You have to wonder what it would take to get House and Senate Republicans to get off their collective duffs and walk across their respective cloak rooms to smell the proverbial coffee. City after city after city in Ukraine has been leveled by Russian artillery and rockets. The port of Mariupol is a shell of its former self. Large areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, are in rubble. Bakhmut doesn’t exist anymore. There isn’t a square mile of Ukraine from Kharkiv in the north through Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, all the way to Kherson on the coast of the Black Sea that hasn’t been severely damaged if not utterly destroyed by Russia’s war of aggression.

Wait. Let’s stop right there. I’ve been writing words like these for nearly two years about the war in Ukraine, and they accurately convey what has happened in the war. So do Ukraine’s numbers of the dead and wounded, both military and civilian. But sitting here in Northeast Pennsylvania, or more to the point, in a limestone and marble building in Washington, D.C., there is no way to adequately conceive of the horror Russia has wrought in the country that stands between it and Europe.

We in the United States don’t have cities that have had to be rebuilt or great expanses of cemeteries in which are buried the civilian dead of wars.

From 1939 to 1945, Nazi Germany wreaked havoc through Europe all the way to the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. When I lived in Germany in the 1950’s and took trips with my parents through Germany and France and Italy, you could still see the damage done in World War II. Churches from the 13th and 14th centuries in small towns lay in ruins with maybe a single stone wall still standing. City after city still had not finished cleaning up the rubble from bombings and artillery shelling. I still have images in my mind of old women in long dresses with headscarves stacking bricks along the sides of blown-up streets in Stuttgart as we drove through on our way to visit friends stationed at an army post in Baumholder.

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Today, having seen the damage wrought by World War II in Western Europe as a boy, it’s hard for me to transfer those images through 65 years to Ukraine, but there they are: new photographs and videos of similar destruction only a thousand or so miles from the destroyed cities I saw........

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