R@pe, murder and ethnic cleansing as they are - Bucha, Irpin, near Kyiv our days

WARNING ⚠️ GRAPHIC CAREFUL, SHOCKING PICTURES.

 AND WORDS. After the Russian retreat from the areas north of Kyiv, evidence starts pouring for a large-scale indiscriminate massacre of civilians. There are shallow, hastily covered mass graves and civilians with capped heads and tied hands shot in the street and left to rot there, in the open. Bodies with cut-off ears and fingers.

A woman who was a village mayor was executed with her entire family. Naked bodies of raped women were piled on top of a heap of tires to burn them. In Bucha, they raped women and underage girls, shot them and then drove on their dead bodies with tanks. Yes, read it once again. THEY R.A.PED GIRLS, EXECUTED THEM, AND RAN OVER THEIR BODIES WITH TANKS. The irony: it was happening on Pushkin and Lermontov Streets. Many bodies are obviously just passer-by’s who may have gone out or cycled for water or bread. But it also seems that the Russians attempted to execute every man aged 18 to 60 they could find. There are at least 280 bodies identified in mass graves in Bucha alone, but the combined body count from all Kyiv area will be in thousands. Now the threat by a Russia Today propagandist to “burn you Ukrainians on top of your Constitution” does not sound at all like propaganda. It sounds like an actual plan. Can you imagine what would have happened had they taken Kyiv?

Now the names of Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel stand alongside the names of Babyn Yar, Auschwitz, Rwanda, Srebrenica. If this does not qualify as an act of genocide, then I don’t know what does. This is Putin’s war which Russians don’t want, you said? These people were killed very much not by Putin himself. They were killed by ordinary Russians who had a choice to boycott the orders if they really were reluctant to fight. They could have surrendered to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and saved their lives. Instead, they chose to butcher civilians and take their flatscreen TVs, laptops, tablets, electric kettles, whiskey bottles, even their shoes and clothes including lingerie – all this loot is now being sent from Belarus to their “innocent” families in Russia, via Belarusian and Russian post (they must be declared criminal organisations after this). Much of the loot is being sold in improvised “bazaars” in southern Belarus. Yes, dear Belarusians, it seems that your fellow countrymen and women are not above buying the loot of the dead, while conveniently positioning themselves as “innocent” passive standbys, always “ni pri chem”. The smartest asses on the block, right? Shame, shame, shame.

But the blood of these people is also on many Western hands. Western politicians who sought to appease Russia, particularly German and French ones, are all complicit in these atrocities. Ukrainian blood is once again on German hands like it was in 1941-1944. This is what the policy of “deep concern” leads to. This is a direct result of “let’s try to understand Russia”, “Putin must have his reasons for it”, “Russia has such a great culture”, “this is much more complicated”, and “but we just need Russian gas”. The price of Europeans’ asses kept warm is our blood in the streets. And Russian culture is every bit as complicit, it is written with blood of butchered and enslaved nations. The scholar of literature Ewa Thomspon brought up an example from Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons” (1862), a classical Russian novel, where the characters boast, with the author’s tacit approval, of their wealth, particularly of exquisite chairs, acquired “during a military campaign in Poland” (that is, a loot from a bloody suppression of the 1831 Polish uprising). Just a tiny example out of thousands glorifying looting and butchery in Russian culture. You think it was debated in Russia since 1991? Or how the idea of a “superior” Russian culture paves way for the idea of Russian supremacy? Huh. On Pushkin and Lermontov streets in Bucha, they raped, killed and ran over teenage girls with tanks. I don’t think there can be a Pushkin or a Lermontov street in Ukraine—or anywhere in the world—after this. And that comes from me, who was greatly fond of both Russian poets and still can recite many lines by heart. If you want one, here's one for today: "Gold did say: 'Lo, I can buy all'. - 'I'll take all', the iron said". Written all over "the great Russian culture", into every Russian's DNA. A programme for action, an algorithm of sorts. Buy all, kill all. Or at least those who can't be bought.

