People check the damage at their apartments hit by a Russian missile in Mykolaiv, Sunday, Oct. 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Imagine if Philadelphia were totally blacked out for a dozen hours daily, with no water or heat and no electricity or cell phone coverage. Imagine if surgeons at local hospitals had to operate by generator, and cars had to drive in total darkness while pedestrians navigated by flashlight.
This is the situation in Ukraine’s major cities, including the newly liberated city of Kherson, as Russian missiles pound civilian electrical grids and power stations trying to freeze citizens into capitulating. Russian officials baldly insist these missiles are aimed at military targets, even though the world can plainly see they are lying.
These missiles are the latest phase of Vladimir Putin’s genocidal effort to destroy the Ukrainian state and absorb its remains into Russia. Having lost military momentum, Putin is taking his revenge on the Ukrainian people — trying to freeze and starve much of the population into fleeing the country or pressuring their leaders to accept Russia’s terms.
The United States and Europe (and Israel) could stop Putin’s murder from the air. The Western allies have the advanced air defense systems Ukraine desperately needs — notably Patriot missile defense systems. Yet they are still holding back.
What are they waiting for? Will the West, and Israel, permit another genocidal killer to succeed in Europe in 2022?
I am usually wary of using the word genocide because I associate it with the Holocaust and the effort to physically wipe out a single religious or ethnic group. But, after covering conflict for four decades and making two trips to Ukraine this year, l feel this term is appropriate when it comes to Putin and his imperial war.
Putin insists that Ukrainian statehood is a fiction and that the country belongs to Russia. He is willing to bomb the country into the Stone Age and kill, starve or drive out much of its population to make his fantasy come true.
So President Joe Biden was spot on when he said at the U.N. General Assembly in September, “This war is about extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state, plain and simple.”
That fact is hard to grasp until you see firsthand the way the Russian military operates in Ukraine.
Every city it has occupied has been brutalized, including those in the four regions Russia “annexed” via fake referendums. Murder, torture, rape and suppression of the Ukrainian language are the norm of Russia’s military game.
The vibrant city of Mariupol that I visited in February simply doesn’t exist anymore. In a sickening pattern, schools, hospitals, universities and apartment buildings in unoccupied cities such as Kharkiv and Chernihiv were deliberately bombed into rubble.
There are no boundaries to the destruction that Putin is willing to rain down on Ukraine’s population. After all, he has appointed Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armageddon” by the Russian media for his ruthlessness, as Moscow’s top commander. Surovikin was responsible for the mass murder of Syrian civilians from the air in 2015.
Last week, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters that the United States has “no plans to provide Patriot batteries to Ukraine” right now. More than a dozen other U.S. allies have Patriot systems, but none has been pressed to lend them temporarily to Ukraine.
At a meeting on Tuesday, NATO foreign ministers focused on sending transformers and generators to help Ukraine restore its electrical systems. That’s great, but as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba pointed out, if Kyiv receives sufficient air defense systems, “we will be able to protect this infrastructure from the next Russian missile strikes [which are] definitely to come.”
So again, as Putin readies more missiles, what the hell are we waiting for?
Trudy Rubin is a columnist for the The Philadelphia Inquirer. ©2022 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
Originally published at Trudy Rubin