Eyes on Ukraine (1)

Since March of 2022 I’ve commented here, briefly and intermittently, on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I’ve read and listened to and watched the documentation of and commentary on this genocidal madness since its inception. I start my day with the news about it, and often end it the same way. I assume, probably wrongly, that everyone else finds it equally absorbing — clearly the future of democracy in Europe depends on the outcome. That some people can’t bother themselves to keep abreast of it, or don’t care about the outcome, or even want Ukraine to lose and Russia to win, I find incomprehensible.

If you haven’t yet grasped the enormity of what’s at stake here, spend ten minutes with Russia’s talking heads explaining how Russians think about Ukraine and Ukrainians.

I don’t intend to inflict gruesome imagery of the war on you. That abounds, if you have the stomach for it, and I’ll point you in its direction. I’ll have some comments on specific images that represent how visual imagery gets used in this conflict, because that’s reshaping our concept of war photography and film in general.

I’ll also offer some thoughts that crop up along the way, sometimes on topics that no one I’ve read considers important enough to mention except in passing. This reflects how I’m processing all this input, while striving to keep from screaming at the insanity of it all.

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Never before have I actually tracked a war in this way. Born in 1943, almost eighty years ago, while World War II raged, I had no awareness of that conflict save in tales thereof I heard later from my elders or read about or saw in movies. The Korean War happened when I was in grammar school, too young to grasp what it represented. Regardless of what I learned in school, no war that took place before my time — the Napoleonic Wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War — ever held my attention.

The first war of which I became aware and, in a sense, took personally was the Vietnam War — partly because people of my approximate age got called up to fight in it, partly because of its domestic political ramifications, and also due to the omnipresence of the newspaper and magazine and TV coverage. Yet while I kept informed about the progress of that conflict, and took a political position in opposition to it, I didn’t really track it — the shiftings of the fronts, the strategies and tactics, the military issues as well as the political ones.

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974), cover

Same holds true for subsequent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. I weighed them from a geopolitical perspective, but didn’t pay attention to them as they evolved on the ground. So why my obsessive attention to the war in Ukraine — especially since the U.S. has no direct combative involvement therein?

Several odd factors contribute, I think. One certainly involves my reading and re-readings of Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, which won the Pulitzer Prize and on which the movie Gettysburg was based. I’d read quite a few war novels over the years, but Shaara managed to do for me what no previous author in my experience had achieved.

Though he didn’t use today’s military vocabulary, Shaara helped me to understand the importance of such issues as shaping the battlefield, ground lines of communication, logistics, and other key concepts of warfare. Furthermore, by imagining himself into the minds of those of positions of leadership on both sides, he illuminated the ways in which belief and personality shaped the decision-making processes in the waging of war.

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I carried those rudimentary lessons into the Capa D-Day Project, wherein professionals with 20th-century combat experience — first photojournalist J. Ross Baughman, and then military consultant and historian Charles Herrick — elucidated the issues involved in the D-Day invasion generally and Capa’s little slice of it in particular. After almost ten years of digging into that story, I find myself comfortable with military jargon and reasonably conversant with military concepts, enough so that I can read detailed daily summaries by milboggers (people who blog about military matters) and understand about half of what they put forward.

Finally (and I know this connects, though I can’t say how), I have discovered lately that I have an appetite for working on chess problems. I’ve never played chess seriously, have no real skill at it, don’t even much like competitive games of any kind. I just know how the pieces move on the board, at a rudimentary level. But the Daily Kos, a website I visit often (see below), includes a regular chess problem among its features, and I often spend time pondering the options. Sometimes I even find a solution. All of which comes as a total surprise. And somehow pertains.

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I don’t bring any particularly useful expertise or insight to the subject of my own to the subject of the war in Ukraine. I don’t see myself as an armchair general or a Monday-morning quarterback. I don’t have opinions about how Ukraine conducts the war, or advice to offer them in that regard. Nor do I have skin in the game, just some casual professional acquaintances on both sides.

However, though by definition I can only observe from afar, I don’t think of myself as merely a spectator, nor of this as a spectator sport. Count me instead as a concerned citizen of the world — a world that the outcome of this catastrophe will affect deeply. And someone who sees democracy worldwide at stake here.

