Murderer & Imperialist

Let's start with the obvious: Vladimir Putin (appropriately pronounced poo tin) is a would-be tyrant, who takes a ruthless approach to squashing any domestic opposition, intimidating, beating and imprisoning anyone who dares to speak up. More than that, he is a murderer, firstly at the individual level with his choice of lethal nerve agents as the murder weapon and, secondly, at the international level, with missiles, rockets, bombs and shells.

Plus, Putin threatens global mass murder by putting the nuclear card on the table. Mind you, when agents from "our side" e.g., Israel's Mossad, murder individuals in third party countries, that is shrugged off as "ruthless efficiency" in "a secret war". I'm not going to comment on the actual fighting in Ukraine, because that tragedy is still unfolding, and is a fluid situation, with resulting seismic shifts in European geopolitics such as Finland and Sweden abandoning non-alignment to apply to join NATO.

All I will say is that if he wants to be remembered in the same terms as his Tsarist predecessors - Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, (Vlad the Conqueror?) - he'd better make sure he does a better job of the conquering side of things than he has heretofore demonstrated in Ukraine. What was originally predicted to be a blitzkrieg pushover has instead encountered major pushback from David against Goliath.

Obviously, Putin expected things to go as per the 1968 script when the Soviet Union sent the tanks into Warsaw Pact ally Czechoslovakia, encountered only non-violent resistance, very quickly overthrew the vaguely liberal Government and had the country's arrested leader flown to Moscow in handcuffs. That scenario has very definitely not been repeated in Ukraine, which has successfully fought back very hard, and taken the war to the Russians inside Russia and on the Black Sea.

So much so, in fact, that the US and NATO now see the chance to not only bleed and weaken Russia but to defeat it and perhaps even get rid of Putin in the process. The last time the Russians did so badly in a war was in Afghanistan but at least the Soviet Union lasted a decade before accepting reality and getting out. Putin should have learned the lesson that the US so painfully learned in Vietnam - that Small can very definitely defeat Big.

Putin is an imperialist who, echoing his mate Trump, wants to Make Russia Great Again. Or, indeed, to bring the Soviet Union back from the dead. He apparently has designs not only on Ukraine, but also on Moldova, its' pocket handkerchief-sized next-door neighbour, which already has Russian troops on its soil in a breakaway region. His talk of protecting Russian-speaking peoples outside Russia proper is eerily reminiscent of Hitler, who started off by saying he wanted to protect German-speakers in countries like Czechoslovakia. This has focused attention onto forgotten corners of Europe, such as the exclave of Kaliningrad, which is physically cut off from Mother Russia by NATO members Lithuania and Poland (respectively, a former part of the Soviet Union, and a former Warsaw Pact ally of it).

Big Doesn't Begin To Describe It

Russia has always been the world's biggest land empire, bigger even than its land empire rivals, China and the US (by contrast, little old NZ is the furthest flung outpost of Britain, one of the world's great sea empires). Even shorn of the various soviet socialist republics that made up the Soviet Union, Russia is still easily the biggest country in the world. Not only that, it is also easily the biggest country in Asia. It stretches so far east that it has a land border with North Korea; a sea border just north of Japan, and a sea border just a few kilometres west of Alaska in the US.

I've experienced the sheer immensity of it for myself when my then partner and I took the Trans-Siberian Express from the Pacific to Scandinavia in 1978. We were in the biggest country in Asia, very close to the borders of China and Mongolia, and yet it felt completely European, so totally had it been colonised. The only place we saw Asian faces was among the Red Army conscripts we glimpsed in passing. The train's reading material described China in "yellow peril" terms.

When I was on the other side of that border i.e., in China in 1973, it was during the Sino-Soviet dispute over ideology and territory. There had been a brief border war in 1969 and the Chinese were very concerned about the possibility of a Russian nuclear attack. They took our group (an NZ student delegation) into a rabbit warren of tunnels they'd built under Beijing to deal with that eventuality. Russia's Far East includes nearly a million square kilometres stolen by the Tsars from the Chinese Empire in the 19th Century.

Turning A Blind Eye To "Our Side's" War Crimes

What disappoints me the most is that Russia has sunk to the level of the US in terms of invading and destroying sovereign countries, murdering and terrorising civilians in the process. The US has made an art form of that, from Korea to Vietnam and Iraq to Afghanistan. Except that the US mass murder and terrorism is hyped up by the Western media as "shock and awe". The US was flattening cities in Iraq and Syria as recently as 2017, using horrific weapons like white phosphorus which inflict hideous burns. The US was "mistakenly" killing Afghan civilians as recently as its last day in that country in August 2021.

