Do I think Putin is a dangerous megalomaniac?
I do.
Do I see his invasion of Ukraine as wholly wrong?
I do.
So why do I have unsettling feelings about the way this war is taking shape?
Why do I feel deeply cynical about the tactics employed by the EU, UK, USA and NATO?
Do you see any day ever when Putin will raise his arms high in the sky and declare he surrenders?
Do you really believe that, however much fire power the West injects into Ukraine, brave and inspiring Volodymyr Zelenskyy will ever win a famous victory?
I don’t.
Do you see an endgame?
Can you imagine any kind of way out of this conflict?
I’m asking many questions but offering very few answers. What I do believe is that there were possible endgames to be negotiated, through the regions now under Russian occupation: Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
These regions have significant Russian populations, and if the West truly wanted to make peace, they would have acted swiftly, years ago, with the annexation of Crimea.
A negotiation of possibly a Demilitarised Zone, or a shared access to ports: who knows. I am not an international negotiator.
Just a scribbler with a fearful heart.
It’s no secret that Putin wants complete access to the Black Sea ports.
Yet earlier on in the war, as a bizarre softener, he agreed to the Black Sea Grain Initiative
Since then, over 500 ships full of grain and other foodstuffs have left three Ukrainian ports: Chornomorsk, Odesa and Yuzhny/Pivdennyi.
It was almost as if he was asking for negotiations.
The raw hard truth is that this war suits the USA, EU and UK down to the ground.
In this utterly ridiculous paradigm, just because Ukraine doesn’t wear the right badges, foreign soldiers will not commit to the battlefield.
If it were a member of the EU or NATO, things would be different, but it’s not.
Hence the Western powers have what some might consider the perfect war: no bodybags flying home; no coffins draped with our flags; an evil enemy to blame for every single domestic political failure; a shop window for the West’s latest military hardware.
None of ‘our’ troops or civilians die; inflation and energy prices can be blamed on Putin, while each night on the news, the tragedy of Ukraine’s continued and inevitable destruction plays out in front of our increasingly disinterested eyes.
Again I state I am no fan of Putin, but consider the Russian perspective. In 2014, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that France and Germany had delayed a peace agreement with Russia so that Ukrainian forces could be trained to NATO standards.
Ukraine then provoked Putin by unleashing a wave of sectarian violence against Russians in the Donbas region.
Despite the presence of a significant Russian population in the areas now annexed, Zelenskyy’s regime has outlawed the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Church.
It is not difficult to understand why the loyalty of Ukraine’s Russian population leans towards Russia.
If you ever wonder why none of the liberal media have spoken out about these concerns, I suggest you look to Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, a book by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
They theorise that when all sides of a nation’s political executive are in agreement, the media will not challenge that position. Apart from a couple of Irish Putin apologist MEPs, nobody has spoken out against this war, and nobody dares to challenge this status quo.
On a macro scale, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the EU and NATO have expanded closer and closer towards Russia.
While this phenomenon was legitimate and democratically engineered, the security barrier afforded by the old Eastern European nations of the Soviet Bloc are now gone.
The West is knocking on Russia’s door, and if you were a lot more sympathetic to Putin than I am, you might contrive to say his invasion of Ukraine was predictable.
I remember years ago listening to Putin making a speech about how Kyiv is the birth place of Mother Russia.
Even back then I said
“Uhoh!”
to myself, so don’t tell me nobody else saw this coming.
Personally I abhor everything about his invasion of a sovereign nation, but I profoundly fear that there is no Ukrainian victory out there; that this terrible war will escalate, with more high-powered weaponry and technology supplied by the West, until there comes a catastrophe that involves us all.
Let us all pray that I am wrong.
©Charlie Adley
25.01.2023
No comments:
Post a Comment