When they claim it's all about ancient hatred...

When Russia first invaded Ukraine, I spent every spare minute helping a scrappy group of aid workers evacuate Ukrainian refugees from the war. At the same time, I was juggling my intensive work with my kids with special needs, including mountains of paperwork.

A family member would take my kids for an hour or so, and I’d shoot out a message on the encrypted chat saying that I had a few minutes to help. I was immediately sent the coordinates of and basic information about a small group or family of refugees and the border crossing they hoped to get to. My job was to use Ukrainian Cyrillic maps, my knowledge of the region and a steady stream of military reports to plot a safe course for the refugees across hundreds of miles of hot territory.

The situation in war changes minute by minute and while some roads were better than others for a while, there were no actual safe zones. I had to keep up with the incident reports of the war. More than once, I was about to route refugees down a well-used road or over a bridge, only to have it bombed and have to call them back at the last minute.

Creative /Commons image by vasenka photography

It was always a race against time, no matter when I logged on. Once we had foreign drivers headed for a children’s home to evacuate orphaned babies and they couldn’t find the street address in the identified town, because in accordance with Eastern European custom, the address was listed as being in the town, when it was actually in one of the outlying villages. Knowing this, I found it just in time and the drivers were redirected.

Then something started to raise my hackles.

More and more of the people I worked with in the international organization expressed animosity toward Russians. By this I mean toward ordinary people. We always hated Putin and the oligarchs and the military. But increasingly there were vicious jokes and fantasies about killing Russians in informal comments.

At first, I said nothing. They had reason. It was stressful work and they were letting off steam. From what I could tell, the Ukrainians among us would have no part of it. They had more reason, but they were more reticent to start with the talk of hate and killing. Maybe it was too real to them. Eventually, I mentioned that hate wasn’t what we were about, and several of my colleagues became irate.

Didn’t I want the Ukrainians to win? Clearly, the Russians are the aggressors here.

And despite levels of complexity I am aware of in the conflict that some of my colleagues were not, yes, I agreed on general principle.

BUT that doesn’t change the issue. How many times have Americans been the aggressors in a war or invasion? If being a citizen of an aggressor nation made one worthy of death, then I and most of the volunteers would be sentenced too.

And I know well what it is like to disagree with a powerful military machine in one’s own country. When I was involved with international organizations against the US invasion of Iraq, alongside Iraqi dissidents, no one talked about wanting to kill Americans. Thank goodness.

Beyond even that though, I strongly dislike fueling the narrative of hatred in this war. It isn’t good in any war, but in this case, it makes even less sense than usual. I’ve yet to see a war that wasn’t utterly senseless and stupid, but this one takes the cake.

I know some reasons why our Ukrainian colleagues may have been silent that many of the Americans and Europeans in the group might not. One reason is that Ukrainian citizens are about a third Russian and there is no clear dividing line. Families are mixed. Friends are intertwined. No one made much of it until recently.

This has, of course, made the shock and terror of this war even worse for the people most closely effected. In the first days of the war, I noted that many of the refugees speaking to journalists as they crossed into Poland were actually speaking Russian, not Ukrainian. Of course, the fighting was heaviest in the eastern part of Ukraine, where most of the people speak Russian and have strong ties to Russia. In the first days, the war was not just a war of Russia against Ukraine, but also a war of Russian power holders against people they saw as their somewhat disloyal serfs.

Still, there has been some real tension between Ukrainians and Russians for years, though most of that was among the political elites and those involved in nationalist groups. Ordinary people, especially in Eastern Ukraine where the conflict has centered, have been so intermingled that few can say they are one-hundred percent Ukrainian or one-hundred percent Russian.

Twenty years ago, some of my closest friends in Prague were a group of artists from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv who called themselves the Tender Russian Painters, though their last names—Boyko, Chernenko and so on—named them more as Ukrainian than Russian.

Though Russian was the language they spoke most often, they were eclectic artists, mostly not even painters. They also weren’t particularly tender.

They set up a safe house for refugees from the authoritarian regimes in Russia and Belarus without any official backing and took no crap. I entered their world as a journalist but soon became an honorary member. The safehouse often had its electricity cut for lack of funds and we’d talk by candlelight with groups of dissidents who had to flee their homes due to incredibly minor disagreements with the Russian and Belarusian regimes. I’d bring a giant pot of potato and cabbage soup and listen to their stories.

None of these people ever made much of their various ethnicities. Ukrainian, Russian, Rusyn and Belarusian flew around in a swirl of eastern Slavic words that I certainly couldn’t untangle as the lone American in the bunch. Soon they adopted a German and a Nepali migrant worker as well. There was little room in that atmosphere for nationalism or ideology.

Later, when I worked in Ukraine there were ethnic tensions only among fringe elements of society. Most Ukrainians and Russians in eastern Ukraine had plenty of both in their family trees.

When issues did crop up, they were more political than ethnic. There were those who were nationalist and wanted monolithic state languages to stand undiluted. There were also more liberal or cosmopolitan opinions, not just among smaller minority groups but among both Russians and Ukrainians as well.

