Every other day, it seems, Russian forces bomb another apartment building or shopping mall. Here’s a report from yesterday:
Dozens of Ukrainian emergency workers labored Sunday to pull people out of the rubble after a Russian rocket attack smashed into apartment buildings in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 15 people. More than 20 people were believed still trapped.
(Full article here.)
It’s easy to get numb to this — not if you’re Ukrainian, but if you’re a foreigner, sure. Especially if you live in a free and comfortable country. Ho-hum. Yet more Ukrainians massacred in cold blood. What’s for dinner? Numbness should be fought, however. Numbness aids the aggressor, aids the killer.
There are “new normals” that should not be adjusted to.
• Here is something from Business Ukraine magazine:
The world’s breadbasket in flames: Russia is deliberately setting fire to Ukraine’s grain fields. This follows similar targeted airstrikes on Ukrainian grain storage facilities. Putin is openly weaponizing global hunger in his war of annihilation against Ukraine.
That is a tweet, with a photo — a photo telling the story. Here is an article from the Associated Press: “Anxiety grows for Ukraine’s grain farmers as harvest begins.”
Russia is committing comic-book evil against Ukraine and Ukrainians. But it’s not funny. Why Ukraine is not more of a cause, worldwide, I don’t know. Actually, I do know: but the answers are painful to elaborate, and, in any case, I and others have done it many times before.
The Russian onslaught is an ongoing emergency for Ukraine, yes, but it is also a grave threat to the broader world, whether the broader world knows it or not. And Putin apologists in free countries are so contemptible, they can barely be spoken of, at least by me.
We have more Mosleyites than I ever would have guessed.
• Here is a name to know — that of Natalia Kolesnik. Just one of the dead. “Just,” I say. An AP report out of Kharkiv is headed “‘Dad, that’s it. She’s dead’: Another day of loss in Ukraine.” It begins,
She had gone out to feed the cats when the shelling began.
It was afternoon, a residential neighborhood, a time to get errands done. But there is nothing routine about life near the front line in Ukraine. . . .
Natalia Kolesnik, like other residents, learned to live with the risks. Then, in a grassy courtyard on a hot and sweaty Thursday, the shelling caught her.
She was one of three bodies on the littered ground.
One more line from this particular report: “Kneeling, Viktor embraced what was left of his wife . . .”
• Ukrainians from various walks of life are fighting for their country — fighting for their freedom and their very lives. Here is a profile from The Economist: “A Ukrainian ballerina goes to war.” The subheading reads, “Olesia Vorotnyk danced with the national ballet. Then Russia invaded.”
• Every day, Russia is becoming more Soviet. Every day, the lines between Soviet Russia and post-Soviet Russia are blurred. Consider this report in the New York Times: “In Putin’s Russia, the Arrests Are Spreading Quickly and Widely: One by one, Russians deemed insufficiently patriotic are being snatched up by security forces as the Kremlin tightens the noose.”
All but the deliberately obtuse can see the reality now.
• Individual Russians exhibit phenomenal bravery, as they always have. One report is headed “Some Russians won’t halt war protests, despite arrest fears.” Amazing that anyone protests at all, considering what awaits him.
Incidentally, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian politician, journalist, and democracy leader — and a friend of mine — has been in prison since April 11.
• In an essay titled “The War Has Happened,” Leon Wieseltier writes,
We have just been through years of contempt for liberal democracy, and the great disparagement is hardly over. We have been told that everything bad in our age is the fault of liberalism, or worse, neo-liberalism, whatever that is. It has been blamed for just about all the unhappiness in the world; and so the peddlers of a new happiness gloatingly call themselves post-liberal, on all sides of the rotted ideological spectrum. Sometimes one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief at the intensity of the hatred for liberal democracy . . .
Yes.
• One more name to know — that of Dmitry Kolker, a leading Russian scientist. He was dying of cancer, and then the FSB snatched him from his bed, to take him to Lefortovo Prison, where he died two days later. They accused him of being a spy. Of course.
To read about Kolker, go here. In addition to being a leading scientist, he was a pianist and organist. Here he is playing Buxtehude on the organ.