Ukraine: Where Are the Children of the Rich?
I do not always have myself entirely under control. Occasionally I find myself on a news website, or on something that looks sufficiently like a news website to make the distinction academic. This happened to me the other day.
I saw a headline. I did not even read the article.
Perhaps this is becoming my McLuhan method of journalism: why bother with the content when the medium has already done most of the work?
The headline was an interview question addressed to Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv:
“Where are the children of the rich politicians fighting, Mr Klitschko?”
I have no particular desire to defend Klitschko. Nor is this an essay about whether one should admire Zelenskyy, support the Ukrainian government, sympathise with Russia, send more weapons, send fewer weapons, negotiate tomorrow morning, or fight until Thursday afternoon. There are already enough people who can explain the war in Ukraine to you with complete confidence.
I am not one of them.
The history behind this war is complicated. Ukraine itself is complicated. Its relationship with Russia is complicated. Its internal political and economic structure is complicated. The response of Europe and the United States has been complicated. Even the apparently simple question of what constitutes a just end to the war becomes considerably less simple once actual people, borders, security guarantees and armies are involved.
This essay is about something smaller: one wonderfully simple moral question.
Where are the children of the rich?
It is a good question.
That is precisely the problem.
There is an obvious moral intuition behind it. If a country demands that its citizens risk their lives, the sons and daughters of the powerful should not mysteriously disappear when the shooting starts. A society in which the poor provide the bodies while the rich provide speeches would be difficult to describe as just.
Ukraine has large differences of wealth, influence and opportunity. It would therefore be entirely legitimate journalism to investigate whether wealth and political connections affect who serves, who obtains exemptions, who leaves the country and who ends up closest to the fighting. That is a factual question, and an important one.
But the headline does something slightly different. It contains a moral argument.
If you believe this war must be fought, show me where your own children are fighting.
And this is where things become interesting.
Suppose we accept the principle.
Why should it stop with Ukrainian politicians?
European governments have spent years arguing that Ukraine’s defence matters to the security of Europe. They have supplied enormous quantities of money, weapons and military assistance. European countries have also trained Ukrainian soldiers. This is not some distant war about which Europe has declared itself indifferent. Europe has deliberately involved itself while drawing a very important line between supporting Ukraine and sending its own forces to fight Russia directly.
Switzerland has drawn that line even more sharply. It has condemned Russia’s invasion and provided substantial humanitarian, economic and reconstruction assistance while maintaining the military restrictions associated with "neutrality".
So let us return to our excellent moral principle.
Where are the children of the German politicians?
Where are the French children?
The British?
The Swiss?
For that matter, where am I?
I am sitting safely in Switzerland contemplating the proper distribution of Ukrainian death.
At this point someone will reasonably object that these situations are not equivalent. Ukraine was invaded. Ukrainians are defending Ukrainian territory. Germany is not at war with Russia. Switzerland is "neutral". Direct military intervention by NATO countries could escalate the war into something considerably worse. Citizenship creates obligations that political sympathy does not. Governments have responsibilities toward their own populations.
All true.
But notice what has happened.
Our beautiful moral principle has already acquired seventeen footnotes.
It is no longer simply: If you support a war, your children should fight in it.
Now geography matters. Citizenship matters. International law matters. Alliances matter. Escalation matters. History matters. Personal responsibility matters. The difference between supporting someone else’s defence and participating in it matters.
In other words, the world has become complicated again.
And perhaps this is what bothered me about the headline. It offers one of the great luxuries of spectatorship: moral clarity without corresponding exposure to consequences.
From a sofa in Switzerland I can demand that Klitschko explain why the children of privileged Ukrainians are not dying beside poorer Ukrainians. It costs me nothing.
From the same sofa I can insist that Ukraine must continue fighting because freedom and European security are at stake. That also costs me remarkably little.
I can even turn around tomorrow and say that the Ukrainians should negotiate, surrender territory and stop sacrificing young men. Should my advice prove disastrous, the consequences will again fall principally on people other than me.
The sofa is therefore an extraordinary strategic position.
From it one can be Churchill in the morning, Gandhi after lunch and Machiavelli before dinner. One can demand resistance, peace, justice, sacrifice and compromise without having to pack a bag.
None of this makes the original question illegitimate.
Perhaps the children of wealthy Ukrainians really are disproportionately protected from the war. If so, investigate it. Publish the numbers. Name the mechanisms. Show who received exemptions and why. Compare social classes and regions. Ask politicians uncomfortable questions.
But that is different from enjoying the moral satisfaction of asking a powerful man:
Where are your children?
Because once we turn that question into a principle rather than an investigation, it refuses to stay in Kyiv.
It travels.
It reaches Berlin and Paris. Eventually it reaches Bern.
And finally it arrives in my living room.
That does not mean I must volunteer for the Ukrainian army before I am permitted to have an opinion about the war. Such a rule would make serious political thought almost impossible. We routinely make judgments about situations whose consequences we do not personally bear.
But perhaps distance should make us less certain, not more certain.
Curiously, it often seems to do the opposite. The further we are from consequences, the easier consequences become to arrange. From a distance, wars acquire clean moral geometries: aggressors and victims, courage and cowardice, resistance and surrender, justice and betrayal. Closer to the ground, these categories may still matter, but they have to coexist with sons who may be conscripted, cities that may be destroyed, relatives living on the wrong side of a border, compromises that feel shameful and alternatives that may be worse.
Perhaps this is not only because distance protects us from consequences. Distance also protects us from complexity. When an event is frightening but abstract, moral certainty gives it shape. It turns something enormous and uncontrollable into something that can be judged. We may not know how to end a war, but we can know who ought to be braver. We may not understand the history, but we can identify the hypocrite. We may have no idea what we ourselves would do if the choices were ours, but from several hundred kilometres away the correct choice can appear remarkably obvious.
This may explain why spectators are sometimes more uncompromising than participants. The participant eventually encounters trade-offs. The spectator can remain loyal to principles because somebody else encounters the trade-offs for him.
There is something suspicious about moral arguments in which the courage is always provided by somebody else.
The original question may therefore be worth asking.
Where are the children of the rich?
But once we ask it, we should not be surprised if the question turns around.
Where are we?