It is even more appalling because we, Ukrainian experts in the West, have been warning about this since 2014 if not even earlier. The earliest paper where I warn about the intensifying imperialism and orientalism regarding Ukraine in Russian media was published in 2013. But our expertise, now prophetic in retrospect, fell on mostly deaf ears. It drowned in the chorus of Russophiles and appeasers. We were often accused, at worst, of “nationalism”, or, at best, told to seek nuance and balance our perspective with the Russian one. These here pictures – is that enough nuance for you, folks?

Sadly my most recent prophecies made in the interview with Dagens Nyheter on 24 February, the first day of the war, are coming true once again: the Russians are bent on genocide and execute civilians. My predictions turned out correct largely because I did my history homework alright, unlike many Ukrainians and Westerners. I remember the 1708 Baturyn massacre when the Russian army butchered up to 20,000 civilians in retribution for Mazepa’s siding with Charles XII, the entire population of Mazepa’s capital. I remember several thousands of civilians executed in Kyiv by the Russian Bolsheviks in February 1918 for merely speaking Ukrainian (yes, it is through acts like that that “Russian-speaking Ukrainians” were forged). I remember countless other civilians executed as hostages, relatives of guerrilla fighters, or even for no reason during the Bolshevik occupations in 1917-1921 and well into the 1920s. I remember 3.5 million, including my great-grandmother, who were starved to death in the man-made Holodomor, the genocidal famine. I remember thousands of intellectuals and artists who were executed by NKVD from 1929 to 1938, and many more who were imprisoned, including two of my great-uncles who spent one year (!) in a prison in Kharkiv, barely escaping execution. I remember the Polish victims of Katyń massacre, likely including my own great-grandfather who went missing in 1939. All these were acts of genocide that went unpunished and even largely unknown. If Russians have long been killing us for being who we are, why would they not do it again? Actually, for at least 20 years we kept hearing from Putin and other key figures how they missed what was going on under Stalin and how badly they wanted it back.

This is the thing. If evil goes unpunished, it will grow and come back bigger. If Russia gets away with murder again, it will continue murdering. Russia was not punished for the Soviet crimes. Russia got away with genocide in Chechnya, with civilian extermination in Syria, with ethnic cleansings in Crimea and east of Ukraine, with brutal suppression of its own dissenters and the protesters in Belarus. It MUST be punished now, or it will continue its murders in Ukraine, and in no time will start murdering elsewhere, think Poland, the Baltic states, Scandinavia... Germany, you think you are completely off the list? Really? Mark me – all my prophecies on Russia have come true. But this time, we have a chance to stop this new brutal murder right in the centre of Europe.

Ukrainians are ready to fight, we need no boots on the ground, but all sorts of offensive weaponry must be given to Ukraine to end this genocidal war and protect other European nations from ever living the nightmare we are living through. I do not see any point in peace talks after this. What is the point of peace talks with anyone whose aim is to kill you rather than wrest concessions? Staving off your own killing? This is now a fight to the death, it is either us or them. Putin and his clique, as well as all military and police commanders and the entire personnel of the Russian military and police must face trial and punishment in a new edition of a Nuremberg trial, condemning also the man-eating ideology of the "Russian world" and Leninism-Stalinism (because that evil also got away with murder unlike the Nazi plague). The former prosecutor of international criminal courts Carla Del Ponte, who prosecuted Milosevic and the Rwandan genocide, already says Putin has to be prosecuted as a war criminal; the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trial voiced a similar opinion. I hope that such trials would end in execution sentences for the top brass just like in 1945. If the UN does not move one finger after this (again), it should just be dissolved just as the League of Nations was. We need a new, working global framework, not just a propaganda exchange club where predators lecture their victims before eating them up. And there must be no way the sanctions are lifted or softened even after the Russian military retreats from all of Ukraine (including Crimea where they have been carrying out a slow-burn ethnic cleansing of Crimean Tatars since 2014). The sanctions must remain in place until Russia ceases to be a threat to the world. Carthago delenda est.