Two Wastelands

 At this moment, we don’t know when the Ukraine war will end, or who will win it. We can say that it looks like the Ukrainians will, but what will they win? Several of the country’s major cities are in ruins, or heading in that direction. Millions of civilians are displaced, and thousands have been killed, and even the staggering numbers of fatalities we’ve heard so far are probably much too low.

And then there is Russia. While physical war hasn’t come to the homeland in a big way,  another form of war has. The West’s sanctions have turned Russia into an economic wasteland, at least for the average citizen. As President Biden has pointed out, most of the gains Russia has made since the collapse of the Soviet Union have now been erased. Millions of ordinary Russians are suffering, and sadly, many there still don’t know why.

We had to de-Nazify Ukraine, President Putin tells them. An odd turn of phrase, since it’s the Russian troops who are behaving like the dreaded German SS occupiers of World War II. If we’re generous, we might say that the shocking brutality toward civilians is only the behavior of a few rogue military units, or of Russian soldiers seeking revenge for their own losses. But there is much evidence that it’s neither of those things. It looks a lot more like policy. The appointment of the military commander who led Russian operations in Syria to oversee the Ukraine offensive is not a good sign.

At some point, it may occur to Mr. Putin how wasteful his war has been. The truth is, he had it pretty good before starting it. He is (or was) perhaps the single wealthiest person on Earth. While most other European nations aren’t especially fond of him, they have been good customers for Russia’s oil and gas. But now, a major pipeline has been put on hold, and those nations are trying to disentangle themselves from the need to buy anything from Russia.

And even when the war ends, and even if Putin is removed from power by internal or external means, Europe will be left with one country half reduced to rubble, land mines and unexploded ordnance, and the other a pariah state. Both will have suffered catastrophically in their own ways, and both are going to need rebuilding, physically in Ukraine’s case and economically in Russia’s. They, and Europe in general, will need lots of time to heal. I wonder what happened to Never Again.