Tag: Ukraine War Horror

Where is Ukraine Going?

By Jasdev Singh Rai

It is not clear what the President of Ukraine expects the end of the war will look like. It is obvious what India’s options are. It is uncertain whether the West has clearly thought out the consequences of its involvement. However, what is clear is that the Ukraine war has started rearranging the order of power in the world, spelling a possible end to a globalised economy and testing world’s leading institutions. If 9/11 precipitated the age of the neurotic State fearful of its own citizens, the Ukraine war is starting the reshuffling of world order and possibly paving the way to reconfigurations of States in future. In this series, I explore each of this in turn.

That Russia is a very powerful country with some successful military campaigns behind it in recent decade cannot be disputed. That Ukraine is relatively a small power with a much smaller army and arsenal compared to Russia is also not contestable.

When Russia surrounded Ukraine in the East and North East, the general view was that if provoked, it would crush Ukraine in a short time. The United States war in Afghanistan lasted nearly 20 years while in Iraq it was about 15 years. The Syrian war is still going on after ten years. Comparatively, the Ukraine war is expected to last much shorter period, perhaps a year.

Ukraine’s choice was between compromising some of its sovereignty or risk war. It bravely chose to take on Russia. The odds are heavy when one compares the military strengths of the two.

With an army of around a million and reserves of around 2 million, Russia also has a phenomenal arsenal. It has 6,255 nuclear warheads, the largest in the world. Some of its hypersonic missile technology surpasses any in the West. It has so far only deployed about 10-15% of its fighting capabilities in Ukraine.

Ukraine is a smaller country with an army of some 200,000 and paramilitary forces consisting of National Guard and Border Guard etc of 60,000. Comparatively it has far fewer weapons, aircraft and missiles and most of them are from the Soviet era, although it has an arms manufacturing industry as well. But training its army, helping with strategy are officers from several western NATO countries, particularly United States and United Kingdom, although both deny any active participation in Ukraine itself having shifted training centres into Germany since February 2022.

ALSO READ: Theatre of Horror In Ukraine

It appears that Russia first surrounded Kyiv from two sides to intimidate Ukraine to give it an opportunity to accept its terms to avoid war. The Russian terms were: Ukraine declare neutrality and pass in law that it would not join NATO. Russia required it to decentralise and give autonomy to Donbas regions, second language status to Russian language and what it calls ‘denazification’ of Ukraine military. Russia considers the Azov forces to be Nazi like outfits. That Azov outfits were hard core right wing with Nazi regalia was also widely reported in most western media until the war started.

Kyiv refused Russian terms. Russia invaded. Having seen that Ukrainian army was intent to fight back ferociously, Russia withdrew and readjusted its tactics to ones it employed in Syria. Concentrating on Donbas as well as South of Ukraine, its approach is merciless destruction and onslaught of key strategic areas using a combination of ground troops and air borne fire. This is producing it results.

There is also suggestions that Russian intelligence about lack of Ukraine resistance was wrong. It is possible that some western agencies may have identified pro-Russian agents and spoon fed them disinformation through Ukrainian officials.

Since the attack, the Ukraine President and other politicians have appealed passionately for the west to get involved directly, either by imposing no fly zones or boots on the ground. However even before the war, USA, UK and European powers had indicated that they would not physically come to Ukraine’s aid. Everyone fears a nuclear war. No one is keen to destroy the whole world yet. The west has nevertheless resorted to sanctions, supply of weapons and training of Ukrainian army. Characteristically Britain has been the most gung-ho, still attempting to play big. Moreover as admitted by US media, the United States has been engaged throughout the campaign in providing intelligence, guiding strategy and targets. Russian media insists that US personnel are on the ground advising tactics, manning equipment etc and some have been captured.

The west seems keen for this war to prolong. It hopes this weakens Russian capability through loss of personnel and armour. It also gives NATO enough intelligence to understand Russian tactics, strategies and the lethal effectiveness or functionalities of its armour. It helps NATO forces to prepare for a real confrontation with Russia.

