UKRAINE AND THE FATAL MYTHOLOGY OF VICARIOUS VALOUR

 

The entire western world has been aswirl with notions of bravery and derring do in the face of a Russian onslaught where, against all odds, Ukrainian troops have repulsed the foreign invader time after time.

Unwilling to countenance any other reality than victory for “tiny” Ukraine against the Goliath of Russia both western political and media elites have thrown all their weight behind providing the Ukrainian troops with every encouragement to fight on.

Weapons of all kinds have flooded into Ukraine to encourage this fight and every PR means available has been bent to the task of maintaining Ukrainian morale again to support the notion that Ukraine can win out.

The harsh reality is however that this has been, since the start, an impossible task, and that encouraging the Ukrainian president and his delegates at the peace conference to tough it out and not agree to Russia’s terms has surely cost thousands of Ukrainian lives and threatens to cost thousands more.

This reality includes large pockets of Ukrainian troops held in what the Russians call ‘Cauldrons’, completely surrounded with no way out and zero chance of being reinforced. The western weapons destined for these troops will never reach them. Russia is bombarding the railway tracks and associated infrastructure to transport them as well as destroying them on the ground and in their storage warehouses.

Russia has also been methodically destroying the fuel storage facilities needed to fuel any surviving military vehicles.

Ukraine’s position is hopeless... yet neither western political elites nor those of mainstream news media are willing to face that fact and continue to mythologise the bravery of the troops leading to the completely false notion that all will be well if everyone just keeps being positive.

Zelensky, being the centrepiece of the vast PR effort underway (Ukraine has scores of PR companies working constantly on Ukraine’s cause) is lauded and lionised in an effort to buoy him up with encouragement to fight to the last Ukrainian. This of course comes universally from people who will never for a moment put themselves in harm’s way, but are enthusiastic in their desire for others to fight (and die) for them.

The Russian army is grinding forward in a slow but methodical campaign, not seeking to take massive areas of land but drawing Ukrainian forces to them, engaging them in combat and destroying them. This process is inexorable and deadly for the now heavily degraded Ukrainian forces that has lost the majority of their best troops and are increasingly made up of recent conscripts and reservists.

These tragic circumstances have been fuelled by a false narrative of Ukrainian victories and valour, of a notional overcoming of a well trained Russian army with a now meticulously worked out campaign whereby the vast bulk of the Ukrainian army will be threatened with virtually certain death if surrender remains an option automatically rejected by Zelensky.

There must come a time when reality requires to be faced for the sake of tens of thousands of lives that will surely be lost if the present fantasy world of Zelensky and his western sponsors prevails.

This requires an end to the pretence currently so overwhelmingly popular across the western world presently, that being the fatal mythology inherent in the supposed Ukrainian, but almost wholly vicarious, and though no doubt often very real, when rendered in PR terms, fictitious valour.