Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine is a catastrophe and a crime. It’s hard to wrestle with the magnitude of it. We can use such words as “destruction” and “carnage.” But these can seem too abstract. It’s well to pause, I think, to consider some individual lives.
On Thursday, I mentioned Tetiana Perebyinis, who was the CFO of a tech firm. She was 43 years old. She was killed with her two children — Alisa, age nine, and Mykyta, age 18 — when they were trying to flee. A colleague of hers said, “It hurts a lot because she was so good and so kind — and innocent. You don’t have words for the people who are able to fire at innocent civilians who are just trying to escape without any weapons in their hands. We’re still trying to figure out how to cope with that.”
Here is a bulletin from the Canadian Mathematical Society:
In Memoriam: Yulia Zdanovskaya, a 21-year old mathematician, was killed on March 8th, 2022 during a Russian forces attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine. In 2017, Yulia represented Ukraine at the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad and won a silver medal at the competition.
Have a look at her face — Yulia’s face. A world of promise, in that young face.
Maybe we can look at one more. Lera Maksetska was a Ukrainian who worked with USAID. She was eulogized by Samantha Power, the administrator of the agency. Lera “was killed by the Russian military just shy of her 32nd birthday.” Have a little more:
Born & raised in Donetsk, Lera answered Russia’s 2014 invasion by working on the humanitarian response. She survived the shelling of Donetsk, moved to Kyiv, and started working with USAID — where she became beloved as “a brave woman with a kind heart.”
War — mass murder — is not an abstraction. Elie Kedourie, the great Baghdad-born historian, had some words of advice for the young David Pryce-Jones. P-J passed them down to me, and I will never forget them: “Keep your eye on the corpses.”
• Charles McPhedran, an Australian journalist who covers Eastern Europe, wrote, “Just driving with refugees from Mariupol. They are in such deep trauma they can barely speak.”
Pyotr Andryuschenko, an official in Mariupol, said, “Humanity has not yet invented a word for what Russia is doing to us.”
Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter for the Kyiv Independent, wrote of his hometown, Volnovakha. “It used to be among the fastest-evolving cities of Donbas. Russia has brought nothing but absolute death.”
Remember these things. Remember the war crimes. Because, very soon, propagandists will fog them up. They will plant doubt. They will say you’re exaggerating. You suffer from “Cold War nostalgia.” You’re a “Russophobe.” You’re a hawk, a neocon, a warmonger. I have heard it all before. It’s coming. Don’t let the fog machine confuse you. Keep your head clear. Keep your eye on the corpses, or at least remember them.
• As of now, Putin’s forces have kidnapped two Ukrainian mayors. Writes Carl Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden, “Wherever the occupiers reach, the democratically elected leaders will be detained and ultimately disappear.” The occupiers “will seek to decapitate the democracy of Ukraine with techniques from the darkest days of history.”
Exactly so.
• Have you seen a video of Ukraine’s president, Zelensky, walking to a hospital to visit wounded soldiers and bestow honors on them? Here. Zelensky and Putin are two very different leaders. They barely belong on the same planet.
Which leader do you prefer?
• By now, you may well have heard the words of Madison Cawthorn, the Republican congressman. “Zelensky is a thug. Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”
Where did Cawthorn learn such things? Where did he learn to talk that way? He did not arrive at those views on his own. He learned them from the media he consumes.
And if a congressman can be so affected — what about ordinary people, millions of them? This is a very big problem.
• Speaking of disinformation: “Hungary has become the EU home of Kremlin talking points.” (Article here.)
• How about this? Ivana Stradner reports that the Serbian media are spreading a choice bit of Kremlin propaganda: The U.S. has developed a bioweapon wherein bats — the animals, not Louisville sluggers — spread disease specifically designed to infect Russians.
Clever, huh?
• The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said, “We are not planning to attack other countries. We didn’t attack Ukraine in the first place.” Andrei Gromyko must be looking up and going, “He’s good.”
• Speaking of Gromyko: “Russian military vehicles are flying Soviet hammer and sickle flags in Ukraine.” (Article here.) Credit for truth in advertising.
• A report from the Wall Street Journal is headed “Ukraine’s New Foreign Legion Takes the Fight to Russian Forces.” The report quotes an ex–defense minister of Georgia: “Ukraine is not fighting only for its own freedom, its own sovereignty, its own independence. This is not the war of Ukraine only.”
