National Post
By giving the appearance of offering up a rousing ovation to a random Nazi during what should have been a hero’s welcome for Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy last month, Canada’s House of Commons displayed its idiot-boy bona fides to the world and gift-wrapped a propaganda victory to the Kremlin in the bargain. That much should be incontrovertible.
But it is approaching 600 days that the Ukrainian people have been forced to endure war crimes and crimes against humanity on a scale unknown in Europe since the days of the Third Reich, and throughout the world’s liberal democracies there is little evidence of any leadership with the backbone and the resolve required to deliver Russia the crushing, humiliating defeat it has invited and richly deserves.
While House Speaker Anthony Rota resigned to atone for what was a genuinely world-class gaucherie, an oddly symmetrical paroxysm went on to grip the U.S. Congress this week. Weakness in the face of Russian terror in Ukraine figured into all that, too.
In the American case, at stake was a shutdown of the government itself for lack of authority to spend money. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy was deposed on Monday when eight Republicans joined with 208 Democrats to oust him. The temporary bipartisan deal McCarthy helped finesse didn’t contain a dime of the US$6 billion President Joe Biden had pledged in renewed military support for Kyiv.
The White House insists this will be quickly fixed, but the Republican Party’s yokel caucus is gathering strength. In a recent House vote, the Republicans’ “America first” faction outnumbered Ukraine’s Republican friends 117-101.
The Democratic Party isn’t exactly blossoming with bright young patriots these days either, with eight in 10 Democrats polled recently saying they’re worried the war has no end in sight, and the Republican base is increasingly dominated by Trumpists. In a recent CBS-YouGov poll, 61 per cent of Republican voters said that the U.S. should stop sending arms to Ukraine altogether.
The now-ousted speaker McCarthy wouldn’t even allow Zelenskyy to address a joint session of Congress during his visits to Washington, but McCarthy had a point: “What is the plan for victory? I think that’s what the American public wants to know.”
And that’s the point even Zelenskyy seems too timid to press home in his oratory, which he’s obliged to couch in expressions of gratitude. He’s forced by the fairweather indifference of democracy’s current generation of leaders to articulate his appeals for help in terms that even morons should understand.
Ever since Feb. 24, 2022, when the gangland tyrant Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale, genocidal war of conquest against the Ukrainian people, Zelenskyy has had to go out of his way to explain the obvious: Moscow, backed by Beijing, is making war on global democracy. The Kremlin has totally up-ended the entire world-order infrastructure that pulled western civilization out of the carnage and corpse heaps of the 1940s.
Here in Canada, owing to the convulsions induced by Rota’s indiscretion and the public attention paid to what every jackass MP has had to say about it, what was almost immediately forgotten was what Zelenskyy himself came to say : “Moscow must lose — once and for all.”
It’s as though we’re determined to comprehend the predicament we’re in as a bit of bad luck for the Ukrainians, but peacetime activity for the rest of us. On Tuesday, Ukraine declared three “stakeholders” Ottawa stupidly allowed to set up shop in the oilpatch — Beijing’s CNOOC, Sinopec and CNPC — as “international sponsors of war.” Do you really suppose this will matter in Canada? Of course it won’t.
To give Ottawa its due, at least there’s a consensus that Russia’s overseas assets should be seized and devoted to the cause of Ukraine’s defence. More than $300 billion in Russia’s Central Bank assets have already been frozen in G7 bank accounts. But U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has gone only so far as the most timid of the European Union states are prepared to go: Let’s talk about putting the interest to Ukraine’s purposes, but leave the Russian principal alone. Mustn’t set any sort of precedent that might complicate matters for the banks, after all.
Meanwhile, we whine about how much we’re spending from our own government treasuries. It’s peanuts.
The United States is far and away Ukraine’s major supporter. But from the outset, Biden’s policy has been to dole out armaments on a piecemeal, bit-by-bit basis . So far, American assistance to Ukraine has added up to roughly US$77 billion, most of that in military hardware. But that adds up to less than one per cent of total U.S. federal spending over the past two years.
Canada’s $8 billion contribution since February 2022 hasn’t been much better, relatively speaking. Only $1.5 billion of that money was for military aid, and the total amount represents about 0.8 per cent of federal spending over the past two years. In strict dollar terms, Canada is behind the Netherlands and Denmark, and in Canada’s new “multi-year approach,” the $1.5 billion in military aid includes $650 million to be spent over the next three years building armoured vehicles and ambulances in London, Ont.
What was true at the outset of the Russian invasion remains more urgently the case now: The Kremlin deserves a bloody, crippling defeat. Every last Russian oligarch should lose his entire property and stock portfolio in every NATO country — no exceptions. Moscow should have fallen by now, and by now we should have been hunting to the ends of the Earth every Russian general, torturer, rapist and child-killer, and every Russian implicated in any way in Ukraine’s suffering and desolation.
Russia itself must be brought to justice “for the crime of aggression itself, and for absolutely all crimes from this aggression, all deaths, every deportation, of every child and adult,” Zelenskyy told the House of Commons last month.
The NATO countries have allowed Putin’s war to become normalized. It’s becoming just the usual, horrible background noise to the bifurcating, “multipolar” world championed by the likes of neoliberal French President Emmanuel Macron, a delusion that unites him with his opposite, Hungary’s rightist Viktor Orban. As of last week, Orban is joined by the similarly Kremlin-friendly Robert Fico in Slovakia , who not long ago vowed not to send “a single cartridge” to Ukraine.
Without much evidence that there’s much fire in the belly in the NATO capitals for a swift and bloody Russian defeat, it’s no wonder everyone’s already “war weary.” The war should have been over by now.
Source: Postmedia News
