Through a Ukraine Glass, Darkly
Freedom & decency attacked by a dictator
I realize it’s much too soon to guess how Russia’s vile invasion of Ukraine actually turns out, but that kind of logic has never stopped me yet. The presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, remarked on Twitter, early in the onslaught, that the front page of the New York Times looked like it was out of World War 2. The only difference I can see is that the photos are now in color.
The world has been surprised and heartened to see the unbelievably brave Ukrainian defense of their homeland against Putin’s brutal, yet inept, invaders. They’ve run out of fuel. They don’t know where they’re going. Ukrainian resistance fighters have been shocked at the rundown level of disrepair inside of captured Russian tanks.
We’ve all seen photos and cell phone videos of blown-out Russian military vehicles strewn along Ukrainian highways, perhaps with a couple of dead bodies, never to laugh again with their Russian families, too.
The Ukrainian Army’s Javelin anti-tank missiles have not been a joke, Comrade Putin. You sent your young Russian conscripts, ill-prepared and not wanting to fight their Ukrainian brothers, sisters, and grandparents, who look just like their own family back home, to do mayhem for nothing. Why in God’s name would they want to kill and die for an ancient Soviet fantasy they know nothing at all about?
The conscripts don’t even want to be there, Vlad! They don’t care about your KGB hallucination of regained Imperial Russian pretend glory. They just don’t. There are even reports that their commanders lied to them, saying they were going on a training mission, and then left them to be captured or die on some forgotten Ukrainian highway when they ran out of gas.
Great imperial glory, Vlad! What a man you are, sitting alone at the end of a 20-foot table, too scared to even sit next to your ministers, much less the President of France. Maybe you’re scared of COVID, maybe assassination by your own people. It’s weird, scary, and sad.
What’s sad for the world, though, is how one madman can enforce murderous obedience on so many. The conscripts, let’s face it, don’t really want to murder anyone, so Vlad, you’re relying on rockets, artillery, and bombs from the air to do your war crimes mostly, hitting apartment blocks and kids’ playgrounds with cluster bombs. What a hero you are, Vlad! You even hit a holocaust memorial.
So where does it go from here? The Russian economy is in freefall. Protests have broken out across the country. Arrests, censorship, misinformation, shutting down independent news outlets, all the Soviet tricks aren’t really going to work now. It’s 2022 now, Vlad. You’re no longer a dashing KGB officer in East Germany 40 years before. You can’t restore the Soviet Union or the Imperial Russian Empire of the Czars, either.
Who will overthrow you, Vlad: The military? The oligarchs? The people? Maybe everybody: It can be a group patriotic effort.
It does scare me, though. Today, Wednesday, March 2, 2022, it’s about 8 PM in Kyiv now. Multiple Ukrainian cities are being bombarded, but the huge Russian column heading to Kyiv appears to have stalled.
Russia’s main advance on the capital — a huge armoured column stretched for miles along the road to Kyiv — has been largely frozen in place for days, Western governments say. A senior U.S. defense official on Tuesday cited problems including shortages of food and fuel, and signs of flagging morale among Russian troops.
Will the Russian military and oligarchs force Putin into a ceasefire agreement with Zelenskyy? Will Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, also send troops, planes, and helicopters? (LOL — If he does give that order, the troops may advance on him, instead.)
These are dark, dark days, obscured by the vile smoke of human suffering, and all for absolutely nothing, just like that song from the Vietnam War.
