Rich Wandschneider

The gas station attendant didn’t know about the war.

Europe’s Ukrainian edge has not seen this kind of destruction since World War II. The destruction of whole cities, of ancient art and architecture, the mass evacuations and the tightening noose around Kyiv, the capital, bring to mind the German siege of Leningrad in that war, when a million and a half Russians died.

If I were President Biden’s speechwriter:

I’d say that Vladimir Putin is the darkest thing that has happened to Russia and neighboring countries since Hitler’s siege of Leningrad and Stalin’s wholesale killings and relocations of real and perceived enemies. It’s hard to get around the numbers, but well over 20 million Russians died during World War II, 7-8 million of them from disease and famine — Hitler’s legacy. Before and through the war Stalin evacuated the entire Muslim population of Chechnya, executed thousands of Ukrainian Kulak farmers and starved millions in his expanding empire.

There is an unholy echo in Putin to these ruthless predecessors. One of his first actions on coming to power was to restart a war in Chechnya — with trumped up charges of Chechnyan bombings in Moscow. Putin had the capital city of Grozny leveled, then stepped out of a fighter jet in full pilot gear in the destroyed city — as if he’d done it himself.

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When millions of Americans were hungry and jobless, President Franklin Roosevelt said that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. Millions of men flocked to Civilian Conservation Corps camps, built trails and highways and shipped small paychecks home; and legislators quickly passed laws to give us unemployment insurance and Social Security. Our parents and grandparents came out of the Depression together.

When Hitler’s planes bombed London, Churchill vowed never to surrender, and ordinary Londoners packed sandbags and ducked underground during nighttime raids. They survived together.

Today’s speechmaker is Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. He speaks from bunkers and the streets of Kyiv, asks Russian moms to come and get their captured sons, tells us that there will be no surrender. He exposes Putin’s lies and shows pictures of bombed hospitals, knows that Putin will not quit and that he and his family are direct targets. Should Putin choose carpet-bombing of Kyiv, he says, the Russians will have to kill him and everyone to take the city.

Putin has Russian history and his own history of big numbers of death and destruction. Without a smile or a blink, he’s reducing public squares, hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote Sunday of Russian attacks on “the internationally recognized memorial at Babi Yar — a ravine near Kyiv where the Nazis massacred more than 33,000 Jews in two days in 1941, followed by an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 others over subsequent years.” Putin took Crimea by force, and has a half-million civilians in the city of Mariupol trapped without food and water.

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It’s time for Biden and our congressional leaders — and for all of us — to step up. The economic noose around Putin’s Russia will have to tighten to impact ordinary Russians, the oligarchs and the former KGB’ers that comprise Putin’s inner circle.

Six-dollar gas? I say put that price on it right now. Send 50 cents to Zelensky. Will it hurt? Can we afford it? On Saturday I watched well-fed people load thousands of dollars’ worth of chips, TVs, socks and toys into big cars in a full Costco parking lot. But yes, a few people will be hurt. Give them gas coupons, a practice we developed in WWII and Safeway uses now.

This paper, the Chieftain, showed pictures every week of men headed off to war in the 1940s. All we’re being asked — at least for now — is to pay more for gas. I have vague memories of Stalin’s pogroms, the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War’s “duck and cover” under our elementary school desks and I’ve watched wars from Vietnam to Syria — where Putin came to rescue the awful Assad. The stakes now are as big as they were in any of them.

Columnist Dowd asks: “Will Zelensky live or die when Russian forces bear down? Will Ukraine exist as a sovereign nation? What does this crisis mean for the identity of America and the West — who will we be when this is over? Will the planet even survive?”

Can economic warfare and persuasion work — and can we avoid nuclear war?

If I wrote a speech for Biden, I’d say: “This is the biggest threat to all of us since Hitler and Stalin. Buck up and join the world in putting down this international menace. Put a button on your chest and pay $6 for your gas. We’re all in this together.”