What Now, Ukraine?

https://amgreatness.com ^ | May 29, 2022 | By Victor Davis Hanson

[Enterprise]

It was supposed to be a clear-cut, unambiguous invasion. Vladimir Putin’s much larger, richer, and more bellicose Russia staged a shock-and-awe attack on a much smaller, poorer Ukraine. He intended to decapitate the government in Kyiv. Then he would annex the eastern half of the country, and quickly consolidate his easy wins in preparation to ratchet up pressure to force western Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

The rest is history. The Russian military proved ill-equipped and ill-supplied. It was poorly led, with a high percentage of low-morale, conscript troops. Russia had no viable strategic plan to capture, much less hold, the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine was Russia’s version of our Kabul—but tens of thousands of deaths added to the equation.

Russian strategists naïvely believed NATO would become paralyzed in mutual recriminations and fear and follow the usual German prompt of appeasement. In fact, NATO united precisely because of the dire worries over further Russian aggression, as the alliance pressured Germany to back off from its self-interested Russian romance.

[MalPearce]

I think you’ll find that I do.

Russia is erasing Ukrainian completely from the school curriculum, in the occupied areas. Under penalty of arrest for noncompliance.

Russia’s cultural erasure in the schools it administers in the occupied regions is so severe that many elementary school teachers are risking arrest to boycott the reopening of their schools.

Their erasure goes far further than Ukraine erased Russian. Which is why even the Russian teachers in the Russian controlled areas are protesting it.

[Verginius Rufus]

Re Putin and Moldova, a blast from the past:

I happened to run across a column I had printed off in Dec. 2005. It's by Stephen Schwartz, is entitled "Denying the Soviet Holocaust," dated Dec. 9, 2005, and is responding to a commentary by Robert Conquest ("Stalinophilia") in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 5, 2005.

Schwartz says, "Only this week, the neo-Stalinist Vladimir Putin prevailed on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)--which has a history of political corruption and mismanagement in postwar Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo, as well as rampant anti-Americanism, even though the U.S. is an OSCE member--to let Russian troops remain on the impoverished territory of Moldova, the last trophy of Stalin's romance with Hitler."