(Dobbs) I Thought I'd Seen It All. Putin Proves Me Wrong
It's death and destruction on a level I never would have imagined.
I used to think I’d seen it all.
In my career, I’ve been detained in many places, arrested in some, jailed a few times, and deported from dictatorships. I’ve been beaten, shot at, even chased by a gang with machetes. I’ve been shelled by Iranian artillery and strafed by Soviet helicopters. I’ve had machine-guns held to my temple by boys too young to grow a beard, and worst of all, seen journalist friends killed close to me, twice right next to me. I’ve covered wars and revolutions and monstrous terrorist acts.
I used to think… in modern warfare, in modern times… I’d seen it all.
Not any more.
The Russian war on Ukraine exceeds all that. Citizens are displaced with indifference. Lives and livelihoods, hospitals and neighborhoods, even life’s basics like food and heat and water, are destroyed without pity. Ukraine’s president Zelinsky yesterday mournfully described the bomb-battered southern city of Mariupol as "just ruins like armageddon.” It is as if Vladimir Putin wants to bomb its people back to the stone age. The Russian assault is indiscriminate on a level I never would have imagined.
In the conflicts I covered, those who were brutalized were members of the wrong ethnic group, the wrong religious group, the wrong tribe. In Ukraine, the only sin for which people are being punished is that they are Ukrainians.
Not that it’s the first place I’ve seen where cities have been leveled and citizens have suffered. But it’s different than the rest.
In Beirut during the civil war, buildings caught in the crossfire were reduced to rubble.
The difference today in Ukraine is, they are targeted. In Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, the Mujahideen stopped to bury their dead. In Ukraine, it’s sometimes not safe enough to collect the bodies, so they are left, of necessity, on the street, then buried in the nearest empty space.
In Belfast during The Troubles, people were blown up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The difference for Ukrainians today is, there is no safe place to hide. Every place is the wrong place.
One of the last international reporters in Mariupol, Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, spoke for all the sad souls whose lives have been forever upended. “I… witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in.”
Even as one who has seen so much myself, I never would have imagined.
Nor would Ukrainians, who must waken each night from their unsettled sleep asking, Why us? What did we do to deserve this?
The answer is, they sided with democracy. They supported democracy, which is antithetical to the doctrines of a dictator. And which might help explain, in fact, why parts of the world don’t see what we see, why parts of the world applaud the aggressor and not them.
What we see are harmless citizens, non-combatants, dying from relentless bombardments. What we see is the ungodly man behind the attacks, rightly branded by President Biden as a “murderous dictator.” We see a scenario of good and evil. We see war crimes.
But condemnation is not universal.
The lead paragraph of a recent piece in The New York Times read this way: “To an independent filmmaker in Hanoi, Vietnam, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is a ‘wise leader.’ In Rio de Janeiro, a former restaurant owner said he was convinced that Ukraine had hired actors to fake war injuries. And a 27-year-old doctor living near Nairobi in Kenya questioned how Americans could be outraged over the Russian invasion when ‘for so long, they had a monopoly over anarchy’.”
Less shocking but more unsettling is that other autocrats, threatened by a democracy movement like Ukraine’s, side with Russia’s ruthless ruler. That’s because in their societies, you’re either at the top of the heap or the bottom. American leaders leave office and build presidential libraries, make millions giving speeches, and metaphorically at least, live in peace behind a white picket fence. What despots understand is, if forced from the top of the pyramid, no lower level is safe. There is no picket fence to protect them.
So they hold on, no matter the cost.
Vladimir Putin, whose own life can be on the line, probably will finish what he started, and continue to wage a war I never would have imagined. A war we never would have imagined.
What I saw over those years of my career was the anguishing antithesis of child’s play. Yet it didn’t bear the heart-breaking brutality of Putin’s playbook. I thought I’d seen it all, but with the unrivaled sorrow of Ukraine, I hadn’t.
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.