Gray Fitzgerald lives in Concord and is a former United Church of Christ pastor.
We celebrate when Ukraine is successful on the battlefield in blocking Russian aggression and the times when the Ukrainians seem to outwit Russia. Most of us are devastated when we see the destruction of Ukrainian cities and the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
We admire their courage and tenacity and cheer them on. Now that they have surprised us in how well they are holding their own against a world superpower, many support the U.S. and NATO sending more armaments, including larger and more powerful weapons.
But there is a risk with this progression. As always is the case, once a war cranks up, no one knows where the devastation goes. However, the probability is if the Ukrainians achieve more successes and Russia experiences more setbacks, we come closer to Putin being ready to deploy his battlefield nuclear weapons.
Putin is used to being the dominant power in that part of the world. Part of his goal is to magnify his own image and the power and prestige of Russia. Now that he has put all of his prestige on the line with the invasion, it’s unlikely he will allow lowly (in his mind) Ukraine, which he doesn’t even consider to be a country, to humiliate him indefinitely. In all probability, there is a symmetry going on in this war. That each success the Ukrainians celebrate on the battlefield is also a step toward Putin using his battlefield nukes.
Then the scary question is, once the first one explodes and that barrier is broken for the first time since 1945, do the explosions stop? Maybe by God’s grace, it is one or two, and then the terrible nuclear blasts end. The other possibility is that the first atomic explosion is like the first on a string of firecrackers that start going off around the world, ending life on the planet as we know it.
We need to dial this war back before that first nuclear weapon destroys a Ukrainian city. It is possible that this country and NATO have one major card to play that could deescalate this war and avoid the nuclear holocaust it could precipitate. Specifically, we could take Putin’s and Russia’s security needs seriously. It’s hard to acknowledge that amid Putin’s megalomania, his mangling of history to justify this invasion, and his outrageous demands, he would negotiate seriously over this possibility. But we should try.
Tucked away in the midst of all that we despise about Putin, there is one part of his argument that is true. He has reason to be concerned about Russia’s security needs. Gandhi made a statement to the effect that it is critical to listen to our enemy because our enemy holds a part of the truth. Russia’s security needs are his part of the truth.
Russians have reason to be fearful about their security. In the last 500 years, Poland invaded Russia in 1605, Sweden in 1707, France in 1812, and Germany in 1914 and 1941. It has been estimated that 27 million pre-World War II Soviet Union citizens were killed during WWII. The numbers are a little confusing, but it appears Russia itself suffered almost 14 million deaths in WWII. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that these multiple invasions coupled with Russia’s huge losses in WWII resulted in Russian trauma and concerns about their security.
U.S. deaths in WWII were less than half a million. To those of us in this country, our losses in that war seem huge, and in one way, they were. However, we weren’t invaded in that war, and Russian losses were approximately 28 times greater than the deaths on our side.
In 1962 the Soviet Union put nuclear weapons in Cuba. The U.S. felt that putting those weapons so close was worth risking nuclear war to have them removed. The world as we know it could have ended around our determination not to let those weapons be placed so close to our mainland.
Part of what motivates Putin is exactly what motivated us to risk nuclear war over missiles in Cuba. A Ukraine aligned with NATO would allow NATO bases on his border and presumably could allow nuclear weapons to be based there in the future.
We would never allow Russian military bases in Canada or Mexico and certainly would never allow nuclear weapons to be based in these countries. Just a few years ago, the U.S. rained the same kind of devastation on Iraq that Russia is doing to Ukraine. Iraq is halfway around the world from us, not on our border, but we bombed and invaded them based on the misguided and false belief they had nuclear weapons. Russia’s concern about security is no different from our fears about our own security.
In the buildup to this war, President Biden was adamant that NATO was open to countries that wanted to join. At that time, the notion that Ukraine not join NATO and be a neutral country was firmly rejected. It’s not clear where that idea is now. But the idea of Ukraine being a neutral country and not a member of NATO needs to be resurrected and offered as a negotiating position.
It is doubtful that in Putin’s grand scheme, it would be accepted. But probable or not, it needs to be introduced as a possible way for the world to back away from the abyss of nuclear war.