You can’t talk peace with these monsters. Putin and his generals need to be crushed. The entire regime should be brought to an end.

Expel Putin's diplomats. Shutter his embassies. Hunt his oligarchs to the ends of the earth. Freeze their assets. Expropriate their wealth. Bankrupt the lot of them.

Here’s my latest on Ukraine today for the National Post & the Ottawa Citizen. I’m filing on a different, insufficiently-investigated angle on sanctions for Macleans magazine overnight.

I’ve got some important backstory in this newsletter a bit later, for paying subscribers only, on the most trustworthy information sources in Ukraine, and also on the Canada-Russia trade links that are (or should be) shutting down, and why it is that this is happening only now.

Yesterday’s Post/Citizen backgrounder was written in the hours before the invasion. The point of it was to place the slouching of the Kremlin’s rough beast towards Ukraine in its global & historical context. I also made some effort to rubbish the commonplace, hackneyed axiom that attributes Vladimir Putin’s belligerence to some genuine concern about NATO “expansion,” which is sometimes called “NATO encirclement,” which is, yes, every bit as dumb as it sounds.

My reluctant conclusion: For all the brave talk, the people of Ukraine are learning what Syrians know, what Afghans and Kazakhs know and what the Belarusians and Tibetans and the Taiwanese know: when all is said and done, they’re on their own, at the mercy of psychopaths.

That was yesterday. This is today, and now everything has changed. Until the early hours of this morning everything the NATO countries and Joe Biden’s White House and the European Union and the G7 were doing was aimed at dissuading the Kremlin from doing what the Kremlin has now done.

There are new tranches of sanctions coming from the world’s democracies and pledges of coordinated asset freezes and other such exertions, which I get into as succinctly as possible in my piece today. But it all raises a troubling question: What’s the point? Now that we’ve all failed to stop Putin from a full-on invasion, what’s the end game now?

To start with, here’s the penny that has to drop: We haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Second World War. What’s happening now is a decrepit nuclear-armed state with veto power on the United Nations Security Council is waging a bloody imperialist war of conquest upon a European democracy - a country of more than 40 million people, a country immensely rich in culture and history and resources, a country larger than France.

Ukraine is Vladimir Putin’s Sudetenland. Ukraine is his Lebensraum. It is not merely Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Chechnya in 1999 or South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008 or the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas in 2014. It is all of these things, combined.

For all the ghastly violence Russia has visited upon Ukraine since 2014 - 14,000 dead, so far - the reason the enormity of what is happening now seems not to have sunk in, at least not in the Anglosphere, may be that it’s the early innings. It’s been less than 24 hours since the invasion began and it’s mostly involved helicopter gunships targeting military infrastructure, and so far the casualties have been relatively low - 137 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians killed, 316 wounded..

But as I write this, Russian forces are advancing on the capital, Kyiv, and whatever happens in the coming days we should surely expect a long and bloody guerrilla resistance.

So, what’s the point of all the efforts by the NATO countres now? It’s not exactly clear. This is what I propose the point should be.

We should start by supplying Ukrainians with all the guns and money and materiel and humanitarian assistance they need. Canada has sent some low-grade “lethal” hardware, which is fine so far as it goes. At least it’s better than what Canada’s federal cabinet ministers were up to last month. Putin will not be stopped by diplomacy and he sure won’t be hashtag-shamed into civilized behaviour.

So whatever we do, let’s do it with this objective in mind: We need to crush Vladimir Putin and all his generals and his cronies. That has to be the end game now.

We need to bring them to an end. Every last one of his oligarchs should be hunted and hounded to the ends of the earth, their billions of dollars’ worth of holdings in real estate and mining and every other industry and bolthole from Chelsea to Toronto should be frozen, seized and expropriated. Evict every Russian official from every multilateral and international forum. Bankrupt the lot of them.

Diplomacy does not work with these people.

In the hours before the invasion this morning, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky gave this address, appealing to the people of Russia. Here it is in full:

I would like to address the citizens of Russia directly, not as president but as a citizen of Ukraine, and I address the citizens of Russia as I would the citizens of Ukraine. We share a more than 2,000-kilometer border. Your soldiers are stationed all along it, almost 200,000 soldiers, and thousands of military vehicles. Your leaders have chosen for them to take a step forward into the territory of another country. And that single step could be the beginning of a great war on the European continent.

The whole world speaks of what could happen day to day. A cause for war could arise at any moment. Any provocation, any incident, could be the flare of a fire that burns everything.

You have been told that this flame will bring liberation to Ukraine’s people. But the Ukrainian people are free. They remember their own past and will build their own future. They build, they do not destroy, as they themselves have told you day after day on television. The Ukraine in your news and the Ukraine of real life are two entirely different places, and the difference is that the latter is real.

They tell you that we’re Nazis. But how can a people that lost 8 million lives to defeat the Nazis support Nazism? How can I be a Nazi? Say it to my grandfather, who fought in World War II as a Soviet infantryman and died a colonel in an independent Ukraine. They tell you that we hate Russian culture. How can one hate a culture? Any culture? Neighbors always enrich each other’s cultures. However, we are not part of one whole. You cannot swallow us up. We are different. But this difference is not a reason for enmity. We want to determine our own course and build our own history: peacefully, calmly, and honestly.

They told you that I would order an attack on Donbass, order indiscriminate shootings and bombings. This leads to some questions, some very simple ones. Who are we shooting at? What are we bombing? Donetsk, which I have visited dozens of times? Where I looked in people’s faces, in their eyes? Artyoma Street, where I strolled with friends? The Donbass Arena, where I rooted for our boys together with Ukrainian lads at the European Championships? Shcherbakov Park, where I drank with friends when our boys lost? Luhansk, where the mother of my best friend is buried? Where his father also rests? Take note that I am speaking to you all in Russian now, but no one in Russia knows the meaning of these places, these streets, these names, these events. These are all alien to you, unfamiliar.

This is our land, and this is our history. What will you fight for and with whom? Many of you have visited Ukraine. Many of you have relatives here. Some might have studied at Ukrainian universities and befriended Ukrainians. You know our character, you know our people, and you know our principles. You know what we value. So stop and listen to yourselves, to the voice of reason, to the voice of common sense.

Hear us. The Ukrainian people want peace, as does their government. Not only do they want it, but they demonstrate that desire for peace. They do everything they can. We are not alone: It is the truth that Ukraine is supported by many nations. Why? It is not about peace at any cost. It is about peace and principles, of justice, of international law. It is about the right to self-determination, that every person might determine their own future. It is the right of every society, and of every person, to security, to a life without threats. I am certain that these rights are important to you, as well.

The truth is that this needs to end before it is too late. If Russia’s leadership does not want to meet us across the table for the sake of peace, perhaps it will sit at that table with you. Do you Russians want a war? I would very much like to know the answer, but that answer depends only on you, on the citizens of the Russian Federation. Thank you for your attention.