Are House Republicans Throwing Putin a Lifeline?

The moral bankruptcy of today's Republican Party and much of the "conservative news media" - not to mention a contempt for democracy - is increasing before our eyes. How else to explain the growing segment of the House Republican caucus that would end aid to Ukraine and in the process throw Vladimir Putin a lifeline notwithstanding the barbarism that Russia has targeted against Ukraine's civilian population.  War criminals are now admired in some GOP circles and most of the GOP remains loyal to Donald Trump who would happily suspend the U.S. Constitution and retaliate against anyone he dislikes or views as an opponent much in the way Putin has done in Russia (it's hard to keep count of the number of Russian oligarchs who have fallen from windows or down staircases).  A column in the Washington Post by George Will - with whom I frequently disagree - looks at what may be the House Republican's betrayal of democracy and aiding and abetting of Putin and the endless war crimes that continue to be committed against Ukrainian citizens. Such is the sickness and depravity of far too many in today's GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

In March 2022, three weeks into the war, the Russians dropped two 500-kilogram bombs on a theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, where hundreds of civilians, their homes having been destroyed, were sheltering. On the pavement on each side of the theater was painted in giant Cyrillic letters the Russian word for “children.” Perhaps 600 people died. The implausible idea that this was an accident became even more so 23 days later when, after a missile attack on refugees at a railway station, the words “for children” — up to 9 children were among the up to 63 people killed — were found painted on fragments of the missile.

A Russian military consistency has been barbarism: Remember the explosive toys Russians scattered to maim Afghan children who would thereafter be burdens for adults too distracted to fight. This is the Russia that some congressional Republicans would, by ending aid for Ukraine, rescue from the criminal misadventure Vladimir Putin began on Feb. 24, 2022.

Today, for a second year, Russia is engaged in what is called “weaponizing winter.” The aim, Petraeus and Roberts say, is to freeze “the Ukrainian people to death in their homes, barracks and foxholes, by destroying power stations, water treatment plants and electrical grids.” But neither Napoleon’s bedraggled troops on their 1,500-mile retreat from Moscow to Paris in 1812 nor Hitler’s ill-equipped legions, some of whose frozen eyelids fell off, were as used to extreme cold as Ukrainians are.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion,” write Petraeus and Roberts, “that by looting some museums and art galleries, and deliberately targeting others for destruction, the Russians were hoping to destroy Ukraine’s sense of cultural and historical identity.” Never mind that Putin’s war justification is that Ukraine has no distinct identity. And how should we categorize the barbarians’ would-be abettors on Capitol Hill?

Days into the war, Russians attacked Red Cross evacuation routes. Later they would use thermobaric weapons, a vacuum bomb with two charges, as Petraeus and Roberts explain: “The first disperses fuel into the air and the second ignites it, sucking all the oxygen out of people’s lungs.” It was a notable barbarity, “especially against civilians trapped in enclosed spaces.”

Russia’s war crimes — targeting civilians, kidnapping children, mass executions, torture, rape — are not incidental to, they are premeditated tactics in, the war that some congressional Republicans seem eager to help Putin win. He knows the help he needs. “If Western defense supplies are terminated tomorrow,” Putin said on Oct. 5, “Ukraine will have a week left to live as it runs out of ammunition.”

This blithe acknowledgment that killing Ukraine is his intention came as some congressional Republicans were intensifying their opposition to aiding Ukraine. Their canine obedience to Donald Trump is congruent with his vow that if reelected he will end the war “in 24 hours.” These Republicans, and the constituents to whom they pander, are not less odious than the congressional and campus progressives “contextualizing” (a progressive synonym for “justifying”) Hamas’s sadism.

Today, during the biggest European war since then [WWII], many Americans seem so indifferent to its outcome that they are prepared to decide the outcome by abandoning the bleeding victim with a low, dishonest shrug.