- Hubert Walas
Genocide.
The first phase of the war came to an end. The Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. To put it bluntly, the Russians lost the Battle of Kyiv and abandoned their plans to conquer the city, at least for now. The capital has been defended, and Ukraine's statehood continues. Thousands of Kyiv residents are returning to their homes. However, the war is by no means over. We are entering phase two.
The Russians are making it clear that the forces recovered from the northern direction will be repositioned in the areas of Kharkiv, Izyum, Luhansk, and Donetsk. A major offensive by the Russian forces is expected there. Its aim will be to seize, encircle and destroy Ukrainian troops in the Joint Forces Operation Area, seize the entire south-eastern strip of Ukraine, which would provide a land bridge to Crimea, and present the "special operation" as a great success of denazification and demilitarisation of U kraine. Ideally, this could be done by May 9th, when Moscow celebrates Victory Day. In the meantime, there are first reports of a part of Mariupol defenders laying down their arms. This is still unconfirmed information, but if it is true, this should not come as a surprise. Mariupol has been heroically defended for over a month.
Mariupol was one of the first, eyewitness examples of the barbarity of the Russian military. The city was almost razed to the ground. Unfortunately, the Russian retreat from Kyiv exposed yet another act of barbarism by the Russian army in the occupied territories. Hundreds of murdered civilians in Bucha, mass graves - not only of men but also of women and children, often with traces of brutal rape. We are dealing with genocide. These are moments when rational explanations end, and we enter the same phase of human degradation that we know from the Second World War, which was perpetrated, among others, by Nazi Germany and the Soviet army.
This barbarism did not begin today but is the result of the gradual, ongoing dehumanization of the Ukrainian people in Russia. Just as the Jewish people were stigmatized in Germany throughout the 1930s, so that by the end of the decade the whole of German society hated the Jews, the same thing happens in Russia to the Ukrainians. And this happened in an era of mass access to information, not in the limited access to Goebbels-controlled German radio and press in the 1930s.
The average Russian usually admits that he is aware of the propaganda broadcast by the Kremlin media and that he 'thinks for himself’. However, years of indoctrination have done their work and subconsciously led to a contemptuous attitude in Russia towards Ukrainians, who are often regarded as sub-human, similarly to th e Germans attitude towards Jews in the 1930s.
Also today, Germany remains in some ways a symbolic state. It is in Germany, where the largest pro-Russian demonstration in Europe since the war began took place. Here, Russians living on the European Union territory are expressing their support for the murder of Ukrainians. And they are doing so on German soil. History has come full circle.
Of course, the Russians - deny everything. They insinuate that the Bucha massacre was staged or, even more interestingly, suggest that the Ukrainians did it themselves. However, technology came to the rescue very quickly. Satellite images, taken during the Russian occupation, showed that the bodies were lying in the streets, in the same places, when the Russians were in control of these areas. This leaves no illusions.
Moreover, on Friday on the Russian defense ministry's channel, Zvezda TV, an officer from the 155th Infantry Brigade, Alexei Shabulin, admitted that the Russian military had taken part in the so-called 'Zachistka'. That means “a clean-up”. Zachistka' had already taken place in Chechnya - it consisted of going from house to house and catching potential insurgents. In practice, “zachistka” is a motivation to kill everyone, who gave a Russian soldier a bad look.
Whereas, the latest ideological underpinning, further dehumanizing the Ukrainian people, was provided by Russian political scientist and propagandist Timofey Sergeytsev in his text 'What Russia should do about Ukraine', which was published on April 3rd in RIA Novosti. RIA is a Russian government media agency, so the narrative coming from RIA Novosti can be equated with the Kremlin's views. What does Sergeytsev write? "Ukrnazism carries not less, but a greater threat to the world and Russia than the German Nazism" - yes, you have heard it right.
