In 1945, the United Nations (UN) brought together 51 countries committed to “maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards, and human rights.”
Founded in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was dedicated to uphold “individual liberty, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” Its three pillars are collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security.
Together, these organizations are credited with maintaining the peaceful coexistence and stability we have enjoyed in the West for nearly 80 years. Security was desperately needed in Europe which experienced the unimaginable bloodshed of 40 million people in World War I, followed by a further 85 million in World War II. Until Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, scene of the bloodiest battles between the Nazis and Soviets in World War II, another World War seemed unconceivable in our lifetimes.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many former Soviet member states were liberated from communist subjugation, elected democratic governments, and joined NATO. While the Russian Federation is not a NATO member, for more than 30 years, there was a history of cooperation and partnership, a relationship shattered in 2014 by Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
Thanks to Ukraine’s fierce resistance to occupation by Russia, and NATO’s imposition of crippling economic sanctions on Russia, Putin is using more and more extreme measures to demoralize and subjugate the Ukrainian population. Defenseless women and children are being bombed in their homes, schools, and hospitals; hundreds of thousands of people have no food, water, or heat and humanitarian convoys are shelled. The population is being terrorized into submission, and yet still they resist.
The International Criminal Court has initiated an investigation into Putin’s war crimes, but depressingly, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia will probably veto its findings. Ironically, it was the Soviet Union that drove the prosecution of Nazi war crimes committed in Ukraine during World War II. Despite committing crimes on a similar scale to those of Hitler, including their conspiracy to jointly invade Poland in 1939, Stalin and his collaborators were never prosecuted, and their atrocities went unpunished. The Russian Federation’s continued membership of the UN makes a complete mockery of international justice.
NATO’s response to the crisis has also received for heavy criticism, not least from Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, whose repeated pleas for fighter jets and a No-Fly Zone have been denied to avoid an escalation of hostilities to World War III. Neighboring countries, notably Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, are understandably nervous about NATOs resolve to protect them should they be next in line. What further obscenity must be committed by the Russian army before NATO considers it must intervene? As Zelensky put it, “How many Ukrainian lives must be lost? Let me know so I can count them.”
Has the West become incapable of standing up to military aggression? Will it allow itself to be blackmailed into inaction by the threat of nuclear war? Putin is a man without morality and, for all our sakes, this crisis must end with his utter defeat and removal from power. I hope that the Kremlin’s corrupt government is exposed so that Russian citizens will never allow such a dictatorship to take root again.
nadiarupniak.com 