Putin and the American Far Right

Russia methodically is destroying a neighboring independent democratic country and is accused of committing mass atrocities, war crimes that include evidence of executions of hundreds of civilians. Yet American far-right radicals applaud Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the same time, the Russians, defeated by stiff Ukrainian resistance in their unsuccessful siege of the capital of Kyiv, switched tactics and are massing armor, aircraft and thousands of infantry for an assault against the eastern Donbas region that has been occupied by pro-Kremlin forces. It borders Russia, which makes resupply easy.

The mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko, said there were more than 10,000 civilian dead in his besieged city after six weeks of Russian bombardments and assaults, their corpses “carpeted through the streets,” the Associated Press reported. The city is in the south, on the Sea of Azov.

This isn’t a war. This is a determined, calculated, purposeful slaughter of the Ukrainian people, an ungodly genocidal horror akin to a holocaust. And Putin apparently is not finished with inflicting brutality; it’s as if he has carte blanche.

President Joe Biden told it like it is Tuesday at an event in Iowa, accusing Putin of committing “genocide.” He said afterward he used that inflammatory description of the invasion “intentionally” because “it sure seems that way to me,” even if international lawyers may disagree.

“It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is trying to wipe out the idea of being Ukrainian,” he said. “More evidence is coming out literally of the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky applauded that statement in a tweet: “True words of a true leader. Calling things by their names is essential to stand up to evil.”

The allied democracies surely would have ended this war weeks ago if Russia weren’t a major nuclear power. Possession of those doomsday weapons is what keeps Putin going.

Faced with the prospect of a powerful Russian invasion on open Donbas terrain instead of more easily defended urban areas, Zelensky pleaded with the allies in an interview on “60 Minutes” Sunday for more weapons.

“They have to supply weapons to Ukraine as if they were defending themselves and their own people,” he said. He often has repeated that Ukraine is battling Russia alone on behalf of all democracies, not only his own country.

“If they don’t speed up [the supply], it will be very hard for us to hold on against this [Russian] pressure,” Zelensky said in Ukrainian, the translation to English in subtitles.

His repeated appeals for allied aid is reminiscent of how Prime Minister Winston Churchill begged President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for weapons at the outset of the Battle of Britain early in World War II, when London stood alone against the Nazi onslaught of Europe. The 1930s Neutrality Act, a series of laws passed by an isolationist Congress, initially prevented FDR from helping the British, until amendments permitted the Lend Lease of ships for resupplying the island nation.

The Western coalition has rejected Zelensky’s repeated appeals for creating a no-fly zone over Ukraine and fighter planes to attack Russian warplanes, arguing that they could incite an unpredictable Putin to launch a wider war, possibly with tactical nuclear weapons.

“I think that today no one in this world can predict what Russia will do,” said Zelensky, possibly the most popular head of state on the planet. “If they invade further into our territory, they will definitely move closer and closer to Europe. They will only become stronger and less predictable.”