Category Archives: History

In the five weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, scores of articles have drawn upon history to explain Moscow's actions and intent. Some point to the Soviet suppression of a democracy movement in Hungaryin 1956, while others draw lessons from the Russian Federations assault on the Chechen city of Groznyin 1999. The idea seems to be to fit Russias actions in Ukraine into a playbook that might tell us what happens next. But this approach, whether applied to the current conflict or others, often obscures the uniqueness of given historical events. The 20th-century philosopher George Santayana said that those who do not understand the past are condemned to repeat it.Notice that Santayana chose the word past and not the word history. That is because history constructs a story of the past; history itself is not repeatable.

But it is important, and historical cases can offer lessons and insights about potential pitfalls that lie ahead. Understanding how present events differ from those of the past adds additional, vital nuance to analysis. Conversely, drawing straight lines from history to explain todays situation is not particularly helpful because Russias actions in Ukraine are without parallel. Russia, today, is not the Soviet Union; the Russian military not the Red Army; Ukraine is not Chechnya; this war is not like Afghanistan in the 1980s. Or in other words history does not quite repeat itself.

History as playbook has been used to paint the Ukraine conflict as start of larger battle for Europe. Citing 20th-century events, some have suggested that after Ukraine, Russia will move on to other countries, like the Baltics or Poland. The Soviet suppression of pro-democracy movements in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and once again in Poland in 1980, suggest a sequence of dominoes that have fallen in the past, and will continue now with the Russians in Ukraine.

But even if it is Putins intent to knock over one domino of a European country after another, the Russian Armyunlike the Soviet Army of oldsimply does not have the capacity to do that. Eastern European countries are no longer members of the Soviet Bloc, but rather members of NATO and the European Union, and as such have collective defense agreements that make it unlikely that Russia could pick them off one at a time. Moreover, with an estimated three-quarters of its battalion tactical groups committed to Ukraine, Russia does not have the combat nor the logistical capability to widen the conflict further. At this point, it is barely holding onto slivers of Ukrainian territory on the eastern edge of the country. Even the thought of attacking to the west, to seal off the border with Poland, is a pipe dream.

History has also been used to predict the operational contours of the Ukraine conflict. In particular, the fact that Russians turned most of the Grozny to rubble has been used to argue that Moscow will likely adopt a similar approach today in Ukraine. However, the differences between Ukraine today and Chechnya in 1999 are important. Chechnya was a small Russian territory with 1.3 million inhabitants; Ukraine is a sovereign nation with over 43 million people. Grozny had less than a fifth the number of residents and a third of the geographical area of Ukraines capital, Kyiv. As such, Russia in 1999 could easily surround Grozny and pummel it to the ground without any real fear of Chechen attacks against it. Not so with Kyiv.

Finally, history has been used to predict the duration of the conflict. The analogy commonly used here is the case of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. In that war, the Soviet Army remained in Afghanistan for about a decade, while suffering at least 15,000 casualties. The argument is that Ukraine will become a similarly protracted conflict. But again, the differences between then and now, and the two invaded nations, are crucial: The Soviet deployment to Afghanistansome 115,000 troops at its peakwas still only 2.5 percent of the 4.5-million-man Soviet Army at that time. The casualties that Russia is suffering in Ukraine are orders of magnitude higher than in Afghanistan. It appears that Russia may have already lost 7,000 to 15,000 soldiers in just the first month. Moreover, military support given to Ukrainiansalready amounting to billions of dollars from 25 countriesis an order of magnitude more than what the United States gave to the Afghan mujahadeen in the early years of the Soviet campaign.

Historical analogies allow us to make sense of complex world events. They should not be seen as a playbook to divine the future. In fact, treating them as such can have the opposite effect: It can cause us to misread the present.

Gian Gentile is a senior historian and Raphael S. Cohen is a senior political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation

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Russia, Ukraine, and the Misuse of History - Defense One

CLEVELAND, Ohio You cant examine the history of the concert industry and its historic music venues without Northeast Ohio. After all, the first major rock and roll concert took place at Cleveland Arena 70 years ago.

The Moondog Coronation Ball, put on by Alan Free, Leo Mintz and others, helped usher in the rock and roll era on March 21, 1952. But it was just the start of Cleveland playing a major role in the genres evolution with a collection of legendary concert venues that played host to the greatest artists of all time during pivotal moments in their careers.

A free event at Music Box Supper Club in Clevelands Flats celebrates the areas lineage of premier concert halls, arenas and clubs. Backed by an all-star panel of historians, CLE Rocks Presents No Sleep Till Cleveland, will revisit the legacies of The Agora, Richfield Coliseum, Cleveland Stadium, Public Auditorium, Leos Casino, Musicarninval and more.

[Reserve your table for CLE Rocks Presents No Sleep Till Cleveland]

The event, hosted by cleveland.com life and culture reporter Troy L. Smith, will be recorded as an episode of the CLE Rocks podcast. Attendance is free. But you must reserve a table at the Music Boxs website.

The panel includes Deanna R. Adams, author of fiction and nonfiction works including Rock and Roll and the Cleveland Connection and Clevelands Rock and Roll Venues. Also on hand will be veteran TV and radio reporter Mike Olszewski, author of multiple books on Cleveland history including Smoky, Sweaty, Rowdy, and Loud: Tales of Clevelands Legendary Rock & Roll Landmarks, and Susan Csendes, a veteran box office manager and disc jockey who worked at The Agora, The Odeon and Tower City Amphitheatre during their heydays.

Together, the panel will discuss the impact of some of the most important moments in Cleveland music history, such as Bruce Springsteens famous 1978 Agora concert, Led Zeppelin performing at Musicarnival the same day as the Moon Landing, the glory days of Richfield Coliseum and more.

CLE Rocks Presents... No Sleep Till Cleveland is sponsored by Wonderstruck Music & Arts Festival, taking place July 9 and 10 at Lakeland Community College, featuring some of the best local, regional and national music artists in the world. Get your TICKETS today.

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The Agora to the Coliseum: A history of legendary Cleveland concert venues - cleveland.com

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (WAVY) A Newport News, Virginia, history teacher is suing one of his former students after he says multiple acts of racism were committed against him.

In his 21 years as a history teacher at Menchville High School, Joel Mungo has never seen anything like it.

Someone left a banana at my door. The banana was perfectly placed in the doorway, Mungo told Nexstars WAVY.

Mungo shared images with WAVY that were taken two weeks ago. The first instance happened in October.

Then it happened once a month, Mungo explained.

A banana was always in the same spot in Mungos classroom doorway.

It was clearly a deliberate act, Mungo stated.

After the sixth time, Mungo said enough was enough.

Mungo reported the problem to Menchville administrators who pulled up surveillance video and found the student believed to be responsible: a 10th-grader in one of Mungos classes.

I gave the student a chance to come clean. I asked him, Hey did you do this? He said No, he played dumb, No idea what youre talking about. So I said OK, go down to the assistant principal. Im the only Black teacher he has. He has six other teachers. No other teachers were involved, Mungo said.

Mungo says the students parents were contacted. He was placed on a two-day suspension and removed from Mungos class.