The whole text is hard to quote. It is pseudo-rational gibberish that can be reduced to a few key statements. Firstly, as Sergeytsev writes, 'new people's republics should be established on territories liberated from the Nazi regime'. The created republics cannot be neutral, they should be subordinate to Russia. Sergeytsev goes further - in addition to 'denazification', Russia's goal should be the 'de-ukrainisation' of these territories. We have just seen an example of such de-Ukrainisation in Bucha. It will happen to people who consider themselves Ukrainians. People who will not want to submit to Russian occupation. In short, in the areas that the Russians will occupy, sooner or later there will be mass deportations to gulags and labor camps deep inside Russia, or simply mass ethnic cleansing, after which only mass graves will remain.
All this shows the kind of war we are facing. It is not just a fight between regular troops, without involving the civilian population, with respect for international laws and conventions, to recreate the balance of power. The rationality or realism that could have been debated until recently, as some Western experts are trying to do, no longer has sufficient cognitive depth to describe the reality we are observing. We are now moving into a different area of human sensitivity. Some analysts or politicians hesitate to condemn the Russian Federation in strong terms in order to take advantage of the situation and to strengthen their tribe against another. A tribe in this sense can be either a political party or the state as a centre of power.
But they forget that the fact that someone was born several hundred kilometres away, within different administrative borders, does not make him or her a different person who does not deserve a fundamental right - the right to life. Meanwhile, the dilemma between a potential economic recession and the death of hundreds or perhaps thousands of defenceless civilians and the enslavement of millions is not a dilemma that we, as people of the free world, should be considering. Rarely in history have there been wars where the situation has been so black and white. In this case, however, we are dealing with a struggle between good and evil. This is how Ukrainians view it when they look at the bodies of their murdered brothers, wives and children. This is also how we, as free people, should view it. Whether we were born in Poland, Germany, Australia, Hungary or Israel. Geopolitics here, which is just a nice name for a war of tribes, must be able to find its supra-state element - the protection of civilisation. And the Ukrainians, who at the moment are the best image of what values the Western Civilisation, the Latin Civilisation, should present, are in danger of losing their independence or even of mass genocide. And if Ukraine is broken, the foundation of what we base our lives on will also be questioned.
The more that it is not due to the inability to provide this help. It would be a sin of omission. We could have done more, but for many calculated reasons, we didn't.
What is even more cynical is that the Russians themselves admit that when they deal with Ukraine their aim will be to create an 'open Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok'. This was said by Dmitri Medvedev, on the occasion of his denial of the Bucha massacre. So in the Kremlin's vision, we would have a great consolidation of Europe with a continental Russia, where Russia provides military power and raw materials, while Europe technology and modernisation. And the Russians believe in this - in the short memory of Europeans, in the desire to get rich quick, in the desire to become independent of the US. But this would be tantamount to renouncing all the values on which our civilisation was built. A civilisation for which Ukrainians are now shedding their own blood.
In more concrete terms, the situation seems to be moving in the right direction. Official and unofficial reports say that heavy equipment is beginning to arrive in Ukraine. This is necessary to repel the expected Russian offensive and then to push the enemy troops out of the country. These are post-Soviet tanks such as T-72s, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery and anti-aircraft systems. Kyiv needs heavy equipment, as the Ukrainians will not lack people and the will to fight. However, these transfers must be larger and faster. This should be accompanied by a complete political withdrawal from subsidising the criminal regime in Moscow. But even the massacre in Bucha did not lead to a full European embargo on Russian oil and gas. This concerns Germany in particular. The fact is that Russian financial resources are dwindling, but not at a fast enough rate. If that is the case, it will allow Moscow more months of war.
Any result other than a complete victory of Ukraine and the repelling of Russian troops from every bit of Ukrainian territory will be a defeat not only for Kyiv but for the West as a whole, which, given the opportunity to tip the balance of power in favour of Ukraine, failed to do so. And when that happens, after a few years, when the Russian military has recovered and Russian society continues to be fed with truly Nazi content, further dehumanizing Ukrainians and possibly other nations, we could be witnessing another, even worse war in Europe. Or possilby the world war. After all, the Second World War, was just a catch-up of the unfinished business of the First World War.
