But diplomacy, but elections! – Thoughts on russia’s war on Ukraine

Ukraine is threatened not by one but now by two fascist superpowers eager to conquer and colonise it. Europe tried to stay out of the russo-Ukrainian war, but now it looks like Europe will have to go to war, one way or another. It can choose between helping Ukraine defend itself from fascism, or become itself the main theatre of a nuclear World War III. Gosh, what is better for our car industry and real estate market…

A year ago, on the second anniversary of russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, I wrote this article, titled “Alone against Fascists“.

It got much worse since.

Back in early 2024, Trump’s people in US Congress were blocking vital military help for Ukraine, with the result that russia was able to push through and take heavily defended cities like Avdiivka, Soledar and Bakhmut.

One year later, on this third anniversary of russia’s orgy of mass murder, rape, torture and child abduction, Trump is again President of United States of America. He is singing praise to putin and russia while insulting Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on every opportunity. You all heard the lies and threats Trump and his henchmen spew, and I won’t repeat them here. The new Mump regime of Musk and Trump (thanks to Timothy Snyder for inventing this term) stopped funding civilian projects in Ukraine and announced not to give any more weapons after the current (Biden-approved) tranche runs out.

History doesn’t repeat itself, and all parallels are limited. But what is going on now is similar to what we all have forgotten because of our comfortable, wealthy life in peace and democracy.

Ukraine is once again is seen as a mere territory to capture and colonise, its people as a inert mass to be subjugated and exploited. Not just by russia: the Mump regime sees Ukraine just like German and russian dictators of the 20th century did: as a mere source of natural resources. Before it was Ukraine’s black earth, now it’s Ukraine’s rare earths.

On the other side of the world, the totalitarian regime in China is watching the developments closely while preparing to invade Taiwan. The North Korean army is fighting war on russian side in Ukraine in return for russian military technology and to train itself in modern warfare in order to attack South Korea and Japan next. Iran not only supplies russia with drones to bomb Ukrainian civilians, it is receiving missile and yes, also nuclear arms technology in return, preparing to annihilate Israel.

It is up to Europe to save Ukraine and the world. Hopefully, it will pull itself together, literally.

Because the nuclear war already began.

As you know, russians were chased out of Chernobyl, and maybe you heard that just a few days ago they sent a Shahed drone to blow a hole in the sarcophagus which was built by the West to protect the infamous molten reactor Nr 4. Did we really get the russian message here?

The message is that russia will attack the sarcophagus again, with drones and missiles. It could blow up the Zaporizhya plant, the biggest nuclear plant in Europe, if russia feels it would serve its interests. putin doesn’t care about his own russian citizens, but he does care about Europeans, he really wants to make us suffer.

Remember: when russia blew up the Kakhovka dam on Dnipro river in June 2023, drowning hundreds or maybe thousands of Ukrainian civilians (especially on occupied territories, see point 3), we in the west just shrugged. And even blamed it on Ukrainian terrorism, because the russian news helpfully suggested this to us.

Trump is blaming Ukrainians for everything now, including of starting a war to steal his nation’s money. As it happens, this American fascist’s favourite blame target is Ukraine’s Jewish president. Not a coincidence.

But now, allow me to debunk some misunderstandings about Ukraine.

1. Why don’t they just surrender? Isn’t living under occupation is better than dying to prevent it?

That is a very popular opinion, I heard it myself when campaigning for the Green Party. An occupation doesn’t mean absence of dying, quite the opposite. It only means YOU, the outside observer, won’t be bothered by pictures of murdered and tortured people, or by stories of raped women, or of children being forever taken away from their families and turned into zombies. We all saw what russians did in Bucha and in other areas of Ukraine which were liberated. We don’t know how many people russians murdered, tortured and raped in the destroyed and occupied Mariupol, and how many they happily continue to rape, torture and murder there, exactly because that Ukrainian city was not liberated. And if we allow russians to keep Mariupol for long enough, around a hundred of thousands of its murdered citizens will never have existed in the first place, they will be replaced by russians. Imagine Germany didn’t lose WW2. Imagine Auschwitz and other sites of mass murder were never liberated but remained inside the German Reich after a “peace” was negotiated with Hitler.

There never would have been any Holocaust. At least not in your history books. Nobody would believe the surviving Jews.

