Tulsi and Tucker, This is Your Guy's Work

Moscow faced a new wave of revulsion and accusations of war crimes Monday after the Russian pullout from the outskirts of Kyiv revealed streets strewn with corpses of what appeared to be civilians, some of whom had seemingly been killed deliberately at close range.

The images of battered bodies out in the open or in hastily dug graves also led to calls for tougher economic sanctions against the Kremlin, namely a cutoff of fuel imports from Russia.

The mayor of a small town, Motyzhyn, was tortured, she and her family were killed and tossed into a shhallow grave by the Russians because they would not collaborate with them:

People tied up and then murdered.

The Russians, of course, deny it, saying, in effect, "who you gonna believe, us or the evidence?"

If you go looking around, you'll find people saying that we'll have real peace if we only give the aggressor the Sudentenland, or some other territory.

Oops, wrong war. But the principle applies. Aggression is not ended by appeasement. We will not achieve a lasting peace by giving Putin the eastern regions of Ukraine, or all of Ukraine. Haven't we learned that the hard way? Putin wants every square inch of the Russian Empire restored, he wants western Europe supine and at his feet and he wants the United States to withdraw from the continent.

I once thought that admitting the Baltics into NATO was a mistake. I was wrong. It's probably evident, now, that the only thing that keot Putin from first marching to the Baltic Sea was NATO. The Baltics have a third of the area of Ukraine and about 1/8th the population. They might have been an easier nut to crack, rather than invade the second-largest nation in Europe.

But I digress.

History is clear on one point: You cannot appease a dictator. You cannot appease a tyrant who is set on conquering his neighbors, and then the neighbors after that.

Putin is not hiding who he is. The fellow-travelers, the collaborators, they all need to be called out.

And the Ukrainins need to be given every tool that they can use to fight this war. The countries taking in Ukrainian refugees need to be assisted.

We can't undo the mistakes that were made in Europe during the 1936-1938 timeframe. But we damned sure don't need to repeat them.