Evening Update

This is our war. If we don’t fight it now, we will lose it—like all the previous ones.

Zhytomyr, Ukraine, March 4, 2022. This was a school, before it was shelled by Russians. By Fotoreserg.

The Cosmopolitan Globalist prides itself on publishing a wide range of opinions. Frequently, we don’t agree with our authors; we ask of them only that their arguments be cogent, supported with evidence, thoughtful, and grounded in the values the Cosmopolitan Globalist seeks to defend.

Today in the magazine, however, we’re publishing an essay by Nicolas Tenzer with which I agree about every word. I can’t speak for the rest of the Cosmopolitan Globalists, but I can say without reservation that Nicolas has spoken for me.

He voices my frustration—my fury—that no one has taken seriously the warnings that he, that I, that so many others have been shouting about Putin’s regime, for years, with too many of them losing their lives for it. He begs Western leaders—and Western publics—to understand the gravity of this crisis and what’s at stake.

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THIS IS OUR WAR

“This is our war,” he writes, “and if we don’t fight it now, we will lose it—like all the previous ones.

Ukraine is at war. Europe is at war. America is at war. The world is at war. Putin’s criminal regime has unleashed a war against the world and Ukraine is, once again, its victim. But let us not forget that Putin’s war against freedom and humanity is still ongoing in Syria. It is still ongoing in Belarus, where the Russian dictator has lent a hand to the dictator in Minsk—and Belarus is currently occupied by Russian forces.

Russia’s monstrous, tragic, and deadly attack on Ukraine is an intensification of Putin’s wars. But it is not a surprise. It was not merely announced, clearly, months ago—it was understood for many years. We didn’t know when or how, exactly, it would happen, but that it would happen was not only predictable, but openly planned. Only the uninformed and the unthinking failed to see it coming. The complacent bastards.

This has been underway for 22 years. It clearly signalled its birth in Chechnya, at the turn of the 21st century; it entered a new phase in 2008 with Russia’s invasion and predation of 20 percent of Georgia’s territory; then came the illegal annexation of Crimea and the occupation of the Donbass in 2014; most of all, it announced itself in 2015 in Syria, with Putin and his minions’ massive and monstrous war crimes. I wrote about it then: “The crimes of the Russian regime are literally changing the world order.”

So the war is here, again, in Europe. It was already there. We just didn’t want to see it. We pushed it out of our field of vision and, in fact, out of our understanding. For 22 years, Putin has moved in only one direction—forward—and the free world has moved in only one direction—backward.

After Putin’s war crimes in Chechnya—to which Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova, Boris Nemtsov, and so many others alerted us, paying for it with their lives—the outrage of the world quickly subsided.

George W. Bush pledged his administration’s support for the legal government of Georgia, but in the end did nothing more than condemn the 2008 aggression against Tbilisi. Barack Obama had no qualms about launching his reset in March 2009. Then in 2015, the same Barack Obama refused to enforce the red line he himself had enunciated inin Syria. He allowed Assad, Iran, and then Putin to massacre hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, using weapons of mass destruction. He made it clear to Putin that he had a free hand—and less than a year later, Putin attacked Ukraine.