Ash Wednesday - Confession

I was wrong.

Those who know me well will know that I have a soft spot for Russia. I enjoy Russian literature and its music and art. I have a relative whose husband's forebears left the Soviet Union shortly after the Revolution and I have a good friend who was born in St Petersburg and visits her family there. I felt sure that the Russian/Byelorussian military "exercises" which were interpreted as sinister by Western governments were no more sinister than those which NATO regularly carries out in Eastern European countries - ie. merely defensive. Even ten days ago, I couldn't believe that anyone would be so stupid or misguided as potentially to start a war in Europe. But I was wrong. One man was.

My grasp of East European politics and history, in particular that Ukraine could not rely on NATO protection if attacked, was woefully lacking. Mr Putin clearly realised that attacking Ukraine would elicit no military response from its so-called Western friends and presumably assumed that a weaker Ukraine would crumble before the might of the Russian military machine. But apparently it hasn't. Whether there are Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the south and east who welcome his invasion ("special operations", or "peace-keeping operation") we can't know, because we won't be told. It's clear however that there is an heroic unity among the Ukrainian people and a desire to be sovereign and independent. One irony of the invasion is that its effect so far has been the opposite of the objective. It's pushed Ukraine westwards rather than eastwards. I can't imagine it ever being a willing satellite state of the Kremlin after this, even if a Putin puppet government were to be installed.

Among the many shocking pictures of the war, tanks and armoured vehicles, shattered buildings, frightened refugees packing railway stations, families sheltering in bunkers, cellars and underground car-packs, one which chilled and shocked me almost more than them all was footage (which I assume was contemporaneous and posed) of Vladimir Putin kissing an icon, crossing himself, and lighting a candle. At about the same time he had put his nuclear forces on high alert. "What sort of man is this?" I wondered.

A few years ago an artist friend gave me a print of an icon she had painted at the Bethlehem Icon Centre. It's of St Michael (of angel fame). I'm not in the habit of kissing it; but it has a certain poignancy at the moment, as an early news report of the invasion was filmed overlooking St Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv (one of the city's many cathedrals). Ironically this beautiful Byzantine building was destroyed by the Bolsheviks between 1934 and 1936, but magnificently rebuilt and restored around the turn of this century. Now it's at the heart of the Russian assault on the city.

My friend from St Petersburg once gave me Anna Reid's horrifying account of that city's siege by the Nazis from 1941 to 1944, in which a quarter of the citizens died of starvation in the first year: Leningrad. The horrors of those years, just ten years before Vladimir Putin himself was born there, exceed anything we in Britain experienced or have cared to contemplate.

So how, I wonder, can he even contemplate investing Ukrainian cities and forcing them to similar straits? Ukrainians after all suffered just as terrible atrocities in World War 2 as their Russian brothers and sisters, such as the massacre of 33,771 Jews in two days at the Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv.

I've this afternoon heard of a family whose sons had been conscripted, one into the Ukrainian army and the other into the Russian army.

As a Christian I am perplexed. I believe that we're all made "in the image of God" (imago Dei), in other words that there's a core of goodness in each person. I also know, and it's transparently clear, that we're all flawed and fail short of even our own hopes of goodness. When I blogged about Leningrad, I wrote: "I find I’m tired of politicians indulging in the rhetoric of suspicion and fear to justify spending on the arms trade. I do realise that Hitler was an exceptional evil, and that there have been and are others like him who need resisting. It’s a complex world. We need a transformation of human nature, transformed by love."

I suppose one thing I learned as a teacher is that if you tell a child they're bad or hopeless they're likely to believe you and fulfil your low expectations. You may criticise or condemn their actions or omissions, but when you condemn their character you kill some of their humanity. Another thing I learned is you should never sanction a whole group for the misdemeanours of an individual. It is counter-productive and teaches a faulty view of fairness and therefore of justice. 

In my view Vladimir Putin is as human as the rest of us. No doubt there are others, even among our allies, who have committed dreadful crimes as well. However his actions in Ukraine are exceptionally evil, even if there's a rationale of fear behind them. We must nevertheless resist evil specifically and not generally.

“Jesus, Lamb of God, have mercy on us.
Jesus, bearer of our sins, have mercy on us.
Jesus, redeemer of the world, grant us peace.”  

AFTERWORD

I've just begun to read for Lent Jane Williams' Approaching Easter. In her preface she writes: "The history of how and why Jesus died on the cross is at least partly an analysis of what we all do to one another when we are controlled by fear, or greed, or love of power, or too much love of ourselves. At every turn, Jesus challenges us to be brave enough to step out of our self-made prisons and turn towards the source of life and freedom, which he calls God. Unfortunately, too many of us don't see fear, greed, love of power, and love of ourselves as prisons. We see these emotions as necessary to grab what we think we need for our own security; we might even be prepared to kill for them, just as people 2,000 years ago were prepared to kill Jesus rather than hear his challenge." I suspect that, as I continue to read, I'll discover that Putin is not alone in a prison of fear, greed, love of power, or too much love of self. I may be there too.