A Good Turn

I was walking with one of my young colleagues from the office last Friday when he told me he had gone down to Lviv with a small caravan the previous weekend to deliver supplies and three all-wheel-drive SUVs to Ukraine.  It was a private effort by one of his friends, who had collected all the goods but needed drivers to help him deliver them.  My colleague was glad to take part.

It's a 14-hour drive to Lviv, which they did in a straight shot, spending the night and coming back the next day.  He said they were treated like dignitaries, given all sorts of gifts in return, including a military vest worn by one of the Ukrainian soldiers.  On the way back, the customs officer asked if he had looked through pockets.  No, he said.  The officer found a clip with a few bullets inside.  The clip was confiscated.  It was chalked up as an honest mistake.

I was impressed but such good deeds are commonplace.  Lithuanians readily identify with Ukrainians and vice-versa.  Jonas Ohman has been active for years in helping supply Ukrainians on the front line in the Donbas with his Blue/Yellow organization and is now an honorary citizen of both Lithuania and Ukraine.  He's won numerous awards for his efforts and is currently involved in a joint collaboration with other donor groups that has raised more than 14 million euros for Ukrainian relief.  Even the Lithuanian Architectural Union raised 5 million euros for a Bayraktar drone last year.  

Several Lithuanians are still fighting in Ukraine, initially part of a small unit but now only a handful remain.  As one of the returning soldiers put it, when you have a big heart and a small mind, you don't realize what death is.  That hasn't stopped Lithuanian doctors, paramedic units and other health workers from going to Ukraine.

There is also big effort being sponsored by the architectural union and construction companies to help rebuild Ukrainian cities that have been devastated by the war.  To some degree this is self serving as there is an enormous amount of potential work here, but for the most part the services are being provided for free at this point. 

We did our share early on by sponsoring two displaced Ukrainian families but haven't done much since then except to make donations.  As the war lingers we feel like we should do more but aren't sure where our services best fit.  I imagine that's the way many feel.

It's a neverending war.  Russia will not stop until it runs out of resources and manpower.  Putin even made a visit to Crimea to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the annexation.  At least, we assume it was him as there are reports that he has several doppelgangers, including one with a severe limp who was in Simferopol and later pitched up in Mariupol.   For Putin and indeed most Russians, Ukraine doesn't exist without Russia.

Of course, the reverse can just as easily be said as Ukraine, or more specifically Kievan Rus, existed long before Russia, and much of what we see today as "Russian" culture and religion actually dates back to this earlier European state.  It's just that Putin chooses to ignore inconvenient history.

Still, this "Russian" heritage is hard to shake.  Most Ukrainians speak Russian.  It's only in the past decade that there has been a language revival in their country, spurred by musicians who are now singing their songs in Ukrainian.  

Lithuania went through this in the late 19th and early 20th century when it sought to distance itself from the Russian empire that was on the verge of collapse.  The founding fathers of the modern state spread the language throughout the provinces and by the early 20th century Russia was no longer able to stamp it out, as they had done for more than a century, convincing scholars that it was never anything more than a peasant language.

This war has brought all those memories to the fore. Russia has always been an aggressor state.  It has acquired vast territories mostly due to the collapse of other states and then tried to forge them into a single state to greater and lesser degrees of success.  Moscow continues to have a hard time managing its far flung state that encompasses more than 17 million square kilometers.  

We all know Russia will never be content with its territorial boundaries.  The Russian house speaker even wants to take back Alaska!  Why stop there? At one point, Russia held land all the way down the American Pacific coastline to Fort Ross, just north of San Francisco.  Imperial Russia was in competition with the Spanish for control of the Pacific ocean, but the empire had started to crumble by this point and Moscow retreated, leaving the territory open to American expansion.

The problem has long been that Russian eyes are bigger than its mouth.  It has great imperial ambitions but has struggled to hold onto its acquisitions, largely because of competing identities and lack of any democratic system to hold these territories together.  It has done so only by brute force.  With that ability once again slipping, Russia finds itself facing the existential threat it might break up once more.  This is what Putin is desperately trying to avoid, and why it was so important for him (or his doppelganger) to visit Crimea.

Having regained freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there isn't a single Eastern European country that wants to return to that socialist state.  This is why all these countries, save Hungary perhaps, are actively supporting Ukraine in this war.  They know that if Putin is able to hold onto any part of Ukraine, he will simply bide his time to strike again.

As a result, military spending has increased significantly as has enrollment in the armed forces and state sponsored militias, which act as national reserve units.  My colleague is a member of the Lithuanian Riflemen's Union, which was allowed to expand its membership significantly this past year, as Lithuania has pretty strict gun laws.  These organizations are open to men and women of all ages.

Mostly, Lithuanians are providing humanitarian support to Ukraine because this is what the country needs most.  More than 8 million Ukrainians have been displaced as a result of this war, trying to establish their lives in other countries while the war rages in their country.  The vast majority are women and children.  The local hospitals and schools have taken in Ukrainian medics and teachers.  Even the architectural union has asked firms to take in Ukrainian architects.  A significant Ukrainian community has formed in Vilnius and Kaunas, but most of these displaced citizens long for the day they will be able to return to their homeland.

It is so satisfying to see this outreach as this is what binds humanity, and even more satisfying to see young persons take such an active role.  We often read the knocks against Millennials and Gen Z in the media, but the fact is these younger generations have a very strong social consciousness and are doing their part to provide humanitarian relief where it is needed most.