George Weigel is rooting for Ukraine to align with Europe to defeat Putin’s “revanchist” impulses. (I finally looked up revanchist, by the way; good word to know.) In context, I think he is rooting for a European Ukraine the better to secure the Eastern Catholic (“Uniate” is another good word to know) fortunes:

Ukraine’s future is an issue of great strategic consequence, which Vladimir Putin understands, if many Americans (including an administration that was seriously behind-the-curve on events in Ukraine) do not. A Ukraine integrated into Europe guarantees that there will be limits to Russian revanchism, an easing of Russian pressure on Poland and the Baltic states, and no de facto reconstitution of the Soviet Union. A future Russian leadership, realizing that Putin’s revanchist game was up, just might stop throwing elbows internationally and attend to Russia’s vast internal problems. Much is at stake in Ukraine, geopolitically.

It’s hard to know what Putin’s up to except that the land of chess Grandmasters seems to produce leaders who can play a longer game than our own leaders, and are (to mix a metaphor) great poker-faces. I’m much friendlier to him than are most Americans, but that’s because of my own concern for the Russian Orthodox, who are thriving – sort of:

Reading Dante these past few days, I’ve thought about my Russian Orthodox theologian friend in Russia, who has been telling me for a couple of years now that the Church’s close relationship with the Russian State is ravaging the Church’s soul. He tells me that we American Orthodox are too naive about the rebirth of Christianity in his country. Yes, it’s happening, and thank God for it, but the way it’s happening is coming at a high cost to the Church’s moral integrity. Or so he says. A Russian Orthodox émigré friend emphatically agrees, telling me that America, for all its problems, is a far, far better place to be a practicing Orthodox Christian. I confess that having grown up in a country in which the State and the Church(es) are constitutionally separated, it is hard for me to understand in detail what they mean, but I take their word for it.

(Rod Dreher) On the other hand, is Weigel too sanguine about Ukraine’s uprising?:

A lot is also at stake morally. The Ukrainian popular uprising of late 2013 was not motivated by an unquenchable thirst for MTV and other expressions of western decadence. It was motivated by a deep yearning for truth, justice, and elementary decency in public life ….

(Weigel) Mine is not a rhetorical question; most “popular uprisings” these days are at least partly the result of stars in the eyes about Western prosperity. We all have confirmation bias, and Putin’s a convenient guy to demonize. Add to that the relative disadvantage of Eastern Catholics in Ukraine aligned with Russia versus Ukraine aligned with Western Europe and all you need is a grain of salt to finish a skepical soup.

No wonder people long for a detailed map of the future, and read such a thing into the Bible. But God’s “get Thee up into a land than I will show Thee” hasn’t come with a map since he first said that to Abram.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.