Shaking scythes at cannon in Koryukivka, Berdyansk, Kharkiv and Kyiv

If you want a picture of what awaits the cities of Ukraine if Vladimir Putin is not stopped, imagine Aleppo.

It’s hard enough to keep up with on-the-ground events in Ukraine, and this newsletter wasn’t intended to be a news bulletin bringing you all the latest mayhem anyway. I’m working on a weekend piece for the National Post, so I’m going to skip the roundup I was working on and get straight to the point.

It’s probably too late.

That’s the conclusion I’d more or less already reached while I was writing my latest for Post, in print today, where I touch on all this talk about making Vladimir Putin pay a “high price” for invading a democratic, westward-looking European republic. Pay attention to the words being spoken by the British, European and American leadership when they describe their own remedies to cope with Putin’s barbaric conduct in Ukraine. It’s all about the price point.

To my ears it sounds a lot like this: Well, we tried brandish sanctions to warn Putin away from any delusional military adventurism in Ukraine. But he’d already secured the financial backing of Chinese strongman Xi Jinping. So we failed. So, from now on, if any decrepit military power wants to insist on conquering a European democracy or something, they can go right ahead, as long as they can afford it.

I very much want to be wrong, and a few paragraphs down from here I’m going to cite the evidence against a pessimistic view. But the way U.S. President Joe Biden talked about Putin in his State of the Union address wasn’t exactly reassuring. “While he may make gains on the battlefield, he will pay a continuing high price over the long run,” the president said.

So yes, it will cost Putin a lot of money to pay for the unpardonable crime he’s committing right now, but don’t worry, we’ll collect, because we’ll let him amortize his debt over time. Over the long run. In a continuing war and occupation of Ukraine.

When I say it’s probably too late, I also mean it’s becoming exceedingly difficult to imagine Ukrainians defending themselves against Russia’s war of conquest except by means of a street-by-street guerrilla war. It would likely last years and cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives, over the long run, while everyone’s attention has long since turned to other things.

This is exactly how the world ended up turning away from the horrors in Syria, where the agony is “continuing,” 606,000 deaths later, with 6.7 million refugees and 6.6 million Syrians displaced “over the long run” out of a pre-war population of about 22 million people.

This is how Aleppo comes into it.

From what we’ve seen of the Russians’ military strategy in Kharkiv this week - The Financial Times is already calling it “another Stalingrad” - it’s exactly like the onset of the Siege of Aleppo all over again, and Aleppo came to be called “Syria’s Stalingrad.”

Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second city, home to 1.4 millon people, and dozens of people have been killed and injured there already. Schools and government buildings and a maternity hospital and entire neighbourhoods have been destroyed already. The Russians have encircled the city, bombarding civilian areas with banned cluster munitions and threatening to besiege the people into rubble, hunger and submission.

Kharkiv

If you thought Vladimir Putin would scruple about doing to Ukraine what he did in Syria, you haven’t been paying attention.

During the four-year seige of Aleppo that ended in December 2016, the Russian air force bombed and strafed and deliberately targeted hospitals and medical clinics in and around that ancient city. Helicopter gunships dispatched by Bashar Assad, the Butcher of Damascus, dropped barrel bombs and chlorine gas on crowded civilian districts. Aleppo was Syria’s second city, with a population of 4.6 millon before the siege. By the time it was over, more than 30,000 people had been killed and more than 33,000 buildings were destroyed. During the final weeks it was a full-on starvation siege.

When Aleppo fell, it was a historic moment, in the most painful kind of way, and I found it difficult to maintain a civil tone when I wrote about it back then: Aleppo has fallen. The last and sturdiest bastion of the Syrian uprising is gone. The Battle of Aleppo is over, the revolution is finished, and the Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad has won. Russia has won. Iran has won. Hezbollah has won. The United States has lost. The United Nations has lost, and the bloody war in Syria, already having taken nearly half a million lives, goes on.

A hospital in Aleppo

I’d been covering the Syrian convulsions for years by then, so it was all pretty disheartening. I’d crossed into Syria’s north with the Kurdish resistance to file to the Wall Street Journal. I’d traveled to Syrian refugee camps all over Jordan for the Ottawa Citizen, and I’d returned to meet with the Free Syrian Army underground in Amman and the Syrian National Council in Ankara. In one amusing episode recounted by my friend Zack Baddorf here, both of us were arrested on the Syrian frontier by plainclothes Turkish police. They’d been tailing us for days, thinking we were jihadists hoping to sneak over the Syrian border to join the Islamic State.

But there was nothing at all amusing about having to bear the reports out of Aleppo in the autumn months of 2016. And there’s little comfort to be had in hearing from Canada and 37 other countries that the war crimes Putin’s gargoyles are committing in Ukraine at the moment will be sorted out at the International Court of Justice some time in the distant future. That’s how we were counseled to console ourselves after Aleppo fell, too.

