A bomb had struck a hospital, destroying the maternity and children’s wards. Grainy images and video showed an Armageddon-like scene: vehicles on fire, the outside grounds singed and a crater large enough to accommodate two men head to toe. A dazed, bloodstained, pregnant woman was being led out by rescue workers.
I’ve worked in many complex humanitarian emergencies before, but this is different for me. These are my people being injured and killed. I watch as large swaths of the land of my ancestors, introduced to me in childhood through Ukrainian folk songs and poems as a bucolic land of freedom fighters and brave dissidents, is being transformed into killing fields. No wonder my dreams keep me in a captive state of despair.
Two weeks into the war, scenes of carnage like that of the Mariupol hospital have become part of the daily horror for Ukrainians that can’t be switched off.
The situation in Ukraine is growing increasingly dire and Western countries need to do more instead of waiting for conditions to continue deteriorating. While the US and NATO should be careful to avoid escalating the war, world leaders should also be preparing for worst-case scenarios and setting non-negotiables to rein Putin in. The indiscriminate shelling of what are meant to be safe havens for women and children needs to be established as a red line no thuggish regime should be allowed to cross.
What of the images emerging from Mariupol in 2022? On Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned that “hundreds of thousands of people have no food, water, heat, electricity, or medical care.” But perhaps the world has become numb to Putin’s familiar tactics: demoralize a population by killing and wounding ordinary people, a strategy also used in Syria and Chechnya. While there is a multinational effort to provide weapons to Ukraine, Western leaders still seem to be repeating the same bullet points of condemnation, sanctions, embargoes and broad platitudes instead of setting down new red lines for the Kremlin.
The desperation has come to the point where one Kyiv mother, Oksana, who endured a harrowing 47-hour journey to a safe haven in western Ukraine texted me for help in evacuating her only son to the West. She wrote: “I am very horrified and I am in despair right now. I have no peace. I cry every hour of every day. I am very tired. I have lost the meaning of life. I beg you for help.”
An Odessa mother, Katerina, tells me that while offers of western resettlement by countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom are welcome, it just isn’t a viable option for her. “I held on all these days and today I can’t stop crying. There is chaos in my head and I don’t know how to live on. This is my home. I look around me and don’t know how I can leave it all … all my friends are at war now. If I leave, I will betray them … like I gave up and don’t believe in them.”
John Shmorhun of the Ukrainian Education Platform, which helps resettle vulnerable women and children in safe havens in western Ukraine, told me that with violence escalating, desperate families in the east are being forced to make heart-wrenching decisions to send their young children on risky evacuation convoys to the West. Some two weeks into the war, the scale of the dislocation is immense.
Western leaders will only be spurred into action — and help unify Europe on dealing with Russia — when they realize that once Putin achieves his military goals in Ukraine, he will go further. Indeed many in neighboring countries are nervously watching his next move.
Hence, officials at NATO should at least psychologically prepare for a direct confrontation with Putin. Preparing for the worst is preferable to being forced to do so later on Putin’s terms.
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