From top: Russian President Vladimir Putin; Eamonn Kelly

The Week That Was

I’m guessing that RTÉs love affair with “Keev” over “Kiev” is an outcome of overly sensitive identity politics, driven by a fear of offending the natives of a country being over-run by Russian tanks. The Ukrainians might one day forgive Russia, but will they ever forgive RTÉ for mispronouncing Kiev?

Who To Believe?

In the media the challenge for the ordinary person, as ever, is to wonder who to believe about anything. While the Western media are calling Russia’s attack an “invasion”, the Russian media prefer the more benign “military operation”, coyly failing to mention that this involves one of the world’s strongest armies firing missiles into people’s apartment blocks.

The argument of who started it was in full swing at time of writing. To simplify, it is generally agreed that invading neighbouring countries is not the done thing. However, encroaching on countries with guided missiles and causing them to react in fear, is not very good form either. This appears to be the basic premise on which opinions differ.

Back in 1962 the Russians encroached on the US by having their friend Castro point some missiles at the US from Cuba. The US military immediately wanted to invade Cuba, but JFK resisted that drastic action in the belief that this could trigger a nuclear exchange, and instead went for back-door diplomacy.

This resulted in the Russians removing the missiles from Cuba in exchange for the US removing missiles from Turkey where they had been placed earlier, encroaching on Russia, revealing the Cuba move as a tat to the US Turkish tit.

Many people clearly still prefer to believe in good guys in white hats and bad guys in black hats. But what if neither side are good guys?

Encroachment

Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and others of the traditional left appear to see something similar in the Ukrainian situation, where former Soviet countries are now members of NATO, essentially placing Russia within striking distance, much as the US had been placed within missile reach in 1962.

From this they conclude that the encroachment is a provocation and that strictly speaking the invasion of Ukraine is understandable, if not necessarily commendable, since invading other countries is seen as a greater crime than encroachment.

So far so predictable. But then Nigel Farage takes the same view as the traditional left, and suddenly you’re wondering, if you’re Mick Wallace for instance, Am I now in the same camp as Nigel Farage? Is there even a left and right anymore now that the US Republican party seems to be rooting for Putin?

Complicating the issue even further is the fact that sitting right next door to autocratic Russia is a western style democracy, no matter how flawed western-style democracies might be in an ideal world. The last thing an autocratic leader like Putin needs is a democracy next door, setting a “bad” example for citizens who refuse to buy into his sole authority.

Israel

On top of all this you have critics of American foreign policy never tiring of asking that if it’s such a crime for one country to invade the territory of another country, how does the US justify continued support for Israel, who have clearly been appropriating Palestinian lands for a few generations now?

This of course leads in to the western ally in the middle east question, and the role of oil supplies in geo-political calculations, not to mention memories of 9/11, the Crusades and the broader religious divides of Islam, Christianity, anti-Semitism and World War II, which leads you neatly back to Russia’s claims that Ukraine is “infested” with “Nazis”.

John Pilger in his article of February 17, “War in Europe and the Rise of Raw Propaganda”, on the MPN news site, writes:

“On 16 December [2021], the United Nations tabled a resolution that called for ‘combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism’. The only nations to vote against it were the United States and Ukraine.”

Make of that what you will.

Monitoring Mission

Craig Murray, former Ambassador to Uzbekistan in the Blair government who became a whistle-blower on human rights violations in Uzbekistan and was subsequently removed from his post for his troubles, writes in his latest blog post, “Ukraine: Where to Find the Truth in Enormous Detail”, that there is an international monitoring mission in Ukraine, called the “Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Monitoring Mission,” which is now being described by western media as “biased”.

This monitoring mission in Ukraine represents 57 states, including Ireland, and has been “operating in conflict zones for over half a century…There are 700 monitors, and they have been in Ukraine since 2014…”

The monitoring mission’s job was “…to patrol both sides of the civil war conflict zone and to record infringements of the ceasefire and de-escalation agreements, bringing these to the attention of the relevant authorities…”

Murray claims that Western mainstream media have decided to ignore the reports from Ukraine by these monitors “because the truth is the opposite of the picture they [western media] wish to paint.”

Murray’s view seems to support the provocation angle. But the problem with that is that it inadvertently casts Putin as a victim, which, given the delicate nuances of identity politics, is an idea that could really mess with Western heads.

More Views

On “Triggernometry”, a You Tube show and podcast hosted by comedians Konstantin Kisin, who is a Russian married to a Ukrainian, and Francis Foster who is English, the February 24 posting had Kisin discussing the hour-long speech Putin gave outlining his reasons for the invasion of Ukraine, a speech which has been largely ignored by western media in which Putin explained why Ukraine is an accident of history and shouldn’t exist. This would be like Boris Johnson explaining why our republic shouldn’t exist.

Kisin holds the view that Russia was emboldened by the West’s lackadaisical reaction when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, igniting a low-level civil war in the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, and giving Putin the idea that Ukraine might be take-able without too much international friction.

Kisin comes to the conclusion that, far from being intimidated by the West surrounding Russia with missiles, Putin sees the West as distracted, interested only in “pronouns”, making it weak and ineffectual, creating the ideal conditions for an autocratic leader to put some expansionist plans into action.

These expansionist plans rely really on the same strategy of “defending” minority ethnic Russian people in other countries and then invading, say Latvia, Lithuania and all the other former soviet-bloc countries who have recently joined NATO.

Crisis Deepens

Meanwhile, over in RTÉ, the crisis deepened as it became clear that not everyone was on board with the re-pronunciation of Kiev, with Tony Connelly, reporting from Kiev itself, still calling the city by its old name and in real danger now of offending sensitivities.

Someone in RTÉ is bound to correct him soon enough, before any real damage is done, while Vladimir Putin hints at nuking countries, and our own Vlad marks the day when war broke out in Europe by, yes you guessed it, attacking Sinn Féin, who are clearly at fault in the entire debacle.

Eamonn Kelly is a Galway-based  freelance Writer and Playwright.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

Sam Boal/RollingNews