You have to wonder what it would take to get House and Senate Republicans to get off their collective duffs and walk across their respective cloak rooms to smell the proverbial coffee. City after city after city in Ukraine has been leveled by Russian artillery and rockets. The port of Mariupol is a shell of its former self. Large areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, are in rubble. Bakhmut doesn’t exist anymore. There isn’t a square mile of Ukraine from Kharkiv in the north through Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, all the way to Kherson on the coast of the Black Sea that hasn’t been severely damaged if not utterly destroyed by Russia’s war of aggression.
Wait. Let’s stop right there. I’ve been writing words like these for nearly two years about the war in Ukraine, and they accurately convey what has happened in the war. So do Ukraine’s numbers of the dead and wounded, both military and civilian. But sitting here in Northeast Pennsylvania, or more to the point, in a limestone and marble building in Washington, D.C., there is no way to adequately conceive of the horror Russia has wrought in the country that stands between it and Europe.
From 1939 to 1945, Nazi Germany wreaked havoc through Europe all the way to the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. When I lived in Germany in the 1950’s and took trips with my parents through Germany and France and Italy, you could still see the damage done in World War II. Churches from the 13th and 14th centuries in small towns lay in ruins with maybe a single stone wall still standing. City after city still had not finished cleaning up the rubble from bombings and artillery shelling. I still have images in my mind of old women in long dresses with headscarves stacking bricks along the sides of blown-up streets in Stuttgart as we drove through on our way to visit friends stationed at an army post in Baumholder.
Today, having seen the damage wrought by World War II in Western Europe as a boy, it’s hard for me to transfer those images through 65 years to Ukraine, but there they are: new photographs and videos of similar destruction only a thousand or so miles from the destroyed cities I saw in the 1950s. We founded the United Nations in 1945 and NATO in 1949 in an attempt by nations that gathered together to try to ensure that the horrors the world had just been through did not happen again. There was a hope years ago that we wouldn’t have wars if they could be adequately described and remembered. But here we are, looking at our televisions and phone and computer screens at the tragic images all over again.
All this because one man, Vladimir Putin, went to bed one night and woke up the next morning and said he wanted to invade Ukraine and make it part of Russia. It didn’t matter to him how much damage such an invasion would wreak, how many lives it would take, just like it didn’t matter to Hitler what it would cost for him to remake Europe in his own image.
We in the United States don’t have cities that have had to be rebuilt or great expanses of cemeteries in which are buried the civilian dead of wars. Maybe that is why it’s all so abstract for us. On a continent thousands of miles away from the war that happened in Europe 80 years ago or even the war that is happening in Ukraine right now, today, this minute, it’s someone else’s history, it’s someone else’s problem.
That appears to be the attitude of the Republican Party. Here is a political party that for decades stood for the defense of our nation and the defense of liberty around the world, and now under the thumb of a so-called leader who is now fully showing his totalitarian nature, many Republicans in the House and the Senate have decided all that is in the past. Ukraine is Europe’s problem. Aides and advisers to Donald Trump have already begun to talk about withdrawing from NATO if he is elected. The Heritage Foundation is hosting a meeting between Republicans on Capitol Hill and advisors to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, a close Putin ally, as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to the White House to make a last-ditch plea for funding before year's end.
If Putin believes Ukraine is not a sovereign nation but a part of Ukraine, well, that’s Ukraine’s problem, not ours, say some Republicans led by Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation. They express admiration for Putin and the way he runs things in Russia. They say, he knows how to get things done. Donald Trump wants to be like him. He is telling us if he is elected, he will be a dictator on “day one” so he can build his wall, apparently by fiat, and “drill drill drill,” even in national monuments and parks.
Republicans are falling in line behind Trump. That’s what’s going on with the refusal by Republicans to fund the war in Ukraine unless Democrats go along with changes in policies on the border that would effectively build the wall Trump failed to build, not with concrete and steel, but with draconian immigration laws.
Republicans and their putative leader profess to be unconcerned by what would happen if Ukraine runs out of money and artillery shells and rockets and anti-missile batteries that defend Kyiv and other cities. They are unmoved by the scenes of destruction caused by Russian shelling and rockets. They are unmoved by the scenes of mass graves in Bucha and Izium and the reports of the Russian murders that filled them with bodies of dead civilians.
Let me tell you what is happening in Ukraine while the Republican thumb-twiddler caucus turns its head and votes the way Donald Trump tells them to vote. All along the 600-mile front line, Ukrainian soldiers are being killed by Russian artillery, rockets and drone strikes every day. They launch attacks across muddy fields from makeshift bunkers where they defend themselves from Russian shelling. They have no heat. All around them lie the ruins of whatever city they’re defending, all the way from the Russian border to the Black Sea. In Dnipro, where some of the heaviest fighting is going on, it’s freezing, in the low 30’s at night, mid 30’s during the day. It will be 35 on Tuesday and 36 on Wednesday. It will warm up to 47 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday and rain all that day and part of Friday, making fields and forests even more difficult to move through, slowing resupply convoys, even preventing drone overflights of Russian positions by Ukrainian forces that need the surveillance and intelligence the drones provide.
Conditions for soldiers on the front lines are miserable in the extreme, and conditions in Ukrainian cities are not much better. Russian attacks on energy infrastructure have caused blackouts and no heat in Kyiv and Kharkiv and other large population centers. Trucks filled with dead and wounded soldiers keep coming from the front lines. The wounded need medical care, and the dead need to be buried.
In Washington, D.C., it will be in the high 40s and mid-’50s this week, perfect weather for members of the House and Senate to call an Uber and take a ride into Georgetown to dine at their favorite restaurant on veal scallopini or sushi or fresh-caught Chilean sea bass, a favorite at high end restaurants right now. Tomorrow, they can hold press conferences in the Rotunda of the Capitol and speak defiantly about how they are standing fast against President Biden’s demand for help with funding Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression. A few of them have even talked about a “war on our southern border” that must be funded before they will approve funds for the real war in Ukraine.
There is no war on our southern border, nor are there problems on our northern border, which some Republican members of Congress have also cited as one of their excuses for not funding Ukraine. Next, we’ll be hearing about the “threat from Canada” in the ignorant babble from Republicans on Capitol Hill and the few Republican candidates left on the hustings nibbling like ducks at the crumbs from Trump’s table.
This is a time of disgrace for the United States of America, that we are sitting here on a continent thousands of miles away from the war fought by Ukraine to defend its democracy and its existence from Russia and the threat it will pose to the rest of Europe if Ukraine does not prevail in its war against Russian aggression.
Putin won’t stop with Ukraine. He’s already got allies in Belarus and Hungary, and Russia is funding right-wing political movements in other European states as we speak. But that’s okay with Republicans who plan on electing Trump as president, and he will pull all U.S. funding for NATO and all U.S. troops out of Europe, so they can push for tax cuts based on all our savings from our abject failure to be the leading defender of democracies around the world.
Ask any Republican planning to vote for Trump in 2024, and they’ll tell you: Who needs to defend democracy at home and abroad when they’ve put a man who grins approvingly as he uses the word “dictator” in a sentence talking about himself?
