A headline from the Associated Press yesterday: “Dead boy pulled from rubble of latest Russian hit on Ukraine.” (Article here.) Routinely, men, women, and children in Ukraine are killed by Russian forces. I wonder whether Russian people in general appreciate the sheer asymmetry of this war.
• From the Kyiv Independent on Friday: “Russia fired 76 missiles at Ukraine from the Caspian and Black seas in the morning, killing at least three civilians and hitting scores of energy infrastructure sites in a coordinated attack . . .” (Go here.)
From the magazine Business Ukraine last Wednesday: “Russia has carried out a targeted airstrike on the central square of the recently liberated Ukrainian city Kherson. This attack has no obvious military value and appears aimed purely to inflict maximum terror on the civilian population.” (Go here.)
What is Russia if not a terror-state? Hasn’t it proven itself such a state, redundantly?
• Another headline from the AP: “Ukrainians hid orphaned children from Russian deportation.” (Article here.)
• A colleague of mine was noting a phenomenon of our time: Those who oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and want to help the Ukrainians resist it, are often called “warmongers.” Personally, I save the word “Orwellian” for special and truly apt occasions. This is one.
• Grigory Kochenov was a Russian, age 41. He was the creative director at an IT company. He had also criticized the Ukraine war. When police raided his apartment, Kochenov, oops, fell from the balcony. They are such klutzes, those Putin critics. Always falling down stairs and such. Getting themselves poisoned. Very klutzy.
• General Valerii Zaluzhnyi is the head of Ukraine’s armed forces. In an interview with The Economist, he said he expected the Russians to try again to take Kyiv. I imagine that’s right.
• In Kyiv’s main square, people have put up a Christmas tree, lighted in the national colors, blue and yellow. Bless these people as they try to pull through: as they try to save their lives, their country, their freedom. Many people are indifferent to their fate, and many are hostile to it. Yet they have supporters, worldwide, all the same.
• A headline: “US poised to approve Patriot missile battery for Ukraine.” (Article here.) I think of Charles Krauthammer, and what he said about Israel: The survival of the country depends on two things: the will of the people to survive and the support of the United States. I believe the same is true of Ukraine.
• Of note: “Ukrainian forces struck the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol on Saturday, authorities said, signaling the importance of longer-range artillery in the next phase of Ukraine’s campaign to recapture land in the south of the country.” (For this report, go here.)
• Consider: “Ukraine’s finance minister says crucial Western financial support is ‘not charity’ but ‘self-preservation’ in the fight to defend democracy . . .” (Article here.)
Also to consider is an article by Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of Estonia: “No Peace on Putin’s Terms: Why Russia Must Be Pushed Out of Ukraine.” She writes, “Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has never been solely about Ukraine. It is also about the international rules-based order and the security architecture of Europe.”
Is she right? And is the Ukrainian finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, also right? I think they are. This is the subject of great debate, of course, in the Free World, including the United States, and especially on our right. I would not have predicted this, some years ago.
I will tell you who agrees with Prime Minister Kallas and Mr. Marchenko: Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. Last March, he said, “This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order. The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.”
• Visegrád 24 circulates a video and says, “The Polish Legion fighting in Ukraine against the Russian Army. Just like in 1920 . . .” As an American, I can’t help thinking of Kościuszko.
• Speaking of Poles, Radek Sikorski asks, Why is it so important to commemorate the Holodomor? (This vast and murderous crime is also known as the “Terror-Famine.”) The answer, he says, is that “Putin is trying to do the same thing again — namely, to reduce the Ukrainian nation to the status of Russian folklore and deny Ukraine the right to exist as a separate nation.”
• A headline: “Donors pledge millions to get Ukraine through winter, bombs.” (Article here.) There is goodness in people (as well as self-interest). Speaking of goodness in people: “Pope Francis called on December 14 for a ‘humble’ Christmas this year, with savings from reduced spending on gifts donated to help the ‘suffering people of Ukraine.’”
I have quoted from this report. Accompanying it is a picture, captioned “Pope Francis broke down while speaking about Ukraine during a prayer service in Rome on December 8.”
• The Ukrainians remind me of the Israelis, in that ordinary people — the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker — take up arms to defend their country. Consider this report, out of Kherson:
For Vladyslav Nedostup, the eight-month occupation of his native city has receded swiftly into the past since the last Russian soldier escaped Kherson on a speedboat in early November, and already seems distant and unreal.
But that chunk of time has left him irrevocably changed: Still a chubby, mild-mannered sociology graduate, he is now also a person who has killed other people — five Russian soldiers, he said sitting in a bar in the liberated city days after the Russian retreat.
“If a year ago somebody told me that I would become a partisan or kill somebody — I’d laugh at them,” he said. “But here we are.”
• The above report is from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. This one is from the AP: “‘Do something:’ Ukraine works to heal soldiers’ mental scars.” This will be a momentous project, for decades.
• Here is a report from the Kyiv Independent. I used to read about such matters in World War II histories. Now I read about them in the newspaper. See whether you know what I mean.
Housed in a grand imperial building with a view out onto the Dnipro River, the Kherson Fine Arts Museum once hosted one of the richest collections in all of Ukraine.
As with the rest of Kherson, which had its electricity infrastructure destroyed by withdrawing Russian forces in early November, the halls of the museum are now cold and dark.
Far more tragically, the Kherson Fine Arts Museum has been emptied of all its works by Russian officials. Of the over 14,000 works in its collection, barely anything remains. Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson was a well-planned operation, a key component of which was the looting of anything deemed to be of financial or cultural value. The Russian campaign of theft was comprehensive and wide ranging . . .
I know there are many, many Russians who would be ashamed of this, if they knew about it.
• Some Ukrainian children have been sent to the West, including to Wales — where these Ukrainian kids are learning the daunting language of that land (and I don’t mean English). For a report, a video, go here. The turbulence of the world can be astonishing, as people are “tempest-tost.”
• Writes Eliot A. Cohen, “Russia’s attack on Ukraine is no normal power grab. And that is why so many experts have misunderstood it.” I recommend that article, highly: here.
• George F. Will has written a column headed “Slinking away from aiding Ukraine would be a major strategic error.” He concludes his column as follows: “. . . Congress should understand that Ukraine’s success in this major war could be crucial to resuming the decline in the incidence of such wars. Certainly Beijing, salivating for Taiwan, is watching for signs of U.S. wobbliness regarding Ukraine.”
Yes. You perhaps know some people whose mindset is this: Taiwan, good. Ukraine, bad. Taiwan, important. Ukraine, unimportant. A lot of these people admire Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin, to one degree or another, and despise the Ukrainians and their desire to be free and independent, rather than wrenched back into the Russian or Soviet empire.
In any event, do you know who, as a rule, is absolutely clear on the connection between Ukraine and Taiwan? The Taiwanese.
I will quote from a piece I wrote last April:
In Taiwan, they are also looking on with special concern. The vice president, Lai Ching-te, said, “The people and government of Taiwan stand with Ukraine. The principle of self-determination cannot be erased by brute force.” The president, Tsai Ing-wen, tweeted out photos of Taiwanese cities, lit up with the colors of the Ukrainian flag. “Our country & people #StandWithUkraine against Russian aggression,” she wrote.
We are witnessing “fateful, epoch-making moments in history,” to borrow language from Sergey Lavrov — and we are witnessing them whether we want to do so or not.