By Max Boot
Columnist|
February 12, 2024 at 6:15 a.m. EST
KYIV — I wish House Speaker Mike Johnson and other MAGA Republicans who have been holding up desperately needed aid to Ukraine could see what I just saw there. In particular, I wish they had been with me on Wednesday morning in Dnipro, a bustling city of about 1 million people in eastern Ukraine. If they had been, they might be less willing to betray the people of Ukraine in their desperate struggle for survival against a barbaric invader.
The day began when air-raid alarms sounded at 5:15 a.m. Roused out of sleep, I stumbled down to the hotel bomb shelter along with other members of a U.S. delegation of policy analysts and former government officials invited to Ukraine by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. We were in Ukraine to see the important work UNHCR is doing to help the millions of people displaced by war.
That morning, as we spent hours in a bomb shelter, we saw why so many have been forced to flee their homes: Vladimir Putin keeps deliberately attacking civilian targets in the hope of breaking Ukraine’s will to resist. On Wednesday, the Russians launched 64 drones and missiles at Ukraine. Most were intercepted, but some got through. A few days later, we saw the damage to an apartment building in Kyiv where four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds of others forced out of their homes.
In Dnipro, we visited an apartment building where at least 64 people had died in an earlier Russian missile strike. Eerily enough, we could still see clothes hanging in a top-floor closet — visible because the entire front wall of the building was gone. Other Russian missiles have struck hospitals, schools and shopping malls in the area. These are targets of no military value whose destruction amounts to crimes against humanity.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...c_magnet-oprussiaukraine_inline_collection_19
The situation is even grimmer in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is located only about 20 miles from the Russian border. Russian forces are constantly bombarding Kharkiv with short-range rockets. The city’s best hotel, once favored by Western journalists and aid workers, was destroyed on Dec. 30. Most other businesses remain open, but many have boarded-up windows. We visited a “subway school” held underground, because it’s too dangerous for children to go to their normal classrooms. (Most of the city’s pupils are forced into the pedagogical purgatory of online learning.) I marveled at Ukrainian ingenuity in converting five subway stations into schools but was heartbroken by the necessity to do so.
In Kharkiv’s North Saltivka neighborhood — shelled regularly by the Russians for six months in 2022 — not a building had escaped damage. Once home to 40,000 residents, this district we visited is now virtually deserted. One of the few remaining residents, an elderly woman named Nadiia, couldn’t stop crying as she recounted to me the shock of the Russian invasion nearly two years ago. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Bullets were flying past us. I was just praying.”
I wished I could comfort her and tell her that she was safe now, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Just last month, a Russian rocket demolished another nearby building. And residents have recently been forced to flee the town of Kupyansk, just 74 miles away, because the Russians are massing for another attack there in the hope of regaining territory lost to the Ukrainians in October 2022.
Last May, when I was in Ukraine, optimism was in the air. The Ukrainians were preparing a major counteroffensive that they hoped would drive the invaders out of the country’s south and shorten the war. But it ultimately failed, and the war grinds on — with no end in sight as it enters its third year. Putin has mobilized more troops, converted his economy to a war footing, and bought weapons from Iran and North Korea. Ukraine is struggling to keep pace. “People are tired,” Odessa’s regional governor, Oleh Kiper, told us. “They don’t understand what lies ahead.”
The first cracks are beginning to appear in the facade of Ukraine’s wartime unity. On Thursday, while I was on a train from Kharkiv to Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the popular commander of his armed forces, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. The two men had long had a tense relationship. Zaluzhny was replaced by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the former commander of land forces, who is less popular with the rank-and-file but gets along better with the president. The change of commanders was risky, but Zaluzhny’s exit was at least handled with dignity.
Columnist|
February 12, 2024 at 6:15 a.m. EST
KYIV — I wish House Speaker Mike Johnson and other MAGA Republicans who have been holding up desperately needed aid to Ukraine could see what I just saw there. In particular, I wish they had been with me on Wednesday morning in Dnipro, a bustling city of about 1 million people in eastern Ukraine. If they had been, they might be less willing to betray the people of Ukraine in their desperate struggle for survival against a barbaric invader.
The day began when air-raid alarms sounded at 5:15 a.m. Roused out of sleep, I stumbled down to the hotel bomb shelter along with other members of a U.S. delegation of policy analysts and former government officials invited to Ukraine by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. We were in Ukraine to see the important work UNHCR is doing to help the millions of people displaced by war.
That morning, as we spent hours in a bomb shelter, we saw why so many have been forced to flee their homes: Vladimir Putin keeps deliberately attacking civilian targets in the hope of breaking Ukraine’s will to resist. On Wednesday, the Russians launched 64 drones and missiles at Ukraine. Most were intercepted, but some got through. A few days later, we saw the damage to an apartment building in Kyiv where four people had been killed, 39 injured and hundreds of others forced out of their homes.
In Dnipro, we visited an apartment building where at least 64 people had died in an earlier Russian missile strike. Eerily enough, we could still see clothes hanging in a top-floor closet — visible because the entire front wall of the building was gone. Other Russian missiles have struck hospitals, schools and shopping malls in the area. These are targets of no military value whose destruction amounts to crimes against humanity.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...c_magnet-oprussiaukraine_inline_collection_19
The situation is even grimmer in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is located only about 20 miles from the Russian border. Russian forces are constantly bombarding Kharkiv with short-range rockets. The city’s best hotel, once favored by Western journalists and aid workers, was destroyed on Dec. 30. Most other businesses remain open, but many have boarded-up windows. We visited a “subway school” held underground, because it’s too dangerous for children to go to their normal classrooms. (Most of the city’s pupils are forced into the pedagogical purgatory of online learning.) I marveled at Ukrainian ingenuity in converting five subway stations into schools but was heartbroken by the necessity to do so.
In Kharkiv’s North Saltivka neighborhood — shelled regularly by the Russians for six months in 2022 — not a building had escaped damage. Once home to 40,000 residents, this district we visited is now virtually deserted. One of the few remaining residents, an elderly woman named Nadiia, couldn’t stop crying as she recounted to me the shock of the Russian invasion nearly two years ago. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Bullets were flying past us. I was just praying.”
I wished I could comfort her and tell her that she was safe now, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Just last month, a Russian rocket demolished another nearby building. And residents have recently been forced to flee the town of Kupyansk, just 74 miles away, because the Russians are massing for another attack there in the hope of regaining territory lost to the Ukrainians in October 2022.
Last May, when I was in Ukraine, optimism was in the air. The Ukrainians were preparing a major counteroffensive that they hoped would drive the invaders out of the country’s south and shorten the war. But it ultimately failed, and the war grinds on — with no end in sight as it enters its third year. Putin has mobilized more troops, converted his economy to a war footing, and bought weapons from Iran and North Korea. Ukraine is struggling to keep pace. “People are tired,” Odessa’s regional governor, Oleh Kiper, told us. “They don’t understand what lies ahead.”
The first cracks are beginning to appear in the facade of Ukraine’s wartime unity. On Thursday, while I was on a train from Kharkiv to Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the popular commander of his armed forces, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. The two men had long had a tense relationship. Zaluzhny was replaced by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the former commander of land forces, who is less popular with the rank-and-file but gets along better with the president. The change of commanders was risky, but Zaluzhny’s exit was at least handled with dignity.
