The Abomination of Ukraine.

 

Not quite 10 years ago, shortly before the Euro 2012 football championship co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, I was lucky enough to spend a weekend in Kiev.  I had a great time, and liked the place a lot.  I came away thinking that I'd like to see more of the country, not least the Crimean Peninsula with its Black Sea beaches, long hot summers and a free and easy culture that appealed to the aging hippy in me.  I posted a lengthy blog about the trip, complete with pictures I took around the city: it's at The World According to Travellin' Bob: Kiev - Euro 2012 (travellin-bob.blogspot.com) if you want to see more.  But here a few extracts from it:

 "We went back the following evening, as it was getting dark, and it was super.  There was a carnival atmosphere still, and we spent a good couple of hours wandering around eating McFlurry’s from the inevitable McDonald’s outlet, riding the carousel and enjoying the street entertainment.   At the end of the street there is a big square that will be one of the viewing areas for Euro 2012 – the big screens were being assembled and there was some kind of bar or UEFA exhibition centre under construction, designed to look like half a football.   I would guess there will be a great atmosphere there.  Then sharp at 10, alarms went off, and a couple of police cars cruised from one end of the street to the other and back again – and the street was no longer pedestrianized but open to traffic.  Efficiently done."

 "Close by was another park overlooking the river.  At the top is the Museum to the Great Patriotic War (that’s World War 2 to you and me).  Surrounding the building is a good array of tanks and armoured vehicles, field guns, jeeps, helicopters and in one separate section some aircraft and Soviet era missiles.  The aircraft ranged from WW2 fighters, through Korean War MiG fighters, 1970s and 1980s Sukhoi supersonic fighters (one of them, for a fee, you could sit in) and, a bit incongruously I thought, a US manufactured Dakota freight plane.  We had a stroll around and paid the extra for Kuba to sit in a MiG 21 fighter – got some decent photos – but I have to say the exhibits were not in the best condition.  Probably standing outside in all weathers (and Ukrainian winters are vicious) doesn’t help them much."

 "The museum itself forms the plinth for a massive statue to the Mother of the Nation.  It’s a huge statue, not unlike the Statue of Liberty, but carrying a bloody great sword and shield rather than the torch of peace, and instead of white marble it’s made of stainless steel and towers 62m above the Museum roof (overall the height goes to over 100m – 330 odd feet).   It’s an impressive monument, especially when floodlit at night.  You can see it for miles.   The Museum itself is circular and on three floors so you kind of spiral your way up from the lowest to highest, and of its kind is pretty good.  It’s well laid out and has some great exhibits, but at the end you’re left with the impression that the only combatants between 1939 and 1945 were the USSR and Nazi Germany – no-one else gets a look in.  Now I know there were more Russian casualties than any other nation during the war, and that their switching sides after Hitler ordered the Barbarossa attack in 1941 essentially ensured that the Nazis would lose in the end but still….it’s an incredibly inaccurate and slanted view of history that Uncle Joe would be proud of.   Whatever else it may have done, the USSR did not save the world.   I wonder if Ukrainian educationalists are doing anything to change that, and owning up to some of the more blatant untruths and inaccuracies……  Do they admit that the famines that decimated the local population in the 20s and 30s were Stalin’s fault?  Do they admit that behind every patriotic regiment advancing fearlessly on the Nazi lines there marched a regiment of NKVD killers who were to shoot dead any soldier retreating?

Probably not."

 "There are still, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall that precipitated the demise of Communism, many monuments to the Old Guard scattered around the city.   My favourite was one to Lenin, in typical pose, head thrust forward in mid oration, that stands perhaps twenty feet tall and is in a little park area at one end of the main shopping drag.  The thing I liked about it was not the statue itself (that is no better or worse than any other of its kind) but that on the little paved area at the foot of the plinth there is a small tent topped by the old Red Flag, and in the tent was a group of guys in military fatigues who were keeping watch on everyone who paused there for photo opportunities or whatever.  Whether they are genuinely members of the Ukrainian army or merely a bunch of unreconstructed Communist sympathizers who are enjoying playing soldier I have no idea, and the banners and placards draped over the tent, as they were of course in Russian, were meaningless to me.   They left us alone while we took our pictures, as did the police on duty (the adjoining road junction is quite busy at all times) – even when we pulled off the road and parked on the footpath next to the monument and, later, reversed back into the traffic flow."

