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How do you know a hero when you see one? Can we predict heroism or cowardice?
Typically I’m more in the “Great Forces of History” camp than the “Great Men of History” camp, more Hobsbawm than Carlysle. Current events might be changing my mind.
The conventional wisdom from Kofman to Ilforte to my Polish cousins seems to be that Putin made a tremendous blunder in invading Ukraine and attempting to implement regime change. That the balance of forces was always against Russia, and that invading only made that apparent. But I’m not sure that follows the available evidence available before the invasion. Putin’s strategy meetings might have amounted to “Lads, it’s Tottenham”; but they were wearing Tottenham jerseys after all.
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya. If you really drew an org chart with leadership roles and dates of events, there were maybe 100 Ukrainians, from TDF and police commanders who chose to fight in Kyiv at key moments to key governmental figures without whom the whole Ukrainian resistance project would have collapsed, to a handful of nationalist psychopaths who chose what seemed like certain death over letting down the side.
But let’s focus on the guy at the top: Zelensky. His early life contains few signs of heroism, or even of particular nationalism or patriotism, very little of obvious self-sacrifice and duty. He’s been in the media industry for his entire adult life. Nor in media was he some Mishima-esque hyper-patriot, he voiced Paddington Bear in the dubs and some of his movies were banned in Ukraine under nationalist laws he opposed, not a bloodthirsty nationalist. Obviously I lack the language skills to really delve into his oeuvre or personality, but there’s little there that would predict that when the chips were down he would stay in Kyiv..
I’m having trouble tracking down citations, but I recall pre-war and in the early war the theory that NATO would immediately evacuate Zelensky and enough of his government to form a reasonable government-in-exile for Ukraine, while funding/arming terrorist groups inside Ukraine, gleefully described as “making Ukraine into Russia’s Afghanistan.” Had Zelensky chosen to go along with that plan, I think Kyiv falls by the end of March, even with a higher assessment of Ukrainian skill today than I had then. [It’s in the nature of asymmetric wars
that demonstrative symbolic victories
are critical to maintaining popular support. Fleeing was a choice he very much could have made, that many leaders have made, that some would call not the cowardly choice but the humanitarian choice to spare his people the suffering of war. But he didn’t.
And I’m left asking, can we predict that? How can we predict how leaders will react under pressure? How can we predict how wars and matters of state will conclude if they hinge on these personal decisions of individual, fallible, men?
Maybe we can blame that on systems. Maybe hyper nationalist Ukrainian networks were ready to kill him if he jumped, and the guy was stuck between picking how to die. But that strikes me as a little too pat an explanation, eliminating the individual by inventing a system that we can put our faith in.
Or maybe there’s some psychological profile? Surely the armies of the world have looked into this, studied this? What conclusions have been reached, and how can we apply them?
Zelensky was and remains a nepotistic, peace-loving, PR-obsessed, meddling clown (which is, of course, still an immensely better background for a national leader than «KGB officer»; Russian people's love for tryhard strongmen characters, culminating in this obscene Sorokin-esque siloviki regime, is a disaster). If Zelensky is to be called a hero, that must prompt us to reassess the very notion of heroism. But eh, not the first time in this war. Very few people have not had to rethink some basic notion, probably.
I reject the premise that him or his top aides fleeing was a priori likely or could determine the outcome of the war. In my opinion, this is all grounded in hubristic and ignorant imperialist attitude, whether native or imported by osmosis from Russia, an attitude that cannot tell Ukrainians from Afghans.
Ukrainians are stubborn. Obstinate. Pig-headed even. They're the type to say «Fuck me!? No no buddy, fuck you» to any perceived slight (e.g. offhand mention of pigs) and think about details later. Maybe that is sufficient to make heroes? In any case, this trait is not dependent on political leaders and, in fact, is the age-old bane of their political leaders. Were he to pull a Ghani, he'd have earned contempt of his electorate (and maybe eventual assassination); army, nationalists and very soon other sections of society would have rallied around, I dunno, Zaluzhnyi to say their fuck you to Putin and the rest of Ruskie Swine. They don't depend on Strong Leaders. They create them out of the crowd. The latest iteration of their culture had begun with telling a spinelss president to go pound sand. In a conflict with a competent power capable of penetrating Kiev in under, say, five hours that'd not have been good enough. But they had to fight Russia, and Russia gave them more than enough time.
This is ethnic psychology. There were more mundane reasons as to why Zelensky was unlikely to flee. Chief among them is that the AFU is (de facto) not that subordinate to the political authority and has had a lifetime of nationalist upbringing and 8 years of war to gain skills and dig in; hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have gone through the war zone, probably as many were exposed to some extent to territorial defense training. Also important was Europe and USA supplying them with defensive weaponry guaranteed to blunt the first wave of armor and aviation, and of course with intel. The attack was not shocking to them. This fact was shocking to Russia. That's about all. Zelensky or not, they'd have responded because that's what their job was and soldiers rarely just ditch their job.
