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We were standing by the open trunk of her Audi, on a cobblestone side street near the center of Lviv. “I can already smell the American tourniquets!” “Ah!” Olesya Vynnyk closed her eyes and inhaled the factory odor of new nylon from my black suitcase. What a thing to ask of people fighting for their lives. Here was another motive-the strongest and most dubious of all. And because I have no transcendent beliefs, the loss of this earthly one left a void of meaning that made me sick. For the first time in my life, I felt hopeless about America. Not of the place I was going, but of the place I was leaving behind, of the Let’s Go Brandon signs and the school-board showdowns and the next mass shooting, the prospect that our experiment in people coming from all over to run their own affairs together was finished. In the days before my trip, I had a feeling of nausea that I recognized as dread. Want to hear more from George Packer about Russia’s war on Ukraine? Join him, Anne Applebaum, and Franklin Foer at The Atlantic Festival, Friday, September 23. But the model had this power only because it was far away, and its flag’s colors weren’t ours. A country that hardly anyone here knew anything about seemed to offer a model of what we all believe to be good and want for ourselves-courage and freedom and unity. You could find the same blue-and-yellow flag planted in the front yard of a ranch house in rural Maine and hung from a parking sign on my Brooklyn street. Polls showed that a war in Eastern Europe was doing what the pandemic and global warming had failed to do: bring Americans together across partisan lines. It ought to be possible to want Ukraine to win this war and still tell what you see and hear there honestly.Īfter the Russian invasion, some commentators in the United States expressed a hope that Ukraine’s fight for survival might inspire Americans to rededicate ourselves to renewing our own democracy. Journalism doesn’t require an anesthetized moral faculty. What’s most crucial is independence: refusing to surrender your judgment of the truth for the sake of a political cause. Objectivity is different: the necessary effort, always doomed to fall short, of rendering reality exactly, like a carpenter striving for plumb, level, and square. As a journalistic stance, neutrality is worthless, and usually spurious, because everyone is a partisan of some kind. It’s absurd to approach this war from a position of neutrality. Nor, I have to admit, did the money I sent to Razom, a Ukrainian American charity, and Come Back Alive, a volunteer outfit in Kyiv that provides nonlethal equipment such as night-vision goggles to Ukraine’s armed forces-though by now certain media ethicists would have barred me from going anywhere near Ukraine. Nor did the Ukrainian flag my daughter and I painted on white paper and taped to our living-room window. The suitcase full of medical supplies didn’t trouble my professional conscience. But a few things are morally clear: slavery, and genocide, and Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine. Moral clarity can be blinding, and most subjects worth writing about are complicated. Journalism that waves the banner of moral clarity makes me uneasy. I set out with exactly 50 pounds of donated supplies in a battered black suitcase that I’d been trying to lose. Some of the schoolchildren were refugees, and many had relatives in the fight. I also received a thick batch of homemade cards from a Ukrainian Catholic elementary school in Chicago, with messages of encouragement in English and Ukrainian and cheerful drawings of sunflowers and blue-and-yellow flags, to be distributed to random soldiers. Cinched and inflated under the armpits or around the hips, they’re designed to stop massive bleeding from major arteries where the body’s limbs join the trunk. The tourniquets, which came in khaki-colored nylon pouches and cost $350 each, looked like high-tech seat belts, with a compression pad on either end and a black rubber hand pump attached. The group sent me its contacts in Ukraine along with the supplies: a dozen junctional tourniquets and 40 pairs of holstered Raptor shears. Fortunately, a friend who had started an organization called Assist Ukraine needed a courier to bring medical supplies to combat doctors in Lviv and Kyiv. View Moreīecause these motives seemed dubious, I looked for another way to be useful. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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