Unchain Ukraine

Peter Brookes cartoon

I tuned into Russia Today (RT) the other day to see whether this TV cum propaganda channel had anything remotely interesting or challenging to say about Russian foreign policy towards Ukraine.

But sadly it was the usual diet of disaffected western critics banging on endlessly about how wonderful President Putin is, so to balance things up a bit I thought I'd share this opinion piece by Dominic Lawson from The Sunday Times.   

Russian boys are dying, Mr Putin – and it’ll be your downfall

By Dominic Lawson -The Sunday Times
Time for a progress report on the geostrategic chess board. Readers may recall that in April this column displayed incredulity at the way in which the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was being admired and even praised as acting “like a chess grandmaster” for the way he was defending Russia’s interests in Ukraine.

Alex Salmond of the Scottish National party and Nigel Farage of Ukip were among many western political figures who lauded the leadership qualities of the cold-eyed ex-KGB officer in the Kremlin, although it’s mystifying why such nationalists should have eulogised a man attempting to reimpose Russian imperialist sway over a country that in 1991 had voted overwhelmingly for independence.

Anyway, this column observed that Putin had played an appalling chess game. First he had caused the political annihilation of his main piece in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, when he instructed the then president to use lethal force against demonstrators in Kiev. Quite possibly his stooge would still be in power otherwise. Then his annexation of Crimea generated such panic among investors that massive capital outflows followed, leading to a collapse in the value of the rouble.

Since then the downing of a civilian airliner by forces armed by Moscow and the fury of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, at Putin’s lies about that incident have led to sanctions to which the Russian leader idiotically responded by a ban on agricultural imports from the European Union and America, with the result that food prices in Russia have soared.

This last is relevant, as Putin’s largest asset on the board is the faith put in him by the Russian people. It is undeniable that his domestic popularity soared with the “liberation” of Crimea. Most gratifyingly for him, not a single Russian soldier lost his life.

This is hardly the case in Ukraine. The Kremlin has been maintaining the pretence that the only people fighting the Kiev government are Ukrainians seeking reunion with Mother Russia, or Russians going as freelance volunteers out of a spirit of solidarity.

Last week, though, it became clear that more than 100 Russian soldiers had been slaughtered in a battle with Ukrainian forces near Snizhnye, in the Donetsk region. This, of course, is absolutely denied by the Kremlin: the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has described the images released of a Russian tank column operating in Ukraine as coming from “computer games”.

Unfortunately for the chances of that lie being believed, real flesh-and-blood Russian soldiers have mothers and fathers — and they know what happened to their sons. Mikhail Smirnov told The Guardian that his grandson, Stanislav, 22, had sent a message from the Ukrainian border on August 19 saying his motor rifle brigade was “being deployed”.

They had heard nothing since. “Our government has gone too far — it has lost its head,” said the grandfather. Reminded that Moscow claims it has no troops in Ukraine, he retorted: “Hey, we are not blind.”

In fact, the Russian government is doing its best to pull the wool over the eyes of those whose sons and grandsons have already been slaughtered. It has ensured that the death certificates lie about where the soldiers met their end. None has received a military funeral, still less been recognised for having died for their country.

A group called the Soldiers’ Mothers Council has now burst through that cruel deception. The recent capture of some young Russian troops in Ukraine — and their pathetic televised pleas that they had not been told by their officers where they were going — has all but destroyed whatever credibility the Kremlin might have had left.

Valentina Melnikova, who leads the Soldiers’ Mothers Council, declared: “President Vladimir Putin is not only violating international laws, not only the Geneva convention; he is also breaking Russian federation law about defence. And as for [Colonel- General Vladimir Shamanov, the Russian airborne commander] . . . He forces his servicemen to fight in a foreign state, Ukraine, illegally, while mothers receive coffins with their sons, anonymously.”

We are talking here of young conscripts. This anger is on a quite different level from that expressed by the parents of professional soldiers from Britain or America who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. And bear in mind that the suffering mother has a peculiarly intense grip on Russian popular imagination. Putin’s most perilous moment — in terms of his domestic support — was the fury unleashed against him by bereaved mothers after the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk in August 2000, when the Kremlin left 23 survivors of a torpedo explosion to suffocate rather than accept foreign help to rescue them.

