Russia, Ukraine, and the long and bumpy road to human unity

Russia's full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation

Update (March 28, 2024): While the physical invasion began on February 24, 2022 (leaving aside that military hostilities towards Ukraine actually commenced way back in 2014), there is a case to be made that the current war began on February 21, 2022.

Michael Sawkiw is Vice President of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and Director of the Ukrainian National Information Service, the UCCA’s public affairs bureau in Washington, DC. On August 11, 2022, he said¹:

We think of the war that is happening right now in Ukraine or the war that has been going on for a decade plus in Syria as a kinetic war. But it’s not just a kinetic war. It's not just about a tank versus a tank, a rifle versus a rifle. The engagement of Russian imperialism through their networks of disinformation is profound.... Colloquially saying, this is a battle of good versus evil. There's no way of mincing words here.... You have to begin with the context of how this war began. This war began three days prior to February 24. On February 21, when the illustrious dictator of Russia came out with his narrative. And his narrative was that we [Russia] will carry out this denazification operation in Ukraine—denazification of a country that has a Jewish President....

Denazification, in my eyes, can only be seen as one instance or one of the first stages of genocide. There are ten stages of genocide that we know. Classification is the first. You go to symbolization, you go to discrimination, you go to dehumanization, you go to organization, you go to polarization, you go to preparation, you go to persecution, you go to extermination, and then you go to denial. Frankly speaking, all ten of those stages are happening right now in Ukraine, so that what the western world has seen as Bucha, Irpin and other places were liberated by the Ukrainians as those western entities came in—whether it’s news broadcasters, whether it’s governments.... There are opportunities to set the record straight. And setting the record straight, frankly speaking, is the designation, or should be the designation of Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The narrative in question is Putin’s televised “Address concerning the events in Ukraine” of February 21, 2022. In Russian schools, lessons on “critical thinking” teach that the President’s pronouncements are to be treated as the most reliable source. A regional school authority, for example, faced with questions from parents, issued the guidance that “Vladimir Putin's speech on February 21, 2022” is "the main historical revelation of recent years and a major guide to our own times".²

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During World War I, Sri Aurobindo wrote The Ideal of Human Unity. It first appeared in the Arya³ in 35 chapters between September 1915 and July 1918. It was brought out as a book in India in 1919. When the second edition was published in 1950 in both India and the US, a Postscript Chapter was added reviewing the book’s conclusions in the light of recent international developments. (In the American edition the Postscript Chapter appeared as an Introduction.) It will be worth our while to read (or re-read) this chapter in the light of recent events. Here is how it begins [all emphases are mine]:

AT THE time when this book was being brought to its close, the first attempt at the foundation of some initial hesitating beginning of the new world-order, which both governments and peoples had begun to envisage as a permanent necessity if there was to be any order in the world at all, was under debate and consideration but had not yet been given a concrete and practical form; but this had to come and eventually a momentous beginning was made. It took the name and appearance of what was called a League of Nations. It was not happy in its conception...

It was, as Sri Aurobindo put it in a footnote, “never more than an instrument subservient to the policy of a few great Powers.”

But that such an organised endeavour should be launched at all and proceed on its way for some time without an early breakdown was in itself an event of capital importance and meant the initiation of a new era in world history; especially, it was an initiative which, even if it failed, could not be allowed to remain without a sequel but had to be taken up again until a successful solution has safeguarded the future of mankind, not only against continued disorder and lethal peril but against destructive possibilities which could easily prepare the collapse of civilisation and perhaps eventually something even that could be described as the suicide of the human race. Accordingly, the League of Nations disappeared but was replaced by the United Nations Organisation which now stands in the forefront of the world and struggles towards some kind of secure permanence and success in the great and far-reaching endeavour on which depends the world’s future.

From April 25 to June 26, 1945, representatives of 50 countries gathered at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, California. For the next two months, they proceeded to draft and then sign the UN Charter, which created a new international organization, which, it was hoped, would prevent another world war like the one they had just lived through. This is the Charter’s preamble:

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS

to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,

HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.

Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

Back to Sri Aurobindo’s Postscript Chapter:

Two stupendous and world-devastating wars have swept over the globe and have been accompanied or followed by revolutions with far-reaching consequences which have altered the political map of the earth and the international balance, the once fairly stable equilibrium of five continents, and changed the whole future. A third still more disastrous war with a prospect of the use of weapons and other scientific means of destruction far more fatal and of wider reach than any ever yet invented, weapons whose far-spread use might bring down civilisation with a crash and whose effects might tend towards something like extermination on a large scale, looms in prospect; the constant apprehension of it weighs upon the mind of the nations and stimulates them towards further preparations for war and creates an atmosphere of prolonged antagonism, if not yet of conflict, extending to what is called “cold war” even in times of peace.

By most accounts the Cold War period ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991. This was, in the words of Vladimir Putin (uttered during his annual state of the nation address on April 25, 2005), “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States, Russia, and Britain committed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine" and “to refrain from the threat or use of force" against the country — a security guarantee that helped persuade the Ukrainian government in Kyiv to give up what amounted to the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, consisting of some 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads.