Recently, reports in the news have revealed the activities of both Russian and Ukrainian extremist and paramilitary groups—precisely the type of rogue combatants who were responsible for the most heinous atrocities in the Balkan wars.

The development of such groups was inevitable, I suppose, even given the scarcity of actual neighborly hatred between ordinary Russians and Ukrainians. A population can only take so much war before some elements crack and become vicious.

Now there are pundits on the region who mutter about “ancient ethnic hatreds.” That’s what they said about Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia too. But when I went and walked the streets with the people in those places, I found bewilderment more often than extremism.

“We were neighbors! We were friends.”

“We worked at the same factory. We went to the same school.”

“I didn’t even know what side I was supposed to belong to.”

That is the reality for the people in the towns and villages of eastern Ukraine as well. Yes, there were Russian activists and hot heads who took money from Putin’s stooges to stir up controversy and make an appearance of widespread grievances among the Russian minority. But the actual concern for locals was limited to wanting to use their native language at school or wanting more investment from the Ukrainian capital, not less.

And on the other side, yes, many Ukrainians felt the oppressive weight of Russia as a foreign superpower glowering over them for years. That was why many Ukrainians voted for measures to require that all citizens of the country learn Ukrainian as well as any minority language they might speak. But that was about as far as the tensions went for most people.

Both Russia and the US meddled in this. Russian interests funded Russian nationalist groups and the US funded Ukrainian nationalist groups, including most unfortunately some with ties to neo-Nazi associations. Both superpowers attempted to interfere in Ukrainian elections for at least twenty years.

The fact is that Russia felt the diminishing of its national power and influence as Ukraine became a separate country, and the US wanted anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine to increase for geo-political purposes. The extremist groups were the only ones either major power could get to raise their concerns locally.

The fact that I point out these uncomfortable issues does not make me an apologist for Russian aggression. There is no excuse for the kind of illegal and idiotic imperialism that Putin and the Russian military have unleashed on Ukraine. Ukrainians have a right to self-determination. Even if US involvement was, in this case, less brutal and bloody, it was also an infringement of that right, which then handed Putin an unfortunate propaganda bludgeon in this war.

The fact remains that this is not a war based on “ethnic hatred.” Most Ukrainians and most Russians have been dragged into the conflict kicking and screaming. This is instead a war of geo-politics.

But wars do create hatred and deeply held enmity. These militarized nationalist groups won’t disappear even if a ceasefire is signed or certain powerful leaders die or undergo regime change. Both governments are likely to deny responsibility for ongoing violence by the paramilitaries they created.

Why does this matter now? Why discuss it if there is nothing we can do?

Because talk of hatred will inevitably lead to a withdrawal of empathy, not just for those we see as the enemy but even for those we think of as the victims. When we in countries that have not recently fought a war at home dismiss the conflicts of others as the product of some implacable “ancient ethnic hatred,” we tell ourselves that this is something that happens only in such barbaric places and we set ourselves apart from the kind of backward people who engage in “ethnic hatred.”

In reality, the US shares responsibility for part of this mess. The US supported extremist groups that have morphed into the kind of paramilitaries that escalate communities toward hatred.

Ordinary Ukrainians and Russians were about as ready to go to war with each other as Oregonians and Idahoans (which if you live in Eastern Oregon, you’ll get that analogy even more explicitly). Yes, there were differences. Yes, some even rallied to secede and join their eastern neighbor. But it was geopolitics that made it erupt in war, not hatred among people.

It is crucial that we do not use such easy explanations to dismiss and distance ourselves from people suffering war on the other side of the world. They are more like us than is comfortable.

Who we are supposed to hate

First, let me tell you a story, a real-life adventure in the “Wild East” of the early 2000s.

I was backpacking through Ukraine during a frigid March with American freelance photographer Kirt Vinion on the trail of a rumor about illegal coal mining operations in the Donetsk region. We’d been on the rails and the cold streets for three weeks and my stamina was wearing decidedly thin. A contact of a contact of a contact finally led us to the apartment of a woman named Svetlana in a mid-sized, out-of-work coal-mining town.

She’d agreed to put us up for the night and get us connected to local people who knew about the mafia operations in the old mine tunnels. Kirt offered her money for her trouble, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Svetlana was educated and she knew a couple of foreign journalists, thread-bare as we might be, could be important in the struggle for a better future for her town and region.

The heat had been off for months and Svetlana kept all four burners of her range stove going, trying—mostly futilely—to heat her apartment. She said the future would be bleak unless the mafia could be brought under control. She took us to a local pub in search of food, and several rough-looking men surrounded us and loudly stated that they were going to kill us. Svetlana played cool, said her “Papa wouldn’t like that” and they melted away.

Creative Commons image by John Karwoski

“Everyone has connections,” she shrugged. “It’s how we survive.”

The next day a local writer friend of hers smuggled us out of town, lying down in the back of his hatchback. The “Papa” trick hadn’t quite worked well enough, they said. Vasya, the writer, dropped us off at the edge of a leafless woodlot as snow began to fall again and told us to walk down the track to the right for two kilometers, then turn left at the fork and we’d find “it.” He sped away before I could get clear on what “it” was.

