Putin should know: Rain hell on Ukraine and it still may not fall

In 1999, on orders of Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s prime minister, a new assault on Grozny began — and this time, the Russians brought hell with them. Humane individuals worldwide might wonder what atrocities Putin is capable of in his indiscriminate violence against Ukraine. The people of Grozny can provide the answer.

The assault began with aerial bombing and shelling of homes, schools and hospitals. The Russians then escalated to the use of thermobaric explosives, also known as vacuum bombs. These are two-stage explosives that spray fuel oil with the first blast, which is then ignited in a second blast capable of bursting through fortifications and vaporizing human beings.

As day drags into hellish day of Putin’s war against Ukraine, the murderer in Moscow appears to be reliving his Grozny experience. Rain enough destruction onto the heads of innocent civilians, burn up enough mothers and children, maim enough old men, and eventually a city will fall. By the time Putin was finished with Grozny, it was, according to the United Nations, the “most destroyed city on Earth.” He may have considered that an honor. It certainly was not an impediment to his world standing.

But a Russian leader, of all people, should know that there is more than one way for a siege to end. Roughly a day’s drive to the north from Grozny is the Russian city of Volgograd, known during World War II as Stalingrad. The name of the city made it particularly attractive to Germany’s Adolf Hitler, who liked the idea of capturing a place named for his Soviet nemesis. Hitler sent hundreds of thousands of troops and hundreds of warplanes to turn Stalingrad into a pile of rubble.

Meanwhile, far to the north, another vast German army had already besieged the city of Leningrad (known before and after as St. Petersburg). Some 600,000 trapped citizens died in a single year of the siege, not only from bombs and bullets, but also from illness, starvation and exposure. People ate wallpaper paste and weeds to survive. The city police force created a special unit to crack down on cannibalism.

Nearly 900 days was not enough to break the will of the Russians in Leningrad, nor did massive advantages in troops and bombs give the Nazis victory at Stalingrad. Hitler spared no brutality, no monstrosity, in his determination to destroy both cities and their inhabitants. But the story ended with the Soviets in Berlin and Hitler dead in his bunker.

No one with an ounce of decency would wish the fate of Leningrad or Stalingrad on the people of Ukraine. But for now, the question of how much Ukrainians must suffer is in the hands of a man who, from his earliest appearance on the world stage, has shown himself to be devoid of decency.

Putin appears to think he is facing another Grozny, where the fundamental weaknesses of the Russian army can be made up through bloody-minded violence. According to reports, he has even sent his Chechnya strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, to Ukraine to rally the troops to the task of wholesale slaughter.

But Chechnya in 1999 was a small place, with one city of more than 50,000 people: Grozny. Ukraine is a large country with many cities. Kyiv alone has more than twice the population of the entire Chechen Republic. Even with millions of troops on his Eastern front, Hitler could not break great cities through siege and shelling. Putin’s forces in Ukraine are but a small fraction of that number.

Despite nearly 25 years of Putin propaganda about the taming of Chechnya, the stories of Leningrad and Stalingrad are still well known to every Russian. In this dark hour, the world can hope that, day by day, more of them recognize that Kyiv and Kharkiv, Odessa and Mariupol, Lviv and Dnipro may be equally unbreakable. Until some way is found to shake Putin from his mad miscalculation, this horrible man will steer a path to hell.