The Russian dictator will have his new, greater Russia and will bomb and shell Ukraine into submission to get it. The man known for having critics poisoned with Novichok or thrown from windows has dropped all pretense of murders committed by his order being accidents.
Vladimir Putin “has ruthlessly fashioned a political system to eliminate dissent and reality itself [and] has the power to cause unfathomable human loss and misery,” Stephen Collinson writes at CNN. The rest of us watch with despair. There is little the West can do to stop him short of sparking a third world war that would compound the death, destruction and misery.
All this, and an unparalleled humanitarian crisis, because Putin wants the Cold War back. He hopes to rewind the joy the world witnessed three decades ago when the Berlin Wall fell and return Russia to global superpower status.
Collinson writes:
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.
If the coverage were in black and white, Collinson adds, it would be mistaken for newsreels from World War II.
In under a week, western countries have supplied Ukraine with “17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania” in scenes reminiscent of the Berlin airlift. Russian forces will eventually attempt to interdict land supply routes, but for now are focused on toppling Ukraine’s government.
In Russia itself, Putin has outlawed journalism. Russian police have jailed thousands of war protestors from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. Putin thought his invasion would go as quickly and easily as his invasion of Crimea. It is instead a bloody fiasco, and Ukrainians determined fighters. Now the dictator is not just fighting to hold territory in Ukraine, but to prevent being toppled by his own colleagues and citizens.
A year ago on this side of the Atlantic, Putin’s American Mini-Me inspired his antidemocratic rabble to attack and ransack the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Since failing, Republican-dominated legislatures across the land have passed laws restricting voting and allowing for the usurpation of the voters’ will under color of law. Donald Trump may be their champion, but Putin’s Russia inspires their dreams of rolling back post-war peace that expanded freedoms for racial, ethnic, and social minorities. Putin wants to recreate greater Russia. They want to recreate a white Christian homeland.
E.J. Dionne wonders if Putin’s war and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky might instead inspire a come-to-democracy moment:
This is already underway in Europe, where leaders of nationalist parties who once heaped praise on Putin are fleeing him in embarrassment. In France, the National Rally Party of far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has ordered its organizers to throw away 1.2 million pamphlets that featured Le Pen shaking hands with Putin. With French voting starting April 10, she doesn’t have a lot of time for her Putin cleansing operation.
In the United States, we can be grateful that Ukraine’s cause draws support across the political spectrum. Witness the applause when President Biden denounced Putin and embraced Zelensky and the Ukrainian people in his State of the Union speech. Especially well-received: Biden’s invocation of Zelensky’s promise that “light will win over darkness.”
That’s what friends of democracy are hoping for in the long run, despite Russia’s overwhelming advantage in firepower. But Zelensky should not be used as a source of cheap grace. We cannot ignore the shadows that have fallen across American democracy, cast largely by the power of an increasingly antidemocratic far right in the Republican Party.
Republican cravenness in the face of a party leader whose pretensions to petty dictator are even more laughable in the presence of a real one. But even now, Republicans seem beyond embarrassment over their submission to this emotionally stunted man-child and playground bully.
Dionne concludes:
With his criminal assault on Ukraine, Putin has reminded the world of where nationalist authoritarianism can lead and how costly a smash-mouth brand of politics that accentuates and exaggerates our differences can be. At the same time, the courage shown by Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians in standing up to brutality should give heart to all defenders of democracy and self-rule.
If America is lucky, Republicans, like Le Pen, will have too little time before November to memory-hole evidence of their efforts to do to the United States what Putin is doing before the world’s eyes in Russia.
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