Today marks two years since the moment that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of the sovereign and democratic country of Ukraine. Two years since his tanks rolled toward Kyiv, since his forces began to rain down ballistic missiles on its towns and cities, blocked its ports, land-mined its fertile fields, and began to kidnap its children.
It is the largest land battle on the continent of Europe since World War II. Ukraine has not asked America or the rest of Europe to fight its battle, it has asked for weapons and ammunition to do the fighting. For Ukraine it is a fight for their survival as a people, a culture, a country, a national identity.
As I predicted months before Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, at any given time, and across the breadth of history, Russia always has at least one of these excuses for its aggression:
- It is expanding the empire — from the reign of Catherine the Great to Putin’s obsession with the “glory” of the former Soviet bloc;
- It is uniting the Slavic peoples — Putin’s claim: that Russian minorities spread across eastern European countries are being persecuted and it is Russia’s role to “rescue” them and their lands;
- It is protecting and celebrating the Russian Orthodox Church — which became intertwined with the Communist Soviet bloc during the Cold War, and a convenient excuse for Soviet persecution of their Muslim minorities.
Since at least 2007 when Russia cyberattacked tiny Estonia, it has been doing the first two out of three. In 2008 Putin chose to invade the Republic of Georgia’s South Ossetia Region, has bullied Kazakhstan, seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, rolled into the Donbas, cyberattacked the U.S. in 2020, and now wages a hot war, supported at home by a massive government disinformation campaign. RT, the Russian news organization with which I used to have friends (whom I hosted for the U.S. State Department while a journalist in metro Denver and visited in Moscow in 2015), is the mouthpiece of Putin’s grip on Russia.
I have no fight with the Russian people, who can be strong, and kind, and decent. I have a big one with Putin and his murderous mafia mob and his insatiable thirst for power.
As the Republican-controlled Congress fails to take up the Senate’s funding package to help the Ukrainians continue the defense of their lives and their democracy, one could seriously wonder at the odd behavior of the GOP and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Why won’t he bring this to a vote, when those in Congress who can count votes say it would pass? Why are GOP legislators talking the Trump talk against Ukraine? Why does Trump continue to cozy up to Putin: Could it be as many have suspected, that Putin really does have something on Trump — or is it his authoritarian plan?
I believe that Trump’s insatiable thirst for power and control is not just his affinity for absolute chaos. I write this warning: If we don’t stop Putin by helping Ukraine, we will face something worse. We could already be seeing it in the Republican party. I call it star-spangled fascism.
For earlier Ark Valley Voice coverage of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Ukrainian fight for their homeland see these search results:
Feature photo courtesy of PBS News Hour.
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