There was no cell signal out in Eastern Ukraine in those days. This was all low tech, so we shouldered our packs and hiked. I could tell Kirt was uncomfortable and doubting my language interpretation skills. I was, however, much happier out in trees, away from too many people. Snow or no snow, this I could handle.

Sure enough, after some anxiety and floundering around, we came to a tiny, dilapidated village bordered by towering slag heaps. We stumbled out of the trees and a wirery old man came out of the nearest house, grinning from ear to ear with delight.

“Valeriy,” he told us his name was. He gave us hugs and double-cheeked Russian kisses and hustled us into the warmth of his “kitchen,” which was an open-sided shed in his garden enclosure. There he had a fire going and he started to fry up a small pile of potatoes. My hunger was almost overpowering. We hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a week and we hadn’t had anything to eat all day—with our escape from death threats and all.

When I thought I couldn’t stand it a second longer, Valeriy divided up the fried potatoes, sprinkled on salt and we fell to ravenously. “Yes,” we’d found the right place, he confirmed, bobbing his head up and down. “Yes,” someone had told him to expect us.

“Svetlana?”

Well, he didn’t know her exactly, but through someone else, a grape vine, one way or another, he knew about us and wanted to help.

“Tonight, you sleep!” Valeriy boomed heartily. “Tomorrow you will see the mines.”

“Will the mafia be upset that we’re here?”

“No, no, silly worries,” he guffawed. “Don’t worry. You’re safe here.”

The next day, true to his word, Valeriy introduced us to his relative-of-some-sort Vasily, who led us into the woods and introduced us to two different teams of illegal mine workers. One group was crawling in and out of a ventilation shaft in the a wooded draw half a mile outside the village.

While Kirt got outfitted to accompany the miners underground, I sat talking to the young women who made up a good part of the crew. They were in their late teens, little more than girls, but their faces were hard and black with coal dust. They showed me the hundred-pound sacks of coal they had drug up out of the shaft by hand without equipment beyond old helmets and headlamps.

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Of course it is, but there is no food here without money... The state controls all the farmland. If we don’t work, we don’t eat and neither do our children.”

Where were the older people? I asked. Mostly anyone over thirty was so sick with lung diseases from breathing the coal dust that they could no longer work. The crews got younger and younger every year, the girls told me.

The second shaft we visited went straight down like a well. There was a twelve-year-old working there, squirming into places the adults were too large to reach. “Yes,” they worried. The women in that group showed me the shrine for a group of colleagues who had died in a cave-in a month earlier. But here the same desperate explanation was repeated, and their gaunt faces and the fact that we could barely find food to buy despite our hard currency made it very believable.

We returned to Valeriy’s house exhausted that night but excited to have finally found what we had been looking for all those weeks. Valeriy had more planned for us the next day. He talked animatedly about how good this land had once been to his family. Showing me a portrait of Joseph Stalin, he kept in a place of honor in his living room, he explained that his parents had been resettled here from some place in northern Russia. They’d been hungry all the time and here the land was open.

“No one living on it,” he smiled, thinking back to his childhood. “The soil grew food as easily as weeds, and there was coal and good jobs for everyone.”

I was practiced at not showing my shock. I’d interviewed on both sides of grisly wars before and I knew how to keep an interested, open expression and just ask questions. But I picked at his memory a bit, tried to ferret out any concern over Stalin’s image in the rest of the world. Nope. Nada. If Valeriy had any clue that Stalin was not widely considered a working man’s hero, he was a better poker face than I.

We bedded down in the living room, covered in beautiful Russian wool carpets, paintings and antique furniture. Obviously this household had once known much better times.

Then, at five o’clock in the morning, as light was just breaking through the trees, Valeriy shook me awake. His face was drawn and ghostly white. His hands trembled and his voice rasped in a terrified whisper.

“Get up! You’ve got to get out now! Go! The FSB is coming for you! Someone snitched.” The FSB is supposed to be the Russian secret police, but colloquially that could mean anything from paramilitaries to mafia to rogue state actors.

Valeriy’s terror was all the more contagious because of his certainty of safety the day before. Kirt and I threw on our packs and ran through the trees on a trail behind Valeriy. We burst out of the woods along side a narrow highway and Valeriy flagged down a bus with letters spelling out Kyiv across the front.

“Don’t come back,” he called out as we swung aboard.

That was my experience in Eastern Ukraine in a nutshell. The most important theme across the whole week we were in the region was the incredible kindness of complete strangers, who—usually for no self-interest that I could discern—risked everything to help, shelter us, smuggle us from place to place or direct us to the next contact, all because they knew the medieval system of mafia-run, black-market coal mining that employed the labor of starving children was terrible and untenable.

The chain of good-hearted, brave people it took to get Kirt and me to that story was humbling. We published it in a major feature for the international newspaper The Christian Science Monitor. It inspired other researchers, but sadly it likely didn’t lead to any immediate improvements in the lives of the people of those desperate villages.

