Russia’s massive invasion of neighboring Ukraine has laid bare a fundamental question facing the United States: At a time of public exhaustion with U.S. involvement in foreign wars, and isolationist wings prominent in both parties, are Americans willing to make sacrifices in defense of democratic values? 

As the Russian assault unfolded Thursday – the biggest attack by one state against another in Europe since World War II – President Joe Biden and congressional leaders made clear that an attack on Ukraine is an attack on democracy. 

“America stands up to bullies, we stand up for freedom. This is who we are,” said President Biden in an address denouncing Russia’s “brutal assault” on its neighbor and announcing new sanctions.

All week, top Biden administration officials have appealed to democratic values, and acknowledged that in standing up to Russian President Vladimir Putin with increasingly harsh economic sanctions, Americans could be forced to make sacrifices in the form of higher gas prices, other economic ripple effects, and possible Russian cyberattacks. 

American-made weapons are already in Ukraine, with more to come. The U.S. and the global community have also stepped up humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

But Mr. Biden and his surrogates have also asserted repeatedly that the U.S. has no intention of engaging in a shooting war with Russia by sending troops into Ukraine, which is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The weapon of choice is escalating economic sanctions, words of condemnation, and a rallying of Western allies to punish and isolate Russia and Mr. Putin.

“This is going to impose severe cost on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time,” President Biden said Thursday. He added: “We have purposely designed these sanctions to maximize the long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on the United States and our allies.”

Behind the scenes, debate remained over which sanctions to impose and what their impact might be. European leaders declined to pull Russia out of the financial system known as SWIFT, in part because such a move could hurt other economies.

Czarek Sokolowski/AP

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (right) meets U.S. troops stationed at the Powidz Air Base, in Poland, on Feb.18, 2022. After Russia launched a major invasion of Ukraine Feb. 24, more U.S. troops were called up to shore up the defenses of allies bordering that country.

Just six months after the U.S.’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years, the longest U.S. military engagement in history, an Associated Press/NORC poll released Wednesday presented stark evidence of Americans’ unwillingness to go to war again: Only 26% of Americans want the U.S. to play a “major role” in addressing the Ukraine-Russia crisis. At a time of deep partisan polarization, the poll showed similar reluctance by both Republicans and Democrats. 

“There’s no appetite for any military action – maybe that’s where there is unity,” says Stella Rouse, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland. 

Still, the poll shows 52% of Americans approve of a “minor role” in addressing the Ukraine crisis, which suggests a willingness to support actions aimed at punishing and pressuring Russia short of military intervention. 

Americans’ reluctance to get involved in foreign entanglements goes back to the founding of the country. And outright isolationism, most pronounced in the America First movement of the 1930s, has flared after periods of deep involvement in wars overseas – such as World War I and most recently, Afghanistan. 

In the run-up to World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met and put out the Atlantic Charter, which was “very much an American liberal values – small-L liberal – document,” says Michael Butler, an adjunct lecturer in history at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Values hold an alliance together, and then, to sell it to your people, there has to be an element of values to it.” 

In the days leading up to Mr. Putin’s invasion, leading members of Congress sought to present a united front, arguing that efforts to prevent a Russian invasion were about defending a world order essential to U.S. national security.  

“Why should it matter to us? It’s a little country, it’s far away,” said Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, speaking Wednesday on a Zoom event sponsored by the Jewish Democratic Council of America. But, he noted, so were Poland and Czechoslovakia, whose invasion by Nazi Germany in 1939 spiraled into World War II. “We’re not doing this for Ukraine. We’re doing this to defend a principle, a set of rules, that has protected us for decades.”

In order for that defense to be effective, lawmakers underscored the importance of unity within NATO as well as within the U.S. itself.

“We’re going to have to remain united, because Putin will look to exploit any fissure, any crack within NATO,” Rep. Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. 

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On Thursday, after the invasion was fully underway, Chairman Schiff told reporters the U.S. needs to “dramatically escalate” sanctions, target the largest banks in Russia, and cut off Russia from the global financial system – including SWIFT. 

Republicans, too, weighed in with strong support for Ukraine and tough sanctions. GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell called on the U.S. government to “ratchet the sanctions all the way up” against Russia.  

Members also said bipartisan unity was essential in focusing the blame squarely on Mr. Putin.

