PEACE AS A SIDE-EFFECT OF ‘A COMFORT’: RUSSIA’S LIFE CONCEPT
This, the twelfth week of the Mean War, had both drama and new shifts, some of them of a destiny changing qualities for entire countries.
The images of soldiers leaving Azovstal after three month’ of heroic battle, carrying their heavily wounded comrades were as dramatic as it gets. Three months of heavy fighting left a distinct sign on those heroic people, and after this experience, all of them, representing many different units of the Ukrainian army, got united , and should be perceived not according to their units’ affiliations, but according to their essential and heroic standing for their country.
Russian authorities know precisely that defenders of Azovstal were soldiers from six different divisions. Without blinking an eye, however, they have declared all of them as the Nazists, and now are preparing a legal ground for setting up a tribunal against them all, instead of a promised exchange of military personnel agreed with the Ukrainian side. Nothing new, of course, but getting repeated, the pattern stamps Russia’s reputation as a negotiating partner and also as a country with ‘a floating’ set of values, putting it extremely diplomatically.
This real life drama and real heroism with the absence of a happy-ending have reflected in a special way against president Zelensky’s address to the full house in Cannes at the opening of the most important film festival in the world. His speech was a master-piece in its fine thinking, precise metaphors, and top class style. And also in its delivery. Volodymyr Zelensky was not simply tired. It is known that he sleeps very little during the last three months, and gets bad news in a high proportion. He also personally experiences real horrors of a terrible, barbarian Mean War, and once a person experiences something like that, it stays in him for the rest of his life. Zelensky experiences this kind of shocking sensations weekly if not often. One has to have a steel psycho to carry on in a measurable way with such emotional luggage which is with you always.
On the day he addressed the super-posh Cannes, president Zelensky was totally busy with the grave ending of the Azovstal three-months’ defence. It is not only grave, it is a grieving situation. But he did bear himself with a calm decency and a dignified composition.
I cannot agree more with Volodymyr Zelensky on his projection on dictators and cinema: “ The worst dictators of the 20th century loved cinematography. It is known about them. But the most important thing left after them is the eerie documentary footage of the newsreel”. In my view, the footage is the most important document of history, because it shows us human expressions and emotions, and provides us with real-time pictures of people, and the results of their activities. We can read volumes of Eichmann’s deeds during the years in different countries. And then we see his so-called face during his trial in Jerusalem, and all that terrible knowledge which did let you sleep for years, gets an explanation as you are watching evil impersonalised, acting so routinely. As if.
It is exactly what president Zelensky meant in his over ten-minutes’ speech at the opening of the 74th Cannes Festival. The leader of the attacked Ukraine said with a deep conviction to the black tied glamour crowd filling every seat of the Palais des Festivals: “ And we will never forget it, because it is not even Hell” , referring to the famous quote from the great film M.A.S.H. “War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse…”. It is indeed. Ukraine experiences it in full measure. Without any fault. Without the slightest objective reason. With no provocation. No nothing. And we are watching it on our screens, helplessly to a large extent. This is what makes this Mean War so deeply mean.
In order to prevent a similar scenario, on this 12th week of the Mean War, Finland and Sweden both decided to join NATO, in a tectonic geopolitical move which was not remotely imaginable yet a half of a year ago. This decision is not only about our border which is a vital thing, undoubtedly. But essentially, it is about the way in which the entire country reacts to evil. As simple as that. Finland leads the countries of Europe and the UK in the adequate and honest perception of the Mean War. 85% of the Finnish population sees it as it is, as unprovoked Russian aggression. The range of such attitudes differs very much among the countries of Europe and the UK, from this noble mark to 20% of seeing the things as they stand by Bulgaria, with many grades in between, which is a sad discovery for many.
