Guest columnist Keith Peterson: A chance meeting in Cyprus and the harsh face of war

Last week I found myself in a traditional meze taverna on the island of Cyprus with friends old and new. One noted that our waitress, communicating with a combination of halting Greek and English, was not Cypriot. Curious, we asked where she was from.

Ukraine she answered. How long has she been in Cyprus? Since March.

Tatyana is one of some 15,000 Ukrainians who have found their way to Cyprus and one of several million who have been forced to flee their homes and are scattered throughout Europe and Russia. In her case, she was briefly married in Cyprus in 2019, returned to Ukraine when the pandemic struck and watched as the Russian invasion and COVID arrived almost simultaneously. COVID took her mother's life.

She fled the war, with her father and her dog, through Moldova and back to Cyprus. Now she works two jobs and waits.

Wars have human faces. It is the face of the displaced such as Tatyana and her father, of the disfigured corpses from Bucha, of the determined Ukrainian fighters, of the frightened Russian conscript sent to the front with little equipment or training, and of the cold, brutal visage of Vladimir Putin, the architect of this vast human tragedy.

In the U.S., there have been disquieting voices on the left and right questioning our commitment to the people of Ukraine and their existential struggle. Doves on the left want to push the Ukrainians to the negotiating table, even though there will be no Russian interlocutor ready to acknowledge that its invasion was a colossal mistake.

Isolationists on the right, such as Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who might or might not become speaker of the House in the wake of the disappointing midterm results, has used contrived reasoning to justify a pullback of support. The Ukrainians, it is said are unreliable and will pull the U.S. into a dangerous place. At least for now, Senate Minority Leader McConnell has slapped down such talk.

What's dangerous is allowing Russia to change international borders by brute force. It was not permissible when Saddam Hussein did it. It is not permissible now. It should be a foundational tenet of the international system.

There continues to be a good deal of speculation in the media whether the West will "crack" under the economic pressures applied by soaring energy prices, particularly in Europe. There is less speculation if Russia will crack under the dual pressures of military defeats and economic sanctions, in part because Russia remains so opaque. The real question is if fear is a stronger force than values in holding together and motivating nations to undertake difficult challenges.

Will fear of Putin's demonstrated brutality keep Russian opponents of the war from acting or keep the Russian people off the streets? Will democratic values hold against short-term economic pressures? So far, the answer is that those values seem to be holding and Putin's gamble that they will not is losing.

President Biden deserves enormous credit for his ability to hold together the Western coalition and to calibrate the support to Ukraine that has allowed the Ukrainians to win on the battlefield without escalating the conflict in a way that would draw NATO forces into a direct confrontation with Russia. The Ukrainians, by their bravery and savvy, have shown that they have earned the West's support.

That success on the battlefield has increased Ukrainian leverage and will be crucial in resolving the Ukrainian crisis in a way that preserves the democratic the values that will ultimately defeat the Russian efforts to subjugate Ukraine.

Perhaps this time next year Tatyana and her father might be able to return home and help rebuild a sovereign, democratic Ukraine.

• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.