The “Will He/Won’t He” game – “he” being Vladimir Putin – isn’t just an abstract foreign policy discussion for Knoxvillians who knew Chris Holzen. The question of when, whether and how Russian troops will attack Ukraine becomes a whole different conversation when you realize that somebody you care about is stuck in the middle of it.
Shortly after the Russians started lining up tanks and soldiers and blood supplies and weapons of war along the eastern border of Ukraine, old friends started calling each other, asking pretty much the same question:
Chris Holzen
“Have you heard from Chris?”
The answer was always no, and, since I was worried, too – Putin has gone way beyond just saber-rattling – I went looking for Chris Holzen, which turned out to be a pretty simple task, since he has a new Facebook page. I sent him a message and a friend request that he answered with a cyber ‘‘wave.’’ We’ve subsequently carried on an extensive on-line conversation, and here’s some of what he has to say:
First of all, he’s OK. I asked if he’s scared, and he laughed (I think):
“To quote President Zelenskyy, “It is safer in Kiev than LA – and that’s true.”
He was probably joking (I think), but nuance gets lost on the internet. I told him that Tim Burchett and I are so worried about him that we’re actually speaking again – something we haven’t done much of since last January 6.
“I DO serve a greater purpose then,” he said. Always with the jokes (I think).
Chris was a very young, very smart, aspiring Republican political operative from Hendersonville when he enrolled in the University of Tennessee to study political science in 1987 after deciding to leave the United States Military Academy at West Point.
He spent the next seven years in Knoxville. During that time, he managed Gary Underwood’s successful write-in campaign for the city council against the sitting vice mayor, Hoyle G. McNeil Sr., in 1989. Underwood won and became the first write-in candidate to pull off a victory in a council election.
Holzen developed a reputation as a boy wonder. I met him the following year when he worked in Bud Gilbert’s campaign for the state senate and got to know him even better when he took a job as Knox County Executive Dwight Kessel’s communications director.
He went on to work in other campaigns and left a lot of friends behind when he landed a job with the International Republican Institute (a non-government organization founded by John McCain). He is now a senior advisor for Europe and Eurasia and has worked in hot spots all over the world.
(Wikipedia describes the IRI as “a non-partisan organization founded in 1983 after U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 speech before the British Parliament in Westminster in which he proposed a broad objective of helping countries build the infrastructure of democracy.
“Quoting the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he stated: ‘we must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.’
“The IRI operates as a political organization abroad, providing training and assistance to favored political parties. As a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, it plays no part in domestic U.S. politics. However, the majority of its board, staff and consultants are drawn from the Republican Party. Its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, draws mainly from the Democratic Party.)
Maybe Chris seems so calm about Ukraine’s current troubles because he’s been in difficult situations before. There were bullets flying when he was stationed in Baghdad during the 2007 “Surge” in the Iraqi conflict, and he got into bigtime trouble in Egypt when it was controlled by the Russian-allied Muslim Brotherhood.
“In 2013, I had to leave Ukraine because I was sentenced to five years in prison in Egypt in absentia for work I had done there – Ukraine had an extradition treaty with Egypt,” he said.
Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest, and a convicted American “spy” would have had a hard time surviving five years in an Egyptian prison, so he was sent to Poland to manage IRI’s Russia program (which, of course, is banned in Russia).
Chris rode out the next five years in Warsaw (2013-2018) but was able to return to Ukraine after its pro-Russian government was ousted, thus eliminating the threat of being extradited to Egypt.
He returned to his adopted home city and is still there today. He says he really hasn’t made a contingency plan to evacuate if the Russians come.
“Honestly, I have not made any. There is no way they could ever take Kyiv. None. If hostilities break out in the east or the south, it is so far away from here that it really would not be something I would need to worry about – remember there’s been a war going on for the last eight years in this country and I’ve been here.
“So, I guess I look at it very differently,” he said. But if the unthinkable became reality, he says he’ll get in a car and drive west – not, he repeats, that he thinks it will happen.
“Russian forces could not take, nor could they ever hold the city of Kyiv or anything to the west of it. Simply impossible. I believe that if (Putin) tries to invade the entire country (an invasion from the north, east and south) and attempts to take the capital, he will be bogged down for years in a guerrilla war that he cannot win.”
I’m hoping he’s right.
Notes: Chris says the name of the city he lives in is Kiev, if transliterated from Russian; Kyiv if transliterated from Ukrainian. He recommends Masha Gessen’s recent account of life in Kyiv in The New Yorker.
Betty Bean writes a Thursday opinion column for KnoxTNToday.com.