Initially when the parents were contacted, the parents seemed to be truly embarrassed. Then when the student was suspended and the parents were informed, then the parents were irate. Its 2022. Just to have some type of hate crime is absolutely ridiculous. I was sickened. I was highly upset. So upset, I took the next day off. I didnt go to work that Friday, Mungo recalled.

Now, Mungo is in the process of pursuing legal action against the racist act.

Im just fed up with the racism around, especially at our academic institutions. Coming from the HBCUs and other colleges, the bomb threats, the nooses, the bananas and now its streaming into public education. Its time to take a stand and just let people know it will not be tolerated. I know Im not tolerating it. You have to speak up. You cant allow it to go on because then it will just continue to go on, Mungo said.

A Newport News Public Schools spokesperson told WAVY the district is investigating the report and has met with Mungo about the racist act.

Link:

Newport News history teacher sues student after reported acts of racism - WRIC ABC 8News

Its official: there will soon be a wedding reception in the White House.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden recently confirmed they will host a celebratory soire at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for their granddaughter, Naomi Biden, and her soon-to-be-husband Peter Neal, on November 19. "The first family, the couple, and their parents are still in the planning stages of all of the wedding festivities and look forward to announcing further details in the coming months," the East Wing communications director Elizabeth Alexander said.

Anything involving weddings qualifies as joyous news, but this one especially so: the American public hasnt had a presidential family member mark their marriage in Washington D.C. for around 15 years (Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of George W. Bush and Laura Bush, had a 600-person reception in June 2008). Yet, throughout history, many White House weddings have been held in the East Wing.

An illustration depicting Grover Cleveland's wedding in 1886.

In 1812, Lucy Payne Washington (sister of First Lady Dolley Madison) became the first person to wed at the then-called Presidential Mansion when she married Supreme Court Associate Justice Thomas Todd. Over the next several decades, the Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson, Tyler, and Grant administrations also held their fair share of ceremonies for their children and relatives. (The East Room has been repaired and decorated for the occasion, the New York Times wrote matter-of-factly about Nellie Grants marriage in May 1874. The number of invitations issued has been limited and will not exceed 300 in all.)

It was President Grover Cleveland himself, however, who had the buzziest White House wedding of the 19th century when he married Frances Folsom in the Blue Room in June 1886. The bride wore a dress of corded ivory satin, heavy enough to stand without a woman in it, according to the New York Timess full-page spread of the affair at the time. The gown was complete with a 15-foot train and orange-flower embroidery. Afterwards, they held a reception in a state dining room. The talk of the event was the floral centerpiece made to look like a ship, where scarlet blossoms and bits of coral stood for seals and rocks, and the banks were made of Jacqueminots, reported the Times.

See the rest here:

The Grandest White House Weddings in History - Vogue

For the fourth year, the University of West Florida will honor traditions, engage in the community and celebrate the future of the University during its annual Founders Week, which will be held April 9-14. Founders Week is a weeklong celebration that serves as an opportunity to bring the UWF family together, welcome alumni and visitors to campus and give back to the community.

Founders Week serves as a time to reflect on UWFs storied past, celebrate our current success and look ahead to our future together, said UWF President Martha D. Saunders. I hope everyone takes the opportunity to showcase their Argo pride during this weeklong celebration.

Founders Week will get underway with UWF Day of Play on Saturday, April 9. Beginning at noon, members of the community are invited to the UWF Sports Complex for a day of fun-filled activities including yard games, tie-dye shirt creation stations, Hawaiian shaved ice treats, vendor booths and baseball and softball games. At 1 p.m., UWFs softball and baseball teams will play Alabama Huntsville at Jim Spooner Field and the UWF Softball Complex.

UWFs Day of Giving, a 24-hour fundraising event, will be held on Thursday, April 14. Day of Giving is an online, social-media-driven effort that supports the University and its programs by giving to any of 80 UWF funds at dayofgiving.uwf.edu. Alumni are invited to share their graduating decade when giving and non-alumni donors can choose from supporting the decade they got involved at UWF or when they made their first gift to the University. Donate $30 to earn a pair of exclusive UWF socks. Last year, the 90s decade raised the most dollars, while the 20s decade had the most donors.

Additional Founders Week events include:

For more information about UWF Founders Week and information on each event, visit uwf.edu/foundersweek.

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UWF invites Argos and community members to celebrate University's history and traditions at fourth Founders Week - UWF Newsroom

Though the Rays are heading into their 25th season, they plan to wait until 2023 to celebrate their silver anniversary. But we couldnt wait to look back, updating our list of the greatest moments in franchise history.

Maybe time will prove otherwise, but the date Wander Franco made his big-league debut, at age 20, after two years as the games top prospect, seems like something worth commemorating. Maybe one day from Cooperstown. Plus, five months later the Rays signed him to an 11-year, $182 million contract.

Making it back for a cameo in the regular-season finale after being sidelined since July 22, Yandy Diaz made quite an impact in the 2019 AL wild-card game at Oakland. He homered his first two times up to lead the Rays to a 5-1 win in their first postseason appearance in six years.

It had become a matter of when, not if, but seeing Evan Longoria cradle a foul popup by the Twins Joe Mauer against the stands behind third base and clinch the Rays first playoff berth was breathtaking, especially for those who had been with the franchise through the dark days. The party they had in the clubhouse afterward was pretty good, too.

The significance wasnt immediately obvious, but minor-leaguer Elliot Johnson crashing into Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli in the ninth inning of a spring game set the stage for a season-long effort to show that the Rays were no longer going to be pushed around.

Carl Crawford headlined the Rays large contingent five players, manager Joe Maddon and the full coaching staff at the 2009 All-Star Game by earning MVP honors, primarily for a spectacular home-run-robbing catch. (The next year was pretty cool, too, as three Rays were in the AL All-Star lineup, with David Price on the mound, Evan Longoria at third and Crawford in left.)

After spending most of eight seasons as one of the games least successful and worst-run franchises, the Rays were under new management. The Stuart Sternberg-led group took over and promised to do things differently and better. A re-branding and a name-shortening two years later were well received, and they have made the playoffs seven times in the last 14 years.

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Triple-A callup Dan Johnson was supposed to be in the starting lineup at Fenway Park, but flight delays from Scranton, Pa., delayed him enough that manager Joe Maddon had to change plans. Serendipitously, Johnson was then available to pinch hit in the ninth and delivered a tying homer off Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon as the Rays went on to win a game that kept them from dropping out of first place.

The Rays had to win on the final day of the season in Toronto for the right to fly to Texas for a Game 163 playoff with the Rangers to reach the playoffs for the fourth time in six seasons. Their two biggest stars stepped up in a 5-2 win in the 14th tiebreaker game in MLB history. Evan Longoria hit a two-run homer and David Price pitched a complete game, punctuating the final out by yelling, Thats what Im talking about.

Losing to the last-place Tigers wouldnt be cause for celebration, but the Rays came back to Comerica Park later that night, after the Red Soxs rain-delayed loss to the Yankees was complete, and popped bottles to enjoy winning the first of what now is four American League East championships.

