The Religious Roots of Ukrainian Resistance

As chilling as morally serious people find Vladimir Putin, his evident pleasure in humiliating his subordinates, and his wanton cruelty in brutalizing those who defy him (be they domestic opponents or countries that refuse to bend to his will), I must confess that I find Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, even more repulsive. In the six decades that I have been following international affairs -- dating back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the good School Sisters of Notre Dame were showing us how to "shelter" under our desks at Baltimore’s Cathedral School -- I cannot remember a more blatant or disgusting liar than Mr. Lavrov. Students of history might have thought that the foreign minister of the Third Reich, the former champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, had retired the gold medal for foreign ministerial mendacity. Mr. Lavrov has proven them wrong -- you can indeed be worse than Ribbentrop.