As I walked through Ivan Franko Park one fall morning in the beautiful western Ukrainian city of Lviv, a woman tossed a chestnut downhill for her burly German shepherd to fetch. The chestnut gained momentum. So did the dog.
The nut rolled toward a young couple posing for a photograph. The dog, intent on its quarry, took no notice of them. The guy noticed the onrushing dog, though. He leaped to his left.
The dog, suddenly aware of this obstacle in its path but unable to stop, swerved to its right. Man and beast collided spectacularly.
The guy fell awkwardly but popped right up. His main concern seemed to be his black leather jacket. No damage.
Woman and dog were now walking down the path toward the guy in the leather jacket. Would she say anything? Would he?
The woman walked right past him. No apology. Not even a glance. The guy said nothing.
The next day, I asked my journalism class at Ivan Franko National University to interpret. They were not surprised that the woman did not apologize. Nor were they surprised that the guy did not say to the owner, as I did, when an American dog put its muddy paws on my tan coat a few winters ago, “Hey, you can’t just let your dog jump on people!” (“He never does that,” came the infuriating reply.)
Why were they not surprised?
Because their lives have been hard, a student named Ira said. She struggled to explain in English. I think she was trying to say that older Ukrainians have been through so much trauma that the petty annoyances of everyday life are scarcely worth noticing.
This is a land that was starved by Stalin, overrun by Hitler, stifled by Soviet repression and in recent years, pillaged by corrupt leaders. And now here’s Putin.
The Russian president’s delusional reasons for invading his neighbor have me thinking about how dangerous it is to concentrate so much power in one person’s hands. If a Hitler, a Stalin, an Idi Amin, a Pol Pot, a Saddam Hussein, etc., takes it into his head to go on a killing spree, there’s not much any of his people can do about it.
Maybe the world needs fewer headmen and more governing councils. Sure, committees can be slow and ineffectual, but I’d like to think that if Councilman Putin proposed invading Ukraine, his colleagues would say “terrible idea” and move on to other business.
When people ask me how I feel about what Putin has unleashed, I tell them about the incident in Ivan Franko Park during my semester in Ukraine. Ukrainians, I assure them, are not easily rattled.
With every passing day since Putin’s myrmidons poured over the border, the world grows more amazed that Ukraine is holding them off. On paper, the Russians should have scored a first-round knockout. On the ground, the Ukrainians are defending their homeland with a tenacity the invaders cannot match.
“Putin thought it would be a blitzkrieg, over in 24 hours,” Michael Naydan told me on Monday.
“It’s now the fifth day.”
Naydan, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine after World War II, is a professor of Ukrainian Studies at Penn State. His life’s work, translating Ukrainian literature into English, has taken him to Ukraine dozens of times.
I thought I was obsessed with the news out of Ukraine. I’m limited to what’s reported in English. Naydan is tracking the conflict in Ukrainian and Russian, and exchanging texts, calls and emails with his many friends, colleagues and former students who are either girding for the fight or joining the hundreds of thousands of souls, mostly women and children, seeking safety in Poland and Romania.
Naydan told me he’s distraught over the events of the past week, but also heartened by the outpouring of support for Ukraine from around the world — including Russia, where to protest is to risk arrest. Even “Saturday Night Live” opened with a Ukrainian choir singing a prayer for their country.
The moral support is important. So is the military hardware. Neither, I fear, is enough. Against all my pacifistic instincts, I want NATO to barge in and teach the bully a lesson, even though such a move could escalate the situation to a terrifying degree.
The hope is that it won’t come to that – that Putin’s decades of near-absolute power have brought him to that moment all despots get to eventually, when belief in their infallibility and invincibility leads them to overreach and then, self-destruct.
Already, the sanctions are “staggering” the Russian economy, to borrow a word from a New York Times headline on Monday. The Ukrainians just need to hang in there.
Hanging in there is what Ukrainians do best.
A vigil for Ukraine will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday in front of Old Main at Penn State.
