Author: Blazingcatfur

ROME (AP) — The head of the Polish bishops’ conference has done what Pope Francis has so far avoided doing: He publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and urged the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to use his influence with Vladimir Putin to demand an end to the war and for Russian soldiers to stand down.

“The time will come to settle these crimes, including before the international courts,” Archbishop Stanislaw Gądecki warned in his March 2 letter to Patriarch Kirill. “However, even if someone manages to avoid this human justice, there is a tribunal that cannot be avoided.”

Over the past week or so, earth-shaking events appeared to be occurring every day: the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the dramatic and almost instantaneous determination of Germany to rearm, the imposition of relatively serious sanctions upon Russia and the international condemnation of that country, and the extraordinary bravery of the Ukrainian people and the eloquence, and charismatic leadership qualities, of their president, the formerly somewhat whimsically regarded ex-comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The world appears to be at a turning point between a decline in western, and particularly American, influence and a galvanizing resurgence of the importance and compelling motivating power of human liberty and national patriotism.

The savage Russian invasion of Ukraine has called a distracted and divided world back to the basics of life and death.

I was born in September 1939, three weeks after Hitler invaded Poland. My earliest memories kick in around the time that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They are memories of the home front in World War II: of blackout curtains at night and rationing and my young uncles going off to war, to Anzio, Normandy, Patton’s Third Army. In living room windows in houses up and down Mount Pleasant Street, we saw little flags with white stars or gold stars on them. They meant that a son or brother or husband was in the service (white) or was dead (gold). I remember the front pages of the Washington Post and the Times–Herald and the Evening Star on the day after the bomb fell on Hiroshima; I have the clearest memory of the inky black headlines and of the photograph of an explosion shaped like an immense mushroom against a flawless blue sky.

As I write this, the centre of Kyiv and much of its suburbs are largely untouched. Sirens and alerts punctuate the day.

Everyone here knows that could change, very quickly. By the time you read this, it might have.

Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, has already felt some of the force of the Russian way of war. So have Mariupol and other cities in the east.

Russia answers resistance with firepower. Rather than send in men to fight from house to house and room to room, their military doctrine calls for a bombardment by heavy weapons and from the air to destroy their enemies.

The UK, EU, and US governments have responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with devastating sanctions against the billionaire businessmen perceived to be in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

Mr Putin has warned his allies for many years they should protect themselves against such measures, particularly as relations soured with the US and EU countries after the annexation of Crimea.

But while some of those closest to him took his advice and remained invested in Russia, others kept their money in palatial properties overseas and football clubs, and their companies remained listed on foreign stock exchanges.