The West is now suppling some advanced weapons. When used it will be an exhibition of their effectiveness. This increases sales as it already has. US arms producers are expected to gain $17 Billion from supply of these weapons and more in future world orders. Some of its decision makers will gain profits from the new package announced for Ukraine. Türkey has already seen manyfold increase in orders for its Bayraktar drones that have gained legendary status against Russian Tanks. Ukraine has been a proxy fighter for NATO, particularly USA and being used as an arms fair to show piece weapons.

For Russia too, the war is an opportunity to learn. It has been engaged in wars in developing countries and against non-State actors such as Syrian rebels. Ukraine is the first real European fighting machine that it is encountering. Armies can do all the simulation exercises in training, but they harden and mature in real battles. Russian arms saw a five-fold increase in sale after Syria. Although components are becoming difficult due to sanctions, Russia is testing some of its latest lethal weapons from time to time in Ukraine. Their sales will grow after the war.

War is an ugly affair and brings out the worst in humanity despite all the human rights treaties and conventions. It’s a merciless killing ground. Once it starts, few if any morals survive in war.

With all the odds stacked against it, realising that no western armies are flying in to help and possibly conscious that they are now fighting a proxy war at great expense to themselves, it is still not clear what the Ukrainian leadership is realistically hoping to achieve at the end. About a quarter of its population is now displaced and many have fled the country. Its cities have been devastated. It has lost territory.

Whether Russia is right or wrong to have gone into Ukraine is immaterial now. Despite the drama of war crimes courts, Putin isn’t going to face any trial any more than Bush or Blair will face trials for Iraq, unless there is capitulation by Russia and a coup hands him over.  Fortunes of wars are not decided by morality, laws or international conventions but by might. Currently, it does not look good for Ukraine. 

It is all very well to say, Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves. But the western world is indulging its own morals and strategic policies to weaken Russia at the expense of Ukrainian families, children and elderly people, even when the situation looks hopeless.

Russia isn’t going anywhere and Donbas is lost. Russia’s army is still intact. It is weathering the sanctions and seems to have factored in the losses in men and arms. Putin’s ratings are higher domestically. Ukraine’s army has lost about 25% of its personnel. Its weapons are depleting. In some wars, the attacked victim has no choice but to fight or die. Ukraine had choices and still has some. Its choices are now limited as the veteran strategist Henry Kissinger has stated.  Is it time to accept the inevitable and avoid further bloodshed.

(This is the first part of a series on Russia-Ukraine war to appear in these columns)

Ukraine Conflict

Blood On Your Face!

By Amit Sengupta

A portrait of Stalin hangs on the wall. The lector reads a report on Stalin, then, the choir sings a song about Stalin, and, finally, an actor declaims a poem about Stalin. What’s the occasion? An evening commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death.
(A student tells this joke. For this crime, the student gets ten years in the labour and death camps, without the right of correspondence.)
Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

Stalin allegedly used to write poetry in his youth. So did Pol Pot, the butcher, and General Mohammed Ershad of Bangladesh. So did, perhaps, Idi Amin of Uganda and Augusto Pinochet of Chile.

Perhaps, Vladimir Putin too writes his own brand of botoxed poetry bloodied with the bloody redness of innocence — from Kiev to Lviv. Certainly, they would all be verse, as terrible as the terrible poetry Stalin wrote during his Georgian youth.

Think of Russia: 10,000 or more young soldiers dead. For no rhyme or reason. Most of them from the provinces did not even know why they were fighting this war, why they were killing people who looked like them and spoke their language and ate the same food and sang the same songs and shared the same oral traditions of the war against fascism.

Treacherous Generals! Thus wrote great Spanish poet Fredrico Garcia Lorca. So, he was shot in the woods by perhaps a footsoldier of another general, while, perhaps, another general gave him shelter. Several top generals of the Russian top brass have been killed in combat. Where have you ever heard generals fighting in the frontlines, except in those magical, mythical, medieval times?

