Putin is the unabashed lord of war crimes
When a 2,000-pound Russian missile slammed into a crowded shopping mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk on Monday — killing at least 18 people buying bathing suits or blenders — that was par for the course for Russia.
Only the day before, Sunday, a barrage of Russian missiles pounded a quiet civilian neighborhood in the center of Kyiv, smashing a high-rise apartment building.
The latest Russian slaughter came as the leaders of the world’s seven richest democracies, known as the G-7, were meeting in Krün, Germany — just ahead of a NATO summit in Madrid. Ukrainian officials think Russian President Vladimir Putin was sending a grim message to both groups that he can win this war, despite Western sanctions. Never mind how many innocent civilians Russia kills.
Neither angry rhetoric — nor more sanctions — will stop Russia’s war crimes in time to save Ukraine. How many Russian atrocities will it take to convince European leaders — and the Biden team — that there is only one way to halt Putin: Provide Ukraine with (still-absent) long-range heavy weapons to counter Putin’s bombs and missiles and push Russian invaders off its land.
Judging by the G-7 meeting, Washington and its allies don’t have the will, or the sense of urgency, to help Ukraine save itself and the West from Putin’s imperial lust.
At the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rightly called Putin’s Russia a “terrorist state,” listing scores of missiles unleashed on civilians in several Ukrainian cities, killing many women and children, just over the past four days.
Vladimir Putin is the unabashed lord of war crimes in the 21st century. Or as his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, put it last week, “Russia is not squeaky clean. Russia is what it is. And we are not ashamed of showing what we are.”
Of course, the Russians deny every atrocity, from the deliberate destruction of thousands of schools, hospitals and civilian high-rise apartment buildings across the country.
This is not the “normal” carnage of war. First, the battles in Ukraine are not the consequence of war, but of an unprovoked invasion.
More to the point, Putin is pursuing a deliberate strategy of laying waste to cities, towns, and villages using long-range artillery, bombs and rockets, since his troops are unable to defeat Ukrainian forces in close battle. He is trying to take over Ukraine chunk by chunk, at present in the eastern Donbas region, and in the south along the Black Sea.
Putin’s goal is to unilaterally annex these chunks into Russia, leaving an economically unviable rump Ukraine cut off from its agricultural and industrial heartlands, and its sea ports. Then he can regroup and try again to take Kyiv.
In the words of one of Putin’s acolytes, former Russian President Dimitry Medvedev: “Who said that in two years Ukraine will even exist on the world map?”
NATO allies nurture hopes that Putin can be coaxed somehow into negotiations. This is self-delusion. Putin has twisted and broken every agreement Russia has made with Ukraine.
That includes the 1994 Helsinki agreement by which Washington, London, and Moscow agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty if it gave up the nuclear weapons it had acquired during the days of the Soviet Union, and the so-called Minsk negotiating framework that Moscow agreed to after invading eastern Ukraine in 2014.
At the G-7 meeting, Zelenskyy appealed for more military support to push Russia out of newly conquered territory before winter, when the frozen ground will make it easier for Russian forces to move tanks, artillery, and supplies.
The West’s drip, drip, drip of heavy weapons — always too little and too late to prevent Putin’s war crimes — is helping to kill Ukraine slowly. NATO must decide whether it wants to permit Putin’s terrorist attacks to continue — or whether it will finally accelerate the shipments of weapons that Ukraine needs to win.