Sunday 27 February 2022

Toomas Karmo: Open Letter to Platoon Commanders in the Russian Red Army Force Invading Ukraine

  Quality assessment: 

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 2/5. Justification: I worked in a public emergency on a task of limited scope, from a position of limited knowledge.  

Revision history:

UTC=20220228T955755Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo adjusted transparency-driven disclosure of personal contact particulars, paying closer attention to need for balancing transparency with security. Kmo then planned to continue producing, in a way not documented here, minor tweaks, over the coming 72 hours, as versions 2.1.1, 2.1.2, ... . . 

UTC=20220227T213003Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo took a firmer line, considering participation in the invasion unambiguously immoral. (In version 1.0.0, he had unwisely suggested that in some limited sense it might be moral to adhere to a solemn oath of military loyalty, taken in good faith at some past time. This is "Wehrmacht Honour", to be dismissed in the Ukraine of 2022 as it was dismissed at the Nürnberg trials in 1946.)  Kmo then planned to continue producing, in a way not documented here, minor tweaks, over the coming 72 hours, as versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, ... . . 

UTC=20220227T203610Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo uploaded base version. He then planned to continue producing, in a way not documented here, minor tweaks, over the coming 72 hours, as versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2, ... . . 


I write in the interest of civic and military honour, as a private Estonian citizen and as a private Catholic Christian loyal to the Holy See. I assume personal responsibility for what I write, having consulted beforehand with nobody. Having, on the other hand, written my thoughts out, I am ready to take any necessary advice, correction, or rebuke from authorities in my Church and in my government, and additionally from within my circle of friends and colleagues. 

For the convenience of all parties, and in the interest of transparency, I display my contact particulars at the end of this letter. 

I respectfully request that sympathetic persons, for instance in Ukraine and Russia, repeatedly translate this letter into good Russian and repeatedly distribute it, both via social media (such as ВКонтакте) and as printed sheets, indicating that their particular translation is not my own, and retaining my own contact particulars, and if choosing to make any change in content (in substance) adding an appropriate entry to the revision log in the document header. In legal terms, this work is intended as a publication under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). 

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What is an honourable course of action for those Red Army platoon commanders invading Ukraine who now consider their platoon to have been recruited into an unjust cause by Kremlin politicians? Of the various good options which exist for such a hypothetical platoon commander, not all are equally good. 

Some will argue that good in a weak sense is the option of remaining true to one's military oath. On this dark so-to-speak 1939-through-1945 "Wehrmacht honour" conception, one continues to fight with due diligence on the Kremlin side, as one promised when the oath was administered. For my part, however, I respectfully dissent from this assessment, holding with the 1946 Nürnberg tribunal (in which Russian judges participated) that unjust orders cannot be obeyed. 

In my own private view (I repeat my willingness to take rebuke from my government, from my Church, and from my friends and acquaintances), it is necessary to consider the military oath no longer binding. Many will agree with my anti-military assessment at least when pondering the case of such platoon commanders as joined the Ukraine invasion without initially grasping its immorality. Without myself being a soldier, I would conjecture that some aspects of military morality become clear to junior officers only in the field, at the hour when civilian anguish is first encountered. 

And in my own private view military disengagement is still more glaringly necessary for those platoon commanders who, on taking their oath months or years ago, either did not foresee being some day sent to invade the brother nation which is Ukraine or who are commanding men who did not foresee this contingency when they for their part took the oath. Officers are responsible for the moral welfare of their subordinates.  

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How should these disengaging platoon commanders proceed? Here are various good options, some better than others. 

Good, but in a limited way, is the option of quietly undermining the work of one's higher command, in some way that does not directly endanger any other personnel in the Red Army. It would be reckless to commit an act of outright sabotage, such as planting an improvised explosive device in the path of one's advancing comrades. A descent into recklessness can be avoided, however, by executing orders less than perfectly. A lieutenant or captain radios to the platoon, for instance, the order that forty fuel containers are to be made ready for an incoming Red Army convoy. Let the fuel be of proper quality, then, prepared just as the lieutenant or captain expects. Let there simply be not quite enough of it. In place of the required forty containers, let there be just thirty, or just twenty. Or let the containers be just partly filled, with spills allowed to occur at the spigot. 