As the sad song goes: It‘s happening in Russia. It is happening in Russia!

As another great poet, Pablo Neruda, a buddy of Lorca, wrote: Come and see the blood on the streets. Come and see the blood on the streets. Come and see the blood on the streets…

Think of Ukraine. Come and see the dead on the streets of Bucha. At Kharkhiv and Irpin. In the outskirts of Lviv and Kiev. Out there in the smoked-out Eastern Front of Ukraine. Hands tied at the back, some bodies. An entire family shot and dumped in the garden. A theatre bombed out. A railway station ravaged by hell-fire.

Dead children and mothers. A few million turned refugees; no more the warmth of their cosy homes in this freezing cold. Now, borderline cases stranded on various European borders: Lithuania, Moldova, Poland…

ALSO READ: Theatre Of Horror In Ukraine

In this grotesque anti-poetry Putin has penned, there are no between the lines. No verse or pause, silence or nuance. Only the sinister shadow of Ivan the Terrible, the Tsar of Russia, And, of course, Totalitarian Stalin of the Great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). And he knows so well that this mindless war waged by him for mindless reasons, he has already lost. He lost it on Day One! He did.

Isolated in Europe and the West, and across the world, a megalomaniac Putin, a ruler for life, can’t even have his last hurrah. Another dictator with a half-twisted smile, in China, also a ruler for life, with his alleged communist hangover, seems to have backstabbed him on Ukraine. So, what will the hallucinating Tsar do now?

His banking system has been turned almost redundant, his lucrative oil economy is bleeding, the rouble has shrunk, his international financial system has collapsed, his finest sycophants in his caricature of a cabinet have all been sanctioned, his best billionaire buddies are finding their assets frozen, including the super-luxury yachts parked at multiple ports; so, what will Putin do now?

Till this day, even as it becomes 60 days and more, in a post-modern era where wars, rare as they are, are fought on the battlefronts in short, decisive stints, and, where diplomacy rules the roost,  this long march to eternity has only nowhere as a dead-end. Till this day, Putin and his beleaguered and confused armed forces, have not been able to win any city or town, port or infrastructure, despite the huge military resources at his command. Even from Chernobyl they have withdrawn.

Reports The Guardian: “Mariupol has become a symbol of Ukraine’s unexpectedly fierce resistance since Russian troops invaded the former Soviet state on February 24.” The UN World Food Programme has stated that 100,000 plus citizens in ravaged Mariupol are starving and there is serious scarcity of water, sanitation and heating. Undoubtedly, it is a major humanitarian catastrophe, and the blame squarely falls on Putin.

“The city still has not fallen,” the Ukrainian Prime Minister said on Sunday. “There’s still our military forces, our soldiers. So they will fight to the end,” he told ABC’s The Week. “We will not surrender.”

Putin and his commanders tried the strategy of putting the capital of Ukraine under siege for days. In contrast, even the satellite towns did not surrender, so brave, strategic and resilient has been the Ukrainian response on the ground. Hence, now top European leaders are making a beeline for Kiev, right under the nose of Putin, standing with the troops and the brave, fighting citizens of Ukraine. Even Joe Biden might land up at Kiev anytime soon, and as did Boris Johnson in a sudden, surprise, solidarity visit.

Hence, while the brilliant comic star of reality TV and valiant president and soldier in fatigue on the frontlines, Volodimir Zelenskiy, fights a winning battle 24/7 with his back to the wall, with clever rhetoric and imaginative manuevering, Putin stands cornered, ghettoized and isolated. All he now has is the dream to capture Donbas and Lugansk, etc, and focus on the Eastern Front, like he did with Crimea in the past. That is, indeed, a big loss to his grand project of extending the Great Stalinist Soviet Empire!

