(Dobbs) Don't Lose Focus On Ukraine. It Could Come Back To Haunt Us.
This is where the world's rules are being decided.
It was a dark joke after World War II that every Nazi captured by the Allied forces had an innocent explanation for his military service: “I was only driving an ambulance at the Russian front.”
Well now, with the war in Ukraine, Russia is turning that on its end. To hear Russia tell it, they’re the ones who’re doing nothing wrong. It’s Russia that’s saying, “I was only driving an ambulance at the Ukrainian front.”
That’s pretty much what you get in a 25-minute interview I just watched with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
He was questioned by the BBC’s Russia Editor, Steve Rosenberg, in Moscow.
For those 25 minutes, Lavrov restated the bromides time after time with a straight face.
— “We didn’t invade Ukraine, we declared a special military operation.”
— “We didn’t attack anyone. Russians were attacked in Ukraine.”
— “The Kyiv regime is shelling its own citizens.”
— “They’re bombing their own citizens.”
— Of Russian missiles and shells that destroyed a market, a maternity hospital, a train station, and so much more: “Fake news spread by the West.”
— Of the Ukrainian government, led by a president who lost Jewish family in the Holocaust: an “openly neo-Nazi regime.”
— Of the massacre in the city of Bucha, where a thousand civilian corpses were found, some with their hands bound behind their backs and shot at point-blank range: a “staged tragedy.”
It is chilling to hear. Because the man does a full Putin. Maybe he has simply drunk Putin’s Kool-Aid. Or maybe he is doing the only thing that a man in his position can do because, as I’ve seen in other authoritarian states, leaders don’t quietly retire to spend their remaining days relaxing behind a white picket fence. Either they stay at the peak of the pyramid, or they go into exile, or jail, or worse. And to stay on top, a lackey like Lavrov has to channel his boss, Putin.
Which means denying the death and destruction they’ve produced. And blaming it instead on their victims.
The leaders of a nation that has taken its invasion right out of Hitler’s playbook— murdering civilians, mutilating cities— call their quarry the Nazis.
But here’s the counterpoint. In a story this week by The Associated Press, a Ukrainian soldier tells of “torched forests and cities burned to the ground. Colleagues with severed limbs. Bombardments so relentless the only option is to lie in a trench, wait and pray.” Another describes his city, once home to a hundred thousand people, as “a burnt down desert.”
Yet in the ultimate epitome of hypocrisy, it’s Russia saying the Ukrainians are the Nazis.
Genocide and deception were part of Hitler’s playbook, and now they’re part of Putin’s. Not that he blanches at either. He claimed Thursday on government-run TV that the West is to blame for “encouraging and justifying genocide.”
What’s so sad is, as our focus is increasingly diverted by other issues— from mass shootings to inflation to insurrection hearings to the Supreme Court— Lavrov and Putin and the Russian state might be getting away with it.
That’s not to say that the resolve of Western leaders has flagged— they continue to do what they can to fortify Ukraine’s military— but the attention of Western citizens has ebbed and, as they focus on issues closer to their own homes, their leaders cannot safely ignore them.
Which could mean, eventually they ignore the ongoing appeals for help from Ukraine.
That would be a pity. The only thing that has changed since Putin pushed into Ukraine is that after the first few months of mishaps, Russia has figured out how to carve out what it wants. Its war has killed untold thousands, uprooted millions, destroyed countless buildings, and rained ruin on Ukraine’s economy. The director of U.S. intelligence told a conference last week that this war will likely become a stalemate, a “grinding struggle” as she put it, but to the sociopath who runs Russia’s war, evidently that’s of little concern. Putin made that clear yesterday when he said, the war can go on “until the last Ukrainian is left standing.” And if Ukraine fights on to expel Russia from its land? “Let them try.”
Yet the Ukrainians are still standing. President Zelensky repeated yesterday his position since the beginning: "Ukrainians are not ready to give away their land, to accept that these territories belong to Russia. This is our land.”
Or to take it down to the level of the soldiers in the trenches, one teacher-turned-warrior put it this way in that Associated Press story: “Who will defend my home and my family, if it is not me?”
Hopefully, the West will continue to help him and his countrymen save their families and defend their homes. Because as Zelensky told CNN, “It is on the battlefields in Ukraine that the future rules of this world are being decided.” Otherwise, the rules already are decided, and Russia wins.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
well done!! tell all your subscribers to "share it" with the whitehouse. Neither we, nor our allies, nor nato are protecting democracy. john
Yes, good caution. I think the western governments are still atrongly committed-even if citizens are onto the next crisis.