Bent but Not Broken
“I’m staying in Kyiv. I’m not hiding — and I’m not afraid of anyone.”
In Lviv, they can barely keep up. There are 200,000 mouths to feed, as women, children, and the elderly pour into the city along the western border. “But the trains are still going,” the mayor warns, “and the numbers are growing.” In other cities, shelters are at capacity. As families crowd into tiny underground spaces for days on end, places like Mariupol and Volnovakha are running out of food and water. “People are there 11 days now,” one of the men says. “[They] are sick… There is no toilet… The basement only gets fresh air when there is no shelling,” which lately, is rare. But Ukrainians are not broken, they want people to know. Not even close.
“Few expected such strength from our people,” Col. Sviatoslav Stetsenko agrees. “Because, when you haven’t slept for three days, and when you only have one dry ration because the rest burned up, when it’s negative temperature out and there is nothing to warm you, and when you are constantly in the fight, believe me, it is physically very difficult,” admits. “But our people endured this.”
That courage starts at the top, fueled by heroic President Volodymyr Zelensky, who Monday night stunned everyone by appearing in his downtown office. “I’m staying in Kyiv,” he announced by video. “I’m not hiding — and I’m not afraid of anyone.” Inspired by his stand, as many as 140,000 Ukrainians from other countries have streamed across the Slovenian, Hungarian, and Polish borders to fight, CBN’s George Thomas reported from the ground in Lviv. And it’s not just native Ukrainians either. “Close to 3,000 Americans have signed up and are either here or are on their way to Ukraine as part of the initiative by the Zelensky administration to allow foreign fighters to come into the country and stand shoulder to shoulder with their Ukrainian counterparts,” he explained on “Washington Watch.”
And the result, Thomas went on, is that here we are “12 days into this invasion, and Russia is losing the war.” Yes, he conceded, they have corners of Kyiv surrounded. “They took Sumy in the south, a very strategic city. They have encircled Mariupol, another very strategic city… and they are continuing their advances in the eastern part of the country.” But let’s face it, he pointed out. This was a war the Russians thought they could win in 48 hours, and “they are stuck — literally — in the mud in the northern part of Kyiv.” What’s more, he said, “the Ukrainians are putting up a very, very stiff fight and in places where… they are surrounded. Thousands of Ukrainians are coming out and confronting these Russian soldiers, waving the Ukrainian blue and yellow flag in the face of these Russian soldiers. I mean, it’s incredible. Talk about defiance.”
The Ukraine of 2022 isn’t the Ukraine of 2014 when Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea, Thomas insisted. “They’ve gotten a lot more weapons in the last eight years. They’ve beefed up their ability to defend themselves and go on the offensive.” This past weekend, he had the opportunity to go to an “undisclosed location” far away from Lviv to get a sense of what was happening. And he was impressed at the number and complexity of the fortifications throughout that part of the country. “They had put up sandbags. They had erected concrete slabs.” At each checkpoint, there were civilians on guard, armed with AK-47s and other weapons. “You’ve got to zigzag through [the barricades],” he pointed out. “They’re building structures, digging trenches… They are not taking any chances whatsoever.”
In the meantime, the international outcry is to the northeast and northwest, where Putin has been firing rockets into residential areas. “They’re not going after military structures,” Thomas said. “You’re talking high-rise apartment complexes. They’re going after hospitals. They’re going after churches. They’re going after schools… So the question that the International Criminal Court is asking is, ‘Are the attacks against these civilian structures tantamount to war crimes?’” Some people, including U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, insists they are. But regardless, Thomas says, “My sense here is that you see a desperation on the part of the Kremlin.”
And Putin isn’t helping his case by shelling areas close to the humanitarian corridors. Organizations on the ground have been pleading for a ceasefire to get their convoys of supplies to people stuck in bomb shelters for days without water and food. “Russian occupiers keep shelling” Oleksiy Kuleba tells the media. “[They] do not give guarantees.”
The network of Ukrainian churches, on the other hand, is doing everything they can to step in and fill the void. “Talk about being the hands and feet of Jesus,” Thomas says. “Churches have basically turned every square inch of their structure[s] into a shelter of Christian homes… People are just opening up their homes to complete strangers.” One 22-year-old he talked to, Anastasia Mochar, lives in a tiny Lviv apartment with her brother and still opened it up to five strangers fleeing Kyiv. Her mother is hosting 24 more. “I was raised in a family where our home was open to other people,” she said. “We were always helping people who were going through a difficult time.”
