Well, it's happened. After teasing it for what felt like an eternity, Putin has finally gone ahead and declared the independence of two sections of eastern Ukraine, making this the second time in the last decade that the Russian autocrat has unilaterally hived off a portion of the sovereign territory of one of his largest contiguous neighbors. Whether targeted sanctions are the best that can be done about this is up for debate. Whether Ukraine could have de-escalated the conflict and effectively undermined Putin's propaganda efforts at an earlier stage by agreeing to grant further autonomy to the breakaway territories merits consideration (I have argued for that position myself). But we should not allow any of these questions of strategy to occlude the moral right-and-wrong of the matter.
While Putin will continue to pursue his usual MO of constructing alternate realities, trying to relativize his own actions, and spinning kernels of truth into the dross of moral nihilism, the basic facts remain these: he unilaterally annexed the territory of a sovereign nation as recently as 2014; he armed separatist factions and deployed relentless propaganda to justify the seizure of still further territory in the country's east; he moved troops into formation with the apparent intent to invade that country while publishing manifestos declaring its historic unity with Russia; and now he has declared the independence of two territories that he had long since brought into his orbit, unilaterally redrawing the border of another sovereign state. Putin's in the wrong, and there should be no further debate about that.
One would think that this fact pattern of bullying behavior and escalating aggression would be enough to preclude anyone from coming to Putin's defense. But a surprising number of people do. The orthodox "realist" tradition in IR, after all, has long held that people like Putin are scarcely moral actors at all—they are merely embodiments of the inexorable will to power of all states, which act to gain as much territory and strategic advantage as they can unless checked by countervailing force, because the international community remains in a lawless state of nature. Then, on the other side, are a number of Putin apologists on the far left, who seem incapable of breaking old habits of thought left over from the days of the Soviet Union and the New Left, no matter how altered the contemporary circumstances.
To try to give these arguments their due, realists and old–New Leftists alike can point to a number of ambiguities in the Ukraine situation that are genuinely hard to litigate. Back in 2014, was the regime change that occurred a popular revolt to remove a corrupt Moscow-backed potentate and enshrine the will of the people? Or was it an illegitimate coup that overthrew an elected government by main force? Depends whom you ask. And it was certainly clear that the government that succeeded these events has been marred by varying degrees of corruption and ethno-chauvinism (so, of course, is Putin's government); that the Ukrainian armed defense is rife with racist militias and white supremacist groups (so, of course, is the Russian nationalist movement).
But what exactly does any of that prove? That Russia has the right to invade and annex territory from its neighboring states so long as their governments can be shown to have also done bad things? That a "great power" has some de facto right to advance its self-interests even if it be in defiance of international law, because might makes right in the Thrasymachean world of international politics? If either of those arguments sounds plausible, consider who else has invoked them over the past hundred years, and ask if one would apply the same logic to those instances as well. Was Poland simply a natural part of Germany's innate "sphere of influence" in 1939? Was the fact that Poland was also full of anti-Semites an excuse for the arch-anti-Semite Hitler to invade? Did the moral status of the Sudetenland annexation the year before hinge on whether or not the Czech government was "corrupt" at the time it occurred?
None of this means that potential Western retaliation to Putin's actions will necessarily be wise or justified. Even if a foreign government is in the wrong and behaving as an aggressor, that doesn't mean that certain kinds of military or economic responses could not be still worse, or yield more harmful consequences in the long run. Certainly, the West should never escalate the conflict beyond the limits of what Putin has already done. If he has in effect seized the breakaway eastern provinces of Ukraine, don't act like he invaded the whole country. If his latest feint is really a ploy to set the groundwork for a future blitzkrieg against Kiev—as it may well be—force him to be the one to prove that through his actions; otherwise, he wins the propaganda battle.
Yet many people on the Left confuse these and similar strategic and moral arguments for de-escalation—which I favor—with the need to relativize or even justify Putin's actions. They see themselves as doing a service for "peace" by showing that they are capable of seeing matters "from the Russian point of view." At its worst, this amounts to a kind of resuscitated Stalinism—except arguably even worse, because instead of doing all this toadying and boot-licking in the service of something that at least pretended to be a universalistic ideology on a mission of world-betterment, it is now in the service of the actions of a mafia state headed by a bullying bigot, whose only ideology appears to be the crassest kind of revanchist nationalism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and machismo.
At its best, the left-wing impulse to find justifications for Putin stems from the tradition of Noam Chomsky—anything but a Stalinist—and his belief that it is the "responsibility of the intellectuals" in any given society to critically interrogate the actions of their own government, much more than it is to criticize the decisions of other states. But while this attitude appears noble on first examination, it sets up a false choice (after all, why can't we criticize both?). It can also be made to serve the cause of distorting rather than furthering the truth, when it is pushed to the point of degenerating into a universal axiom that fault simply must always be found on the U.S.'s side, otherwise we aren't doing our jobs. Just think how much ink was wasted on arguments that U.S. diplomacy actually caused the early crises of the Cold War or the Korean War, for instance—none of which have stood up to later examination since the Soviet archives were opened.
(Meanwhile, the thing that really needed to be criticized was not how the Korean War started, one way or the other, but the fact that the United States conducted that war by carpet bombing civilian targets—something that remains a crime against humanity regardless of the role of U.S. or Soviet diplomacy in the initial act of aggression across the 38th parallel. So too, whatever there will turn out to be to criticize in the U.S.'s responses to Putin's actions this week will likely not have to do with whether or not the U.S. "started it" (Putin alone "started it")—but what effect these policies have on the innocent, whether in Russia or in Ukraine.)
In contemplating these various options for how the intelligentsia should respond to Putin's actions, it's helpful to revisit the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary; since, there too, the Western Left tried out every one of these alternatives.
Hard-core Stalinists defended Soviet actions (I recently found a 1958 novel by John Berger at a used bookstore, A Painter of Our Time, that is a particularly awful example of this school, full of pseudo-profound non sequiturs along the lines of "sure, maybe Stalin was moving toward another genocide in his final days based on his deluded fears of a 'doctor's plot,' but in the impoverished Third World they don't even have doctors, so what do you think of that?") ; for others, it was the final atrocity that prompted their break from the Party. Humanistic liberals, anti-communist socialists, and politically-unclassifiable people like E.E. Cummings all vociferously denounced the invasion, with some confusing opposition to the Soviet policy with the need to support a more aggressive Western military posture in response.
As so often, Camus charted a morally clear course between these various options, acting yet again as "neither victim nor executioner": his response to the invasion implied that it is in fact possible to condemn—and condemn utterly and unreservedly—the Soviet invasion, while opposing retaliatory war and further bloodshed at the same time. But is such condemnation empty if it is not backed up by arms? Does it mean anything to say the Soviet invasion was wrong, if one is not taking to the streets of Budapest to fight the onrushing tanks? What do words matter, what do opinions matter, next to actions? Camus reminds us that they matter a great deal:
"In Europe’s isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them."
That is the task that confronts us today with respect to the Ukrainian people and other innocents who may perish as a result of Putin's reckless aggression. More so than figuring out what policy response could stop Putin, if any can; for such questions are ones on which people of goodwill can disagree. The preliminary and more immediately pressing task is to be of like mind on this threshold point: that we will never make excuses, never condone, "even indirectly," Putin's regime or his behavior.
One must remain utterly clear-eyed about who he is and what he has done throughout his ignoble career: his assassinations, his lies, his atrocities, his blatant thievery against both neighboring states and the Russian people. Only then can we have a sound discussion as to what, if anything, can be done about him.
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