Vladimir Putin’s supporters are involved in this war

Vladimir Putin’s apologists like to reduce his war against Ukraine to bloodless geopolitical terms.”It all boils down to NATO expansion”, they will argue. “One must understand what George HW Bush said or did not say to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, at the end of the Cold War..” “In reality, it was the West that provoked Russia into action.”

But then you look at the reality: On July 8, Russia bombed Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital.

A two-story wing of Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt hospital was destroyed, trapping children and medical staff. “We hear voices, people are lying under the rubble,” said the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. Affected departments included intensive care, operating theaters and oncology. Images of the aftermath showed pale, frightened children – including cancer patients still hooked up to their medical machines – being carried out of the building. Doctors and nurses in blood-stained white coats treated wounded survivors in the street.

“My child is terrified,” the mother of a 4-year-old boy recovering from spinal surgery told Associated Press reporters outside the hospital. “This shouldn’t be happening, this is a children’s hospital.”

It wasn’t even the only hospital hit that day. Another medical center in Kyiv and at least 50 civilian buildings in several cities across the country were hit by a barrage of missiles, including hypersonic missiles, according to Ukrainian security services. (Russia denied deliberately targeting civilian areas and blamed Ukraine’s air defenses.)

Three days earlier, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, was in Moscow, negotiating a supposed “peace deal” with Putin. Then, as Russian missiles struck Kyiv on Monday, Orban resurfaced in Beijing, meeting with Xi Jinping on his self-proclaimed “peace mission,” which appears to be more about repeating Kremlin arguments and normalizing Putin’s aggression than about any realistic prospect of peace.

Meanwhile, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Moscow on Monday for his first state visit since the war began. If the leader of the world’s largest democracy was embarrassed about having dinner with Putin after this latest devastating attack, he showed no sign of it. Some world leaders might have considered cutting their visit short and flying home to protest their host’s bombing of a children’s hospital, but not Modi.

Putin bears direct responsibility for the atrocities he is inflicting on Ukraine. But we should be clear that he cannot sustain this aggression alone. North Korea and Iran are said to be supplying important weapons, but key countries like India and China are keeping the Russian economy afloat through their purchases of oil, gas and military equipment.

This latest attack will serve as a rousing reminder to NATO officials arriving in Washington today for the three-day summit of world leaders. It is hard to imagine a more jarring incident that could galvanize and focus people. No doubt there will be even more forceful statements and promises of support for Ukraine. But that is not enough. It is time to be clear about how Russia can continue to prosecute this war and to what extent Putin’s supporters are complicit.

(See also: Russia, North Korea and the Axis of Autocracies)