I met him in Moscow in 2007 while working for the Campaign
For Tobacco-Free Kids, a great organization based in Washington, D.C., that promotes anti-smoking policies
throughout the world. I recall Kobzon giving a moving speech about how he
smoked, quit and didn’t want his children or grandchildren to start.

And, as corny as it seems, I like his voice and singing, but
not his toupee.

Soviet-era crooner Iosif Kobzon.

His politics – in support of whoever occupies the Kremlin at
the moment – are reprehensible, of course. He and fellow singers Valeriya and
Oleg Gasmonov are three Russian singers who helped me learn the choppy Russian
that I know, but whose support for fascist Russian President Vladimir Putin I
detest.

Oleg Gasmonov sings: “I was born in the USSR.”

But while Kobzon sucks up to Putin, he is hardly the person
you would expect the European Union to sanction if it is serious about
thwarting the Kremlin midget’s war against Ukraine and the rest of the
civilized world.

How much can Kobzon travel nowadays, anyway, at his age? Does the EU think they are punishing him by denying him visas? Perhaps
he’ll be denied performing a concert or two for far-flung Russian diaspora, but
how exactly does this relate to stopping the Russian army in Ukraine? Besides
visa bans, the sanctions include asset freezes. Maybe the aging, Kremlin
insider was silly enough to leave his money in a foreign bank account nearly a
full year after Russia invaded Ukraine? Doubtful. If he is, he deserves to lose
it all.

The EU is, alas, continuing to dither while the continent
burns.

Greeks are threatening to exit. So are the Brits, now
marginal players in world affairs. It takes only a Czech president with a
drinking problem and a Hungarian wannabe dictator to throw the whole alliance
out of whack.

But what about NATO, the strongest military alliance in the
history of the world, as General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg brags?

My response: Stoltenberg, you’ve been spending too much time
on the Norwegian ski slopes and not enough in reality.

NATO is a 28-nation alliance that is highly bureaucratic,
highly immobile and highly unable to respond quickly to any threat.

It operates under the pass-the-hat-system of unanimity. In other words: OK, you want mutual defense? How much will you contribute?

This must have the multi-billionaire Putin laughing all the way to
his Swiss bank accounts.

If there is one redeeming value of Putin’s war, it is that
he exposed how money-grubbing and unprincipled the West has become.

Valeriya sings her hit “Clock.”

But back to Kobzon.

EU, why stop there?

Why not sanction Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Nikita
Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuriy Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko?

After all, Kobzon is almost as dead as they and the EU are.

Kyiv Post chief editor
Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected]