Today marks the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States’s support for Ukraine has been constant but is now beginning to wane in the population and among some Republicans in the U.S. Congress. It is a good time to look again at what principles are at stake.
An estimated 100,000 Ukrainian lives and 200,000 Russian lives have been lost, which is both incalculably tragic and criminal, as are the Russian military’s many war crimes. These losses alone, though, cannot account for the injustice of Russia’s invasion. If life alone were all that is at stake, Ukraine would have been right to sue for peace at this time last year. So would have been the British Cabinet members who advocated negotiating with Nazi Germany in May 1940, when they faced the prospect of losing hundreds of thousands. Ukraine now, like the British then, has decided that something is worth fighting for. What is that something?
Their common good. This is what I argued in an address to the American Academy of Catholic Artists and Scholars on January 20, 2023. The common good, like the just war tradition, originated in Catholic thought, most prominently in the work of Thomas Aquinas. It is a matter of natural law, accessible to all people and undergirding the rights of peoples everywhere.
The common good is the shared cooperation of a people in political activity and institutions that promotes the good of people, families, and associations in the community. The common good is instrumental to everyone’s good but the shared cooperation is itself a good that may be called civic friendship. These ties among a people endure across time and make them a nation, one whose identity is expressed through their common history, their literature, their music, their stories. Ukraine’s national identity, like that of many eastern European nations, was forged in the nineteenth century.
The common good, while overlooked in today’s commentary on the war’s injustice, underlies the most important goods – and accounts for the largest bads – at stake in the war.
The common good is the moral underpinning of international law’s core principles of political independence and territorial integrity. It the good that these principles protect and what Russia brutally violated in a crime akin to those of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. If these basic norms of international life are to be respected, defending Ukraine is essential. (A fine statement of Ukraine’s war aims is here.)
Ukraine’s common good is precisely what is denied by the Russky Mir ideology of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his chaplain, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, who deny that Ukraine is a nation at all and proclaim that it is a part of Russia. Denying the existence of a people with a common good is what arguably makes the invasion and the war crimes genocide.
Ukraine’s common good is what is sacrificed by peace proposals that advocate that Ukraine settle for something less than its full independence. An end to the war cannot mean an end to Ukraine.
This common good is what is ignored by Realist arguments that Russia’s invasion was a legitimate – or morally “understandable” – response to provocations to its sphere of influence on the part of the West. Russia regarding Ukraine as a part of its sphere of influence is precisely the injustice at stake.
The common good is slighted by a school of conservatives who see moral decline in Ukraine and moral revival in Putin’s claim to defend traditional civilization in Russia. Any internal problems with Ukraine’s common good – and every nation has them, not least Russia – does not remotely justify its takeover.
The common good is the moral underpinning of Ukraine’s claims to self-determination, which it asserted in December 1991, when its population voted almost unanimously for independence from the Soviet Union. But self-determination raises an issue: Does it also justify the rights of populations in Donbas and Luhansk, the eastern regions of Ukraine much of whose population is culturally Russian and that Russia now occupies, to determine what country they want to be a part of? Or of Crimea, which Russian seized in 2014? Yes, but only by a supermajority vote and guarantees for minority rights, not through the invasion of an outsider and its bogus referendums. Reliable polls show that the populations in Donbas and Luhansk strongly favor remaining with Ukraine. Crimeans would join Russia, which may be justified eventually, but only well after the war, when the population may make such a decision truly freely. (For my natural law defense of self-determination, see here.)