I cannot have been alone in feeling conflicted when I saw the images of Alexander Dugin, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fascist ideologue, staring with his head in his hands at the bombed-out car that his daughter had been driving.
Dugin is, by any measure, a nasty piece of work. His ideas have veered about over the years, but his hatred for open societies is a constant. He has gone from an interest in the occult to a chauvinistic elevation of Russian Orthodoxy, from self-proclaimed “Russian fascism” to traditionalist conservatism. But he is clear about one thing: Russian imperialism is the route to spiritual purification. Dugin’s doctrines are said to have a direct and immediate influence over Putin. He has spent years arguing for the forcible annexation of Ukraine as a first step toward eventual confrontation with the decadent West.
Few people bear more responsibility for the horrors now playing out on Ukraine’s bloody steppes. Dugin might not have given the order that launched the armored columns, but he spent 25 years championing the aggressive Russian revanchism that provoked the invasion. On any list of guilty men, his name must be close to the top.
And yet, looking at the photograph of him, I could see only a stricken father trying to take in the fact of his daughter’s horrible death. I was reminded of George Orwell’s reaction when, in the trenches outside Cuenca during the Spanish Civil War, he had a clear shot at an enemy soldier who was rushing back to his post after relieving himself: “I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”
The ethics we apply to warfare are, in many ways, arbitrary. Had Darya Dugina been vaporized by a Ukrainian missile when she visited occupied Mariupol in June, enthusing over “Russia’s empire-forming space,” everyone would have thought it fair game. The death of civilians is considered a war crime only if they were deliberately targeted. Collateral damage is seen as inescapable in all wars, including this one. And collateral damage can be defined very loosely.
During World War II, the Allies deliberately bombed German cities to break enemy morale and disperse workers from industrial areas. Nagasaki was obliterated before the Japanese government had time to decide whether it should surrender in the wake of Hiroshima.
When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was challenged about the incineration of women and children that bombing raids necessarily involved, he responded that, whereas during World War I the use of gas was considered acceptable and the bombing of cities was not, in World War II, it was the other way around. It was all, he observed cold-bloodedly, a question of fashion.
Does the manner of a civilian’s death matter morally? In recent weeks, 27 Ukrainian women of the same age as Dugina have been killed by Russian missiles. Some of them, too, left uncomprehending fathers staring with their heads in their hands. Their deaths count for no less than hers. Indeed, to the extent that she had been echoing her father’s calls for imperialist wars, she was a more legitimate target than they were.
Should we, then, excuse her murder? Should we applaud whoever was responsible and urge them to have another go at Dugin himself, who was presumably the intended target? Should we justify terrorism, even state-sponsored terrorism, against civilians of whom we disapprove sufficiently strongly?
No. One of the things that distinguish our philosophy from Dugin’s, and Putin’s, is that we believe in rules. Yes, those rules are sometimes broken, but not without consequences, including the possibility of a court martial. A U.S. soldier who deliberately injures or kills a noncombatant can expect sanction. The victim can expect compensation.
Instead of normalizing the murder of civilians behind the lines, however dreadful their views, we should be doing the opposite. We should be seeking justice for those 27 Ukrainian women and for Dugina and for all the other civilians who have died in Russia’s needless war of aggression. We must ensure that there are trials for war crimes — not for reasons of vengeance but to preserve the legal order that has pertained since 1945.
The Soviet Union was never held properly to account for its atrocities in Poland, the Baltic States, or, later, its Comecon satellites because it was never formally defeated. Russia, as its designated successor state, was given a fresh start. Let us not repeat that mistake. Putin must be seen to lose, and justice must be seen to take its course.
