OPINION: Thinking Out Loud – Is Kyiv Burning?

Putin has now turned his attention to bombing the very center of Kyiv, particularly its historic and political district. It reminds me of a desperate and vengeful Hitler’s notorious orders in 1944 to destroy Paris when the Allies forced Nazi German forces to retreat from the French capital.

“Is Paris burning?”, the irate pathological Fuhrer demanded over the phone from his military commander in Paris. Fortunately, the German general in charge refused to follow orders and to destroy the wonderful city.

We now know that Hitler had ordered the same fate for Kyiv in September 1941 when his invading troops captured the then-Soviet Ukrainian capital. Again, thanks to his orders being disobeyed, the ancient city was spared. But instead, fleeing Soviets set off explosives in central Kyiv causing far more damage and deaths than the Nazis inflicted at that point.

With the exception, that is, of the city’s Jewish population. It was cynically accused of being responsible for the carnage, and several days later tens of thousands of Jews were rounded up and executed in the nearby ravine of Babyn Yar.

And today? We have Putin in the role of Hitler, and Russia as Nazi Germany. Putin used the same arguments as Hitler did in the case of the German-speaking Suddetendeutsch to dismember Czechoslovakia in 1938 by claiming to be “liberating” Russian speakers in Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas. Today, Ukraine is Putin’s “Lebensraum” in the economic, social and geopolitical senses that Hitler also saw Ukraine as representing. Just refer to his Mein Kamppf.

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For Putin, Ukraine represents not only a staging area against the West, but also a Lebensraum for Russia with additional cultural and historic elements added. Just, read between the lines in his various pronouncements dealing with history, cultural identity, and understanding of where Russia’s borders should be.

Targeting, ancient Kyiv, he is once again reasserting, together with his servile, chauvinistic, entourage and propagandists that he does not recognize the Ukrainians as a separate nation, and that he wants Ukraine – if he can’t have it – to be destroyed.

Not scorched earth – but aggressive “destroy anything in our way” – tactics. 

The last attacks from the air on central Kyiv have damaged several famous historic and cultural monuments. The escalation it represents should not pass unnoticed in the outside world. There is no excuse for this imperialistic barbarism and any appeasement of the monster behind it is a crime in itself.

Ancient Kyiv has survived the onslaught and destruction wreaked by the Mongols and Russians in the tsarist and Soviet periods. It will withstand Putin’s Hitler-like blitzes and attempts to establish a long-lasting despotic Russian Reich.

But now is the time for Ukraine’s friends (particularly in Washington and Berlin) to say enough is enough and give Ukraine the means to turn the tide and avoid what happened after Munich 1938.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.