Gonna do a long cat post on Russia and empathy for Russia and Russians. Up front: I love Russia. I have loved ones in Russia and will for the foreseeable future. Russia was the first foreign country I lived in for any extended period. My Russian has degraded, but I used to read the Russian pantheon in the original. My exposure to Russian spiritual writing led me to Orthodox Christianity. My bookshelf is full of known and not so known Russian writers, my walls with Russian icons. In art, music, literature, science, and culture Russia stands with Greece, Italy, and England in what it’s given the world. No exaggeration.
I have to think that what I’ve felt as I’ve watched what Russia has turned into since the poor but hopeful days of the 1990s and early 2000s must be comparable to what people who genuinely loved Germany or Japan felt in the 1930s. It is a horror. Everything bad and dysfunctional about the nation has been amplified to the extreme. Everything good and beautiful has been distorted into something unrecognizable and enlisted in service of evil aims. If you love Russia you should hate what it has become.
Russia is not a special snowflake and does not have special security needs that trump the rest of the world. It is time for Russia to grow up and take on a more mature and cooperative view of security and politics. Other nations have managed this. For some it was traumatic- Germany, Japan. For others it was painful but managed— the melting away of the British Empire and French colonies. These are also proud, historic nations with legitimate security concerns that have moved past paranoia and aggression and might makes right. Even the United States has been appropriately chastened by Iraq and Afghanistan and we now are more modest in our use of power and our ambitions, hopefully for good. If you love Russia you should hope they lose this war, quickly if possible, long and painfully if it comes to it. They aren’t going to achieve anything good for themselves or the world if they win.
Most of us have seen someone we love completely lose the plot in a similar way. The things they want for themselves are bad, they exaggerate their faults. Even the qualities we used to value and love are twisted into something horrible. They hurt people around them and they demand we sympathize. Mature people know that the only response is to help the people they hurt and to let our loved ones experience the consequences of their actions. Even if it hurts us to see that happen. We don’t help anyone by making excuses or trying to shield them from the tragedy they create for themselves. Even when the people they are hurting aren’t perfect, even if we haven’t always been a perfect friend or dad or spouse, we have to recognize who is wrong and who is right.
Finally— nations do not have emotions, interests, or aims. People do. It is not in the interest of the Russian people to be sanctioned or to see boys come back in boxes from an unneeded war in Ukraine that will not make Russians safer or more prosperous. There is a lot of truth in the analogy that the Russian people are traumatized to the point that they have trouble knowing what’s actually good for them. Many of us have seen this as well. We can’t want to help Russians more than Russians want to be helped. Only Russians can decide for themselves that they hate being abused more than they love the good times with the abuser. It’s not our job to make that process less painful for them, in fact, pain may be the only way they figure it out.