All Randy Arozarena did in Game 7 of the 2020 ALCS against the Astros was hit a two-run homer in the first inning to give the Rays a lead they wouldnt relinquish in winning their second AL pennant. What Arozarena did for the week was hit .321 with four homers and six RBIs to win the ALCS MVP award, the first rookie position player to do so. And that was all part of his record-smashing month, when he hit .377 with a record 10 homers and 14 RBIs for the 20-game postseason.

After parting ways with disgruntled Joe Maddon, the Rays took what seemed like a chance in hiring as their next manager, Kevin Cash, the Indians bullpen coach known for his baseball savvy and mediocre playing career. Cash has led the Rays to three consecutive playoff berths including back-to-back AL East titles and a second trip to the World Series and became the first to win back-to-back AL manager of the year awards.

After parting ways with disgruntled Lou Piniella, the Rays took what seemed like a chance in hiring as their next manager Joe Maddon, the Angels bench coach known for his funky glasses and creative thinking. The move turned out to be brilliant. Maddon led the Rays to four playoff appearances in six years and won two AL manager of the year awards.

Blake Snell was in the minority, believing he could do great things after a miserable 2017 season in which he was sent down twice. He was most definitely right, winning 21 games losing five and posting a sterling 1.89 ERA and the second Cy Young Award in franchise history.

Winning 20 games was a big deal for the Rays David Price in the 2012 season. A bigger one came when he was voted winner of the American League Cy Young award, the most prestigious individual honor won by a Tampa Bay player to this day.

Having been on the wrong end of four no-hitters at the time, the Rays finally got to do the celebrating as Matt Garza blanked the Tigers, walking one in a 120-pitch gem.

Evan Longorias Game 162, 12th-inning homer understandably is the moment recorded in history, but Dan Johnson made it all possible three innings earlier. Down to his and the Rays last strike against the Yankees, Johnson stunned the crowd with a liner that tucked just inside the rightfield pole for a tying homer, setting the stage for the dramatic ending that sent the Rays to the playoffs thanks to Boston also losing at Baltimore that night.

The Rays made it back to the World Series a second time, but there was little pomp and extremely odd circumstance given the pandemic that delayed and cut short the season. The Rays clinched the pennant by surviving a seven-games-in-seven-days ALCS against the Astros played in San Diego, then flew to Arlington, Texas, to take on the Dodgers in the neutral site World Series.

Scott Kazmirs first-pitch strike was one of the few highlights in the 3-2 loss to the Phillies in the World Series opener, but the reality was that there was a real, live World Series game being played in St. Petersburg. And that alone was pretty amazing.

Mike Brosseau didnt want to call it revenge, which was fine because everyone else did it for him. Having nearly been hit in the head in by a 101-mph Aroldis Chapman fastball in a Sept. 1 game at Yankee Stadium, the Rays infielder struck back at a most dramatic time. Facing Chapman in the eighth inning of the fifth and deciding game of the 2020 ALDS, batting with the score tied and one out, battling back from an 0-2 count and through 10 pitches, Brosseau homered to send the Rays to the next round and the Yankees home. Hands down the greatest moment Ive been a part of in baseball, Rays manager Kevin Cash said.

Tampa product Wade Boggs came home to make history, and that he did, reaching 3,000 hits in dramatic fashion. He became the first of the then-22 players to reach the milestone with a home run. Boggs made an emotional trip around the bases, saluting his mother, who was killed in a 1986 car accident, then dropping to his knees and kissing home plate.

Twenty years of trying to get a team in Tampa Bay and three years of building the franchise under managing general partner Vince Naimoli culminated with a fastball from Wilson Alvarez to Detroits Brian Hunter low and inside, but who cared to the delight of a roaring sellout crowd of 45,369 at Tropicana Field.

The Rays were the winners in one of the wildest endings to a World Series game after trailing 7-6 with two outs in the ninth, and two on. They got a single from Seminole native Brett Phillips who hadnt had an at-bat in nearly three weeks or a hit in a month to score the tying run, then an error by Dodgers centerfielder Chris Taylor that allowed Randy Arozarena, who fell down after rounding third, to get back up and slide home safely head-first, banging the plate with his hand.

Evan Longoria hit the modern-day shot heard round the world, his 12th-inning homer capping a wild comeback from a 7-0 deficit as the Rays not only beat the Yankees but clinched the AL wild-card playoff berth. Longoria joined Bobby Thomson of the 1951 Giants as the only players to hit a walkoff homer in the final regular-season game to put his team in the playoffs.

David Price threw the pitch, Bostons Jed Lowrie hit the ground ball, Akinori Iwamura made the pickup and raced to step on second base and the Rays the Tampa Bay Rays won the American League pennant and were going to the World Series. This improbable season, as radio broadcaster Dave Wills screamed, did indeed have another chapter.

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From Wander to the World: Top 24 moments in Rays history - Tampa Bay Times

LeBron James has split the past dozen years of his career into three four-season segments, each in a different city. The results in his latest stint, in Los Angeles, are by far the worst.

In four seasons as a member of the Heat, LeBron reached four Finals, winning two. In four seasons in his return to the Cavaliers, LeBron reached four more Finals, winning one. And in four seasons thus far as a Laker, LeBrons won one championship, lost once in the first round of the playoffs, and failed to reach the postseason twice.

A title is a title, and the Lakers 2020 banner will fly forever. But despite tremendous expectations coming into the 2021-22 season, the Lakers have been officially eliminated even from play-in contention, with seven consecutive losses dropping them to 11th place in the West. The final blow came Tuesday night, courtesy of a Suns team that Anthony Davis claimed got away with one in their series last postseason because he was injured.

Extremely disappointed, Lakers coach Frank Vogel told reporters after the blowout loss. Disappointed for our fan base. Disappointed for the Buss family, who gave us all this opportunity, and we want to play our part in bringing success to Laker basketball and we fell short.

Now, Vogel is expected to be fired two years after winning a championship, and the Lakers will head to the draft lottery, where they will promptly hand over their pick to either the Pelicans (if it lands in the top 10) or the Grizzlies (if it falls outside).

This season is the greatest disappointment in LeBrons career, even if he qualifies for and then outscores Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo for the scoring title. But are the 2021-22 Lakers, overall, the greatest disappointment in NBA history?

It may be hard to recall, but with James, Davis, and newly acquired Russell Westbrook, Los Angeles was the no. 2 preseason betting favorite to win the championship, behind only the Nets. Never mind that the roster looked incredibly old or that Westbrook didnt seem like a great fit on this roster or that the Lakers had just lost in the first round of the playoffs to a better Suns team. (Davis was indeed injured in that series, but so was Chris Paul.) The Lakers had star power and a championship pedigree and the sheen of a top contender.

But the Lakers fell, and they fell hard. They didnt just fail to compete for a title they didnt even make the expanded play-in field. With a 31-48 record and three games remainingincluding contests at Golden State and Denverthey might lose 50 games.

