The present conflict in Ukraine is intense and tragic. Never since WWII has a country with which Canada and especially this part of Canada, shares such ties, been under such attack.
As the media present the suffering in the towns and cities of that country, we must consider how we can resolve this and prevent this same destruction from being put on the population of other places.
Sanctions are a non-military way to make Russia suffer for its actions, and they do not entail the ravaging of whole cities, as some perhaps would have the West do in retaliation for the Russian invasion.
Such may be the views of those who say the war will not stop until Ukraine's victory. This seems very close to the old U.S government's all-in sentiment based on the old domino theory - that if one country falls to the enemy, others will follow, with no end. Events after the Vietnamese victory in 1974 proved that one setback does not necessarily cause a cascade of subsequent defeats.
Russia's troubles invading Ukraine shows it likely does not have the ability - even if if it had the will - to move on to other conquests.
Seeing Ukraine's victory as the only acceptable outcome leaves the West's engagement open-ended. What does it mean to not lose the war? Is there no middle ground between total defeat and overwhelming victory? Closing off that possibility - and the calls for "regime change" in Russia seen recently in U.S. media - do nothing to move toward a diplomatic solution.
Finland's Winter War is held up as example of another small country fighting off aggression by Russia (Soviet Union, at the time). Jared Diamond's book Upheaval points to the traits needed for a country to overcome adversity. He sees Finland's success in far-away 1939/1940 as an example of such resilience.
And Finland's defence against the massive onslaught was heroic. Matthew Halton, a Pincher Creek-born Canadian war correspondent, writes of it in his WWII book Ten Years to El-Alamein. Hie wrote though that captured Soviet soldiers said they were members of only third-rate units and were easy pickings for the Finnish forest-smart sharpshooters. Halton was trying to dispel the idea that the Finnish rebuff indicated that the Soviet Union was a push-over. Events later in the war proved him right, when the Soviet Union held off against the largest invasion force ever seen in human history and eventually prevailed despite the loss of more than 20M lives.
In the Winter War, stubborn Finnish resistance did stall the Soviet Union army's advance, and then time passed and invading units had to be peeled away to prepare for expected attack by Hitler's Germany. The Soviet Union then agreed to stop its threats on Finland in return for Finland giving up land in the north near USSR's important port at Murmansk.
As well, as Jared Diamond points out, one of Finland's strengths was bending with the wind. Finland would hereafter give attention to Russian sensibilities.
Diamond says Finnish president Passikivi perceived that USSR leader Stalin's interest in Finland was not ideological but was strategic and geopolitical. If Finland showed it could be trusted not to harm USSR's strategic concerns - and the country had already showed the cost of trying to conquer it - then USSR would see no easy net profit in invasion or take-over. And since the 1950s Finland has been walking a tightrope, according to Diamond. The Communist Party was legalized and brought into the government as much as its voter support warranted. Finland did not fuse itself to the West economically but did open significant trade with the West, while also trading extensively with the Soviet Union. On occasion the Soviet Union admonished Finland to show more "responsibility" and to self-censor expression of anti-USSR publications. Finland never expressed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons as part of NATO. It maintains a neutrality in regards the West versus USSR/Russia stand-off and at least at this point is not a member of NATO. And Finland has maintained its status as an independent country.
Such "responsibility" is sometimes forced on the neighbour of a super-power. The U.S. placed warships on the scene when it stopped Cuba from acquiring Weapons of Mass Destruction in 1962.
Such "responsibility" is seen again and again in Canadian history in our relations with the U.S. Our border has not always been undefended as it is famously said to be today. Canada has suffered two periods of U.S army invasions; incursion by freedom-fighters in 1838 who helped to bring down the oligarchy that ran Canada at that time (the Family Compact), and also cross-border raids by anti-British Irish Republican Fenians.
And Canada has learned to be independent but to be gentle on U.S. sensibilities. After U.S. complaint, Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish was thrown out of the government caucus when she stomped on a doll bearing the likeness of president George Bush, for example.
The U.S. invasions of Canada were never of an ideological nature - both our countries have been basically-capitalistic liberal democracies since settlement. The attacks were for territorial conquest or to remove Canada as a base from which the British could threaten the U.S.
Russia's war on Ukraine is similarly not ideological. No longer is Russia under Communist control, surrounded by capitalist countries. Putin was a wealthy exploitative businessman, now a politician leading a pro-business regime. Is Russia trying to install a billionaire/business class as ruling class in Ukraine? Not likely.
Is the Russian invasion a war on democracy as a whole, a war on humanity, as is sometimes described? I don't see it.
I think seeing it as a fight between good and evil gives us no way out but further conflict and horror.
Must the conflict widen and deepen, to become a wide-open fight of the West against Russia, or can we find a way to give peace a chance?
A loosening off the fever pitch of the confrontation between the two camps - Russia in one and NATO in the other - is the route forward.
There has been massive death and loss and destruction, and Europe has been or is right now - even as you read this - on the edge of atomic mass radiation poisoning due to endangered nuclear power plants. We have for too long trusted in the military solution, in the technological solution.
For us to move forward, we need to find a wiser way.
We are all in this together. Of course, we will never understand exactly where the other is coming from. But at the end when we have exhausted ourselves in fighting, we will find ourselves at the negotiation table. Only if each is ready to give something will we have opportunity to clean up the rubble, pick up the pieces and start again.
Leaders on all sides must temper their statements, listen to what the other is saying, and be ready when it comes to talking, to listen and to see the other as a human being worried about simple survival.
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originally published in Millwoods Mosaic in March 2022
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