Op-eds

Putin’s comprehensive invasion of Ukraine across its north, east and south borders and inland rocket attacks started early in the morning of Thursday 24 February 2022.  

His speech to justify the invasion invoked the objectives of demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine, which he holds responsible for genocidal attacks on the Russian people in Eastern Ukraine.

These allegations are not only totally false but turn upside down the realities in which it is he, Putin, who has been committing precisely these evil deeds.

Putin started a huge militarisation of Russia from the beginning of his presidency, while Ukraine’s armed forces remain a small fraction of Russia’s.

When it comes to the Nazis, let us define its generic species: fascism, as an aggressively, militarist, and ultra-nationalist dictatorship, using force to expand its realm to include ethnically related regions of other states. After Hitler this fits Putin on all accounts, not Zelensky.

The allegation of genocidal activity by Ukraine is simply absurd. However Putin’s wars in Chechnya and Syria have been in this category.

Putin’s long rambling speech two days earlier included such farcical allegations as that in 1991 ‘Russia was robbed’. By whom? By President Yeltsin of Russia deciding peacefully with the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine on 7 December of that year to dissolve the Soviet Union and declare the sovereign independence of all three states.

He went to describe Ukraine as only half-decommunised (meaning presumably ending the Communist system), and that he would take care now of its full communisation. At this point the unscripted Putin appears to be deranged politically.

Putin has been openly informed by Biden that the US will not intervene militarily, and obviously by Macron and Scholtz that Ukraine’s accession to NATO is simply not on the agenda.

In these circumstances, Putin has engaged in an ‘unjust war’ to the extent of crime against humanity.

It remains for the combination of Western sanctions, a mounting global tsunami of moral and material support for Ukraine, and above all courageous fighting and resistance by the Ukrainians to defeat this evil man.