As Russia attacked Ukraine, the power — and sometimes absurdity — of words was on display

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/02/2022 (937 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The United Nations is dedicated, in a way, to the power of words.

That organization is the fulfilment of a vision that getting the world’s countries around a table together to yak it out will prevent violence. Indeed, the United Nations charter replaced the formerly accepted law of the “right of conquest” with membership in the great international debating society.

On Wednesday night, the Security Council of that body, which since 1945 has served to make war between established states rare — and wars of pure aggression between them rarer still — was doing what it does, trying to talk its way out of war.

“I have one thing to say from the bottom of my heart,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said to open the meeting, succinctly summing up its purpose: “President Putin, stop your troops from attacking Ukraine. Give peace a chance. Too many people have already died.”

Moments after he said that, while the U.S. ambassador was making a similar, more drawn-out appeal, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on television on the other side of the ocean, offering a few words of his own to make it clear that he wasn’t interested in listening. He was launching a war on Ukraine, perversely justifying it using the U.N.’s own charter, twisting those words to render them absurd.

And he offered chilling words that seemed to warn of nuclear war with the West if it interfered with his invasion, promising “consequences greater than any you have faced in history.”

And then, while the United Nations meeting went on with its words of pleading and condemnation and legal explication, the Russian leader’s military began speaking in a crude language louder than Russian or Ukrainian or English or the others spoken around that table in New York. He began raining missiles on Ukraine, and sending columns of troops across its borders.

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For all the moments of heartbreak and horror that have come this past week watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine ramp up and unfold, it has also been a week of great speeches. Ones that deserve to be remembered by history. Ones that deserved to be listened to more closely in the moment.

I’m thinking first of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s last-minute appeal Wednesday — hours before the United Nations meeting — directly to the Russian people, in Russian, in which he assured them Ukraine did not want to fight them, and pleaded with them to tell their president not to attack.

“You have been told that this flame will bring liberation to Ukraine’s people. But the Ukrainian people are free,” he said. Responding to Putin’s claims Ukraine would attack in the Donbass region, he spoke personally. “Donetsk, which I have visited dozens of times? Where I looked in people’s faces, in their eyes? Artyoma Street, where I strolled with friends? The Donbass Arena, where I rooted for our boys together with Ukrainian lads at the European Championships? Shcherbakov Park, where I drank with friends when our boys lost? Luhansk, where the mother of my best friend is buried? Where his father also rests?”

And he appealed to the similar personal recollections of Russians. “Many of you have visited Ukraine. Many of you have relatives here. Some might have studied at Ukrainian universities and befriended Ukrainians. You know our character, you know our people, and you know our principles. You know what we value. So stop and listen to yourselves, to the voice of reason, to the voice of common sense.

“The Ukrainian people want peace, as does their government,” he said. But not peace at any cost. “We know for sure that we don’t need the war. Not a Cold War, not a hot war. Not a hybrid one. But if these forces attack us, if they try to take our country away from us, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. Not attack, but defend ourselves. And when you attack, you will see our faces. Not our backs, our faces.”

I am also thinking of the words of the Kenyan UN delegate Martin Kimani, which explained eloquently — from the perspective of a post-colonial state that did not draw its own borders — why wars of aggression over territory were not the answer.

“We chose to follow the rules of the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations charter,” he said of Kenya and other African countries, “not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.” A peace made by talking with other nations, through multilateralism. “Multilateralism lies on its deathbed tonight. It has been assaulted today as it as it has been by other powerful states in the recent past.”

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Powerful words. Putin offered his own this week, even before his brief late-Wednesday declaration of war. On Monday he spent half an hour explaining his justification for the coming war. It was a rambling rewrite of history, one in which he portrayed Ukraine (which is led by a Jewish man, descended from Holocaust victims) as a Nazi state and a nuclear threat. He denied that country’s right to existence as independent from Russia. He decried that any of the former Soviet republics were now independent.

He ended that speech by “recognizing” the independence of two parts of Ukraine where he had waged a clandestine war for more than half a decade, and pledging to send troops — “peacekeepers” — to defend them. This was the start of an invasion that ramped up into all-out war on Wednesday.

Putin slouched as he delivered the words, and in contrast with those speeches pleading with him to take a different course of action, he delivered them without much apparent emotion. It was not a speech to inspire, or to persuade. It was decidedly not an invitation to negotiation. These were words that appeared to be offered for the sole purpose of justifying what was to come, to the world and to the Russian people.

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I am a writer: much of my life is based on the value of words, and their imagined power and importance. So maybe, watching the United Nations meeting the other night, the absurd powerlessness of those appealing for peace to influence the events that were taking place at the same moment struck me as a more significant contrast than it did others.

But it did strike me as both absurd and significant, especially because the meeting itself was being chaired by the UN ambassador from Russia. The presidency of that committee is a rotating position, and this week fell during Russia’s turn. Moreover, Russia holds a permanent veto over any resolutions or decisions the Security Council might make. So it was a foregone conclusion that the emergency meeting to discuss Russia’s violation of the international law would not produce any action by the council, even before any missiles were fired.

That situation appeared more like tragedy and farce combined as the reality of what was happening became clear, and the meeting continued.

“When Pearl Harbor happened the meetings stopped. C’mon people, stop pretending. War has started,” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted. And then, “Unprovoked, evil, aggression. From a permanent member of the security council, during a meeting of the Security Council of the United Nations. Sheer, brutal thuggery. Time to get out of that meeting.”

Inside the meeting, the perversity of the situation was apparent to the Ukrainian ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, who in exasperation repeatedly told the Russian chair of the meeting to stop talking with those in the room and call his president to stop the unfolding attack. He demanded that the Russian ambassador should, given that his country was at that moment violating its United Nations charter obligations, relinquish the chair to a “legitimate member.”

“There is no purgatory for war criminals,” he said. “They go straight to hell, Ambassador.”

Those are words from this week I will remember for a long, long time.

Of course, they did not stop the war. But once it started, there were a few more words I heard that made an impression — even served as inspiration.

“No to war.”

This was the chant of thousands of Russian citizens in the streets of Moscow the day after the invasion was launched. The words themselves, even the presence of those speaking them at such protests, posed great personal risk to the demonstrators; 1,700 were arrested Thursday, in a country where even lone demonstrators quietly carrying signs are routinely imprisoned.

Those people could not have expected their government to listen to them any more than it had listened to the pleas of the Ukrainian president or the members of the United Nations. It is unlikely they will immediately save any lives.

Still, they shouted the words anyway. “No to war.”

Even in a week where the impact of bombs overwhelmed the talk intended to fend them off, those mostly anonymous Russian protesters made an impression. And demonstrated that words can still have power.

Edward Keenan is the Star’s Washington Bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca