4 NEWS
THE WEEK 9 April 2022The main stories...
news agency RIA Novosti. It states that
the “denazification” of Ukraine will
require more than just the liquidation
of the country’s “nationalist elite”.
A “substantial part of the populace” is
“also guilty of being passively Nazi, and
facilitators of Nazism”, the article says,
and will require “re-training through
ideological repression and fierce
censorship” for at least a generation.
The author argues that Ukrainian school
textbooks should be confiscated; that the
people of Ukraine should be compelled
to denounce one another; and that
memorials to Russian soldiers should be
erected to commemorate the war against
Ukrainian fascism.Putin’s brutal tactics, which have served
his purposes well in both Chechnya
and Syria, have depended on “a level of
cynicism and weakness from the West”,
said Daniel Boffey in The Guardian. The question now is
whether the West is at last prepared to put a stop to it. Alas,
it’s hard to see where justice will come from, said Mark
Wallace in The i Paper. It’s no good looking to the UN Human
Rights Council, which is supposedly “responsible for the
promotion and protection of human rights around the globe”,
given that Russia is a member
of that body. And nor is there
likely to be any meaningful
action from the UN Security
Council, which is supposed to
deliver “effective collective measures” for, among other things,
“the removal of threats to peace and... suppressing acts of
aggression”. Again, Russia is a member and has a veto. As
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky (below) pointed out
in a powerful speech to the UN Security Council this week,
these bodies have never looked more impotent.One institution that might make a difference is the
International Criminal Court (ICC), said The Economist.
It has opened an investigation into the Ukraine war and will
no doubt find plenty of evidence of Russian war crimes.
Of course, there’s little chance that it will ever manage to
drag Putin into the dock. Russia doesn’t recognise the ICC
today, and the body’s rulings can in any case only be enforced
through the UN Security Council. But the ICC should
nevertheless press on. The legal process will “shed light on
Russia’s lies, to the embarrassment of Putin’s international
backers”, and might deter some of Putin’s lieutenants from
following orders to commit further war crimes.In the meantime, said the FT, the best the West can do is to
send more arms shipments to Ukraine and further squeeze the
Kremlin’s ability to finance its war. The EU prepared a new
sanctions package this week, said Katja Hoyer in The Daily
Telegraph, but Germany is still blocking
by far the most effective measure: an
immediate import ban on Russian gas.
Such an embargo would be painful for
Germany, which currently imports 40%
of its gas from Russia, but it wouldn’t be
catastrophic. Most studies predict that it
would lead to an economic contraction
of, at worst, 3-4% (see page 16). “Berlin
needs to accept that there is a price to
pay for its complacent energy policy
over the last two decades. At the
moment Ukrainians are paying it.”Here in Ukraine, “no one can talk about
anything else,” said Iuliia Mendel in The
Washington Post. Every mobile phone is
full of harrowing images of the dead
bodies lying in the street, with their
hands tied behind their backs, and of the
partially buried corpses in mass graves.
Every laptop carries reports of the
summary executions and sexual violence,
the women raped in front of their
children, the bodies crushed under
tanks. Before the war, Bucha, 35 miles
northwest of Kyiv, was “known as a
great, cosy town, an affordable option
for those looking to stay close to the
capital”. But following the retreat of
Russian forces from Bucha, and the
discovery of the horrors they perpetrated
during their four-week occupation, it’s
now synonymous with the murderous
brutality of Vladimir Putin’s invasion.“The West can no longer be under any illusions about the
nature of this war,” said The Times. Ukrainian officials say
they’ve found the bodies of more than 400 civilians in recently
retaken towns near Kyiv. One can only imagine the toll in
towns and cities still under Russian control. The Putin regime
dismissed the horrifying images with the usual shameless lies,
said David Ignatius in The
Washington Post. The pictures
were faked for the benefit of
the Western media, it claimed;
“All those who died in Bucha
were some kind of traffic offenders,” asserted one member of
parliament; the West chose Bucha for its “egregious accusation
against Russia” because the name sounds like “butcher”,
insisted talk show host Olesya Loseva. Moscow’s claims were
comprehensively rebutted by analysis of satellite imagery,
which showed that the dead bodies on the streets of Bucha
had been lying in exactly the same position since mid-March.The reports from Bucha, Irpin and other towns are appalling,
said John Ashmore on CapX, but I’m puzzled by this idea that
“Russia has only now crossed some sort of line”. Putin’s
“savagery” has been apparent for years. He honed his
scorched-earth military tactics in the two Chechen wars, in
1994 and 1999, where his troops unleashed the same brutality,
shelling civilians and engaging in looting and indiscriminate
murder. More recently in Syria, Russia set out to cow the
population of cities such as Aleppo in the same way by
deliberately targeting hospitals and by establishing
humanitarian corridors on which their troops subsequently
fired. Russian atrocities are nothing new, agreed Peter Bergen
on CNN. In the first Chechen war, around 25,000 civilians
died in just two months of fighting in the capital Grozny. This
is how the Putin regime wages war.Terrorising civilians is indeed
“a deliberate weapon of the Russians”,
said The Independent. Those shelled
homes and schools are not collateral
damage – they’re the target. Likewise, the
gang rapes, mutilations and summary
executions are not just random acts
of brutality. At this scale, it’s
“systematic”. If anyone doubts that there
is a murderous plan at work in Ukraine,
said Christopher Booth in The Spectator,
they need only read an article published
last weekend by the Russian state-ownedWar crimes in Ukraine: will Putin face justice?
COVER ILLUSTRATION: NEIL DAVIES“The gang rapes, mutilations and executions
are not just random acts of brutality”A woman mourning her husband, killed in BuchaBanca do Antfer
Telegram: https://t.me/bancadoantfer
Issuhub: https://issuhub.com/user/book/
Issuhub: https://issuhub.com/user/book/