Its difficult to gauge each teams preseason outlook in the earliest NBA decades, but we can at least start in 1984-85, which is the first season for which Basketball-Reference lists preseason title odds. Among the betting favorites over that span, the Lakers immediately shoot to the bottom; this graph shows the ultimate result for every other top-two favorite entering the season:

Only two other favorites missed the playoffs, both from the same season. In 2004-05, three teams were tied for the second-favorite slot after the Spurswho eventually won the titleand two of the three faltered: Minnesota, which went 44-38 after reaching the Western Conference finals the previous summer, and the Lakers, who went 34-48 after trading Shaquille ONeal to Miami.

So assuming that Brooklyn makes it out of the play-in, only three of the 83 top-two favorites on record will have missed the playoffs. The 2021-22 Lakers are oneand, unless they win their last three games, they will also collect the worst record of the bunch.

But wait, the historical comparisons get even worse. B-Ref also lists over/under win totals dating back to the 1999-00 season. The Lakers, with a mark of 52.5 this preseason, are one of 149 teams this century projected to win at least 50 games (or the equivalent of 50 out of 82 games in a shorter season). And out of that 149-team group, the Lakers will almost certainly fall short of their over/under total by the widest margin.

One other Lakers outfit makes the list: the Now This Is Going to Be Fun 2012-13 Lakers, who entered the season with enormous expectations after adding Steve Nash and Dwight Howard. They fell 13.5 wins short of their over/under but at least won 45 games and reached the playoffs. The 2021-22 version cant say that much.

To be fair, these Lakers arent the greatest underachiever among all teams this century. That dishonor belongs to the 2007-08 Heat, who traded Shaq midseason, lost Dwyane Wade to injuries, and tanked for better draft lottery odds down the stretch as they won just 15 games versus a projected 46.5. But that Heat teams over/under ranked 12th in the league; they werent expected to be a top contender like the 2021-22 Lakers, and the disappointment is so much more visceral when a prospective favorite falls flat.

Injuries hampered the Lakers efforts to meet expectations, of course, as they did for many teams on that chart. The previous greatest underachiever was the 2005-06 Rockets, who lost both Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming for large swaths of the schedule.

The Lakerslike most teams this seasonlost numerous players to injury, too, most notably James and Davis for a combined 60 games. Davis alone missed roughly half the season with multiple injuries and has recently blamed injuries for the teams downfall.

Our goal was to win a championship, Davis said Tuesday. Feel like we had the pieces, but injuries got in the way of that. And that was the difference in the season.

Yet while injuries certainly didnt help, the Lakers were outscored even when James and Davis played together, as well as by themselves.

Judging the Lakers so harshly is not merely a product of selective memory. They didnt win a title, didnt reach the Finals, didnt even qualify for the play-in game as the 10th-best team out of 15 in a shallow Western Conference. Statistically, among teams projected to contend for a title, the 2021-22 Lakers are the largest underachiever for as far back as we have data. At least this team made some sort of history.

Read more from the original source:

Are the Lakers the Biggest Disappointment in NBA History? - The Ringer

On the evening of February 21, 2022, three days before Russian forces began the largest land invasion on the European continent since World War II, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an angry televised speech. In it, he expressed familiar grievances about the eastward expansion of NATO, alleged Ukrainian aggression, and the presence of Western missiles on Russias border. But most of his tirade was devoted to something else: Ukrainian history. Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us, Putin said. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. Ukraines borders, he asserted, have no meaning other than to mark a former administrative division of the Soviet Union: Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia.

To many Western ears, Putins historical claims sounded bizarre. But they were of more than casual importance. Far from an innovation of the current crisis, Putins argument that Ukraine has always been one and the same with Russia, and that it has been forcibly colonized by Western forces, has long been a defining part of his worldview. Already during the Maidan popular uprising in Kyiv in 201314, Putin claimed that the people leading the huge protests were Western-backed fashisti (fascists) trying to tear Ukraine from its historical roots. (In fact, the protests caught the West by surprise, and although they included a far-right fringe, they were no fascist takeover.) And in July 2021, well before the buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, the Kremlin published a 7,000-word essay under Putins byline with the title On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Both Russia and Ukraine, it asserted, have not only common roots in language and faith but also a shared historic destiny. Since its publication, the essay has become part of the required curriculum for all service members in the Russian armed forces, including those fighting in the current war. According to Putins logic, all divisions between Russia and Ukraine are the work of Western powers. From Poland in the sixteenth century to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century and the Nazis in World War II, they have periodically coerced Ukraine or led it astray. In this reading, Kyivs pro-Western outlook over the past decade is only the latest form of external interferencethis time by the European Union and the United Statesaimed at dividing Russia against itself. Ukraines forced change of identity, Putin wrote, is comparable...to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. In Putins meaning, us included Ukrainians. Ukrainians and Ukraine, in other words, arent just naturally part of Russia; they dont even really exist.

A variation on the Ukraine doesnt really exist theme is the Kremlins assertion that Ukraine is a foregone failure. According to this viewlong echoed in a more sophisticated form by Western commentatorsthanks to its geography and political history, Ukraine is forever destined to be riven by internal division or torn apart by more powerful neighbors. This was the core narrative of Putins propaganda the last time he invaded Ukraine, when he grabbed Crimea and the Donbas following the Maidan protests in Kyiv. Then, Russian state media reported that Ukraine was a failed state taken over by a neo-Nazi junta and that Russian forces were riding to the rescue. The close Putin adviser who directed all this propaganda, the bodyguard turned strategist Vladislav Surkov, reprised the theme in an interview with the Financial Times last year. Ukraine, he said, using an odd analogy, was like the soft tissue between two bones, which, until it was severed, would rub painfully together. (With Russian journalists, he was more straightforward: the only method that has historically proved effective in Ukraine, he said, is coercion into fraternal relations.)

As the extraordinary resilience and unity of the Ukrainian population in the current war have demonstrated, these Russian claims are nonsense. Saying that Ukraine doesnt really exist is as absurd as saying that Ireland doesnt exist because it was long under British rule, or that Norwegians are really Swedes. Although they won statehood only 31 years ago, the Ukrainians have a rich national history going back centuries. The idea that Ukrainians are too weak and divided to stand up for themselves is one they are magnificently disproving on the battlefield. As for the neo-Nazi insult, this is belied by the fact that Ukraines president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and that in the most recent parliamentary elections, in 2019, Ukraines far-right party, Svoboda, won less than three percent of the vote. As Putins imagined Ukraine has increasingly diverged from Ukrainian reality, the myth has become harder to sustain, the contradictions too acute. But rather than adjusting his historical fantasy to bring it closer to the truth, Putin has doubled down, resorting to military force and totalitarian censorship in a vain attempt to make reality closer to the myth. He may now be learning that reality is hard to defy: the wages of bad history are disaster in the present.

Putins obsession with Ukraines past can be traced to the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Until 1991, most of todays Ukraine had been ruled by Russia for 300 yearsslightly longer, in other words, than Scotland has been ruled by England. And with a population that is today nearly as large as Spains, Ukraine was by far the most significant Soviet republic besides Russia itself. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser, famously wrote, Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire. This isnt literally true. Russia today is still a vast multiethnic empire, taking in a 3,000-mile-wide slice of northern Asia and including more than a dozen Asian nationalities, from the 5.3 million Tatars on the Volga River to a few thousand Chukchis on the Bering Strait. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Moscow lost its West.

