On July 8th 2024, Russia launched one of its most heinous attacks on Ukraine yet. Among the several healthcare targets was Okhmatdyt children’s hospital, the largest in Ukraine where they treat cancer patients and kids with heart defects. Total: 38 dead, with most of the 200 injured being innocent children.

Apparently, if you’re a Russian military planner and you realise that relentless attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid are not crippling the country enough, the next target on your list is children and patients. Targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure like homes, schools and hospitals is a war crime. Deliberately targeting a children’s hospital with not one, but twomissiles, is the essence of terrorism.

Been there, done that

War is one thing, but terrorism is another. The world tends to get fatigued with war because there’s always some kind of conflict happening somewhere and usually far away. However, terrorism is different. Terrorism, by definition, is meant to strike fear in the hearts of people by attacking close to home. Just ask the citizens of Manhattan if they’ve forgotten about 9/11. Have the people of Iraq forgotten about ISIS? Will the people of Rwanda ever forget the Hutu/Tutsi genocide?

War has one primary aim: Defeat your enemy as quickly as possible and seize their territory, people and resources while sustaining as few casualties as possible. War is a land grab intended to add the resources of another nation to your own. War is also about power: Demonstrating that you have superior military commanders and equipment is perversely supposed to assure the conquered that they’ll be better off under your rule once hostilities end.

The primary aim of terrorism is not to conquer territory, but rather to draw attention to a cause by inflicting as much indiscriminate damage as possible on an unexpecting population. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda colleagues were not trying to conquer New York, they were trying to make Americans think twice about the safety and security of their homes and cities.

Up the ante, lose the plot

In February of 2022, Putin decided to escalate his 8-year guerrilla war in the east and Crimean regions of Ukraine into a full-scale invasion. He amassed 190,000 soldiers, tanks, artillery and air power at the border intended to show Ukraine the inevitable. Unfortunately for him, Putin miscalculated the readiness of the Ukrainian people to tamely accept Russian power, and he absolutely underestimated the will of Ukrainians to accept Russian domination.

After two and a half years of no meaningful territorial gains for Russia, and with 500,000 troops dead or injured, you’d think that Putin might withdraw in humiliation to preserve what’s left of his mediocre military.  Think of the U.S. when they pulled out of Vietnam. Even the pre-Putin era Russians understood enough was enough when the Soviet Union retreated from Afghanistan in 1989. The fact that Putin has upped the stakes in Ukraine and started targeting hospitals full of children is a sign of his panic. The Soviets knew they had lost in Afghanistan, and it led to the downfall of the U.S.S.R. When Putin and his mobster colleagues finally withdraw from Ukraine, they will also be finished.

Targeting a children’s hospital is not an act of war, it’s an act of terrorism. It’s also a sign of just how desperate Putin and his mobster cronies are. They’ll do anything to preserve their grip on the levers of Russian power and wealth, and soldiers and Ukrainians are just cannon fodder.

Thankfully, the people of Ukraine are not afraid of occasional power outages, and the attack on Okhmatdyt has only galvanised their resolve to defeat these terrorists. Within an hour of the attack, thousands of ordinary Ukrainians showed up at Okhmatdyt with food, bottled water, shovels, diapers, brooms and even fresh fruit. This is how you defeat terrorism, and this is how Ukraine will defeat Russia.

Slava Ukraini!  Heroiam Slava!