Russians at War

 Big kerfufle at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) of late over the screening of Muscovite Pity Party Russians at War. 

Under pressure from the local Ukrainain community, the Festival has suspended screenings, not out of any acknowledgement of the community's concerns, but over "security concerns" - concerns which, for the record, the Toronto Police did not share, and made no recommendations about one way or the other. 

Cue the tiresome hand-wringing from the local artsy-fartsies abut the power of the film's pacifist message. Propaganda? Oh no ma'am. Just humanizing the rape of pillage of a country. 

I would have a lot more sympathy for the argument from artistic expression if the director, Anastasia Trofimova, had not been a Russian national previously employed by Russia Today (RT). Or, if this had not been during a time of war in which real lives were at stake. 

So what's the difference between Russians at War and Twenty Days in Mariupol, which gave the Ukrainian side (and won a pile of Oscars in the process)? This: Mariupol is about people defending their country from brutal invaders.   Russians at War is about the invaders. This is not different sides of the same issue: they are not equally entitled to my sympathy. 

Make no mistake: those allegedly poor Russians are there to kill Ukrainians.  Unless they mutiny and defect, they will probably obey their orders and kill more. 

A message of pacifism will make no headway in Moscow. It could make quite a bit in democratic countries. Loosey-goosey both-siderism could easily take hold in the more squeamish elements of democratic society and push ballot-box pressure to end military aid, or force Ukraine into futile "negotiations" - the appeaser's favourite euphemism for "surrender". 

The Kremlin is quite happy to push this kind of psychological opiate, especially when they're this close to getting their operatives back into the White House - Trump and Vance have both stated their plan for Ukraine is give Russia everything it wants, and I do mean everything. Russia at War is just what the Russophile Trumpists need. 

Anti-war my ass. 

At least Modi didn't get his Majority. He'll have to form a coalition government, and won't be able to rewrite the constitution. That is an EXTREMELY good thing.

A democratic India is a very good thing to have in the world. Whereas and autocratic one, aligned with Russia and China, would be a very scary thing indeed.
Take what releif may come.

Pay the Price

When Mike Johnson finally allowed a vote on military aid to Ukraine, (to universal celebration of all decent minded folks in the free world), I was tempted to, in the words of Churchill, “sleep the sleep of the saved and thankful”. 

Speaker Mike Johnson

It is of course a great relief – Ukraine isn’t down for the count yet. But how much is too little too late? Six months of wasted opportunity, lost territory, and lost lives. Adivka is lost. As we speak, the Russians are advancing on Lyptsi and Vovchansk. Who knows when the aid will actually arrive? 

It would not surprise me if The Russians put up a statue of Johnson in Adivka. That he finally did the right thing after 6-months of dithering does not redeem him. He very nearly cost an entire nation its existence. Its liberation will be that much more difficult and bloody because of his Trump inspired dilly-dallying. Putin’s other puppets in Congress were clearly distraught – a delicious sight, all those tankie tears.

$60 Billion. That’s about what it will amount to. That sounds like a lot. How much is democracy worth?

Some well-meaning people have complained that $60 billion is a lot to spend on other people’s wars; that it could buy a lot of hospitals and schools at home. To such folk I would like to say that it would also buy a lot of Russian language lessons and Cyrillic signs to put up over those hospitals and schools. 

That’s what I’d like to say. I’m more likely to say that it will save countless Ukrainian lives. It seriously will.

To begin with, almost none of this is in the form of cold-hard cash. Skids of dollar bills are not being sent to Kyiv to finance Zelensky’s imaginary summer home – this is a Rascist fantasy. Most of it is in the form of military hardware, already constructed and currently gathering dust. So why not send it to an embattled people who could desperately use it? Unless you want them to be slaves. . .

Patriot Missiles

Some of that hardware will include Patriot missile defence systems which will shoot down Russian missiles before they land on Ukrainian cities. Will anyone who’s not a Kremlin Kretin tell me this is not money well-spent? Better than letting the Patriots rot in landfill somewhere? That is what the pacifist position amounts to: withholding technology that could save lives, and letting the Russian missiles fall where they will.

Pacifists are people who refuse to prevent massacres, even when they can.

