Ukraine and the limits of dialogue

For months now, I have been receiving alarming, early-morning text messages from Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halyč, leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The texts are typically sent after this heroic churchman has spent the entire night in a bomb shelter (as he has done many, many times over the past four and a half years), and they include a digital map of where Russian missiles and drones have lit up the nocturnal sky by hitting Ukraine’s capital city. There are no military targets on the map. Russian strikes are deliberately aimed at civilian sites, and while Ukrainian air defenses shoot down some of the missiles and drones, others get through. Innocents are killed and families lose their homes because of this campaign to intentionally inflict civilian casualties. On June 15, a Russian drone did serious damage to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the historic Orthodox “Monastery of the Caves” (so much for Czar Putin as “defender of Christian civilization”).

This is not war. It is terrorism. Its aim is to destroy national morale. And it isn’t working any more than the Nazi Blitz of England did in 1940. Were a 21st-century Quentin Reynolds reporting from Ukraine today, his signature phrase might be “Kyiv can take it,” as “London can take it” summarized British grit and resolve in the face of the Luftwaffe.

But Kyiv shouldn’t have to take it. And it is only suffering these terror attacks because Czar Putin is losing the ground war he initiated on February 24, 2022 – a war that continues despite catastrophic Russian casualty figures caused by the Russian military’s utter disregard for the lives of the poorly-trained troops it commands.

Japanese militarists justified their willingness to fight to the death in World War II by appeal to a secular-nationalist Bushido code, which regarded surrender as dishonor. Russian barbarism in Ukraine is even worse because it is being allegedly justified by appeals to Christian faith and truth. Thus, in his March 6, 2022, homily at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church tried to portray the Russian attack on Ukraine – then stalled in its attempt to seize Kyiv by blitzkrieg – as a religiously warranted holy war between Christian Russia and the satanic West that Ukraine aspired to join. If that lie was not blasphemy, it was at the very least blasphemy-adjacent. This sacrilegious campaign of attempting to bless the unjustifiable has continued ever since and has been condemned by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, “first among equals” in the leadership of the Orthodox Churches.

All of which raises urgent questions about the limits of dialogue in certain historical circumstances.

Winston Churchill, who was prepared to deploy mustard gas to thwart a German invasion of Britain in 1940, was no shrinking violet when it came to the use of armed force. Yet Churchill insisted that, as a general principle in human affairs, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war” (a maxim later transposed by Harold Macmillan into “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”). As indeed it is. Religious leaders like Pope Leo are not driving out of their lane when they point out that war is always a defeat for humanity. Why? Because we are rational creatures, whose endowed gifts of reason ought to make it possible to settle our conflicts (which will remain part of the human condition until the end of time) without mass violence. So the failure of rational discussion to resolve conflicts is always something to be deplored.

It is not the only thing to be deplored, however.

So is surrender to tyranny. So is virtual acquiescence in a genocidal attempt to extinguish a nation and its culture, which is Czar Putin’s stated goal in his war against Ukraine. So is the failure to provide all possible assistance to those who, at their daily peril, resist the tyrants and the murderers who willfully target non-combatants in their effort to break a country’s will to resist.

Moreover, the proportionate and discriminate use of armed force can create the conditions for the possibility of the kind of dialogue that can lead to the peace composed of security, freedom, and justice. For there can be circumstances in which real dialogue and genuine negotiations are possible only when the aggressor (or those who keep him in power) have not only been shown that their efforts at conquest are in vain, but that ongoing aggression is unbearably costly for them. Then, at an admittedly tragic price, the stage is set for reason to play its proper role in resolving the conflict.

That is the case in Ukraine today.

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