“Russia strikes Kyiv as Western leaders meet in Europe,” reads a headline from the Associated Press. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the report:
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the missiles hit at least two residential buildings, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a 37-year-old man was killed and his 7-year-old daughter and wife injured. Associated Press journalists saw emergency workers battling flames and rescuing civilians.
The strikes also damaged a nearby kindergarten, where a crater pocked the courtyard. U.S. President Joe Biden called the attacks “barbarism” after he arrived in Germany for a Group of Seven summit.
Yes, barbarism. That’s what the Ukrainians are up against, immediately. And that’s what the rest of us are up against, ultimately. For the Dispatch, Klon Kitchen wrote an article subheaded “We should give the Ukrainians what they need to win, for their sake and ours.”
• Another headline from the AP: “Biden urges Western unity on Ukraine amid war fatigue.” (Article here.) That heading is entirely apt. But “war fatigue” can be odd. This fatigue is often felt by people who are doing no fighting or dying in the war whatsoever. They are simply, for example, sick of reading about it. They are ready to “move on.”
• Ukrainians can’t afford fatigue for they are fighting for their very right to exist. That is the heading of an article by Natalia Melnyk: “Ukrainians Are Fighting For Their Right To Exist.” The closing paragraph reads,
Russia is not our liberator; it is our tormenter. Its authoritarian rulers have no respect for human rights. Our choice is to fight for our freedom — or live under Putin’s oppressive rule. We choose to fight.
This ought to earn the admiration of people who value freedom.
• The Ukrainians are doing extraordinary things to save their country, and their countrymen. Here is an article on “Ukraine’s secret, deadly rescue missions.” People are willing to risk their lives to rescue their fellow man, in peril. There’s great hatred in the world — savagery, barbarism — but there is also great love, and courage.
• Many people shrink from the idea of good and evil. They think it is simplistic. Many, many situations are gray. Nonetheless, there are situations that present the black and white of good and evil. People try to muddy these situations. Don’t let them get away with it, if at all possible.
• Individuals, as well as nations and peoples, ought to be known. Here is Andrii Verkhohliad. As Anton Gerashchenko explains, Verkhohliad had been fighting since 2014, when Russia initially invaded. Now he is dead. “We have one purpose,” Verkhohliad said in a video: “the independence of our Ukraine.” He spoke of “freedom for our children, freedom for our parents, and freedom for our country.” Pretty basic. But pretty important, too. Not to be spat on, I wouldn’t think.
• Here is a woman named Tetiana Antoniuk, a journalist, 70 years old. “Badly beaten up,” says Gerashchenko. “They broke her spine because she refused to give away her [Ukrainian] passport when evacuating.” There are many, many such stories. Such facts and barbarities. To know a few is to know the many.
• Myroslava Gongadze introduces us to a man named Volodymyr, 70, from Moshchun. He sheltered 27 of his neighbors during a Russian occupation. “When they were able to escape,” says Gongadze, “the Russian forces took over his home and then destroyed it completely.”
• “Bucolic Ukraine forest is site of mass grave exhumation,” reads another headline from the AP. These articles are hard to bear. But all that we foreigners have to do is read (or not). The Ukrainians themselves have to live the articles, so to speak.
This one says,
The hands of several victims were tied behind their backs. . . .
Workers wearing white hazmat suits and masks used shovels to exhume bodies from the soil of the forest, marking each section with small yellow numbered signs on the ground. The bodies, covered in cloth and dirt, attracted flies.
“Shots to the knees tell us that people were tortured,” Andriy Nebytov, head of the Kyiv regional police, said at the scene. “The hands tied behind the back with tape say that people had been held (hostage) for a long time . . .”
For the complete article, go here.
• An article by Mark Krutov, of RFE/RL, if you can bear it. (Those initials stand for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.) “Dungeon Of Death: Survivor Recounts Dire Conditions For Captives Of Russian Soldiers In Ukraine Basement.” The article begins, “The elderly and sick died quietly.”