He knows. He understands. Many know and understand.
• Remember the name of Brent Renaud.
Award-winning American journalist Brent Renaud was killed by Russian forces in the Ukrainian city of Irpin, police in Kyiv said . . . Another American journalist was reported wounded.
(Article here.)
Deep gratitude to all those risking their necks to bring us the news.
• A headline from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty: “Ukrainian Pianist Plays A Final Rendition Of Chopin In The Ruins Of Her House.” The article, with video, is here. Beauty amid barbarism.
• Ultimately, I believe this war will be known as a freedom struggle: a struggle of freedom against tyranny, decency against barbarism. Some will never acknowledge it. Not “realist” enough, they will think. But most people will acknowledge it, I believe (and hope).
• This is the Odessa Opera, giving an outdoor concert — singing the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, “Va, pensiero,” from Verdi’s Nabucco. This chorus, this hymn, has provided inspiration to many people, in many places, over the years.
• Arvo Pärt, the Estonian, is not only an important composer, he is a humanitarian — lifelong. Back when Mikhail Khodorkovsky was a political prisoner, Pärt dedicated a symphony to him. He wanted to make a gesture, of some sort. Otherwise, he felt helpless. I wrote about this in 2019, here.
Pärt is now in his mid 80s and rarely emerges in public. But he emerged to write this:
Dear friends in Ukraine, dear colleagues, dear all fighting for your home at the price of your life,
We bow before your bravery, bravery in the face of nearly unbearable suffering.
We are with you as much as we are able to be. All that is left to us is a lump in our throat and tears and prayers. Words have begun to lose their meaning.
Forgive us!
Forgive us for failing to protect you from a disaster unimaginable in our time.
Long live Ukraine!
• Here, you will see a young Russian woman, in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. At an anti-war rally, she is carrying a blank sheet of paper. Of course, the police arrest her and carry her off.
Do you ever get the idea that the Russian state is afraid of its own citizens? Aren’t all dictators, at some level, afraid of the people they rule? These dictators know they are not legitimate.
• Here are Putin and Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, sitting together, as Lukashenko says, “If we hadn’t assaulted them preemptively, they would have assaulted our forces.” So, “we weren’t the ones who started this assault — our consciences are clear.”
Sure. One good thing about Belarus? Unlike Russia, they still call their secret police the “KGB.”
• Jonah Goldberg was taken aback by the “moral equivalence” exhibited by a young heroine of the American Right — a woman with a Twitter following of 3 million. She equated our waging of the Iraq War with Putin’s assault on Ukraine. For years, conservatives combatted moral equivalence on the left. To have to combat it from the other direction is . . . strange, dismaying, and wearying.
• Writes Garry Kasparov,
Putin will escalate every time. It’s his only strategy. He will escalate if you intervene and save Ukraine and escalate if you don’t. So you must reduce his capacity to do harm.
For many years — certainly from 2014 on — I heard from the Buchanan Right, “De-escalate!” That was directed at the West, believe it or not, not at Putin. All the while, Putin escalated. People should get real. If not at this late hour, when?
• Here is an interesting story, of thousands: “Indian evacuee: The kindness of Ukrainians saved my life.”
• A word about Israel. I cut this country a lot of slack. It needs to find its allies where it can. It can’t afford to be too picky: tough neighborhood, existential threats. But much of the case for Israel is rooted in the moral. It was that way in the late 19th century. It was that way, with greater urgency, in the 1940s. Neutrality between Putin and Ukraine won’t do. Not considering the mass murder and nation-effacement being carried out by the Kremlin.
• In a headline, you can say a lot — as in this one, from the Washington Post: “Amid war and brutality, Ukrainians are transformed and united.” (Article here.) Ukraine had a number of fractures, after independence. But the great unifier of the citizenry, as Kateryna Yushchenko, among others, has pointed out to me, was Vladimir Putin.
• A picture, by Gleb Garanich, of Reuters. (I have noticed his photos, and used them on this site, for years.) “Volodymyr, 61, and his son Yaroslav, 23, react as an evacuation train with their relatives, mother, wife and three children departs to Lviv at Kyiv central train station . . .”
I’m tempted to say, “And in the 2020s.” But I have no doubt that people said, “And in the 1930s.”