Like me, other passengers opened the windows of our sleeper cars for a breeze only to find the air so smoky it covered our faces in soot within minutes. At one point, a group of new Russian army recruits, skinny adolescents with acne cratering their faces, boarded my car. They joked about how the air made them feel like they'd been smoking all day, when they were trying not to so that they could carry out whatever mission lay ahead of them in Russia's conflict-ridden borderlands. (Putin's crew was then fighting a counterinsurgency war in nearby Chechnya.) The soldiers scraped together their spare change and insisted on preparing meals for us all to share from goods purchased in outdoor markets where the train made stops.
During that trip 12 years ago, it already felt as though something was changing in terms of Russia's relationship to the world. It was becoming harder for journalists to write critically about the government, particularly its military. Luxury restaurants, car dealerships, and cosmetics stores were popping up, yet ordinary Russians were still struggling to make ends meet.
As that train stopped in small towns, grandmothers and children holding paper trays of homemade chicken cutlets and cucumbers for passengers to buy looked so much more wind-worn and soot-covered than we did. At one stop, a policeman in his fifties, with his wife and two kids, heading home to Chechnya, joined me in my cabin. They'd been on vacation in Crimea, which Ukraine still controlled then. "Did you know that it had once belonged to Russia?" he asked me. It was easier, he added, for his family to go there when he was a kid and Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union, but it was beautiful and I should visit. He and his wife took turns wiping their children's sooty faces with wet washcloths. "My God, when did this heat get so bad?" he asked not exactly me, but the air, the planet.
And it's true, I've never forgotten the heat that enveloped us all then and my early sense of our shared humanity in the face of a changing climate. Of course, as anyone in the American West who experienced the record fires, heat domes, and megadrought of the last year knows, it's only been getting worse.
As different as our all-too-fragile democracy still thankfully is from Russia's autocracy, what we do have in common is short-sightedness. It causes the political class in both countries to focus on military solutions remember the disastrous Global War on Terror? to geopolitical problems with deep historical roots. What if we had marshalled the support of intermediaries like Finland or Israel back when Volodymyr Zelensky first reached out to Putin upon taking office as Ukraine's president in 2019? What if long ago Washington had declared that Ukraine would never be a candidate for membership in NATO? Perhaps today its president wouldn't be pleading for a NATO no-fly zone that could take the world to the existential edge of nuclear war.
What might still make a difference would be nonviolent, diplomatic steps to protect the victims of this war, paving the way for diplomacy to triumph over militarism and sustainable development over destruction. It makes me sick to my stomach that the window to act is closing for the people I love, near and far. Not just the horrific killing and destruction of the moment, but the long-term suffering likely to come from the environmental damage we're causing should impel us all to call for a major diplomatic push to end the nightmare in Ukraine now. After all, if the world's great powers don't pull together soon on climate action, we're in trouble deep.
Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino
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