Ukraine is the first war in Europe since the numerous wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 90s. The Russians stayed out of that but NATO and the US bombed Serbia, including "accidentally" bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing people in the process. That was under "good old boy" Bill Clinton. When there is talk about "war crimes", it needs to be realised that war (all war) is a crime by definition. What else would you call mass murder? Oh, I know, "fighting for our country and freedom", as we're told with a straight face every Anzac Day. Atrocities committed in the course of war simply add insult to injury.

Coincidentally, Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, died during the early stages of the Ukraine War in 2022. TV news rescreened the infamous interview where she was asked if the death of 500,000 Iraqi children because of US-led sanctions on Saddam's Iraq during the 90s was worth the price? She answered "yes", it was worth the price. I don't recall any Western leaders calling her a mass murderer or a war criminal. And her obituaries stressed how she was the central figure driving NATO's eastwards expansion. Ukraine is paying the price today, as the meat in the sandwich between Russia and NATO.

Putin's war on Ukraine is indefensible and he is as much of a war criminal as Assad or Kissinger or Bush (or even Obama, who authorised more drone strike kills than any other President). But what is happening in Ukraine has a lot longer history than simply Putin waking up with a hangover and saying "I feel like invading someone today".

Putin's Russia has previous form in flattening cities, bombing schools and hospitals, etc. Hence the subtitle of this article - brute strength and ignorance. The modus operandi of the Russian military seems to be that if they can't actually win any battles or capture any territory, they'll destroy as much of their enemy's country as possible.

The Second Chechen War led to its capital, Grozny, having the unwanted title as the most destroyed city on Earth. How ironic that Chechens are now Putin's cannon fodder in Ukraine. Putin and his fellow mass murderer, Assad, flattened cities like Aleppo in Syria, including hospitals. He has sent the troops in before to former Soviet republics, from Georgia to Belarus and, most recently, Kazakhstan.

And, of course, into Ukraine, in 2014, where they have been ever since, in Crimea and the Donbas region. Russia and Ukraine have a tortured history - one of Stalin's many, many horrendous crimes against humanity was to deliberately impose a mass famine on Ukraine in the early 1930s which led to millions starving to death. One result was that when the Nazis invaded Ukraine a decade later, some Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators.

Explanation, Not Justification

This is not to justify Putin's war of aggression and terrorism on Ukraine but to explain how we got to where we are now. When the Soviet Union and its ossified brand of so-called communism collapsed 30+ years ago, that was the perfect opportunity for the West to step in and lend a helping hand to build a functioning democratic capitalist country - as the victorious Allies did with the Marshall Plan in Germany and Japan after WW2.

But, no, the "winner" West decided to humiliate the "loser" Russia, to rub its face in the shit and to join the systematic looting of the resulting gangster economy - which is where the "oligarchs" came from (funnily enough, the likes of Bezos, Musk and Gates are not called oligarchs. Their New Zealand counterparts are approvingly called "rich listers" by the corporate media here).

They hadn't learned from the past - after WW1, the victorious Allies bankrupted and humiliated Germany. The result? Hitler. 1990s' Russia morphed from being led by international laughing stock Boozy Boris Yeltsin to being taken very seriously indeed under Vladimir Putin, a KGB killer with a big chip on his shoulder. Nobody's laughing at Russia now.

NATO is front and centre in the Ukraine War. But it should have ceased to exist in the 1990s as the Warsaw Pact did, when "we won" the Cold War. There was no further reason for its existence. But, no, it kept going and it kept expanding, looking for wars to fight to justify its existence - the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan. Getting further and further away from Europe and the "North Atlantic".

It has set out to be a global geopolitical bloc - even NZ has some sort of non-NATO-member-but-ally status. "While New Zealand is not a member of NATO, it is one of a few countries referred to as 'partners across the globe' that contribute to NATO-led defence operations" (Newshub, 8/4/22) In 2022 Jacinda Ardern became the first ever NZ Prime Minister invited to a NATO Leaders' Summit. New Zealand is getting sucked further in by providing lethal military aid and training to Ukraine. We just can't resist getting involved in a good old European war.

NATO relentlessly set out to confront, contain and provoke Russia, a country with traumatic memories of invasion from the West, pushing right up to its borders, poking and prodding the paranoid bear until it lashed out and Ukraine is paying the price. Politicians, generals and arms dealers need an enemy to justify their continued existence - Russia fits the bill admirably.

