"Heat, water, electricity — for the children, for the elderly, for the sick — these are President Putin’s new targets," said Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a NATO meeting this week. "He’s hitting them hard. This brutalization of Ukraine’s people is barbaric."
Perfect words for a perfectly heinous reality. And in a perfect world, international forces would put a stop to Putin's barbarity. Instead we dwell on a globe where the Vladimir Putins and their equally squalid mouthpieces, such as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, can exist. History will remember.
For now, journalism must do the work of chronicling Russia's unconscionable acts in Ukraine — and merely note with the gravest sorrow the military absence of a united planet against the acts' warmongering architect. Lucky for Vladimir, henchman Lavrov is always on hand to defend the indefensible, which he does with chilling reserve. For him, rationalizing the incineration of children, the elderly and the sick is just another day at the office.
At a press conference yesterday on "European security," the foreign minister justified Russia's air strikes on, and shellings of, Ukraine’s energy grid — strikes that are hitting not only power supplies but civilians — as legitimate military operations. The United Nations differs with Lavrov in identifying the strikes for what they are: war crimes.
Ukraine's internal affairs ministry reports that 520 cities, towns and villages are now trying to cope with the resulting power supply problems. Yesterday on recently liberated Kherson alone, Russia fired dozens of shells and hit five residential areas. Freezing temperatures have descended on Ukraine, exposing civilians to almost unimaginable hardships — no heat, of course, and no water. The civilians thus exposed are, as Mr. Blinken noted, among Ukraine's most vulnerable.
If by a "Greater Russia" Putin meant more than a territorially larger Russia, he has forever savaged the aspirational phrase. In Ukraine, Russian greatness has been extinguished for at least a generation — less by Ukrainians than by Putin himself. He has refashioned Russian warfare as strategic blitzes not against enemy combatants — they might shoot back — but against women, children, the old and infirm. Such is Putin's expression of a Greater Russia.
In turn, Foreign Minister Lavrov expresses extraordinarily preposterous justifications of Russia's medieval playbook. At yesterday's press conference, for one, he seriously argued that Russia is striking Ukraine's energy facilities — mum was the word on murdered civilians — because they are used "to pump up Ukraine with Western weapons for it to kill Russians." That would be Russians who aggressed against Ukrainians in violation of international law.
Mr. Lavrov wasn't done. His justifications became even more ludicrous. He absolved Russia of any wrongdoing by comparing its wanton carnage in Ukraine to Russia's heroic defense of Stalingrad in the Second World War. Said the foreign minister quite seriously: "Stalingrad was our territory too and we have beaten Germans there so much that they ran away." (That ahistorical bit of trumpery implied that Ukrainians should ... run away from their own country?)
He also incoherently explained that Russian air strikes are hitting venues where Ukrainian forces are being supplied by the West. (That is, they're supplied at power plants, leaving civilians lethally hypothermic and dehydrated.) The NY Times reported that bit of nonsense in the only laconic fashion it could: "He did not elaborate." But somewhere in Lavrov's muddle of unraveled incohence, the message was clear enough: It's the West causing Ukrainian casualties, not Russia.
In conclusion, Lavrov accused NATO of international skulduggery; of whipping up troubles everywhere, including with China in "an anti-Russian and anti-Chinese alliance." One can only hope that on this, Lavrov is right.
It seems an oddity of history that the world's most odious villains took a wrong turn in their educational youth. Hitler dreamed of art school but wound up reading fanatical antisemetic and extremist nationalistic tracts. Stalin studied for the priesthood but became enraptured by Marxist texts. Young Sergei Lavrov loved physics and planned to study it at university but instead entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. It fiurther seems he concentrated his studies there on humbug and bloody hogwash.
In other words, for Vladimir Putin, he grew to be the perfect foreign minister.