We tried, but the work of a journalist is to highlight one crisis after another. Usually, the follow up falls to others.

But today that story takes on new significance, and my knowledge of Eastern Ukraine—such as it is—is sought out due to the current war. I’m always hard pressed in these conversations to explain, “No, really these people were Russians. They spoke Russian… Yes, they helped us. They probably saved our lives a few times… Yes, they had portraits of Stalin… Yup, they were clueless… Yes, they literally shared their last remnants of food with us.”

And damn it! That is not a political statement. It is just a fact.

Yes, the Russian invasion is wrong, illegal and unwarranted. Yes, even in the East where there are a lot of “ethnic Russians,” it’s still wrong. Putin is a madman. So many Russians are duped by propaganda. Valeriy was. He thought Stalin saved his family. Heck, maybe Stalin did save his family, after he murdered a third of the Ukrainian population, which was why all that good farmland was empty and waiting for Russian resettlement back in the 1930s.

That doesn’t make it less of a fact that Svetlana, Vasya, Valeriy and Vasily risked their lives to help us, a couple of shoestring American journalists, get the word out about the excesses of their mafia overlords, That doesn’t erase their kindness and courage. And it does not mean I will ever hate all Russians or feel comfortable around the online vitriol and hate speech about ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

It’s understandable, and if your family or friends are under bombardment or held hostage in a blockade, you get some free passes to emote, in my book. But don’t ask me to go along and laugh at sick jokes about killing scared young recruits who don’t know where they are. I’ll work on planning routes for refugees and aid workers until I am sleep deprived and tottering, but hate has nothing to do with it.

I know there are Russians who do know the truth of the matter and they are horrified and ashamed at their state’s actions. They have my sympathy, not my hate. I’ll help them too, if I can.

And those who don’t know… Those who are taken in by the propaganda? I hope they’ll get out of that and force this war to stop. I’ll help there if I can too, and I know to be careful, because those guys who threatened to kill us in the pub, they were ordinary small town Russians too.

This isn’t naïveté. It’s just realism. People are people here or over there.

If given a chance, some people will go to extremes, grab all they can for themselves no matter who it hurts, hurt others just for kicks or a sense of power, scream hate and even kill. People here have that capacity, when they think they have the backing of those with power, as they did on January 6, 2021. And people there do too. The greater the feeling that violence is condoned, the greater the atrocities.

It isn’t a fundamental difference in humans. It’s just whether or not we let the bad wolves in our midst be in charge with guns or whether we insist on good wolves and the rule of law.

No matter the times or the conflict, there is always someone we’re supposed to hate. Most often, it seems like it’s right-wingers and rural “conservatives” preaching hate against this or that group, sometimes someone we’re at war with, sometimes someone coming to work the hard, dirty jobs they don’t want.

But the war in Ukraine has seemed to give educated, liberal folks a weird kind of license to hate. And the terms and jokes I’ve heard out of people I thought were level-headed and kind are sobering.

It’s one more reminder that no category really matters, not left or right, not ours or theirs. What matters—and it matters a great deal—is what kind of person an individual chooses to be right now in the moment, relating, thinking, talking. That line you cross when you let a little hate speech go because it feels good to release some of the pent up frustration, that’s the line that matters.

Gaslighting the whole world

A friend asked if it’s possible that Putin really doesn’t know what he’s doing in Ukraine and how badly things are going for his troops. He has the internet. He and his advisors have always been world-savvy. How can he just not care that everyone sees his crimes?

Well, now. That’s quite an interesting question.

I know Russia fairly well. I can predict how Putin’s restrictions will play out. Russia is still a country with inadequate access to media and information for most people. It’s also a country with a lot of tradition around the symbol of a strong leader/national father figure.

So, in short, at home he can put it over on a lot of people. Not all of them anymore, hence the brave members of the Russian intellectual and professional classes who have protested once and then been silenced. I root for them, but unless enough of Putin’s closest friends feel the same way, little is likely to change his thinking.

But beyond knowing Russia, I know his "type" all too well.

Putin has a double, you see. Not a physical double in this case, but a psychological double… in my life.

This is a person who is highly intelligent, immensely arrogant, physically self-controlled, consumed with inner anger and contempt for others as well as utterly convinced of his own righteousness. Both Putin and his psychological double in my life have at times claimed their crusade is about spiritual and moral purity. They also both show signs of a kind of hyper-masculine fragility.

Both regularly accuse others of the actions they have either just committed or are about to commit. Both insist that any casualties of their actions are the fault of those they are attacking. Both appear to be immune to all attempts at diplomacy or discussion.

I am sure I’m not the only one with a Putin double handy, but mine has been copying Putin in real time. This is a family member who has been waging a decade-long campaign to tear me down as a parent, much as Putin has nursed his personal grudge against Ukraine for years. First, when my kids were babies, it was always, “She can’t possibly be safe with kids when she’s visually impaired.”

Photo of a room reduced to rubble. Through the wreckage of a smashed television set, we see a gas mask amid other debris. -Image via Pixabay

Sometimes it was stated openly to discredit me in front of others. Other times it was a quiet jibe for my ears only, but in hopes that I would react and bring down the criticism of others for tainting a family get-together with drama.

