(Dobbs) Why Must So Many Die? It's a Question Putin Has Never Answered
Yet there are nations that stand by his side.
It’s one thing for some foreign governments to support Russia’s motives in Ukraine. It’s quite another to support its methods. Which leads me to ask, how can any decent leader or any decent government stand up any more for Vladimir Putin, or even act as if it’s neutral in this fight?
Putin is a guy whose army, which outmans and outguns Ukraine’s and was expected to overrun the country in a cakewalk, has failed him. So he turned to other methods to have his way. Since October, he has unleashed nine nationwide blitzkriegs against Ukraine’s infrastructure, the most recent just yesterday. Each time, his forces have fired anywhere from seventy to a hundred missiles, from several directions at once, at critical facilities for electricity and sewage and water.
No corner of the country has been spared. As I write this there is only periodic power in parts of the capital, Kiev. In Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, there is no power at all.
And all this in temperatures in the teens.
Putin is a guy who is trying to scare and starve and freeze Ukraine’s people into submission. And it could work. Ukraine’s top military commander General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi told the British journal The Economist, “We are balancing on a fine line.” If the Russians eviscerate electrical power in the country, he said, “that is when soldiers’ wives and children start freezing. What kind of mood the fighters will be in, can you imagine?”
Putin is a guy who stood at a reception in the Kremlin a week ago for “Heroes of Russia”— clutching a flute of champagne— and commented on the attacks, as if Russia was the innocent victim of the war, “Yes, we are doing it. But who started it?” We know, of course, the answer. It started with Russian troops invading a sovereign next-door neighbor.
The date was February 24th, 2022.
Putin is a guy who gave a promotion to the military officer who, shortly after attacking Ukraine, was in charge of troops that entered the small city northwest of Kiev called Bucha, then when they withdrew, left more than 450 corpses strewn in the streets. The officer now is known as “the Butcher of Bucha.”
The European Union has added him to its blacklist of the worst of the worst in Russia, saying the troops under his command “killed, raped, and tortured.” Make no mistake, they weren’t killing Ukrainian soldiers. They were killing, raping, and torturing civilians.
Putin praised them all for “heroism and courage,” and promoted the bloodthirsty butcher who led them.
So how can any decent leader or any decent government show support any more for Putin?
Although most of the world’s nations—more than 130— have stood up against him, many have stood with him. What some say by way of an excuse is, they are dependent on Russia for everything from food to energy to weaponry for their own armies. I once did a story about Russia’s connections with India. Roughly two-thirds of India’s military equipment is built in, and maintained by, Russia.
Big powers like China and Turkey play both ends against the middle, which means they haven’t openly assisted Putin but haven’t harshly condemned him either. Am I crazy to think that at some point— and things have reached that point in Ukraine— morality should play a role in their alliances?
Nations like Eritrea, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, and Ukraine’s neighbor Belarus have explicitly supported Putin. That’s no surprise. Their leaders are as despotic and corrupt as he is.
And there are more. The Intelligence Unit of The Economist created this map just a month into Russia’s invasion.
As you see, the map includes plenty of nations on the African continent that are indebted to or dependent upon Russia for one thing or another, and if they aren’t proactively standing with Putin, they lean in that direction.
Maybe they need to reassess. Maybe they need to walk in the Ukrainians’ shoes and live through days with no water or power and nights with no light. Maybe they need to take shelter in the subways of the capital or sleep in the ruins of their homes. All in temperatures in the teens.
And maybe they need to read the story two days ago in The New York Times with the title, “A Russian Missile, a Sudden Death, and Unspeakable Grief.” It’s a personal piece about Dmytro Dudnyk, who had gone out to get a chocolate bar and was bringing it to his mother-in-law’s home near the city of Kherson as she started preparing lunch. But he only made it to the doorway. A rocket slammed into the yard and he never got across the threshold.
Multiply that by the nearly 7,000 Ukrainian non-combatants, civilians, who have died since February 24th, so far,
The Times in effect asked “Why?”, describing the village where Dmytro was killed as “a tiny settlement of little or no strategic value.” But “Why?” is a bigger question than that. For when Dmytro’s mother Irnya reached the house, she sobbed over the body of her son and asked, ““Why? Why? Why you?”
Vladimir Putin has told us why he invaded Ukraine. He has told us why he has made citizens suffer. But why have so many innocent inhabitants died as Dmytro Dudnyk did? That’s a question he has never answered. And apparently a question that some nations, those that haven’t stood up against him, haven’t asked.
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, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other 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, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Well said, Greg. Putin may believe that as long as he holds power and never leaves Russia he can--literally-- get away with murder.