Bucha |
The diplomatist’s credo in Voltaire’s Candide: “Well, my dear Pangloss,” Candide said to them, “when you were hanged, dissected, whipped, and tugging at the oar, did you continue to think that everything in this world happens for the best?”
“I have always abided
by my first opinion,” answered Panglos, “for after all, I am a philosopher,
and it would not become me to retract my sentiments.”
“Brutal” is one way to describe President of Russia Vladimir
Putin’s continuing efforts to occupy Ukraine.
This from a recent AP
report: “On March 15, a friend of the dead man was approached by
Russians demanding his documents. They’re at home, he said. On the way there,
they passed the grave. He pointed it out. The next moment, witness Iryna
Kolysnik says, the soldiers shot him.”
Apparently, Russian soldiers do not appreciate the black humor
that has found its dark seat in the hearts of war ravaged Ukrainians.
“’He was talking too much,’ one said, adding an expletive.”
The British Sun
reports: “Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region, said thousands
of people had been at the station at the time the rockets struck.
“The Rashists (Russian fascists) knew very well where they
were aiming and what they wanted: they wanted to sow panic and fear, they
wanted to take as many civilians as possible,’ he said.”
President Joe Biden has described Putin’s brutalization of
the Ukrainian civilian population as “war crimes.” But even now it is doubtful
whether Biden, committed to a “diplomatic” solution concerning Putin’s “war
crimes” activity in Ukraine, is willing to maintain his sanctions until the
last Russian soldier has left the bomb cratered country and the borders of
Ukraine have been restored to its condition before “Putin The Great” had
invaded the country.
“Russia has already failed in its initial war,” Biden said recently, and added,
“We’re going to stifle Russia’s ability to grow in years to come
[emphasis mine],” which seems to suggest
that sanctions will perhaps remain beyond the point when, God and the U.S.
Congress willing, Ukraine has been supplied with sufficient deterrent power to
drive the last Russian soldier from the country.
Sufficient deterrent power, Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal said both before and
after his trip to Poland, should include a supply of planes to Ukraine, so that
the country might better defend itself from a Russian military that controls
the skies over Ukrainian air space.
Those favoring a diplomatic solution to the war on
Ukraine – prepositions are important -- by a military unchallenged in the air
have been primed by diplomats to leave a face-saving escape corridor for Putin,
the butcher of Bucha, so that he will not, as he and Moscow have repeatedly
imitated, reign nuclear weapons on those presumptuous enough to intervene
successfully and militarily to compromise his conquest plans.
At this point even the diplomats are no longer pretending
they can hardly guess what Putin’s plans are. Western states no longer have the
luxury of doubt. Putin plans to occupy permanently the Donbas region of
Ukraine, a military strategy that will provide him with a land bridge
connecting Russia with Crimea, earlier annexed by the Moscow military geniuses
that so far have failed in occupying Kyiv, arresting President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and carting off
his tortured carcass to Moscow where it can be displayed triumphantly by Putin in
Red Square.
Putin has reacted to the West’s diplomatic entente with
undisguised contempt. Proof of his contempt is evident in his propagandistic
lies and the utter destruction of major cities in Ukraine. Putin claims that
Ukraine is “not even a country,” but rather an appendage of Russia – like
Crimea. And his war crimes are prosecutable.
Even CNN has jumped aboard the “war
crimes” float: “The evidence of apparent atrocities in Bucha came as Human
Rights Watch (HRW) announced it had documented allegations of war crimes in the
occupied areas of the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Kharkiv regions… ‘The cases we documented amount to
unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians,’ Hugh
Williamson, HRW's Europe and Central Asia director, said in the statement. ‘Rape,
murder, and other violent acts against people in the Russian forces' custody
should be investigated as war crimes.’"
Putin The Great -- now looking East towards China rather
than West towards diplomatists in Washington DC – knows, as every Czar and tin
pot dictator the world over has always known, that force majeure will always trump diplomacy in the short run. And “in
the long run,” as economist John
Maynard Keynes has said gloomily “we are all dead.”
The dead dotting the
streets in Bucha will not protest the indignities of a Russian occupation. And
in the long run outrage will disappear; the diplomacy of Russian victors
will triumph; Germany and the United States once again will be able to power
its long term indifference to “war crimes” with Russian oil; sanctions will
disappear; Russian troops will occupy the Donetsk region of Ukraine, as earlier
they had occupied and annexed Crimea; the blood of Ukrainians will continue to
purchase Western timidity, and life will go on, the West ever believing, along
with Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, that all difficulties can be
diplomatically surmounted in this “the best of all possible worlds.”
Comments