Still better is a plan of surrender, provided one can secure the free and informed consent of one's men before acting. Suppose the platoon agrees, after some minutes of discussion, that the Russian invasion is a fratricidal injustice, bringing on the one hand suffering to Ukraine, and on the other hand dishonour to the Red Army. Now one is ready, as an officer, to surrender, with the informed cooperation of one's men. Here again two options exist - both of them good, and yet one better than the other. 

The less good option is to seek out some opportunity of surrendering to a numerically superior force, by deliberately leading the platoon into contact with some larger Ukrainian unit. 

The better option is to seek out some opportunity to surrender to a numerically inferior force, as when some nine-man Russian platoon turns itself over to a two-man Ukrainian patrol. 

Surrender to a numerically superior force can take on the morally ambiguous aspect of self-preservation. Surrender to a numerically inferior force, on the other hand, takes on the aspect of a moral declaration. Such a surrender indicates to all observers, through the language of military action, a loyalty to principles and to Russia's true long-term national interest. 

[Author contact particulars: Toomas Karmo; Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com; http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/; telephone 372-5864-6540; papermail Observatooriumi Street, Tõravere hamlet, Nõo Rural Municipality, Tartumaa County, Estonia 61602.]

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Saturday 19 February 2022

Toomas Karmo: Open Letter to Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Urging Red Army Refugee Arrangements

 Quality assessment: 

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 3/5. Justification: I knew enough to treat my subject adequately within the limited scope I set myself.  

Revision history:

UTC=20220219T124753Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo uploaded base version. He then planned to continue producing, in a way not documented here, minor tweaks, over the coming 72 hours, as versions 1.0.1, 1.0.2, ... . . 


I write this open letter to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as a publication on my server space http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com/. I hope to convey either its text or a notification of it, via private e-mail, over the coming days or weeks to whatever parties may from time to time appear appropriate - at any rate to the Russian Embassy in Tallinn and to some Ukrainian diplomatic authorities. 

I write as a concerned private Roman Catholic layman, and as an Estonian national. I lack significant contacts, whether formal or informal, with the government of any country. 

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As Catholics, we are aware that "our Final Examination will be on the topic of love." We are also aware that love involves following Gaudium et Spes and Fr Pedro Arrupe, S.J., in embracing "the preferential option for the poor". Finally, we recall in this context Pope John Paul II's 1991 admonition that poverty "is not limited to material poverty, but encompasses cultural and spiritual poverty as well." 

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This winter, Russia's Red Army emerges as a new cohort of the poor. Here we find persons of limited cultural exposure and of correspondingly limited vision. I would presume these individuals are still more crushed than the US Army deserters with whom I used to chat at Catholic Worker in Toronto. At Catholic Worker, a couple of US Army personnel explained to me that in their home towns, far from the centres of American wealth and prestige, adolescents finishing high school had faced a stark, a merely binary, choice. They could work at some low-wage unskilled job, for instance as short-order cooks in a roadside hamburger restaurant. Alternatively (the one alternative), they could join the military. The military offered them their sole realistic path to a dignified adult life, dangling as it did the inviting prospect of a duly funded post-secondary education. 

The available choices cannot be much better in Russia. Now we have not only the Dostoyevskian spectacle of an Army of the Disadvantaged - a kind of Army of the Бурлаки - conceivably marching on Kyiv, but the spectacle of an Army facing military and diplomatic adversity. 

The adversity may take a while to eventuate. At first, there might be something that can be presented to Russian television audiences, far to the east of Ukraine, as a victory: air superiority quickly seized and tenaciously maintained, some Ukrainian territory gained, perhaps even a Kyiv government overthrown. But in the longer term? Things did not go well for the USSR in post-1981 Poland. Neither did things go well for the USA in post-2003 Iraq. Why should things, at any rate in the longer term, say in the five-year or ten-year term, be expected to go well for this particular Army?

