Seeing Putin Clear

Putin’s Russia is a terror-state. Day after day, year after year, it kills and maims innocent people in Ukraine. “Children among 18 killed in Russian attack on Zelensky’s home city,” reads a headline from the BBC. (The article is here.) That city is Kryvyi Rih. Half the dead were children and teenagers, ages 3 to 17.

We ought to know their names and faces. Otherwise, the dead are mere statistics, or abstractions. In a post, Vladimir Kara-Murza named their names, gave their ages, and showed their pictures.

Kara-Murza, as you know, is a Russian democracy leader and a former political prisoner. He is a Russian patriot who believes in human rights for all — wherever they live.

• In the Free West, leaders ought to decry atrocities such as the massacre in Kryvyi Rih. I hear no such sounds out of our government here in America. Who will now lead the West? It falls to the likes of the Czech foreign minister:

• Inna Sovsun is a member of Ukraine’s parliament. I spoke with her in a podcast shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion, three years ago. Two weeks ago, she circulated the below:

• Over and over, President Trump says that he “likes” Vladimir Putin. So does his envoy Steve Witkoff. So do others. Some of us find this so galling — such a betrayal of what we would like America to stand for — it is hard to put into words.

Andrew Roberts, the British historian, did a good job in the House of Lords last month. He began, “We must not underestimate the gravity of what has happened, which is that during a war against totalitarian dictatorship, the United States has effectively changed sides.”

Further on, Roberts spoke of “this startling American defection to the side of a dictator who, throughout his career, has only ever wished America ill.”

• A report from Defense News tells us,

Pete Hegseth will not attend a gathering of 50 countries to coordinate military support for Ukraine, multiple European officials and a U.S. official said — the first time the coalition will gather without America’s secretary of defense participating.

That makes sense.

We are also told this:

Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, founded the Ukraine Defense Contact Group shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

• Virtually every day now, Russia’s state media exult. This has been painful for some of us to follow — but important, too.

• Another news item:

The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said on Thursday that the U.S. government had switched off a satellite that transmitted its Russian-language program into Russia.

That program is Current Time. I wrote about it in a piece last week, “Radios and Lifelines.” I quoted Vitaly Mansky, a prominent Russian filmmaker, who said, “It is the only television in the world that tells us, in Russian, the truth about the current state of affairs.”

• Trump has decided to kill RFE/RL and our other radios. But RFE/RL is still going, because it has contested Trump’s decision in court and it still has a little funding, which had previously been dispersed to it. RFE/RL has had to furlough workers, but it is still producing reports.

This one is from two days ago:

Is it any wonder that the Kremlin and its allies want to see RFE/RL killed off, once and for all?

• In a column, Kara-Murza wrote,

Last month, Trump moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees international broadcasting in 63 languages and reaches an estimated 420 million people in more than 100 countries. For citizens of authoritarian states such as Russia, where independent media have long been silenced, U.S.-funded news outlets were a vital source of truthful information about their own countries and the world. And though this is a gift not just to Putin but to dictators all around the world, from Cuban communists to Iranian mullahs, it was Moscow in particular that couldn’t hide its delight.

“This is an awesome decision by Trump,” said Margarita Simonyan, head of the Russian state propaganda network RT. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.”

“We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.” This reminds me of what a CCP organ said about the Voice of America. I mention it in my above-cited piece. “The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”

• Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Russia editor, noted something two weeks ago:

• The Associated Press published a story relating to the “information war,” the battles in the “information space”:

Austrian authorities said Monday that they uncovered a Russian-steered campaign aimed at spreading disinformation about Ukraine following the detention in December of a Bulgarian woman accused of spying for Russia.

• Can Ukraine survive without American support? Survive as a nation? Some say yes, some say no. But what if America is hostile? Not merely neutral as between Ukraine and its invader, but hostile to Ukraine?

Ukraine’s allies will have to do their utmost. The Swedes are under no illusions, being in proximity to Russia, and a new member of NATO. “Sweden unveils its largest military aid package for Ukraine, worth nearly $1.6 billion.” (Article here.) A West unled by America is weird, but we had all better get used to it, fast.