Bucha

Neighbors

Celebration of Orthodox Easter occurred a week after its American counterpart.

In Ukrainian-American households, the customs and tradition of spring equinox during Holy Week dwarf those at other times of the year.

As Holy Week approached, politicians and pundits had hoped, in vain, the annual celebrations might impact relief for besieged cities in Ukraine, but bloodshed continued.

The attempted conquest of Kyiv from February 24 to March 30, ended in the wave of Russian and Chechen invasion troops rolling back north to reveal to the world the first shocking glimpses confirming the brutality of the Russian martial philosophy.

The grisly images from Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel west of Kyiv, and Bordyanka in the east, prompted an influx of international journalists and forensic specialists to evaluate the claims and evidence.

The claims and counter-claims over horribly mutilated Ukrainian corpses reingnited public discussion of civil and historical implications of genocide. It was clear the events of the war from late February through April, would transform vocabulary and psychology, not just the international policies of the United States and the European Union.

Unfortunately, the international institutions designed to promote peace, and declarations of 1945 such as Never Again, would be revealed as shallow, disingenuous, well-meaning rhetoric wholly empty of integrity when the issue was forced.

Putin proved himself the master demonstrator of cynicism and realpolitik.

The crimes committed by his troops in Ukraine were orders of magnitude beyond what most Americans could imagine.

Somehow, Zelenskyy and his countrymen withstood an assault that proved fearful in the extreme, but not the irresistible juggernaut that most experts predicted would enter Kyiv in three days, no more.

By the sixty-first day of the invasion, the few defenders and civilians of the Mariupol seaport in the south were hanging on within the five or six floors of tunnels beneath the Azovstal steel manufacturing complex. The Russian attempt to wipe out the remaining troops was abandoned as the Battle of Donbass took shape on the axis between Kharkiv and Izym in the northeast, and near Kherson in the south.

The biggest war news Sunday night had been the significant conflagration in the Russian oil depot of Bryansk.

A brief consideration of the build-up in the Donbass of eastern Ukraine, suggested a continuation of ill-preparedness, military inexperience of Russian conscript troops and a failure to concentrate on a narrow front while attempting too many different objectives in an uncoordinated fashion.

The Bryansk strike might, or might not, have been an accidental event, or a well-executed Ukrainian raid timed to distract Russian attention from the Donbass battles.

In some ways, the limited Bryansk attack paralleled the tactics successful in sinking the Russian flagship Moskva. Likewise, there were features of Bryansk reminiscent of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo early in World War Two: a militarily insignificant but of psychologically profound importance in shaking the enemy’s confidence and focus.

The details of the sinking of the Moskova seemed to indicate use of a large armed Ukrainian Bayraktar drone near the ship to capture attention of the ship’s anti-aircraft gunners. The moment of attack had been skillfully chosen by the orientation of the Moskova’s air defense radars which did not sweep a full three-hundred sixty degree arc.

With the Russian gunners focusing on the drone above, and the ship at an angle leaving its shoreward flank blind, two anti-ship missiles from Ukrainian shore batteries hit the Moskova without detection.

Perhaps the Bryansk strike during the night of April 25 was a tactical decoy for some future Ukrainian attack, moving the fight from being solely on Ukrainian soil, across the border to Russia.

* * *

The immense incompetence of the Russian military was suspect: it might be propaganda, but also might be the revelation of a major international power gone soft from years of neglect and corruption as well as a product of the traditional Russian attitude of arrogance, for which Zelenskyy invented a new word: ruscism.

That same week of eastern orthodox Easter, likewise, had unmasked the lack of resolve if not outright treachery, of the current German government. For German Premier Olaf Scholz, his continued supply of Russian oil was vastly more important than the genocide in Ukraine.

In the absence of a complete European embargo on Russian oil and gas, the significance of the Bryansk attack, was to halt the flow of Russian oil to Europe by military means when politics and diplomacy failed. Additional attacks on Bryansk would render Sholz’s dissembling, irrelevant.

While other far less wealthy European states had not hesitated at the Ukrainian plea for weapons and military support, the German and Slovenian governments were mired in internal discussions of arms shipments to Ukraine. Such discussions, by the night of the Bryansk raid, were little more than procrastination with the hope Ukraine would fall before the German government made a decision.

But Ukraine did not fall.

* * *

His daughter and her husband had been fired as winemakers at their father’s winery, almost exactly a year earlier.

