Charles Steele is the chairman of business, economics, and accounting at Hillsdale. He has spent several years teaching in Ukraine and Russia.
What was your experience in Ukraine?
I taught graduate economics in Kyiv for 2.5 years at the Economic Education and Research Consortium, now Kyiv School of Economics. Many of my students went on to earn Western Ph.Ds and a number of them returned to Ukraine to work on reform and teach at KSE. In fact, the first report I heard of the attack was an email from one of my former students in Kyiv telling me the city had just come under missile attack. I’ve heard nothing from him or the others since.
What is your impression of Ukraine and the Russian invasion?
The short answer is that Ukraine is a free country, and a dictatorship run by a Soviet secret police officer has invaded. He did so purely because he is set on restoring the Soviet empire and his own power.
What can you say about the war?
The unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 — Crimea and Donbas — was the actual start of the war. It has been ongoing since then. At the time, officials in the West pretended not to know who was invading. This was ridiculous; in spring 2014 I gave a talk for the Classical Liberal Organization at Hillsdale where I showed it was the Russian army.
The current full-scale invasion is an extension of that. Putin has spoken for years about restoring the old Soviet Empire. In 2014, he began expounding the “good Hitler/bad Hitler” theory, in which Hitler is pronounced “good” up until September 1939. Hitler’s invasions prior to that were “justified” in Putin’s account because he was uniting ethnic Germans. Only when he entered Slavic lands did he become bad. Putin espouses the same idea, only it’s “Soviet peoples” he has spoken of unifying. Putin particularly denies the existence of a Ukrainian ethnicity or nationality, and claims they are Russians. There’s a long history of Russian leaders trying to eliminate Ukrainian nationality (the Holodomor is one of the more horrific examples), but Ukrainians are culturally, linguistically, and politically distinct. Putin has spoken of “denazifying” Ukraine by purging the Ukrainian nationalist elements. Ukrainians understand he is willing to exterminate them if that’s what “unity” requires. It is clear that Russians are attacking civilian targets in Ukraine.
Why would Putin attack now?
The Kremlin’s claim that they were afraid of Ukraine joining NATO is a scam. There was no movement at all for Ukraine to join NATO.
Our current American president is senile or at least appears to be. Our administration’s idea of military reform is getting more transgenders in uniform, and our strategic vision is stopping climate change. America is at its weakest point in Putin’s lifetime. There’s no more opportune time than now for Russian expansion.
What can you say about President Volody Zelenskyy?
A little. After Yanukovych abdicated in 2014, the new elections selected Petro Poroshenko as president. He was a middle-of-the-road reformer, pro-Western, but no strong principles, a vacillator, and the preferred candidate of the Obama administration. I think Ukrainians had better options (e.g. Vitaliy Klichko, the current mayor of Kyiv), but Poroshenko won. There was some effort to curb corruption under Poroshenko, but it was not very effective. Ukraine even appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Burisma, but Vice President Joe Biden personally intervened to stop that.
In the 2019 presidential election (they have five-year terms), Jewish TV comedian Volodymor Zelenskyy defeated incumbent Poroshenko, winning 70% of the vote — the first time Zelenskyy ever ran for office. He ran on an anti-corruption platform and has been fairly faithful to it, but hamstrung by all the bureaucracies and political factions. He’s been very Trump-like in that regard, struggling against an entrenched bureaucracy, and I don’t think American Democrats forgave him for getting along with President Trump. Regardless, Zelenskyy has been pretty honest and something of a unifier. That makes him a threat to Putin. If Ukraine can make democracy and limited government and freedom work, Russians will ask why they can’t try these things.
What should American policy be?
America must never involve itself in a major ground war in Eurasia. I do not know of any solution to the current debacle. I am sure that resisting evil is always warranted. I would suggest that the West ought to entirely isolate Russia (and China) economically. We should detach them entirely from free world economies. This would be painful for us but the regimes in both countries would collapse.
American policy, in general, should always be to support people fighting for freedom and simultaneously not to intervene militarily in other peoples’ wars.
