Ukraine Dispatch 12 | Reality

Ukraine Dispatches

Volume 1 2022

Podcast

Chapter One

I

Watching the BBC News 24 or any other western 24-hour news-agency differs from the daily newspapers. Newspapers remove us from the immediacy of the horror inflicted upon the People of Ukraine by the Russian forces.

Without muddying the waters, it is wise to remember that there is an equally horrendous war in Yemen where no quarter is given by either side.

II

This morning’s edition of The Week’s WeekDay A.M. reports via Reuters that President Zelenskyy of Ukraine has been advised by his chief of staff, Alexi Arestovich, that the exact timing will depend upon the “resources the Kremlin was willing to commit to the campaign”, but that the war in Ukraine could be over by early May.

A senior US defence official, in Monday’s press briefing, reported that “almost all” of Russia's military offensives in Ukraine “remain stalled” after making little progress over the weekend and that the military convoy to the north of Kyiv has also made little progress towards the capital.

III

Despite the terrifying overview of the bombardment of the southern Port of Mariupol, the number of civilians killed in that city now approaching 2,000, not to mention Russian soldiers and Ukrainian soldiers, 160 vehicles were able to use a humanitarian corridor briefly on Day 19 (Monday 14 March) with refugees attempting, ITV News reported, to reach Zaporizhzhia via the nearby city of Berdyansk.

Whilst the BBC and other News Anchors wisely do not report Ukrainian dispositions, it is clear that the fierce battle for Mariupol is due to the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ fierce resistance and counter-offensive. Furthermore, they have the support of the civilian population. This was never factored into Putin’s thinking.

IV

News also reports the comment by Leonid Slutsky, a Russian MP and one of the delegates in  Russia’s negotiating team. Mr Slutsky confirms that peace talks between Russia and Ukraine have made "substantial progress", even suggesting that this substantial progress could lead to a "unified position in the coming days".

Extraordinary. Only last week Russia was insisting on :

·      surrender,

·      immediate laying down of arms

·      demilitarisation by Ukraine,

·      agreement to become neutral

·      agreement never to attempt to become a member of NATO

·      agreement never to attempt to become a member of the European Union

If Ukraine is defeated, Ukraine will suffer

·      permanent military occupation

·      merciless subjugation

·      execution of all so-called ‘enemies of the state’

·      forced back behind a renewed ‘Iron Curtain’

of the most repressive regime in the world, a police state, a dictatorship, an Orwellian nightmare, a country over which the long dark night of repression has descended upon its hapless 146 million population.

V

The Financial Times (FT) reports that Russia’s campaign has been beset by strategic errors, logistical shortcomings and intelligence blunders that vastly underestimated Ukraine’s capabilities. The FT confirms that Russia’s failure to secure a swift win leaves the end game unclear, whereas two weeks ago the FT took the view, as did Western nations, that Russia would secure a swift defeat.

In a leading article headed China are prepared to send weapons to Russia, US intelligence claims in the Daily Telegraph (DT) dated March 15, by Robert Mandrake, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Nick Allen (US Editor) we find catch a glimpse of China’s real intentions:

“Reports have claimed that Mr Putin has been raging behind the scenes at the slow progress, although he has declined to show any public frustration. Only last week Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, insisted ‘everything is going according to the plan’. ”

— Daily Telegraph, Robert Mandrake, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Nick Allen (US Editor)

VI

That is the same behaviour by Adolf Hitler when things were not going his way. With that man, it was impossible to reason. Often, his generals tried to reverse his catastrophic decisions by sound-reason and common-sense. Those tools of debate are anathema to the dictator, to the tyrant. That tyrant regularly overruled them, usually sacking them. They knew what would happen to them if they resisted. It did not, however, save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, the armies of both sides slogging it out, and with the civilian populations caught in between.

The litmus paper test of the July 20, 1944, Bomb Plot resulted in the execution of three field marshals, 19 generals, 26 colonels, two ambassadors, seven diplomats, one government minister and three secretaries of state, as well as the head of the Berlin police.

The Russian people should take note as the darkness of the long night of the FSB police state descends upon them.

