Time to Change the Game with Russia: Patten

Today is “Officers’ Day,” otherwise known as “Men’s Day” among those who served in the Soviet military. My former business partner Kostya – a Russian-Ukrainian who once made his way onto the FBI’s most wanted list – had once served and used to joke that it was a day to put on your old uniform, get drunk thinking about the old days, and pass out with your face in the herring salad. Not anymore.

Russian President Vladimir Putin chose the day after “Officer’s Day” to launch Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine twenty-four hours short of two years ago. In doing so, he sent a message to his men, some of who brought only their parade uniforms for what they must have thought would have been a quick jaunt down to Kyiv. But now, two years later, momentum appears to have slowly accrued to their side.

It’s been nearly two years since I headed out there to check on a friend who jumped into Ukraine’s war effort with both feet and bring him some radios to distribute to local defenders before the taps of foreign assistance came heavily on for a bit. And the proliferation of Ukrainian flags that seemed to fly on every Maine town square have since dwindled, as has America’s enthusiasm for the faraway country’s fight against a bullying neighbor.

As some of us contemplate what all this means, one thing strikes me clearly: it’s time to take the politics out of how we think about the Russo-Ukrainian war. The late Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.) once said that our politics end at the water’s shore, but that is less the case today than it once may have been.

Valentine’s Day came and went with a predictable flurry of GIFs of Putin and Donald Trump lying side by side in a bed of roses. When he (finally) takes the rostrum of the House the week after next to deliver what may potentially be his last State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden may shame Republicans for slowing the latest Ukrainian aid package, but if he blames them for Ukraine’s recent withdrawal from Avdiika, a city in the country’s East, that would not be smart.

Had there been no Russia-gate circus from 2016-2019, I wonder if we would be where we are. Yet by politicizing Russia then, one side in our political duopoly muddied the waters in such a way it became tough to see things clearly. Then, by asserting in 2020 that a laptop chock full of incriminating information and belonging to one Hunter Biden, which was oddly forgotten at a Delaware repair shop, and falsely claiming the whole thing was a Russian ruse, they clouded things further.

In fact, it made things so convoluted that Tucker Carlson flew to Moscow earlier this month to get Putin’s side of the story. All he really learned though was that Russians – or at least the ones for whom Putin speaks – like losing, which makes them oddly similar to us.

Then, a week after Carlson’s trip (during which he pleaded to Putin for the release of an American journalist who once studied in Maine, at Bowdoin College in Brunswick), Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny died mysteriously (a.k.a. was murdered) in a prison near the Arctic Circle. Once a student of pro-democracy trainings I helped conduct in Russia in the early 2000s, Navalny’s death last week hit me hard but not as hard as the murder of Boris Nemtsov under the shadow of the Kremlin in 2015. At the time my late friend Nemtsov was shot five times in the back, he was preparing a report on Russia’s skullduggery in Ukraine.

Russian freedom fighters do not associate with one of our political tribes over the other, at least the real ones don’t. And while some Ukrainians have tried to play cute with our politics – I know this better than most (in 2018 I pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent for a Ukrainian politician in the course of Robert Mueller’s otherwise fruitless campaign to determine that Trump was a Kremlin stooge) – the smarter ones, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, know that playing partisan politics with Americans is a fool’s errand.

Supporting an independent and democratic Ukraine is in our interest. While another $60 billion seems like a lot when our own economy is faltering (as yes, it’s ok to speak truthfully and say things are too hard for too many in America right now without fearing how such candor will fare politically), as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) rightly put it, we’re spending our money on our guns which create jobs for our people.

But there is also a difference between arms dealership and leadership, and while he is still president, Biden needs to explain far more clearly than he has to date where all this is going. I remember serving in the George W. Bush administration when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, and there was heady talk at the time about how we were going to respond until the mild-mannered and soft-spoken national security advisor Steven Hadley interrupted and asked if anyone was prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia over tiny Georgia. The room went silent.

Since then, Russian troops have clawed back some of their lost pride. We need to better understand their intentions and, where appropriate, help their neighbors defend their own territorial integrity. However bad the Putin regime may be, the only way it becomes an actor in our political game is if we invite it in. Moscow just wants us to be confused and off their backs, and in half of their ambitions they have succeeded. Now it’s time for us, by thinking clearly, to change the game.