Iron Curtain 2.0

OPINION:

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is an epic tragedy, with the death and destruction wrought by the Russian president’s missiles and bombs evoking the most horrific of calamities. An additional consequence is the troubling reappearance of a bloc lost in sullen isolation, an unexpected development during an era of global interchange. By all appearances, Iron Curtain 2.0 is descending.

Mr. Putin has shelved democratic sensibilities and revived KGB-style control by walling off accurate information about his Ukrainian incursion from his 144 million Russian citizens. A new law threatening 15 years in prison for publishing “fake” news about the war, along with the arrest of thousands of war protesters in Moscow and other major Russian cities, has substituted state media for independent journalism. Far-reaching platforms like Twitter and TikTok have been encumbered with content restrictions within Russian boundaries. Facebook has been fully blocked.

Unsurprisingly, the world is reacting by cutting off Russia from the painstakingly established international order. Global corporations, which made haste to serve Russia and its satellite nations after the original Iron Curtain crumbled during the early 1990s, are pulling out now by the hundreds. Coca-Cola, Apple, Exxon-Mobil and McDonald’s are among them — adding to the pain exacted by NATO-based economic sanctions and the shuttering of crucial financial services like Mastercard and Visa.

The European Union has joined the United States and Canada in closing their airspace to Russian commercial airlines, suddenly cutting off travelers from the interconnected world — with a glaring exception: China vowed in February to make Russia its best friend forever and has refrained from condemning Moscow’s callous assault on Ukraine. The takeaway: There will be no reinforcement of the Great Wall of China — symbolic or otherwise — to keep out the Russians.

The original “Iron Curtain,” so labeled by Winston Churchill, consisted of barriers erected after World War II to isolate the Soviet Union and its vassal states from outside contact. For Westerners, the Second Coming would hardly have been more exhilarating than the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991, the end of the Cold War and the embrace of “glasnost,” or openness. Witnessing the reinternment of Russia behind a wall of isolation is dispiriting, indeed.

A sympathetic world is rightly reaching out to besieged Ukrainians, undeserving of the punishment raining down upon them, with relief resources and messages of support. For his part, Mr. Putin has failed to prove his case for violently separating them from their homeland and their very lives.

Whether he succeeds in placing any or all of Ukraine behind a new Iron Curtain is yet to be determined, but Russia itself is already descending into the shadows. If everyday Russians share blame for their deepening predicament, it is in their historical inability to produce leaders with authentic democratic sensibilities.

In the meantime, Ukrainians and Russians alike bury their sons by the thousands. Sadly, together with the dead may be lost the freedom that took more than 70 years to win.