It is estimated that Hitler had 7,000 people arrested of which some 4,980 were executed, some slowly strangled with piano-wire on Hitler's express order; and that man had executions filmed so that he could watch them.

On the night of August 31, 1939, hours before his illegal invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, he issued a special directive, stipulating that the army were to be actively encouraged to carry out deliberate acts of terror against the civilian population, and that this terror was to have no bounds, no restrictions. His troops took him at his word and exercised wanton violence without restraint, the accounts of which, even 83 years after the event are difficult to deal with.

Yet, now we have Irpin and Bucha. For the Russian People the writing is on the wall.

What did that evil man write of the Polish Nation?

“They [the Poles] are a rabble ... How can they demand the rights of independent states?”

— Adolf Hitler, 1930

When one considers that he said that in 1930 and by 1939 it had solidified into him reducing the Polish People to the status of a permanent slave state, then we should indeed look upon the 65 minute televised rambling of revisionist history by Vladimir Putin on that peculiar Monday night broadcast three weeks ago from the Kremlin.

With that man in the Kremlin, we have humanitarian corridors set up, agreed with between Russian and Ukraine forces respectively, this being coordinated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), only to then have the civilians bombarded by artillery within the corridor.

Kremlin-man has factored in the Hitler-dimension. Create unmitigated terror and then subjugate.

There is no difference between that man in the Berlin bunker and this man, equally cruel, in the Kremlin.

We know that Putin longs for a return of the USSR. Consider this, then, of another evil man, Josef Stalin.

“A freely elected government [in Eastern Europe] would be anti-Soviet, and that we cannot allow.”

— Josef Stalin, 1945

QUOTE

Chapter Two

The War Against World Domination

I

The Ukrainian People have a natural wartime leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky. He grows in stature by the day.

Do not underestimate the resolve of the Ukrainian people.

Do not underestimate the resolve of the People of Poland and the sacrifices being made by them in aid of their neighbour. Likewise, the Peoples of Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, and of course, nations from further afield, worldwide.

Do not fail to understand that Ukraine is fighting on behalf of all the European nations, both the European Union and the United Kingdom ~ of all of us.

It would be calamitous for the American People to fall into their ‘arsenal of democracy’ role, making sacrifices to send armaments to Ukraine, without realising that if Ukraine falls, so, too, will the USA. In 1940, President Roosevelt had no difficulty grasping reality. That if Britain fell to the Nazis, the USA would also fall.

If Ukraine fell, Putin would not stop at the gates of Kyiv. He would not stop moving westward. Emboldened, he would do as Hitler did.

II

Just as Hitler’s megalomania lit the fuse of Japanese Imperialism, so too, would Putin light the fuse of Chinese Imperialism.

All of the eastern European Nations have suffered at the hands of Soviet Russia and of the Russian Federation.

In 2017, only 42 per cent of Americans held valid passports. Putting that into context, a British Daily Mail tabloid newspaper article dated November 6, 2021, suggested that one in six Americans ~ 55 million people ~ have never travelled outside their own state, and some 27.5 million Americans do not hold a valid American passport. That is a sober reminder to us all as to why Trumpism – ‘make America great again’ – MAGA - is very dangerous to world peace. Trump is a direct threat to world peace.

III

President Zelensky is therefore right, as are many other Ukrainian MPs, to emphasise that the war they fight in defence of their sovereignty, independence, freedom and open democracy, is also our war.

The one essential difference is that Ukraine is the battlefield. To Brits, we found ourselves in the same position in 1939-1941.

The old generation knows precisely how Ukraine feels, and there are many people from that generation still alive. Many more of us were born in the immediate aftermath and long shadow of World War II.

IV

Putin has grand designs. Hitler proved to be the master of lies and deceit in his declaration in 1938 that after the annexation of the Sudetenland he had no other territorial ambitions in Europe, and the West and the former Soviet Union were duped into believing that tyrant, with all the horror that he then unleashed upon the world with his invasion of Poland 12 months later, followed by the whole of Europe and Scandinavia (mercifully excluding Sweden and Switzerland).

One nation stood between Hitler and world domination - the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. History confirms that Britain stood alone, along with her Empire, and we should not forget that this period of holding off Nazi Germany lasted for two years and three months, and only then ended, because the other Axis Power – Japan – attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, without warning.

