Shadows over Kyiv

George F. Kennan and John J. Sullivan

It’s worth pausing to consider the dual perspectives: opposites in dialogue, paradoxes that alternately illuminate and obscure. Two names—George F. Kennan and John J. Sullivan, both former American ambassadors to Moscow—help us grasp the stakes of a war, Ukraine’s, that also holds the fate of the West in the balance. Kennan’s thought is woven from the fabric of myth, his voice tinged with a prophetic resonance. He analyzed reality with a literary gaze, freeing himself from the tyranny of time and its ideological fads. A conservative to his core—perhaps even a reactionary, in the sense his friend John Lukacs gave the term—Kennan despised the political drift of his country (epitomized by Ronald Reagan and, even more so, Joseph McCarthy), which he saw as a perilous lurch toward right-wing populism. Yet if we recall him today, it’s not for his views on America but for that famous “Long Telegram” of 1946, which laid the foundation for the containment doctrine that shaped the West’s Cold War stance. Open conflict with the USSR was to be avoided; instead, Iron Curtain nations would be held at their borders until the internal contradictions of Soviet regimes triggered their collapse. History, since 1989, proved him right. But Kennan also urged keeping a hand extended. He knew the victorious West underestimated the resentment of Moscow’s elites, and that the humiliation of post-Soviet Russia—stripped of its empire, gripped by mafias, and ringed by former vassals turning to Brussels and Washington—could ignite a bomb of incalculable force. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine would hardly have surprised him.

Nor did it surprise John J. Sullivan, who witnessed the war’s onset firsthand. He recounts it in a gripping memoir, Midnight in Moscow, depicting Russia as a shadowy chessboard haunted by double agents and past betrayals. Ukraine rises beyond a mere geopolitical battlefield—though it is that—to become a symbol of Russia’s obsession with reclaiming a mythic past. Kyiv stands less as a real security threat than as an affront to the nationalist sensibilities of Putin’s regime, and a mirror to Western weakness in the Kremlin’s eyes—a weakness not just in values, deemed corrosive, but in military resolve. How else to explain the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Kabul, a turning point in the world’s view of American power?

Kennan and Sullivan write from distinct angles about realities not wholly alike, yet they share a kindred melancholy: the certainty that history is far from over, and that this tragedy’s roots run deep. I suspect both would view Trump’s choices with unease, seeing them as handing Moscow a victory on a silver platter. Both might argue that the Russian soul refuses to bargain with the weak. No one knows the price of today’s peace, nor whether we’re witnessing the final chapter of one war or the prologue to a larger conflict. Zelensky’s Ukraine, with its ruined cities and heroic resistance, echoes Poland in 1939 while foreshadowing an uncertain future. Europe signals its rearmament; the United States—like Léon Bloy’s God—withdraws. The Kremlin pushes its troops onward. China watches, patient and unmoved. Perhaps the next act will play out in Tehran, with targeted strikes to end its nuclear ambitions. The world, today, is a far more menacing place.