In a long and detailed post, the spectacle mag reports:
The Ukrainian people are fighting for their survival...against Ukraine.
what the West calls a democracy, Ukrainians call a nightmare.
The author of the spectacle has done a bit of an about-face - rather like Yulia Mendel - when it comes to the Ukraine conflict.
About five years ago, when this war evolved from a civil war in Ukraine into its full-scale form, I was completely misinformed about the state of Empire, by default, like most Europeans. I was entirely on Ukraine’s side. I spent time online calling people Russian propagandists. I bought a Ukraine football shirt, which I used to wear proudly…
The article goes on to detail the conscription campaigns in Ukraine, the silencing of dissent and the depopulation of the country, all of which are well-known to anyone who has been following this conflict in detail since 2014.
The author's conclusion is:
My suggestion would be simple: hold an election. Allow the people to vote for politicians who have understood the writing on the wall and who might be less completely controlled by the interests of NATO and the Western military-industrial complex. If you tell me the constitution does not allow it, I will refer you to the paragraph above about the Maidan coup, and I will ask you to try again.
Good luck with that as the only way an election is going to happen is if there is another western backed coup to oust Zelensky or a clandestine effort to buy him off and slide in a more compliant replacement.
Of course, if you define Ukraine as its puppet government, controlled by NATO and kept in place by the same Western powers that benefit from every day this war continues, then yes, they want to keep fighting. It is not their children being sent to die. Zelensky’s children live safely outside Ukraine, as do the children of the vast majority of the Rada. The West is determined to fight Russia until the last Ukrainian. And the Ukrainian people, the real Ukraine, the only Ukraine that matters, have made clear that they are no longer willing to be the last Ukrainian.
The Ukrainian people have never been what mattered in this war and that began with the Ukrainian state's crackdown in the east from 2014 onwards.
Arguably, it was the Russians who cared more about Ukrainian people, namely those Russian-speakers being persecuted in eastern Ukraine as 'separatists' because they did not agree with the Maidan coup.
It's really impossible to imagine, for example, that if there was a coup in London, backed by say China or Russia, where right-wingers shot protestors and brought down a democratically elected government that the rest of the UK would just roll-over and let it happen?
But maybe they would, who knows, as they helped it to happen in Ukraine?
Only the eastern Ukrainians did not roll-over because they knew they would end up as second-class citizens in the new 'democratic' Ukraine which is exactly what started to happen after 2014 as a result of the Ukrainian state crackdown and the farcical Minsk agreements that no-one took seriously, least of all the Ukrainians.
The western narrative is that Russia 'forced' many of these people to become Russian citizens, compelling them to take Russian passports or evacuating them to Russia to be 're-educated' including many children (that the ICC accuses Russia of 'kidnapping'). But even that was done largely to ensure that people could survive on meagre Russian state benefits rather than those being denied or made difficult to get by Ukraine and that at least some children could live in some sort of safety while the war went on.
Admittedly, western nations in the EU and others opened their doors to millions of fleeing Ukrainians and did provide them with significant benefits in many cases but how many of them issued citizenship passports to these people?
Did Russia have other, bigger reasons for invading in 2022 than the fate of Russian-speaking Ukrainian separatists - of course it did.
But it took a very cautious Putin many years before he ramped up support for the separatists and eventually invaded to secure the Donbass as a buffer zone against yet more NATO enlargement and further encirclement of Russia.
It was never a 'full-scale' invasion but genuinely a 'special military operation' where the intention was a kind of short, sharp shock in order bring Ukraine to the negotiating table, which is actually what happened with the 2022 peace talks.
But even the SMO was not really big enough to achieve its objectives and in this respect it failed, in addition to the higher than expected level of Ukrainian resistance and lower than expected performance of the Russian military.
When it was clear that Russia had committed itself and was now on the back foot, the west stepped in directly to scupper the peace talks and commit Ukraine to a war of attrition it could never win unless NATO stepped in directly, which very unlikely as that would have led to WW3 and hypersonic missiles raining down on European capitals.
Instead a successful proxy war has been fought by the west at the expense of both Ukraine and Russia in terms of human costs and the EU/UK economies in terms of economic costs.
Sanctions forced Russia to pivot east and although their economy has undoubtedly been severely impacted, Russia has so far survived a sanctions regime that would have brought almost any other country to its knees.
Sometimes it's good to be a 'gas station masquerading as a country' rather than a country masquerading as a democracy.
Many years since the 2022 invasion, hundreds of thousands of military and some civilians have perished in a war that was never supposed to happen but did because someone, other than the direct participants, wanted it to.