed, but Andrii didn’t seem amused. I apologized, explaining that it just seemed like a funny method to round up Russian saboteurs. Also, it seemed some Russians had chosen to stand with the Ukrainian people, so perhaps this was counterproductive. To emphasize my point, I mentioned Marina Ovsyannikova and her interruption of the nightly news. Andrii cut me off. “Do you think she’s a hero?”
“I think she’s brave.”
“She was fined 30,000 rubles, that’s less than 300 dollars. She was then immediately released. Are we really supposed to applaud her even though until a few days ago, she was happy to dispense propaganda while Russia waged its war?”
The war was only a few weeks old, and I remarked that sometimes it takes people time to find their conscience. Andrii could hardly contain himself. “Really? A few weeks old? Don’t forget, this war has been going on since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, or at least since it took the Donbas in 2014. Should it take eight years to find one’s conscience?”
For Andrii, a narrative that categorized the Ukrainian and Russian peoples as victims of Putin’s war absolved Russian citizens of decades of complicity. “I am sick of reading media stories pitying liberal Russians emigres who’ve fled to Helsinki or to Istanbul to work their tech jobs remotely as they cry about their devalued rubles. Their complaint is always that they have no future in an authoritarian Russia, not that a genocide is occurring inside Ukraine. They say Stop the War. The don’t say Save Ukraine. They would be happy to see Ukraine annexed into Russia. It’s only the means of that annexation they object to, a method of war that has made them pariahs. The end in Ukraine is fine with them, just as it was fine in Crimea, in Georgia, and in Chechnya. Did any of them leave Russia after those successful invasions? No, of course not. It’s failed wars they’re against, not Ukraine they’re for; there’s a difference.”
The atmosphere between us turned tense.
“Palyanytsia,” said Matt, trying again with great effort.
Andrii relaxed with a smile. “That’s better,” he said. “Now you’re getting it.”
The next morning, Matt and I sat at the roulette wheel awaiting the end of an air raid. The attack from the day before had struck the Lviv airport, and while I wondered where today’s rockets might land, the word genocide, which Andrii had used the day before, troubled me. I had often been taught that people who live under autocratic regimes are never the enemy; rather it’s the regime itself. This theory seemed to be driving our Western strategy of sanctions, one designed to place domestic pressure on Putin and perhaps even cleave the Russian people away from him. Indeed, our entire Western strategy seemed to hinge on two variables: the resolve of the Ukrainian people to endure and fight; and the resolve of the Russian people to resist and reject Putin. If either faltered, the Ukrainian people would be subjected to genocide, a term often used in hyperbole, but the definition of which fit: “the deliberate and systemic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.”
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Putin has been open about his desire “to solve the Ukrainian question.” This summer, in a lengthy essay published by the Kremlin, he denied the existence of an independent Ukrainian nationality and also claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are one people—a Russian people. And if Putin is engaging in genocide, are everyday Russians complicit? While polling inside Russia is unreliable, multiple independent polls show strong majority Russian support for the war in Ukraine. So if a majority of Russians support the war is a Western strategy that relies on internal Russian pressure against Putin fundamentally flawed?
Time will tell.
A video grab from March 15 shows Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova holding a sign protesting the war in Ukraine during a government sponsored broadcast, in Moscow on March 14, 2022. Stella Pictures/ABACAPRESS.COM/Reuters
In a conflict already echoing the Second World War, it would seem we are wishfully projecting our sentiments onto the Russian people. If Ukraine—and the liberal Western order—can prove victorious in this war, perhaps we should be thinking of Russia like we thought of Germany in the 1940s. The decoupling of the Russian people from the regime that acts in their name is an exercise Americans and the West seem more interested in than Ukrainians, whose resolve against Russia remains incredibly high, with nearly eighty percent rejecting any territorial concessions, to include Crimea and the Donbas. And if the pronunciation session of rusni-pyzda with Andrii didn’t hit home this point, walking down the street in Lviv one need only glimpse the front of any currency exchange: the offered rate for rubles is 00.00, so worthless.
The next morning, we waited in the Vienna Coffee House for Yaroslav Hrytsak, a history professor at Ukrainian Catholic University and prominent intellectual, the author of the bestselling Global History of Ukraine. When Hrytsak arrived, he sat across from us, adjusting his chair as if preparing to deliver a lecture. His mask, which he’d pulled beneath his chin, served as a hammock for his ample, grey beard. “This coffee house,” he announced, “is the oldest in Lviv.” He held his index finger to the bridge of his nose. “It is worth noting that the oldest coffee house in Lviv is named the Vienna Coffee House, while the oldest coffee house in Vienna is named the Lviv Coffee House. That is a good first lesson in eastern European politics and culture.”
Hrytsak, like Andrii, believed it wasn’t possible to decouple the war in Ukraine from the Russian people. When I asked if he could explain why, he peered over his reading glasses and took a breath; it was as if I’d arrived in the last fifteen minutes of a three-hour movie and asked him what it was about. With patience, he replied: “No one feels Russian identity more than Ukrainians. You see, the Russian identity is a spiritual one, in which Russia believes it is the savior of the world.” When I asked what Russia had to save the world from, Hrytsak replied, “The West, of course. Right now, Putin isn’t fighting Ukraine. Remember, he’s fighting Nazis and Nazism is synonymous with the West. In Putin’s mind Ukraine does not exist; it is a fiction, a creation of the West, one he must destroy. Embedded in Russian identity is a belief that it has a special mission to fight the West. From Napoleon to Hitler, Russia is the one that saves the world from the West and its depraved fascist tendencies. Russia defeated Napoleon. Russia defeated Hitler. And Putin will defeat Obama and Biden.”
“Obama?” Matt asked. “He’s not even in office.”
“As I said, this isn’t a rational war, it is a spiritual one.” Hrytsak sipped his coffee, gathering his thoughts before he continued, “Over five hundred years there have been many attempts to emancipate Russian society. Every attempt collapses with a ruthless autocrat. Why do the Russian people choose unfreedom? The answer is Russian culture. If Russia is indeed the savior of the world, that would mean its suffering has meaning, that its suffering is synonymous with its piety. That’s why the sanctions won’t work. Could you convince a Christian to become godless by making him suffer? No, of course not, his suffering only draws him closer to God. Russia has enjoyed periods of freedom, but always it returns to this condition of suffering. It’s important to understand that it’s not Putin who took Russia, but rather Russia which gave itself to Putin, and Putin has used Russia’s history of suffering to consolidate his power.”
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Hrytsak folded his arms. “This city has been Austro-Hungarian, Polish, and Russian. The Poles in particular have a very strong claim on Lviv, but their culture is different than Russia’s. They have the ability to rethink the past, while Russian culture has a tendency to relive the past. In the one case, it’s like driving car with a small rearview mirror you can reference. In the other case, it’s like driving a car with your windshield coated in mud. All you can do is look out the back window.”
