What the Ukrainians experienced and understood in the first days of the war, the West is only now starting to realise. This is how human and social consciousness is arranged – an abstract understanding, which is the result of the work of political analysts, is not a stimulus to action. What is outside the sphere of practical experience and is not perceived by the senses does not help decisive action.
The world’s leading think tanks, including the renowned RAND Corporation, believed that Russia would win their unprovoked war against Ukraine within 72 hours, and that it made no sense to supply Ukraine with weapons. But it has turned out very differently; seven weeks of the war have passed, Russia has not received any tactical, let alone strategic advantage. Moreover, at Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, the “second army” of the world suffered crushing defeats. The retreat of the Russian troops was so swift that they did not have time to cover up the traces of their occupation. Then the terrible truth of their crimes was revealed to the whole world.
What the Russian soldiers left behind shook the whole world. Hundreds of killed, tortured civilians, women, children. Mass rapes not only of women but also of children. The unimaginable atrocities of the occupiers have become a focal point of public consciousness in the West; the detached, formal expressions of “deep concern” and sympathy have been replaced by anger and determination.
Humanity has always been at the centre of the values of the Western world, and is the basis of modern civilisation. The problem of the public consciousness of the civilised world is that it was believed that if human life in modern Western civilisation is a core value, then the same must be true for Russia as well. But the bitter truth of what we have seen leads us to the inescapable conclusion that Russia is not party to the values of world civilisation. Russia is a totalitarian state whose population has been zombified by propaganda, the very reincarnation of Nazi Germany under Hitler’s Third Reich.
The fact that Western society is only now beginning to wake up to this is the fault of the political elites, whose only goal was to obtain electoral support at any cost. All the efforts of European governments have aimed at improving the material well-being of their voters, juggling with democratic slogans, promoting pacifism, reducing security and defence spending, while in the East, a terrible monster was growing slowly but steadily.
The West has finally awakened. The visit to Ukraine of the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, who visited Bucha and saw with their own eyes hundreds of corpses and the once comfortable suburban city almost obliterated, drew a sharp line in the sand for the West’s understanding of Russia and the role of Ukraine in modern history as a bastion of world civilisation.
The terrified eyes of the Head of the “European government”, when she automatically covered her face with her hands, will forever remain in our collective memory.
Now almost all European top-politicians have begun to realize what modern Russia is. Today, even openly pro-Russian politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Silvio Berlusconi have condemned the war crimes of the Russian army in Ukraine. Perhaps even the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Olaf Scholz, who blamed only Putin for starting the war and called for respect for the Russian people, will understand that it is not only about Putin. Old people and children were killed, ordinary Russian soldiers and officers raped women. The problem is not only one of Putin; political scientists and historians need to figure out how this state of affairs came about. How, did the neighbour of civilised Europe turn into such a terrible “Gothic” monster, and how did Europe knowingly allow the profits from trading with Russia to arm a hostile and aggressive army of invasion and allow depraved television propaganda to reduce the Russian people to a bestial state?
Now both the United States of America and Europe are no longer “studying the question” of what weapons can and cannot be supplied to Ukraine. They will and already are being delivered, as one well-known American publication wrote, “practically everything except nuclear weapons.” The West has not been fooled by Russia’s lethal it is conducting a local “special operation” in Ukraine. They understand that Russia is carrying out a dress rehearsal of the “denazification” and “demilitarization” of Europe, and openly declares this in its military doctrine. Russia has been slowly but surely moving towards this goal for decades, gradually increasing the scale of aggression – first Georgia in 2008, then Crimea and Donbass in 2014, Syria in 2021 and finally, a full-scale war in Ukraine on February in 2022.
If, as Russia had originally planned, Ukraine had been defeated in three or four days, then NATO forces in the Baltic countries and Poland would already have been “tested” for strength. There are still sceptics in American and European expert circles who cannot believe in the reality of such a scenario, just as they could not believe that in the 21st century Russian soldiers could rape and kill innocent women and children.
Today, the dilemma of the future world order is formulated simply: “now or never.” It is necessary to finally defeat the Russian Nazi aggressor in Ukraine, here and now. It is Russia that must be denazified and demilitarized in such a way that it can never again threaten any state in the world. The pain and suffering of the victims of Russian Nazism should not be in vain.