V

I have often asked myself what might have happened had this attack not taken place, or, conversely, had Nazi Germany not, in a fit of hubris, very unwisely declared war on the United States of America. I am glad that Hitler did so! Why? Because it enabled Britain's wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to put pressure on President Roosevelt to defeat Germany and secure its unconditional surrender. Both Roosevelt and Churchill were united from the outset in securing unconditional surrender. Nothing less was acceptable to either Churchill, the British people, or the British Empire and its Commonwealth. Only then could they turn the combined Allied might against the Axis forces of the Empire of Japan.

Chapter Three

I

The frustration of the Government of Ukraine over the provision of MiG jet fighters from Poland is not unlike Churchill’s frustration when President Roosevelt kept denying his request for the 50 World War I destroyers lying at anchor in US Naval ports. Congress could not bring itself to take such a step, and the President’s hands were tied. Eventually, American public opinion moved in favour of Britain, which in turn, moved Congress, and it is said that before the Act was even laid, as it were, the ships were already halfway across the Atlantic. Roosevelt had given the order to sail anyway.

Ukraine’s situation is equally delicate.

On one hand, the free world stands with Ukraine.

On the other hand, people vacillate, bite their nails, feel awfully upset at what they see on the screen … and leave it at that. A couple of European leaders feel they can parley with Putin. Another one in the Middle East, too. The three depend on Russia for energy. democracy in action is never tidy. Only recently, did a page require several readings. At Britain’s darkest hour, Roosevelt was speaking with Canada without Churchill’s knowledge, as to the ports to which the British Fleets would sail in the event of defeat.

II

Benito Mussolini, that other evil man, desired a new Roman Empire, more accurately, the Roman Empire of ancient history to be reborn. A man with an inflated ego - made worse by Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain using this tyrant as an “honest broker” to act as a go-between with Hitler at the Munich Crisis in October 1938 - he illegally invaded Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), caused havoc, and then, as with the Russians today, a numerically large army does not guarantee invincibility.

That man in the Kremlin should take note of where Mussolini and his mistress ended up. When a nation realises that it has been duped, and the spark of innate freedom ignites into brilliant light, then a People can rise as one and rid themselves of the cause of their pariah status.

Politics and diplomacy are, bluntly, a very dirty business, and even more so when one decides to wage war illegally, in deliberate contravention and contempt of the Rule of International Law.

Freedom and Democracy always prevail over totalitarianism, but the cost of human suffering and sacrifice will be colossal.

III

At school, we learned of the two sides of history imagined as a wartime coin with allies and axis. It is sober this week to read that the West and NATO are the Allies, whilst Russia and China are referred to as the Axis. It is comforting to learn that the United States has already served notice on China that it will face crippling sanctions should it attempt to supply arms or undercut Western Sanctions against Russia.

IV

Today, Day 20, we have the Prime Ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia meeting President Zelenskyy personally in Kyiv.

The President of the United States will travel to Europe for the NATO Extraordinary Meeting in Brussels scheduled for March 23. Vladimir Putin should take note.

We do not see the man in the Kremlin venturing outside.

Cut off from the outside world, even from his own people, he is a man who would, if his shadow crossed him, try one of his wondrous mixed martial arts moves to throttle his own shadow. He is an evil man but only the Russian people can decide his future, his fate.

It is not for the West or NATO to even consider this, even though Putin has a reputation for ordering the summary execution of national leaders and opposition.

V

Today a BBC presenter asked why - given the advent of zoom and virtual conferring - three prime ministers should physically travel to Kyiv to meet with President Zelensky. Then I realised my own age.

For me, it is natural to recall Winston Churchill visiting Paris just days before France fell, in an effort to rally the French Premier Paul Renaud, and also the French people, as well as the French Armed Forces and the British Expeditionary Force. That of course is field leadership.

The very field leadership we see with President Zelenskyy.

Which is why the President of the United States is visiting Europe. Sometimes, the old school principles are vitally important in this vain, frivolous, disrespectful but now, very serious, 21st Century.

15 March 2022
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© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022