Many of us are still trying to comprehend a world that will tolerate Vladimir Putin's enormous cruelty toward innocent Ukrainians who are also the least capable of defending themselves — women and children, the old, the ill, the disabled. The West has aided Ukraine with armaments, of course, a noble and necessary act, and for that the West should be applauded. But how these free, safe and secure nations can simultaneously abide Putin's inhumanity on a scale that violates every law of modern warfare is incomprehensible — especially when the war itself is a strident violation of international law.
Meanwhile, Ukraine copes as best it can, and with assistance from the United Nations. Last summer the "peacekeeping" organization appointed Canada's Denise Brown as its resident coordinator in Ukraine. As her U.N. bio states, she "brings more than 25 years of experience in humanitarian affairs and recovery programmes, with a particular concentration on complex emergencies" Rarely are foreign emergencies as exigent as Ukraine's, or more complex.
Three days ago The NY Times' former U.N. correspondent, Carole Landry, sat down with Brown to discuss her impressions of Ukraine's humanitarian crisis: where it stands, what's being done, and where it might lead. What Brown related is heartbreaking but fully expected, given the West's refusal to directly aid suffering Ukrainians.
Now that winter has arrived, the people's hardships are more severe and deadly than ever, which Brown addressed proleptically and — even with the U.N.'s support — rather helplessly. "To keep people safe, you need electricity, water and heating. That’s the biggest worry, everybody’s biggest worry," she said. "It’s [Russia's] damage to the energy infrastructure which is the new dimension, which is overwhelming and which gives all of us cause to worry.... As the energy infrastructure damage grows, if, at some point it all disappears, what then?"
Landry asked Brown about her most recent travels in Ukraine. "In the past two weeks," she replied, "I’ve been to Kherson twice, Mykolaiv and the Sumy region. In Kherson, two weeks ago, I saw empty grocery stores, there was nothing, not a crumb. Supply chains were disrupted. Many older people were still there and were very happy to see us. You could sense their relief."
This was just after the Ukrainian army drove Putin's forces out of the city. Evident is that the invaders took no care of the people whom Putin had so recently "liberated" so that they could rejoin Russia as proper constituents. His annexation of their homeland survived for merely a matter of days — a dramatically truncated period reminiscent of those that transpired under Hitler's "Thousand Year" Reich.
Brown returned to Kherson last Sunday. She remarked: "It was different. First of all, it was much colder. They are re-establishing the power lines, but because of the mines, progress is slow. Electricity is linked to water, which is linked to heating, so it was cold. There were three grocery stores open. And the one that was empty two weeks ago was full, and there were 500 people waiting to get into the grocery store. I felt that after the hope and relief two weeks earlier, people were worried, extremely worried."
Such is the Devil's wheel of Ukraine: people hurled from hope to anguish and desperation. Atop mines slowing the progress of energy restoration is Russia's constant shelling of Kherson, disrupting what energy supplies the residents did have. The Russians ran from a fight in Kherson, but they do know how to load a mortar from safe distances.
Most heartbreaking is Brown's explanation of Ukraine's most vulnerable citizens. "We see a lot of elderly people who didn’t have the means to move or didn’t want to leave their homes behind," she said. "We also worry about women alone with children. We worry a lot about people with disabilities who may be on their own.... On the faces of people, I see stress and anxiety." Each day of cold, hunger and dehydration brings the additional worry of an artillery shell dropping on one's home.
Concluded Brown: "The worst-case scenario from my point of view is people left on their own: the elderly, women with children, people with disabilities. We need to make sure we know where they are. If we don’t, that’s a big problem. I don’t think Ukrainians want to leave. I think they want to stay. They have been through a lot already. I think they want to see this through."
Another person who wants to see this through is Vladimir Putin. His own troops do not, particularly, but he's willing to see them die by the thousands as his missiles and shells kill perhaps equal numbers of innocent Ukrainians — chiefly, those who are most defenseless. The West has supplied and continues to ship air defense systems, but some ballistics will always get through. And so in city after city, village after village, Ukrainians will freeze and die.
If this is the new, permanent, post-postwar international order, the world is in for a lot of pain; for increasing hardships, more widely spread agony, and ceaseless aggressions, which shall inaugurate all the preceding. Absent united nations' military negation of international acts of invasion and terror such as the Russian president's, these acts will multiply globally. If the West believes that such action now in Ukraine is too burdensome and perilous to pursue, it's going to be shocked by the ramifying horrors that await it just a few years down the road. Evil unmet is evil unchained.