The Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol was atrocious, but prepare to view continued televised horrors as Vladimir Putin steps up his attacks across Ukraine. Despite fierce Ukrainian resistance, and Western economic and military assistance, the devastation and death will continue until the Russian guns fall silent.
Ukrainians alone cannot make that happen. But they are on their own militarily because the United States and NATO are firmly against getting into a direct and costly armed conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky can issue pleas, but there will be no U.S. or Western military forces fighting on the ground or in the air above Ukraine. Putin knows that, too.
Whether he knows how badly he has miscalculated a bloody conflict of his own making, however, is unknown.
Like two of his predecessors in the Kremlin — Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, who crushed reform-minded communist Czechoslovakia in 1968 with the backing of the Warsaw Pact countries, and Nikita Khrushchev, who put nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962 — Putin has set his country on an untenable path.
Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling might help clarify some of the circulating narratives about past nuclear standoffs between the United States and Russia.
One account holds that the United States stood by and watched Russian tanks snuff out the liberalizing Prague Spring in 1968 because of the risk of war with a nuclear-armed Soviet state. Not exactly the case.
The second is that the U.S.-Russia Cuban missile crisis was spawned by feared Soviet incursions in the Western Hemisphere.
On Aug. 20, 1968, I was in West Germany as an attache at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn whenSoviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded the rebellious satellite Czechoslovakia. Years earlier, in 1962, I was the overnight duty officer at Fort Niagara in Youngstown, N.Y., when President John F. Kennedy announced the “quarantine” to prevent Soviet shipments of military equipment to Cuba and ordered U.S. military forces into high-alert Defense Condition 3 (Defcon 3). The Czechoslovakia and Cuba crises and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are completely different matters.
To be sure, watching Russian troops rolling through Ukrainian towns invokes an unshakable sense of having experienced before what we are witnessing today. And the deployment of U.S. troops to NATO countries neighboring Ukraine calls to mind my task as post adjutant deploying a Fort Niagara specialist to a Florida installation to assist in a possible Cuban conflict. But the similarities don’t run deep.
In 1968, the United Stateswas positioned, diplomatically and militarily, to counter Western incursions by Warsaw Pact nations, including from neighboring East Germany. But Czechoslovakia was in the Soviet orbit. But this was not a new Russian push into the Western sphere.
What’s more, in 1968, we were a shattered nation.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, worn down by public opinion and a political casualty of a Vietnam War tearing the country apart, abruptly announced he would not seek reelection. America was bloodied by the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy Our cities and towns were engulfed in riots; universities were consumed by antiwar protests. The same month that Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, police and Illinois National Guardsmen went on a rampage outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, clubbing and tear-gassing hundreds of demonstrators, news reporters and bystanders.
In 1962, we did confront the fear of engaging in the mutually assured destruction that would have been the likely outcome of a direct U.S.-Soviet nuclear weapons clash. But it was not because the Soviets were moving to bring Fidel Castro’s fledging Communist government newly into their orbit.
Kennedy announced the quarantine in 1962 because Khrushchev intended to deploy ballistic missiles in Cuba — creating a nuclearthreat only 90 miles from the U.S. mainland.
We now live in a different world with different strategic interests.
The Warsaw Pact? Formally dead 1991. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics? Dissolved 1991. Germany was reunified in 1990, and Czechoslovakia was dissolved in 1993, creating Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Cuba is now an orphan nation.
Today’s Russia finds itself ensconced on a globe of interdependent nations from which it is diplomatically isolated and being punished by sanctions, boycotts and near-universal disdain.
Yes, Russia’s nuclear capabilities remain a threat. But nuclear posturing cannot save Russia from the destructive course set by Putin. Ukraine and Ukrainians are now bearing the brunt, tragically and devastatingly. But maternity wards, homes, farms, bridges and factories will be rebuilt. There’s no stopping that. The United States and the West must hold firm.As with past Russian tyrants, a day of reckoning will come for Vladimir Putin.
Colbert I. “Colby” King writes a column — sometimes about D.C., sometimes about politics — that runs in print on Saturdays. In 2003, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. King joined the Post’s editorial board in 1990 and served as deputy editorial page editor from 2000 to 2007.