Steve Bailey's Blog : It is Putin

Don Nuechterlein's article "Zelenskyy prompted Putin into War" (March 10) left me a bit confused. On the one hand, he says that the Ukrainian president prompted the Russian invasion of his homeland by applying for membership in NATO. On the other hand, Nuechterlein indicates that Putin will keep up pressure on Ukraine even if Zelenskyy withdraws his application to NATO. I am inclined to agree with the latter of these two contradictory statements.

Why did Zelenskyy want to join NATO in the first place? For the same reason Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania did. They did not want to be forced back under Russian control.

The failure lies not in Zelenskyy's application to NATO, but in NATO's hesitation to welcome Ukraine into the alliance. If NATO had acted preemptively, accepted Ukraine, and followed up by placing nuclear missiles in the developing Slavic country, none of this would have happened.

But then, in fairness, the European leaders had to spend four years looking over their shoulders to see if the most powerful member of their alliance was still with them.

Any strong move by NATO against Putin would not have gone over well with the Trump administration.

Modern western leadership lacks the audacity needed to deal with Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, the residue of the Cold War still guides policy toward Russia, long after it ceased to be the mighty Soviet Union. Yes, Russia has nukes, but so does Pakistan, and that did not stop the west from making military incursions into that country to get bin Laden.

A policy framed around former President Barack Obama's statement — "Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness," — would have gone a long way toward preventing this catastrophe. But, either way, make no mistake: the blame for the death and destruction in Ukraine rests firmly on Vladimir Putin.

Steve Bailey, Richmond

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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