The bottling of red wines of 2021 at Haymarket the previous Friday had been well-planned by the winemaker, a physicist who had opted to take up winemaking almost seventeen years earlier. It was a small winery most recently owned by mainland Chinese that included five acres of cabernet sauvignon, petit verdot and petit manseng vines, and therefore about half the area of the closest neighborhood winery.

By mid-afternoon Good Friday, by the orthodox calendar, the time Christ had uttered his final words Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani, the trip back home through traffic on Route 15, brought him slowly driving the dusty gravel road past the neighbors’ vines.

Bottling at Haymarket had gone smoothly: he was watching over the volunteers hefting empty cases, feeding empty bottles. As the bottles were taken into the back of the refrigerated bottling trailer, they were automatically filled by machine, exiting the opposite side of the rig where volunteers packed twelve full, labeled bottles into cases and shoved the cases along a roller chute where another crew piled cases onto a pallet.

Seven hundred fifty milliliters wine each bottle, twelve bottles per case, fifty-six cases each pallet which were then hauled by the vineyard hand with a forklift into the storage area. For each of the four wines, about six pallets were created.

The single white, petit manseng, could be marketed within a few months. However, the reds, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, and merlot, would rest in bottles for two years before being sold.

…these were things to consider while passing the traffic circle that, to the west, would lead to Ag Reserve, a winery he knew well, north past the one-time home of American President Monroe where he took refuge while the British burned Washington DC during the 1812 War, past the antebellum plantation Oatlands where the annual point-to-point horse races would take place Sunday, and past its spinoff congregation Churches of Our Savior. The first built in 1871 and for twenty-five years home to a congregation made up of refugees from the Leesburg St. James Episcopal Church until wokeness destroyed the Episcopal liturgy in 1979.

By 2016, the congregation was refused an unconditional renewal lease on the 1871 Church which was owned by the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the conditions of extension were denial of priest ordination and member confirmation, effectively denying a future to the congregation that had opted for traditional Anglicanism while rejecting the new 1979 Episcopal reset that included a social justice platform and had abandoned the basic tenets of the Church.

* * *

The car screeched to a halt, and the gravel under its wheels crunched.

In passing that Orthodox Good Friday, he had seen two figures walking among the neatly pruned petit verdot vine, each just beginning to show the first signs of life: in the previous year, he had seen both neighbors only once, and that for a brief conversation at the local Food Lion grocery.

“Hey, guys,” he said.

A year before, he had agreed to work for their enemies, their father and sister, who had control over the small winery. His notion had been to hold the business together as winemaker for six months until daughter and her father reached some rapprochement. He had hoped the family, fractured by the death of her mother in early January 2021, might settle their differences as to whether to sell the farm and cash in, or to keep it within the family.

The elder sister continued as general manager. The younger, who had been given a large house and a third of the vine acreage, had been fired.

The refusal for both sides to compromise or settle meant a year of contention, of lawsuits and ill will, during which the business must still go on.

It had proven impossible to maintain interactions with both sides, and the refusal of the father to make good on his promise of an employment contract, a voice in the hiring of a winemaking consultant or an honest interaction, led to his resignation in October.

Nor had he gone out of his way to patronize, support or visit the neighbor winery after his resignation.

“Pete!” she said. There was no sense of discomfort, no awkwardness.

“Just getting back from bottling at Haymarket…” he said.

Ty, her husband, moved to the other side near him.

It was she to do the talking: she was still fussing against her father: some said she was just waiting for him to die, although her expectation of inheritance might nor might not be realistic given the fierceness of her animosity with her father, who had just pass his eightieth birthday.

They discussed, but not seriously, his possible bid to buy her half of the family vineyard.

“…her mother’s third husband left her mother a million dollars…” he said of his wife. “She is very ill in San Diego, but doing better…”

The large mansion on a mere three acres next to his farm, had been sold immediately after it was built for seven hundred thousand dollars six year earlier. It had resold for a million-eight a month earlier after being listed at a million-six.

The considered the size and location of the daughter’s home, and talked of local land values. Since the opening of the neighborhood winery in 2008, the sleepy farm neighborhood had been extensively built and was now a high end enclave and neighborhood which had been the home of the AOL founder.

It had been great luck to have captured his home farm of thirty four and a half acres a half dozen years before the expansion had begun.

* * *