• Pundits in the Western media like to decide what the future of Ukraine will be. I hope that Ukrainians themselves will have some say. “Just give up territories!” say our pundits. “End the war!” The thing is: The Ukrainians aren’t fighting for mere territories — mere dirt. They are fighting for the people in those territories — endeavoring to save them from murder, rape, deportation, subjugation.
That is very, very hard for some people to understand, strangely.
Ukraine is not a mere game, a tussle between powers: Putin vs. Biden and all that. No, real flesh-and-blood lives are at stake, every day.
And anyone who thinks that Putin will be sated with territories has never met him. Or never listened to him.
• For years, our Putin apologists have said, “He’s spooked by NATO, you know. He’s encircled. Russia has legitimate security concerns. People in the east of Ukraine want to be with Russia. A State Department official named Victoria Nuland keeps pulling the strings in Ukraine. The Ukrainian government is a Nazi junta.” Blah blah blah. They’re still at it. The thing is, Putin keeps pulling the rug out from under them. Because he is blunt about his imperial ambitions.
I recommend an article by the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov: “How Far Do Putin’s Imperial Ambitions Go?” The subheading reads, “The Russian president and his inner circle speak openly about retaking the vast lands that Moscow once controlled. As the war continues in Ukraine, Russia’s neighbors are taking the threats seriously.”
Here are the first three paragraphs of Trofimov’s article:
“At the Bering Strait with the United States,” the 9-year-old boy ventured hesitantly. Mr. Putin, who chairs the board of the Russian Geographic Society, contradicted the boy to triumphant applause. “The borders of Russia,” he pronounced, “never end.”
The scene, years before Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine unleashed the biggest war in Europe since World War II and triggered a breakdown between Russia and the West, illuminates a conviction deeply held by many in Moscow’s establishment: that Russia has the natural right, and the existential need, for territorial expansion.
Until recently, this imperial belief was often couched in language that is more acceptable in the 21st century, such as security concerns about NATO’s expansion or apprehension about alleged discrimination against Russian-speaking minorities. Since the war began, however, calls for seizing new lands have become much more explicit.
Oh, yes.
In this article, Trofimov quotes Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of Estonia. Putin, she says, “is also after the Baltic countries if he succeeds in Ukraine, and this is why we have to do everything so that he doesn’t succeed in Ukraine, because otherwise his appetite will only grow. If he gets away with this, nobody can feel safe.”
Those words ought to be repeated: “If he gets away with this, nobody can feel safe.”
• In the West, and the United States in particular, I have noticed the usual amount of pro-Putin sentiment. He is the great nationalist (even as he slaughters to rebuild the Russian and Soviet empire). He is the guardian of Christendom. He is our champion against the woke. He’s stickin’ it to the homos and the neocons. All that.
Even more — as usual? — there is anti-anti-Putin sentiment. A resentment of Ukraine. An instinct and itch to defend Putin. An allergic reaction to anything involving freedom or a freedom struggle. Anything touching on freedom, democracy, and human rights. I get this reaction all the time. A furious reaction. I used to get it from the left, pretty much exclusively — especially when I wrote about Cuba — but now I get it from the other direction, too.
A state GOP official told me, in some pain, that many of his troops were anti-Ukraine. Why? Because they associate Ukraine and its struggle with Biden and the Democrats. Simple tribalism is always at work. Always.
Would the Democrats be less supportive of Ukraine if the U.S. had a Republican administration? A Reaganite administration? A GOP administration in the freedom-loving, democracy-supporting vein? I have no doubt.
Then there is the factor of Russian propaganda. The reach of the Kremlin’s propagandists is long. It was thus in Soviet days and it is thus now. Indeed, the Kremlin has many veterans of the USSR — starting with the KGB colonel in charge. I hear Russian propaganda repeated to me by good red-blooded Americans, and I am almost — almost — impressed, with the skill of Putin’s guys.
Finally, there are people who simply want peace and quiet. I can understand them (and I am among them, of course). I wrote a whole book on the subject. A Ukrainian defeat, and a Russian victory, would not bring the Ukrainians peace and quiet — the peace and quiet of the grave, maybe. (I am echoing Margaret Thatcher here.) And it would not bring the rest of us peace and quiet either.
To be continued . . .