My friend, the novelist Alan Judd, emails with the right quotation for those who argue that Putin should be given an ‘off-ramp’. It is from Henry V: ‘How can they charitably dispose of any thing when blood is their argument?’ It really is Putin’s argument. I have been studying an astonishing piece from RIA Novosti, the official Russian news agency, earlier this month, called ‘What Russia should do with Ukraine’. Barbarously written (or possibly barbarously translated), and barbarous in thought, it is about the need to extirpate every ‘Nazi – read Ukrainian –’. The Ukrainians have for years supported ‘total terror’ in ‘Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol, and other Russian cities’, apparently, and so there must be ‘a set of measures in relation to the Nazified population mass, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals’: ‘All of them are equally involved in extreme cruelty against the civilian population, equally guilty of the genocide of the Russian people, do not comply with the laws and customs of war. War criminals and active Nazis should be exemplarily and exponentially punished.’ There must be ‘re-education’ through ‘ideological repression’.
It is quite inadequate, the article goes on, for Ukraine to become a neutral state between East and West, so anything called ‘Ukraine’ must go. ‘The collective West itself is the designer, source and sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism…Ukronazism carries not less, but a greater threat to the world and Russia than German Nazism of the Hitlerite version.’ All ‘armed Nazi formations’ will be ‘liquidated’. The nationalist elites must be ‘eliminated’ and the ‘social “mud”’ beneath them must atone for their guilt. Russia will ‘act as the guardian of the Nuremburg trials’. Russia was so patient but was rejected. It ‘did everything possible to save the West in the 20th century… The last act of Russian altruism was the outstretched hand of friendship from Russia, for which Russia received a monstrous blow in the 1990s’.
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