Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Ukraine is struggling to stop a renewed Russian invasion

Let’s all turn our attention to Ukraine.

I am appalled and angry that Ukraine’s plight is in America’s rear-view mirror as our media (and our public?) focus on campus sit-ins and calls for endowment disinvestment from and boycotting of companies doing business with Israel while the Hamas-Israel war rages.

Where are the protests in front of the Russian Embassy and its consulates, let alone on educational campuses nationwide, over the Russian killing of Ukrainian babies; the Russian kidnapping of untold thousands of Ukrainian children; the Russian butchering of civilians (remember Bucha?), the Russian bombardment of Ukrainian schools, hospitals, and power plants; let alone the indiscriminate Russian flights of killer drones attacking innocent Ukrainians in their sleep?

I see, hear, and read these student and professorial protests, and I wonder: is there any understanding of 20^th and 21^st century American and world history? Or are they all Russia’s 21^st century version of Lenin’s “useful idiots?” Because, for sure, Putin and his Russian acolytes are delighted to see disruptions in American politics over Israel, and Trump’s tribulations. Anything to turn our attention away from their ongoing effort to conquer democracies like Ukraine and former Soviet and Czarist possessions now in NATO and the European Union.

What Russia is doing now

I realize this column could be outdated when you read it—we are, after all, a weekly newspaper.

But as I write, the news from Ukraine is disheartening.

Here’s a report filed in the New York Times an hour before I started writing this column last Sunday afternoon, May 12.

“After two long years, the war in Ukraine keeps finding new zones of misery.

Over the past two days, several thousand civilians who had hung on through some very tough times finally abandoned their homes in Ukraine’s northeast after the Russians opened a new front.

On Friday at dawn, Russian troops launched a complex attack with aircraft, artillery, infantry troops and armor, surging across the border near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. By all accounts — and by the shudders of enormous bombs hitting the ground not far from the evacuation point — the two sides are now locked in heavy fighting over a string of villages just a few miles inside Ukrainian territory.

…Military analysts say they believe the incursion may be part of a wily Russian strategy, not necessarily to open a new line of attack on Kharkiv but to suck away Ukraine’s forces from other battlefields where the Ukrainians are already worn out and stretched thin.

…Ukraine must be careful how it responds, given its depleted military. Supplies from a long-delayed American aid package are only beginning to trickle to the front lines, leaving the Ukrainians more vulnerable than they have been in months.”

The current Russian assault has been expected by most Western correspondents in Ukraine, including that of The Economist. In a headline, the London, England based magazine called Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion “holding Europe’s line.”

To quote their analysis:

“The purpose of the fighting around Chasiv Yar is not to retain every inch of land, but to prevent the Russian army from sweeping across the rest of Ukraine and taking its main cities, including Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odessa and Kyiv. Similarly, Mr. Putin is not interested in the Donbas for its territory; he is trying to subjugate Ukraine and end its quest to become part of the European order. Last week Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, told The Economist that this order could perish “much more quickly than we think.” Ukraine is where the fight is taking place.”

The fight for the European order,
and NATO and Western survival

Ukraine’s fight is our fight, not just Europe’s. That was the reason our Congress finally signed off on that crucial money for military aid to Ukraine—a sign off that took far too long.

The MAGA Republicans who fought that aid package were ultimately denounced by their fellow Republicans. Even Georgia’s Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was labeled “Moscow Marjorie” by her GOP detractors.

And doing Moscow’s bidding was exactly what she was doing, whether she was insightful enough to understand that or not. That six-month delay weakened Ukraine disastrously. It took top intelligence briefings on Ukraine for House Speaker Mike Johnson to agree, against the wishes of the far MAGA right, to bring the Ukraine financial and military package to the House floor, then passage, and ultimately President Biden’s signature.

But the delay was unconscionable. And so were the Biden administration’s ongoing delays in sending Ukraine the offensive and defensive weaponry it needed.

It was Macron who told The Economist, as we quoted last week:

“At the NATO summit in the summer of 2022, we all ruled out the delivery of tanks, deep-strike missiles, aircraft. We are now all in the process of doing this, so it would be wrong to rule out the rest. But above all, it would be wrong in terms of credibility and deterrence vis-à-vis the Russians to rule it out. I note, by the way, that the aggressiveness of the Russian response to what I said showed that this was having the desired effect, which was to say: Don’t think that we will stop here if you don’t stop.”

By saying “wrong to rule out the rest,” Macron refers to his determination to send French troops to Ukraine if there’s a possibility Russia will break through Ukraine’s weakening front lines.

In Putin’s eyes, there’s no difference between French troops and NATO troops.

So that’s what’s bringing us to the precipice of World War III.

And the students and professors are screaming about Israel and Hamas? And ignoring Ukraine?

Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.

Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.