I don't remember, was it you or someone else early into the war, there was a post with phrasing like «I'm sure Russians too have analytic centers with very smart people dedicated to planning this stuff, and we're seeing the result of one hyperintelligent network beating another, but it's a high-level play, full of feints and moves we cannot comprehend with our limited info». And well, no. Russians don't have anything like that. I'll fully believe if after the war they publish evidence showing that Putin didn't even consult with his «folders» but just watched Evening With Vladimir Solovyov to stay informed. Accordingly, his gamble was not grounded in realistic assessments of his or Ukrainians' forces.
They only needed to be slightly less delusionable to get the upper hand.
Weren't me. If anything, as I said at the beginning, I tend towards the view that the detailed intelligence stuff is made-up bullshit. Either we imagine it into existence altogether, or intelligence operatives imagine it is important to justify their budgets. Most of the forces at play here can be figured out from things like GDP figures in this day and age. I remember the posts you were talking about. My comment from the first week of the war is that the reliable leading indicator of Ukrainian collapse and defeat would be when leadership (governmental and military) starts disappearing from Ukraine and showing up in the EU, we have not seen that in any significant numbers today to my knowledge.
Sure, cool, great, Ukrainians are all fiery independent descendants of Cossacks ready to fight at the drop of a hat, and ready to fight before the hat is halfway to the ground if it's Russians. That didn't kick in until the Russians were Nine miles from the city center of Kyiv and had already enveloped Mariupol and taken Kherson. And it didn't kick in in 2014 until the Russians/proxies had already taken Crimea and the majority of Donetsk and Luhansk. So I suspect the best Ethnic Psychology is going to get us is a post-facto just-so story, it has relatively little predictive value.
Sure, but they would have done it without half their country, and without the kind of conventional and political Western support in training and equipment that has proven decisive in allowing Ukrainian forces to face Russian forces in conventional battles and retake territory. Which, at the very least, is a significant downgrade for the majority of Ukrainians. Conventional war is hell, but I'd rather fight a conventional war than an insurgency. Delivering that improvement on the margins is what holding Kyiv delivered, and Kyiv was only a few decisions from falling.
Which brings me to this. How do you define a hero? Taking a significant risk to one's own life (remaining in the capital, ten miles from an army that wants you dead rather than fleeing to Poland) to deliver an improved situation to your nation/ethnos/whatever (bloody conventional war over Slavic Syria) seems to fit the bill for me.
Blitzkriegs can happen irrespective of psychology; Russia has «conquered» (covered) a lot of land then and did not secure any of it, the AFU were reasonable to allow it to break against Kiev which the army of invasion had no means to secure.
In 2014, UA army was genuinely incapable of fighting and reasonably retreated.
More important facts are that Kherson and Melitopol fell basically like Putin expected them to, and Kharkov did not. There were some grounds for expecting Ukrainian surrender, but I maintain that it didn't rely on a few individually heroic people, or even on hundreds of people. In Kherson, there was a substantial consensus against making a stand. In Kiev, it was the other way around by a tremendous margin. You have to recognize that Zelensky was known to be a peacenik, and suspected to be Russian agent by nationalists. His individual cowardice wouldn't have come as a great shock; everyone fighting now had more trustworthy and committed superiors. And seeing the army remain unbroken, the populace would have reacted much the same. It was possible this'd have upset the Ukrainian response a little bit. But Russians couldn't really find and kill Zelensky, and the first guy to recognize that they'd be unable to kill him too would have sufficed as an acting President.
I also do not believe that Western diplomatic and military support would have faltered upon his flight. Ghani had been abandoned before he fled, it was an inevitability since the decision to withdraw American forces was made under Trump. Here, on the other hand, Ukraine as a nation was receiving increasing commitments before the first Z vehicles crossed the border.
A hero is someone who contributes his life to greatly advance a noble cause. But there are disqualifying criteria: irresponsibility, fame chasing, fraud. Zelensky did fuck all to prepare for war, and perhaps even degraded Ukrainian defense capability, betting on Putin's peacefulness. Starting as a clown LARPing as a president, he's secured the office for real, and now he's enjoying the role of a hero, enabled by others, merely a banner.
At most his contribution excuses what he was before the war. A Churchill can only be a hero inasmuch as he's not a Chamberlain. Roll them into one, and you get a fool's redemption arc, not a hero's journey.
I guess Zelensky counts as a Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks hero, though.
Isn't someone sharply and dramatically learning about their deficiencies and delusions a critical part of the hero's journey? That's not to say that a story cycle actually defines a hero. Maybe Zelensky isn't a hero. Maybe we should use a more functional definition of a hero, and he is a hero because that is the role he is acting in for his people. Maybe not. No matter what, I don't think someone's earlier mistakes counts as a disqualification from being a hero.
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