It will be little more than a month now before large areas of what was once Ukraine become part of the Russian Federation. For anyone having partaken of the chance to observe anything of the villages, towns and cities involved via the video reportage of American Patrick Lancaster and Englishman Graham Phillips what you will have seen lately will perhaps have come as a shock.
One of the cities taken in relatively recent times was Severodonetsk and recent videos have shown the devastation there. The cause of that devastation has two causes. One cause was the attacks of the Russian military on locations taken as bases by the Ukrainian army and associated units of the so-called voluntary battalions (the most extreme of the forces fighting the Russian military). The other cause, by local civilian witness accounts, has been perpetrated by the Ukrainian side as they retreated.
The first case is easily understood. Where the Russian military was fired upon it attacked, returning fire. In western press and media Russia has been accused of actively targeting civilian homes as well as schools, hospitals and other locations of civilian use. I will return to this subject a little later in this commentary.
The second case where the retreating Ukrainian forces seek to destroy civilian infrastructure appears counterintuitive when you think of it. Aren’t they there to defend what they see as the Ukrainian civilian population from the Russians? Why would they wreak vengeance on that civilian population and its vital assets when they leave?
First the case against the Russian military.
It is said that the Russians are indiscriminate in their attacks upon the civilian population in the areas within the war zone. The crucial fact to understand on this point is that the majority of the civilian population living in this region speak Russian and are extremely pro-Russian in their outlook. The question to ask yourself is this one, if it is indeed the case that the people in this region so close to Russia look to Russia and Russians as friends why would Russia and the Russian military target them?
The above is separate from various other facts and aspects that should also be considered.
If the reason for the Russian campaign in the region is to liberate the people there from oppression by the Ukrainian-speaking forces from western Ukraine wouldn’t it be counterproductive to target and kill them and destroy their homes and vital infrastructure. One must also ask what benefit to Russia or the Russian military would come from such a policy?
In addition, why would you use scarce and at times expensive weaponry to effect this policy? In addition, how would it benefit Russia to win and occupy a wasteland of devastated villages, towns and cities that it would be their responsibility to rebuild at enormous expense?
Now let us look at the second case where local residents say that the Ukrainian forces, predominantly, if not exclusively, from west Ukraine destroyed all they could manage before retreating to positions further west.
On the face of it this suggestion appears absurd. Aren’t they all Ukrainian within the sovereign state of Ukraine and therefore on the same side? Didn’t the Ukrainian army and its associated militias arrive to defend these people from the attacking Russians?
The solution to any confusion concerning the questions above is this:
The history of Ukraine has delivered a country split down the middle. Those in the west tend to look west. Those in the east to the east. That history is a bloody one due to the second world war during which Ukraine was a battleground in more ways than one. Quite apart from the atrocities committed by the Nazis there were those committed by those who were Ukrainian nationalists who for a time fought alongside the Nazis. This while the Ukrainians of the east looked to the then Soviet Union to liberate them from Nazi oppression.
The situation described in brief above has an entire history of its own which is too long and interwoven with massive trauma of its own. Save to say that with the liberation of Ukraine by the Red Army and the subsequent incorporation of Ukraine into the Warsaw Pact there were a great many Ukrainians in western Ukraine who found this to be an unconscionable defeat for their ideals regarding Ukraine. After all they had hoped, as well as fighting with the Nazis against Russia they could create a free Ukraine they had also hoped that the Nazi’s ‘Operation Barbarossa’ would completely crush communist Russia.
The Russian-speaking majority in eastern Ukraine were, by contrast, obviously overjoyed that the Red Army had liberated them and would commemorate this fact each year on May 9th.
These events of the second world war are crucial and created the situation that prevailed since then in Ukraine. This combined with the obvious geographical loyalties that have grown up over time due to ethnicity, intermarriage, language and culture. Ukraine is and has been since the second world war and for time immemorial a somewhat schizoid nation, split in two parts with great distances both mentally and physically between them.
To come back now to the second case above, of retreating Ukrainian troops destroying civilian infrastructure as they go, I suspect you can already hazard a guess regarding where the crucial problem lies.
A significant number of Ukrainians who live in western Ukraine feel a deep and abiding hatred for Russia, partly from the sociopathic policies of the Stalin era which resulted in so many of their ancestors dying, partly due to the hatred that was nurtured almost as a cult belief in western Ukraine which became a “normal” part of regional life there. The belief in some mythical benefits for Ukraine stemming from the Nazi occupation of Ukraine along with their war against the Soviet Union created a largely uninspected, cult-like following.
The result of the above was the way this sizeable minority in western Ukraine perceived the Russian-speaking Ukrainians of the east. They conceived them as ‘Russians’ in essence and gave them the blanket pejorative name, ‘Moskals’. By this and the self-perpetuating group-thought “celebrated” in nationalist marches, literature and speech they linked them indelibly as a hated group, one that they saw as traitors who praised those that they despised with a passion.
Perhaps it is becoming clear to you why the troops and militia members (some of whom proudly wore swastika tattoos on their bodies) might not have the best or kindest of feelings towards those they found themselves among in eastern Ukraine. In fact, having read the general level of animus felt against them you can now understand why they would act as accused by the civilians whose villages, towns and cities they left in such ruins.
(In recent days a report by Amnesty International has pointed to the practice of Ukrainian forces using locations near civilian habitations. As well as this they have occupied civilian dwellings, schools and hospitals cleared of civilians for their bases. This will account for almost the entirety of Russian attacks on such locations which have been used for accusing Russia of attacks upon civilians and civilian infrastructure and will account for some (but far, far from all) of the damage seen.)
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment