By Andrew Malekoff
I hesitated writing about Ukraine. What is there for me to add? I’m not a foreign policy expert or combat strategist, and I understand that Ukraine is not the only place on Earth living under the horror of war.
What I see from afar is a genocidal terrorist dictator carrying out the ritual slaughter of innocent men, women and children for vengeance and territory, including directed attacks on civilians that cannot be justified in any way whatsoever. It is a case of mass murder and not a “special military operation,” as Putin put it.
Especially jarring were the strikes against the Mariupol Maternity Hospital which, we now know, took the lives of at least one pregnant woman and newborn baby.
On the day of the blast, the woman was photographed being carried away on a stretcher by five men, directly across the façade of the bombed-out maternity hospital, as she held her swollen belly in her hands.
According to a surgeon on the scene, the woman’s pelvis was crushed and hip detached.
The baby was delivered via caesarean section but, according to medics, showed no signs of life. They focused on the mother and after more than a half hour of resuscitation she died.
Almost 40 years ago I was present for the birth of my first child in a benevolent hospital setting with an abundance of caring medical support. The hospital staff, as was ritual for new parents, provided my wife and me with a “candlelight dinner” in room outside the hospital’s maternity ward before we took our baby home.
When I first learned of the Mariupol Maternity Hospital blast, I recalled the tranquility of that candlelight dinner – the beginning of a normal, if challenging, life transition for our family.
I could not help but transpose that peaceful scene in our lives to one of sudden malevolence, the result of an intentional act of evil against innocents. I have only the tyranny imagination to work with, to try and understand evil injected into such a moment.
Joshua Yaffa, writing from Ukraine for the New Yorker, brings reality to such moments. He recounted the story of seven-year-old Semyon who arrived at Ohmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv on day two of the invasion.
Yaffa reported: “Seymon had been riding in a car with his parents and two sisters when they came under fire. Shells exploded around them, sending shrapnel ripping through glass and metal, then flesh. His parents and one sister died on the spot; his other sister was taken to a different hospital. An ambulance brought the boy, unconscious and losing blood, to where doctors performed emergency surgery and put him on a ventilator.”
Pediatric surgeon Roman Zheshera told Yaffa that shrapnel had passed through the side of Semyon’s neck and that he was on life support, with little sign of brain activity.
“As a doctor, I understand what happened to this child,” Zhezhera told Yaffa. “But I don’t understand what is going on around us, here and across the country—something absurd and terrible is happening.”
Little Seymon later died.
Yaffa reported about hundreds more children suffering from severe conditions that required urgent care with supplies of expensive and rare medicines running low.
“Given the ongoing risk of missile strikes and air raids, most of the children had been moved to a series of basements in the hospital complex,” he said. “Inside one, dozens of mattresses were arrayed on a concrete floor. The space was dank and drafty. The ceiling leaked. Mothers rocked their crying children or lay silently with them.”
Nearby, Yaffa described a father seeing off his young son, who had leukemia. “When the kids leave, it will be easier for everyone,” the father said. “After all, someone needs to stay behind. If no one is here, the Russians will just enter and that will be it.”
I would not want to be the individual making the decision that the U.S. take military action that could spur World War III should Putin, in all his futility, decide to target civilians with chemical weapons, for example. He has done it before. One can argue he has done enough already to warrant more aggressive military action from outside Ukraine.
Nevertheless, I must wonder, where do the U.S. and NATO allies stand as we are exposed daily to images that hearken back to the horrors of WWII? Will choking the economic life out of Russia be enough to stop further slaughter of innocent civilians?
I don’t think so.