All he could do therefore was order massacres, executions, Stalin-style, indiscriminate bombing and missiles flying into homes, hospitals and schools. Surely, these are no signs of a smart and strategic military commander sitting in Moscow which led such a stoic and sustained battle for months in the frozen landscape in Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Putin seems to have willfully forgotten that more than 20 million Russians died in the protracted war against fascism, whereby, the Red Army first liberated Berlin, whereby, Adolf Hitler and his wife, then, chose to commit suicide. Many of the millions who died came from Ukrain and neighbouring  Belarus, also ruled by a tin-pot dictator, another best buddy of the Tsar in Moscow.

The tragic epic hereby unfolding is heart-breaking: between the young men and women fighting each other in a meaningless war in Ukraine, there is a history of deep, intrinsic, intimate and shared memory. These shared memories are stronger than war, victory or defeat. They are childhood memories, spoken as fairy tales turned real, inside the warmth of the home and hearth, around a soft, crackling fire, as the snow would fall over the meadows like sheets of white, and the howling wind would creep in through the cracks in the window. These are real stories, and they shall never die.

Nobel Prize winning journalist Svetlana Alexeviech narrates another joke cracked by the grandson of a seasoned communist and party card holder who was tortured and brutalized in all kinds of dingy hell-holes during the Stalinist purges for reasons no one knows till this day. His wife, also a card-holder, died of the brutality, cold and hunger in prison. The joke:

A professor and an Old Bolshevik are at a séance. The professor: ‘From the very beginning, communism was based on an error. Remember the song: Our train is flying forward… The next stop is the commune…’

The Old Bolshevik: “Of course, I do. What’s the problem? Trains don’t fly.’

Theatre Of Horror In Ukraine

By Amit Sengupta

We took prisoners, brought them to the detachment… We didn’t shoot them, that was too easy a death for them; we stuck them with ramrods like pigs, we cut them to pieces. I went to look at it… I waited a long time for the moment when their eyes would begin to burst from pain… The pupils… What do you know about it! They burned my mother and little sisters on a bonfire in the middle of our village…

— Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War

This is her first book. Exiled and hounded in Soviet Russia, this Noble-prize winning journalist has lived most of her life out there and in Belarus, currently ruled by another dictator, Vladimir Putin’s war-mongering buddy. Surrounded by women who fought the bloody battles in the Second World War against the marauding fascists of Adolf Hitler, the journalist documented the lives and times of scores of Soviet women: snipers, nurses, doctors, tank drivers, captains, soldiers, mothers and sisters and daughters who were at the front.

She quotes Osip Mandelstam: Millions of the cheaply killed / Have trod the path in darkness…

She writes, with deep sadness, borne out of the history of her own ravaged land which defeated the fascists: ‘‘During World War II, the world was witness to a women’s phenomenon. Women served in all branches of the military in many countries of the world: 225,000 in the British army, 450,000 to 500,000 in the American, 500,000 in German… About a million women fought in the Soviet army…

Svetlana writes in the second chapter, A Human Being is Greater than War: “The children of the victors. What is the first thing I remember about the war…? My childhood anguish amid the incomprehensible and frightening words. The war was remembered all the time: at school and at home, at weddings and christenings, at celebrations and wakes. Even in children’s conversations. The neighbour’s boy once asked me: ‘What do people do under the ground…? How do they live there…?’ We too, wanted to unravel the mystery of war… It was then that I began to think about death…”

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, painted with the immense intensity of immaculate pain, in the backdrop of bombings and the Holocaust, has been resurrected yet again in our own special distances of angst and anger, as Ukraine fights back, and it is indeed fighting back with its back to the wall, and the Russians know it, especially the detached, dehumanized, dictator in Moscow, who seems to have learnt no lessons from the Nazi barbarism in his own beloved homeland which sacrificed more than 20 million fighting people in the war, as the Red Army conquered Berlin and Hitler committed suicide.

Other memories of immaculate insomnia are creeping back, as real time war stories, as Kiev holds on, children die, run for their lives, and more than 1 million Ukrainians are turned refugees in a senseless war which Russians do not support and which even Putin seems to have no clue about.

