Europe & Eurasia

“Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred!” is how Václav Havel ended his speech to a crowd of freedom-longing people gathered in Prague on December 10, 1989. This statement was one of the slogans of the Velvet Revolution and embodied the overall spirit of this unparalleled historical event.

While Orthodox Christianity lacks the historical tradition of just war theory to criticize war, it does have a theological resource it could draw upon to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: personhood.

We should seek a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Torgau in Germany. We need a negotiated end to the current war in Ukraine.

A look at the history of Iran-Russia relations demonstrates the same pattern of Russian regimes exploiting Iranian resources. Most evidently, tsarist Russia obstructed the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–07, and the Soviet Union attempted to create a satellite state in the Azerbaijan province of Iran.

In our day it is difficult for some, perhaps many, to recall that the West’s Cold War policy of nuclear deterrence—anchored in traditional just war moral principles of just cause, right intention, proportionality, and discrimination—helped avert war rather than increase the prospects of nuclear conflagration.

With those words—“Her Majesty’s Government will…”—the speech from the throne was not read by the monarch. For the first time since the beginning of the present reign, this important address to Parliament was read for her by her 74-year-old son, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.

With Vladimir Putin’s planned two-day war to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government now in its third month and Russian casualties piling into the tens of thousands, concerns abound that Putin might take increasingly drastic steps to alter the disastrous situation he faces on the battlefield. To prevent those grim prospects—or at least contain their effects—President Joe Biden should turn to the playbook his predecessors drafted.

The war in Ukraine is proving to be a tragic proving ground for trends that will almost certainly be replicated in other twenty-first-century warfare. Decentralized decision-making, the targeting of population centers, tactical speed in decision-making, the rise of artificial intelligence, vital intelligence sharing, and the strategic impact of moral and spiritual injury demonstrate the boundaries for future combat.

In this episode the editors discuss Rebeccah Heinrichs’ article about John Kirby’s emotional statement about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mark Tooley’s editorial about Poland and Ukraine as martyr nations, and Christian realist articles from 1947 debating whether the Chinese communists could exist and thrive in a democracy.