Tuesday, April 05, 2022
Are We Witnessing a Turning Point in History?
Five weeks ago, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a fateful speech in reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His government’s decision to, among other things, inject more than $100 billion into the country’s military and deliver lethal support to Kyiv marked a sweeping policy shift away from decades of constitutional pacifism that had kept Germany often on the sidelines of major conflicts.
It was, in the words of Scholz and his allies, a “Zeitenwende” — a turning point in history, a watershed moment made all the more pronounced by the German language’s knack for sprawling, declarative nouns.
German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said that Germany “cannot look away or stand apart,” and that this “Zeitenwende cannot be had for free.” After clinging to European visions of perpetual peace, war in the heart of the continent had shaken Germany’s cautious political establishment into action.
For many on both sides of the Atlantic, the battles in Ukraine may even mark something more stark — a “Zeitenbruch,” as coined by former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, which is a rupture in history, the closing of one age and the entry into another marked by even deeper uncertainty and great power rivalry.
In Washington, let alone the capitals of Western Europe, there’s a palpable change in atmosphere. The heroism of Ukraine’s defenders and the reported atrocities carried out by Russian forces have fired the imaginations of the Beltway class, which after years of quagmire and stalemate in the Middle East now has a far more morally clear and potentially winnable conflict to get behind.
American flags seldom fly in my left-leaning Washington neighborhood, but a brief Sunday stroll turned up myriad iterations of Ukraine’s blue-yellow bars hanging from fences and doorways. European diplomats in the city speak of an unprecedented solidarity among NATO allies and hail the Biden administration’s leadership in rallying support for Ukraine and sweeping sanctions on Russia. The West as a geopolitical entity has rarely been more united as a bloc and more coherent as a political project.
For some U.S. commentators, Ukraine is not just ground zero in a confrontation with the Kremlin, but the battlefield for the future of liberalism. “If [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is successful in undermining Ukrainian independence and democracy, the world will return to an era of aggressive and intolerant nationalism reminiscent of the early twentieth century,” warned political theorist Francis Fukuyama. “The United States will not be immune from this trend, as populists such as [Donald] Trump aspire to replicate Putin’s authoritarian ways.”
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum located in Ukraine the launchpad for an ever-expanding ideological war against illiberal autocracy. “Many American politicians would understandably prefer to focus on the long-term competition with China,” she wrote. “But as long as Russia is ruled by Putin, then Russia is at war with us too. So are Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary, and potentially many others.”
Yet, for many outside the West, the moment is less a turning point than a reminder of the past. Critics point to a long tradition of Western double standards on the world stage. The Russian invasion elicited a Western response that was swift and all-encompassing — Ukrainian refugees were welcomed, while governments imposed crippling sanctions on Russia for its violation of international law. Where was such action in other contexts, they argue, including those where the United States and allies were complicit in ruinous wars and occupations?
“We have seen every means we were told could not be activated for over 70 years deployed in less than seven days,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said at a security conference in Turkey in March. “Amazing hypocrisy.”
A delivery driver in Baghdad recently told the Associated Press that Iraqi insurgency against U.S. troops was as justified as Ukrainian resistance to Russian forces.
In the West, the fight over Ukraine is seen with almost Churchillian clarity. Elsewhere — particularly in countries that have reasons to doubt Winston Churchill and Western moralism — suspicion and distrust endures. “You never know when the U.S. will spring a nasty surprise on you and start to look at you negatively, which is something the world’s only Hindu-majority country has to worry about,” right-wing Indian journalist Raghavan Jagannathan told my colleague Gerry Shih. “You have an Abrahamic past. There’s a strong binary of, ‘You’re right or wrong, you’re with us or against us.’ ”
Scholz may have initiated a sea-change in German defense policy but has so far resisted calls for wholesale bans on imports of Russian natural gas and oil, which fill the Kremlin’s coffers yet also buttress much of the German economy.
“The Zeitenwende speech broke some taboos in German foreign policy, but so far these are only enough to soothe the German conscience,” wrote Berlin-based analyst Oxana Schmies. “Economic opportunism has not yet been overcome either. Strategic thinking has yet to establish itself in the body politic.”
“The problem is that no one knows how long the Zeitenwende will actually last because now comes the hard part,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “If the war starts to ramp down, I worry that there will be a real desire for things to go back to how they were, and that’s just not possible.”
Monday, April 04, 2022
Evidence of Russian Atrocities Grows
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin got one thing right: His invasion did lead to Ukrainian civilians greeting troops as liberators. Only they weren’t greeting Russian troops. They were greeting the Ukrainian troops who in recent days have entered villages around Kyiv that had been occupied by the Russians for more than a month.
The Ukrainian government proclaimed on Saturday that all of the Kyiv administrative region had been freed of Russian control. It was as if the Free French forces were entering Paris in 1944.
The reason civilians were so jubilant to be liberated has become grimly apparent. Sickening pictures from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, show the corpses of residents who had been bound, shot and left by the side of the road. The mayor of Bucha said that some 270 people had been found in two mass graves and another 40 were lying dead in the streets.
