Opinion: Why did it take the West so long to wake up to Putin's outrages? - CNN
今天，2022年三月一日，举世瞩目乌克兰战事。以下英文文字来自上面链接文章：
"What will it take for them to wake up?" one Ukrainian soldier asked me, when I interviewed him as a journalist about Georgia's and Ukraine's shared ordeal in 2015. Now we know the answer, but back then, as we sat in a cold, wet trench on the frontline of Ukraine's war we could not find it.
The soldier, Dima, was like every Ukrainian you now see on your screen: stoic, determined, calm. He was 23, a software engineer from Kyiv who had only recently decided to leave his job and join the fight. His girlfriend was furious with him, he told me, but fighting was not optional.
"They think we are fighting to join NATO. But we are only fighting for our values and they happen to be the same as Europe's values. We are fighting for them too. I wish they realized it," he said.
They do now. The whole world is suddenly high on moral clarity. For everyone who has lived on the frontlines of Putin's hatred for liberal democracy, this show of Western unity and the resurgence of liberal values comes as an incredible relief. But it won't last unless we also accept that it already comes too late for far too many.
It is too late for Georgians who never stopped losing lives and land, for countless residents of Aleppo who died in the Russian bombardment, for 298 men, women and children who fell from the sky when a civilian Boeing MH17 was shot down by a Russian BUK missile in 2015, for thousands who died in the Donbas in the last 8 years and for countless others who are yet to die in Ukraine.
It is too late for Dima, who was killed in eastern Ukraine in fighting a year after we spoke and long before Europeans finally recognized that it was them he was fighting for.
His question why it took the West so long to wake up is still being asked by millions of people who live on frontlines of Putin's hatred for liberal democracy all around the world. It is the question that should inform whatever the West does with the new world order that will hatch out of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
生命诚可贵，
爱情价更高。
若为自由故，
两者皆可抛！
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