Occasionally the Western media now mentions in passing that the West broke its promise to Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to not expand NATO eastwards by "one inch" - that was the terms on which he removed Russian troops from Germany, allowing its peaceful reunification, one of the highlights of 20th Century history (see, for example, the Times, 19/2/22) But Russia was lied to and betrayed, and Putin is not one to forget or let go of a grudge.

Useful Historical Reminders

I am old enough to remember when the boot was on the other foot, namely the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where the US went ballistic (pun intended), threatening nuclear war because it wouldn't tolerate Russian missiles 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The West trumpets that Russia backed down and withdrew its Cuban missiles.

It does not trumpet that, as part of the deal, the US secretly agreed to withdraw nuclear missiles from Turkey, a NATO member with a land border with the then Soviet Union. Russia has always consistently said - do not use our neighbours to threaten us. The US has codified that same principle since 1823 via the Monroe Doctrine, which declares all of South and Central America off-limits to any rival imperialists.

And history shows us that Russia does get out of some places that it has militarily conquered if it gets what it wants. I've been to two of them in my European travels. In WW2 the Red Army liberated Norway's northernmost territory and then pulled out (there is even a statue thanking the Red Army up there). Read this 2019 statement from the King of Norway to mark the 75th anniversary of that liberation, "'I will repeat what is written on the memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers on the Western Cemetery in Oslo: 'Norway thanks you'. This is carved in stone'".

"Six thousand Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the final battles of the north. Some 100,000 Russian prisoners of war were sent to camps in Norway, and 13,000 died here. 'Norway will never forget the Soviet Army's war effort', said the King. 'We know the losses and sacrifices it required. The many soldiers who took part on the Soviet side are also our heroes. The events of 75 years ago give strength and inspiration to relations between our neighbouring countries, which for centuries have been characterised by peace'".

That 2019 wreath laying ceremony in far northern Norway, a key NATO member with a land border with Russia, was attended by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, the same right-hand man of Putin who is now routinely denounced in the Western media. And the Red Army also liberated Austria in WW2, jointly occupied it for ten years, then left in 1955 when Austria promised to be perpetually neutral (which it still is). Ukraine may survive as an independent nation if it promises to stay out of NATO and adopts neutrality.

There are all sorts of lessons to be learned from the Ukraine War. One that resonates with me as an anti-bases activist is the critical and negative role that foreign military bases play in geopolitics. A major motivation for Russia to annex Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 was the fear of losing Sevastopol, the base for Russia's Black Sea Fleet (Russia also has a naval base and an air force base in Syria, which gives it a motivation to get involved in that country's wars on the side of Assad). Mention of Syria brings up another fascinating example of realpolitik in Ukraine.

"Perhaps the main factor in Israel's official reluctance to criticise Putin harshly is Russia's support of the regime in Syria, where both Russian and Iranian forces are present. Israel negotiated an understanding with the Russian military that enables Israeli forces to deconflict with Russian forces and strike Iranian targets in Syria. Israel views the Russian presence there as a check on Iran's influence and therefore an important protection for Israeli security" (Council on Foreign Relations, 8/4/22). This despite the fact that Israel is a staunch US ally and that Ukraine has a Jewish President.

Atrocities Propaganda

As the cliché says, truth is the first victim of war. Take the case of the Ukrainian defenders of Snake Island, who at the beginning of the war, were called upon to surrender. They responded: "Russian warship, go fuck yourself", a phrase that echoed around the world. It was reported that the Russian warship then opened fire and killed them all. It was a great story of what murderous bastards the Russians are. The Ukrainians were declared posthumous heroes. Except, embarrassingly, it quickly emerged that they had run out of ammunition and had, in fact, chosen surrender over death and had become prisoners of war (Ukraine has since recaptured Snake Island).

In July 2022 the United Nations released a damning report which attributed equal blame to Russia and Ukraine for a Russian attack on a nursing home which killed numbers of civilians. Why did the report blame Ukraine? Because it stationed soldiers inside the home, making it a target, and using the residents as human shields (putting it on par with popular Western villains like ISIS and Saddam Hussein).

Even the language used to describe Ukrainian defeats is a study in propaganda. Their defeated soldiers are "evacuated" to positions behind Russian lines or into Russia itself. By contrast, I think back to when German tanks hove into view during my Dear Old Dad's ill-fated stint in the North African desert during WW2. He wasn't "evacuated", he "surrendered" and was "captured" - then he was shipped off ("evacuated"?) to an Italian prisoner of war camp. Let's cut out the bullshit language.

