I visited Ukraine in 2012 as a tourist, and spent time in many of the same areas that are being fought over right now. Kyiv was and remains among the most beautiful cities that I have ever been to – fully the equal of Paris – and the Ukrainian countryside had the same sort of sylvian, wholesome fecundity as Ohio or Indiana. It’s distressing to imagine that rolling countryside covered in obscenely mangled bodies and burned out tanks, or that city turning into a garbage heap of organized murder like Mosul – for the record, one of the least beautiful cities that I have ever been to, fully the equal of Phoenix. It’s not so much distressing as it is bonkers, for lack of a better term, to watch the magnificent chaos and mayhem of two modern armies doing their best to kill each other on a continental scale – something that I’ve trained to take part in, in theory, for most of my adult life – play out in real time.
It's possible that historians, working with the benefit of hindsight, will identify a point where this human catastrophe could have been avoided. As one of the greatest Americans, Ulysses S. Grant, once said: “Though I have been trained as a soldier, and participated in many battles, there never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.” Sadly, that time is past now, and the only thing to do is to help the Ukrainian people to kill as many Russians as possible, and to put the thumb screws to the Russian economy to an extent that hopefully, with any luck, the wheels fall off the whole stupid enterprise. The best that can happen at this sorry stage is that Kyiv is defended like Stalingrad in 1942, and not like Paris in 1940. If that happens, then we as Americans may be able to avoid spending the 21st Century as we spent much of the 20th, absorbed in foreign wars and rumors of wars.