We are all praying for silence and peace in Ukraine...

 Fiona Hill, former National Security Official in the U.S., tells any interviewer who will listen, ‘we are already in World War III.

In his twitter account, former chess champion, Russian-born Gary Kasparov writes:

This is already World War III. Putin started it long ago & Ukraine in only the current front. He will escalate anyway, and it’s even more likely if he succeeds in destroying Ukraine because you have convinced him you won’t stop him even though you could.…There is no waiting this out, This isn’t chess; there is no draw, no stalemate. Either Putin destroys Ukraine and eventually hits NATO with an even greater catastrophe, or Putin falls in Russia. He cannot be stopped with weakness….the price of stopping a dictator always goes up…if they  care so much about the fine print and think Putin does too, ask Zelensky to issue Ukrainian passports to any volunteer to fly in combat. Sell jets to Ukraine for I (Euro) each and paint UKR flags on them.

The cries from the street carry words like,

“You are using Ukraine as a shield to protect NATO countries” and

“Are you going to sacrifice Ukraine so NATO won’t have to go to war?”

Yesterday a maternity hospital was destroyed by a Russian bomb/missile, leaving a monstrous crater immediately adjacent to the building and dozens of pregnant mothers in trauma, if not death.

Crimes against humanity, committee by Putin, have mounted to more than 1000, according to the Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor, while the International Court of Justice is formally investigating Putin on a charge of committing war crimes.

War crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 19948: willful killing, torture or inhman treatment, including biological experiments, willful causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly…..intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population…against civilian objects which are not military objectives…attacking ro bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended…etc…(from the UN website)

Also from the UN website:

The 1998 Rome Statue establishing the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute), in Article 7, Crimes Against Humanity, reads:
Crime against humanity means any of the following as part of a widespread attack directed against any civilian population, with the knowledge of the attack: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer of population, imprisonment, torture, rape sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, enforced sterilization or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity, persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national ethnic, cultural, religions, gender …or other grounds, that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law…etc. (from UN website)


The significant difference between the ‘real time’ events of the carnage in Ukrainian towns and cities, and the gathering of evidence by Ukrainian and international prosecutors, however, leaves the people of Ukraine between a rock and a hard place…Here is another parallel process, whereby western and NATO leaders are pondering over the ‘fine print’ about avoiding an all-out military confrontation with Putin, while they generate a military ‘Marshall Plan’ to ‘support Ukraine in this fight…the politicians too caught between a rock and a hard place. And while volunteers from around the world are flying to Ukraine to fight on their behalf, and contributions of both medical and military materiel are flowing into Ukraine, the television screens are saturated with both blood and devastation.

 

In my worst nightmares, I never expected to be tapping the keys to print these words. I never anticipated the depths of depravity of a single human being, although crime and war stories, in history and in literary works, ought to have been adequate warning. Putting off, shoving out of mind and out of sight, and out of consideration, for the simple need to get on with whatever needed to be addressed in one’s own life… these are despair-saving or at least avoiding measures. And we all need and take them, consciously or not.

A Russian scholar, Amy Knight, appearing on npr, noted that putin’s greatest fear is that the openness, the freedoms, the opportunities and the culture of the western liberal democracies will come to Russia and leave no room for him and his regime.

The world knows that nothing will be the same after this war ends, no matter how it ends. Whether or not the kind of diplomatic parsing of Article 5 of the NATO charter, about whether or not a no-fly zone over Ukraine would trigger the Third World War, and whether or not such a strategy would even be effective against the

putin has to be stopped and the sooner he is stopped, the fewer lives will be lost, and fewer injuries will be inflicted, the fewer hospitals will be disabled, and the fewer towns and cities will have to resort to bomb shelters, underground caves and subway stations, as safe zones for those who have left. Also the sooner this carnage is brought to a halt, the sooner the refugee migration, now over 2 million, will cease, and the millions of lives that have already been tragically and permanently overturned will be able to begin to grieve, to mourn the inestimable losses and to even think about re-building their nation. We are all facing whatever prospects are to come.