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In the face of the bleak probabilities, a means of honourable and dignified escape must now be constructed. What is needed is a clear, institutionally defined, path, free of moral ambiguity, through which a Red Army soldier can upon attaining moral clarity leave his unit and find temporary political refuge within the EU. I consequently imagine a political-refugee Non-Governmental Organizaation, "PQR", being created, at the Ukrainian grassroots level, with support from governments in Ukraine, in the EU, and in NATO. Imagine now the path of the Red Army recruit "Sergei Petrovitch", as he realizes that he has been recruited out of his isolated and impoverished community (perhaps many hundreds of kilometers east of Moscow and Sankt Peterburg, where life gets rough) into an unjust cause. Here is how the people at PQR support Sergei Petrovich, as he works to avoid moral complicity:

  • In the general confusion befogging (to take a hypothetical military example) some contested countryside some tens of kilometres northwest of Kyiv, near the Belarus frontier, Sergei Petrovich detaches himself from his unit. (Perhaps he is in a three-man patrol detail, and his two sympathetic comrades allow the detail to split up "just for half an hour", kinda-sorta knowing what is about to happen with Sergei, and willing to run their own entailed personal risks at debriefing tomorrow morning: we may well assume depression and loose discipline through much of the Red Army, once the initial weeks of euphoria are over.) 
  • Sergei Petrovich proceeds to some ordinary Ukrainian farmhouse, taking his chances as he knocks at the door. The safety catch on his firearm is clearly and demonstratively engaged. He explains to the frightened people - at first he has to shout this, since they scarcely dare open up - that he has his safety catch on, that he will toss his firearm down with its catch still on, and that he needs the help of PQR in leaving the Red Army. Eventually, people in the farmhouse understand, recalling what they already know of PQR from the media. Having accordingly let him in, they manage to find him a civilian jacket and civilian trousers, both of them a more or less reasonable fit. Helpfully, several weeks ago they did take the precaution of stocking multiple printed-out copies of a map disseminated over the Internet by PQR, detailing the location of their own oblast's network of PQR "Transit Houses". 
  • PQR now makes his way under cover of night, retaining his military compass and his electric torch, but now minus his uniform and his firearm, to the nearest Transit House. In operational terms, this is no very hard task: PQR has to cover just 30 km on foot, on rather level ground, and the map makes clear how he can proceed across fields and along farm fencing. 
  • Seven hours later, with Sergei Petrovich in the local Transit House, PQR begins the process of documenting him as a political refugee, temporarily liable to political prosecution and therefore temporarily unable to return to Russia. 
  • PQR next conveys Sergei Petrovich to the Ukrainian defence forces, some safe distance outside currently contested territory. 
  • In a courteous but firm debriefing, the Ukrainian forces record Sergei Petrovich's military particulars (rank, serial number, areas of special technical competence, ... ). 
  • The forces and PQR jointly arrange for Sergei Petrovich's speedy transfer westward, out of Ukraine, to some appropriate reception camp run by PQR and the EU. In this PQR-with-EU camp, Sergei Petrovich receives a detailed security screening from the host-nation authorities, as with Displaced Persons in the aftermath of the 1939-1945 war. With the lengthy security procedures complete, Sergei Petrovich's details are conveyed to the UNHCR database. Additionally, particulars of his family back home in Russia are entered into a database of potentially vulnerable persons, as PQR in the EU liaises with Amnesty International in London. 
  • Months or years later, once a peace treaty ends the Ukraine conflict, Sergei Petrovich is assisted by his host EU country in returning home to Russia.
  • Sergei Petrovich's conscience is now clear. He knows that despite having entered the Red Army without due consideration, he providentially found himself, once in the operational combat field, at a duly considered decision point. He knows that at that instant he did take the morally correct decision, correctly serving Russia's longest-term national interests. 
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