“Putin invading Ukraine only emboldens our adversaries, which poses a direct threat to our national security,” said Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a statement to the Monitor. “Now is the time for Republicans and Democrats in Congress to come together as Americans and work to punish Putin’s terrible violence.”

In the run-up to Thursday’s invasion, some Democrats expressed concern about influential figures on the right resisting calls to defend Ukraine and appearing to sympathize with the Russian president. Earlier this week, former President Donald Trump called Mr. Putin’s maneuvering vis-à-vis Ukraine “genius,” while Fox News host Tucker Carlson called into question the value of America defending Ukraine’s borders when the U.S. is facing a huge spike in illegal immigration over its own southern border.

Michael Caputo, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, has a different take, born of his life experience: He has lived in Ukraine, his wife is Ukrainian, and her parents still live there. But he’s torn over how the U.S. should respond. 

 “I understand Donald Trump when he says we should focus on America first,” Mr. Caputo says. “I absolutely understand the people on Fox who are complaining that we don’t pay attention to our own border while we’re concerned about Ukraine’s border.”

And he agrees that values are highly relevant when it comes to helping Ukraine. 

“We should be concerned about our border and Ukraine’s border – more about our own, of course,” he says. “But Russia’s attack on a sovereign nation – it absolutely concerns us as members of the family of man.”

Sergei Grits/AP

Damaged radar arrays and other equipment sit outside a Ukrainian military facility in Mariupol, Ukraine, Feb. 24, 2022. Russia launched a barrage of air and missile strikes on Ukraine Thursday and Ukrainian officials said that Russian troops rolled into the country from the north, east, and south.

Blaming the West and what he sees as its Kyiv proxies, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday announced what amounts to a war of regime change, aimed at destroying Ukraine’s military potential and changing its geopolitical alignment but, he insisted, not permanently occupying the country.

Very few Russian security analysts were picking up their phones Thursday. It seems many have been blindsided by the speed with which Mr. Putin has acted after spelling out his grievances in a lengthy speech officially recognizing two east Ukrainian rebel republics barely three days earlier.

But those who did claimed that the operation – which none will call an “invasion” – was going well, that Russia has established dominance in the air, that much of Ukraine’s military and command-and-control infrastructure had already been greatly reduced, the Ukrainian army in the Donbass region surrounded, and many strategic points seized by Russian special forces.

“Our first impression is that Ukrainian forces have very few chances” to repel the Russian onslaught, says Vladimir Evseev, a military expert with the Kremlin-funded Institute of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Moscow.

The assault began in the early hours of Thursday, with air and missile attacks against Ukrainian military airfields, command and communications centers, air defense installations, transport hubs, and supply depots. Russian armored formations dashed across the border from Belarus in the north and Crimea in the south, and Russian airborne troops were reportedly on the outskirts of Kyiv by evening.

Incursions were reported at other points, notably near Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, just 25 miles from the border. Amphibious forces were said to be assaulting parts of Odessa, a predominately Russian-speaking port city on the Black Sea. Russian troops, backed by separatist militias, were reportedly engaging Ukrainian troops all along the 300-mile contact line in the east and driving for the port city of Mariupol on the Azov Sea.

Russian Presidential Press Service/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin cast aside international condemnation and sanctions and warned other countries that any attempt to interfere with Russia's invasion of Ukraine would lead to "consequences you have never seen," in an address to Russia in Moscow, Feb. 24, 2022.

Despite Mr. Putin’s pledge not to occupy Ukrainian territory, the separatists lay claim to the entire Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk – of which they only hold a third at present – and seem likely to incorporate them into their self-proclaimed republics if the offensive is successful.

Political goals

Russian military objectives seem clear, but longer-term political goals are murkier. Analysts say Russia has learned a lot watching U.S. wars of regime change over the past two decades, including how to use swift and overwhelming force, in the form of missiles and air power, to overcome the enemy’s capacity to resist with minimal direct contact between opposing armies.

“We’ve already demonstrated our capabilities,” says Viktor Baranets, a former defense ministry spokesman who writes a column for the Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. “We are not attacking civilian objects, only military ones. We are pulling out the wolf’s teeth. It only depends on how long it takes the Ukrainian army to surrender.”

As for the political endgame, Mr. Evseev says he expects “the Ukrainian leadership to be overthrown by the Ukrainians themselves,” which seems to be code for installation of a puppet regime. Others argue that Moscow doesn’t care who leads Ukraine, as long as the country renounces its goals to integrate with the West, particularly NATO, and accepts its place within a Russian sphere of influence.