Now, the travesty that confronts every person living on the planet cannot and will not be ignored or avoided, denied or devalued. And, if I were a betting man, I would sadly and despondently place my money on both Fiona Hill and Gary Kasparov, ahead of Biden, Johnston, Trudeau and Macron. Zelensky of Jewish origin, representing his country and the rest of the world, is unfortunately placed in a box in history: having to show leadership, inspiration, creativity and courage to his people, as well as to inspire the rest of the world to come to their aid, while being dubbed a neo-Fascist Nazi and also while having to remain safe and secure out of the range of Russian missiles and rockets and also while steering negotiations with a foe neither he not the rest of the world can or will trust.

 Betting on the Hill/Kasparov reality assessment that World War III has already begun, and that the fine print of Article 5 can be avoided by some kind of ‘end-run’ regardless of how putin responds, does not mean that NATO diplomats, The White House and the various government leaders from London, Paris, Berlin and Rome as well as Warsaw and Budapest, will do enough to provide the military victory that Zelensky and his countrymen and women seek.

In between, war and détente, in between Europe and North America, in between NATO and Russia, in between war crimes being committed and war crimes being prosecuted in the International Court of Justice, in between the facts on the ground (as disseminated by Zelensky and his countryfolk) and the Russia alternative reality (propagandized by putin and Lavrov)…in between the democracy of the west (regardless of its many and deep flaws) and the autocracy of Russia (with even more endemic and foundational inhumanities) in between yesterday and tomorrow…we are all on tenterhooks, including all of the participants. None of us has the insight, the power or the microphone to make a significant impact on the daily and hourly reports of bombs and missiles and roadblocks and tears. There are multiple ‘cooks in this broth’ so many that it is almost too complex for any single agency, government or army to keep up with the developments.

So, not only is truth on the slaughterhouse floor, so is the prospect for truth or any facsimile thereof to emerge after the slaughter ends. There can be little doubt that with 74 million Americans voting for a disgraced president who propagated lies from his first day in office to today, that this American tragedy has emboldened putin. If that many Americans can be seduced into stepping willfully and blindly into a cave of such profound and evident ‘alternative reality’ for whatever reason then why would putin not actually believe that his ‘alternative reality’ of Nazis running the government in Kyiv would ‘sell’ at home and around the world.

There is so much visceral energy extant tilting in the direction of supporting autocracies and China and India seem to be caught up in the swirling winds of that energy. They both abstain at the Security Council, rather than condemn Russia. And with Bejing leaning toward not neutrality but actual support for Russia, the world’s geopolitical stage, too, appears to be tilting in the direction of these two dictatorships. A Chinese reporter was embedded inside Russian soldiers, while telling the Russian ‘side’ of the story, to his Chinese audience yesterday. Erin Brunett’s Out Front, on CNN carried the story last evening.

It would seem that nuanced sophisticated calculations may be the snare that impales NATO and thereby Ukraine, while the millions of ordinary people around the western world are also ensnared in the same entanglement. And yet, without nuanced calculations, we might already have witnessed the first use of a nuclear weapon in wartime since World War II. It is hard not to put ourselves in the Oval Office at the time of President Truman, who faced the conundrum of having to decide whether or not to drop the first hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ostensibly, although not exclusively, to finally bring that war to an end.

The spectre of bringing this war to an end, while still a pale replica of the Great Wars of Europe in the twentieth century, confronts all of us, and especially those charged with leadership and decision-making, on the fly, in the midst of the death toll, and in the face of impending threats and rantings from the Kremlin.

Grace in the face of incredible pressure, that place where Hemingway found that one is at one’s life-edge, taut, highly sensitive to all of the pulsations of the moment and ready for the challenge….is it a masculine model of some kind of hero….and yet, this man’s writer nevertheless took his own life in 1961…

I heard someone say this week, “Now when I pray, I ask that this whole thing be over!” as if to ask God to bring an end to the pain we are all, especially Ukrainians, are going through. The fact that the Ukrainian Orthodox church seeks to break away from the Russian Orthodox church can hardly be a surprise to many of us in the west, after the Russian church endorsed the war and thereby the slaughter of innocent Ukrainians.

I pray that the needle can and will be threaded, so that real détente, from authentic individuals telling each other the whole truth, can and will bring some silence to the cacophony and the carnage.

Must the Hitler archetype wreak even more devastation that the original?