The atrocities in Bucha were no aberration. There is ample evidence of other war crimes by Russian troops across Ukraine. Human Rights Watch has documented Russian troops committing rape, summary execution and looting.
In Mariupol, the Russians bombarded a theater where civilians were sheltering. The word “CHILDREN” was printed in Russian in huge white letters outside. An effort to discourage aerial attack may have actually invited it. Some 300 people in the building were reported killed by Russian bombs on March 16.
But it is one thing to kill civilians with bombs and missiles. It is another to kill them with bullets to the back of the head. This is a different level of evil — the kind of organized atrocity that Europe has not seen since the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Russia’s “anti-Nazi” operation has led Russian troops to act precisely as the Nazis once did. If there is any justice in the world, Russian war criminals, from Putin on down, will someday face the kind of justice that the Nazis received at Nuremberg.
This, sadly, is the Russian way of war. It is how Putin’s forces fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II. They commit war crimes to terrorize the population into surrender. But it hasn’t worked in Ukraine. Russia’s savagery has simply caused the Ukrainians to resist all the harder because they know they are fighting not just for their freedom but for their very survival.
In the past week, the invaders have been driven out of the Kyiv area, with crippling losses. The Russians have lost, according to open-source reporting, at least 400 tanks and, according to the State Department, at least 10,000 troops; by a standard military metric, that means another 30,000 Russian soldiers may have been wounded. So roughly a fourth of the initial Russian assault force — which included Putin’s best troops — is probably out of action.
Having failed in their initial objective of regime change, the Russians are trying to reorganize their battered and depleted forces to capture the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. This would have been much easier to do at the outset of the war, without those heavy losses. Now the Russians will be hard-put to encircle the Ukrainian forces in the east, which have been fighting Russian-backed separatists since 2014.
How will this war end? No one can yet say. The Ukrainians are rightly enraged by Russian atrocities and will be less likely to make territorial compromises with the invaders, knowing that to do so would be to consign their fellow citizens to a Stalinist hell. But as a former Putin adviser says, “Russia cannot afford to ‘lose,’ so we need a kind of a victory.”
The 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia, should remind us that it is possible to make peace even with war criminals — but only after they have been defeated. There is no indication yet that Putin feels he has lost this war. That is why it is so essential that Russia suffer a decisive defeat in the Donbas.
The West must continue to ramp up aid to Ukraine, providing it with the kind of heavy combat systems needed to drive back the Russians in the south and east as they have already done in the north. It is good to see the Biden administration getting ready to transfer tanks to Ukraine.
Other weapons, including artillery, fighter aircraft and long-range air defense systems, must follow. The only way to achieve peace at this point is not by negotiating with the Russians but by defeating them.
As for the Europeans: It is time, finally, to stop all oil and gas purchases from Russia. Germany, in particular, cannot continue paying blood money that subsidizes today’s version of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. Enough is enough.
Sunday, April 03, 2022
Ex-U.N. Prosecutor: Issue Global Arrest Warrant for Putin
With Russian forces withdrawing in some areas of Ukraine, horrors are being revealed including murdered civilians and entire towns leveled. Add to that the deliberate shelling of hospitals, schools, and residential buildings and it's clear that Putin's scorched earth approach has crossed the line into war crimes, For this a former United Nations prosecutor is urging that an international arrest warrant be issued for Putin. As the BBC reports, the deliberate murder of civilians occurred in the town of Bucha:
At least 20 dead men were lying in the street as Ukrainian troops entered the town. Some of them had their hands tied behind their backs. The mayor said they had buried 280 people in mass graves.
While such a warrant would be ineffective within Russia so long as Putin remains dictator, this would (i) bar him from leaving Russia and (ii) set the stage for eventual prosecution in the manner of Slobodan Milosevic, the one time president of Serbia, who likewise had ordered war crimes to be committed. A piece in Politico looks at the issue:
GENEVA — The former chief prosecutor of United Nations war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda has called for an international arrest warrant to be issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Putin is a war criminal,” Carla Del Ponte told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps in an interview published Saturday.
the Swiss lawyer who oversaw U.N. investigations in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia said there were clear war crimes being committed in Ukraine.
She said she was particularly shocked by the use of mass graves in Russia’s war on Ukraine, which recalls the worst of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
“I hoped never to see mass graves again,” she told the newspaper Blick. “These dead people have loved ones who don’t even know what’s become of them. That is unacceptable.”
Other war crimes she identified in Ukraine included attacks on civilians, the destruction of civilian buildings and even the demolishing of entire villages.
She said the investigation in Ukraine would be easier than that in Yugoslavia because the country itself had requested an international probe. The current ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, visited Ukraine last month.
If the ICC finds proof of war crimes, she said, “you must go up the chain of command until you reach those who took the decisions.”
She said it would be possible to bring even Putin to account.
“You mustn’t let go, continue to investigation. When the investigation into Slobodan Milosevic began, he was still president of Serbia. Who would have thought then that he would one day be judged? Nobody,” she told Blick.
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