Joyce Davis: Putin will not stop at destroying Ukraine
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We need a global peacekeeping force to stop monsters like Russian President Vladmir Putin.
That’s what I told Sharon Reed, morning anchor for the nationally syndicated Black News Channel, last week, as reports emerged that Russia had bombed the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
Putin is threatening to unleash World War III, or worse, I told her. And the world needs to act now to avoid a global disaster.
Even before Putin sent his troops into Ukraine, people in countries around Russia knew him as a ruthless bully. In his war on Chechnya, there’s ample evidence Russian troops committed atrocities, including raping, beating and killing women and children.
And Putin has regularly poisoned opposition figures like Alexei Navalny, who had the audacity to criticize corruption. Navalny is still alive, although under Putin’s control in a Russian prison.
But my former colleague Galina Staravoitova didn’t get a chance to go to prison. She and I were Peace Fellows at the United States Institute of Peace in 1993-94. She was a Soviet dissident, a member of the Russian parliament and a staunch advocate for ethnic minorities in the former Soviet Union. And Galina was a fighter. She didn’t like Putin. And he didn’t like her.
In 1998, many believe Putin sent his henchmen to kill her, gunning her down in the stairwell of her apartment building.
I heard countless stories like this when I supervised broadcast services for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the former Czechoslovakia. The people I worked with were all dissidents from Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Moldova and Russia itself. People in these countries know Putin well, and they can’t be surprised at the barbarity of his invasion of Ukraine, especially because it was on the road to closer ties with the West and democracy.
French President Emmanuel Macron is warning the worst is yet to come. Last week, we got a clear sign of it. Pictures from Ukraine show Russian missiles hitting Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. And Putin has put his nuclear arms forces on alert, signaling to the world he’s thinking about using them.
Just the thought should galvanize the world into action. President Joe Biden gave the world ample warning that Putin would invade Ukraine. But the world did nothing. The United Nations issued demands that Russia leave but took no action.
Will the world really sit around and wait for Putin to use nuclear weapons in a deranged quest to restore the Russian empire?
The United Nations must act now to organize a global peacekeeping force to fight Putin in Ukraine. Chechens and Georgians are already on the battlefield. They know what’s at stake. Sooner or later, the rest of the world will know, too.
Joyce Davis is PennLive’s outreach and opinion editor. She served five years as associate director of broadcasting for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty based in Prague and is the author of two books on international affairs. Follow her on Facebook and on Twitter @byjoycedavis.