The Fate of Ukraine makes it clear that even 20 years into the 21st century and despite the world’s wishes to learn from history, a lone autocrat who ruthlessly fashioned a political system to eliminate dissent and the reality she itself has the power to cause unfathomable loss of life and misery.
In a Kiev suburb on Sunday, two young children and two adults were wiped out by Russian shelling as they tried to flee. “A family died…before my eyes,” said Irpin mayor Oleksandr Markushyn. 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 Kiev’s likely fate. Other Ukrainians have been trapped by shocking Russian bombings of humanitarian corridors. Photos and videos of Ukrainian men putting their families on evacuation trains and going into battle rekindle the trauma of a continent’s bloody history.
If the harrowing video from Ukraine were in black and white, it would be easy to confuse it with the historical newsreels of World War II, the last time such scenes of devastation and cruelty were inflicted by a sovereign nation on another in Europe.
And it all stems from the mind of a Russian president seemingly driven by his own historical scars as a KGB officer in East Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall. Putin, seeking to redraw the map of post-Cold War Europe, has now crafted the counterpoint to those joyful scenes three decades later in his relentless bombardments intended to revive Russia as a superpower.
Ukraine’s future looks increasingly bleak
Massive Western sanctions could eventually stir up enough opposition inside Russia, where citizens are struggling in a collapsing economy, to topple Putin. Arms shipments to Ukraine from the West will certainly increase the cost to Moscow’s forces of invasion and eventual occupation.
“We are humans, and it is your humanitarian duty to protect us, to protect civilians, and you can do that,” Zelensky told the world.
“If you don’t, if at least you don’t give us planes to defend ourselves with, the only conclusion remains – you also want us to be killed very slowly.”
Putin continues to dictate events
“Vladimir Putin has, unfortunately, the ability – with the manpower he has in Ukraine and the overreach he has – the ability to continue to crush things, against incredibly resilient and brave Ukrainians,” he said. he told Jake Tapper.
Speaking from Moldova, a non-NATO US ally fearful of being next in Putin’s line of fire, Blinken appears to envision a post-invasion future in which a Western-backed Ukrainian resistance could put a heavy toll on Putin’s troops.
“I think we have to be ready for this to last for a while. But winning a battle doesn’t mean winning the war. Taking a city doesn’t mean taking the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people,” he said. Blinken said. “On the contrary, he is destined to lose. The Ukrainian people have demonstrated that they will not allow themselves to be subjugated by Vladimir Putin or by Russia.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also pointed to the severity of Western sanctions, but signaled that Zelensky’s plea for immediate EU membership was unlikely to be accelerated.
“No one doubts that this brave Ukrainian people and the exceptional leadership of President Zelensky, all fighting for our common values, belong to our European family,” von der Leyen told Tapper. “And with the application, President Zelensky has started a process. This process will take some time.”
Putin’s Personal Crusade
The way Putin single-handedly pushed his country into war, crushed internal dissent and berated seemingly puzzled national security aides on TV underscored just how much the war in Ukraine is a personal crusade.
“He is now engaged in a conflict where either he is going to have a costly military victory, followed by a costly occupation that he cannot afford, or he is going to get caught in a long-term military quagmire, at the same time that he’s facing a second front, which is a plummeting economy in his own country,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said on “State of the Union.”
“So the combination of those two things, I think, puts us in a very dangerous position. And that’s that he’s going to have to do something, an escalation, an amplification of this crisis, in order to restore the strategic balance. , in his view, with the West. And I’m worried about what those things might be.
So far, in the two and a half weeks since the invasion, Putin has only escalated, despite a calm response from the West to his nuclear provocations. It remains unclear how he would react to the possibility of Poland or Romania supplying fighter jets to Ukraine – a step that appears to bring two ex-Warsaw Pact nations closer to indirect conflict with Russia. .
The toll of the invasion, however, shows that whatever pain the new Western measures might inflict, they are unlikely to stop Putin from playing out his obsession that Ukraine should never be allowed to join. the West – even if that means blasting it and its people to pieces.
As Zelensky said in a new video message on Sunday evening, “the audacity of the aggressor is a clear signal to the West that the sanctions imposed on Russia are not enough.”
