Shameful displays at the United Nations are not rare, but the decision of the United States to vote with Russia and North Korea against Ukraine’s resolution on the third anniversary of the war belongs in a special category. Would that the new administration in Washington were capable of shame.
Last Friday, to conclude a week of parroting Russian propaganda on its war against Ukraine, President Donald Trump observed that he had been watching Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards. He has no cards, and you get sick of it. You just get sick of it. And I’ve had it.”
Trump knows something about cards, having run casinos into bankruptcy in New Jersey and his family now contracting to build new ones in Albania. But Zelenskyy has cards too, cards that Trump is incapable of recognizing.
He has the courage, perseverance and — to use a favoured term in Trump’s Washington — “warfighting” of the Ukrainian people. One of his face cards — or perhaps an ace — was in Canada this week: Sviatoslav Shevchuk, patriarch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC).
Ukraine is a majority Orthodox country, but the UGCC is a vibrant minority. They follow Eastern (Greek) traditions in liturgy and governance but are fully Catholic, in union with the pope in Rome. Patriarch Sviatoslav is the “father and head” of the UGCC, which knows more than most about Russian aggression. In 1946, Stalin declared the UGCC illegal, seized its sacred buildings, abolished its public worship, martyred many of its faithful and drove the rest underground, where they remained until 1991.
In Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine today, the UGCC has been declared illegal again. The UGCC knows something about playing the game of history without any evident cards.
Patriarch Sviatoslav is visiting the United States and Canada in part to thank the generous Americans and Canadians — governments, civil society and private individuals — who have supported his country in wartime, and in part to encourage the Ukrainian diaspora, increased in recent years by Ukrainians who have fled the brutality at home.
On Tuesday evening he gave a public address at the University of Toronto campus, having been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Michael’s College earlier in the day.
“What will succeed in forcing Putin to abandon his plans: plans to destroy my people, my country, my Church; to obliterate an international order based on law and human rights; and to exploit what he purports to be the ‘impotence of the democratic world’?” he asked. “After three years of war, I can say with certainty: only our moral clarity, our unity in courage and our joint decisive action, by God’s grace.”
In the worldview of Russian President Vladimir Putin, those are worthless cards. Ukrainians are right to fear that Trump also regards “moral clarity” and “unity in courage” as useless. They are not.
The evening’s event, “War, Peace and Truth,” included Professor Timothy Snyder. Snyder’s 2010 book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, chronicled the lethal danger faced by Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states from 1930 to 1945, when 14 million people were killed in the Holodomor, Holocaust and the sundry terror campaigns of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Snyder, a historian at Yale, had recently returned from eastern Ukraine, and spoke about attending the opening of a new underground school. Not metaphorically underground, like the UGCC in Soviet times, but actually subterranean. Near the front, where Russian missiles can land at any time, the children go to school underground, in a cheery bunker, to be safe.
Patriarch Sviatoslav too spends a good deal of time underground. Instead of leading worship in his cathedral, he often does so in the crypt, which also doubles as a shelter for those seeking refuge from bombing. And so, like his people, he ardently desires peace — “but not any peace” rather a “just peace” and a “sustainable peace.” Peace cannot be another pause granting Putin time to re-arm and then re-invade.
“A just peace for Ukraine requires not only material support, but an unshakeable and unbending commitment to defending the truth,” Patriarch Sviatoslav said. “Ukrainians need the clear-eyed recognition by western states of the type of violence that is being perpetrated against the victim. Throughout this war, lies have multiplied about the Ukrainian people, and foreign actors have used these distortions to excuse — and even support — Russia’s actions. These lies, beyond the bombs and the ammunition, have caused devastation to Ukraine, the Ukrainian people and their identity.”
The prelate and the professor made a moral-ethical claim that is ignored by those who think they understand power politics, those who think that Ukraine has “no cards.” Their claim is that ignoring truth promotes war and prevents peace. Peace-making begins with truth-telling.
“Big lies are back,” Snyder said. Putin’s lie — that Ukraine has no right to exist, is not a real country, is a threat to Russia — cannot be the foundation for peace. Truth is not optional in seeking peace; it is essential. It is not possible to choose lies and also peace.
It is a corollary of what Winston Churchill said in 1938 about making deals in the bloodlands: “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.”
Patriarch Sviatoslav made a concrete plea for Canadians to reject the lies being told in Moscow — and now in Washington, it breaks the heart to say — about Ukraine.
“Be vigilant in speaking the truth in your own communities, countering lies and misinformation wherever they arise,” he said. “I ask that you refuse to subscribe to or propagate the lies that have been contributing to the suppression, degradation and elimination of my people. We must be sure that, in the face of lies, we are bearers of truth.”
Tuesday’s lecture was near the Royal Ontario Museum, which has outsized banners advertising its 80th anniversary of Auschwitz exhibition. The banners read: “Not long ago. Not far away.” Perhaps Snyder, one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust, saw them. His reminder that the big lies are back in the bloodlands means that “not long ago” and “not far away” is, well, not long ago and not far away.
To Catholic ears, Trump’s declaration that Ukraine has “no cards” carries a profoundly distressing echo of one of the twin architects of the bloodlands. It was Stalin who derisively asked, “How many divisions does the pope have?” The pope had no cards to play.
Until he did. And when Pope John Paul II played them, he was ordered to be killed by Stalin’s successors. He survived. The Soviet Union did not.
Patriarch Sviatoslav is, like John Paul, from the bloodlands. He told Snyder that, biblically understood, blood has a voice. The blood of Abel, killed by his brother, like the Ukrainians are killed by their brother Slavs, cries out to heaven. The Ukrainian patriarch, like the Polish pope before him, allowed us to hear that cry in Toronto.
With Patriarch Sviatoslav in Canada this week, and with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Kyiv for the anniversary on Monday, it was a proud week to be a Catholic and a Canadian.
National Post