It just gets worse and worse
Ukraine accused Russia this morning of forcibly deporting thousands of its citizens to Russia to be used as “hostages” in an attempt to force the government in Kyiv to surrender. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said that 6,000 residents of the besieged port city of Mariupol have been taken to “filtration camps” in the separatist-controlled Donetsk region in Ukraine’s East. Another 15,000 people who live in a Russian-controlled part of Mariupol have had their passports and other identity documents confiscated.
“People are being forcibly moved into the territory of the aggressor state,” Donetsk Regional Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told the AP today. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry announced that some of the citizens being deported could be sent to economically depressed parts of Russia. Some could be relocated as far away as Sakhalin Island off Russia’s Pacific coast.
Russian officials confirmed that Ukrainians are being relocated in Russia but claimed that they are going of their own free will and will be offered jobs if they agree to stay for at least two years. A Russian general who commands troops in the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine’s East claimed that the Ukrainian deportees were being given accommodations and money. Ukraine’s ministry of intelligence said that Russia intends to “use them as hostages and put more political pressure on Ukraine.” The Ukrainian foreign ministry said that Russia is flooding Eastern Ukraine with propaganda claiming victories they haven’t achieved in an attempt to convince people to give up and turn themselves over to be evacuated to Russia.
This kind of stuff is a specialty of the Russian FSB intelligence service. What they can’t win on the battlefield they attempt to win with propaganda and pressure tactics. American WNBA star Brittney Griner has been in custody in Moscow for several weeks after having been arrested at the airport and charged with carrying vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage. Griner has played in Russian basketball club leagues for the last seven years in the WNBA off-season, so she was aware of the dangers of being caught with any kind of drugs in Russia. It is thought by American officials that she is being held hostage in a Russian prison in retaliation against American sanctions that were imposed when Russia invaded Ukraine four weeks ago.
You could say that the deportations of Mariupol’s citizens to Russia is an act of desperation by Russia which has suffered recent defeats on the battlefield and is thought to have had as many as 15,000 of its soldiers killed in action and many more thousands wounded. But making illegal arrests and taking hostages is standard operating procedure for Moscow. A country that launches an unprovoked attack on a neighbor with which it shares longstanding cultural, religious, and political ties is a country that is willing to do anything to win, including purposeful bombardment of schools, hospitals, and civilian neighborhoods, kidnapping and murdering political officials, looting commercial goods and national treasures, and committing every other violation of international norms they can think of.
Ukraine is holding its own and may yet beat back Russia’s illegal war of aggression, but the cost it will pay is going to be very, very high. Millions of its citizens have become refugees and will need the support of Europe and the United States for years. Putin may have set out to take control of Ukraine and replace its democracy with a dictatorial puppet, but what he has ended up doing is destabilizing the entire globe and doing significant damage to the world economy.
World War III is being fought on the soil of Ukraine for right now, but the chance of this war spilling over into the rest of Europe gets higher every day. This is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, folks.
Russian oligarchs’ and national frozen assets should be confiscated as reparations for Ukraine. Every kopek Liquidate their properties and fund refugee relief. And send Tucker and the fellow travelers to Siberia where they will find out how great Russia is.
If, as many seem to think, Ukraine is only step one, is it better to "control the skies" now, or wait for Putin to consolidate control of Ukraine as staging area for expanded war in the region? The threat of nukes never goes away, so we will face that anyway if he invades one of the NATO countries... or we will watch and wail as Europe is divided by a new iron curtain and do nothing then as well. Maybe our wise men are doing a rope-a-dope: let Russia tire itself out on this war, devastate their economy for a while with sanctions, then take them on at their weak point by lining up a hundred staging posts for NATO bases around their border. Seems little hope that Russians will oust Putin, or that Putin will accept defeat, unless he is actually defeated. Is he a madman or not? Only one way to find out. I know this steps toward risk of WWIII. Is it inevitable if a madman with nukes is loose on the landscape?
I'm totally devoid of military or diplomatic experience, so don't mistake me for one who knows anything. But history seems to tell us that our leaders frequently don't know much either.