Attention has turned in recent days to the massive refugee flow out of Ukraine into neighboring countries. Most notable is the influx into Poland where upwards of a million innocents have fled to avoid the shell fire, rockets, and cluster bombs of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Approaching 2 million Ukrainians, including more than half a million children, have now left their homeland. The flood is likely to increase because the spate has long since ceased to be primarily those who have friends and relatives conveniently located across friendly frontiers and now includes masses of ordinary Ukrainians without any other hope. They are giving up everything to save their families. Who knows how many will decide before the war ends that this is their only option?
We have all seen the photographs of jammed platforms at Ukrainian city train stations, of tearful and fearful mothers shepherding their children to safety, and of infants screaming in terror and dismay amid the nightmare that has engulfed their young lives. I have not used the word “indiscriminate,” as many others have done, to characterize Putin’s barbaric assault on defenseless civilian parents, children, and the elderly. For these murders are not a byproduct of general war or the unintended “collateral damage” — a hideous euphemism! — of long-range Russian bombardment made necessary because Moscow’s forces are bogged down against stiff resistance. No, these attacks are deliberate acts of military terrorism. They are part of Putin’s strategy. He is,
as I’ve noted
, a reckless gambler upping the ante.
Industrial-scale murder and mass refugee migration are perhaps his chief means of attempting to make the pain of continued conflict too high — too high for Ukraine to continue fighting, too high for the West to continue supporting that fight, and too high for Ukraine’s neighbors to keep accepting the increased burdens that refugees naturally bring with them. Putin has turned his attention to civilian slaughter because his military forces are stymied — the Soviet math of “correlation of forces” means they still are likely to prevail — and has coupled it to a list of demands in exchange for which he says he will stop the war. The Kremlin issued
a set of prerequisites
for a cease in hostilities. Essentially, these would lock Russia’s outrages and gains in place, rewarding it for its years of predation, and add Ukraine to Moscow’s legitimized sphere of influence.
The demands are that Ukraine cease all resistance, recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, recognize the bogus independent states Putin’s forces have overrun in the Donbas region, and write into Ukraine’s new constitution that it will never join either NATO or the European Union. Putin’s attacks on civilians are the mailed gauntlet in which his demanding, grasping hand is outstretched toward the West including his brutalized neighbor. They are part and parcel of his strategy. He is making maximal demands with scenes of “or else” now playing before the world on television screens. This is the “golden bridge” Putin is suggesting of an escape for him from a war in which he badly miscalculated both the speed and effectiveness with which the free world would unify against him and the strength of resistance from a country one-twenty-fifth the size of Russia, with a military one-tenth as powerful on paper even before considering nuclear weapons and a population less than one-third the size.
We should want him to have a bridge away from conflict, for the alternative is a spreading and intensifying war. But it cannot be the bridge he has suggested, for it is one that depicts a maximal demand as a minimal concession. The extreme international danger is that the most Ukraine and the West can properly agree to — it’s difficult to imagine what that might be — is less than the minimum the Russian tyrant can accept and still avoid domestic humiliation on a scale that endangers his continued grip on power, however tight that now appears to be. The combination of demands that lock in gains and rewards for aggression on the one hand, and murder and terror against innocent civilians on the other, is the gambit of a desperate despot, but it would be profoundly dangerous in consequence to regard it as a bluff.
Putin is prepared to kill as many people and threaten as many countries as it may take to cling to power. To acknowledge these things is not to argue for any letup in pressure from the West, which should continue. It is, though, an acknowledgment of the fantastically risky calculation facing the West because for three decades it failed to face the reality of what was being created in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
