I'm with Biden on the cluster bombs

[Hekate]

35. The children of Ukraine have been targeted since the beginning: in bombings of schools and...

…maternity and pediatric hospitals; by kidnappers (about 3/4 of a million children taken to Russia), and by torturers (yes, you can identify if a dead body has been tortured — there were young kids who had their teeth knocked out and bones broken). There are many credible reports of wholesale rape of children and adults.

These are all war crimes, and there are credible accounts going back many years that this brutality is the policy of both the Russian Army and the Wagner mercenaries.

We had some intense discussions here at the beginning of the invasion by people who thought the Russians would stop and be happy if the Ukrainians would just cede Crimea. The answer is no — appeasement never works. Never, never does it work. Russia has a very genocidal history with Ukraine and Crimea — look up Stalin’s manufactured famine.

My comment has always been — what part of the US would you be willing to cede to an invader who claimed it had once belonged to them, and who arrived with tanks and bombs and proceeded to flatten it into rubble? Somehow, all I get is crickets.

I am sorry and sickened that there is a war. But Ukraine did not start it, nor did they provoke it. Nor did we. I am extremely grateful that Joe Biden set about repairing our relationship with NATO and the EU. Russia is nobody’s friend, nor have they ever been. Vladimir Putin was born and raised in the KGB, and witnessed the downfall of the Soviet Union. He believes that was the greatest catastrophe in the history of Russia, and he would like more than anything to rebuild that empire, and to weaken the West — which is why he wants all of Ukraine and has had a hand in Brexit and other schemes to break apart the EU.