Sevastopol
I just left the Mendocino Peninsula which is just north of the Russian river. When you visit this part of Northern California, you learn that Russia once held a stronghold in this part of the state. There was a Russian colony in this part of California from 1812 to 1841. It seems the Russians thought Northern California was the land of plenty when it came to the bountiful forests and the abundance of sea mammals, which were popularly used for their furs, their blubber and their meat. Indeed, while we lunched down by the Noyo River in Fort Bragg, we could watch the seals playing in the river mouth. This all got me thinking about the attack this weekend on the Crimean city of Sevastopol for some reason. This was an attack by the Ukrainian Air Force and it was quite successful as air raids go. Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014 when they aggressively invaded Ukraine and took the peninsula that juts out into the Black Sea. Sevastopol was one of Ukraine’s two big ports on the Black Sea, the other being Odessa. And for the better part of the decade, the Russians have made Sevastopol their Black Sea naval headquarters.
This weekend, the Ukrainians attacked Sevastopol with the drone strike specifically timed to coincide with a planned meeting of the Russian naval command. This morning they announced quite proudly that their attack had been successful, and that dozens of Russians, including some of the senior naval command that was meeting in Sevastopol, were killed or seriously injured. For some reason this has stopped me in my tracks and makes me wonder how I am supposed to feel about specific people (even though they’re Russians and the clear aggressors in the Ukraine war) being targeted and killed. I have no way of knowing if these particular naval commanders were one’s responsibility for ordering grave and inhumane attacks from their naval ships on Ukrainian civilian sites, but they may have been. I often catch myself when people wish for harm on what even I might consider evil individuals, wondering about the righteousness of wishing harm on any human being. Was i supposed to be happy or sad when it became clear that Pregozhin (of Wagner Group and quasi-coup fame) was shot down and killed in his private aircraft? He was clearly a horribly brutal man who had directed terrible attacks on the Ukrainian people, but then he had unmasked the vulnerability of Vladimir Putin for a few exciting days last August, so I had no idea how to feel about his death.
Long ago, I determined that I was against capital punishment. I understand that I have never had a close friend or family member be the subject of violence or a crime. Perhaps my unwillingness to agree with the concept of capital punishment is innocent due to its lack of real personal experience, but then again, I have never felt that one person or even 12 angry people of a supposedly impartial jury have the right to sentence another person to death. It has always felt to me that the right to life and death rests with some higher being whether that be God, nature or fate. It has always occurred to me that for other people to make that life and death determination simply has too much potential for fallacy to be conscionable.
The same thing applies to this Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol. How am I to know if the men or women that were killed during the drone attack were righteously killed? I’m sure the odds are better than even that along with some evil doers who may have been killed, there must’ve been some good people, who were collateral damage and also killed. That’s what makes me unable to be happy to hear that such an attack occurred. There is also the feeling that I harbor that it is simply wrong for any person to proclaim a death sentence on another, no matter how provable the righteousness may be. I am certain that you could draft up some hypothetical or real circumstances that might convince me otherwise under specific circumstances, and that my views have plenty of logic cracks imbedded in them, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling this discomfort with premeditated killing. I know that I consider killing someone in self-defense to be ethically defensible, but that may be the only generic circumstance other than outright war (something I have plenty of other reservations about), which I can agree with. I understand that war is hell, and that the realities of war are considered grounds for the suspension of our otherwise normative values, but I simply think, like in the case of punishment, that playing God with life and death is simply not something I can support or at least be pleased with.
I suppose that makes me some sort of bleeding heart liberal, which I know myself to be, but it still troubles me. I am deeply in support of the U.S. giving military support to Ukraine and I want badly for this war to go in the direction of Ukraine. I admire Zellenskyy for his commitment to the battle and the fact that he chooses to address the UN, as he did this week, in his green military fatigues as a symbol of the fight in which he is engaged. I know that Zellenskyy is the man who authorized the attack on Sevastopol and was undoubtedly aware of and may have even conceived of the timing of the attack to coincide with and target the senior military command’s presence, but still I feel uncomfortable with the whole affair. I suspect that this would make me a lousy war-time leader since undoubtedly there is an ever present need during war to make such questionable calls. I am reminded of the movie The American President, starring Michael Douglas when, after ordering the attack on a Libyan installation in retaliation to a attack by Libya on an American position, is told that what he had done was very presidential. He corrects his aide by telling him that it was the most un-presidential thing he had ever done. I recall admiring that line and thinking that it was well-considered.
Clearly the aggressions of war are not new. Bad people have been doing bad things for as long as man has walked the earth, and good people have been forced to take a path that does not always turn the other cheek, but is sometimes driven by the greater good to get aggressive in retaliation. I get it. It makes sense, even if not enough was done to avoid that path. When do people turn from enemies to friends or vice versa? It has always intrigued me that I grew up starting life with the view that the countries of the Axis were bad. Germans and Japanese were bad (for some reason, Italians were never bad, just pliable…go figure). But after the war wounds healed, I found myself in a world where they were all our good friends. Meanwhile, the Russians, who had been our ally during the war, were quickly our enemy. But not just any old enemy, they were our mortal and existential enemy. And even though in the 1980’s once the wall came down and Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet empire, Russia remained at arms length. A few Americans tried to exploit the new resource-rich country, but most of us were still hiding under our desks and were wary. And for good reason, since it did not take long for Russian oligarchs to arise and become the new evil-doers of the world under the banner of extreme capitalism. In fact, they seemed to take the worst of capitalism and turn it into something worse than communism had ever been…at least for us. What is worse than a communist with an atomic weapon? An extreme capitalist with even more atomic weapons.
I don’t have any comfortable resolution of this quandary. I don’t like Russia and I don’t like Putin and what he stands for in terms of authoritarian bullying. I feel comfortable saying that he is evil, just as Hitler or Mussolini were evil. I have never found myself having any disdain for those who killed or tried to kill either, and if I learned of someone assassinating Putin, I might well look the other way and just accept it, but for some reason, the vision of the attack on Sevastopol with a drone zeroing in on an in distinct office building in which there was a conference room with a bunch of military leaders having coffee and tea as they discussed their next military actions will just never sit well with me.