If Vladimir Putin sees video of Ukrainian girl singing ‘Let It Go’ in a bomb shelter, he’ll understand why he can’t win

Opinion

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This article was published 08/03/2022 (1060 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For nearly two weeks, the invasion of Ukraine has been a daily TV show of good versus evil.

On the evil side, you have war criminal Vladimir Putin. His rule of engagement is simple: There are no rules of engagement. There is no international law, no Geneva Conventions, no human decency. There is just the indiscriminate shelling of civilians and the barbaric razing of a peaceful nation by a cowardly psychopath who has cashed out his worthless rubles for a non-refundable ticket to Hell. I hope Satan is hatching special plans.

Burning for all eternity is not sufficient punishment for Putin.

The images of evil, as broadcast by western media and livestreamed by heroic Ukrainians under siege, are creating flashbulb memories for the world. Until this invasion, we had never seen footage of a nuclear power plant taking tracer fire. Putin’s murderous zombies in uniform — do not call these animals “soldiers” — have looted and attacked schools, hospitals, churches, houses, villages, electrical grids, sanitation systems, pharmacies, grocery stores, playgrounds and even humanitarian corridors of outgoing escape and incoming supplies.

And, yet, two weeks of state terrorism and scorched earth savagery has failed to achieve Putin’s blitzkrieg goal for a rapid decapitation of the Ukraine government.

Why? This is Hollywood Storytelling 101: He badly miscalculated the good.

Putin underestimated Ukraine’s indomitable spirit.

What this madman is now discovering, as he desperately wages genocide while simultaneously destroying his own country, is that you can’t impose authoritarian myopia on a clear-eyed populace. You can’t threaten the fearless. You can’t issue ultimatums to a sovereign nation that rejects your world view because they already love the opposite.

You can’t bomb an indomitable spirit into submission.

Amid this harrowing darkness, Ukrainians just keep radiating light. It’s beyond inspiring.

This includes the children. In recent days, I’ve been struck by three videos of Ukrainian girls, unrelated and miles apart, who share the same spirit. This weekend, MSNBC was filming a report from a refugee camp in Poland when a little girl sauntered into the frame with a wide grin. She stared into the camera and tossed her soccer ball into the air with exuberance.

The world is on red alert. This child, faraway from home, just wanted to play.

As MSNBC’s Ellison Barber tweeted, “the best interruption of a live shot I’ve ever had …”

It was a beautiful sight. And more proof Putin will never control Ukraine. It’s impossible.

Then there was the girl in the coastal city of Odesa, helping to fill sandbags in advance of a feared amphibious assault by the Russian animals. She, too, was smiling under her toque. She told news cameras she believed her city would be just fine. Despite being too young to understand the concept of faith, her faith was in her blood because faith is in her country.

The third Ukrainian girl, identified as Amelia, brought me to tears.

Here is just one of the millions of children displaced by Putin’s evil. Three weeks ago, Amelia went to school and played outside. She watched TV and had sleepover parties with friends. Now she is in a bomb shelter in Kyiv. But her spirit, like the adults fighting for her country, is shockingly unbreakable. In the viral video, Amelia is making grown men in that bomb shelter weep by belting out “Let It Go” from Disney’s “Frozen.”

She hits her high notes and smiles between verses.

The touching video brought a response from Idina Menzel, Queen Elsa in the hit film.

“We see you,” she wrote to Amelia. “We really, really see you.”

We do indeed. The world really, really sees all of Ukraine. It is not a stretch to say that, at this moment in time, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is leader of the free world. It may not last. He may not survive. Russia may just decide to level Ukraine as its battle plans turn to dust.

But for now, Zelenskyy is doing the unthinkable: holding off a nuclear superpower.

This is the power of good. This is the power of being on the right side of history.

And it is why Putin should really, really see he has already lost this war.

His treacherous evil is simply no match Ukraine’s indomitable spirit.

Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, one of the biggest mistakes in military history, has unwittingly exposed many truths about his long feared and once vaunted military. The first being: these animals are incompetent. Based on the last two weeks, it’s not clear Russian ground forces could take Chicago. Ukrainian soldiers are defending major cities, batting down Russian aircraft like pinatas and racking up the body count of their enemy.

Putin thought his army could swoop into Ukraine like killer bees. Instead, he kicked a hornet’s nest. He will be stung by this catastrophic folly for the rest of his days.

Ukraine is under assault. But the children keep playing and singing.

Ukraine refuses to be erased by evil.

Vinay Menon is the Star’s pop culture columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @vinaymenon