Andrey Suzdaltsev, a political scientist at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, says the precedent to consider is Moscow’s 2008 war with Georgia.

In that case, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was lured into attacking the Russian-protected separatist statelet of South Ossetia, and the Georgian army was subsequently defeated when Russia’s 58th Army smashed its way into the country. Russian troops penetrated into Georgia proper, did considerable damage, but declined to march on Tbilisi and withdrew, leaving Mr. Saakashvili still in power.

“The West had been pushing Saakashvili into action, but then abandoned him to his fate,” Mr. Suzdaltsev says. “The Georgian army fought well enough, but it was defeated and basically ceased to exist. Russia had made its point, and then withdrew without taking any Georgian territory. I think something similar will happen with Ukraine.”

Emilio Morenatti/AP

A woman holds her baby inside a bus as they leave Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 24, 2022. Russia launched a wide-ranging attack on Ukraine, hitting cities and bases with airstrikes or shelling, as civilians piled into trains and cars to flee.

Mr. Putin’s ambitions are a hot topic of debate, in Russia as well as the West. He has been widely characterized as a revanchist who seeks to restore the Soviet or czarist empires.

“I don’t think Putin is looking at 19th century or 20th century models,” says Nikolai Petrov, an expert with Chatham House in London. “He is a neo-imperialist. He wants to establish a controlling stake in neighboring countries rather than the old-fashioned idea of grabbing land. ... Frankly, I think the U.S. is his role model. He pretends to a much smaller zone of interests than the U.S., but he is making clear that he will react to any outside interference within that area that affects Russian interests. ...

“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to Putin who is president of Ukraine. It’s a battleground for him where NATO is competing for influence with Russia. I believe he is quite sincere when he explains that,” says Mr. Petrov.

SOURCE:

CIA World Factbook, Global Firepower, Ukrainian census

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Russian reaction

It may be too soon to gauge the Russian public’s reaction to the shocking news they awoke to on Thursday. Social media feeds such as Facebook and V’Kontakte were full of people posting black squares on their profiles, to signify shame about the war on Ukraine, but there were also expressions of pride in Russian forces’ actions. There were also scattered protests against the war across Russia, including in Moscow, resulting in hundreds of detainments.

A CNN poll published just a day before the invasion found that half of Russians believe it would be right for Russia to use force to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, while a quarter said it would be wrong and the remainder were unsure.

But the realities of war, along with the unpleasant surprises that often come up, may change that picture, if the Russian offensive becomes bogged down.

“In any case, we are never again going to see the Russia we are used to living in,” former Putin adviser-turned-critic Gleb Pavlovsky said on the Ekho Moskvi radio station Thursday. “Now the world for Russia will be a litany of blows and counterblows. We’ll be isolated, and the outside world will treat us as beyond all rules. We cannot win” in the long run, he said.

Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and Chinese leader Xi Jinping talk at a meeting in Beijing Feb. 4. Stronger political and military ties between the two countries could reshape American calculations in international crises.

Vladimir Putin’s war on an independent Ukraine has begun, and in the short term he’s bracing for sanctions from an uncommonly united West. But he has a broader goal: reasserting Russia’s Soviet-era weight on the world stage. And for that, he’s been drawing on a playbook crafted in Washington, exactly half a century ago.

It was this week, in 1972, that President Richard Nixon made a dramatic visit to Beijing, capitalizing on China’s political split from the Soviet Union, then the preeminent Communist power and America’s main rival. At a stroke, he increased U.S. leverage with Moscow.

Now, even as Mr. Putin was preparing to invade Ukraine, he’s been working to flip that script by moving to strengthen his political, economic, and military ties with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The aim: to place Washington, not Moscow, at the point of a geopolitical triangle, having to deal simultaneously with two geopolitical foes. That prospect has Washington policymakers increasingly worried.

Still, the critical open question is whether things will ultimately turn out the way Mr. Putin hopes.

Sputnik/Kremlin/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting of his security council in Moscow, Feb. 21, 2022.

Pushing through an open door

In some ways, his bid for closer ties with Beijing is a case of pushing through an open door. Both Russia and China are autocracies, opposed to what they see as U.S. dominance in international affairs. They both view the U.S. and its democratic allies as in historical decline and have sought to stoke divisions among them.

Both have denounced Western criticism of their human rights records and are bridling over a raft of economic sanctions. Both see benefits in forcing Washington to spread its diplomatic and military resources between challenges in their two distant parts of the globe.

