(Dobbs) The Depth of Loss, The Unforeseeable Future. No One Knows. Anything.
After WW2, we thought we were past this. Now, no one knows.
Many news stories ought to end with “No one knows.” Certainly every story about this war.
No one knows the depth of loss still looming over Ukraine. How many more citizens will die? How many more cities will be crushed? No one knows how long Ukraine’s courageous but outgunned forces can hold off the Russians. Keir Giles of Britain’s Conflict Studies Research Centre says the odds aren’t good: “Russia has time on its side.” No one knows how far Vladimir Putin will go to get what he wants. No one knows, not for sure, what he wants.
All we know is, every time we think to ourselves, he just wouldn’t go that far, he does. Then farther.
Another thing no one knows is how far the West eventually might go to stop Putin. Beyond support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia, what will the West do if he ignores international treaties and, as some say has already happened, he uses phosphorus weapons in cities. Or worse, chemical weapons. Or worst of all, nuclear weapons?
And while there is talk about some day putting Putin on trial to answer for his atrocities, no one knows how.
From all appearances, he doesn’t even seem to care. Costly miscalculations, crippling sanctions, threats, isolation, none has changed his behavior.
Nor has the growing chorus of global condemnations. As Russia’s war machine murderously marauds through Ukraine, the rhetoric grows rougher— Putin has been called a terrorist, a war criminal, then on Tuesday, President Biden’s charge of genocide. Biden’s calling it what it is, because among other things, genocide means someone’s striving to destroy a national population, which is what Putin is doing as he tries, however futilely, to turn all Ukrainians into Russians, or as Biden put it, “to wipe out the idea of even being able to be Ukrainian.”
French President Emmanuel Macron criticized Biden for raising the heat, saying “an escalation of rhetoric” might escalate tensions. Monsieur le President, tensions already could not be higher. If we have learned nothing else in the 50 days of this war, we have learned that diplomatic niceties won’t move Putin. Ukraine’s President Zelensky applauded Biden, saying, “Calling things by their name is essential to stand up to evil.”
Amen.
No one knows about the indiscriminate impact on Ukrainian children, although it can only be awful. Some have seen horrors, some have been displaced, some have been orphaned, all have had their lives disrupted.
One mother in Mariupol, named Kristina, said of her scared and hungry children, “The fire was gone from their eyes.” Another named Oleksandra Makoviy hand-wrote vital information on the back of her diapered daughter Vira, age 2, so that “if my husband and I died, Vira could find who she is.”
And if a picture is worth a thousand words, 6-year-old Vlad Tanyuk’s face speaks for all the children of the nation. He was photographed by the Associated Press behind his home, beside the grave of his mother Maryna, who died of starvation during a siege near Kyiv.
President Zelensky this week said what everybody sees: Russia has destroyed “any basis of normal life.”
How can life be normal when time is on the side of the abuser, not the abused?
How can life be normal when there are scenes like this, with a caption in The New York Times saying, “Burying bodies in a cemetery in Bucha?”
Because cemeteries now are everywhere. They bury bodies behind the fences of home-grown gardens. They bury bodies in the grass medians of roads. They bury bodies in the plazas of public parks. They have too many bodies to bury only in cemeteries. They bury bodies in the nearest available space.
How can life be normal when no one even knows if Putin will stop with Ukraine? Apparently he hoped his invasion would be a warning to NATO not to expand, but now two historically neutral nations, Sweden and Finland, are talking about joining the military alliance, which ironically Putin precipitated. So he has just gone a step further, threatening to move nuclear weapons closer to his two neighbors and warning them, if they proceed, of “the most undesirable consequences.”
The prime minister of Estonia said last month, “Mr. Putin cannot win this war. He cannot even think he has won, or his appetite will grow.” His appetite for territory, his appetite for control. As the leader of a former Soviet republic, she would know better than most. But no one knows what would sate his appetite.
Centuries ago, Genghis Kahn and his Mongols swept across Asia, then Europe, leaving nothing but death and devastation in their path. Decades ago, Hitler tormented all of Europe with the same diabolical disdain. As Poland knows so well.
In the 21st Century we thought we were past this. Now, no one knows.
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 said, and it certainly needed to be said! Thank you