Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Since I wrote about NATO and international politics yesterday with Sweden's bid to join NATO moving forward, a few months after Finland's bid to join moved forward, it's been in the news that Ukraine is pressing its case again to join NATO. During the NATO summit in Vilnius this week world leaders have paid lots of lip service to supporting Ukraine's defense. Some, like the US, have already put action behind their words with billions of dollars of material support, while other nations have talked big but then found bureaucratic excuses not to follow through. When it comes to NATO membership, all the talk remains positive— but as a future thing, not now. Why later?

Well, under the principle that you can't insure a burning building, NATO is a mutual-defense alliance, and Ukraine is currently in an active state of war with Russia. To admit Ukraine to NATO now would be to commit all 31 of the current NATO members to a military conflict with Russia. That sure seems unwise, doesn't it?

The thing is, maybe not. Imagine what Russia would do if suddenly 31 other countries, with significant armies and massive economies, said, "Hey, you want a piece of Ukraine? You've got to come through all of us." They would stop the war. ...Well, if they were rational, and concerned with self preservation, they would stop. Like when Khrushchev backed off during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. But it took real guts on Kennedy's part to force that confrontation. It's not clear than any NATO member country today has such guts. So instead we'll wait until Russia is finishing wrecking as much of Ukraine as it can, and then consider admitting whatever's left. If anything is left.

Turkey today ratified Finland's petition to join NATO. The vote in Turkish parliament, which was hardly a sure thing, now goes to president Tayyip Erdogan, who has signaled he will sign it. Erdogan's approval was also hardly a sure thing. He demanded, and won, a few concessions from Finland as a condition of the vote. Turkey is the last of 30 NATO member countries to approve Finland's petition. Finland may officially be inducted at the next NATO member meeting in July. Example news coverage: Reuters article 30 Mar 2023.

This may sound like wonky, unimportant international news, so let me put it in context. It's about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

1. One of Russia's stated goals for invading Ukraine was to prevent a country on its border (i.e., Ukraine) from joining NATO.


2. Russia's invasion prompted more countries to want to join Russia; principally Sweden and Finland.


3. Finland joining NATO greatly increases the Russia's border with NATO members. See map below.


4. Own goal: Russia.

Prior to Russia's invasion in 2022 the country had very little border with NATO states. There was a bit with Estonia and Latvia. Counting in Kaliningrad, it shares a bit of border with Lithuania and Poland. And if you consider Belarus basically part of Russia (it has basically a sock-puppet government) it has more border with Lithuania and Poland.

One of Russia's stated goals/justifications for invading Ukraine in 2022 was to limit its border with NATO. Russia contended (i) Ukraine was going to join NATO, (ii) NATO represents a military threat to Russia, and therefore (iii) it had to annex Ukraine to keep NATO further away.

Claim (i) was false. Ukraine did not want to join NATO— though it started talking about it more seriously as Russia built up for the invasion. Claim (iii) is ridiculous logic as if Russia did annex Ukraine it would add borders with NATO member states Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland.

...Not that any of this would justify invasion even if it were true, but it didn't even make sense. And now Russia has achieved the opposite of its stated goal. Finland and Sweden, which were content being outside of NATO prior to 2022, petitioned to join. Now with Finland's membership imminent (Sweden's is still blocked on approval from Turkey) there soon will be hundreds of new miles of NATO member countries on Russia's border. Russia's aggression provoked the opposite of one of its stated goals.

The fourth episode of HBO's miniseries Chernobyl (2019) is entitled "The Happiness of All Mankind". It's a slogan from a propaganda banner left hanging at a civic center in one of the towns in the exclusion zone near Chernobyl that were evacuated after the nuclear reactor explosion. Showrunner Craig Mazin notes that the banner is described in first-hand accounts from liquidators as described in Svetlana Alexievich's book, Voices from Chernobyl.

"Liquidators" are what the hundreds of thousands of men sent to Chernobyl in the weeks and months after the explosion called themselves. If "liquidators" sounds more ominous than "cleanup crew"... well, it is. I'll get to that in a subsequent blog.

First I want to write about the opening scene of episode 4. Soldiers are evacuating people from the 30km exclusion zone. Not everyone wants to go.

In this scene one soldier confronts a babushka who doesn't want to leave. Babushka, BTW, is a transliteration of the Russian word for grandmother. It appears in Polish, too, as a borrowed word. It's used in both languages more loosely than in English as a term for any older woman.

Babushka doesn't want to leave. The soldier tells she must and explains it's for her own safety. She refuses again, giving a litany of all the deadly hardships she's lived through on this land: the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin, the Holodomor, World War II, etc.

While she's arguing with the soldier she continues milking her cow. The soldier grabs the milk pail from her, steps outside the barn, and pours it out on the ground. BTW, the soldier is not doing this to punish her for disobedience. The reality is cows in this region are eating irradiated grass, and their milk is dangerously irradiated. It's poisonous to drink. That's why people have to be evacuated.

But the babushka is undeterred. She picks up the empty bucket, sets it back under the cow, and starts milking again.

The soldier, seemingly in a fit of anger and her stubborn disobedience, pulls out his pistol. We hear the BANG! of a shot— followed by WHUMPF! as the body hits the ground.

( Spoiler! (Open to read more...) )

It's worth calling out a word the babushka used in this scene. A single word. Holodomor. The miniseries doesn't explain it but instead leaves it there like a clue, an easter egg for curious people to use as the starting point for further research. And OMG, what a terrible easter egg. Holodomor was a genocide Stalin perpetrated against the people of Ukraine in the early 1930s by starving them. It's estimated that up to 5 million people died.

For this episode, for this scene, that background puts into better context why a person who lived through that isn't afraid of invisible radiation or a soldier with a pistol.

Next: Find out what else they shoot in Our Goal is the Happiness of All Mankind