For Putin, Russias European empire was all-important. Although there has long been an exoticizing streak to Russias self-imageYes, we are Scythians! the hitherto gentle poet Aleksandr Blok declared after the 1917 revolutionthe country has always seen itself as a European, rather than an Asian, power. Its great composers, novelists, and artists have been European in orientation; its historic military triumphsagainst Napoleon and Hitlermade it a senior player in Europes concert of nations. By pushing Russia back into her gloomy pine forests, away from such ringing old place names as Odessa and Sevastopol, the loss of Ukraine, in particular, injured the Russian sense of self.

At the heart of Russias Ukraine problem, then, has been a war over history. The first battle is over where the story begins. Conventionally, the story starts with a legend-wrapped leader from the Middle Ages, Volodymyr (or Vladimir in Russian) the Great. A descendent of Norse raiders and traders from Scandinavia, Volodymyr founded the first proto-state in Kyiv toward the end of the tenth century. A loose but very large fiefdom known as Rus, it was centered on Kyiv and covered todays Belarus, northwestern Russia, and most of Ukraine. Volodymyr also gave Rus its spiritual foundations, converting his realm to Orthodox Christianity.

Although Russians and Ukrainians concur on Volodymyrs importance, they disagree over what happened after his kingdom broke up. Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it disintegrated into warring princedoms, and in the thirteenth, it was overrun by the Mongols, under Batu Khan. In Russian accounts, the populationand, with it, true Rus culturefled the violence, heading northeast, to Moscow and Novgorod. Ukrainians, however, argue that Rus culture remained squarely centered on Ukraine and that what emerged in Moscow was a separate and distinct tradition. To Western readers, the argument seems trivial: it is as though the French and the Germans were locked in battle over whether Charlemagne, the ninth-century founder of the Carolingian Empire, belongs to modern France or modern Germany. Ukrainians, however, understand the significance of the Russian claims. One of Kyivs landmarks is a large nineteenth-century statue of Volodymyr the Great, holding a cross and gazing out over the Dnieper River. When Putin put up his own, even bigger Vladimir the Great outside the Kremlin gates in 2016, Ukrainians rightly saw it not as a homage to a tenth-century king but as a blatant history grab.

In fact, for most of the next seven centuries after Volodymyrs reign, Ukraine was outside Muscovite control. As Mongol rule crumbled through the 1300s, the territory of present-day Ukraine was absorbed by the emergent Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in turn combined by dynastic marriage with Poland, so that for the next two and a half centuries, Ukraine was ruled from Krakow. Eventually, even Ukraines faith acquired a Western veneer: in 1596, the Union of Brest-Litovsk created the Greek Catholic, or Uniat, Churcha compromise between Catholic Poles and Orthodox Ukrainians that acknowledged the pope but was Orthodox in ritual and allowed priests to marry. A politically canny halfway house between the two religions, the union helped Polonize the Ukrainian nobility, part of what Putin sees as a long pattern of the West pulling Ukraine away from its rightful Orthodox home.

It was not until the late seventeenth century that Moscow forcefully entered the picture. A series of uprisings by Ukrainian Cossacksmilitarized frontier groups, centered on the lower Dnieperhad weakened the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Then, following a long war with Poland over Ukraine, expanding Muscovy was finally able to annex Kyiv in 1686. For Ukrainians, it was an out of the frying pan into the fire moment: Polish rule was simply swapped for its harsher Muscovite counterpart. But in Putins telling, it was the beginning of the gathering of the Russian world, using an archaic phrase that he has resuscitated to justify his war against Ukraine today. Another century later, Poland itself was partitioned among Austria, Prussia, and Russia, with Russia ending up with what is today Belarus and central Ukraine, including Kyiv, and Austria with todays western Ukraine, then known as eastern Galicia, which included Lviv.

Ukraines modern national movement began in the 1840s, led by the first great Ukrainian-language writer, Taras Shevchenko. Born into an enserfed peasant family in a village near Kyiv, he exhorted Ukrainians to throw off the Russian yoke and excoriated the many who Russified themselves in order to climb the socioeconomic ladder. (These views earned him ten years in Siberia.) As the century progressed, and especially after Tsar Alexander IIs assassination by anarchists in 1881, tsarist rule became more repressive. Hundreds of Ukrainian socialists followed Shevchenko into exile, and Ukrainian-language books and education were banned. At this point, Ukraines east-west divide turned into an advantageat least for those living in the western partbecause in Austrian-ruled Galicia, Ukrainians were able to adopt the freer civic culture then taking root in Europe. In Lviv, they published their own newspapers and organized reading rooms, cooperatives, credit unions, choirs, and sports clubsall innovations borrowed from the similarly Austrian-ruled Czechs. Although disadvantaged by a voting system that favored Polish landowners, they were able to form their own political party and sent representatives to Lvivs provincial assembly, to which the typical Ukrainian deputy was not a fiery revolutionary but a pince-nez-wearing, mildly socialist academic or lawyer.

Ukraines reputation as a land cursed by political geographypart of the bloodlands in the title of the historian Timothy Snyders best-selling bookwas earned during the first half of the twentieth century. When the tsarist regime suddenly crumbled in 1917, a Ukrainian parliamentary, or Rada, government declared itself in Kyiv, but it was swept away only a few months later, first by Bolshevik militias and then by the German army, which occupied Ukraine under the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. After the armistice that November ending World War I, Germany withdrew again, leaving the Red Army, the reactionary Russian White Army, the Polish army, a Ukrainian army under the socialist Rada minister Symon Petlyura, and an assortment of independent warlords to fill the power vacuum. In the chaotic civil war that ensued, the group worst hit was Ukraines Jews. Scapegoated by all sides, more than 100,000 were killed in 1919, in a series of massacres unmatched since the 1600s. Beaten by the Reds, Petlyura formed a last-ditch alliance with Poland, before fleeing to Paris when Poland and the Soviet Union made a peace that divided Ukraine again, the Russians taking the east and the center, the Poles the west. Two small borderland regionstodays Bukovina and Transcarpathiawent to newly independent Romania and Czechoslovakia, respectively.

Not surprisingly, Petlyura is a hotly contested figure. For Russians, he was just another pogromist warlord. (That viewpoint saturates the Kyiv-bred but ethnic Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakovs novel The White Guard, for whose characters Petlyuras army is a frightening mob.) For Ukrainians, conversely, he led their countrys first stab at independent statehood, which might have succeeded had the Allies only given him the same diplomatic and military support that they did the Balts and (less successfully) the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis, and the Georgians. To accusations of ethnonationalism, they rejoin that the Rada government printed its banknotes in four languagesUkrainian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddishand that the leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was a distinguished Jewish lawyer, Arnold Margolin. Petlyuras army rampaged, they concede, but he could not control it, and so did all the others. The controversy played out in 1926 in a Paris courtroom, after Petlyura was assassinated by a Jewish anarchist who claimed to be avenging family members killed by Ukrainian soldiers. The three-week trial was an international sensation, with the defense presenting a devastating dossier of evidence about the pogroms, while the prosecution sought to paint the assassin as a Soviet agent. After only half an hours deliberation, the jury declared him innocent, and debate over the affair still rages.

