Humanitarian
17.05.2022

“We Can Repeat:” A Military Theater of the Absurd

“We Can Repeat:” A Military Theater of the Absurd

It’s already been two months since Ukrainians began waging their struggle against the Russian aggressors. However, you need to understand that by starting a “special military operation” on the 24th of February, the Russian Federation committed an act of aggression not only against Ukraine, but also against Europe, accompanied by bloody and brutal war crimes and offenses against humanity.


From the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the aggressor country in the territory of Ukraine, 572 children have been injured. As of April 19 the official toll of murdered children reached 205, and the number of wounded increased to 367 according to the Prosecutor General Office. These numbers are not final as work is underway to establish the count in places of active hostilities, in the temporarily occupied and liberated territories. The military invasion of the Russian Federation creates conditions for Ukrainians, designed for their mass physical destruction, including but not limited to killings with a political and ideological component.

Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, Mariupol, Trostyanets, and Borodyanka are on the list of Ukrainian cities that, in the eyes of the whole world, are associated with the horrors of the Russian war, and this list becomes longer every day. Men with hands tied behind their backs shot in the back of the head, women shot for daring to leave the basement, bombed schools and kindergartens– the indiscriminate killing of civilians seems to be a feature of the Russians’ war against Ukrainians. 

Every day, information on the number of murders, tortures, mutilations and rapes is updated with new data from different regions of Ukraine. These are repeated and deliberate cases of flagrant violations of international law, the rules of war, and ordinary human morality. These are crimes against humanity.


From stories that are overgrown with new details, the blood runs cold. According to the official website of the Bucha city council, more than 400 bodies have already been exhumed from mass graves, among them a 23-year-old Kateryna Yershova, who was raped, tortured and afterwards killed with a shot in the head: “The girl was captured in the street, tortured, raped, shot and thrown into the mass grave in the church yard,” – stated in the Bucha city council. The stepfather of the victim, Andrii Derenko, declared that her body was maimed, the majority of nails on fingers were absent, as if she tried to protect herself and fought back. Police told the family that Karyna had been tortured and killed. However, additional horrible details were not disclosed. It is known that the victim’s hands were burned to the bone, leaving the silver rings on her fingers, which she always wore. In addition, a tourniquet was placed on Karyna’s leg, possibly to stop the bleeding from the gunshot wound. Relatives of the victim say that in 2014 they were forced to leave Donetsk due to the occupation, but the Russian occupiers still caught up with them near Kyiv. According to Karyna’s stepfather, he is ashamed to speak Russian because the Russian armed forces killed a Russian-speaking girl.


 

So what is the reason for such hatred, and why are the occupiers committing such atrocities? The root cause can be seen in the worldview of Russians and the paradigm of their life values, instilled by the Russian authorities.


 

Twenty-first century Russians’ biggest achievement is, surprisingly, the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II. The majority of citizens of the biggest country in the world lives by the ideals of the victory of 1945. Complete militarization of the Russian Federation and slogans “We can repeat” followed, while in Ukraine the slogan “never again” prevailed. 


The leader of modern fascist Russia, Vladimir Putin, for his part, only fueled the thirst for military hysteria: “Russia will be ready to respond to any aggressor who dares to repeat the attack of Hitler’s Germany on the Soviet Union,” – stated Vladimir Putin in an interview with TASS back in 2020. “The Soviet Union has been hit by a very terrible, horrific attack by Nazi Germany, we have lost 27 million people,” the president said in response to a request to comment on the phrase “We can repeat,” which became a popular slogan for Victory Day in Russia. “There is no country in the world that would suffer such a loss. And if anyone dares to try to do something similar, we will repeat.” At the same time, Putin added that Russia “has never sought and does not seek such a development.”


Now, the cynicism of such statements should not surprise anyone, given that Russia has now become a total empire of lies, where manipulating the minds of the population has become the norm that shocks the whole world.  

But the worst thing is that when the shocking footage of the punitive operation in Bucha was released, the Russian propaganda flywheel picked up these facts to raise the fighting spirit of the Russians, and instilled pride in the events that took place on the threshold of the European Union in the spring of 2022. On April 17, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba in his Twitter post wrote shocking information: “We can repeat:” in Russia, “The Massacre in Bucha” is proudly depicted on T-shirts.” The Russian Federation is probably proud of the actions of Putin’s army in Bucha. They began to create special T-shirts about this genocide, which are in demand, according to “Dyvoglyad“. Clothes with the inscription “Bucha massacre– we can repeat (Buchanskaya reZnya – mozhem poVtorit)” quickly became popular in Nazi russia. The T-shirts depict a russian man with a knife cutting a pig (a common animal metaphor with which Russians associate Ukrainians). 

On top of that, recently US President Joe Biden called Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin a butcher. At the same time, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz interceded for the people of the Russian Federation, despite the fact that 71% of them support the war against the people of Ukraine.

Moreover, EU member states should be on the alert, as ever more Russians support military invasion of Europe. 86.6% of citizens support the invasion of Putin’s army in the European Union. They view Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia as the next potential victims. These are the results of a poll obtained by Active Group: all in all 75.5% of Russians approve of the idea of ​​armed invasion of another country and believe that it should be Poland. 41% of respondents immediately chose the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) as their next victims, and another 39.9% chose Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.

Current events in Ukraine must become central to the entire civilized world, which must prevent further war crimes that pose a threat to Europe as well. We should not expect critical thinking from the population of the Russian Federation, because the main ideology of ​​the Putin regime is total militarization, which has eaten up most of the state funds in recent decades, and educating a generation of soldiers who are ready to kill anyone for his crazy ambitions. In 2020, when the whole world was suffering from a pandemic, Russia increased its military spending to $61.7 billion. And $42.2 billion was allocated for “national defense”. Overall, Russia ranks fourth in the world in terms of defense spending, closely following the United States, China and India.

Russian preschools start to put the idea of r​ussia’s invincibility in the minds of children at an early age. The scale of the disguise in military uniform of World War II is impressive. Preschoolers march with toy guns, and school-age children actively join the ranks of the Russian movement of schoolchildren “Unarmiya,” the creation of which was initiated by the minister of defense of Russia Sergei Shoigu. Back in 2016, he made a shocking statement that the Reichstag building would be reconstructed in the suburbs of Moscow: “Not its complete replica, just enough for our soldiers to conquer a specific place,” he said. Soon, in April 2017 “the Reichstag near Moscow was conquered.” In other words, the propaganda of the war in Russia has been expanding for years, instilling in the population the inevitability and need to be ready for the development of military scenarios that Russia is constantly implementing in foreign countries under the guise of good intentions: Transnistria, Georgia, Syria, Azerbaijan and now Ukraine. So who will be next?

Ukraine has already begun to lay the groundwork for bringing those responsible for war crimes in Ukraine to justice. On March 16, 2022, the UN International Court of Justice announced the first victorious decision for Ukraine in a dispute against the Russian Federation concerning the interpretation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and under which Russia was obliged to immediately cease military action in Ukraine. But little has changed since then. In addition to Ukraine, 13 other countries have launched investigations into war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, according to Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova. But the world must understand that crimes can be fully considered only after the end of the war. Because the flywheel of propaganda in Russia continues to promote the theme “we can repeat.” Who will be next in this military theater of the absurd? We can only guess…

 

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