In Putin’s evil vs. good war against Ukraine, the forces of good

Frederick Kempe is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Council.

This is a story of evil versus good.

It’s the story of a despot’s ruthless attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine, versus the historic, but nonetheless insufficient, rallying of democratic states to save the country.

At midday on Monday, in the central Ukrainian industrial city of Kremenchuk, sitting serenely astride the Dnipro river, about 1,000 men, women and children wandered the Amstor shopping mall, trying to enjoy some normalcy amidst a brutal war.

Some 185 miles away and a few thousand feet overhead, Russian bombers flying over Russia’s Kursk region likely Tupolev Tu-22M3s, released at least two Kh-22 medium-range, 2,000 lb. nuclear-capable cruise missiles, developed in the 1960s to destroy aircraft carriers.  An air raid siren wailed, and Ukrainians, well-practiced in the fifth month of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war, scrambled for safety.

Around the same time at Schloss Elmau luxury retreat in Germany’s Bavarian Alps, the Group of Seven leaders, representing the world’s largest democracies, huddled around conference tables in an effort to add to their far-reaching sanctions on Putin and Russia. They debated options to choke the finances that fuel Putin’s war, including putting a price cap on oil sales to Russia that could reduce the $1 billion dollars the world pays Russia every day for energy.

As they struggled to make progress, one of the missiles screamed down on the shopping mall.  A CCTV video captured a bucolic day, with wispy clouds adorning the otherwise blue sky, and then the massive fireball of the blast and the curling up of a gigantic black smoke plume. Shattered glass and debris flew past the camera.

A day later, as Ukrainian officials tallied the death toll — at least 20 dead and 59 wounded in a war where Putin’s military has already killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians — NATO leaders gathered for the summit that had brought me to Madrid. They were abuzz about the timing of Putin’s shopping mall strike, knowing that it was aimed as much at them as Ukraine.

“Talk as much as you want,” Putin seemed to be saying to them. “Sign whatever documents you like. I’ll outlast you and your spoiled societies with my war of attrition, restoring imperial Russia and sealing my place in history even as your decadent West continues its decay.”

Putin could be confident that despite historic agreements in Madrid this week and even though arms deliveries from the United States and its partners are increasing in numbers and quality, no one was yet willing to provide the heavier, longer range, precision weaponry that could have prevented the shopping mall strike and so many others, and might allow an urgently needed counteroffensive.

Even so, NATO reached a level of unity unseen in more than 30 years.    

At the end of a marathon, hours-long negotiating session involving NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Turkish President…