No Purgatory for War Criminals
No Purgatory for War Criminals
On the importance of recognizing the gradations of evil
Like many, I have been gripped by the scenes of the largest outbreak of war in Europe since World War Two. As Vladimir Putin himself has framed it, Ukraine is fighting for its very right to exist as an independent country. Among the many striking moments came this quote from Ukrainian Ambassador to the UN Sergiy Kylsyltsya from the end of a late night United Nations session on the eve of the invasion.
As I said, relinquish your duties as the chair. Call Putin, call Lavrov, to stop aggression. And I welcome the decision of some members of this council to meet as soon as possible to consider the necessary decision that would condemn the aggression that you will launch on my people. There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, ambassador.
As I call this blog “Christian rationalism,” you might be expecting me to analyze the theological complexities of this claim. But that’s really not the point. Kylsyltsya is simply telling the Russians, diplomatically and poignantly, to go to hell.
Other profanities have also surfaced in the initial conflicts, including in seemingly half of the “on the street” interviews I’ve seen in Ukraine. On Snake Island in the Black Sea, a Russian warship warned the Ukrainian defenders to surrender or they would be fired upon. Their last words, in translation? “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”
Many of you know that I don’t personally swear very often, if ever. Yet I don’t hesitate to quote profanities in this context — quite the opposite, I hope they will be valorized and remembered for a long time. Why?
It all comes back to the main reason I’ve always given for why I don’t swear — I don’t usually face circumstances that are deserving of that type of response. Casual swearing simply diminishes the impact. But if there’s ever a moment that does deserve that, it is when your country is under attack.
Give ‘em hell, Ukraine.
How will the West respond?
Direct military action, including declaring a no-fly zone, is appropriately off the table. Despite what some may think, this is not because we are war-weary, which we admittedly are. No, it’s because of the accepted international logic of nuclear deterrence — in order to prevent nuclear war from breaking out, we have made it crystal clear which countries we will use military force, including nuclear weapons, to defend — our NATO allies. And Ukraine was never on that list.
It is important that, while tensions are high, we recognize this constraint. Full-blown nuclear war would be a far worse outcome for all of humanity than even the complete subjugation of Ukraine. We are not going there, no matter how bad it gets.
And yet, there is still a wide range of options available to us. As I write this, member countries have just announced that they are cutting “selected Russian banks” out of SWIFT, the financial transactions system, an action some have called the “nuclear option” of sanctions.
That phrasing is… probably a bit misguided, given the complexities of nuclear deterrence that I just described, but it at least gets across the message that this will have a huge ripple effect, particularly on the Russian economy, its oligarchs, and the ruble, but also on the rest of the world.
This is simply a stunning development given where we were at prior to the invasion. Back then, it didn’t even seem clear that Germany would follow through on cancelling the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project from Russia, but that was gone in the first day. And now Germany has just announced that they will be sending weapons to Ukraine, overturning a decades-long policy of not exporting deadly weapons to conflict zones. The invasion marks a “turning point,” newly-elected Chancellor Olaf Scholz explained.
And it’s a stunning change for Scholz and his party, the Social Democrats. Their most recent chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is still on the board of Nord Stream, and serves as the chair of Rosneft, a Russian government-owned energy company. While Schröder’s actions up to this point have been particularly egregious — he defended the invasion of Crimea, for instance — we Americans don’t have to look to Germany to see our leaders being naively duped by Putin.
Let’s rewind all the way back to June 2001, when President George W. Bush was asked a simple question regarding Putin: “Is this a man that Americans can trust?”
I looked the man in the eye and found him very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue and I was able to get a sense of his soul, as a man very committed to the best interests of his country, and I appreciated the frank dialogue. There was no diplomatic chit-chat trying to throw each other off balance; there was a straightforward dialogue. And that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship. I wouldn’t have invited him to my ranch if I didn’t trust him.
After Putin betrayed that trust by invading Georgia at the end of Bush’s presidency in 2008, the newly-elected President Obama turned around and offered him a “reset,” with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously presenting Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (yes, the same Lavrov) with an actual red “reset” button to ceremonially press in March 2009. He predictably lapped it up, and five years later, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and began supporting the separtists in eastern Ukraine anyways.
We haven’t even gotten to Trump, who as recently as Tuesday was praising Putin for his initial recognition of the breakaway regions in Eastern Ukraine. If you wonder why Putin would go all the way and invade Ukraine, I simply point you to this unending history of appeasement. He’d gotten away with it all — why would this time be any different?
In the lead-up to the invasion, President Biden appeared to hedge on these consequences for Russia at a press conference. If it was just a “minor incursion” — which he didn’t clarify but presumably would include moving troops to support the pro-Russian rebels in territory they already militarily controlled — then maybe we wouldn’t be able to unite our allies to enact the toughest sanctions.
He was widely criticized for this line, and I get that some people just saw the same tack of appeasement manifesting yet again. At the same time, though, it was thoroughly appropriate to recognize that the West would offer a gradation of responses, so there would be room to penalize a full-blown invasion further. Whenever we are operating outside of the nuclear umbrella, the penalty awaiting an action should accord with its severity, in order to do whatever we can to offer incentives to take less severe actions.
We understand this clearly in the criminal justice system. No one sees it as appeasement to criminals that homicide receives stiffer sentences than burglary. The world of international law is less codified, but while the theological content of the ambassador’s words might be bluster, there will indeed be international consequences for any war crimes committed by the Russian army.
Already, we see Americans predictably trying to make this really all about us, using these world historical events simply to score political points. It’s the latest exhibit in a suffocating American parochialism.
Don’t get me wrong: We should make Putin’s grossest enablers pay, at the very least politically, in due course. But let’s not pretend that their actions are anywhere close to as bad as those of Putin himself.
And here’s where I’m going to bring theology back into this. As evil as he’s been, Putin is not Satan. He is made in the image of God and will ultimately be judged by God alone for his actions on earth.
I pray for him. Of course, I primarily pray that the sanctions by the West — and China’s refusal to bail him out thus far — would induce him to retreat from Ukraine out of simple pragmatism, or absent that, oust him from power. But I also pray that God would touch that soul of his that Bush claimed to see. That he would see the destruction he is bringing upon Kyiv, commonly recognized as the birthplace of his people, admit that he was wrong, and call for a retreat. Because with God, even war criminals can be forgiven should they repent — they don’t in fact go directly to hell.