Vladimir Putin is many things; a “humanitarian” is not one of them.

Steven Witkoff may think sycophantic praise for the Russian president will get Putin to a deal, but that ignores two important realities. First, Putin and his army have brutalized his own people and committed numerous and heinous war crimes against the people of Ukraine. Second, when history is littered with Putin’s broken promises, the only way to get him to a deal is strength and resolve, not appeasement.

Pope Saint John Paul II, who had experienced the ravages of fascism and communism in the 20^th century, believed that the reason the Soviet Union fell in 1989 was not that it could not win the nuclear arms race but because its society was built on a lie — a lie about the human person.

Like Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin before him, Putin has no regard for human life. He doesn’t see the human person as made in the image of God, but simply as a means to an end, a way to attain power, gain territory, and exert control.

From the beginning of the war, Putin has targeted civilian populations in Ukraine, killing as many as possible, destroying homes and communities, but more importantly, attempting to destroy their will, to take their pride and their dignity. How many videos of Russian drones chasing innocent Ukrainians do we have to see?

A Congressional delegation that visited Ukraine in 2023 found the horrors of what Putin had inflicted on the Ukrainian people. The details were revealed in a Republican-led hearing by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs titled “Exposing Putin’s Crimes: Evidence of Russian War Crimes and other Atrocities in Ukraine.”

Sexual violence included the rape of children, the elderly, and mothers in front of their children.

The youngest known case was a four-year-old and the oldest an 82-year-old. A report on Russia’s use of rape as a weapon of war found that men were sexually violated using a number of different tools to sodomize them, including one that electrically shocks the genitals. The report found particular vulnerability for female detainees to sexual violence and torture by Russian soldiers, including gang rape.

Amid reports of mass executions and torture of civilians in prison, the Congressional delegation witnessed “corpses littering the streets of Bucha with their hands tied behind their backs, bullets in their head, some of them decapitated.”

According to House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-TX), Ukrainians, including children, have been subjected to electric shock, severe beatings, suffocation, attacks by dogs, and waterboarding in detention centers.

The investigators who collected this evidence called it “a calculated plan to terrorize, subjugate, and eliminate Ukrainian resistance and destroy Ukrainian identity,” according to McCaul.

Putin is abducting Ukrainian children, calling it “patriotic adoption.” Some of the children have lost parents in the war; others are simply living in Russian-captured areas. Often kidnapped at night, they are smuggled across the border and secretly placed with families, taken to “education” facilities, or placed on adoption websites.

According to a new documentary, “The Stolen Children,” narrated by national security expert Meaghan Mobbs, human rights groups show databases operating effectively as catalogs where stolen Ukrainian children are marketed. This includes girls as young as 13, presented as “ready for sex,” and with a formula that, by age 16, she is able to have her first child.

Putin sends the male teenagers to the front lines, where he has lost as many as 1.4 million troops in this war. These young men are expendable. In pure Karl Marx tradition, humans are simply Putin’s means of production.

The Russian president continues to target religious communities, particularly in the occupied territories. His army has bombed more than 700 churches and murdered as many as 56 priests and pastors, many times after they were tortured. He is particularly obsessed with evangelical churches and Baptists, whom he believes are connected to the West and the United States.

Religion is used as a weapon of war because Putin, like other authoritarian dictators, fears people of faith. If he can crush those whose authority is God, not the state, he can defeat and control them.

In 1983, Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” Our founder, Phyllis Schlafly, and millions of Americans knew our struggle with the Soviet empire was bigger than a military conflict; it was a spiritual one.

Our conflict with Vladimir Putin still is.

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Kris Ullman is President of Eagle Forum, a non-profit advocacy organization founded by Phyllis Schlafly in 1972 and dedicated to protecting life, championing women and advancing pro-family policies.

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Exposing The Brutal Realities Of Putin’s War On Humanity