Daring to talk diplomacy

Canada has a clear side in this war. To be critical of that is to ask for abuse.

Allied seige of Sebastopol by V. Nesterenko (Crimean War)

During any war, there are rules: boil everything down into the blackest and whitest shades you can. Repeat the same thing over and over again. If anyone dares to stick their head above the crowd to shout about a shade of grey, give them a swift blow to their temple. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

There is nothing good about what’s happening in Ukraine. There is no justification for the carnage. There is no reasonable way to say that what Russia is doing is good. People are being killed and are suffering and are being pushed out of their homes and are losing things that are dear to them. They’re being forcibly displaced. They join others, whether in Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Centrafrique, Manipur state in India, Mali, in the DRC — others who never asked for their lives to be shattered by violence.

But what Ukraine has that the others do not is strategic importance for NATO, the West and specifically, the United States.

As a Canadian, my personal opinions don’t matter, whether I’m fully in favour of Ukraine using every weapon in the world to destroy Russia or whether I think Russia is justified in its aggression. I’m not raising funds or doing anything related to the conflict. But I do provide material support to Ukraine through my taxes which are paying for weapons (and not, say, paying to close the gap between the life expectancy of First Nations people and non-First Nations people in Alberta, for example, which is 18.5 years. Sure, let’s talk about genocide…).

Some will argue that this material support should be given without asking questions or being critical. In fact, there are Facebook groups and message boards and Telegram channels full of people whose jobs are to swarm the second that someone questions any of this, they are slapped down. But that’s not my nature. And so, I ask questions.

We all know that if Russia were rallying 300,000 soldiers 900 km from Washington DC, and if that distance put them inside of Canada, the United States would be kicking in our heads. NATO is trying to amass 300,000 trops in the Baltic region in the next 30 days to match Russia’s strength before it invaded. Canada just sent off two warships to help ‘deter Russian agression.’ At more than 400 days at war, Russia’s air and naval capacities haven’t seemingly been damaged.

There’s little question that the only way out of this is a negotiated settlement. Russia understands that US hegemony is slipping and struck Ukraine at a moment where it knew it would be able to make gains as the American empire falls into decline. Those gains are not just territorial — they stand to make gains as a global power broker. Recall that they planned to export 250,000,000 doses of their vaccine, Sputnik V. Argentina, Ghana, Hungary, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and the UAE all approved the vaccination and it became an important counterbalance to the stingy, patent-clutching approach to global vaccination of the United States.

(Of course, Canadian media played up how unfair it is to use a vaccine as a diplomatic tool. Coming from a country that gobbled up way more than its fair share of the mRNA vaccines, it’s a bit rich.)

Russia didn’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts, obviously. Russians were undervaccinated while the country was sending vaccines out around the world. But we can moralize all we want, which many love to do, while missing the point: they’re playing a longer game of consolidating their power and influence. And their invasion of Ukraine is an important part of this.

And so, if this is the background, what exactly does it serve to imagine that this horror will end when Ukraine figures out how to best Russia?

It certainly serves the elites, the industries who have benefited from weakened Ukrainian exports and, of course, the arms dealers. They win the most in this.

We’ve been poisoned by the rhetorical World Police approach to geopolitics that have been the status quo since the Cold War under US hegemony. “We can’t let Putin get away with this” is a very common cry. And sure, if we had the ability to stop him from getting away with any injustice he’s commited, we should intervene. Except we do not. Canada has forgotten how to do sophisticated foreign affaris, instead hitching itself to the US and its millitary (almost) whenever they ask. We have no more ability to bring Putin to the Hague than we do to make snow fall in August. But saying so makes it feel like we have this power, and so it remains usefule rhetoric.

As is the case for any ruthless world leader, Russians need to defeat Putin. Americans should have brought justice to George Bush, Britons to Tony Blair. And so on. We can (and should) support resistance movements doing this work but at the end of the day, it is up to the people over who a dangerous and vile leader ruler to decide.

Obviously (obviously, obviously) the only option is negotiations. Russia has global super power aspirations and aspirations of any kind mean that there are things that are negotiatable. On whose terms, over what — there are people all over the world, and certainly in Russia and Ukraine that have much more interesting things than I have to say about this. But I know that often in the fight between life and land, if you choose land, you pay for it with life. Maybe it’s worth it, I dunno. It’s hard to honestly say that it is, writing from occupied territory where genocide is ongoing.

Now, it isn’t as if Canada could be part of negotiations — we picked our side years ago when we put military resources to training the Ukrainian army — but Canada is irrelevant. Or, it’s irrevelant to acheiving peace. We are not a peacemaking or peacekeeping nation and we couldn’t play any role in this.

And maybe that’s why talking about diplomacy and negotiations gets you instantly called a genocide supporter in Canada; because our collective understanding of what’s possible has been so constricted, so torqued that there’s zero space to imagine negotiations that aren’t 100% caving to Russia. This is a fallacy.

You can’t say any of this publicly though. It’s not allowed. Everything I have said here is Russian propaganda, straight from the Kremlin itself. Didn’t you know? Talking about peace is a Russian ploy. Because if there’s anything that Russia has shown the world at all, it’s how much they love pea—— no, wait.

Anyway, I’m not an expert in Russia or Ukraine. I know Canada and Canadians and so I speak about that to them. I have no opinion on how Ukrainians themselves should feel or what they should do — that isn’t my place. But I do know that the war in Iraq didn’t end because Iraq was armed to the teeth. I know that the war in Afghanistan didn’t end for any benevolent feelings on behalf of the Americans. Wars end when the aggressor is forced to realize that there’s nothing in it for them to keep it going. Diplomacy is a process to ensure the aggressor comes to understand this. It takes deft diplomacy and negotiations to end this because the war machine will always march along if it can, as long as there’s money to be made. And from where we stand today, sadly, there are still billions and billions to be made.

If you want to read a Canadian article that I found really helpful in understanding where things are at right now, especially after the Wagner group stuff, take a read of this.