There’s always hope, though, but before we turn to all that, do yourself a favour and take out a subscription to this newsletter. Do me a favour and make it a paid subscription, $5/month. I’ll have more by the weekend in the National Post, but I hope readers will have a look at what I uncovered for newsletter subscribers just two days ago, which hadn’t been reported anywhere. It still hasn’t. Which is to say, if you want backstory you’re not getting anywhere else, this newsletter is worth the price of admission, if I do say so myself.

Okay, now I’ll present evidence against the proposition that it’s probably too late.

The freakout about Vladimir Putin muttering darky about nukes: Of course we shoudn’t put anything past Putin. He’s a psychopath. But there’s no evidence to justify wetting our trousers about the order Putin passed on to his generals to “transfer the deterrence forces,” which is to say Russia’s nuclear weapons, to “a special mode of combat duty”. For starters, that doesn’t even appear to be a real thing.

As an argument against imposing a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine (NATO warplanes shooting down a Russian fighter-bomber? There would be mushroom clouds!) it just doesn’t wash. When Putin insinuated last Sunday that he’d be prepared to reach for the big red button he said it was because people were saying mean things about him. The Europeans were making “aggressive statements.” Quite a few mean things have been said about Putin since then. Doctor Strangelove is still just a movie.

As for a No-Fly Zone, it looks like it’s coming, kind of. If the Ukrainians obtain all those Javelins and Stinger missiles and Surface-to-Air Missile batteries that the NATO countries are shipping off to them, they’ll have something like a ground-based no-fly zone for themselves without any help from NATO warplanes, which aren’t coming anyway.

Eliot Cohen, a former U.S. State department analyst who’s now teaching at Johns Hopkins University, says Putin can be brought to his senses, or to his knees, but only if the Ukrainian resistance is effective enough to cause such massive losses in Russian troop strength that the Russian people stgart to get really angry. There have already been protests all over Russia and perhaps thousands of arrests, but it’s hard to say, because Russia’s only independent newsrooms are being shut down. I’m trying to figure out what reliable conduits of information are still working. In any case, here’s Cohen: “Only one thing, in fact, can cause Russia to rethink and even abandon its program of conquest: coffins.”

There’s also some cause for optimism in the potential for financial sanctions to inflict sufficent pain within Russia’s ruling oligarchy that they’ll make some real, active difference. That’s if the sanctions are vigorously enforced, of course. It’s probably too much to hope that Putin will be dissuaded from his lust for lebensraum in Ukraine by mysteriously plunging to his death from a sixth-story window, as so many of his opponents and have in recent years. Still, already, Alex Konanykhin, a Russian entrepreneur and former banker, has just announced that he’s offering a $1 million bounty for Putin, dead or alive.

So, a vice-grip of sanctions on the oligarchy has got to be made to squeeze hard. There are only about 500 super-rich Russian riffraff out there, and they hold as much wealth as the rest of Russia’s 144 million people combined. It’s a lot of money - $640 billion - and much of that loot is tied up in yachts and posh real estate and industrial holdings and investment portfolios in the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada and the United States. So let’s get on with it. Sanction, sieze and expropriate the living daily outs of them. Put another way, long story short: Kill the body and the head will die.

Any hope along these lines rests in the electorates of the liberal democracies keeping up the pressure on their elected politicians - which is the only reason European and North American leaders are taking any effective action anyway. In my National Post column in print today, I set out some reasons why we all just might be up to the task of keeping the heat on.

The defence of Ukraine is a cause that implicates every one us, not just our governments, and that penny is dropping. The fight has certainly drawn Canadians to Ukraine’s side (91 percent in this Maru poll, details here) and one in four of us say Canadian Forces troops should be sent to fight alongside NATO troops and Ukrainian forces, even if that means taking casualties. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky says 16,000 people have already enlisted in a Ukrainian international brigade.

This is genuinely a people’s war now. And poignantly, the Ukrainian struggle has captured the hearts of the Syrian people, and Hongkongers, and Uyghurs, Venezuelans, Iranians and many others who know what a jackboot feels like on their necks.

Lastly, what leaves me open to optimism is the way the Ukraine struggle has enlivened the world. It’s the sort of thing that affirms one’s faith in humanity. I go into that in the National Post piece I keep linking to here. It’s as though all those scenes out of Ukraine - the ordinary people rising against armour, standing on the roads in front of tank columns - have awakened something ancient and decent in all of us. Something genetically hardwired in our common humanity.

There are reasons why in today’s Post column I cited lines from Seamus Heaney’s tribute to the Croppies of 1798, the peasant rebels whose last stand was at Vinegar Hill. Do please subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already, or upgrade to a paid sub to see what you’re missing if you’re subscribing already. Then we’ll finish up for now with the whole poem.

Requiem for the Croppies

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.