OPINION:
One year ago, Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin made the conscious choice to violate international law and illegally invade the sovereign country of Ukraine.
In the days leading up to the invasion, as Mr. Putin lined up an estimated 190,000 troops in armored vehicles and tanks, the world watched with bated breath to see if the former KGB colonel turned dictator would actually cross the line into Ukraine. At that time, many in Washington dismissed the possibility that Mr. Putin would actually start a war, insisting he was merely trying to leverage negotiations with the West.
One of the most common but naive interpretations of the blossoming crisis were those who viewed Mr. Putin through an oversimplified Western lens, saying he would not invade because he had little to gain and much to lose. But those who know Russian history and understand Mr. Putin know that he is not interested in negotiations or practicality.
Mr. Putin is interested in power.
Contrary to the amateur view of apologists who have struggled to justify Mr. Putin’s cruelty with political science, the invasion of Ukraine was never about Kyiv’s attempts to join NATO or Moscow’s need to defend Russia from an imaginary invasion from the West. It was about fulfilling the long-held narcissistic fantasies of Mr. Putin, who has believed that he was ordained to reunite the Soviet Union ever since it collapsed.
Those who dismiss that notion conveniently ignore world history and the fact Mr. Putin came to power in Russia through an act of terrorism against his own people.
In 1999, Mr. Putin’s FSB orchestrated the Moscow apartment bombings, a series of attacks that killed hundreds of Russian civilians and were blamed on Chechen rebels as a means of rallying support for the Second Chechen War. Once engaged, Mr. Putin used the war to relegate then-President Boris Yeltsin to obscurity so that he could take control of the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin was not above state-sponsored terrorism then, and he is not above it now. Anyone who doubts what is happening in Ukraine is terrorism should consider the arbitrary killing and crimes against humanity committed by Russian soldiers. According to the United Nations, women have been raped, children kidnapped, and Ukrainian civilians confined and coerced into forced labor.
“My colleagues interviewed a former prisoner of war, and he was from Mariupol, and he was forced in Mariupol to collect the bodies on the city streets. He told us that Russian soldiers were expected to meet the daily quota of one truck of corpses per day. And that is, as he said, in Mariupol, meeting with that quota was not a problem at all,” said Matilda Bogner, head of the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, in a report released on Tuesday.
To date, the U.N. has documented at least 8,000 civilian deaths and 13,000 injuries, including 487 children killed and 954 hurt. According to UNICEF, the percentage of Ukrainian children living in poverty has almost doubled, from 43% to 82%. The international agency says that many children are also deprived of medical care since Russia has destroyed more than 800 health care facilities.
While the real number of casualties is believed to be much higher, these tragedies have occurred amid Russian bombings, leaving 14 million displaced, many without electricity and water. The U.N. has documented more than 100 cases of sexual violence, with hundreds of cases of “enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention” and torture against Ukrainians in occupied areas.
“These are just the cases that we have been able to document,” Ms. Bogner said. “The real scale of these things is yet to be fully understood, but our figures show that there are a lot of violations taking place.”
These facts, among many others are why both Presidents Biden and Donald Trump have accurately called Russia’s illegal invasion a genocide.
Just as their wishful thinking was wrong a year ago, when they inaccurately predicted that Mr. Putin was trying to leverage negotiations, those who believe the West can turn a blind eye to Russia’s cruelty are wrong now.
In a stunning twist of irony, while many of these calls for restraint, negotiation, and good-faith peace talks come from anti-war activists on the left, they also come from some “nationalists” despite there being nothing nationalist about coercing a sovereign nation-state to compromise its independence and surrender part of its population to an enemy that means to enslave them.
Such compromises are non-negotiable. Would you trust Russia with the fate of your family?
Those who have argued it is a “conservative” position to ignore evil should reflect upon the Reagan doctrine, which called for the U.S. to stand with any country facing Moscow’s aggression.
“We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives — on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua — to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth,” then-President Reagan said in 1985.
While some naively insist there is a distinction between Soviet Russia and Mr. Putin’s United Russia regime, any difference is merely cosmetic. Mr. Putin is the living embodiment of the Soviet legacy of brutality, evidenced by his ruthlessness against other nations and the pro-democracy opposition that courageously stands against him.
When it comes to genocide, there is no neutrality, negotiation or restraint.
As President George W. Bush rightly said in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” You either stand with the innocent or, by default, are morally responsible for enabling murder — a legacy Switzerland rightly endures for veiling its amoral callousness with “neutrality” during the Holocaust.
Amorality is not a legacy America should want or deserve. Our nation, the most noble and courageous in the history of the world, must stand on the right side of history — now and forever.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington prosecutor and senior U.S. official who served in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. He now serves on the editorial board for The Washington Times.
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