Is he thinking of Adolf these days in his hallucinations of becoming Peter the Great, the Tzar of the erstwhile Russian empire, the immortal King of Kremlin? Isolated by the world, his banks and economy squeezed out, his own people hating him, and even China fudging its bets since it has huge stakes in western and global economy, this suicidal shadow he has willfully cast upon himself, seems so historically familiar. Indeed, this could be the last hurrah for Tsar Putin, with his personally stocked up billions in hidden accounts and the many luxury yachts and dachas at stake, seemingly appearing like dust in a desert.

An Indian student walks across and is shot. Others somehow escape to the border, helpless at the various check posts. Ukrainians hugging each other, as if for the last time, lovers and beloveds, mothers and daughters, soldiers, young and old. Women learning how to operate the famous Kalashnikov. A world boxing champion picks up the gun. A tennis player builds up a solidarity network while playing in Mexico. A former beauty queen joins the barricades.

ALSO READ: Will Putin Dismember Ukraine?

And along with their gutsy president, in fatigue, no more a comic artist of great excellence, but a soldier leading from the front, refusing to run, becoming a democratic role model when compared to a totalitarian Putin.

How many Russian soldiers have been killed so far, and how many wounded in this mindless, meaningless war, is a conjecture not even Putin can solve. Now, it is being revealed that they did not even know why they were fighting the war in the first instance: surely, this is no war against fascism! And will Putin be able to eliminate the truth even as he bans all national and international media telling the bitter stories in Ukraine and Russia?

How many Ukrainian civilians, kids and soldiers, have been killed so far in this nasty war, and how many wounded? The death count multiplies, as the brave shed their blood on the barricades and on the streets. Russian soldiers giving tea, sharing love and compassion with the captured Ukrainian soldiers. Talk to your mother, a young Russian woman soldier tells her neighbour. Tell her, you are safe, that you will be back in the warmth of your cosy home in this cruel winter once again. Tell her, mother, dear mother, don’t you worry, I am with old friends, and they speak our language, like we speak theirs, and we share the same history, mother, and we know so well the difficult childhood memories of war!

The Guardian in London reports that Otaci is border town in the poorest country in Europe: Moldova. It is located on the opposite of river Dniester, across the city of Mohyliv-Podlsky in Ukraine, as a friendly town next door. A bridge links the two.  There are other old, cherished, shared bonds too.

So, the people of Otaci, like the people of all border towns, have stood up like a rock to reach out to the people of Ukraine. They are providing them with warm food, warm shelter, internet and free onward travel in cars and taxis across other destinations in Europe. ‘‘Where is your wife,’’ asks a volunteer in Otaci. ‘‘She is across the bridge.’’ “Don’t you worry”, tells the volunteer, “she will make it.”

UN news reports that amid dwindling food supplies in embattled areas in Ukraine, the conflict could have devastating consequences beyond the country.  It has reported that an unpreceded number of traumatized people are desperately leaving the besieged country in ruins, being bombed out from all sides, but still holding ground with millions staying back and refusing to move, fighting it out till death must come, if it must come at all!

Heavy fighting is being reported from the nuclear plant in Ukraine. Radiation levels are normal and the facility’s cooling system has had no impact, a senior political affairs official of the UN told the Security Council in an emergency meeting. Now, this Putin’s war, is turning into a deadly theatre of the absurd.

The concluding chapter of Svetlana Alexievich’s book tells the story of Ukraine as it dies to live. It is called, ‘Suddenly we wanted to desperately to live’. She writes:

It was Stalingrad… The most terrible battles. The most, most terrible. My precious one… There can’t be one heart for hatred and another for love. We have only one, and I always thought about how to save my heart… For a long time after the war I was afraid of the sky, never of raising my head towards the sky. I was afraid of seeing plowed-up earth. But the rooks already walked calmly over it. The birds quickly forgot the war…

The question is, will Europe and the world forget this one-dimensional war in the days to come? Will all the children come back home yet again? Will the dew-soaked birds choose to fly in the dawn, tweeting, across the black sky, ravaged by a mindless war?

Yes, they will.