Three years
How long, O Lord?
Three years.
Three years of praying the same thing over and over, and waiting and hoping and wondering what God is doing.
4:30am, 24th February 2022. That’s when the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. Europe’s most significant war since 1945. Every day since I have been praying for a just peace for Ukraine.
I have very mixed feelings about this war, as about most wars really. On the one hand, I am and remain a committed pacifist as a principled position. I do not think it is right to take human life, nor serve in the military.
On the other hand, if there’s any conflict going on that could make a very good case for actually being a just war (unlike the vast majority of wars in which ‘just war’ is a flimsy pretence1), the defence of Ukraine is definitely up there. Russia, an authoritarian dictatorship unilaterally invaded Ukraine on the basis of lies in a war of aggression to conquer territory, and has committed numerous war crimes in doing so.
So, if you do believe in just war theory, I think you actually have a moral obligation to support Ukraine with direct military aid. I think Ukraine’s cause is just, but I think it’s always and ever wrong for followers of Jesus to pursue violent means. Which leaves me in a bit of a paradox: I want Ukraine to ‘win’, I genuinely hope that they do, but I also think they are more profound commitments that prohibit the taking of life.
It is somewhat depressing to be here at the end of these three years, and to have had Trump make his comments in the last week; not surprising though. Much of what Trump does is not surprising, and so it’s no surprise that a man who was elected the first time with Russian interference, who openly admires Putin, who is engaged in a fascist takeover of America and destroying its democratic organs in favour of an illiberal dysfunctional facsimile of democracy, who lies consistently and is surrounded by lies, and who weighs everything up as a ‘deal’ - that he would repeat Russian propaganda, abandon Ukraine and verbally attack it, propose an outrageous deal on Ukraine for its resources in exchange for nothing, and attempt to negotiate with Russia over Ukraine without Ukraine. This is just par for the course for Trump. Yet its unsurprisingness should never make us lose sight of how disgraceful and immoral it is.
I think that people often think pacifism is naïve, that pacifists are outsourcing their violence to others to keep their own hands pure. If you meet a few intelligent, principled pacifists, I hope they will disabuse you of this notion. Of course, I have never experienced what it might be like to be a pacifist in a country invaded by a hostile power. But pacifism demands courage, love, and a willingness to suffer, even die, for the sake of the other - even the enemy. I happen to think that pacifism can be politically effective, and there are some good case studies in that being so; but even if it isn’t, there is something more important that efficacy.
I have no idea what will happen in Ukraine. I can make prognositications, read the news, evaluate the shifting geopolitical realities of Europe, the US, Russia, China, and so on. I have hopes, dreams, and grim realities. What I long for, most of all for Ukraine, is just peace. That God will uphold what is right, and set the world aright. Maybe he will do that tomorrow. Or the next morrow. Or the next-next morrow. I know that he will do it one morrow. It’s that trust in his merciful justice that keeps me praying.
Looking at you, weapons of mass destruction