You have to wonder what it would take to get House and Senate Republicans to get off their collective duffs and walk across their respective cloak rooms to smell the proverbial coffee. City after city after city in Ukraine has been leveled by Russian artillery and rockets. The port of Mariupol is a shell of its former self. Large areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, are in rubble. Bakhmut doesn’t exist anymore. There isn’t a square mile of Ukraine from Kharkiv in the north through Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, all the way to Kherson on the coast of the Black Sea that hasn’t been severely damaged if not utterly destroyed by Russia’s war of aggression.
Wait. Let’s stop right there. I’ve been writing words like these for nearly two years about the war in Ukraine, and they accurately convey what has happened in the war. So do Ukraine’s numbers of the dead and wounded, both military and civilian. But sitting here in Northeast Pennsylvania, or more to the point, in a limestone and marble building in Washington, D.C., there is no way to adequately conceive of the horror Russia has wrought in the country that stands between it and Europe.
