Putin's Invasion of Ukraine Is a Terrible Sin That All Russians Will Bear - Bloomberg - 0 views
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Even in his speech announcing the invasion, Putin referred to his oft-stated belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. This, of course, was never true — even when they lived side by side in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The two identities and cultures are distinct. But Russians and Ukrainians are the closest of kin. Even when we speak different languages, as we have increasingly done since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, we understand each other. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made the most of his eloquent speech on the eve of the invasion by speaking in Russian, directly appealing to Russian citizens with the ease of someone who shares a cultural code with them. It runs thick as blood and has nothing to do with official Soviet avowals of brotherhood.
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A lot of evidence pointed to Putin's intention to invade. But I kept hoping he would stop at the last moment, because a full-scale attack on Ukraine, guaranteed to spill the blood of Ukrainian civilians, is the worst war crime a Russian can possibly commit. Even the inevitable parallels with Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria, which I drew before when Putin took Crimea and when he published his historical screed assailing Ukraine as an “anti-Russian project,” do not do justice to what happened in the early hours of Feb. 24.
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To make the curse permanent, God marked Cain to make sure no one would kill him to end his suffering. Russia, with the nuclear arsenal Putin keeps bragging about, also bears a kind of Cain’s mark now. It is not Putin who is cursed now — it’s all of us Russians. Our identity, wherever we are, will be tainted by this invasion, by our failure to stop the dictator long before he crossed this unspeakable line.
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