“This is the spirit of Ukraine,” Thomas insisted, “the sense that in the middle of fighting a battle, they’re also opening their homes and being the hands of Jesus.”
If you’d like to help, there are Christian groups on the ground near the Ukrainian border as we speak. The team at Samaritan’s Purse is one of them — setting up an emergency field hospital with the capacity to do 14 major surgeries a day. They’ll have an intensive care unit, 60 beds, and an emergency room. “Ukrainian families are hurting and in desperate need of physical aid and prayer during this difficult time,” Franklin Graham urged. To donate, click over to their Crisis in Ukraine page.
Originally published here.
Putin an End to Russian Oil
President Joe Biden has set a lot of records since last year — all of them bad. He added another one Monday when the United States hit the highest price of gas per gallon ever. Topping the record of $4.11 from his old boss, Barack Obama, Biden has the dubious distinction of presiding yet over another crisis: the collapse of America’s energy independence.
Maybe, some speculate, that’s why he was so reluctant to ban Russian oil and gas. Under his administration, the U.S. was taking in 40 percent more Russian crude oil than at any time under Donald Trump. Taking those imports off the table would make the pain at the pump even worse, he knew, which is probably why he was frantically trying to stop Congress from passing a bill forcing his hand on our Russian supply. And yet, the anti-Putin sentiment is so strong in both parties that even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rebuffed Biden. “Pelosi was not moved by [the White House’s] arguments,” sources told Fox News. When the president himself called Pelosi on Monday night, she refused to budge — forcing Biden to announce an end to Russian oil, gas, and energy imports.
The decision took longer than it should have, members of both parties complained, and when the president finally did act, he took great measures to deflect any blame it might cause. “It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. That’s simply not true,” Biden claimed, despite canceling the construction of the Keystone pipeline the minute he stepped into the Oval Office. “We’re approaching record levels of oil and gas production in the United States,” the president argued, “… The oil and gas industry has millions of acres leased. They have 9,000 permits to drill now. They could be drilling right now, yesterday, last week, last year.”
According to Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), whose district is in the heart of America’s oil country, that’s simply not true. “The production is… actually a really good level,” he agreed. “But the problem is that… there are plenty of pipelines that the Biden administration has refused to certify. They’ve weaponized some of the agencies and departments and they won’t certify them… We need to cut the red tape and start planning and permitting export terminals in this country. That will take several years. I mean, you have to imagine that’s two to three years from the time that you say, ‘Yes, we’re going to do it’ to the time that it actually gets built, maybe even longer. So, reversing course is a step by step process, but we need to take that first and most important step right now.”
And the reality is, Biden hasn’t shown the slightest indication that he’s willing to take that step. Beholding to his Green New Deal fanatics, he hasn’t considered a single viable solution to this oil crisis. Instead, he’s suggested taking America’s business to other bad actors in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia — which to Pfluger, who understands our capacity, is absolutely astonishing.
“At what point in time is the administration going to learn the lesson?” he demanded to know on “Washington Watch.” “We don’t need Iranian oil, Russian oil… We have what we need right here, and we can do the job better and cleaner than anybody else.” Pfluger said he was in Ukraine with a congressional delegation a few weeks ago and had a sobering conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky. “He said he didn’t believe that we would be in this situation if the Nord Stream project did not exist. I mean, think about what that statement is — that energy security is such a degree of national security that the president of Ukraine did not think that we would be in a situation that his country would be invaded by Putin.”
Pfluger’s bill, the Midland over Moscow Act, would put America’s focus back on domestic production and cut the red tape that keeps us from sending our oil to the world. “We don’t need to be brokering deals with Iran or Venezuela or any other malign actor. We’ve got what we have right here. We need to focus on domestic energy production. That’s what Midland over Moscow represents.”
Other countries are begging for that sort of leadership from America. Alberta’s premier, Jason Kenney, told the press this week, “… [I]nstead of going cap in hand to the Venezuela, Saudi, and Iranian dictatorships to replace Russian conflict oil, we could turn this around, I believe in less than a year,” he argued. “If the United States is serious about this, they could come back and help us build Keystone XL. If President Biden had not vetoed that project, it would be done later this year — 840,000 barrels of democratic energy that could have displaced the 600,000-plus barrels of Russian conflict oil that’s filled with the blood of Ukrainians.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