If the aid prolongs the war, it will be by allowing Ukraine to survive, which I refuse to see as a bad thing. If Russia continues to attack, then that is Russia’s crime. Russia can achieve peace any time it likes; it need only turn around and go home. It is Russian greed and Russian bloodlust and Russian delusions of grandeur that keep the killing going, not Ukrainian insistence on survival, nor its friends’ attempt to help.

Democracies either stand together, or fall one-by-one. There is enough strength in the democratic world to keep a large piece of it democratic, but no one state – no, not even that one – can do it on its own. So we are faced with a choice: a world dominated by democratic ideals (however imperfect), or dominated by strong-men like Putin, who will grab and take what they want.

Dictators are basically bullies, school-yard bullies who’ve gotten control of countries. They don’t want to make deals with you. They don’t want to reason with you. They won’t honour agreements with you. They will grab and take as much as they think they can get away with. That’s why appeasement never works. They’ll just keep taking more. So, you can either stand up to them now, or later, or not at all and find yourself with nothing.

That’s why I support the $60 billion aid package, and all other such packages from all over the civilized world. Make it $70 billion, 100, 200, whatever it takes. How much did it cost to bring Hitler down?  You can be sure Putin will not be skimping on his war!

It will mean diverting more resources into manufacture of engines of death. Sorry, but sometimes that’s what survival requires. Auschwitz was not liberated by good vibes. Nicer things will be neglected so that worse things don’t appear. I don’t like it either, but it’s not like I had a say in any of it. Putin and his followers chose the way of war, and we need to respect their decision. 

Fortunately for us, the Ukrainians alone are currently shouldering the burden of blood. We don’t have to disrupt our soft comfortable lives – yet. We owe it to them to render any assistance we can, whether it’s convenient or not.

Slava Ukrayini!
Слава Україні

 On June 25 of this year, I was lured out of bed with news  that Russian helicopters were shooting at Russian armed columns on their way to Moscow. When I got out of bed it was even better: twenty-five thousand armed Wagner mercenaries had seized control of Rostov-on-the-Don and were on their way to Moscow. 

Then it was all over by lunch. Prigozhin changed his mind, and called the whole thing off. 

Yevgeny Prigozhin, former hotdog salesman, now commander of Wagner private army

Blink - or sleep in - and you would have missed it. Never in my life has such a huge news story amounted to so little. 

For the briefest of moments - less than an afternoon in fact - it looked like the world world was entering into a new phase. One of the world's biggest and most problematic countries was about to implode in on itself. Who knows what it would look like afterwards, but at the very least, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was through. Putin couldn't possibly fight a civil war and a foreign war at the same time, especially if the rebels controlled the border areas. Russian forces would have to come home, or else wind up unsupplied and encircled. It was over.  

Until it wasn't. 

You ever been awoken from a deep sleep, in the middle of an amazing dream, because your fucking air conditioner chose that moment to "CLANG"?  That's what it felt like. For a couple hours, it really felt like Victory was around the corner. If you think we're disappointed, imagine how the Ukrainians must feel! 

Still, it's difficult to see how this could fail to benefit Ukraine somehow or other. At the very least it'll further demoralize Vatniks on the front line: bickering leadership is rarely condusive to morale. And a couple expensive Russian helicopters were shot down. . .

If I made too much of it, in my defense I wasn't the only one: I daresay most of the internet, experts and amateurs alike, assumed full-scale civil war was on. When twenty-five thousand armed mercenaries start marching to the capital, it's not an unreasonable assumption to make. Death and destruction seemed far more likely than *poof* - nothing. I'm in the middle of Antony Beevor's Russia: Revolution and Civil War, and this was more or less how the last Russian civil war started, so it was not exactly a ridiculous thing to think. 

What the hell was Prigozhin playing at? Who the hell knows. Commentators are all a tizzy because there really is no logical explanation (not that logic ever had a place in Russia) or rational justification for it. Was he bluffing? Did he realize he bit off more than he could chew? Did he think his support was not strong enough? Or some other end game we can't even imagine and won't know for years to come. That'd be my guess. 

The whole thing is weird. The only thing I'm certain of is you'd have to be a Grey Zone imbecile to think either Putin or Prigozhin has come out of this stronger. 

 

 The Nova Kakhovka Dam has been blown, flooding large parts of southern Ukraine. Thousands will need to evacuate. Thousands lack clean drinking water. Untold numbers will drown. Thousands are without power. Agriculture in the region has been ruined. Most of the animals in Nova Kakhovka Zoo have died. It is a humanitarian, ecological, and economic catastrophe.