It would have been irritating enough if this person’s opinion were just an opinion. As it was, it meant that my kids and I were more isolated from the rest of the family because unlike other parents, I was “never to be left alone with anyone else’s kid.”

Need I say it? But ok, nope, I didn’t have close calls in the safety arena. I fished an infant nephew out of a swimming pool before anyone else could react. I prevented a number of possible accidents involving babies and batteries, which I heard clattering in just that particular way that only batteries clatter. My kids were all-in-all physically safer than their cousins and even when I wasn’t allowed to babysit, I still managed to be handy in a few crises.

Then, when that outright falsehood wasn’t as easy to pull over on the rest of the family, the campaign switched to my “overly rigid” parenting methods. As you might already know, my kids were both adopted from Eastern European orphanages and had trauma and health issues as baggage. I went at parenting much the way I go about most things—with research first, exacting planning and then enthusiastic implementation.

I usually had one or two “attachment parenting” books under my arms in the early years and when doctors said, “Routine is so very important to children who have experienced attachment trauma.” I didn’t just blow it off. I first made a plan for meals and bedtimes and stuck to it. I also noticed the chaos that happened when I occasionally didn’t.

The long and the short of it was that both of my kids needed a lot of structure, routine and cushion to be emotionally regulated and healthy. So, there were a lot of family arguments when I insisted I needed to leave an event in time for my kids to be only one hour late for bedtime rather than four hours late, as other parents found acceptable. Or when I insisted that massive doughnuts at 5:30 pm are not a good idea, since I was giving them dinner at 6 no matter how inconvenient it might be.

And yeah, I insisted they not have sweets right before real food. I didn’t just mouth it. I meant it.

This Putin double was always criticizing and rallying others to blame me and my parenting choices for any difficulties.

Well, once my kids got older and my daughter was diagnosed with severe ADHD and a neuro-developmental disability as well as attachment trauma, there was extra fodder for the cannons. Suddenly, the Putin double went from someone who quoted studies to a science denier on child development.

“There is no dis-ability. Arie is pathologizing her kids. There is trauma behind these kids’ terrible behaviors to be sure. Trauma she created through bad parenting.” That is a lot more concise than the lengthy, berating, yelling lectures this Putin double regularly delivered, but it uses all the key words and phrases.

When asked what exactly caused this “trauma” or what was the “bad parenting,” I’m told it is things like “using the wrong tone” or “not setting enough limits” or “making an assumption.” Because the internet is full of a blame and shame culture, it’s dangerous to repeat this sludge, but I trust that even just reading about my parenting journey has given my readers some context for this.

Yeah, I’ve had my parenting moments. Who hasn’t? I guarantee you that no one parenting kids with attachment trauma and FASD can claim to have never used a harsh tone they regretted. When a neuro-diverse kid has an “executive functioning disability” as in this case, consequences and behavior modification methods don’t work the way they do with other kids.

A lot of consequences still happen anyway, but getting mad at the child because the standard methods don’t work on them isn’t really helpful. But there is no one I’ve ever met who can truly manage to never get mad when an otherwise reasonably healthy twelve-year-old colors on freshly painted walls again or throws a two-hour fit about brushing their teeth for the tenth night running.

But I digress… The heart of this post is about Putin and the kind of thinking that allows someone like my difficult family member to take things to open war “and devil take the civilian casualties.”

I guess the civilians in this case are the kids.

Putin spent the winter sending tanks crawling across Russian grasslands toward the Ukrainian border. His double spent the winter criticizing my tone of voice or yelling at me over conversations he misheard from the other room, since I’ve relocated back to his neck of the woods. Both were warned. Both claimed innocent intent.

“Just training exercises. We have a right to develop our defenses,” said Putin.

“I have a right to an opinion. I’m just giving valuable parenting advice,” his double said.

My eleven-year-old son who was adopted from an Eastern European orphanage had a hard time getting attached to our family when he was little. Hearing this constant criticism of his primary parent really confused him. He started repeating the same words, yelling at me, insisting he didn't have to follow any rules or do his homework because I am “bad at parenting.” Kids that age don’t generally use the word “parenting,” but they do repeat what they hear.

Then in February, Putin sent his troops storming into a sovereign country, a nation that had long thought of the Russians as their friends and called them “brothers.” They started bombing schools, hospitals and residential buildings as well as “legitimate” military targets, if such a term can be applied to an unprovoked war.

The Putin double near me started lecturing my easily manipulated neuro-diverse kids behind my back about how my parenting is “rediculous” when he took them and cousins on “fun” outings. He encouraged them to disregard any instructions I gave. He spoke of me and to me with contempt and hate. He yelled and demeaned me in front of the kids because I asked my son to look through a pile of cast off socks to pick out his.

The criticism, shouting and covert attacks on my children’s relationship with me was very much like bombardment. And while it didn’t kill, it wreaked havoc on my children’s psyches.