 "Another trip into town gave us the opportunity to ride a funicular railway up the side of the hill from the main road alongside the Dniepr to the top of the hill and visit the beautiful Cathedral and Monastery of St. Michael.  The building is exquisite, painted a pastel blue with white pillars and stunning gold domed roofs.  Inside, every flat space on the walls, the floor and the ceilings is covered with beautiful frescoes.  There are a number of places to light prayer candles (that can be purchased from a small shop just inside the main door), but no seating – everyone stands.  When we visited, a monk or priest was leading a small ceremony of some kind: there was no congregation, but he was chanting his prayers in a deep and sonorous voice, with responses coming from the choir of monks in a balcony facing him.   Although I understood not a word, it was very moving somehow, and beautiful.   Like most such places, no photography is allowed inside, which was a shame – I would love to have been able to shoot off a bunch of pictures because this paragraph just doesn’t do the building justice."

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Two years after I wrote this, Russia invaded Crimea, and the typically weak response by the US and NATO allowed Putin's forces to annex the entire Peninsula, and within weeks conduct a referendum in which an overwhelming majority voted to "remain part of Russia" and secede from Ukraine.  There was much handwringing and cries of a rigged vote, but no more.  Crimea remains annexed and forgotten by most of the world. My beach holiday there will never take place.

Emboldend, two provinces in the east of Ukraine, around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk (collectively, the Donbas region) announced they were breaking away and wanted independence.  Overnight, thousands of armed militia, carrying state of the art weaponry and wearing unbadged military combat fatigues, appeared on the streets: a rebel army.  They were widely believed to be Russian troops smuggled in to assist the "rebel commanders", and within a very short time genuine Russian troops joined them.  A war broke out between the breakaway states and Ukraine, and 8 years later it continues to rage.  A war memorial in Kiev carries photos and the names of nearly 15,000 Ukrainian armed forces that have died in the conflict.  Added to them are no doubt several thousand innocent civilians, including nearly 300 slaughtered when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, passing over Donbas en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down by a Russian BUK anti aircraft missile.

No-one has been brought to justice for this atrocity.

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So in some respects, the Russian invasion that has been brewing for weeks, stoked by Putin's anti-West paranoid rhetoric and executed last night should be no surprise. 

Neither should the so far inadequate response from the US, the EU and NATO countries, including Britain.  A raft of promises have been made pledging support and weapons, but not fighting troops, to support Ukraine in its hour of need.  Sanctions have been announced aganst Russia and its oligarchs and business community, but on their own they are unlikely to work - and in any case appear inadequate.  For example, a graphic on a Polish tv news bulletin on Tuesday showed that the US and EU had each applied sanctions against several hundred businesses and individuals while the UK had applied them against......5 small banks (that no-one has ever heard of) and three individuals described as "close to Putin": all three individuals have been operating quite happily for the past 8 years, despite being sanctioned by the US after Crimea was annexed.  Hardly "the world leading action" announced by Johnson.  

Meanwhile stronger sanctions, such as removing the Russian rouble from the international banking payments system SWIFT, removing the licence of every Russian bank trading outside Russia, and cancelling the diplomatic accreditation of Putin himself and cronies like Medvedev and Lavrov, while issuing internatioinal arrest warrants against them for the MH17 atrocity are nowhere to be seen. Nor likely to be any time soon....

So we are now watching lines of armoured vehicles and battalions of troops pouring into Ukraine through Donbas, through Ctimea and through Belarus (sanctioned by Putin's equally insane mate Lukashenko) heading, presumably, for Kiev.   And so far, unimpeded - except for resistance in Donbas from a Ukrainian army dug in since 2014.

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Where it is all likely to end is anyones guess - how can you predict the actions of a psychopathic megalomanic with any degree of confidence?  And yet that is what Biden and Johnson and von der Leyan and Stoltenberg and the resat of the EU and NATO leadership must do.  There are no easy choices and no clear path to peace, but simply a straight route to carnage, as far as I can see.