Atlanticism: Russo-Ukrainian War, Part I: Ignorance

A few weeks ago, a senior priest I know mentioned after Mass, as I was helping him to his motorcar, that he had several times visited Russia & toured the natural beauty of that vast country. He said with sadness in his voice that he would never again visit the Russian Federation, "not after what they did," meaning the brutality of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine & the massacres, child kidnappings, & other war crimes that have happened since. I wanted to respect his ethical stance, but could not as it was ethically incoherent: His tours of Russia took place after the Second Chechan War (1999-2000, insurgency until 2009), a war in which the Russians, under Vladimir Putin first as prime minister & then as president, unleashed horrific & indiscriminate violence against Chechnya, including veritably flattening the capital, Grozny, which the United Nations described in 2003 as "the most destroyed city on Earth."

He never condoned atrocities committed against the Chechens—I want to be clear about that—but he did tour Russia after all the evil they did in Chechnya while declaring that he would never again tour Russia after all the evil they are doing in Ukraine. He thus declared that the atrocities committed against the Chechens were, at a minimum, forgivable, but that the atrocities still being committed against the Ukrainians are unforgivable. Why are massacres & atrocities committed against the Chechens, a North Caucasian people who are largely Muslim, forgivable, while massacres & atrocities committed against the Ukrainians, an East Slavic people who are largely Christian, unforgivable?

The most charitable explanation is that he was speaking out of ignorance, that he had either ignored Chechnya as it happened or forgetten about it since, but even that doesn't speak well of him. There is an ancient principle in law, Ignorantia juris non excusat ("Ignorance of the law excuses not"). Worse for this priest, this is not just a principle of Roman or Western law, but of the Divine Law, as expressed in the Book of Leviticus, 5:17:

"If any one sins, doing any of the things which the LORD has commanded not to be done, though he does not know it, yet he is guilty & shall bear his iniquity."

In the early days of the invasion in February 2022, a Twitter mutual who describes herself as an "amateur historian" tweeted about the return of war to Europe for the first time since the Second World War. I reminded her of the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001), most prominent among them the Croatian War of Independence (1991-1995), the Bosnian War (1992-1995), & the Kosovo War (1998-1999), the latter two of which involved U.S.-led N.A.T.O. interventions. She replied with regret that as she composed her tweet she'd forgotten the wars of the former Yugoslavia & then added reasonably that she had been a small child during those wars. I was an older child (a "teenager") & a young adult during those wars & remember being shocked out of my naïve childhood belief in the myth of progress by first the Rwandan genocide (1994) & then the Srebrenica massacre (1995); it makes sense that they loom larger in my mind than in hers. Her distress & outrage at the Russian invasion are not invalid because she forgot about the Yugoslav Wars, but neither is out public discourse advanced by hyperbolic claims devoid of necessary context.

I open this series of reflections with "Ignorance" not to condemn either of my interlocutors, but to illustrate the confusion, misperceptions, & biases that have made our public discourse about the Russo-Ukraine War so frustrating & unproductive, so stupid. The next two parts are to be "Isolation" & "Intervention."