Genocide

There is a sentence that ends arguments before they begin: “war is hell, both sides do terrible things, so there is nothing to choose between them.” It sounds like maturity. It is in fact the opposite of looking, a refusal disguised as worldliness, and it collapses the moment you actually examine what is being fought over Ukraine. Because what is happening there is not one war fought by two morally comparable armies. It is two different things at once, occurring on the same map and called by the same name. One is a deliberate, years-long campaign to exterminate a civilian population. The other is a disciplined defense that strikes only military and economic targets. To see them as a single phenomenon — “the war,” with its regrettable excesses on both sides — is already to have lost the thread that connects the facts to any honest judgment. ...

Every war needs a founding lie, and this one has a particularly seductive one: that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” torn apart by malice and propaganda, who would fall back into a single embrace if only the troublemakers were removed. It is an attractive story because it dresses an invasion as a family reunion. It is also false, and not in a vague or sentimental way. History refutes it precisely. Ukraine and Russia did not drift apart in the twentieth century over politics; they forked in the Middle Ages, from two different roots, into two different civilizations. The man pulling the trigger believes he is correcting an accident. He is, in fact, fighting the conclusion of a process that was settled long before he was born — and, as I will argue at the end, he is now completing it against his own will. ...