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. 

****

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." 

****

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?

****

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. 

==END OF BLOGSPOT POSTING.==