Ukraine and the end of Russia as a Great Power

By Joris Voorhoeve

The incredible viciousness of the war in Ukraine keeps a normal person awake all night. The mined bodies of Ukrainian citizens who were shot randomly in Butscha by misled angry Russian soldiers are nauseating. The soldiers were ordered to withdraw after the failure of their attack on Kyiv. Putin sends them now to east and south Ukraine to conquer territory, again at the cost of thousands of lives. He concluded that his aim to destroy the independence of all of Ukraine ran into a resistance that was too much for his soldiers, to which he constantly lied in the past several years. Now, more death and destruction will be spread in the Donbas and the coastal cities of the Black Sea. And poor Putin says he has no other option… It is not difficult to recognize a psychiatric mass murderer. 

Putin appointed the vilest of his generals to top commander. Spreading fear by bombing hospitals, orphanages, and streams of refugees, like in Syria, chases the Ukrainian population to Western countries. He thinks Ukraine belongs to Russia. If the Ukrainians resist this, they simply deserve to die or be forced out. Other countries that support them, deserve in his view to get disrupted by millions of refugees.  

Why does this evil make one sick? Evil spreads like a pandemic. It will infect our diseased world further. How to call a halt to this, how to disinfect the following hatred and how to heal it? I am not able to accept philosophically this carnage as a side of mankind that shows its ugly face in many countries throughout history. We are simply forced to side with the victims, be brothers to them, and wash the wounds of this war with a strong solution of solidarity. To ignore, to look the other way, makes one a passive collaborator. It is simple: all that is needed for the vilest evil to prevail is that normal people do nothing. 

Chinese and other important leaders have not raised any objections. China will gain from what happens: energy, metals, other materials the West says it will not buy anymore, and the capital of the Russian oligarchs, will now seek revenue elsewhere. Russia will have to depend on Chinese loans. We witness now the last phase of Russia as a large power. It will go down further and become a vassal state of China. The dichotomy in the world between governments that are based more or less on the approval of their population,  versus dictatorships that think they “own” their people and may commit politicide against them, becomes ever sharper. The EU is too divided to handle this. North-Atlantic cooperation that includes also Asian democracies is needed. Sadly, India keeps silent.