The world said “no” to Putin and demanded that he cease hostilities and stop wantonly killing civilians. Putin obfuscated, denied, twisted facts and blamed the victims of his aggression. He said the civilians were “human shields” because they had not left the war zone quickly enough. Then he closed humanitarian corridors for fleeing refugees, trapping them so that they could not escape. And when some did, his troops shot and bombed them.

Meanwhile, my family united to demand that Putin’s double stop the harassment. And the double obfuscated, denied, twisted facts and blamed the victims of his aggression. I supposedly wasn’t sensitive enough when my son said he didn’t want to sort socks. My kids’ have learning disabilities because I must not have used the right “behavior modification methods.” He had to step in because his conscience demanded he let “the truth” be known. If I said anything, he shouted over me, never allowing a word or phrase to be heard through the barrage.

And the children saw that a loud voice and a large, male body is what wins. They saw their mother shamed, treated with contempt and shouted down for no particular reason. And they learned from that. They learned what a mother is worth in this patriarchal world. They didn’t die, but they lost something immensely valuable as they repeated his words and screamed, “I hate you! I want a real mother! You’re disabled! You’re a bad parent!” for days after each family gathering with the Putin double.

As the weeks dragged on Putin accused Ukrainian forces of using chemical weapons. By now, many world leaders were savvy to his mind games and hazmat forces went on high alert. With no evidence that his accusations were anything but wind, another reason for those accusations was apparent. He was covering for and confusing the discussion about his own chemical attacks. And evidence of the use of white phosphorous by Russian troops has already emerged.

At the same time, Putin’s double fell in love with the word “abusive,” screaming the accusation at me over and over again. Allowing no word about actual events in edgewise. To confuse the discussion and to cover for his own abuse, the easiest angle is to accuse others of the actions he himself has committed.

Why do I belabor this point of comparing these two men?

Partly, it’s simply because they took their actions at the same time, and that made the comparison striking. I, like many who thought they knew Russia, was taken in for much of the winter by the insistence that while the criticism from Putin’s double was irritating and insulting, it was basically harmless, just an abhorrent and insulting opinion. Then, I got a rude awakening when my son started screaming hate at me, throwing objects and even pummeling me with his fists. We’ve already had to call the police twice to help him calm down and keep everyone safe, including him.

But more than that, with these two situations side by side in my life I can see them both more clearly. Putin’s actions are not just those of a war criminal. That is plenty bad, certainly. But it is important to understand that he is also gaslighting the whole world, engaging in a campaign of psychological warfare.

At the same time, every abuser who employs the tactics of gaslighting and psychological abuse is as dangerous to the people in their life as Putin is to the people fleeing his bombs. More than ever before, I have come to understand the pleas of organizations helping victims of domestic violence, asking that we take psychological abuse as seriously as physical abuse.

My family and I waited too long to act decisively. We are acting now. You need not fear for my children’s safety or call up an intervention on their behalf. But I see now that I didn’t act when I should have. As a result, my children suffered a retraumatization of the early terror they lived through when they were tiny infants in a faceless orphanage system.

I let an untenable situation go on too long, partly because I was distracted by volunteering to organize evacuations of refugees from Ukraine. I didn’t realize that while I was off putting out blazes, my own house was on fire.

I hope people hear me on this one. Please take psychological abuse seriously. If you are experiencing a barrage of verbal attacks, gaslighting, manipulation, twisting of facts, a campaign of denigration and contempt, these are classic signs. It can be very hard to take action when the relationship is close and there is often a cost of setting firm boundaries. We often love those who engage in this abuse and our children do as well.

If you see someone else under this kind of onslaught, I hope you will remember not only that but also how easily victims are blamed and issues are obfuscated by psychological abuse. There is often a sketchy narrative in which “both sides” are apparently guilty of misdeeds, but in reality, the misdeeds of one side far outweigh those of the other.

Putin alleged discrimination against the Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine and western support for right-wing groups to justify this war. There is some legitimacy to these claims. Still, while those may be concerns that need to be addressed, they are not war crimes that slaughter thousands upon thousands of people.

Putin’s double also accused me of raising my voice or being overly persistent in a rule with my kids. And for a time, my family was taken in by this and insisted that this was a conflict between two people who had both made mistakes. I even admitted that I had raised my voice and that it wasn’t good.

But finally, my family came to realize that the times I succumbed to frustration or exhaustion were a tiny fraction of my parenting, which has been almost entirely calm in the face of much difficulty, and even my worst parenting moments are not the kind of actions that create the type of internal trauma my children were acting out.

It is not easy to set limits on Putin’s double. For now, he has free rein at the extended family home and while he’s been asked to leave by the legal owners, no one is willing to force the issue in a way that could be traumatic for any of the kids, including his. For now, my kids may miss some family gatherings in order to be kept safe. We will have to find more things to do in our little basement apartment on weekends and we’ll miss the beauty of this spring in the mountains until Putin’s double either leaves or shows signs of working through his issues.

I only wish it was this easy to put limits on Putin, and despite the ordeal I’ve been through, I’m so grateful his double doesn’t have nuclear weapons.

