Not since 9/11 has an unprovoked hostility been so clearly defined as good versus evil. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has, if nothing else, sidestepped the usual vagaries of who started what or who is the victim and who is the aggressor. On the one side is Ukraine, a sovereign nation. the second largest in land mass in Europe. On the other is Russia’s authoritarian ruler, Vladimir Putin, with an enormous military and an unbridled desire to return his country back to the Soviet Union days.
Even his cover story for this extraordinary military action — including a claim of “peacekeeping” support for “breakaway” regions of Donetsk and Luhansk — was so flimsy one wonders why he bothered. The absurdity peaked when Putin explained in a Feb. 24 televised speech that his goal was the “denazification” of Ukraine, a country currently led by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Jewish grandson of a Holocaust survivor.
In Baltimore, as is the case across the United States, the only serious questions people are asking themselves today is how best to support Ukraine and punish Russia and whether economic sanctions announced by President Joe Biden are tough enough. The appetite for engaging in a direct military clash and putting U.S. troops in the line of fire, meanwhile, is appropriately low. And while there’s certainly been some finger-pointing over whether the U.S. had done enough to support Ukraine after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, as both of the last two presidents withheld military aid from that country, this sort of second-guessing is like fretting over U.S. military preparedness prior to Pearl Harbor. Let the historians pass their judgment. What people really want to know is, what happens next?
