As Many Dead Slavs as Possible

[Kiev, 2/11/16]

Laying siege to a city, you’re not just cutting it off from reinforcement and supplies, but information. In Ukraine, the Russians aren’t quite doing that. Even more incredibly, they still allow trains to run. Two weeks into Russia’s invasion, you can still take a train from Kharkov to Lviv, then board a bus to Poland, all for free. Russia clearly wants civilians out of the warzone so it can engage what’s left of the Ukrainian military.

Still, why hasn’t Russia shut down Ukrainians’ access to propaganda from Kiev and the West? With electricity and Wi-Fi still on, Ukrainians can get all these stories of Zelensky humiliating an evil, delusional and bumbling Putin, with demoralized Russian troops just begging to be allowed to trek home, in the snow.

Earlier, the West celebrated the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a nameless Ukrainian pilot who supposedly shot down six Russian planes. The always reliable Wikipedia explains, “Although not confirmed to be real, the Ghost of Kyiv has been credited as a morale booster for Ukrainians.”

How delicate to define a total lie as “not confirmed to be real.” As a sure sign of desperation, absurd lies can’t boost morale for long, though.

Now, we’re told a Ukrainian woman has just downed a Russian drone with a jar of tomatoes, thrown from her balcony. With such force and accuracy, this broad must be signed to your favorite MLB team as a lights out closer!

Another one, two, three 9th inning from the Babushka of Kyiv! When you see Elena jog from the bullpen, game’s over!

I only found out about this awesome slinger from Graham Siebert, an American in Kiev:

Effective Use of Marinated Tomatoes—Yesterday, while having a cigarette on the balcony of her Kyiv apartment, a Ukrainian “Babushka” heard a buzzing sound nearby. Soon she realized that the buzz came from a Russian drone, likely used for artillery spotting. She reached under her chair, picked up a jar of marinated tomatoes, and she threw the jar, still containing the tomatoes, at the drone. As describe in this article, she scored a direct hit. She and her husband went downstairs, recovered the pieces of the downed drone, and threw them in separate garbage cans.

The article mentioned is in The Mirror, a London tabloid, and Siebert doesn’t just believe it without question, but adds, “There is no one else in the World who could pull this off, other than Ukrainians.” A day earlier, Seibert already said:

I’m feeling pretty prescient. I blogged at the very beginning of the war that the countryside would be too marshy for armor to operate, and the roads were inadequate. I recently gave credit to General Mud for stymieing the advance. That’s probably as good of a single sentence analysis as you will get.

We should be close to the point at which Ukrainians invite the demoralized soldiers to walk back home, leaving their equipment behind them. Ukraine will have the best army in Europe.

As a record of an articulate civilian under the stresses of war, Seibert’s accounts from a besieged Kiev are fascinating. Responsible for a wife, three children and parents-in-law, Seibert must stay strong and calm. In fact, he ends most blogs with an assertion of male strength, such as, “That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man slept in late, the good-looking woman was contentedly in his arms, and Grandma got the children breakfast. An above average breakfast, of course.”

On a practical level, Siebert has filled sandbags, stocked up on food and boiled all his eggs, just in case the electricity is cut.

For all his optimism, Seibert must know this war can get much worse, and it will, I believe, unless Ukraine surrenders. There’s no way Putin will withdraw his troops defeated. If Russia loses, she’s finished, so Putin will commit whatever is needed, manpower or weapon wise, to prevent that.

At the start of Russia’s invasion, Chris Hedges wrote that although “Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry,” it’s still in the wrong, because “preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime.”

The Russian invasion, though, is only an escalation of a war that began in 2014, with the US-orchestrated Maidan Revolution. Ukraine’s steady attacks on the breakaway Donbas have killed thousands of Russian civilians, and made refugees of 1.4 million. If Ukraine was admitted into NATO, hostile nuclear missiles would be just six minutes from Moscow, and unfriendly troops 180 miles from Volgograd, a chokepoint for Russian oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea. Putin had to act.

Let’s not kid ourselves, NATO is not a defensive pact but Uncle Sam’s mercenary army, to be sent wherever. Most of the “coalition” soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan were from NATO.

Every war is filled with war crimes, and not only that, each war is, by definition, a crime against humanity, for no one, soldier or civilian, deserves to die in the most grotesque manner, with maximum pain and minimal dignity, as is routine in war. That said, peace at any cost is even worse, else nation after nation wouldn’t fight wars.

Though Hedges titles his article, “The Greatest Evil Is War,” it’s obviously not true to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Babushka of Kyiv or the heroic Ukrainian soldiers celebrated by Graham Seibert, for they can end this war by simply surrendering, and they should, actually, to save lives.

Blustering, the West is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, with Zelensky as their chickenshit thespian. In Tablet Magazine, the Paris-based Vladislav Davidzon gushes, “Glory to Ukraine! And glory to Zelensky, the bravest Jew on earth!”

If you’re unfamiliar with “chickenshit,” it means the mindless, counterproductive or even deadly commands that often come from military leaders.

In his classic Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, Paul Fussell devotes an entire chapter to chickenshit. An excerpt:

Some of the Second World War masters of chickenshit became famous for it, like General Patton. He insisted that members of his Third Army dress genteelly in the combat zone, and many men died with their neckties tucked in between the second and third shirt buttons. The war’s champion practitioner was probably Hitler, with his insistence on appearing to win the war instead of winning it, and his devotion to the heroic facade regardless. General Paulus at Stalingrad begged to relieve the suffering by surrendering while some troops were left alive. He addressed the Fuhrer in these terms:

ARMY REQUESTS IMMEDIATE PERMISSION TO SURRENDER IN ORDER TO SAVE LIVES OF REMAINING TROOPS

and added a heartrending recital of disaster, including the destruction of five whole divisions, with 18,000 of the wounded unattended in their agony. Paulus concluded: "COLLAPSE INEVITABLE." To this Hitler sent this monumentally chickenshit reply:

SURRENDER IS FORBIDDEN. SIXTH ARMY WILL HOLD THEIR POSITIONS TO THE LAST MAN AND THE LAST ROUND AND BY THEIR HEROIC ENDURANCE WILL MAKE AN UNFORGETTABLE CONTRIBUTION TOWARDS THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A DEFENSIVE FRONT AND THE SALVATION OF THE WESTERN WORLD.

What Zelensky is doing with Ukrainian soldiers and civilians is actually worse than chickenshit. As with Ihor Kolomoyskyi, his Jewish pygmalion, to see as many dead Slavs as possible is an end in itself.

Ever more nakedly, they’re trying to wreck the entire West. With embargo caused food shortage widely forecast, another holodomor looms.

[Kiev, 2/9/16]