Putin revealed to the world his chilling lack of concern for the terrible deaths of his country’s own servicemen when he later appeared on the American chat show Larry King Live. Asked “What happened?”, he just shrugged, smiled and said: “It sank.”

It is true that Putin’s popularity was not done any harm by the deaths of Russian soldiers in the conflict in Chechnya. But there is a crucial difference, and not just because the Chechens were themselves the separatists trying to create a new border. For the Russian public a conflict with terroristic Muslims is one thing; killing fellow Slavs is quite another. This is reflected in such opinion polls as have been carried out. One recently conducted by the Moscow-based Levada centre found only 10% favoured sending Russian troops in support of the anti-Kiev separatists.

If Nato’s meeting in Wales this week were to assume the cold logic of chess, the argument should go as follows. Putin’s biggest piece, his queen, is his popularity within Russia. More stringent sanctions, including the freezing of financial assets, will greatly inconvenience the Kremlin, but they take time to set up and more time to bite.

The brutal truth is that nothing will reduce Putin’s domestic popularity with more certainty than a dramatic increase in the deaths of young Russian conscripts in Ukraine. So in order to diminish his main asset — and, obviously, to honour our commitment, made in 1997, “to support Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity and the principle of inviolability of frontiers as key factors of stability and security” — we should supply our most advanced tank-busting handheld missile launchers to the Ukrainian army.

I suspect this will not be the line to come out of Nato’s emergency summit: it has a dread of being accused of “escalating the conflict”. Even so, giving a somnolent Nato a renewed sense of mission is just the latest direct result of the Kremlin’s blunders on the geostrategic chessboard — along with destroying its vital relationship with Germany’s leader and forcing its monopoly gas exporter, Gazprom, into an appallingly bad contract with China in place of a much more lucrative deal with a now-reluctant Europe.

One can understand why the Russian president committed this blunder. It was the secession of Ukraine, something neither wished for nor planned by the then US president, George HW Bush, that precipitated the break-up of the Soviet Union, and Putin has long wanted to restore that empire.

He is doomed to disappointment. To put it in chess terms, he is a clever tactician but an appalling strategist.



Here Today.... (20 July 2014)






Frustration: The reporter announced her resignation on Twitter saying she was 'for the truth'

A journalist from Russia Today, Sarah Firth, has resigned in protest at the TV channel's coverage of the shooting down of Malaysian Flight MH17.

I can't say I'm surprised because one look at the station tells you that it's just a propaganda arm of the Russian Government.   


Disgust: Sara Firth handed in her resignation in a protest against Russia Today's coverage of the MH17 attack

Russia Today (14 December 2013)


I've taken to watching a new news channel recently - Russia Today - which as far as I can tell seems to consist of lots of people (presenters and contributors) who admire Russia greatly - while harbouring an intense dislike of the west.

Whenever Russia today covers some remotely controversial subject, a disaffected flunkey gets wheeled out to make an unflattering comparison between Nato countries like Britain or America - and good old mother Russia. 

During an industrial dispute or strike in Britain, for example, it is normal for some left wing politico, often an academic or swivel-eyed Trotskyist, to be wheeled out to tell the viewers that their country is going to hell in a handcart.

Because the Government is useless and politically corrupt - whereas we seldom see or hear very much about life under President Putin and his friends - for example, the recent barbaric treatment of Greenpeace activists.

Anyway I dearly wish that I had watched Russia Today during the great Grangemouth debacle involving the Unite trade union, its unimpressive leader Len McCluskey and the Labour Party selection contest in nearby Falkirk - which became bogged down in allegations of vote-rigging. 

Now that would have made great viewing I'm sure, for unintended comic reasons if nothing else, but my mind was on other things, I'm sad to say.

Yet every time I watch the programme, I ask myself the same question:

Do the people who control the editorial content of Russia Today understand that a similar programme could never be made in President Putin's Russia?  

If they do, then at least we can all sleep soundly in our beds - safe in the knowledge that, whatever else, irony is not dead.

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