Ukraine’s fate starkly underlines that even 20 years into the 21st century and despite the world’s vows to learn from history, a lone autocrat who has ruthlessly fashioned a political system to eliminate dissent and reality itself has the power to cause unfathomable human loss and misery.
Putin’s apparent willingness to bombard Ukraine into submission and clearly gratuitous targeting of the innocent civilians he insisted are Russian kin mean the humanitarian disaster is likely only just beginning. More than a million refugees have already fled their homes, according to the United Nations. Millions more will likely follow — as family lives, jobs and communities are shattered. That’s without the thousands of civilians sure to die in a prolonged Russian blitzkrieg.
In a Kyiv suburb on Sunday, two small children and two adults were obliterated by Russian shelling as they tried to flee. “A family died … in front of my eyes,” Oleksandr Markushyn, the mayor of Irpin, said. Meanwhile, the dead lay unburied in the smoldering wreckage of Kharkiv — a city of 1.5 million people, which was under a prolonged bombardment that served as a warning of Kyiv’s likely fate to come. Other Ukrainians were trapped by shocking Russian shelling of humanitarian corridors. Photos and video of Ukrainian men putting their families on evacuation trains and heading out to fight are reviving the trauma of a continent’s blood-soaked history.
If harrowing video of Ukraine was in black and white, it would be easy to mistake it for historic newsreel of World War II, the last time such scenes of devastation and cruelty were inflicted by one sovereign nation on another in Europe.
And it all flows from the mind of a Russian President apparently motivated by his own historic scars as a KGB officer in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Putin, seeking to redraw the post-Cold War map of Europe, has now engineered the counterpoint to those joyous scenes three decades later in his relentless bombardments designed to revive Russia as a superpower.
Ukraine’s future looks increasingly bleak
Massive Western sanctions might eventually whip up sufficient opposition inside Russia, where citizens are struggling under a collapsing economy, to topple Putin. Arms shipments to Ukraine from the West will certainly increase the cost to Moscow’s forces of the invasion and possible occupation.
“We are humans, and it’s your humanitarian duty to protect us, protect civilians, and you can do it,” Zelensky told the world.
“If you don’t do it, if you at least don’t give us airplanes so that we could defend ourselves, that the only conclusion remains — you also want us to be very slowly killed.”
Putin is still dictating events
“Vladimir Putin has, unfortunately, the capacity — with the sheer manpower that he has in Ukraine and the overmatch that he has — the ability to keep grinding things down, against incredibly resilient and courageous Ukrainians,” he told Jake Tapper.
Speaking from Moldova, a non-NATO US ally that fears it might be next in Putin’s firing line, Blinken seemed to be looking ahead to a post-invasion future in which a western-supported Ukrainian resistance might make Putin’s troops pay a heavy price.
“I think we have to be prepared for this to last for some time. But just winning a battle is not winning the war. Taking a city does not mean he’s taking the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people,” Blinken said. “On the contrary, he is destined to lose. The Ukrainian people have demonstrated that they will not allow themselves to be subjugated to Vladimir Putin or to Russia’s rule.”
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, also stressed the severity of Western sanctions but signaled that Zelensky’s plea for immediate EU membership was unlikely to be fast tracked.
“Nobody doubts that these brave Ukrainian people and the outstanding leadership of President Zelensky, all fighting for our common values, that they belong to our European family,” von der Leyen told Tapper. “And with the application, President Zelensky set a process in motion. This process will take some time.”
Putin’s personal crusade
The way that Putin has single-handedly pushed his country into war, crushed internal dissent and berated apparently bemused national security aides on television has underscored how much of the Ukraine war is a personal crusade.
“He is now engaged in a conflict where he’s either going to have a costly military victory, followed by a costly occupation that he can’t afford, or he’s going to get caught in a long-term military quagmire, at the same time as he’s facing a second front, which is an economy in free-fall in his own country,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said on “State of the Union.”
“So, the combination of these two things, I think, puts us in a very dangerous place. And that is, he’s going to have to do something, some escalation, some amplification of this crisis, in order to restore strategic balance, in his view, with the West. And I’m worried about what those things could be.”
So far, in the two-and-a-half weeks since the invasion, Putin has done nothing but escalate, despite a calm Western reaction to his nuclear provocations. It remains unclear how he would react to the possibility that Poland or Romania might provide fighter jets to Ukraine — a step that appears to drag two ex-Warsaw Pact nations closer to indirect conflict with Russia.
The record of the invasion, however, shows that regardless of how much pain new Western steps might inflict, they are unlikely to stop Putin playing out his obsession that Ukraine must never be allowed to join the West — even if that means blowing it and its people to smithereens.
As Zelensky put it in a new video message Sunday evening, “The aggressor’s audacity is a clear signal to the West that sanctions imposed against Russia are not enough.”
