Ukraine on the brink | thearticle

Ukraine stands on the brink of war — a war of potentially unimaginable destructiveness, inflicted on an innocent victim by a vastly superior enemy, led by a megalomaniac. American

intelligence has named this Wednesday as a likely date for the long-predicted Russian invasion. Even if the heavily armed and mobilised battle groups now stationed along the border do not

cross it this week, Vladimir Putin has already achieved several of his aims. He has made himself the centre of global attention, with foreign politicians taking turns to pay court to him in

Moscow; he has divided his enemies in the West, splitting NATO leaders into a “war camp” and a “peace camp”; and he has destabilised Ukraine itself without firing a shot. Indeed, the

Ukrainians feel as though it were they, not the Russians, who are now under sanctions. Rumours of war are damaging their economy, turning their airspace into a no-fly zone for commercial

airlines and fuelling panic. No doubt the Kremlin hopes that placing this fragile young democracy under siege will exacerbate tensions along linguistic and religious lines. This week the

Duma in Moscow is expected to recognise two separatist republics in the Donbas, a further bid for the allegiance of the region’s Ukrainians, at least half a million of whom have been issued

with Russian passports since 2014. Putin could try to set up similar puppet states in the rest of the Donbas, once the Soviet Union’s biggest coalfield but now a postindustrial wasteland

that has been further depressed by eight years of Russia’s low-intensity proxy war. If the tanks roll in, however, the real prize for Putin is Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. In the

last century Kharkiv, then larger than Kyiv, was the first capital of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918, was taken by the Red Army, retaken by the Whites, and finally

subdued by Reds. During the Second World War, the Germans took Kharkov (as it then was) in October 1941. Stalin ordered his forces to retake it in May 1942, suffering heavy losses at the

hands of Erich von Manstein. (Kharkiv’s war memorial is pictured above). In February 1943, as the German retreated after the disaster of Stalingrad, the city fell to a Soviet offensive. But

Manstein recaptured Kharkov a month later. The Red Army only retook it in August 1943, by which time more than three quarters of the city lay in ruins and its population, which had been more

than a million, was reduced to about 170,000. The Jewish inhabitants were massacred (15,000 were buried in one mass grave) or deported to the death camps, about 80,000 others starved to

death and 125,000 were enslaved in Germany. Kharkov never acquired the symbolic status of Stalingrad and Leningrad, but the four major battles fought over the city during the Second World

War give it a uniquely terrible yet heroic distinction in the history of Ukraine. Today Kharkiv is a thriving city of 1.4 million and the country’s main technology hub. Situated just 25

miles from the Russian border, “Ukraine’s Silicon Valley” is extremely vulnerable to attack. It is hard to believe that a Russian President would be ruthless enough to force a community that

had suffered such a traumatic urban history to endure being fought over yet again. But Kharkiv could be given the treatment Putin’s forces meted out to Grozny two decades ago: the capital

of Chechnya was virtually razed. Kharkiv one of several places with deep historical resonance in the tragedy that may be about to unfold. Others include Odessa, Ukraine’s main port, and of

course Kyiv, the capital and ancient centre of Orthodoxy. Sir Robert Fry, the former Lieutenant General and military historian, has written here today with great knowledge and insight about

the changes in the Russian army’s strategic and tactical doctrine since 1945. What nobody can explain, however, is the moral turpitude that has led President Putin to this pass. The world

has tolerated his sinister presence on the stage for so long that we have perhaps become inured to his toxic influence on everything he touches. Now, though, it has become impossible to turn

a blind eye to Putin’s cruelty. In him we are confronting the darkest threat to humanity for generations: a man who is ready to risk the destruction of entire peoples, even the whole world,

to slake his lust for power. It is not too late for Putin to draw back from the jaws of Hell. If he does not, the subsequent conflagration may well ultimately engulf him and his regime too.

In the process, however, such pandemonium will ensue as Europe has not witnessed since the era of the dictators. We can only pray that Ukraine, the Golgotha of the 20th century, will be

spared this ordeal in the 21st. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed

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