Stories of atrocities need to be taken with a grain of salt. Here's a cautionary tale. When Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990, the world recoiled in horror that his soldiers had tipped babies out of incubators at a hospital, leaving them to die. "The Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old girl who was publicly identified at the time by her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicised, and was cited numerous times by United States Senators and President George Bush Senior in their rationale to support Kuwait in the Gulf War".

"In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al Sabah and that she was the daughter of Saud al Sabah, the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organised as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, which was run by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al Sabah's testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda" (Wikipedia).

Zelenskyy & "The US Agenda"

There are aspects of the whole Ukraine tragedy that have not been highlighted by the Western media. Ironically, Time (which is not noted as a Russian propaganda publication) has shone a light onto a couple of them. Simon Shuster's "The Road To War" (Time, 14&21/2/22) puts the individualistic American spin onto Russian war motives - namely, that Vladimir Putin has a Ukrainian goddaughter whom he adores and whose father, Viktor Medvedchuk, was leader of the biggest Opposition party in Ukraine. The article also offers considerably more substantive reasons for Putin's hostility.

"The leading voice for Russia's interests in Ukraine, Medvedchuk's political party is the biggest Opposition force in Parliament, with millions of supporters. Over the past year, that party has come under attack. Medvedchuk was charged with treason in May (2021) and placed under house arrest in Kyiv... Short of war, one of the best ways that Putin has to influence Ukraine is through Medvedchuk and his political party. So, it should not be surprising that Russia's military standoff with the West has escalated in step with the crackdown on his friend".

Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected Ukraine's President in 2019. "But Medvedchuk's faction came in second place, making it the biggest Opposition force in the country. 'Millions of citizens voted for us', Medvedchuk told me. 'Putin gave a promise to protect them'. Medvedchuk's TV channels worked to weaken the new Government. 'They were eating into the electoral base, just destroying Zelenskyy' says the President's first National Security Adviser, Oleksndr Danyliuk. The networks were especially relentless in attacking the Government's response to the covid-19 pandemic and its failure to secure vaccine supplies from Western allies".

"When Russia released its own vaccine in August 2020, Medvedchuk, his wife and their daughter Daria were among the first to get it. They then flew to Moscow to talk to Putin. It was the first public meeting the Russian leader had with anyone - unmasked, on camera, and without social distancing - since the pandemic began. Their talks that day resulted in a deal for Russia to supply Ukraine with millions of doses of its vaccine, and to allow Ukrainian labs to produce it free of charge".

"When Medvedchuk brought this deal to Kyiv, the Government rejected it. So did the US State Department, which accused Russia of using its vaccine as a tool of political influence. But as the death toll mounted in Ukraine - and no vaccine shipments arrived from the West - voters turned away from Zelenskyy in droves. By the fall of 2020, his approval ratings fell well below 40%, compared with over 70% a year earlier. In some polls taken that December (2020), Medvedchuk's party was in the lead".

"Zelenskyy grew especially concerned about the party's television channels, which he condemned as messengers of Russian propaganda. When he decided to take those channels off the air last February (2021), it was not only a defensive move, says Danyliuk, his former Security Adviser. It was also conceived as a welcome gift to the Biden Administration, which had made the decision to go after international corruption a pillar of its foreign policy. As Danyliuk put it, the decision to go after Putin's friend 'was calculated to fit in with the US agenda'".

"... Last February (2021), days after the Inauguration of President Joe Biden, America's allies in Kyiv decided to get tough on Medvedchuk. The Ukrainian government started by taking his TV channels off the air, depriving Russia of its propaganda outlets in the country. The US Embassy applauded the move. About two weeks later, on February 19, 2021, Ukraine announced that it had seized the assets of Medvedchuk's family. Among the most important, it said, was a pipeline bringing Russian oil to Europe, enriching Medvedchuk and his family - including Putin's goddaughter Daria - and helping to bankroll Medvedchuk's political party".

Using Decrees, Not Courts, Against Domestic Opponents

"...A senior US official tells Time that Ukraine has always been a top priority for the Administration. 'There has been very extensive and almost constant focus on Ukraine from day one'. When the Zelenskyy government decided to go after Medvedchuk, the US welcomed it as part of Ukraine's struggle to 'counter Russian malign influence', the official said. The methods used in this struggle have been novel and controversial. Rather than working through the justice system, Zelenskyy has imposed sanctions against Ukrainian tycoons and politicians, freezing their assets by decree".

