A lot of us think it’s important to name names — names of victims (as well as names of perpetrators). I don’t know the name of that man, in the picture above, or of his son, killed at 13. But this picture conveys something. Something of what Ukrainians are enduring.
The picture was taken by Sofiia Gatilova, of Reuters. I have also noticed, for several years now, pictures taken by Gleb Garanich, also of Reuters. Stark and stunning pictures. I would like to meet these photogs someday. Both are the type to risk their neck, to convey the news via their cameras.
• This tweet shows you pictures of Mykola Rachok. They were circulated by Anton Gerashchenko. He says,
Mykola Rachok, 27, a Ukrainian philologist, intellectual with no combat experience, went to defend Ukraine from the first days of war, died at the front.
Our best people keep dying in this damned war.
• Victoria Nuland is an undersecretary of state (and a bogeyman — bogeywoman — of the Buchanan Right). As reported by Peter Baker, of the New York Times, Nuland said that Russia has taken as many as 1,000 Ukrainian orphans and given them to Russian families. “First Russia makes orphans ,” said Nuland, “and then it steals those orphans.”
• Anne Applebaum had an apt comment, typically:
And there it is: one day after signing an agreement to allow the export of grain, Russia attacks the port of Odesa. It’s not sanctions creating high food prices and hunger. It’s Russian cruelty.
• You need a strong stomach to listen to the rhetoric on Russian state TV — “genocidal rhetoric,” as Julia Davis says. And documents. She is the creator of the Russian Media Monitor. Once more, she circulates video of the top Russian TV people, saying that Ukraine no longer exists, that Ukrainians who resist subjugation are bugs and worms, etc.
(The Cuban Communists, by the way, have always referred to Cuban democrats as gusanos, worms.)
Think of what Russian citizens inhale, from their state media — the only media that exist in Russia now — day in, day out.
• The relationship between the Orbán government in Hungary and the Kremlin continues to be warm. The Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjártó, has gone to Moscow, to get more gas. Here is a picture of Szijjártó with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. The two look very chummy and jovial. And why not? Just before the February assault, as Russia was massing troops along the Ukrainian border, Lavrov awarded Szijjártó the Russian Order of Friendship.
Well earned, no doubt.
(Viktor Orbán, natch, is scheduled to speak at CPAC next month. In May, CPAC held a session in Hungary, under Orbán’s wing.)
• A headline: “Pelosi to Blinken: Label Russia as terrorist state, or else Congress will.” (Article here.) That would be interesting.
• Food for thought in this article by Seth G. Jones and Philip G. Wasielewski. The former is a scholar at CSIS, the latter is an ex-CIA man, now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The Biden administration’s reluctance to provide Ukraine with more sophisticated weapons critical to its defense comes at a high cost. Russia now controls a quarter of Ukraine and is gradually pushing westward. If the U.S. fails to change its policy, Russia will continue to seize more territory in Ukraine and may become emboldened for future conquests.
• Here is a tweet from the “Supreme Leader,” the head sadist in Iran, Khamanei:
#NATO is a dangerous entity. The West is totally opposed to a strong, independent Russia. If the way is opened for NATO, it will recognize no limits. If it hadn’t been stopped in #Ukraine, it would have later started a similar war in #Crimea.
I see that Khamanei could write for many a U.S. publication. You would never know the difference. He could even have his own cable show, or podcast!
• Speaking of which: I have had occasion recently to revisit one of the last things Charles Krauthammer ever wrote — perhaps it was the very last. I don’t know. He wrote it in the summer of 2017. He called his piece “The Authoritarian Temptation.” This borrows from Jean-François Revel, who wrote a famous book in 1976: The Totalitarian Temptation. “The Authoritarian Temptation” was published in The Point of It All (2018), a Krauthammer collection edited by his son, Daniel.
Writes Charles,
In what would have been unimaginable 25 years ago, mature Western democracies are experiencing a surge of ethno-nationalism, a blood-and-soil patriotism tinged with xenophobia, a weariness with parliamentary dysfunction and an attraction — still only an attraction, not yet a commitment — to strongman rule.
Now, in 2022, has the attraction become more of a commitment?
Krauthammer continues,
Its most conspicuous symptom is a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias. Remarkably, this tendency is most pronounced on the right. The reversal is head-snapping.
It snapped a lot of our heads.
More Krauthammer:
Today, some on the right have begun to profess a certain admiration of and attraction to Putin and his brand of Russian authoritarianism.
The result is jarring. After decades of left-wing apologists for Russia, it is now lifelong conservatives who are asking: What’s so bad about Putin anyway? . . .
Sure he emasculated the political opposition, shut down independent media and regularly kills political opponents and journalists. But he’s got omelets to make. Moreover, as President Trump said when asked about the killings, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?”
Moral equivalence so shocking, emanating from the elected leader of the United States, is not to be ignored.
There is a lot “not to be ignored” today. Or to be ignored. It is a choice, ever and always.