WHO KNEW THAT WHEN A BESIEGED city bravely refuses to surrender, its assailants don’t just go “oh” and back off? Instead, they carry on with ever- greater brutality. There is nothing new in the manner of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” was the realism that Athens supposedly offered Melos — an independent state destroyed chiefly because, Thucydides suggested, the Athenian empire could not be seen to be weak. The Melians resisted, and died.
Is this not Ukraine and Russia today? Is not
