A Gordian knot

Greek legend has it that an oxcart in a village in a remote region of the Persian Empire was tied down with a rope knot that was so large and tangled that no man was able to untie it. I’ve encountered more than a few large tangles of fishing lines that vexed me similarly. As the legend grew, it was said whoever could untie the knot would become king forever.

In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great who was not in the least modest about his talents arrived and had a go at untying the knot. Frustrated with his inability to untie the thing, he drew his sword and cut it in two right down the middle.

This legend has come down to us as an example of how a very clever man or woman for sure might solve a very complex and difficult problem by cutting through the bullshit that has become encrusted on the ways we think about an intractable problem. That is I submit where we are with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It is not possible to not think about the war.

And if you look into the history of the region, you’ll find much that beggars belief. The region and its inhabitants have suffered greatly over the millennia. For example:

There was a slave trade. During the 1500s Islamic Tartar warriors regularly raided north from Crimea, Turkey and North Africa into the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom and Russian territories to seize and carry away European Christians into the Ottoman Empire where they were sold into slavery. Known as “harvesting the steppe”, some historians estimate that up to 3 million Europeans may have been taken and enslaved.

There were pogroms. Wherever Jews lived, every now and then their neighbors rose up to drive the Jews away, take their property, and kill them. This brief description does no justice to what happened over and over again.

There were fake villages. After Russia annexed Crimea from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, the Russian Empress Catherine II toured her new domain on a barge that floated the Dnieper River. Her lover and minister, Grigory Potemkin, was said to have set up "mobile villages" on the riverbank. As soon as the barge carrying the Empress and ambassadors arrived, Potemkin's men, dressed as peasants, would populate the village. Once the barge left, the village was disassembled, then rebuilt downstream overnight. We know such false fronts as Potemkin Villages.

There was starvation. Stalin inflicted a great famine horror on Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 in what is known as the Holodomor causing the death of millions of Ukrainians.

There was war. In 1941 the German Wehrmacht invaded the region stretching from the Black Sea to Lithuania in Operation Barbarossa with an army of 3.5 million and a front of 1600 kilometers breaching, incidentally, a German/Soviet Non-aggression Pact. The German High Command issued orders to execute Communist Party officials and every Jew they could find in the streets after dragging them out of their homes.

There were promises. Ukraine was one of the Soviet Republics and when the Soviet Union disintegrated as a political entity three issues arose. First, Ukraine possessed a large quantity of nuclear weapons. Second, the Warsaw Pact nations began to look to Europe and the West with hopes to join the European Union and the military alliance NATO. And third, Russia and the West were vexed about German reunification.

Scholars have devoted careers to explaining what happened, and none of it is good for Ukraine. Stated very simply, the West made certain promises to Ukraine to induce them to give up their nuclear arsenal, all of which was transferred to Russia. Then the US orally promised Mikail Gorbachev that if Russia did not oppose the reunification of West and East Germany, the US guaranteed that the NATO membership would not advance “one inch” toward the Russian frontier. The Russian psyche was understandably concerned about a repetition of the invasions of Russia to take Moscow perpetrated by Napoleon and Hitler.

Next, in a series of provocative moves, the former Warsaw Pact nations of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania were admitted to NATO membership and significant Western arms and troops were deployed to the territory of these new members. All of which, of course, left Ukraine in the middle of these great power forces.

There were invasions. In 2013 Ukrainians rose up to protest the President’s refusal to sign a deal to become a member of the EU. The US meddled in Ukraine’s election when US State Department representative Victoria Nuland was caught by Russian eave’s droppers saying, “fuck the EU”.

Then Russia saw an opening and snuck into Crimea and reclaimed it as its own. I say reclaimed it because the Crimean Peninsula for many centuries had been a part of the Russian empire until Nikita Khruschev, who was born in Ukraine, gave it to Ukraine.

Which brings us to where we are today.

There has been a conflict in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists since 2014. And in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with forces large enough it thought to conquer all the rest of Ukraine to the Polish border.

The unprovoked aggressive Russian invasion is a violation of the international law of war and the Russian forces have committed many other violations and illegal acts to the extent that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin. Russia is waging a war of aggression and causing extensive deaths and property damage with drone and missile attacks. Drone video evidence shows the summary execution of prisoners. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from their parents and relocated to interior Russia. While I am no fan of the ICC, those warrants and charges must be resolved before there will be peace.

The West’s response to the invasion has been half-hearted at best with economic sanctions that Russia seems able to largely circumvent. The United Nations has said next to nothing about the war. Russia’s seat at the UN Security Council means they possess veto power over any Security Council action.

The US sends arms and money, but even that meager effort is inconsistent and very unpopular with the American voters. Maybe we should take Warren Zevon’s advice and send some lawyers.

During his campaign for President, Donald Trump promised to end the war very quickly. But it grinds on and it seems we might anticipate a federal judge from Paduka would get in the way because, after all, it is what Trump wants to do and we can’t have that.

We need a world leader like Alexander the Great to cut through the bullshit that allows this war to fester on.