The guy with the hard-to-spell name and penchant for green commando pullovers flew to Washington D.C. on Wednesday to deliver a Christmas reality check to President Biden and Congress.
If you paid attention to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s (I’ve read his last name spelled three different ways in newspapers in the last 48 hours) speech to Congress, you heard him say Ukrainians won’t stop fighting Russians until every last Ukrainian is dead.
The bad news for Ukraine’s allies — especially Americans — is that Russian President Vladimir Putin has shoved a similar-sized pile of chips across the proverbial craps table by stating he is willing to accept hundreds of thousands more Russian casualties before he shouts “uncle” in Ukraine.
I’m sure fellow history lovers share my fascination and sense of horror over the parallels between the slaughter that began in February in Ukraine and past military ventures that engulfed the same vast swath of territory.
Putin must have forgotten everything he read about Hitler when he decided to launch an invasion aimed at grabbing Ukraine in one fell swoop. At 233,000 square miles, Ukraine is the largest country located entirely in Europe.
Stymied by the resolute Ukrainians and his undermotivated troops (read the Sunday New York Times’ special report last Sunday on Putin), the Russian leader resorted to taking Ukraine under siege by bombarding its cities and power network with the goal of leaving Ukrainians freezing in the dark with no working plumbing.
The irony of ironies is that the son of Russians who survived World War II failed to take a lesson from his parents’ experiences in the 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad. The Russians refused to surrender the city and Putin’s assumption that Ukrainians will veer away from that stalwart stubbornness in the face of death is mystifying.
Zelenky’s trip to Washington also echoes another desperate journey in December 81 years ago when Winston Churchill paid a prolonged visit to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Visit Mount Vernon and you will see the photograph of Churchill and Roosevelt standing in front of Washington’s tomb on Jan. 1, 1942.
Churchill had endured the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Blitz and the U-boat attacks on British shipping for well over a year, all the while looking in vain across the Atlantic, hoping Roosevelt would commit the “arsenal of Democracy” to crush Germany.
His prayers were answered three weeks before the photo was taken when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America entered the war barely a week after Siberian troops helped drive Hitler’s exhausted armies back from the gates of Moscow.
Churchill knew on New Year’s Day 1942 that the pendulum had swung away from Hitler even though brutal battles lay ahead for the Allies. Zelensky left Washington on Wednesday night with no similar assurance.
A divided Congress could pull the plug on money and arms for Ukraine even as its members pay lip service to Ukraine’s struggle.
Any student of history knows that an unlikely Russian conquest and occupation of Ukraine won’t bring peace to Europe.
Poles, Germans and Eastern Europeans who lived behind the former Soviet Union’s “iron curtain” know how freedoms are abridged when Russian tanks roll into their countries.
Russia and Ukraine are remote places to Americans, but not to Europeans: The driving distance from Moscow to Berlin is slightly longer than the drive from New York City to Denver. If Putin can’t be stopped on the Ukrainian border, then what’s to stop him from crossing the Polish or Estonian border?
By showing up at the White House in his “war president” outfit, Zelensky told us all we need to know about him and his country. Clothes, in Zelensky’s case, truly make the man, and his outfit stated loud and clear he is just another soldier in Ukraine’s struggle.
If the Russians kill him, then a teacher, or plumber, or bus driver, or cook will step up and take charge as the bloody slog grinds into another day, another week, another month and into its second year.
Merry Christmas and peace on earth.
