What’s our red line, then?
What more does Vladimir Putin have to do before our collective moral conscience kicks in strongly enough to get off our pathetically useless “We stand with Ukraine!” virtue-signaling backsides and do something to stop him?
So far, this ruthless, heartless, genocidal monster has bombed innocent mothers and babies in a maternity hospital, attacked refugees as they desperately try to escape, murdered starving people including an American man as they lined up for bread, blitzed a drama theater where hundreds of Ukrainians were sheltering, and reportedly kidnapped 2,500 kids to deport them to Siberia in scenes reminiscent of Nazi transports.
At what point do we say enough?
At what point does our sense of outrage and disgust manifest itself into something more effective than a viral Instagram meme praising Ukraine’s inspirational leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky?
At what point do we grow a pair and take on Putin?
All I see is endless groups of two-faced politicians from the US Congress to the British Parliament, and today Italy’s, jumping to their feet to give Zelensky ecstatic standing ovations — while ignoring his demands for more substantial help to beat the barbaric Russian invaders.
Worse, they keep boasting about their tough economic sanctions while continuing to import over $1 billion a DAY of Putin’s oil and gas, thus directly refilling his war chest at the same time as they praise themselves for supposedly financially crippling him.
Meanwhile, more than 10 million Ukrainians have fled their homes in one of the greatest humanitarian crises of modern times.
And while I applaud the staggering generosity of those kind souls all over the world who’ve raced to take in these poor people, I’m more concerned with how to stop millions more having to follow them out of their homeland.
There seems to be an astonishing degree of wishful thinking going on when it comes to the cold, hard, brutal reality of this war.
I keep reading that Putin’s lost his mind, he’s losing the war, he’s about to be taken out by his own disillusioned generals, his troops are quitting in droves.
Yet what I’m seeing with my own eyes in daily devastating footage, and hearing from war correspondent friends on the ground, paints a very different and far grimmer story.
Let’s be clear: Putin isn’t just taking over Ukraine, he is wrecking it brick by brick.
His merciless military is rampaging through city after city, bombarding them to smithereens.
Mariupol, the 10th-largest city in Europe’s second-biggest country, with a population of 434,000 people, has been virtually destroyed, with 90% of all buildings now bombed.
One aid worker from the Red Cross described the scenes as “apocalyptic” with no food, water, sanitation, electricity, cellphone connectivity, radio or television.
Veteran ex-NBC foreign correspondent Bill Neely tweeted today: “Horrifying reports from Mariupol; thirsty people draining water from radiators; streams contaminated by rotting bodies; dogs feeding on corpses; people eating dogs & scavenging for food in bombed buildings.”
Two astoundingly brave Associated Press journalists, who risked their lives to stay in the city after all other media left due to the relentless bombardment, witnessed bloody pregnant women being pulled from ruins and mass graves including endless dead children everywhere they went.
Again, I ask a simple question: What’s our red line?
When an evil dictator invades a sovereign democratic country and systematically slaughters its people, the rest of the world has historically felt a moral compulsion to stop him.
Hitler was defeated because we literally fought him to his death.
But with Putin, the dishonorable heir to Hitler’s crown as world’s most despicable man, we’ve chosen to sit back and do nothing.
Oh, we send a few weapons to Ukraine, and we seize a few oligarch yachts.
But we dare not actually do anything to stop him, not even impose a no-fly-zone, because we’re all so terrified that Putin might nuke us.
All he’s had to do is threaten us — and I don’t think he has any intention of starting Armageddon — and we’ve run a scaredy-cat mile.
President Biden promised us that he’d be tough on Putin, but his idea of tough is to constantly say what he won’t do to him.
Biden insists America won’t engage Russia in combat because “I won’t start World War III.”
So instead, he bans Russian vodka, caviar and diamonds.
Other world leaders, from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to French President Emmanuel Macron, have been equally keen to talk a good game but walk a woefully weak one.
They all love to sound Churchillian but lack Winston’s resolve to actually stand up to a global bully before it’s too late.
What a bunch of supine cowards.
Putin must be laughing his smug, pudgy little head off at how spineless and fearful the West has turned out to be whenever he rattles his nuclear saber.
I don’t think he’s mad or irrational at all.
I think he’s doing exactly what he’s been doing for years, from Georgia to Crimea — seizing back land he thinks Russia should never have given up.
And he can’t believe his luck that the worse he behaves, the less keen we seem to tackle him.
I’ve heard all the arguments about why we shouldn’t engage with this repellent despot.
But frankly, the longer his war crime charge sheet grows, the more sickened I feel.
What’s happened to us when we can sit back and watch innocent women, children and elderly people get annihilated like this, knowing we have the greatest military force in history but don’t have the balls to use it?
Boris Romanchenko, 96, survived the Nazi Holocaust during World War II, after enduring hellish conditions in concentration camps at Buchenwald, Peenemunde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen. He returned to Buchenwald in 2012 to celebrate the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by US troops, where he recited the pledge made by survivors to create “a new world where peace and freedom reign.”
On Friday, he was killed by a Russian bullet fired at his house in Kharkiv.
He died because unlike in World War II, the world doesn’t have the stomach to fight a tyrant to safeguard peace and freedom.
And the only message this gutlessness will send Putin is to carry on, harder and more devastatingly.
As Churchill said: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