In fact, the violence and chaos of the Petlyura era were merely a prelude to much greater Ukrainian tragedies in the years that followed. Beginning in 1929, Joseph Stalin launched the Holodomorliterally, killing by hungera program of forced deportations and food and land requisitioning aimed at the permanent emasculation of Ukraines rural population as a whole. Rolled out in parallel with a purge of Ukraines urban intelligentsia, it resulted in the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians. Covered up for decades, there is no doubt that this extraordinary mass killing was deliberate: the Soviet authorities knew that villagers were dying in great numbers, yet they persisted in food requisitioning and forbade them from leaving the famine areas for the towns. Why Stalin perpetrated the famine is less clear. An estimated three million Kazakhs and Russians also starved to death during these same years, but he chose to hit Ukraine hardest, probably because it embodied his twin demons in one: the conservative peasantry and a large, assertive non-Russian nationality. Even today, however, there is an ongoing effort by Russia to block international recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide. In his Historical Unity essay, Putin refers to the famine only once, in passing, as a common tragedy. Stalins name is not mentioned at all.

Less than a decade later, a new round of horror was visited on Ukraine following the signing of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army occupied the Polish-ruled western part of the countrythe first time Russia had ever controlled this territory. Two years later, however, the Wehrmacht marched in anyway, and two years after that, the Red Army returned. Both armies deported or arrested the Lviv intelligentsiaa rich mix of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jewsas they arrived and killed political prisoners as they departed. For a few months in 1943, a large ethnonationalist Ukrainian partisan army controlled most of northeastern Ukraine, establishing a primitive administration and its own training camps and military hospitals. Remarkably, small units of this army carried on an assassination and sabotage campaign for years after the war ended, with the last insurgent commander killed in a shootout near Lviv in 1950.

Overall, 5.3 million Ukrainians died during the war years, an astonishing one-sixth of the population. Again, many died of hunger, after Germany began confiscating grain. And again, it was Jews who suffered most. Before the war, they made up a full five percent of Ukraines population, or some 2.7 million people; after it, only a handful remained. The rest had fled east or lay in unmarked mass graves in the woods or on the edge of cemeteries. (In the fall of 2021, as part of an effort to commemorate these events, Zelensky presided at the opening of a new complex at Babi Yar, or Babyn Yar, the park next to a metro station where nearly 34,000 Kyivan Jews were massacred in September 1941. On the sixth day of Putins invasion this year, three Russian missiles landed in the park, causing damage to the Jewish cemetery there.)

For the Soviets, and for Putin today, the most important fact about the Ukrainians during the war was not their victimhood but their alleged collaboration with the Nazis. The most controversial Ukrainian figure of the period is Stepan Bandera, the leader of a terrorist organization in Polish-ruled interwar western Ukraine. Having already been sour when the area was under Austrian rule, Polish-Ukrainian relations dramatically worsened with the new governments Polonization drive, in the course of which Ukrainian-language schools were closed, Ukrainian newspapers strictly censored, Ukrainians banned from even the lowliest government jobs, and Ukrainian candidates and voters arbitrarily struck from electoral rolls. The repression radicalized rather than Polonized, so that the largest Ukrainian parliamentary party, the compromise-seeking Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, was increasingly squeezed out by Banderas underground nationalists. When the Wehrmacht entered western Ukraine in June 1941, Bandera joined forces with the Germans, organizing two battalions, Nachtigall and Roland, although he was almost immediately arrested by the Nazis, who found him too hard to control.

Ever since, Russia has used Bandera as a stick with which to beat the Ukrainian national movement. No matter that far more Ukrainians fought in the Red Army than in the Wehrmacht and that Germany was able to recruit tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war, too. As in Soviet days, a standard epithet for Ukrainians in Russian state media today is BanderivtsiBanderitesand Putin revisited the trope in an even odder than usual speech on February 25, the day after the Russian invasion began, in which he called on the Ukrainian army to overthrow the drug addicts and neo-Nazis in power in Kyiv.

After the end of World War II, and especially after Stalins death in 1953, Ukraine enjoyed several decades of relative stability. Compared with the other non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians were simultaneously extra repressed and extra privileged, making up the largest single group of political prisoners but also acting as Russias junior partner in the union. The Politburo was packed with Russians and Ukrainians, and in the non-Slavic republics, the usual pattern was for an ethnic national to be appointed first party secretary, while a Russian or a Ukrainian wielded real power as number two. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Ukraine floated to independence without bloodshed, after its own Communist Party leadership decided to cut the tow rope to the sinking mother ship. It is this late-Soviet little brother relationship that Putin grew up withand which he may believe (or have believed) Ukrainians would be ready to return to were it not for the Wests interference.

Ukraines political path in the three decades since independence has accentuated all of Russias fears. At first, it seemed as if Russia and Ukraine would move on parallel tracks in the postCold War era. Both countries were riding the rapids of economic collapse combined with new political freedoms; neither seemed interested in the past. In Ukraine, nobody bothered to take down Kyivs Lenin statue or rename its streets. Russias new ruling class, for its part, seemed more interested in making money than in rebuilding an empire. It was easy to imagine the two countries developing along separate but friendly paths: like Canada and the United States or Austria and Germany.

That happy illusion lasted only a few years. The two hinge moments of Ukraines postCold War history were two highly effective and genuinely inspirational displays of people power, both provoked by the Kremlin. In 2004, Putin tried to insert a burly ex-convict and regional political boss from Donetsk, Viktor Yanukovych, into the Ukrainian presidency, an effort that seems to have included having his pro-European electoral rival, Viktor Yushchenko, poisoned. After Yushchenko survived the attack (with his face badly scarred), the vote was blatantly falsified instead. Sporting orange hats and ribbons, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians poured into the streets in protest and stayed there until the electoral commission conceded a rerun, which Yushchenko won. For Putin, the protests, known as the Orange Revolution, were a plot orchestrated by the West.

