Near­ly sev­en decades after they were writ­ten, the repeat­ed lines at the end of each verse of Pete Pete Seeger’s great polit­i­cal song “Where Have All the Flow­ers Gone”, pose what may be the defin­ing ques­tion for some of the ways the world is deal­ing with the war in Ukraine: “When will they ever learn?”. The answer seems to be: “not yet”.

Every rea­son Putin gave for his inva­sion twist­ed his­to­ry and vio­lat­ed inter­na­tion­al law, to say noth­ing of the norms of what we are pleased to call civilised behav­iour. The UN should have tak­en a force­ful stand imme­di­ate­ly. It’s not as though there haven’t been enough precedents.
When the war began, how­ev­er, the body to which the world should be able to turn for help and guid­ance in times of strife, couldn’t pass a res­o­lu­tion con­demn­ing it. Rus­sia not only has a veto, at that point it also held the rotat­ing chair as head of the Secu­ri­ty Council.
It seems rea­son­able to spec­u­late that the tim­ing of the war was no coincidence.
What­ev­er the case, in the view of David Smith, who spent a decade as an advis­er to for­mer Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Kofi Anan: “You couldn’t make up such a night­mare, the war machine tak­ing con­trol of the peace forum.”
The world’s two most pop­u­lous nations, Chi­na and India, chose to abstain. There’s a phrase for that: craven self-interest.

                               SANCTIONS AND POSTURES     

And then there are sanc­tions. Those lev­eed on Rus­sia are the most exten­sive and poten­tial­ly hard-hit­ting ever approved. They are designed to crip­ple the coun­try and hurt its wealth­i­est cit­i­zens. Their effec­tive­ness will take months, if not years to assess, but they are proof that a large seg­ment of the world can unite in com­mon cause. How long they are will­ing to pay the price of doing so should be a sig­nif­i­cant entry when the bal­ance sheet of account­abil­i­ty is audited.
Using sanc­tions as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for a knee jerk blan­ket pun­ish­ment of Rus­sians out­side the coun­try who are ret­i­cent to express pub­lic con­dem­na­tion of Vladimir Putin, how­ev­er, seems unnec­es­sar­i­ly harsh.
What Mari­na Ovsyan­niko­va, an edi­tor at state-con­trolled Chan­nel 1 did by burst­ing on air, live, to denounce the war, defines coura­geous prin­ci­ple and defies the log­ic of self-preser­va­tion. But peo­ple like her are under­stand­ably few and far between.
If you’re a Russ­ian artist, ath­lete or pub­lic fig­ure out­side of the coun­try, whether or not to denounce Putin comes down to a choice between being on “the right side of his­to­ry” — which risks the pos­si­bil­i­ty of up to fif­teen years in jail — or being free to go home safe­ly to fam­i­ly and friends. But even those who take the risk are being penalised.
A sim­ple exam­ple is Russ­ian film­mak­er Kir­ill Sokolov, whose lat­est work was banned from the Glas­gow film fes­ti­val. Organ­is­ers deemed it “inap­pro­pri­ate to pro­ceed as nor­mal with the screen­ings while the assault on the Ukrain­ian peo­ple con­tin­ues,” because the movie received some Russ­ian gov­ern­ment fund­ing. Appar­ent­ly, the fact that Sokolov’s fam­i­ly is half Ukrain­ian doesn’t count. Nor does him hav­ing signed two peti­tions against the war, which car­ries the prob­a­bil­i­ty that if he returns to Moscow, he will be pun­ished by the regime that sanc­tions are sup­posed to hurt. How, it is fair to ask, does ‘dou­ble jeop­ardy’ serve any worth­while pur­pose, oth­er than rais­ing the stakes on a game show for enter­tain­ment value?

                              EMPTY GESTURES VS ACTION  

A prin­ci­pled stand is one thing. Smug — and safe — self-right­eous­ness is quite another.
Ges­tures like pour­ing what you think is Russ­ian vod­ka down the drain serve no use­ful pur­pose, unless you count post­ing the act on social media to show­case “com­mit­ment” or whatever.
Far bet­ter to direct effort into sup­port­ing Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s exhor­ta­tion: “All Amer­i­can com­pa­nies must leave Rus­sia. … Leave their mar­ket imme­di­ate­ly, because it is flood­ed with our blood.”
One notable refusenik is the Koch organ­i­sa­tion. Accord­ing to the web­site “Pop­u­lar Infor­ma­tion”: “Koch Indus­tries, the con­glom­er­ate run by right-wing bil­lion­aire Charles Koch, has numer­ous ongo­ing busi­ness oper­a­tions in Rus­sia. Since Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine, Koch Indus­tries has giv­en no indi­ca­tions that those busi­ness oper­a­tions have been sus­pend­ed. On the con­trary, the lim­it­ed pub­lic com­ments made by Koch sub­sidiaries oper­at­ing in Rus­sia indi­cate that their busi­ness activ­i­ties have continued.”
But then, in the 2019–2020 elec­tion cycle, Koch did give near­ly $1.5 mil­lion dol­lars to Repub­li­cans, none of whom could restrain them­selves from cheap pol­i­tics by refus­ing to applaud when dur­ing his speech to a joint ses­sion of Con­gress, Zelen­skyy thanked Pres­i­dent Joe Biden for help his help so far.
How­ev­er, don’t be sur­prised if a few mem­bers — from both par­ties — start show­ing up in dark green tee shirts as a show of “sup­port” (trans­la­tion: try­ing to ride on his coattails).
Play­ing Pete Seeger’s song once an hour on every radio show might not be a bad idea…
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