Putin’s cruelty has crossed a line that demands strong international response
Unable to win on the battlefield and desperate to save face in the wake of growing protests both in Russia and around the world, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has turned to weaponizing the weather in his invasion of Ukraine. In so doing, he is revealing plans for a genocide that should not be ignored by the United States or our NATO allies.
In an act that can only be described as an attempt to freeze, starve and terrorize millions of civilians, Russia launched more than 85 missiles at power plants across Ukraine. The missiles will have little impact on Ukrainian military forces, but the lack of reliable power poses real threats to Ukrainian civilians.
Patients on dialysis and other treatments requiring running water are already on the verge of tragedy, as water pumps cannot operate without reliable power. Simultaneously, other hospital and nursing home patients who rely on stable electricity to power pumps and other machines are left to wonder how long backup generators will continue to run.
Outside of hospitals, winter is rapidly approaching and temperatures are dropping across Ukraine. Overnight temperatures in the northern Chernihiv Oblast region are expected to dip below 20 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend, with daytime highs rarely above freezing for the next four months. One of the five smallest oblasts (administrative regions) of Ukraine, Chernihiv Oblast is still home to nearly a million Ukrainians, all of whom are now facing the prospect of a winter without heat or running water.
Even those Ukrainians living in areas with milder temperatures or access to necessities like heat and water are facing the possibility of being cut off from modern tools of information, medicine, education and productivity. To use a modern colloquialism, they’re being bombed back to the pre-industrial, age and their lives are on the line.
Putin has targeted civilian populations and infrastructure from the very beginning of the war. He is a war criminal with a long history of waging war on civilians in Ukraine, Syria, Chechnya and others. His only reticence is motivated by fear of international retaliation.
As far as Putin is concerned, there are only two outcomes to the invasion: Ukrainian capitulation or complete destruction. Genocide was always on the table. Thankfully, the world and the heroic Ukrainians had another plan: defeat Putin. Rather than accept defeat, the Russian dictator simply developed a new strategy to wantonly murder his neighbors.
Even the tiny nation of Moldova is facing serious threats from rolling blackouts due to Putin’s reckless attack on the European power grid.
What this means for U.S. and NATO policy is for President Joe Biden and European leaders to decide, but at a minimum we should seek to officially declare Putin a war criminal — a designation he seems strangely afraid of.
Militarily, further action by the U.S. and our NATO allies should be informed by NATO’S history and purpose, with a keen eye toward the events that led to the formation of NATO in the first place. More than just an alliance, NATO was founded to provide collective security against the Soviet Union, rebuild European infrastructure and prevent the type of devastating destruction created by World War II from occurring again. Ukraine may not be a member of NATO, but right now, Russia is threatening to rain down exactly that type of destruction on Ukraine and its NATO neighbors, with civilians as the target of choice.
While Putin’s threats of deploying atomic weapons that would bring on nuclear winter should be heeded, so too should his threats of weaponizing the actual winter. Both pose an immediate threat to an unfathomable number of lives, and both must be taken seriously.
We wrote last month that Republican “America First” policies of appeasement toward Putin would sacrifice American national security. So does ignoring or downplaying Putin’s latest desperate attempt to turn the tide of a war he is losing by weaponizing the weather.
The U.S. and its NATO allies cannot afford to allow Putin to continue to target innocent civilians by destroying their basic means of subsistence. Decisive action to ratchet up the pressure on Russia, starting with an official declaration that Putin is a war criminal, must be taken to bolster our support of the Ukrainian military and stop further attacks on civilian infrastructure before it is too late.