Originally published in the Sunday Times (London).
The killing by rocket and warhead of 300 civilians six miles above the earth has given the world a bitter sense of what Ukrainians have experienced these past six months. Russia has invaded, occupied and annexed one Ukrainian district, Crimea, in violation of law and custom and in defiance of the lessons of the Second World War. But so long as this was happening in a faraway country, it did not seem so important.
From the beginning, the Russian campaign against its neighbor Ukraine has been justified by lies. Moscow has claimed it defends democracy, although Ukraine, not Russia, holds free elections. Moscow has argued the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine are violated, although such people are freer in Ukraine than in Russia itself. Russia has maintained that Ukraine is run by fascists, although the far right polls worse in Ukraine than practically anywhere in Europe. It is not in Ukraine but in Russia that the president admires the talent of Goebbels while speaking to rabbis, where one of his advisers rehabilitates Hitler as a statesman, where the Holocaust is blamed on Jews on national television, where Nazis march the streets on May Day.
The downing of a passenger jet will not shock the Russian propaganda apparatus. European and Malaysian corpses present nothing more than a slightly more challenging test than do Ukrainian ones.
President Vladimir Putin immediately issued the Orwellian guideline that the media has followed: Ukraine is responsible for what happens on its territory—even though he also claims the Ukrainian state does not exist and the territory in question is “New Russia” and as part of the “Russian world” should belong to Russia.
He has also insinuated that it was Ukrainian authorities that shot down MH17, a line followed with enthusiasm by the entire Russian media establishment. But Ukrainian forces have not been firing anti-aircraft weapons, since its enemies have not been flying planes. Russia’s proxies, by contrast, boasted of having the weapons that could do the job, downed two Ukrainian planes in the same airspace in the preceding days and claimed to have shot down another Ukrainian plane at the exact time and place MH17 was destroyed. The information that the Kremlin’s proxies had downed a big plane at high altitude was credible enough for Russia’s media, which proudly reported it. Only later, when it was discovered that the flight was civilian, did the tone change. The leader of those proxies, the Russian citizen Igor Girkin—known by his alias Strelkov—now changes tack and claims that some of the passengers had been dead for days when the plane left Amsterdam.
Since December, when Russia began the current conflict by trying to stop Ukraine signing a trade agreement with the European Union, Moscow’s claim has been to represent a better Europe than the “decadent” EU. Much better to join Moscow’s wholesome Eurasian Union: founding members Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan; client regimes the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Untroubled by bureaucracy, law and state boundaries, Putin’s “Russian world” protects a Christian legacy energized in the writings of the Eurasian theorists by the wisdom of Nazis and Stalinists.
Russia’s alternative Europe has been visible in Ukraine since March, in the detention and torture of reporters, artists and priests; in the killing of prisoners of war; and in the social breakdown of big cities such as Donetsk and Luhansk—not so long ago as safe as British cities of comparable size
These are the sorts of thing that happen when war is fought but not declared, laws are mocked rather than observed, and propaganda allowed to set the tone for reality.
The downing of MH17 was probably an accident in that the men who initiated the missile firing sequence did not mean to bring down a civilian plane. But things like this are bound to happen—and will continue to happen—when a major power substitutes anarchy for policy.
Somewhere deep in the general sadness must figure the total pointlessness of this war. The strategic premise of the Russian intervention is simply wrong: that there is no real Ukraine, only a shapeless mass that yearns for Russia. As scholars of Ukraine have been pointing out for months, this simple error means that Russia must either keep escalating the conflict in the hope of getting the result it wants or admit its mistake.
This appalling massacre should be seen not as an isolated event, but as one crime in a series of others; its casualties among a larger number of those whose death is the all-too predictable result of the violation of borders, the destruction of conventional authority, the prosecution of low war with high technology.
The question is whether Europe has something more robust than this nihilism, some capacity to take seriously its own announced commitments, some sense of obligation and indignation less yielding to foreign propaganda and narrow self-interest than has so far been the case. MH17 will not influence the Kremlin, not by itself. It might change something in Europe, perhaps even enough to bring the senseless war to an end. That is the hope, but it is not a strong one.
Timothy Snyder is a Professor of History at Yale University specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe.