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I’m back from book leave—alllllmost there now—though given the situation on the Ukrainian border, I don’t feel like I’ve been gone much at all. 

One thing that’s been on my mind recently, in fielding questions on TV or in casual conversation about the Russia-Ukraine crisis, is how quickly the political-media narrative calcifies into conventional wisdom. I don’t think that people necessarily do this out of malice. There’s a lot going on in the world at all times, and most people don’t have the bandwidth to follow it all, let alone incorporate all the necessary nuance—especially if you aren’t an expert in the area. 

So with that in mind, I want to share five broader thoughts that I’ve had while reading and thinking about the current Ukraine crisis, in addition to talking to domain experts and people with deep first-hand knowledge of the situation...

Putin’s Ukraine Pickle

Vladimir Putin’s stance on Ukraine has started to shape-shift. Is he positioning himself for retreat? Five thoughts on the crisis behind the crisis.

It’s tempting, as a lover of history, to imagine the Russia-Ukraine crisis from the perspective of some future historian. Or, if this had happened 100 years ago, how would we see it today? And what jumps out at me immediately is how we mistakenly perceive history as occurring in spasms. An army invades. A treaty is signed. Even when we read more scholarly works, describing all the behind-the-scenes details and negotiations and movements, we still don’t fully understand what it was like to experience events as they were unfolding. I recently ran across this sentiment, perfectly captured in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn: “We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” 

This is all to say that the current crisis feels like it is progressing so quickly and yet so slowly at the same time. I now spend hours each day trying to stay on top of the various developments—troops moving here, a diplomatic response there—but the overall picture hasn’t changed much at all. There is a lot of frenetic movement behind the scenes, but the central question—will Russia invade Ukraine?—remains as difficult to answer as it has ever been.

Personally, I find this feeling of stasis, one that is somehow also chaotic and tense, to be deeply strange and more than a little unnerving, especially when I go on cable news to comment on the situation and, after dramatic music and terrifying graphics, the camera cuts to me and I have to say, “We still don’t know.” 

But that is the truth and that is my first, somewhat meta observation at this precarious moment. Indeed, imagining the various outcomes of multi-level negotiations with potentially militaristic outcomes is complex, ever-changing, and not always suited for YouTube clips or Twitter. As you’ll see below, only one person right now—Vladimir Putin, of course—knows if Russia is going to war, and even he doesn’t seem to know yet...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT