Imagine for a moment that you are a grandmother, sitting in her little cottage outside Warsaw, finishing the last of your gnocchi and listening to the radio. It’s a lovely sunny day in Poland and you are just reminiscing about your life, remembering what it was like to grow up in a Warsaw Pact nation.
Well, your momma’s gnocchi was a lot better than yours. Little wonder – she made it almost every day. You were married before you knew that she made it so often because potatoes were all she could get from the stores back then. You were just a kid. You remember the good times but you also remember the scary times, like when your uncle mouthed off at work and the police came to talk to your father about him. It was so scary.
You don’t like to think about the bad stuff – the empty stores, the fear of talking even to your neighbor, the constant struggle you watched your parents go through just to keep food on the table. You remember once standing in a long, long line all day just to get groceries and your momma crying all the way home over the tiny bag she had managed to get. There was a lot wrong with the Warsaw Pact.
A neighbor passes by your window and you wave at him. He’s Russian but has lived in Poland since before you moved into this house. You remember being so nervous as a child when a Russian family moved into your apartment building – you never did speak to their daughter although she was about your age. Too scary to trust any neighbor then, but much, much too scary to trust a Russian.
You smile, happy to know you don’t have to worry about that any more. Your Russian neighbor is such a nice man and those scary days are long over and gone.
The music stops and an announcer comes on the radio. Ukraine has fallen. The Russian Republic has driven the Ukrainian government from the country and has troops now on the Polish border. The war is over. Russia has won.
You sigh deeply and shed a tear. But no time to cry now. You have a lot of work to do and not much time to do it. You already packed your bags weeks ago when the tide turned against the Ukrainians. Now to pack the last few things you want to keep and get going. You’ll stop in Warsaw for your daughter and son-in-law. Fortunately, the baby isn’t due for a few more months. You’ll catch up to your son and his wife on the border with Germany – thankfully, they have a nice American car that’s big enough for all four kids.
They laughed at you when you insisted on everyone packing ahead of time but they aren’t laughing now. That’s fine – as long as everyone is safe and the whole family makes it to France, it will be just fine. You’re leaving now – twenty years behind the Iron Curtain was enough. Never again. The West can’t abandon you if you live in their backyard. France, Britain, Spain – you don’t care. Anywhere but under Russian rule.
If that sounds like a fanciful story, it’s not. Millions of Eastern Europeans lived under the thumb of the USSR. Like most of the rest of the world back in the day, ‘soviet’ and ‘Russian’ are interchangeable terms to them. The fear of a return to Russian domination is visceral – and very, very real.
Crimea is a dot in the Black Sea – and its annexation by Russia made all of Europe nervous. But a full scale invasion of a massive (by European standards – Ukraine is on par with Colorado by US size standards) European nation is something else again. The invasion of Ukraine is an an existential threat to all of Europe.
Our grandmother in the tale above is just one of millions. And it won’t just be those who grew up in the Warsaw Pact – their children and grandchildren have heard all the stories. Some sad, some mildly funny, some grim and some horrible beyond description – and none that these generations want to relive. In all honesty, the panic will probably start to set in before the Russians actually complete the takeover if it becomes obvious that the Ukrainians are going to lose.
European borders are more picket fences than true borders these days – it will be difficult or even impossible to stem the flood of refugees. As the stampede grows, Western European countries will find it next to impossible to cope and they, too, will see violence and panic as natives fear being overwhelmed by the unending tide of humanity.
If Russia weren’t intent on taking more territory, it soon would be – and no one sane believes they really intend to stop with Ukraine. Not that it matters – if your neighbor abandons his property, just move on in! No Eastern European nation can cope and they will all be clamoring for Article Five to be invoked.
Now we have a real world war. Now the US and Russia come to blows on the battlefield for the first time in over a century. Now the risk of escalation is extremely high. Now the blood of millions will flow.
Or we can just ship equipment, money and supplies, give intel and training, to the Ukrainians and let them stop the whole thing in its tracks.
Seems a pretty simple choice.
