Carlin gives his impressions of the war in Ukraine during a visit to the country. There may be peace one day, but there will never be love from the Ukrainian side.
After a week walking the streets of Kyiv in which, to my enormous surprise, I had not seen any sign of war, the Russians launched a drizzle of intercepted missiles on the city early on Friday, the first attack from the air in the capital of Ukraine in 51 days.
The question is, what for? Of course, it is the big question that must be asked generally about this war that is so absurd, so unnecessary and cruel. What? Did Vladimir Putin mount his “special” military adventure to prevent NATO – that is, the United States, France, Italy, Turkey, Albania, etc. – from invading Russia from Ukrainian territory? There was as much or even more possibility of Argentina invading Uruguay, or Uruguay invading Argentina.
But let’s try to figure out something resembling logic in a conflict that has claimed more than 200,000 lives in 14 months. Let’s see. No. First let’s remember Stalin’s fabulously cynical but accurate phrase, that one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic. Each one of those 200,000 was a human being with fathers and mothers, often married and with children.
Like Dmytro, a chubby 28-year-old with a friendly, mischievous face whose photo I saw placed over his grave on Wednesday in a cemetery in Irpin, the city where Ukrainian resistance was so withering a year ago that the Russian troops abandoned their attempt to capture Kyiv, 25 kilometres to the south, and fled back home.
One thing has become clear to me after traveling hundreds of kilometres in the Ukraine, after seeing countless graves and destroyed buildings and tanks, after speaking with fifty people of all walks of life – politicians, soldiers, priests, engineers, waiters, workers, men, women, old people and teenagers. If one thing is clear to me after ten days in Ukraine, it is that Putin’s armed forces will never achieve their initial goal of taking the capital and conquering Ukraine.
The war is limited today to the south and east of the country. That is where the carnage is taking place, a trench warfare concentrated in regions such as Bakhmut that, as happened in the First World War in France, does not affect most of the country. What it is about, basically, is the attempt by each side to strengthen its position on the ground in order to eventually strengthen its position at the negotiating table.
What will be negotiated? In all probability, the ceding to Russia of part of the Dombas area, in the east, and Crimea in the south. What is not known is how long it will take until they go from killing to talking.
Let’s go back to Friday’s missiles. Why were they dropped on Kyiv, 700 kilometres from the combat zones? There is an evil side, like the scorpion that kills the frog that helps it cross the river because it is “in its nature” to do so. But if there is a logic, it will consist of an attempt to undermine the warlike resolve of the Ukrainians so that they accept concessions in exchange for peace.
There are other imponderables, such as whether “the civilised countries,” as the Ukrainians call them, will continue to send them enough weapons. Whether the Russian economy will survive a drawn-out war. Whether Putin will fall. Let us remember that the loss of 15,000 soldiers in ten years in the war in Afghanistan precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. More than 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in 14 months in Ukraine. Will there come a point where a critical mass of the Russian people will say enough is enough? We will see.
What is known is that Putin cannot win the war, but he cannot lose it either. It is taken for granted that if Russian troops were expelled from all of Ukraine, Putin would be, politically at least, a dead man. Therefore, given the reserves of soldiers and weapons that Russia has, that is not going to happen. Not in the current circumstances.
What we also know is that unless Russia resorts to the nuclear bomb, Kyiv is not going to fall, and the Russians will not try to make it fall again. Before coming to Ukraine, I had read articles about the failure of the Russian invasion at the beginning of the war, but only now, after having visited the areas north of the capital through which the Russian troops entered, do I understand the dimension of the fiasco both at the military and political level.
Just by blowing up a bridge on the main road from the northern border to the capital, they forced the Russian tanks to divert onto secondary roads where the Ukrainian military destroyed them almost at will. The 70-kilometre column of Russian military vehicles that once inspired terror turned out to be paper tigers. The worst mistake, however, was to believe that the entrance to Kyiv would be a triumphant parade.
The Kremlin lies and lies, but the problem comes when it believes its own lies. They thought that the Ukrainian government was really a Nazi government, and that the Ukrainian people would receive them as liberators, with flowers and kisses like the Parisians greeted the Allied troops in 1944. The Russian leaders could not have made bigger fools of themselves.
Another thing I have learned on this trip is that, far from what I wanted to think, the typical Ukrainian does not distinguish between Putin and Russia. The invasion and the atrocities that have accompanied it have generated a deep hatred of Russians in general, of whom Putin is seen only as the figurehead. If launching missiles at Kyiv is an attempt to soften up the Ukrainians into eventually giving up large amounts of their territory, it is not going to work.
Rather, if we add to this the corpses that arrive every day from the front, quite the opposite. The day will come, I suspect, when the Ukrainian government will have a hard time getting the popular support it needs to reach an agreement with the Russians. But there will have to be an agreement. One way or another, one day there will be peace. What there will never be, not on the Ukrainian side, is love.
This column appeared in Clarín, Argentina, 29 April 2023, and is translated by Kieran Tapsell.
John Carlin is a journalist, author and columnist for both English and Spanish language newspapers.
Contributions to Pearls and Irritations
Your contribution will fund quality independent comment and analysis in Pearls and Irritations
Contribute
