This week, the Russian army has taken aim at a Ukrainian train station where 4,000 people were waiting to evacuate. A rocket exploded, killing a number of the evacuees, as well as children. Painted on the remnants of the exploded missile, in Russian: “…….for the children”.
I know. I cannot believe it either. But it is true. President Zelensky’s face was a Greek masque of grief. This is too horrible, one more among a lengthening litany of evil spewed out by Vladimir Putin and his cohorts to destroy Ukraine. The horror of intentionally murdering children and small babies, just so a ruthless man can be “right” and retain the slavish support of his backers……is so extreme, the mind is numbed and cannot feel anything but the huge emotional wash of revulsion and pain. There really are people, and governments in this world who seem to have sprung from hell itself.
Meanwhile, the American President, similarly grieved and horrified, accuses Putin of war crimes, and says correctly that he should be quickly gone from the scene, unfit to govern anywhere. No argument. But his administration still has no plans to provide President Zelensky and his gallant army with any of the war planes and advanced weaponry they so desperately need for defense, and for which they have pleaded for weeks, nonstop. It comes down to simple fear. Fear that one of our planes, piloted by an American citizen, with no identifying marks on the fuselage, may wind up in an aerial war with one of Putin’s planes, which would move the arrow perhaps toward a nuclear explosion from Moscow.
That reasoning must now be called out as an evasive excuse. No American would pilot planes given and flown in defense of Ukraine, and of course the identifiers would be painted over, so the Ukrainian Air Force could use them. The “brand name” of where the planes come from is then an invisible nonfactor, since identifiable American-made weapons on the ground have been shooting at Russians for weeks. So – with Congress and the Department of Defense wishing to help Ukraine as much as possible, and send planes over to save the children and families that Putin is targeting,
WHO on earth is telling President Biden that we’d “better not” do that?? For one thing, since the First Lady’s Secret Service detail and several other SS agents have now been compromised for their naivete in allowing foreign agents to befriend them, the blame is up for grabs. But it cannot escape anyone’s notice that Putin and his enablers have continued and increased their terrorism because he knows, and they know - that Mr. Biden will do nothing beyond a certain level to help Ukraine. Yes, with American ground weapons, Ukraine can outshoot Putin’s henchmen, outfight them and still helplessly watch friends’ corpses pile up, but to deny that Ukraine is still in dire straits as Putin’s propaganda machine broadcasts lies is to quietly put one’s head under the pillow and wish this would all go away.
Indeed, Putin’s a hideous model of homo sapiens sapiens, but Putin’s evil is still mortal: it has an end, and so does he. To have opportunity to send rescue to a nation nobody expected would fight like this, and applaud from the cheap seats at home but do NOTHING further than palliative assistance to a nation presumed already lost, constitutes an evil that does NOT end, and we must answer for this. The blame for refusing to act with all one’s might to save a democratic country, modeled on the United States, in dire, daily peril is a moral evil that will never end, and shall surely, as time goes ‘round, be visited upon America, for our failure of nerve and resolve.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
