Burnt Along With the Altars

 The news reports of the Russian strikes that apparently left an historic Ukrainian cathedral in flames earlier this week brought to mind for me that awful passage in Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, in which the Cossack general rampages through Poland, burning churches and slaughtering those who seek shelter within them. 

With barely disguised sadistic relish, Gogol describes the hideous vengeance Taras exacts on the Poles. He "did not even spare the dark-browed Polish beauties," Gogol writes, "[...] who found no refuge, not even in churches as they clung to altars. Taras ordered them to be burnt along with the altars." (Constantine trans.)

Here we are in the 21st century, and it would appear that violent Russian nationalism and imperialism still relishes the burning of religious structures.

But I don't applaud the Ukrainian decision to lob drones at Moscow either. The attacks yesterday left plumes of black smoke over the Russian capital, in an effort to "bring the war home to Russians," as the news reports say. And while no deaths were immediately reported, it seems clear the attacks were aimed at civilian infrastructure. 

I don't mean for a second to draw a moral equivalence between Russia's and Ukraine's war aims in this conflict. One side is clearly the aggressor here. And Trump has had a year and a half already to put the theory to the test that Putin really desires peace and would be satisfied with a reasonable compromise. How has that been going? 

But I am also unnerved whenever I hear political leaders start to talk about strikes on densely-populated cities and civilian infrastructure in terms of reprisal. The New York Times yesterday attributed the following line to Zelensky: "If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well."

The Times adds: "Mr. Zelensky cast the drone onslaught as a response to an attack this week on the Pechersk Lavra monastery complex in Kyiv, one of the holiest sites in Eastern Orthodox Christianity."

It is sad that so many governments around the world—including our own, including Israel's, including—it would seem—that of both Mr. Zelesnky and Mr. Putin—still need reminding that, under the laws of armed conflict, civilians are not a valid target, and one atrocity against an unarmed population does not justify another in retaliation. 

I still adhere to Stephen Spender's timeless admonition: "No cause is just unless it guards the innocent / As sacred trust." 

And many of the people looking up at the balls of dark smoke over Moscow yesterday were indeed innocent. They include children; the elderly; people who never chose Putin's illegal war and in fact oppose it. 

One of them was an ordinary Russian citizen, Nikolai, who, as the Times puts it "called himself a staunch opponent of Mr. Putin and the war, [who] said he had always thought that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine would eventually come back to haunt the country."

This doesn't mean we should join Trump in trying to "both-sides" the conflict. But it does mean we should not "become uncritical, vindictive, / And [...] in order to beat / The enemy, model ourselves on the enemy," as Louis MacNeice puts it in the Autumn Journal. 

Ironically, Trump's efforts to distance himself from the Ukrainian cause and wash his hands of the country's fate—in Chamberlain-esque fashion (just this week, he reiterated that the war "has nothing to do with us," as he put it)—may have actually left Ukraine's military more emboldened to flirt with the risk of committing war crimes. 

Without much promise of ongoing U.S. support, Ukraine has little to lose from alienating its allies. Whereas Biden—for all his other mistakes—at least always struck a pretty decent balance between unwavering support for the justice of Ukraine's self-defense cause—and stern guardrails against U.S. support for Ukrainian reprisal strikes deep into Russian territory. 

And so we are left with a situation in which both Ukraine and Moscow are now burning, and the primitive law of an eye for an eye is returned to the rules of warfare. And so innocent people like the man the Times spoke to, who earnestly oppose their own government's atrocities, are put at risk. 

It's an unspeakable tragedy, since people like Nikolai are in truth natural friends and allies to Ukraine. He's the last person who should be put in danger. Yes; quaint and curious war is! as Thomas Hardy put it; You shoot a fellow down / You'd treat if met where any bar is, / Or help to half-a-crown.