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.