Both sides are blaming the other. Since lying is Russia's national sport, (I wouldn't trust Dmitri Peskov to spell his own name), I am inclined to believe Ukraine. These are lands Ukraine considers its own, and hopes to liberate soon. It will be inheriting a massive mess, one they're hardly likely to be imposed upon themselves. Not to mention how much it complicates their plans for counter-offensive in the area. Sabotoging one's own counter-offensive seems one double bluff too far. True, Russia also claims the territory. And the Russian side of the river has gotten the worst of it. But Russia has historically never given a shit about its own people, and never shied away from causing ecological catastrophes (Kara-Bogaz anyone?), so I have no problem believing they'd do this to their own side. Scorched earth is their way, or in this case, soaked earth.

Roger Waters off a Pig's Back.

 Are there no surprises left in life? Now for my third returning special guest. 

Having written here: 

https://stevedylan.blogspot.com/2022/08/being-roger-waters.html

that Roger Waters seemed to enjoy the trappings of authoritarianism much too much to fully condemn them, he's come out in full support of Putin. He's also under investigation in Berlin for anti-semitic imagery, and a uniform just a bit too naziesque for local liking: 

https://www.itv.com/news/london/2023-06-06/religious-leaders-criticise-pink-floyd-bassist-after-nazi-style-costume-stunt

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-denounces-roger-waters-performance-in-berlin-as-antisemitic/

I think he was allowed to wear it in the end, but still, that floating pig emblazoned with the Star of David is a bad look. 

With Boot Firmly on the Same Foot: Grey Zone at it Again

Now for some returning guest stars!

Up first, Putin fan club newsletter Grey Zone, they of the "we caught some chick in a crowd wearing death's head cufflinks, proving Ukraine is the Fourth Reich!" brand of wisdom. They struck again with another piece of irrefutable evidence, this time proving beyond all reasonable doubt Ukraine was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. What is this Quod Erat Demonstratum smoking gun? 

They found a boot at the bottom of the North Sea. 

That's right, a boot. 

Hardly OJ Simpson's glove, is it? 

This is the standard of evidence upheld by these jokers. Evidence that the flying saucer people would dismiss. But not the tankie/vatnik crowd, who will grasp at any straw. 

Now Ukraine may or may not have been behind the sabotage (to what end, who knows), but her involvement is ever revealed, it will not be on the pages of Greyzone News. 

Next up, the return of slimeball, sleezebach Sachs, Jeffery, he of the "Mediator's Guide to Peace in Ukraine", which absolved Russia of all blame, and put responsibility for the current bloodshed squarely on the shoulders of NATO, and those Eastern European countries who had the nerve to join it. Those countries are supposed to be Russia's playground you see, and their inhabitants, Russian property. 

Sachs recently signed a letter to the New York times, under the heading "The US Should be a Force for Peace in the World", which regurgitated all these claims. 

You will notice, (after guffawing at the wildly inaccurate map of Europe) how the signatories apparently reserve the right to invade Canada and Mexico.

As a Canadian, I can say that if the US were in the habit of invading us, stealing our grain, storming out capital with tanks and defenestrating our Prime Minister, you're DAMN RIGHT we'd seek protection from whomever might be able to provide it. We have not, because it has not been necessary. The US has not threatened our national sovereignty since 1814. We don't even guard the border anymore. Letting us do our thing has not hindered US power or prosperity or prestige in any way.  It has proven a highly successful, mutually beneficial arrangement. Russia could learn something from it. 

These assholes though don't see it that way. They have more in common with Russia's way of thinking. So of course, they support Russia's claims. They don't want to help Ukraine, and if they had their way, wouldn't help the rest of Eastern Europe either. The days when  Russian tanks could storm Warsaw, Budapest, or Prague with impunity were the good ol' days for them, a time of peace an stability. 

This is what it means to blame NATO expansion. It assumes only great powers have interests or rights or legitimate security concerns. 

Sachs is also behind a number of articles claiming "Russia was provoked", a standard refrain of the blame NATO crowd, which assumes Russia has no free will of its own. Russia didn't choose to send a hundred thousand troops across a national border, it can only respond to Western stimuli like so many Pavlov's dogs. Would he invoke this kind of blame-the-victim excuse in any other context? "My ex was flirting with another dude, so I had to kill them both!". 

Fuck off Sachs.