Tacitus has come back to life thus to describe Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine. But let’s look at the full quote:
“These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by
their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
I knew you’d find me out. You are right: Tacitus hasn’t resurrected, and the tirade he quoted was aimed not at Russia, which didn’t exist at the time, but at Rome. Yet every word applies to Putin and his fans’ idea of peace.
As the Ukrainian counteroffensive gathers momentum, Putin’s propagandists both in Russia and in the West are shedding crocodile tears about the on-going loss of life and property. Let’s stop the carnage and negotiate, they whine. We all want peace, don’t we?
Yes, we do. But let’s not confuse peace with the Ukraine’s surrender, which is exactly what those Putin mouthpieces want. They want Russia to keep the areas occupied during the bandit raid in exchange for a cease-fire.
This after the Russians have done to the Ukraine exactly what the Romans did to the ancestors of today’s Scots (see the quotation above), a thousand times over.
If Zelensky were to sue for peace now, he’d betray all those thousands of Ukrainians murdered, tortured, raped and looted. He’d let the Russians get away with destroying Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, blowing up her dams, bombing her grain ports – all in an act of brutal and unprovoked aggression.
Zelensky won’t do any such thing. The only peace he’ll accept is a just one: Russia withdrawing to her pre-2014 borders, relinquishing her capacity to relaunch the raid once she has caught her breath and regrouped, and providing real security guarantees – not the Mickey Mouse ones of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
Thus, when you hear a Western pundit or politician call for immediate peace negotiations, make no mistake about it: he is a Putin agent, witting or unwitting. And something tells me those creepy-crawlies will be coming out of the woodwork in force over the next few days.
For, after two months of positional, or rather attritional, balance, the Ukraine seems to have achieved a strategic breakthrough.
In preparation for a Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Russians created what essentially is two lines of defence. The first is extensive minefields, making any armoured advance difficult and costly. The second line is fortifications and other facilities for the troops to dig in.
In theory, there is also a third line, but it’s designed merely to slow down a Ukrainian advance, not to stop it. It was mainly the dense minefields that kept the Ukrainian offensive in check, supported as they were by air raids on those who tried to clear the mines.
Now it appears that the Ukrainian army has managed to punch through that first line in at least two, possibly three, places and accelerate its assault on the dug-in Russian troops. The cluster munitions recently supplied by the West are playing a key role – to the accompaniment of wailing on the part of aforementioned Putin agents.
The new offensive started at dawn on Wednesday, and yesterday Ukrainian forces liberated the village of Staromaiorske, an important launchpad for a breakthrough in the southerly direction towards Berdyansk. Even Putin had to admit begrudgingly that Ukrainian attacks in the south have intensified.
He claimed, however, that Ukrainians are making no headway, which statement can only be understood in the context of his incessant assurances that the ‘special operation’ is developing as planned. Quite. He did plan to get bogged down for 17 months, suffer hundreds of thousands of casualties and achieve the improbable feat of uniting practically the whole world against Russia.
In parallel, Ukrainian forces are advancing on Robotyne, Zaporozhye province, heading in the direction of the city of Melitopol near the Sea of Azov. Should Melitopol be liberated, Ukrainians will effectively cut the Russian army in half, breaking the supply lines to the Crimea.
It’s way too early to tell, but every indication is that before long Ukrainian armour will break through into operational space, at which point Russian troops will face a rout. The Institute of the Study of War (ISW) confirms that Ukrainians are steadily advancing to the east of Robotyne, which means they have broken through the minefields, making such a success possible.
While Putin isn’t doing so well on the battlefield, he has stepped up the propaganda war, conscripting his Goebbelses, foreign and domestic, to launch another ‘peace’ offensive. To that end, the Russians have invited Zelensky to Moscow, guaranteeing his safe passage.
The Ukrainian president treated that trap with the disdain it deserved, but this gave Putin’s propagandists more ammunition. You see, they are screaming, Zelensky is rejecting Putin’s peace initiative. He is the aggressor, he is the warmonger.
No amount of cynical hypocrisy on the part of those mouthpieces surprises me. They are the ones, after all, who have described a handful of Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory as acts of terrorism. That’s like Hitler accusing Western governments of mistreating racial minorities.
However, I await with bated breath a Western counterpoint to such tunes. Specifically, I look forward to a certain Mail columnist calling for peace and accusing the Ukraine of undermining it. If I were a betting man, I’d wager that a statement along those lines will appear this weekend. But I’m not, so let’s just wait and see.