Pro-European protesters during the Maidan uprising, Kyiv, December 2013

In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency, after the pro-European bloc rancorously split. For the next four years, he devoted himself to looting the Ukrainian treasury. But in November 2013, he went a step too far: just as Ukraine was about to ink a long-planned and widely popular trade deal with the European Union, he abruptly canceled it and, under pressure from Putin, announced a partnership with Russia instead. For Ukrainians, as for Putin, this was not just about how best to boost the economy but also about Ukraines very identity. Instead of heading westwardperhaps even one day joining the European Unionthe country was being coerced back into the Russian orbit. Initially, only a few students came out in protest, but public anger grew quickly after they were beaten up by the police, whose upper echelons Yanukovych had packed with Russians. A protest camp on Kyivs central square, known as the Maidan, turned into a permanent, festival-like city within a city, swelling to a million people on weekends. In January 2014, the police began a violent crackdown, which climaxed with the killing of 94 protesters and 17 police officers. When the crowds still refused to disperse, Yanukovych fled to Moscow, and the contents of his luxurious private compoundHerms dinner services, chandeliers the size of small cars, a stuffed lionwent on display in Ukraines National Art Museum. In the power vacuum that followed Yanukovychs flight, Putin invaded first Crimea and then, via thuggish local proxies, the eastern border cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The land grab pleased the Russian public, but if Putin intended to pull Ukraine back toward Russia, his actions had the opposite effect. New presidential elections brought in another pro-European, Petro Poroshenko, a Ukrainian oligarch who had made his money in confectionary rather than corruption-ridden mining or metals. Then, in the years that followed, a mass civilian effort supported Ukrainian forces in a low-level but grinding conflict with Russia in and around Donetsk and Luhansk. (Until the Ministry of Defense was reformed, the previously neglected Ukrainian army was literally crowdfunded by direct donations from the public.) Ukrainian support for NATO membership rose sharply, and in June 2014, Ukraine signed a wide-ranging association agreement with the European Union. Most symbolic and popularor, in Putins eyes, most cunningwas the EUs 2017 granting to Ukrainians of bezviz, visa-free 90-day travel to the whole of the Schengen area. Russians still need visas, which are extortionately expensive and burdensome. The contrast grates: little brother has not only abandoned big brother; he is better traveled now, too.

Ukraines progress before the invasion should not be overstated. Shady oligarchs pulled strings behind the scenes, and the country was hobbled by pervasive corruption. (Transparency Internationals 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index puts Ukraine alongside Mexico and Zambia but ranks it as slightly less corrupt than Russia.) But for all of the countrys problems, its history since independence has been one of real changes of power, brought about by real elections, between real candidates, reported by real free media. For Putin, the Ukrainian example had become a direct political threat. What if Russias own populationand not just the urban intelligentsiastarted demanding the same freedoms? In his Historical Unity essay, Putin explained away the fact that Ukrainian presidents change as being the result of a system set up by the Western authors of the anti-Russian project. Ukraines pro-Russian citizens, he wrote, are not vocal because they have been driven underground, persecuted for their convictions, or even killed. Whether he actually believes this is unclear, but it might explain the slightly ad hoc tactics used by the Russian army in the first week of his war on Ukraine. Putin may really have expected his tank battalions to be greeted as liberators.

As during the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 201314 Maidan protests, which came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraines fierce self-defense today is a defense of values, not of ethnic identity or of some imagined glorious past. Putins obsession with history, in contrast, is a weakness. Although earlier in his presidency, banging the gathering of the Russian world drum boosted his approval ratings, it has now led him down what may turn out to be a fatal dead end. In terms of square mileage alone, Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe, after Russia itself. If you placed it over the eastern United States, as The Washington Post recently observed, it would stretch from Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean, and from Ohio to Georgia. Occupying it permanently would be enormously costly in troops and treasure. Moreover, Putins war has unified Ukrainians as never before. And whether they are speaking Russian or Ukrainian, their sentiment is the same. Already, video clips have gone viral of babushkas telling Russian soldiers that they will leave their bones in Ukrainian soil and of Ukrainian soldiers swearing joyously as they fire bazookas at Russian tanks, all in the purest Russian. The war is likely to go on for a long time, and its final outcome is unknown. History, Putin may be learning, is only a guide when its the real sort.

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Putins War on History: The Thousand-Year Struggle Over Ukraine - Foreign Affairs Magazine

There are four majors on the PGA Tour, but the Masters well may be the most prestigious of all.

The Masters, which began in 1934, has been held at Augusta National Golf Club every year since 1946. The tradition-rich event has one of the most iconic prizes in the sport the green jacket and also happens to be one of its most exclusive.

The winners of the Masters include the greatest golfers to ever play. From Jack Nicklaus to Arnold Palmer to Ben Hogan and Tiger Woods, the tournament has helped shape some of the most prolific golf careers of all time.

Which players have won the Masters? Here's a look at the golfers who are members of the elite green-jacket club as well as why that award is one of the most important ones in all of sports.

MORE: How many times has Tiger Woods won the Masters?

The list of Masters winners over the years is riddled with the names of the greatest golfers to ever play. That said, no golfer has had more Masters success than Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear won the tournament six times during his legendary career, with the first coming in 1963 and the last in 1986.

Tiger Woods is just behind Nicklaus with five total wins, the first of which came in 1997 while his most recent came in 2019. Arnold Palmer is the only other golfer with four or more green jackets.

Dustin Johnson holds the scoring record for the Masters. He shot 20-under par during the 2020 tournament and won by five strokes over the rest of the field. Previously, Woods and Jordan Spieth's mark of 18-under from 1997 and 2015, respectively, had been the best in tournament history.

Below is a full look at the history of the Masters, from the most recent winner, Hideki Matsuyama, to the first champion,Horton Smith in 1934.

*Note: The Masters was canceled from 1943-1945 as a result of World War II.

MORE: Golf world remembers Lee Elder, the first Black player to win the Masters

The Masters prize pool has stayed the same since 2019. There is an$11.5 millionpurse for the event and the winner will make$2.07 million. That represents 18 percent of the total purse.

In the first year of the Masters, Horton Smith's payout was just $1,500. The tournament first awarded a $1 million prize to the first-place finisher when Tiger Woods won in 2001.

Below is a breakdown of how much the Masters winner has made by year, per Golf.com.

*Expected winner's share for 2022.

MORE: Why Phil Mickelson is missing the Masters for the first time in 28 years

Augusta National describes the green jacket as "the ultimate symbol of success at the Masters Tournament." The unique award has been gifted to winners since 1949, when Sam Snead won it for the first time.

Green jackets first became a part of Augusta's legacy in 1937. Members of the club began wearing them so they could answer questions from patrons that were less familiar with the course.

The original jackets were made of a heavy woolen material, but they were quickly replaced by a lighter-weight version.

Per tradition, the winner of the previous year's tournament, Hideki Matsuyama, will present the green jacket to the winner in 2022. In rare circumstances during which a golfer wins the event in back-to-back years, the chairman of Augusta National will award the jacket. The only time this didn't happen was when Jack Nicklaus won the event in 1966 and was instructed to put the jacket on himself, as he was the previous year's winner.

Only Augusta National members and tournament winners are allowed to wear green jackets at the club. And the jacket must stay at Augusta National unless it belongs to the tournament's reigning champion. In the year after winning, the champion is permitted to take the jacket home from the club but must return it the following year.

Originally posted here:

Masters winners by year: List of past champions, payouts, green jacket history - Sporting News

When the world saw the horrors in Bucha and the towns around Kyiv, it was like a tide had gone out, leaving behind the grisly driftwood of dead bodies. By now, youve seen the photos and read the stories: the women raped in front of their children, the men executed with their hands behind their backs, the people who fell off their bicycles and lay for weeks under the open sky until the photographers arrived.

When I saw photos of the heads and hands and feet of town elder Olha Sukhenko and her family protruding from the sandy grave in which they were hastily buried, when I saw journalists crowded around her shoddy burial among the pines outside of Motyzhyn, I thought immediately of the Ukrainian forests where dozens of my relatives were shot and dumped in mass graves in 1941: in Zhytomyr, in Medzhybizh, in Salnitsa, Ostropol, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. I thought, this is what it must have looked like then, when, returning in 1944, their relatives found a million Ukrainian Jews, buried in the loam. It was these massacres that began to break the Nazi soldiers carrying them out, forcing the invention of a more efficient and less intimate way of eradicating a people: the death camps, like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek.