Both also are also determined to assert control over democratic neighbors: Ukraine, in Russia’s case; the offshore island of Taiwan in China’s.

Indeed, in the run-up to Mr. Putin’s bid to muscle Ukraine back into Moscow’s orbit, he and Mr. Xi used a meeting this month to issue a statement foreseeing a “friendship without limits” and committing each leader to key policy goals of the other.

Mr. Putin signaled “opposition to any form of independence for Taiwan.” The Chinese president seconded Russia’s demand for an end to the expansion of NATO and echoed Mr. Putin’s opposition to the “color revolutions” with which formerly Soviet bloc states, including Ukraine, established democratic governments looking toward the West.

Still, how much practical difference Mr. Putin’s growing warmth with Beijing will make in his dealing with Western pushback over the move into Ukraine remains unclear. And that uncertainty reflects a major potential hitch in his Nixon-scale vision for a new Russia-China axis.

Since the Cold War years of the 1970s, there’s been a profound power shift between Moscow and Beijing. China, not a geographically shrunken and economically vulnerable post-Soviet Russia, is now the major global power alongside the United States.

And while Mr. Xi has good reason to draw closer to a fellow U.S. rival, any expanding Russia-China alliance is bound to be on China’s terms.

Even in the short term, the effects of this will bear watching.

Chinatopix/AP/File

Chinese pilots prepare to fly a J-16 fighter jet at a training base in Ningbo in Zhejiang Province, Jan. 14, 2021. China flew 39 warplanes toward Taiwan on Jan. 23, 2022, in its largest such sortie of the new year. Taiwan is watching the Western response to Russian aggression in Ukraine closely, concerned about what messages China may absorb.

An early test

An early test will come in China’s response to Mr. Putin’s effective pre-invasion takeover of the eastern flank of Ukraine by unilaterally recognizing breakaway enclaves there as Moscow-allied republics.

Mr. Xi has long trumpeted the importance of “territorial integrity” as a core principle – not least because it’s been central to warning off the U.S. and its allies against interfering with his determination to “reintegrate” Taiwan into mainland China.

When the Russian president last moved to claim part of Ukraine – his 2014 annexation of Crimea – Beijing withheld its support for the move.

Now, Mr. Putin will be hoping China will extend its recognition as well to his newly allied Ukrainian “people’s republics.”

He’ll also be looking to his expanding trade links with China as a counterweight against new Western sanctions, especially with this week’s announcement by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz of a freeze on approval for the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline, meant to increase the flow of Russian gas to Western Europe.

A gas pipeline from Russia’s far east began exporting to China three years ago, but at nowhere near the volume of its current exports to Europe. An additional pipeline, doubling the supply to China, won’t come on stream for at least several years.

And in seeking to expand his trade links with Beijing, Mr. Putin could still find himself subject to the very complaint he’s been leveling at Washington and NATO: that Russia has been denied its rightful “great power” respect ever since the breakup of the USSR.

Yes, China welcomes the energy and other raw material supplies Russia is keen to export. Trade between the countries has been on an upward trajectory, doubling to roughly $150 billion, since Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

But China’s total trade with the European Union remains some four times that, about the same amount it still does with the U.S.

Mr. Xi’s long-term hope of repairing the recent downturn in relations with the West could limit how enthusiastically he returns Mr. Putin’s embrace over the coming days. That’s especially true if Russia’s invasion into Ukraine escalates into a full-fledged bid to take over Ukraine and in effect bomb its elected government into submission to Moscow.

Wildlife specialist Wayne Hartley took notes with a detective’s professional air, a dead manatee at his feet. He nodded his head. Jotted some more.

When he got home, the scribblings were nonsense. “I was upset,” explains the former Army Ranger. Alone in his yard, he threw his cap into the dust. And wept. 

That manatee, after all, was an old friend. 

Mr. Hartley, who works for the Save the Manatee Club, first began a daily census of manatees in 1981. At the time, there were only around 36 of the aquatic mammals in Blue Spring State Park, a manatee refuge south of where the St. Johns River, one of the laziest in the world, widens out near the old steamboat town of Palatka, Florida.

The Blue Spring group boomed to nearly 800 manatees at its peak, says Mr. Hartley. He had to buy a baby name book to keep up. But in the past year, he’s been far busier documenting deaths. 