The way in which Finland carried on the pivotal matter of the country’s joining NATO will go to the history’s books. Its openness, its extremely thorough preparedness on all and every level and in all and every aspects, the planning, the timing, the proceeding, the attitude, the publicity, the dialogue with the nation, all of it reminds me of an elegant chess combination conceived and executed brilliantly. Finland is rarely blessed with our president Sauli Niinistö, and in this existential issue, the government, the parliament ( 188 members of it from 200 voted for, remarkably), experts, journalists, people in its majority reacts and acts exemplary. We are very proud of such a just reaction by Finland as a country. It does matter a lot. It sets the standards high. And keep it, in a calm and assured way. Chapeau to us all.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, on the 12th week of the Mean War, after three months of hysteria, the energy seems to dwindle. For the first time during the military campaign, some of the people who are familiar to a large TV audience in Russia, honestly, to a giant audience, started to produce something unexpected, something which would make them a target of vicious attack momentarily yet a couple of weeks ago. In the sphere of official mass media military propaganda in Russia, nothing is done by chance. Such things do not happen there, period. People who are involved in that process and that industry for years, know it by their skin on a micron-like level. They would not open their month to pronounce some criticism without a sanction, or ‘a recommendation’ as they call it, by the certain curators from the presidential Administration which has been transformed, according to first-hand knowledge from there, into ‘almost completely a military unit, with its strict discipline concerning every move, not to speak about decision-making’.
So, in such a heavily controlled situation, two leading military experts, both colonels of the Soviet army, both good specialists, both with a serious experience of work in the Soviet and early Russian General Staff, started to disseminate totally weird statements. “ There is no slightest doubt that our ( Russian) army would need at least a decade to restore itself’ , says one of them, facing a long-faced quazi-militant hysterical propagandist who leads the most popular Russian TV talk-show and everyone one’s same long-faces in the studio. Nobody protested. But there was much more. The colonel was very conveniently arguing that Russia ‘does not need the third Afghanistan ( with the first one happening in the 1920s and 1930s, the same fruitlessly). ‘ Contrary to Afghanistan, the population of Ukraine is much bigger, and they can, actually, fire the weapons much better. They are defending their country, – a pause, an express self-check – well, in the way they understand it, but they do-defend-their-country with weapons in the hand very efficiently, one must say – because this is what we are seeing. So, do we need the third Afghanistan there? No, we do not”, – stamped the colonel. Nobody argued. But there was more: “ All these de-nazification and de-nationalisation, all these are not the goals of the army. The army has completed its goals in Ukraine. It has. Now, there are not the army tasks , there are tasks for the Ukrainian population themselves, and possibly for special organisations ( like FSB or local administrations). But not for the army. The army should be recalled from Ukraine. Now.” Nobody argued in a studio full of shameless, cynical, professional one-sided Russian propagandists. Nobody was even angry. They all know the truth. And now it is aired national-wide. Why? And why now?
There is another expert who was speaking at the same time, also during this week 12th of the Mean War, in another extremely popular and the same if not more hysterical militant propaganda TV show. He dared to speak the truth about the total isolation of Russia , ‘let’s face it, we are completely isolated in the world’. He suggested that it is ‘a high time for people to stop consuming information-tranquillisers and to face the truth’. He said that the war is weakening the Russian army while the Ukrainian side ‘might have an one-million army soon’, that ‘with the US lend-lease program and the EU full-scale military assistance, strategically the situation will be only worsening for the Russian army, and it is advisable and necessary to seeing things as they are’. Nobody argued in that studio either, all gloomy faces were around. They also know the truth. As they know it in the Kremlin, as well.
And the first signal about it was sent to the Russian public by the president’s press-attache, himself a complete hard-liner, even by the Russian standards. Speaking alongside his hard-line colleagues from anti-dream team, the Russia’s super-arrogant minister for foreign affairs and extremely cunning and trying so hard, always unsuccessfully for his country and often quite successfully for his beloved self the first deputy head of the Kremlin Administration Senior Kirienko, in front of a giant rally of selected youth in what was called as ‘the marathon of knowledge’, the P’s speaker said the following: ‘ We ( Russia) will get the peace. Of course we will get it. On the conditions which are comfortable for us’.
The Freudian slips of those people are amazing although they are not surprising. So, the Kremlin mouth-piece, a trained, experienced and highly disciplined former KGB high-rank officer who does not utter a random word without a good reason, started to prepare his country for a peace solution. He does exactly the same thing which the two colonels started to do on the state Russian TV in psychological preparation of the Russian public for the changing situation which demands now finishing the army’s actions somewhat in the foreseeable future. This is happening for the first time during the three months of the Mean War. And it comes straight from Mr Peskov’s boss.
But in his addressing the mass of the selected youth, the president’s press-attache said more than he wanted, actually, rather atypically for ever restrained self. “A peace on comfortable conditions’. Those people just sincerely do not get that peace is not a relative value. That’s the problem with them. And it would be like that forever.