Western outrage, new sanctions, and promised state-of-the-art
weapons came too late to save the man found shot dead next to his bike on a
grassy bank outside Kyiv.
The man was pictured in a weekend of horrific imagery from Ukraine.
He was one of many blameless civilians whose destiny randomly
collided with President Vladimir Putin's barbaric invasion. Scenes being
revealed as Russian troops pull back from Kyiv are causing searing flashbacks
to atrocities last visited on Ukrainians by the Nazis in World War II.
This is one snapshot of the bloody price Ukrainian civilians
are paying for Putin's obsession with Russia's Cold War humiliation, and it
encapsulates how global responses to crimes against humanity -- short of
military action -- struggle to keep pace with a vicious on-the-ground war.
The sense of revulsion about what is happening in Ukraine
produced new momentum to hold Russia accountable on Monday. The European Union
and Ukraine launched a new probe into potential war crimes in the Kyiv suburb
of Bucha, where bodies were found strewn in the street. Members of Congress
called on President Joe Biden to speed up the flow of weapons into
Ukraine to beat back the invasion. The European Union is facing rising pressure
to accept what would be a painful economic hit by totally cutting off Russian
oil and coal exports.
Biden reacted to the growing catalog of inhumanity on Monday
by calling for more sanctions and for a war crimes trial to take place against
Putin.
"You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a
war criminal," Biden said. "He is a war criminal. This guy is
brutal."
But the awful tragedy being revealed in Ukraine is that all
of the measures the West is prepared to contemplate to punish Moscow and impact
the long-term course of the war cannot do much to save civilians being targeted
now.
And it is questionable whether any of the potential responses
to the bloodlust by Putin's troops will sway the ruthless
Russian leader anyway.
The reflex for leaders to offer horrified condemnations, to
demand accountability and to lash out at Putin is understandable. It's also
critical for the world not to be numbed into acceptance.
But the West is unlikely to halt Putin's campaign of
atrocities in the short term -- especially since the Russian leader has proven
immune from moral outrage. And given the scale of carnage already committed,
including attacks on apartment blocks, hospitals and bomb shelters, he also
appears to have long passed the point of any restraint.
New momentum for fresh punishments for Russia followed a
weekend in which harrowing footage emerged of civilians shot dead, some
execution-style, in Bucha. A CNN team also observed a mass grave in the town on Sunday and witnessed the removal of bodies from a basement on Monday.
Ukraine warned Monday that such scenes may be the "tip
of the iceberg," and President Volodymyr Zelensky said worse atrocities were
being uncovered.
"There is already information that the number of victims
of the occupiers may be even higher in Borodyanka and some other liberated
cities," said Zelensky, who will address the UN Security Council on
Tuesday morning.
"In many villages of the liberated districts of the
Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions, the occupiers did things that the locals had
not seen even during the Nazi occupation 80 years ago."
Putin knows the West's limits
The toughest sanctions ever, Russia's new status as a global
pariah and its cultural, diplomatic, economic and sporting isolation haven't
stopped the Kremlin strongman yet. Given Putin's apparently secure political
position, he shows no concern at being labeled a war criminal, and the chances
of him standing trial are remote barring staggering political change in Russia.
Russia's contempt for the notion of accountability,
meanwhile, shone through its absurd claims that scenes of the decomposed bodies
being pulled from the basement and images of civilians apparently killed
execution-style were staged by the Ukrainians.
Armed with the world's largest stockpile of nuclear warheads,
Putin understands that the West is unwilling to intervene directly in Ukraine
and risk a disastrous clash with Russia with measures like a no-fly zone to
save civilians.
He is offering a lesson in why other dictators might consider
pursuing nuclear arms. The kind of Western interventions to save civilians in
places like Kosovo or Libya are prohibited in Ukraine, simply because of the
implied power of the Russian leader's arsenal -- and his saber rattling earlier
in the war.
Eighty years after dictators like Adolf Hitler in Germany or
Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union spread terror inside and outside their
countries, Putin is creating an awful new spectacle for the 21st century --
that of a dictator who cannot be deterred.
A special kind of impunity
Putin's willingness to absorb punishments already clamped on
Russia over the invasion gave him a special kind of impunity. Sanctions on the
Russian economy and oligarchs may have a debilitating impact in the long term.
But they have clearly failed as a tool of deterrence.
The Russian leader has also appeared willing to tolerate
heavy casualties among his troops in the face of heroic resistance from
Ukrainian forces. The recalibration of Russian strategy to trying to
consolidate control of eastern regions may, however, show even Putin can be
moved by events over time.
From the outside, the war is a military, diplomatic and
economic disaster for Russia after its failure to seize key objectives. But it
can still be a perverse success for Putin if his goal is simply to destroy as
much of Ukraine as possible and create a victory parade for Russian state
media.
So in many ways, he's playing an asymmetric game with the
West, whose sanctions and punitive measures are based on a more logical view of
Russia's interests and its own limitations.
Still, the White House reacted to the horror emerging from
Ukraine by promising to quicken the pace of military, humanitarian and economic
aid to Kyiv.
"The images from Bucha so powerfully reinforce now is
not the time for complacency," US national security adviser Jake Sullivan
said Monday.
Such help could shorten the war and alleviate attacks on
civilians in weeks and months to come. But Putin has been besieging and
bombarding Ukrainian cities for weeks. Millions of people were already driven
out of the country into Western Europe as refugees.
A Nuremberg-style trial?
Momentum is also growing for some kind of formal mechanism to
hold Russian leaders accountable for war crimes. Former Ukrainian Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told CNN's Jake Tapper on Monday that the invasion
was the biggest disaster in Europe since World War II, and merited a system of
justice similar to the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.
"We need to prepare right now. We need to urgently
launch a kind of joint investigative group in order to be prepared to bring to
justice Putin and to see Putin sitting behind ... bars."
But the nature of the post-Cold War international system
would complicate the establishment of a system that enjoyed global legitimacy.
Russia, for instance, would be certain to veto any attempt to involve the
United Nations with its Security Council vote. China would also seek to derail
any effort to impose accountability for human rights abuses given its own
repression of Uyghur Muslims that the United States has branded a genocide.
Still, the difficulty of bringing Putin to justice does not
mean that Russians lower in the chain of command cannot be investigated, though
the International Criminal Court in The Hague doesn't conduct trials in
absentia. The organization does, however, already have investigations in
Ukraine, which has accepted its jurisdiction even though it's not a member of
the court.
One potentially significant new blow against Russia could
come from Europe as the European Union draws up new sanctions. French President
Emmanuel Macron backed a ban on Russian coal and oil exports to the EU as soon
as this week.
But it's doubtful whether other big powers, including
Germany, would go that far, given the energy shortages and spikes to already
high inflation that would result.
Such a move would undoubtedly make strides in starving
funding for the war in Ukraine.
But in the shorter term, it would also beg two questions: Is
Putin even vulnerable to pressure anymore? And how many more Ukrainian
civilians will die until he is?
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