Throughout Florida, state officials counted 1,101 manatee deaths in 2021 out of a total population of between 7,250 and 10,000. The state has already recorded 326 dead manatees this year, as of Feb. 18.

Last year, over half of those deaths occurred in the Indian River Lagoon, a stretch of coastal rivers not far from Blue Spring. Despite efforts to supplement their diets, over a dozen of the animals per week are either starving to death or dying from cold stress as they leave warm water areas in search of food, made scarce because of water pollution. 

SOURCE:

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Mr. Hartley’s job is to match carcasses to known animals, using a collection of drawings and scribbly notebooks – one of the most complete sets of notes on individual wild animals in existence.

An unprecedented effort to feed and rescue dying manatees underscores a precarious balance for one of nature’s most charismatic animals – and an ethical dilemma for humans who must weigh the risks and benefits of intervening to alleviate damage they themselves have caused. 

It’s important manatees maintain what philosophers call “wild animal sovereignty” – that they “live flourishing lives ... independently of us,” says Texas A&M University philosophy professor Clare Palmer, in an email.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Wayne Hartley points to a chart depicting individual manatees he is tracking from Blue Spring State Park to points across Florida, on Feb. 9, 2022. The animals wander through the warm season and return to the temperate waters of Blue Spring when winter comes.

“There are ethical trade-offs here,” says Professor Palmer, co-author of the upcoming book, “Wildlife Ethics.” “Saving a species may mean a loss of wildness. But it seems likely that conservation is moving into an era where some values will have to be traded off to protect others.” 

Resilient but vulnerable

Like humans, manatees are wanderers.

But when winter cold fronts blow in, they gather in large groups in places like Blue Spring, about 30 miles north of Orlando. The water is so clear that schools of 4-pound tilapia and 20-inch snook look like they are swimming in an aquarium. Meanwhile, catfish annoy the massive manatees like mosquitoes.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

A rescued manatee wearing a buoy swims near others at Blue Spring State Park on Feb. 9, 2022. The buoys help conservationists track weak animals until they are fully recovered.

Wildlife specialist Cora Berchem floats across the water in an Old Town canoe, counting animals.

She has seen manatees battered, bruised, and torn up. Recently, one was stuck in a bicycle tire, earning him the name Schwinn. (The tire eventually came off.) Another is named No-Tail. A badly boat-struck female was set to be euthanized, but managers gave her a last chance by releasing her into Blue Spring. She recovered and now has a calf at her side.

In small and sometimes humorous ways, Ms. Berchem says, she sees the hopes of humanity reflected in the shimmer of Blue Spring.

“They are incredibly resilient – yet so vulnerable,” she says. 

Instead of the canary in the coal mine warning of danger, environmentalists say, the manatees are more like the miners. 

“They are so much like us in that they have their family bonds, they have their tribes and favorite places and places they like to avoid,” says Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director and a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. “They are very unique and individual. They are sentient. They can experience pain. And they have feelings – literal, emotional feelings.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Save the Manatee Club specialist Cora Berchem visits Blue Spring State Park on Feb. 9, 2022. Ms. Berchem worked for years as a crew member on reality TV shows until she discovered manatees. Now she considers them "my family."

Beyond politics

Susan MacManus grew up in Florida taking family kayaking trips down the Weeki Wachee River, where manatees would playfully bump up against their boats. 

Now an emeritus political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, she sees the die-off as part of a Florida paradox, where the economic and political benefits of development and growth have long had a wary coexistence with a profound and often toothy wilderness.

Yet she says the push to stave off more manatee deaths has in some ways risen above Florida’s politics, with popular support for environmental protections – including the 1978 Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act.

“There is strong support for trying to keep the manatee population strong in Florida, and it’s getting harder and harder to do it – for reasons of growth, climate change, and food sources,” says Dr. MacManus. “But there is also sadness and a worry that it’s going to get worse before it gets better – if it does.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Visitors to Blue Spring State Park in Florida pose for a selfie in front of a manatee sculpture on Feb. 9, 2022. The park is crowded nearly every day during the winter as people come to watch hundreds of manatees rest in the waters. Not far away, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is conducting a manatee feeding program to try to save hundreds of the animals from starvation.

Florida has struggled in recent years with water quality due to large-scale agriculture, residential development, and porous soils that allow septic fields and fertilizer byproducts to run off. Nitrogen-charged water creates algae blooms that killed 46,000 acres – over half – of the seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon in 2021. Those grasses are the manatees’ main food.

