Putin and Trump: At War with History

I have never been to the Russian Air Base on the Eastern edge of Ukraine in Millerovo, where attack helicopters, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and ground forces have begun the Russian invasion. The last time I was in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk (about 60 miles from Millerovo), I visited a military plant that was then converting to syringe manufacturing. I was with Yuri Shchekochikhin who represented the region as a member of Parliament.

Yuri is dead now; murdered by the Putin Regime for telling the truth. Perhaps the most courageous leader of independent journalism in the former Soviet Union, he was poisoned before either Anna Politkovskaya or Aleksandr Litvinenko. I’ve been reflecting on our time together in Ukraine and Russia, and as his host at my home when he first visited the United States. I will always remember his sweet incredulity that after I made a quick phone call to a local Chinese restaurant, a man on a bicycle arrived with dinner. Yuri closed his big round eyes and slowly shook his head in disbelief.

Over many years and more than a few vodkas, Yuri and I became friends. I remember him tugging at my arm in a Moscow hallway, excitedly explaining that he had interviewed the FSB agents (formerly KGB) who carried out the order to bomb apartment buildings in Russia - a false flag operation to garner support for military suppression in Chechnya. It was my turn to look at him, incredulous; ‘really,’ I asked? ‘How can you be so sure?’ He looked at me with his soulful eyes and short, cropped hair and leaned in: “They told me, the ones who did it; they talked with me, the agents; I interviewed them.”

In that same region of Eastern Ukraine that Yuri once represented, Russia has issued papers to nearly a half-million residents - officially identifying them as Russian citizens. If ‘provoked’ by some horrible slaughter of these innocents, it would not be the first time Russia sacrifices its own. Or as now seems equally likely, he may just recognize the two regions as part of Russia.

But really? Why, we ask? What is Putin thinking; what does he want that he is willing to risk so much? This is not fundamentally about his thinking but about the feelings deep in his Russian soul. He yearns not only for the warm-water port Russia has sought since Peter the Great (which he has now secured in Crimea). He is driven to repair a profound affront to Russian exceptionalism. His quest is to remake Kyivan Rus’ and repair The Great Schism - the spiritual and religious split in 1054 between Rome and Constantinople that has given us what we now understand as Eastern Orthodoxy in contrast to Roman Catholicism.

This is less about Ukraine as a runaway Soviet Republic, and more about Putin trying to roll back 1000 years of history. Comparatively, Trump is a piker. But the January 6th attack on the US Capitol was without question an attempt to rewrite American electoral history. Both these political strongmen understand that the power to rewrite history is also the power to shape the future.

Democracy is resilient and can better withstand the forces of autocracy than can the valiant but vastly outmatched Ukrainian military. Democracy in America won’t just collapse like an apartment building.

But the marauders on the Capitol steps operating as paramilitary units (and equipped as such), Putin with control over a vast military and propaganda apparatus, and Trump in his pathological lying and fanaticism all share the same disdain for history when it stands in the way of their dystopian visions for the future. It was because of his hope for a better future that Yuri was determined to tell the truth. And alongside the catastrophe unfolding on the ground in Ukraine, truth itself has also suffered a terrible blow.

More than geography is at stake in Ukraine.