From that standpoint, the absolute best detailed coverage of this terrorist invasion of a peaceful country that I have found over the past 20 months has come not from the New York Times or CNN or NBC or any major news outlet but from Markos “kos” Moulitsas, Mark Sumner, annieli, and others at the Daily Kos online.

Credit where credit is due. Based on stories I’ve read at CNN, NYT, et al over the course of the war, what the MSM has done excellently is first-person reportage on the consequences of the war to Ukraine’s infrastructure and people and soldiers. Long-form journalism at its best. Understandably, this requires courageous journalists on the ground in Ukraine, bearing witness to the horrors that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine. For obvious reasons, this isn’t the forte of the contributors to DK. So we should celebrate the MSM for subsidizing and publishing that kind of in-depth coverage.

What DK does so well, and the MSM so clearly fails at, is dispelling the fog of war to the extent possible with frequent, consistent, clear-eyed and hard-headed analysis of the military operations on both sides, grounded in personal experience of combat. Unequivocally pro-Ukraine, but not blindly so. DK has proven itself unparalleled in this regard, Pulitzer-level IMHO.

From DK I have learned more, hour to hour and day to day, about the actual progress of the war than I have from any MSM platform. See, for example, Peter Olandt’s analysis, “The Russian mobilization is best understood in the context of the BTG.”

(DK is also a great source of war-related visual imagery: much embedded video and still photography, links to even more.)

This may not all qualify as “news you can do something about” (DK’s slogan), but it takes raw data and turns it into information — the only real basis for knowledge and understanding.

And annieli’s daily DK digest of key stories and other materials related to the war — exemplary, targeted content aggregation — has no equal on the web, at least in English.

Which raises an obvious question: Given how much warfare (and how many wars) go on around the world all the time, why does no MSM platform have staffers comparable to Kos and Sumner et al for analysis, nor even comparable to annieli for compiling daily updates from credible sources? Sure, they each have their military experts to whom they turn for quick soundbites and periodic short-form synopses and prognostications. But (correct me if I’m wrong) not one of them has on staff a combat savvy war analyst providing running commentary on any crisis anywhere. Wazzup wid dat?

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Russia Worships the Porcelain God

Here’s a fact that explains so much about the Russian psyche —  often repeated, yet just as often un-analyzed. Yes, they loot. They take anything valuable and portable that’s not nailed down: money, jewelry, clothing, cars and motorcycles. They also take valuables that aren’t so portable: computers, big-screen TVs, other heavy electronics, even washing machines. But they also take household goods — foodstuffs, kitchenware.

Most tellingly, they steal … wait for it … toilets.

Russian soldier stealing a toilet

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I’m sure this blog has readers who, like myself, have had their homes burgled. Have any of you ever had your toilets boosted? Porcelain toilets are heavy and cumbersome. Who the effing hell steals toilets, especially to transport them for hundreds and hundreds of miles?

People who don’t have toilets steal toilets.

The soldiers and marines and mobiks and mercenaries fighting for Russia come from a nation that, two decades into the 21st century, can’t even supply them with toilets. Which makes toilets — and, for many, even indoor plumbing — a luxury worth scavenging.

Imagine the passivity, the inertia required in this day and age to tolerate a government that pretends to world-class modernity but can’t even reliably provide its subjects with a comfortable place to shit.

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Worth a Visit

Some relevant material online elsewhere that I find of interest:

• For anyone interested in the forensic analysis of photographs, I recommend this investigation of the photos documenting the 2022 Ukrainian attack on the Kerch bridge.
• To remind us that some Russians have the courage to oppose this madness, here’s a TED talk by Nadya Tolokonnikovat, of the group Pussy Riot, in which she speaks to Putin.
• And, for dessert, “Ukrainian Pie,” a rewrite of Don McLean’s “American Pie” as a tribute to Zelenskyy and Ukraine, recorded in Kyiv and sung by Alex Kozar of Kyiv.

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For an index of links to all posts related to this story, click here.

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