February 2022

I was writing something yesterday, a thing that I started a few days ago, and when I returned to finish it this morning, I realized that I didn’t care one bit about it because right now, all I can think about is Ukraine. 

Let me be clear that I know practically nothing about Ukraine. I know that it’s in far eastern Europe or in the far western part of the former USSR depending on how you look at political geography. I know that it’s next door to Poland. I know about the man-made famines of the 1930s. I know that the Ukrainian people suffered badly during Stalin’s purges and during WW2. I have a few Ukrainian friends. That’s about it. 

I know a little bit more about Russia, and I know that Vladimir Putin is a kleptocratic autocratic homicidal despot and that no reasonable person should trust a single word he says, not a word about Ukraine and not a word about anything else. I know that there are plenty of theories about his nostalgia for the former Soviet Union’s central place on the world stage and his longing to reunite the former Soviet republics and lead a great world power again blah blah blah, but I don’t believe any of that. I think that Putin’s only objective, his only belief, his only guiding principle, his North Star, is power. 

I can’t stop thinking about this; about families huddled in subway stations hundreds of feet below the street in Kyiv, about explosions and air strikes and hand-to-hand combat in the streets. I should be working right now but I’m watching the President’s address. I have a meeting in 7 minutes, so I hope he makes it quick. 

I also hope that we sanction the bloody hell out of Russia. I hope that we shut down every financial avenue available to Putin and his henchmen. I hope we seize their Swiss chalets and their Paris pieds-a-terre and their London townhouses and their yachts at Cap D’Antibes and every penny they have in Western institutions. I hope we shut down their power grid and their internet and their broadcasting capacity. I hope we find all of the oligarchs’ children in their private boarding schools and their Ivy League universities, tell them that their semesters are over, and put them all on planes back to Moscow and St. Petersburg. I even hope that we order my beloved Russian hockey players back to Russia until Putin pulls every last soldier out of Ukraine. 

I don’t want to see American troops fighting in Russia or Ukraine or Belarus, but this man cannot be allowed to rule a large part of the world and if we allow him to get away with this outrage, he will do exactly that. I hope we don’t let him get away with it. I hope we shut this madman down right the heck now.