Kiev/Kyiv (pixabay)

Before agreeing to give up this nuclear arsenal, Kyiv sought three assurances. First, it wanted compensation for the value of the highly-enriched uranium in the nuclear warheads, which could be blended down for use as fuel for nuclear reactors. Russia agreed to provide that. Second, eliminating ICBMs, ICBM silos, and bombers did not come cheaply. With its economy rapidly contracting, the Ukrainian government could not afford the costs. The United States agreed to cover those costs with the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction assistance. Third, Ukraine wanted guarantees or assurances of its security once it got rid of the nuclear arms. The Budapest Memorandum provided such security assurances.

Russia has broken virtually all the commitments it undertook in that document. It used military force to seize, and then illegally annex, Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014. It incited a separatist uprising in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, clandestinely sending soldiers and weapons to provoke a conflict that grew into a full-blown war, which so far has claimed more than 13,000 lives and driven some two million people from their homes.

In 2014 and 2015 two agreements were signed in the Belarusian capital Minsk. In the first, Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists agreed to implement an immediate ceasefire. This quickly broke down and was followed by Minsk II, which was signed by representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the two pro-Russian separatist regions. The leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, who gathered in Minsk at the same time, issued a declaration of support for the deal, which set out military and political steps that remain unimplemented. A major blockage has been Russia's insistence that it is not a party to the conflict (!) and therefore is not bound by its terms. On February 22, 2022, Vladimir Putin declared that the Minsk agreements “no longer existed,” and that [of course!] Ukraine was to blame for their collapse.

Since Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea region in 2014, the UN’s Security Council has met dozens of times to discuss the Ukraine-Russia crisis. It cannot take any action because Russia is a permanent member with veto-power and, ironically, the Council’s current President. Speaking before the UN last Monday, Ukraine's representative Sergiy Kyslytsya challenged the Security Council to defy Russian intimidation, saying: "The United Nations is sick.... It's been hit by the virus spread by the Kremlin. Will it succumb to this virus?" The answer is “in the hands of the membership.” The UN’s Secretary-General António Guterres stated that the latest developments in Ukraine are testing “the entire international system” and that “our world is facing the biggest global peace and security crisis in recent years” — arguably since the end of World War II.

Back again to Sri Aurobindo’s Postscript Chapter:

The League of Nations was in fact an oligarchy of big Powers each drawing behind it a retinue of small States and using the general body so far as possible for the furtherance of its own policy much more than for the general interest and the good of the world at large. This character came out most in the political sphere, and the manoeuvres and discords, accommodations and compromises inevitable in this condition of things did not help to make the action of the League beneficial or effective as it purposed or set out to be....

In the constitution of the U.N.O. an attempt was made, in principle at least, to escape from these errors; but the attempt was not thoroughgoing and not altogether successful. A strong surviving element of oligarchy remained in the preponderant place assigned to the five great Powers in the Security Council and was clinched by the device of the veto; these were concessions to a sense of realism and the necessity of recognising the actual condition of things and the results of the second great war and could not perhaps have been avoided, but they have done more to create trouble, hamper the action and diminish the success of the new institution than anything else in its make-up or the way of action forced upon it by the world situation or the difficulties of a combined working inherent in its very structure. A too hasty or radical endeavour to get rid of these defects might lead to a crash of the whole edifice; to leave them unmodified prolongs a malaise, an absence of harmony and smooth working and a consequent discredit and a sense of limited and abortive action, cause of the wide-spread feeling of futility and regard of doubt the world at large has begun to cast on this great and necessary institution which was founded with such high hopes and without which world conditions would be infinitely worse and more dangerous, even perhaps irremediable. A third attempt, the substitution of a differently constituted body, could only come if this institution collapsed as the result of a new catastrophe....

The League of Nations came into being as a direct consequence of the first war, the U.N.O. similarly as a consequence of the second world-wide conflict. If the third war ... does come, it is likely to precipitate as inevitably a further step and perhaps the final outcome of this great world-endeavour [towards Human Unity]. Nature uses such means, apparently opposed and dangerous to her intended purpose, to bring about the fruition of that purpose. As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history of mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done....

The ultimate result must be the formation of a World-State and the most desirable form of it would be a federation of free nationalities in which all subjection or forced inequality and subordination of one to another would have disappeared and, though some might preserve a greater natural influence, all would have an equal status.... All else would be determined by the course of events and by general agreement or the shape given by the ideas and necessities that may grow up in the future. A world-union of this kind would have the greatest chances of long survival or permanent existence. This is a mutable world and uncertainties and dangers might assail or trouble for a time; the formed structure might be subjected to revolutionary tendencies as new ideas and forces emerged and produced their effect on the general mind of humanity, but the essential step would have been taken and the future of the race assured or at least the present era overpassed in which it is threatened and disturbed by unsolved needs and difficulties, precarious conditions, immense upheavals, huge and sanguinary world-wide conflicts and the threat of others to come. The ideal of human unity would be no longer an unfulfilled ideal but an accomplished fact and its preservation given into the charge of the united human peoples. Its future destiny would lie on the knees of the gods and, if the gods have a use for the continued existence of the race, may be left to lie there safe.

1. Kremlin File podcast (August 11, 2022).

2. "How to talk about the war?"

3. Between 1914 and 1921, Sri Aurobindo brought out a philosophical review, the Arya, in which he wrote, under a continual deadline, all of the works upon which his reputation as a philosopher, Sanskrit scholar, political scientist and literary critic is based. For six and a half years he produced from scratch the yearly equivalent of two or three full-length books, but working on as many as seven simultaneously.