Environmental groups, pushing for a long-term solution, filed a lawsuit this month against the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in a bid for stricter water quality standards for manatee habitats – and to hold polluters to account.

“The carnage from 2021 should remove any doubt that Florida’s waters are in crisis,” said Ms. Lopez, the environmental lawyer, in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “The Biden administration needs to act fast to protect manatee habitat[s] from further destruction.”  

The decimation has happened so fast that manatees haven’t been able to adapt their behavior. 

“Manatees know what they know, and it might take several generations before those that survived the collapse of the Indian River Lagoon pass that knowledge – that institutional knowledge – to their young,” says Ms. Lopez. 

Daily feeding

Meanwhile, the public is assisting state and federal wildlife managers in a historic bid to save the struggling Indian River herd. Donors have helped defray the cost of distributing 3,000 pounds of romaine and butter leaf lettuce per day since late January at a feeding station in Brevard County, designed so the animals won’t associate the feeding with humans. Rescues of stressed and emaciated animals are ongoing.

Such interventions are becoming more common in conservation for plants and animals alike. In 2008, volunteers transported 31 seedlings of the disappearing Florida torreya tree to North Carolina. Scientists have begun to gather genetic data on stressed species like Jonah crabs, the black-footed albatross, and narwhals in a nascent bid to genetically modify animals to deal with changing conditions.

“Protecting them matters to us as well as to them,” says Professor Palmer at TAMU.

In four decades of research, this has been Mr. Hartley’s toughest year. Earlier, he saw the species removed from the endangered species list, only to now face possible reinstatement.

But Mr. Hartley is hopeful some of the environmental damage can be reversed. He references dam removal projects where experts thought it would take decades for the environment to rebalance. Instead, it took just years for rivers to revert to natural form.

“Fixing this doesn’t have to take forever,” he says. “Which is why it’s so frustrating that we’re not doing more now.”

Editor’s note: The name of the Save the Manatee Club has been updated.

AP

A woman waits for a train to leave Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 24.

Soon after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, CNN showed a moving video in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city. In the freezing morning, a group of civilians could be seen gathered in a circle on the cold stones of a city square, kneeling in prayer as bombs rained down around the city – including an apartment block.

As CNN’s Clarissa Ward explained: This group prayer “speaks to the state of ordinary Ukrainians here who have done absolutely nothing to deserve this, who have no quarrel with Russia, who have no desire for war or conflict, who are not engaged with the geopolitics underpinning all of this, but who will ultimately be the ones to bear the brunt ... of this major attack ... on a sovereign, independent nation.”

Another video by The Washington Post shows hundreds of civilians seeking shelter in a Kharkiv subway station. As it was, some of the first reports of civilian casualties by Russian forces came from Kharkiv. Such reports worried the Kremlin enough that the Defense Ministry claimed any videos of civilian casualties would have to be “staged.”

In fact, Russian President Vladimir Putin could be very concerned about the Russian people turning against the war because of high civilian deaths in a country with a shared culture and history. In announcing a justification for the invasion, Mr. Putin said it was needed to protect Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine. That claim was quickly dismissed in the West as a type of “false flag” excuse for war.

Perhaps Russians didn’t buy it, either. The invasion did spark some small protests in Russia, according to Radio Free Europe. In Saratov, for example, lawyer Denis Rudenko stood in the snow holding a sign reading, “Putin is a war criminal.”

Foreign leaders were equally blunt about civilian causalities or were eager to console Ukrainian civilians. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel tweeted this: “In these dark hours, our thoughts are with Ukraine and the innocent women, men and children as they face this unprovoked attack and fear for their lives.”

President Joe Biden said, “President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering.” In early February, the United States predicted a Russian invasion could result in up to 50,000 civilians killed or wounded. Many experts worry the war could morph into urban conflict, which often results in civilian casualties.

One of the newer lessons of modern warfare is that the killing of civilians – or the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives – can lead to defeat, perhaps not on the battlefield but eventually in the court of public opinion. Even terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic State have had to curb their barbaric attacks on civilians because Muslim societies openly opposed such violence.

Perhaps that circle of civilians kneeling in Kharkiv were proclaiming their innocence, hoping their prayers would protect them and others like them. At the least, the image is a reminder that a world increasingly embracing protections for civilians in wartime can help end such war. Evil acts carry the seeds of their own undoing.