In a nutshell, Russian troops have got no legal right at all to be storming across Ukraine. This could finish off Putin and his party, United Russia. I phoned a pal of mine in Moscow and he said the Muscovites he knew were appalled by what he was doing, and that Putin had ‘lost it.’
Initially on 22.2.22 we were told that ‘peacekeeper’ forces were being invited in by the newly-ratified People’s Republics, to try and stop eight years of bombardment, genocide and ethnic cleansing. If Putin had just stopped with that as his war aim I reckon he could have succeeded. It is simply explicable, papers would understand it. Russian troops would only go say 20-30 km from the borders of the two mini-states, because that would be far enough to stop the shelling. Anyhow, that ‘peacekeeper’ war-aim definitely cannot involve encircling and attacking the capital city, Kiev, can it?
What operating instructions were given to the Russian military? Why do they imagine they are in Ukraine? As the whole world comes round to support Ukraine, as armed support flows in from all corners of the earth, Russia must swiftly recognize the impossibility of its goal – whatever that is.
NOTE: the massive ethnic cleansing of Eastern Ukraine has been ignored by the western media. O, its just Slavs ie Russians who are being cleared out. So we don’t mind that. Only one country in Europe is bothered about a continual, ongoing, successful genocide program and that is Russia. Eastern Ukraine was the powerhouse of the country, with loads of advanced industry – now it’s desolate. Walk down its empty roads and see the bomb-shattered houses, schools, public buildings. For eight years its inhabitants have heard the thud, thud of missiles and their explosions, every other day.
America helpfully gave Ukraine three billion dollars of ‘lethal aid’ and so the missiles now raining down upon Belarus and Lugansk are far more deadly. But nobody cares – except the Russians! Listen to your radio, they may just allude to a ‘civil war’ in the east of Ukraine. No it really isn’t that – it is Genocide as defined by the 1947 Genocide Convention, the destruction and eradication of a people and a culture. I’ve heard a figure of around fifteen thousand killed in these states over the years by the shelling.
Back in 2014, the very year of the Neo-Nazi coup staged in Ukraine by America, the UNHCR (Human Rights council) reported in June that ‘since the start of the year around 110,000 Ukrainians have arrived in Russia.’ (Source: Ukraine in the Crosshairs, William Dunkerley, 2014, page 152) That has been ongoing and Russia has had to cope with the massive flood of refugees. It has grown worse just before the present crisis. As of now one million inhabitants of the two mini-states have applied for Russian passports, so they can emigrate. Europe just does not care about this, does it? Only RT reports on this issue, so right let’s just ban RT. Sure, that solves the problem.
So Europe has an explicitly pro-genocide and pro-ethnic cleansing policy. Normally one might expect criticism of a state that continually bombs its own people, but O no, the EU actively supports this process by loading up Kiev with weapons – priming it to blow for WW3.
The more Europe is guided by the USA in its military postures, the sooner we will arrive at WW3. Europe makes endless false accusations against Russia [1] so that dialogue is hardly possible, plus it has expelled its Russian diplomats. This is brutal and barbaric behaviour.
In all this we need to remember how congenial a new war in Europe would be for America. The present conflict has been brewed up in order to stop the Nordstream-2 pipeline. America cannot endure the idea of friendship between Germany and Russia: NATO exists to stop this. The great dream and hope of Putin for friendship and cultural exchange developing between Europe and Russia has been successfully thwarted by the US-UK, to ensure that the trillions keep being spent on armaments.
I predict that, alas, Putin won’t live long after this, his party United Russia will fall , it cannot win another election – and Russia itself may even break up with the trauma, of being condemned by all the world. I always admired Vlad – yes I confess – but his catastrophic or cataclysmic misjudgement here is ruining everything.
Had he stuck to his initially-defined aim, that was honourable and possibly achievable. He could have said, ‘The Kiev government can end this conflict any time it wants, by ceasing to bombard Belarus and Lughansk. Then we will leave Ukraine’ The media would have understood this and he would have had a clear exit strategy – whereas now he has none. Thereby his ‘operation’ would be legal – and here we are talking about mainly the Hague Convention (1907), the Nuremberg Principles (1940s) and the Geneva Protocols (1977) as having laid down the basic ‘laws of war’, the idea that some defensive military actions are legal.
But he didn’t do that. What is truly terrifying here is the way one old man can decide what the Russian army will do. Russia has a tradition of strong Czars or kings and here we see its undoing. He announces that he wants to ‘de-Nazify’ a country – run by a couple of Jews! No way is that a legitimate war aim. Perhaps Putin’s great, final achievement is to unify all of the world as we have never seen before in condemnation of his act.
The UN Security Council has just voted 11:1 in condemnation of Russia (China abstained) and now the General Assembly vote is due.
Slow, gradual healing has to take place in that part of the world. It lost what, seven million was it in the WW2? … and let’s not go into who was responsible for that. We need more empathetic, feminine Ministries of Peace able to sense the pain and insecurity of the Other. Maybe Ukraine will be like Czechoslovakia, a put-together country at the end of WW1 that just did not want to exist as a unity and split into two parts. There is deep history here, where Kiev in the ninth century was where the original Rus nation began to exist. Belarus and Russia both take their names from it.
- NK, ‘The Novichok Chronicles, The Skipal and Navalny Hoaxes compared’ 2021
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