In fact, Holocaust was never spoken about in the USSR, the only allowed code word was a reference to “peaceful Soviet citizens” who were shot over pits in forests of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics by Nazi German soldiers. In Kyiv, I used to live and go to school right next to Babyn Yar, and all that time I had no idea what really happened there. We were brainwashed and lied to about Babyn Yar in school.

More to the point of the current situation: russia had successfully erased its past genocide of Ukrainians before. In the Holodomor famine which Stalin organised in Ukraine in 1932-1933, at least four million of Ukrainian peasants were deliberately robbed of all food and starved to death, those who tried to flee or “steal” food were shot on the spot. At the same time Ukrainian intellectual elites in the cities were being arrested and then shot or worked to death in the Gulag.

Unlike with the Holocaust, the Soviet Union succeeded in erasing all memory of the Holodomor and the Ukrainian Executed Renaissance not just inside USSR, but in fact everywhere in the world. Even after the collapse of the Soviet regime, outside of Ukraine Holodomor was widely considered to be a far-right Ukrainian conspiracy theory. First thing russians did in occupied territories now was to raze all Holodomor memorials, and burn books mentioning it.

If it’s not on TV it didn’t happen, right?

2. But diplomacy! Why do Ukrainians demand weapons instead of negotiating?

There is nobody for Ukrainians to negotiate with – putin is not interested in any diplomacy. Not with Ukrainians, not even with the Europeans. He is currently negotiating with Trump who will get what in Europe.

If we stop supporting Ukraine with weapons, we won’t force Ukraine to negotiate, one cannot negotiate about the method by which one will be executed. We will force Ukraine to lose the war.

But let’s assume you just don’t care about those Ukrainians and you just want peace. Graveyard peace if needed, and return to business, look how expensive toilet paper became because of this foreign war. Let putin do to Ukrainians whatever he wants. Well, he will. His plan is to incorporate Ukrainian human and military resources into the russian war machine, to force millions of Ukrainian men and boys into a much, much bigger and more powerful russian army than ever before, and send them to kill you and your family.

Even electing an AfD fascist as your own national leader, to make peace with russia and because you need to stop all those refugees from conquered Ukraine coming to your nice country, won’t save you. History teaches us that dictators don’t like each other and don’t agree on what belongs to whom, see the failed Hitler-Stalin Pact. And by the way, 2 years after the pact, Hitler invaded USSR in 1941 because he wanted to have Ukraine as German Lebensraum and Kornkammer. Inspired by Stalin’s Holodomor.

Yes, this war can only be ended with diplomacy. But for that, we need to make putin understand he will never win this war, and we can only achieve this by strengthening Ukraine and weakening russia.

Trump does exactly the opposite.

3. Ukraine refuses to hold elections!

That is a russian troll narrative which Trump took over after meeting russians in Saudi Arabia. Even if Trump may be demented (which his unhinged tirades do suggest), his people like Vance or Musk are definitely not. They know that there is a good reason Ukraine can’t hold elections, and it is not just the legal formality of Ukrainian constitution which forbids elections during war time.

If Ukrainians were to do as told by Trump and putin, and prepare elections in the middle of the biggest war since 1945, the result would be simply the end of Ukraine.

That’s why: Ukraine would need to abolish martial law, dissolve the conscript army, open borders, and set up elections in a situation where civilians everywhere in the country are daily targetted with drones, missiles and glide bombs and where a large part of the country and millions of its people are under enemy occupation. Do I need to spell it out in detail how fast under such circumstances the russian army would be able to march into Kyiv under a false pretence of a broken ceasefire, kill everyone associated with the Ukrainian state, and then hold its own “elections” where Victor Medvedchuk will win at least 120% of popular support?

Yes, I am aware some western politicians would perfectly love this outcome. But see Point 2, because putin has plans which go way beyond Ukraine.

Also Ukrainians want elections, they fought and died on the Maidan for their right to have them, and what did we in the west do to deserve that right? How exactly did Germans qualify for democracy? Or Nazi-collaborating nations like Austria, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain? After 1945, they were simply given freedom and democracy as a gift, and do they value it?

Yesterday, on 23 February 2025, every fifth German voted for Nazis. In the East, every second German is officially a Nazi-supporter. But there is not even one single far-right lawmaker in Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.

Ukrainians want peace more than anyone else, it is their lives being taken daily. Once they have peace from russia, they will hold their elections, which will be free, safe, democratic, and fair, something most people on this planet can only dream about. Whether the United States of America will see another election in the near future, is all but certain.

Слава Україні! Героям слава!

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