April 29, 2024: Recent Russian attacks on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv are seeking to make the city uninhabitable. This is accomplished by eliminating electricity supplies, water supply and sanitation systems along with reliable food supplies. The objective is to drive the population out of the city and declare victory. Or, to put it another way, the Russians will create a desert and call it peace. This phrase was coined by the ancient Romans, who often practiced this tactic against hostile cities in an effort to bring peace to a hostile region. The Romans did not invent this approach, but they did come up with a catchy name for it.

Before the Russian invasion, Kharkiv, also known as Kharkov, had a population of about 1.5 million. The city is one of the oldest in the region with history going back nearly 3,000 years. Kharkiv is less than fifty kilometers from the Russian border and the Russian province of Belgorod. The population of Belgorod province is 1.5 million and the provincial capital, Belgorod City, has a population of 340,000. Before the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kharkiv was the major city in a region consisting of several provinces.

After 1991 Kharkiv became Ukrainian and Belgorod remained Russian. There were Ukrainians living in both cities but Russians considered Ukrainians similar to Russians while Ukrainians considered Russian dangerous at times and in early 2022 that fear came to life once more.

Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city, right behind the capital Kiev, which has a population of three million, twice that of pre-war Kharkiv. The current Russian attacks on Kharkiv are having the desired effect and the population is fleeing to avoid all the explosions and the collapse of the local economy and public utilities like electric power, water, and sewage services. This sort of thing hasn’t been seen since World War II, when several German and Japanese cities were largely reduced to rubble and had to be rebuilt. In Germany the capital was divided into sectors, each occupied by troops and administrators from one the major nations, Russia, America, Britain, and France, that faced Germany during the war. The Americans, British and French encouraged local Germans to rebuild.

The Russians did not do so in their sector of Berlin, which remained shabby compared to the three Western-occupied sectors and wasn’t rebuilt until the Russians left in 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russians also left behind a 157 kilometer-long wall they built in 1961 to prevent East Germans and other inhabitants of Russian occupied Eastern Europe and Russia itself from just walking into West Berlin and then to the West, usually by air because Berlin was surrounded by the Russian occupied portion of Germany.

Now Russia wants to reduce Kharkiv to rubble, the way they did to their sector of post-World War II Berlin and, to a lesser extent, the eastern portion of Germany Russia occupied until 1990. Currently the Russians want to destroy Kharkiv in order to create an unoccupied buffer zone between Russia and Ukraine. That appears to be the Russian version of creating a desert and calling it peace, or at least an uninhabited buffer zone.

Russia is trying to inflict this degree of damage on other parts of Ukraine but Ukraine is a big country and the Ukrainians are still fighting back. Another after-effect the Russians will have to live with is Ukrainian memories of this latest Russian atrocity against Ukrainians. This may end up matching the 1930-33 Holodomor in which the Russians deprived the Ukrainians of food produced in Ukraine because the Russians wanted to export it all to raise money for the industrialization of Russia. Ukrainians called this the Holodomor, or great hunger, because about ten percent of the Ukrainian population starved to death.

The Ukrainians never forgot the Holodomor and saw Russians creating a new Holodomor in Kharkiv and other parts of Ukraine as well.