Two weeks into an unwarranted war against a sovereign democratic nation – an invasion dreamed about, created, and advanced by Russian President Vladimir Putin — the world is witnessing the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Ukrainian towns and cities. More than 2.3 million Ukrainian refugees have fled into Poland, Romania, Hungary, Moldova; more than one million of them are children.
It is, in the words of one refugee who reached the Polish border “Hell on earth. If you have peace, don’t take it for granted because it is so vulnerable.”
A tide of people fleeing the Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities and towns crowd metro and rail stations for any way to flee westward. Photo NewsBeyondDetroit
Only two weeks ago this nation of 45 million people was pursuing normal life; taking their children to school, going to work, grocery shopping, holding birthday parties, attending church, watching soccer matches, planning summer vacations, just as the people of other nations of the West were. In a matter of hours, this changed, with an unprovoked attack on a democratic sovereign nation, causing a refugee crisis not seen in Europe since World War II.
The indiscriminate bombing of residential areas, schools, homes for the elderly, orphanages, hospitals — this morning news of the bombing not just of more hospitals, but of a maternity hospital and a children’s hospital — is as horrifying as it is unbelievably brutal. Imagine, those who can, what it would be like to be in labor, and have the hospital around you bombed to the ground.
The Mariopul Deputy Mayor Sergi Orlov said this morning “they are telling the world we have lied about the bombing in the center of the city of the hospitals. One building doesn’t exist anymore. These were pregnant women, and doctors and children killed and injured.”
Russia isn’t denying the attack but is calling it “justified”. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov following the party line that Ukraine is just part of Russia, said: “the hospitals were in control of the rebel forces.”
Really.
In continuing barbaric behavior, Russian troops are firing on humanitarian corridors, killing entire families as they try to flee. In Mariopul, Orlov said that they tried for the sixth time this morning to set up an evacuation corridor for civilians of the once-500,000 population city. It failed. Some 100 residents tried to drive out in their cars and when they reached the Russian checkpoints they were fired upon. “This is genocide of our nation,” said Orlov. “I’m half Russian and half Ukrainian. Half of our dead are Russian-speaking.”
These are also war crimes, according to the International Tribunal. Putin doesn’t care.
That the war is not going as Putin envisioned is obvious; he planned a quick assault, welcomed by Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who would accept a puppet government. It is part of his two-fold goal to extend the Russian empire and unite ethnic Russians and Slavic people under one banner. Putin doesn’t just want the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine, he’s got his eye on the Russian-speaking Transnistria region of Moldova, on the southwestern edge of Ukraine. This is all part of what is called in Russian “Novorossiya” or “new Russia.”
An elderly lady is assisted crossing the Irpin River on the edge of Kyiv, after the bridge was destroyed. Photo courtesy of AP.
Ark Valley Voice has written about this in the past months, as we saw Putin position Russian troops at the borders of Ukraine and we have a familiarity with Putin’s long-standing goal of recreating the Russian empire.
Putin’s 40-mile-long convoy to Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv is stalled; out-of-gas, and demoralized. Russian casualties are mounting. The Ukrainians are fighting back; bravely, heroically, against all odds. They know what they are fighting for; their lives, their families, their homes, their freedom, and their country. The Russian conscripts do not.
According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), prevented from his quick victory, and filled with grievances against the West, Putin is angry and unpredictable, but his response is classic Russian; bomb the entirety of civilian areas, pulverize the resistance whether it be military or civilian, and conduct medieval-style siege warfare against Ukrainian cities and towns.
Why, readers may ask, is Putin doing this? The truth is this: Putin doesn’t want the people of Ukraine and he doesn’t care what he does with them. He wants the territory and its resources.
Russia has a history of taking territory while exterminating the population. They did it in Chechnya and the border regions of the North Caucasus, when between August 1999 to April 2000, they took the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
They did this in the Crimea when they took it from the Tartars in the 1700s, and then again in 1944, when Stalin deported about 200,000 Tatars to Siberia and Central Asia, calling the ethnic Muslims traitors to the USSR and bringing in ethnic Russians to replenish the workforce.
After Stalin’s death, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine in a move hailed as a “noble act on behalf of the Russian people.” On this act, Putin balances his claims to Crimea, and to the region’s Russian-speaking people.
Most recently, Russia joined the Syrian president in the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and hospitals in Syria, with no regard for human life. This week it was confirmed that Putin is inviting his Syrian pals to fight in Ukraine.
U.S. officials now say we are in a new and even more dangerous period of this war. The CIA in a report to the U.S. Congress yesterday said that Putin sees this as a war he cannot lose. If he believes this is a war he can’t lose, what does that mean?
As Ukraine fights the war against Russian and for western civilization, the people; especially the children bear the brunt of this.
As children stream out of Ukraine, many millions of them remain under attack, traumatized, starving, hiding in basements and metro stations without food, water, or heat. So far as we know, the Red Cross and UNICEF are the international aid groups that have been able to get at least some help to trapped Ukrainian civilians. UNICEF has delivered 62 tons of supplies to Ukraine to aid in helping the nation’s children, and it is not nearly enough.
“The only way to keep children safe is for the bombs to stop,” said UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, speaking from Ukraine on Wednesday morning.
So far NATO and the West have shown no appetite for enforcing a no-fly zone that would put them in direct conflict with Russian planes. To do so, say strategists, might mean World War III. But about this, the West is united: Putin has to be stopped. The question is — how?
Featured photo: A Ukrainian family flees the Russian invasion of their country. Russian troops are firing on humanitarian corridors out of Ukrainian towns and cities. Photo by Reuters.
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