"This strategy, which the Government calls 'de-oligarchisation' has targeted many of Zelenskyy's domestic opponents and, in particular, their television channels. The US has avoided criticising the crackdown, not wanting to 'micromanage' what Ukraine was doing, said the senior US official. But in the case of Medvedchuk, the US Embassy cheered Zelenskyy on".

"'We support Ukraine's efforts to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity through sanctions', the Embassy said in a tweet last February (2021), the day after the sanctions froze Medvedchuk's assets. The party leader was furious. 'This is political repression', Medvedchuk told me. 'All my bank accounts are frozen. I can't manage my assets. I can't even pay my utility bills'".

Those extracts from a long article provide a lot more context for what led up to the Russian invasion and cast serious doubt onto the carefully curated image of Zelenskyy as a democrat. Not to mention the leading role of the US in working to undermine Zelenskyy's opposition. As for Medvedchuk, he disappeared from his Kyiv house arrest shortly after the war began but was captured by Ukrainian forces in April 2022.

Ukraine's Nazis

Now, what about those Nazis? Putin gave as Russia's casus belli the need to "denazify" Ukraine. This is a joke, right? Ukraine has a Jewish President, who presumably is not a Nazi. The blanket use of the word "Nazis" is undoubtedly Russian propaganda. But what could Putin be referring to? As I've already mentioned, some Ukrainians did welcome the Nazis as liberators from Stalin's Soviet Union. Ukrainian collaborators with the German occupiers were led by Stepan Bandera, a Nazi and anti-Semite, who is still revered by a significant number of today's Ukrainians as a hero of the struggle for an independent Ukraine. But that's all buried away in the World War 2 past, surely.

In a word, no. Ukraine does have Nazis today, and they are significant players, not only nationally, but globally. Once again, a lengthy Time article by Simon Shuster provides fascinating, not to mention spine chilling, details about the Azov movement ("Like, Share, Recruit: How A White Supremacist Militia Uses Facebook To Radicalise And Train New Members", 18&25/1/21)

"Its fighters resemble the other para-military units - and there are dozens of them - that have helped defend Ukraine against the Russian military over the past six years. But Azov is much more than a militia. It has its own political party; two publishing houses; summer camps for children; and a vigilante force known as the National Militia, which patrols the streets of Ukrainian cities alongside the police. Unlike its ideological peers in the US and Europe, it also has a military wing with at least two training bases and a vast arsenal of weapons, from drones and armoured vehicles to artillery pieces".

"Outside Ukraine, Azov occupies a central role in a network of extremist groups stretching from California across Europe to New Zealand, according to law enforcement officials on three continents.... After the worst such attack in recent years - the massacre of 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 - an arm of the Azov movement helped distribute the terrorist's raving manifesto, in print and online, seeking to glorify his crimes and inspire others to follow" (my emphasis).

"... The Christchurch mosque attacker, who livestreamed the atrocity on Facebook, had been radicalised by far Right material largely on YouTube and Facebook, according to a New Zealand government report released in December 2020. He had spent time in Ukraine in 2015 and mentioned plans to move to the country permanently".

"'We know that when he was in that part of the world, he was making contact with far-Right groups', says Andrew Little, the Minister responsible for the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. Little says he does not know if these groups included Azov. But during the attack, the shooter wore a flak jacket bearing a black sun, the symbol commonly used by the Azov Battalion" (emphasis added). The Azov Battalion was based in Mariupol, which was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting thus far of the Ukraine War.

Mainstream Western media prefers to euphemistically call them "far Right" or "ultra-nationalist" but Shuster's Time article makes clear that they are Nazis and that their malignant and murderous influence stretches all the way from Ukraine around the world, including to Christchurch. Personally, I think the Russians will have done the world a favour if they have destroyed this outfit in the battle for Mariupol, in the same way that their Red Army predecessors destroyed the original Nazis in the 20th Century.

No "Winners" In War

To conclude: what Putin did was unforgiveable. Nothing justifies the invasion and attempted conquest of a sovereign nation, inflicting death and destruction in the process. But, as I've said, there is plenty to explain why we're where we are now. As always, the principal victims of war are civilians, particularly children, who are the innocent parties in it all.

The best outcome we can hope for is for Russia to get out of Ukraine, that the issues between the two neighbours be resolved by diplomacy, and that the US and NATO (and its mates, including New Zealand) butt out. They're only fanning the flames (and making arms manufacturers rich in the process). The worst-case scenario is that this becomes a stalemate war that drags on years, with accompanying massive death and destruction, as with the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. It has already dragged on since 2014, so I fear that this dramatic 2022 escalation will just make it a larger and more deadly stalemate.