Mariupol

Mariupol, a modern European city with historic buildings that survived prior wars, is by all reports a smoking wasteland, where the remaining population has suddenly been crashed through centuries to a state beyond medieval, beyond the stone age.  Perhaps the image is they've gone the other way, into the future of urban apocalypse.

According to the BBC, there is hardly a building in the city that has not been destroyed or damaged by Russian rockets, bombs and shelling. The city has been without electricity and running water.  Russian forces surround the city, preventing food and medicines from entering. Thousands of its citizens have been killed outright, and others are dying of starvation and dehydration, as well as wounds and disease, partly because hospitals have been targeted and demolished.  

 Hundreds of thousands of Mariupol citizens have managed to get out, but Russians continue to agree to humanitarian corridors and internationally supervised evacuations, only to bomb travel routes and machine gun buses of evacuees.  Others have been kidnapped and taken to filtration camps and across the border to Russia or Russian allies.  

This is barbaric butchery with modern weapons, and it is happening before our (averted) eyes.  We've seen the slow demolishing of cities before in recent decades, but mostly in more remote places.  Mariupol is a 34 hour drive from Paris,  26 hours from Berlin, a couple of hours by plane.  

When the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin in 1948, a round the clock airlift by the US kept the city alive and eventually broke the blockade.  But the Soviets did not have nuclear weapons then.  And they weren't lobbing rockets into the city.

Most coverage of the war in Ukraine suggests that Putin has overreached, that he has been humiliated.  But a few observers suggest that his real target all along was eastern Ukraine and the southern ports like Mariupol.  Brett Stephens in the NY Times reports on a theory that Putin is after the considerable fossil fuel and other resources in the region.  This is a more sensible motive if harder to caricature than a grandiose vision of a Russian Empire with him as emperor, or Czar.  People were long perplexed as to why Hitler did not invade England when he was poised to do so, but instead turned to Russia.  But the answer was obvious to some at the time: Russia had the natural resources--the fossil fuels, iron, etc.--that Hitler needed to maintain a fighting force that could compete with what the US could build.  England did not.

Could it be, then, that Putin started this all by making a somewhat symbolic but very pointed rattling of his nuclear arsenal just before he invaded Ukraine, accompanied by speeches that sounded like the ravings of a Hitler-adjacent madman.  Perhaps a version of Nixon's Madman theory--make the enemy think you are capable of anything.

In any case, it worked.  The US and western European countries could be coming to the aid of Mariupol directly, by a thoroughly announced convoy taking food and medicine in, and residents out.  And prepare to give them air cover and military support if the Russians make a move to hinder them.

That the West is clearly not going to take that risk is understandable.  It is also, as Ukraine's president suggests, cowardly.  Of course the main responsibility, the essential moral as well as political crimes here, belong to Russia.  These actions in Ukraine have set world civilization back decades.

 The West not coming to the aid of Mariupol's people in such a direct way may be politically necessary.  But it is still a moral failure.