War in Ukraine — A Grim Anniversary
August 24 is Ukrainian Independence Day. On that day in 2022, I published Part 1 of a 2-part series on the Forbes Leadership Strategy Channel: A Ukrainian Business Leader’s Fight For Survival: Waiting For The Worst But Believing In A Miracle.
That article introduced readers to Oleksiy and Olesya Gulevych, the Founders of JANDA, a specialized high-tech clothing manufacturing and retailing company in Kyiv Ukraine, and their struggle to survive the russian invasion of their peaceful nation.
In October 2022, I posted the second installment, Two Frogs In Sour Cream: A Ukrainian Entrepreneur’s Lessons On Leadership Under Siege, in which I focused on certain psychological characteristics required of leaders to prevail in situations of extreme duress.
Today is February 23, 2024, exactly two years since that brutal assault, and ten years since the Maidan Uprising which many Ukrainians consider the first phase of russia’s war on Ukraine.
The situation in Ukraine remains dire and the responses here in the US and elsewhere are worsening matters.
It is our shared moral duty to continue to help Oleksiy and Olesya and all the people of Ukraine. We must recognize the interconnectedness of issues that are being distorted and misrepresented through propaganda as separate and meaningless. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains in a recent essay, A Thieving Little Man in His Bunker: Lessons From the Life and Work of Navalny on Resisting Autocracy, “the Republican party and its far-right allies around the world are doing everything possible to assist Putin in destroying Ukraine.”
In Beware the Weak Man, Timothy Snyder brilliantly distills a cluster of important entwining geo-political and psycho-social elements, reminding us that “for the weak man, fear is everything, and fear must also become everything for us” and that “when we fall in line behind the fearful … we help the weak men create a politics of fear.”
In what can be seen as a companion piece, Donald Trump's Leadership Clinic: How To Disguise Impotence As Power, published in 2018, I described then President Trump as “psychologically impotent” and explained that “[H]e uses proxies as prosthetics. He engages surrogates to enact on his behalf to project the appearance of ferocity, a psychological fraud used to dupe us into believing he is capable, not ineffectual.”
It is imperative that we confront the reality that the war the Ukrainians are fighting is not just theirs and not just over there.
As Pericles presciently noted 2500 years ago, "just because you don’t take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."