As I am writing this, the Russians are shelling Kharkiv, a European city of 1 and ½ million. Ukrainians call it ‘the city of poets.’ Kyiv, the capital city, is under siege. It holds about a million more people than Philadelphia. 
There’s much speculation about what Putin is trying to achieve by seeking to smash and conquer Ukraine. One may read of the many political and historical reasons for this aggression. Putin’s own words cannot be trusted – “denazification”, to stop “genocide”. No one believes him.
I don’t care why he’s attacking Ukraine, not really. His ultimate motives are locked up inside him. However, what I see in the reporting from Kyiv and Kharkiv is a free people fighting for their lives against a war machine ordered into action by a dictator. Again, as I am writing this, it appears that Putin is preparing to do to those cities what he did to Grozny in Chechnya in 1999-2000 and Aleppo in Syria in 2016. Using indiscriminate artillery barrages and bombing, he turned those cities into rubble and killed tens of thousands of men, women and children.
We will see it happen as we have never seen it before. Both cities are filled with journalists. Phone cameras are ubiquitous. We are wired into what may be a massacre unfolding in real time. How will we react to suffering of this intensity and duration, a suffering we will be unable to escape or tune out? What pressures will build on western governments to take military steps to stop the massacre? Putin has already alluded to the use of nuclear weapons should we interfere.
I remember the anxiety at school and at home in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was 10 years old. I did not understand anything about the causes of the crisis or the military maneuverings of the Soviet Union and the US, but I knew the nuns and my parents and Aunts were more worried than I had ever seen them. And yet, the entire crisis had an abstract air about it – we heard reports of meetings and ships at sea and troop movements and confrontations at the UN, but we were not watching European cities on fire or close up portraits of refugees, explosions, dead bodies in squares and on bridges. We weren’t watching a beleaguered President, unshaven, weary, magnetic, trying to sustain hope in his people.
We’ve seen this before, of course, in Syria, and in our own ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign in Iraq. To our shame as a people, we dismissed the suffering of the Syrians, who did not look like us, and one country, Iraq, was an ‘enemy’ ruled by a monster. The Ukrainians ‘look’ like us. We will be unable to fall back into a chauvinist dismissal of them. As offensive as it is to common decency and morality, their suffering and murder ‘counts more’ with us.
I wonder what we as a people, here and in western Europe, will be willing to sacrifice so that Ukrainians can escape destruction. We will have to confront that question as we sit in witness to one more of the great crimes of this awful century.
