As America was debating the Super Bowl halftime show and bickering about politicized mask mandates, the mood in Europe over the situation in Ukraine was turning mighty bleak — 130,000 amassing Russian troops and the possibility of an imminent military invasion can have that effect.
This week, the defiant Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that his government had been told that Wednesday will be “the day of attack.” Russia, of course, denied this, and Zelenskyy later walked back his comments, saying he only was repeating media reports of the opinions of others. But who can trust Russia?
Nobody. European leaders were confirming the likelihood of an imminent invasion all day Monday. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the situation as “the edge of a precipice.”
President Joe Biden has been conspicuously absent when it comes to such attention-getting rhetoric, even though the U.S. has removed embassy personnel from Kyiv to the far western city of Lviv. This is unfortunate. Biden can and should command a bully pulpit. The U.S. cannot just stand by while Russian President Vladimir Putin commands, in essence, that Ukraine abandon all of its alignments with the West.
Others are stepping into the breach.
Under the Daily Telegraph headline, “This is the E.U.’s darkest hour,” the British former infantry commander and chairman of the Cobra Intelligence Group Col. Richard Kemp drew a perhaps inevitable comparison between Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, and Neville Chamberlain, the notorious appeaser of Adolf Hitler. “Today, it’s almost as if President Macron is reading from Chamberlain’s script,” Kemp wrote Monday.
Kemp and other British hard-liners are reacting to Macron’s pressuring Ukraine to, in essence, appease its aggressor, Putin, by implementing the so-called Minsk Accords that would, in simple terms, compromise Ukraine’s sovereignty as a nation and give Moscow and its shadow actors a far greater say in its affairs.
Putin of course has demanded precisely that, under the guise of security concerns. America’s political leaders were pathetically slow to wake up to the evils of Putin, preferring to use him in their own domestic rivalries without realizing he was laughing at them with every social media manipulation he authorized. But we’re all surely well aware by now, at least, that Putin is nobody’s sweetheart.
Kemp aptly called Putin’s methods “gunpoint bartering.” Consider this recent Putin remark directed at Ukraine: “Like it or not, you’ll have to tolerate it, my beauty.”
What a creep. And a dangerous one to boot. The situation in Ukraine has been giving Wall Street jitters, not least because of the potential impact on world energy prices, potentially making the global inflation problem even worse. Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, talks less like a James Bond villain and goes down easier with the Wall Street types, but he’s still a depressing read: “Moscow is angry at the EU,” he was quoted as saying Monday, good cop to Putin’s bad guy but a manipulative double act nonetheless.
American should be a whole lot angrier with Putin, a one-man wrecking ball to prospects for relative global calm as the coronavirus retreats.
Reportedly, President Barack Obama’s exit note to President Donald Trump cited the situation in North Korea as the most pressing of global problems. In reality, that piece of paper should have contained the name Vladimir Putin. Ukraine might not be the end. Already there is tension along the border of Lithuania and the notorious Belarus.
What to do now? Clearly, time is running short for any kind of so-called diplomatic solution to this issue, although it’s still worth trying.
In every successful negotiation, each side has to give up something it wants. In this case, there should still be diplomatic measures that can be done to avoid loss of life and a cascading global crisis.
That, of course, would require a level of unity in the contra-Putin camp that has been sorely lacking to date. And it would require far more U.S. focus on the crisis. Most Americans are not aware of who is traveling to this region on their behalf to try to resolve the situation. Do not leaders like Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who visited Kyiv on Monday, deserve heartier U.S. support?
Ensuring global stability and security is a crucial part of the job of the most powerful leader in the world, and that has to take precedence.
It’s time for skilled negotiators to do everything they can to maintain peace, but none of this can include empowering Putin to exact his will upon the world or to oppress the rights of Ukrainians.
Here in Chicago, we worry about the many Chicagoans with friends and family in Ukraine, a nation with long and close ties to this city.
They, and Ukrainian immigrants and descendants across the nation, deserve America’s practical, firm and intensely focused support.
