Friday’s missile and drone strike on Ukraine surpasses, according to experts, all previous ones. Thirty civilians were killed, 150 wounded. No other casualties have been reported.
But in any case, this is a terrible atrocity. Most likely, it is caused by the desire to take revenge for a large warship drowned in Feodosia. Revenge is terrible. But it’s also stupid.
Just now, many countries have begun to hesitate: is it worthwhile to continue supporting Ukraine with arms and money, or is it better to seek peace at the cost of compromise, at the cost of concessions to Putin?
And now Putin himself has dealt a crushing blow to these “conciliatory sentiments”. The cruelty and indiscriminate nature of the “retaliation” has already prompted the UK to start supplying Ukraine with new air defense equipment, and U.S. President Joe Biden to make a new appeal to Congress to urgently provide aid to Ukraine. Surely now there will be far fewer opponents of such support for Ukraine in Congress.
Public opinion in the democratic world has been awakened by this barbaric act of revenge, as Europe was once awakened by the Batac massacre of May 1877. (Batak is a town in Eastern Rumelia, now Bulgaria, but then a European province of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish bashibuzouks slaughtered almost the entire population of Batak and burned it down. The media spread the news of the tragedy around the world, and it became one of the occasions for the Russo-Turkish war, which ended with the liberation of Bulgaria).
All efforts of Kremlin agents to create a favorable climate for reconciliation with Ukraine by this missile attack were dispelled and turned into nothing. The world, horrified by Russia’s brutality, is once again rallying around Ukraine.
I believe that Republicans in Congress will now not dare to refuse requests from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will delicately remove his veto when voting on EU aid to Ukraine.
Such acts of cruelty do not so much intimidate as unite the victims of aggression and their allies in unanimity.
It is surprising that this is not understood in the Kremlin. Apparently, moral motivation is so alien to the current Russian leaders that they have lost the ability not only to be guided by it, but also to take it into account as a factor in calculations.
