Gratitude to Ukraine (2024)

Gratitude to Ukraine (2024)
Security, Freedom, Democracy, Courage, Pluralism, Perseverance, Generosity, Tymothy Snyder.
 
https://snyder.substack.com/p/gratitude-to-ukraine-2024?
 
Debts are awkward, especially debts of gratitude. When we owe others too much, we can find it hard to express our appreciation. If we are not reflective, we might minimize our debt, or simply forget it. If we think highly of ourselves, we might ignore a debt to someone we regard as less important. In the worst case, we can resent the people who have helped us, and portray them in a negative light, just to avoid the feeling that we, too, are vulnerable people who sometimes need a helping hand.
Americans (and many others) owe Ukrainians a huge debt of gratitude for their resistance to Russian aggression. For some mixture of reasons, we have difficulty acknowledging this. To do so, we have to find the words. Seven that might help are: security, freedom, democracy, courage, pluralism, perseverance, and generosity.
Perhaps the most important and the most unacknowledged debt is security.Ukrainian resistance to Russia has vastly reduced the chances of major armed conflict elsewhere, and thus significantly reduced the chances of a nuclear war.
Before this war began, one scenario for a major conventional conflict with nuclear risk was a Russian invasion of a NATO country. Ukrainian resistance has revealed the weaknesses of the Russian armed forces, and destroyed much of Russia's fighting capacity. Thanks to Ukraine, this scenario is far less likely than it was a year ago, and will remain unlikely for years to come.
The major scenario for global conflict in the twenty-first century was thought to be a Chinese-American confrontation over Taiwan. As a result of Ukrainian resistance, Beijing sees the difficulties it would face in an offensive in Taiwan. The flashpoint of what most analysts regarded as the most likely (or even inevitable) scenario for major war has essentially been removed.
This debt is all but impossible for Americans to register. In daily press coverage, we are drawn to the headlines that make us feel threatened, or suggest that the war is somehow about us. This can prevent us from seeing the overall picture.
For American policymakers and security analysts, it is literally dumbfounding that another country can do so much for our own security, using methods that we ourselves could not have employed. Ukraine has reduced the risk of war with Russia from a posture of simple delf-defense. Ukraine has reduced the threat of a war with China without confronting China, and indeed while pursuing good relations with China. None of that was available to Americans. And yet the consequence is greater security for Americans.
For me personally, the greatest debt concerns freedom. This is a word that we Americans use quite a lot, but we sometimes lose track of what it really means. For the past thirty years or so, we have fallen into a very bad habit of believing that freedom is something that is delivered to us by larger forces, for example by capitalism. This is simply not true, and believing it has made us less free. "The whole history of the progress of human liberty," Frederick Douglass said, "shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle." It will always be the case that freedom depends upon some kind of risky effort made against the larger forces. Freedom, in other words, will always depend upon an ethical commitment to a different and better world, and will always suffer when we believe that the world itself will do the work for us.
By choosing to resist invasion in the name of freedom, Ukrainians have reminded us of this. And in doing so, they have offered us many interesting thoughts about what freedom might be. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, for example, makes the interesting point that freedom and security tend to work together. Throughout this war, speaking to Ukrainians, I have been struck that they define freedom as a positive project, as a way of being in the world, a richness of the future. Freedom doesn't just mean overcoming the Russians; it means creating better and more interesting lives and a better and more interesting country.
It is hard to overlook what Ukrainians have done to defend the idea of democracy. In a basic sense, this is what the war is about. Vladimir Putin represents the twenty-first century practice of managed or fake democracy,in which an oligarchy preserves some appearances and rhetoric of democracy, because it has no alternative to propose, while hoarding wealth and power and making any meaningful political participation impossible. The Russian system relies on a televisual spectacle that assures Russians that everyone else is just as corrupt, and so they should love their own Russian corruption because it is Russian.
But what if everyone is not equally corrupt? What if there were a neighboring state, Ukraine, where elections are actually free, and where unexpected people can come to power? This is what has to be made unthinkable, by hate speech directed at Ukrainians, and by war since 2014, including the full-scale Russian invasion of this year. Its goal, precisely, was to physically eliminate the legitimate Ukrainian government as well as the leaders of Ukrainian civil society, and thereby make of Ukraine a kind of Russian hinterland.
 
Read more.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/gratitude-to-ukraine-2024?