My newsfeed knows what kind of stories I like: “Retired Russian General Says Putin is Leading Russia to Defeat”; “Russia’s Budget Deficit Has Surged”; “Russia Just Lost One of its Most Advanced Weapon Systems”; “New Reports on Putin’s Ailing Health.” For a short while I was also getting stories from the Hindustan Times about how the brave Russian soldiers were devastating the Ukrainian army—I must have clicked on the wrong article—but that has stopped, and the news is all good again. Like most people in the West, I find myself cheering Ukraine’s armed forces on as they inflict casualties on the Russians. This war is, as Leon Fink and others have argued, a “good war,” maybe the goodest war since World War II. The military defense of Ukraine seems to fit all the traditional Catholic just-war criteria. The lines are so clearly drawn between the aggressor and the smaller, freer nation it attacked that the war has captured our attention in the West. Add the Ukrainians’ plucky and unexpectedly successful defense against steep odds and the war in Ukraine has all the elements of must-see TV.
I don’t think this attitude is good for my soul. As the casualties mount on both sides of the conflict, I am increasingly troubled by the “good war” narrative. Not because I have any sympathy for the Russian version of events; this is clearly an unprovoked war of unjust aggression, prosecuted with criminal brutality against soldiers and civilians alike. I do not believe that Ukraine belongs to Russia’s sphere of influence any more than I believe in the Monroe Doctrine, or any more than I believe that an eighth-grader who is being bullied should accept the school pecking order as natural and inevitable. Nor do I have any affinity for Republicans whose opposition to support for Ukraine is an unappealing admixture of “America First” chauvinism and sotto voce admiration for Putin’s putatively Christian nationalism. Rather, as a Christian, I think there are reasons why lament rather than cheerleading should be our first response to the war in Ukraine. Three considerations should complicate the narrative of a good war for any Catholic.
The first is the disproportionate nature of the West’s response to the invasion of Ukraine when compared with conflicts elsewhere. The Catholic just-war criterion of proportionality is usually restricted to the consideration of whether the means used are proportional to the end sought. But a Catholic approach should also call into question the proportionality of our response to various conflicts going on in the world. The outpouring of aid for Ukraine has been motivated by a genuine concern for the victims of the invasion, a concern that is stoked by news stories updated every hour. The suffering of millions in Ukraine—and of Ukrainians scattered to other countries—has rightly attracted our attention and empathy. But the Russians have been shelling Syrian civilians and destroying their cities for years with barely a shrug from most of us in the West. In September 2018, the head of the Kremlin’s parliamentary defense committee announced that in Russia’s first three years of backing the Assad regime it had killed 85,000 people in Syria. Russia claims that these victims were all terrorists and that Russian forces killed no civilians, but that is clearly false. Millions of civilians have fled Syria, but only 20 percent of them have been welcomed by the West. Since the invasion of Ukraine began a year ago, the number of Ukrainian refugees Europe has accepted is about four times the number of Syrian refugees that it’s accepted in the ten years since the Syrian civil war began. The United States has fast-tracked refugee status for Ukrainian citizens, while other refugees from places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo wait. The conflict in Congo has been the bloodiest in the world since World War II, with the number of its casualties dwarfing those of the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts combined. But Congo never appears in my newsfeed, and most in the West pay no attention to war there.
Please email comments to [email protected] and join the conversation on our Facebook page.