As Russian missiles pounded Kyiv in the war’s worst aerial assault, conservative influencer Benny Johnson was chasing clicks. Johnson, a professional rage-peddler, blasted out gruesome footage of the murder of a Ukrainian refugee named Iryna Zarutska, turning Moscow’s war of aggression into culture-war fodder.
That very night, half a world away, another young Ukrainian woman, Viktoria Grebenyuk, and her infant son were killed in Kyiv — not by random street crime, but by Moscow’s deliberate and methodical campaign to erase Ukrainian identity.
Three innocent lives were taken — one in North Carolina and two in Kyiv — but four crimes were committed.
Iryna Zarutska was slaughtered in cold blood aboard a train in Charlotte just minutes after boarding. Wearing headphones and suspecting nothing, she was heading home from her shift at a pizzeria when surveillance footage shows Decarlos Brown Jr. — a man with 14 prior arrests and documented mental health issues — lunging at her with a pocketknife, stabbing her in the neck and chest. Passengers screamed and scattered as she collapsed. She died at the scene.
In the second heinous act, Viktoria Grebenyuk and her infant son Roman fell prey to Moscow’s insatiable hunger for war. By day, Viktoria worked at a Ukrainian charity, caring for patients with HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases. Her story, unbearable in its particulars, is repeated daily as Russia bombs Ukrainian schools, shopping malls and apartment blocks.
The third crime was wanton exploitation. Benny Johnson is a former journalist who was fired from one job for plagiarism and from another for publishing false conspiracy theories. He was named in a 2024 Justice Department indictment of a Kremlin-funded propaganda scheme in which right-wing influencers were paid by former employees of Russia Today, apparently without knowing exactly where the money came from.
Johnson published the video of Zarutska’s murder not to honor her memory, but to harvest clicks and generate outrage. In amplifying the story, Johnson and other hard-right voices leaned into the fact that the attacker is Black — deliberately racializing the crime to inflame U.S. divisions. Johnson is the same man who allegedly took Russian money to spread Kremlin lies. The hypocrisy is nauseating: He accused the media of being “silent” on Iryna’s death. What nerve, from someone whose shameless grift helped chip away at U.S. support for Ukraine, while he allegedly pocketed Russian cash.
The fourth crime is harder to name because it is committed by many, and no court will ever rule on it. It is the crime of indifference that festers into complicity. In Charlotte, a repeat offender with a schizophrenia diagnosis was released without bail just months before he killed Zarutska — never mind that his mother had pleaded with authorities for help after he turned violent at home. It was a cascading failure of mental health systems, criminal justice and public safety.
This localized American indifference perversely mirrors a larger betrayal: our collective, decade-long passivity in the face of Russian aggression. We watched Moscow annex Crimea in 2014, dismissing it as “not our war,” and allowed the Kremlin’s dream of recolonizing Ukraine to metastasize into the full-scale invasion that forced Iryna to flee her native land in the first place.
In both cases, Charlotte and Ukraine, preventable tragedies unfolded while those with the power to act chose finger-pointing over courage. Russia does the killing, Ukraine the defending and America is morally culpable through a thousand small failures that add up to one unforgivable crime: refusing to use our power to help a victim fight back, to help freedom stand against tyranny.
Complacency may not leave blood on train car floors or in apartment block rubble, but its consequences are no less deadly. Indifference from the world’s most powerful nation helps war criminals like Putin thrive.
As Meaghan Mobbs, director of the Center for American Safety and Security, put it, “I am begging you: if you are outraged by the gruesome murder of a beautiful young woman by a deranged maniac on Charlotte public transport, then be outraged too by a woman and her baby slaughtered while asleep in their beds in Kyiv by another maniac hell-bent on killing.”
Johnson isn’t an outlier. Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. and Stephen Miller also posted about Zarutska’s death — transforming a tragedy into a prop. All in pursuit of America’s self-destructive culture wars, and all to the Kremlin’s giddy delight.
We can afford neither exploitation nor indifference. Both dishonor the dead, erode American power and weaken the resolve needed to stop Russia’s criminal war.
Iryna Zarutska fled Russian bombs only to die on American soil. Viktoria Grebenyuk and her baby were murdered by Russian bombs sleeping in their beds. No amount of outrage or vengeance will bring them back. Even a death sentence for Iryna’s killer, as President Trump urged, would not fix deep-rooted failures in America’s justice and health care systems, nor would it prevent the next such tragedy.
But supplying Ukraine with what it needs to win will break Putin’s illusion of victory and show him that continuing this madness will lead to Russia’s ruin. The only justice worthy of the victims is to end the war that killed them.
Andrew Chakhoyan is an academic director at the University of Amsterdam. He previously served in the U.S. government at the Millennium Challenge Corporation and studied at Harvard Kennedy School and Donetsk State Tech University.