Time for more war?

I’m still at my computer late at night. I shouldn’t be, but I am still here, because on the other side of the world there is a driver in a minivan in a city just west of the front lines in Ukraine, sitting with her phone, trying to get a signal from the struggling cell towers, praying for a map to guide her and her cargo—a family with a disabled child—out of the path of indiscriminate bombs and gunfire.

And I’m the one with that map.

How in the hell…? Well, life is weird. I was in Ukraine many years ago. I can read the maps. I can sort of understand the language. I was also in the Balkans during conflicts there. I was a journalist, but I was also known as “that one is good with a map.”

Image of the Carpathian mountains by https://www.flickr.com/photos/bortescristian/

There was the time when no one could get across the Macedonian front lines and somehow—visually impaired as I am—my eyes were drawn to a faint logging trail on the hiking map I was using to navigate our team around the war zone. It seemed to avoid all the hostile checkpoints and the shelling areas, though not quite all the sniper ranges.

We decided to try it and we got through, so that we could give reports on the situation—kids hiding in basements listening to blasts that rattled the windows—back to the Red Cross, humanitarian aid groups and the world at large.

That was twenty years ago, but as it turns out, I’m still good with a map. Or so my colleagues say in a network of volunteers trying to evacuate the most vulnerable people who don’t have their own cars from Ukrainian hotspots. There are kids hiding from bombs in basements again, and I’m stuck in La Grande, Oregon amid snow melt, muddy roads, preteen basketball games, family dental appointments and IEP meetings, but there are those who still want to call me back in.

That’s the part that floors me. Isn’t there someone with a paid job, who can do this ten times better than I can. “Nope,” says the guy I get orders from. He’s ex-military but he’s a volunteer too and on disability. Some of the other volunteers are civilian employees of the military, but they aren’t getting paid to do this. The US military is strictly hands-off, even when it comes to evacuating kids. The situation is that touchy.

For the past few days, we’ve been evacuating children in orphanages, families with small children, the sick, the disabled and the elderly, people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten out. Our group has evacuated more than 500 independently and our maps have helped many others picked up by other organizations.

I don’t really have time for this, given that my life was already jammed with multiple health crises—mine and my kids’—as well as bureaucracy and trying to be a writer. That’s why I’m on it after my son is in bed.

And one last report is coming in... I watch in horror a video forwarded from Twitter, showing a bomb falling onto the bridge I was just about to guide that van across. The guy videoing nearly dropped his phone, the blast shook him so badly even hundreds of yards away. His voice is hoarse, in shock, “The bridge… the music place… hit.”

It’s heartbreaking. But I don’t have time to think about it. I am back to the map, scanning feverishly for another route. OK, that one. Yes, it goes by a military zone but it’s only an old training center, no buildings, unlikely to be a target. It’s the only way west left anyway. Send them that way.

I send it off. Pray. Think of the dim photo I’ve seen of some of the drivers in one of our minivans, smiling through exhaustion. Maybe the same one. Maybe a different one. Then I have to sleep, to force myself not to think about it any more.

I have been almost entirely absent on social media and in real life social situations. My friends ask why I don’t have much to say about Ukraine. They know I’ve been there. Don’t I care? Isn’t it terrible that Biden won’t impose a no-fly zone to protect the Ukrainians? Don’t I think it’s all about Putin going after the natural gas reserves in Dombas? Shouldn’t NATO be doing more to help?

I’ve always had an opinion because I have been a lot of places, know a lot of things first hand and research what I don’t know. And my first field was Eastern Europe.

But I’ve seen several of today’s top “experts” on Eastern Europe and Russia on TV admitting that we’re bamboozled. The “old Russia hands” as we used to call people who were supposed to know this stuff said Putin was just posturing. Before Feb. 24, if you’d asked me, I would have said the same. And we were disastrously wrong.

What is worse is that we’ve woken up to a geopolitical world that has shifted in fundamental ways. Our confidence is shaken and we have to recalculate most of our assumptions about the world.

The one thing we do know is that Russia has nukes, a lot of nukes. And yes, their tanks fall apart and their supply lines are in utter chaos. (This is actually something any old Russia hand could have told you ages ago. Russians even have phrase for that sort of thing, “That’s Russia!” delivered in a sarcastic/resigned tone.) But that does not mean all of their nukes will malfunction and their missiles seem to fly well enough, if not always straight.

Russia—the state structure that is—still has a lot of fight in it, a lot of corrupt flexibility and a lot of technical expertise, though often concentrated in certain places rather than spread out across general manufacturing. I like Russiasn in general and consider several to be good friends, but I have never had any doubt about the villainous nature of their authority figures or state bureaucracy.

Just as we thought Putin was posturing, we think—we hope—enough Russian officials are as worried about the prospect of nuclear war as we are that “they wouldn’t go that far.” But we’ve just been taught a hard lesson on what our speculations are worth after the bombs fall.

So, when asked I am much more likely to look troubled, shrug and say “for once I’m glad I’m not in charge.”

The Ukrainians have every reason and right to demand greater help from the west. The west, the US specifically, mucked around in Ukrainian politics, financed this or that party, supported western-leaning figures and nationalist groups. Now our diplomats put their palms forward and say, “Hey, we never promised anything.” But the promise was implied. It is even implied for anyone in all the wordage of UN documents on human rights and peace.

But the choices are stark. Putin has little left to lose. He will likely not survive, if his war fails. And he doesn’t strike me as the self-sacrificing type. I fear he’ll use chemical or nuclear weapons before he’ll allow his forces to lose. That would likely be inside Ukraine for now… likely… again the value of these speculations...

But while I would very much like to believe that the Russian operators with the actual physical means to either launch or not launch long-range nuclear weapons won’t go through with orders to use them, that’s one hell of a bet.

So, I don’t know what to tell our policy makers, except this: I’m a disabled person, living in a basement on disability and I’ve got two kids with special needs to take care of. And I’m now a “key component” in the urgent humanitarian effort to evacuate Ukrainian civilians from the war zone. That is ridiculous!

I’m badass and all—har har—but the people doing this should be paid and have the proper software and childcare and so forth.

Some people are clamoring for a bigger military budget, when our military can currently do diddly crap about the current situation, and there is nothing saying this will be the last time. At the same time, we have only minuscule humanitarian forces.

If we’d had a huge professional humanitarian corps—say funded a third as much as we fund our military (that would be incredibly huge)—ready to step in in crises, including doctors, drivers, administrators, IT support and yes, the occasional map analyst, we could have evacuated the Ukrainian population so fast Putin’s war would have been merely an infrastructure loss that we could have forced his cronies to pay off for years to come.

But we don’t. We have volunteers scrambling, disorganization, chaos and ad hoc efforts.

I know this is scary. (I’ve had nightmares about nuclear war too—like I had as a kid, for the first time in 30 years. I know. I know.) But please don’t be pulled into the same old cycle that goes nowhere. Beefing up the US military and filling the coffers of military contractors is not going to fix this or prevent the next one. The thing that can actually counter the nuclear threat is a humanitarian corps that has the strength and power of a military machine without the weapons.

Maybe some covert ops team will get in and neutralize the Russian capability for launching nuclear weapons. I hope they do, and that would be a good focus for military people. But that does not require all the gigantic hardware or even a fraction of the budget and personnel of the US military. That kind of operation requires focus, specialized skills, people who not only know languages but know the cultures intimately.

So, increase spending on that kind of thing? Sure.

But that’s a long shot and it might easily not work. What is not a long-shot is funding a humanitarian corp that could prevent an entire country from becoming hostages in the first place. Fund a humanitarian corps as big as an army. Train people to fight fire, floods, wounds, disease and every other type of crisis. Have equipment and vehicles ready the way a military does. The reason armies have those things and humanitarian agencies don’t is just money, not any difference in commitment and urgency.

Next time, let’s have an answer that renders the next tyrant impotent.

We don’t send Ukraine fighter jets, not because we don’t have the money, but because the Russians could use that as an excuse to launch a nuke, maybe at us, but maybe just at western Ukraine, into the midst of the millions of refugees streaming toward the west. That’s the scenario I fear most acutely. We have sent humanitarian aid but not enough and not with the logistical coordination that would really matter, and that we could do, IF we were prepared.

I hear the pleas of Ukrainians, begging for NATO—essentially that means the US, my country—to “close the sky.” That sky is raining death and destruction on them every day. And they believe we could stop it. But military analysts know we might well not be able to stop it and it would mean all-out war between superpowers, mostly on top of the Ukrainians. As understandable as their cries are, it would be unlikely to save them.

More armies, bombs and guns has rarely been a good answer in human history. Maybe it was different before the nuclear age. Maybe. I don’t know what it was like to live during WWII. I have generally thought we had to fight the Nazis. And I think the Ukrainians have to fight this war, and the individuals going to fight with them are on there right side of history. But making a bigger war won’t help Ukraine or anyone else.

So, if you’re one of those people wondering what exactly we should do. Build a humanitarian corps. Build international peace and security structures. They matter.

The one time I was facing the barrels of guns in a war zone nose to nose, it was not more guns that saved me and my vulnerable interpreter. It was three unarmed peacekeeping personnel, who put themselves between us and the gunmen. That war could have blown up but it didn’t, and that was one of the reasons why.

My prayers go with all those fleeing war tonight—the people navigating dark back roads winding ever westward or packed into train cars hoping the missiles won’t find them. My prayers go with the drivers heading toward the war with a trunk full of food and winter coats and seats waiting to carry out refugees. My prayers go even with the soldiers, those who have to fight for their homes, those forced to fight, those misled by lies and those who turn aside from killing by jamming their guns or snipping wires in a tank.

I hope against hope that this war, as awful as it is, will not drag out into a longer war, will not cause longstanding hate in mixed families and mixed neighborhoods, will not spill over into other countries. But like so many others, I can’t do much about those things besides hope. What I can do is help to save one more van full of refugees. That won’t change the course of the war, but it will matter to that one.