Citing the famous quote attributed to the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, my friend Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist and author, wrote, If one cant write poetry after Auschwitz, then what can one say after Bucha?

In both cases, it turns out, one can say a lot while saying not much at all. In the four days since the massacres became public knowledge in the West, much was said, including by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who, on Sunday night, asked Russian mothers, in Russian, If you raised your sons to be marauders, how did they become butchers, too? And yet, atrocities like those at Bucha, Irpin, and Trostyanets show us exactly where human institutions fail. They push language to its limits, leaving us speechless, grasping for words that are pale approximations of what they are describing. (I am thinking as I write this of Anna Akhmatovas famous poem about the Great Terror, Requiem, which begins with a woman who is waiting in line with Akhmatova outisde the jail and asks the poet, Can you describe this?)

They also show us, undeniably, the failure of the very systems the West has constructed to prevent such things. After Auschwitz, Europe said never again. Then the victors put on a trial of two dozen Nazis, but most of the other perpetrators died peacefully in their beds. After World War II, the victors created a global body, the United Nations, meant to prevent another catastrophe like this one and an International Court of Justice, headquartered at the Hague, to punish those that dared to try.

And yet, never again has become, in practice, over and over and over again. The global institutions that the West put in place failed to stop the bloody proxy wars of the Cold Warin Vietnam, Angola, El Salvadorin part because the two main adversaries in those wars, the United States and the Soviet Union, both sat on the U.N. Security Council, where they wielded veto power. The Russian Federation, the successor state to the U.S.S.R., still holds that power today. Thanks to the Russian veto and a lack of political will in the West, the U.N. failed to stop the slaughter in Syria, aided and abetted by Russia, nor did Russia suffer any consequences for what its army did in Chechnya, which became a blueprint for Bucha. George W. Bush also showed the world how easy it is to skirt the U.N. altogether when he made up his mind to invade Iraq. And even when it came to clear examples of genocide, the U.N. failed to stop those in Bosnia, Xinjiang, and Myanmar; when it sent in its peacekeepers to places like Rwanda, it failed to stop that genocide, too.

If the world, as embodied by the United Nations, couldnt stop the vast slaughter of Syria, Rwanda, and Myanmar, what hope did the villagers of Bucha have? Its why Zelensky, in his scorching speech to the Security Council on Tuesday, wondered why we have a United Nations at all. Ladies and gentlemen! he said. I would like to remind you of the first article of the first chapter of the U.N. Charter. What is the purpose of our organization? To maintain peace. And to force peace. Now the U.N. Charter is being violated literally from the first article. And if so, what is the point of all other articles?

What is the point, he argued, of an organization that can not carry out one of its most basic functions? Why have an institution whose design negates its purpose? What is the point of a U.N. where members of the Security Council are allowed to wage war and commit war crimes? If this continues, the finale will be that each state will rely only on the power of arms to ensure its security, not on international law, not on international institutions, Zelensky said. Then, the U.N. can simply be dissolved.

In pointing out the hollowness of the U.N., Zelensky danced dangerously close to agreeing with his enemy, Vladimir Putin. The Russian president has spent his 22-year tenure consciously and openly undermining the postwar order and its institutions, at least the shape they took after 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Though Putin loves the United NationsRussia can use it for a patina of legitimacy while bogging the place down in bureaucratic procedure or ending things with a vetohe loathes institutions where the U.S. holds sway but Russia doesnt. This is why, for example, in the run up to Russias invasion of Ukraine, we heard so much from Moscow about NATO and indivisible securitythe idea, essentially, that Russia should get veto power over European security, too. Those are the institutions Putin wants to destroy.

But Putin also understands the power of cynicism and sophistry to erode institutional moral authority and shatter international consensus. This is why, for instance, he is always trying to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal world orderto force the West to admit that might has always made right, but he was the only one honest enough to say so. (Or as Andranik Migranyan, a friend of the Russian foreign minister, told me when we spoke recently, Big countries have big demands and solve them in big ways.)

It is why Ukraines efforts to document, with the help of international investigators, the war crimes that Russia seems to have committed in Ukraine will be largely a formality. Ukraine, along with the Netherlands and Australia, are bringing legal action against Russia for its role in shooting down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014. A Russian BUK missile exploded by the nose of the civilian airliner, and the bodies of 298 passengers and crew rained down on the sunflower fields of the Donbas. The Netherlands, which lost 193 citizens in that disaster, launched a formal investigation, and later held a news conference to make a convincing case that they had figured out who had launched the missile and how. The Russian government, meanwhile, conducted its own investigation, which spun elaborate theories that kicked the blame away from the Kremlins doorstep. Meanwhile, the state propaganda machine provided ever more bizarre explanations for the crash, including the invention of a Spanish flight dispatcher named Carlos and a plane pre-packed with corpses that America deliberately crashed in Ukraine to make Russia look bad. And it worked. Most Russians bought their governments version of events and, despite legal action brought by the Netherlands and other governments, the people who shot the plane out of the sky are walking free.

The same is already happening after Bucha. The Kremlin and Russian Foreign Ministry immediately did what they always do, predictably and cynically waving away the massacres as fake. Then, Russian state media, as usual, took the baton and started doing the real work, developing and disseminating alternative explanations of what happened, and thereby muddying the waters. Kremlin media is already telling its viewers that the corpses are actually those of Russians who had been shot by Ukrainians, or were not corpses at all: they have been showing footage that they say depicts the bodies in Buchas streets moving their hands (theyre not) or sitting down (they dont).

Now that Russia is in a near total information vacuum, most Russians will inevitably believe their government and not understand why the world is so intent on hating them. Meanwhile, the Russian government is calling for an independent international investigationthat is, one dominated by Russiathat would prove the Kremlins lazy and ludicrous explanation (its favorite) that it was all a provokatsiya, a false flag operation.

Bucha is just the beginning. In Mariupol, the Ukrainian government suspects, the situation will look far worse. Meanwhile, the Kremlin seems to be laying the philosophical and moral groundwork to encourage or excuse any crimes Russian soldiers might commit in Ukraine. RIA Novosti, a Russian state media site which has in the past telegraphed the Kremlins thinking, published a manifesto on Sunday declaring that Russia no longer has to distinguish between the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people. Both are Nazis and therefore subject to legitimate liquidation. Not only does Ukraine have to be dismantled as a state, the piece argues, but the Ukrainian population must live through the hardship of war and absorb this lived experience as a historical lesson and an expiation of its guilt.

The chances that the Russian soldiers who carried out the killings in Buchaor Irpin or Mariupolwill see justice are slim at best. The only chance of them or their commanders ever facing justice is if Putins regime completely disintegrates. The question is what falls faster: Putin, or the world order that America and the West have become accustomed to, the one to which Putin is taking a sledgehammer in Ukraine.

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Never Again Again: The History of Putin's Terror - Puck