split
Russian forces fail to encircle Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian), Ukraine’s second largest city after Kyiv, located in the east of the country just 20 km from the Russian border. It is a siege similar to that of Mariupol, where the Russian army bombards residential areas and civilian structures with artillery and air force (pictured). In Kharkiv Oblast, about a quarter of the population report Russian as an ethnicity and about half are native speakers of Russian, although Russian is actually used much more frequently at home and in everyday life (about 75% of the time).
In Mariupol, Donbass, the number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers is even larger. We have all seen entire residential neighborhoods of Mariupol destroyed by bombs, as well as the theater and the swimming pool that housed civilians who fled those neighborhoods, not to mention the deliberate attack on the children’s and maternity home, as one CNN Analysis shows. The news on Saturday was that the Russian army had bombed and irreparably destroyed the Azovstal Steelworks in Mariupol, one of the largest in Europe and vital to the economy of that region. Putin has repeatedly stated that the goals of the “military special operation are to “denazify and “demilitarize Ukraine in order to protect the Russian and Russianspeaking population from “genocide (obviously a completely unfounded accusation). It is now becoming increasingly obvious that these goals are not true, even if we were to believe Putin’s “good intentions”. Today it is finally clear that the greatest threat to the Russian and Russianspeaking population of Ukraine is the Russian army itself. Even if Russia wants to conquer and occupy these regions, it will never have the money and resources to rebuild all of the infrastructure it is destroying. But most importantly, he will never be able to restore the lives, affection, memories of the people, mainly Russians and Russian speakers, whom he wiped out with his guns and bombs.
Collective Punishment
So what’s the goal? The goal is obviously collective punishment. Collective punishment is the term for which we want to punish a family, a community, for the “debts” of individuals. It’s an ancient “juridical” principle, present for example in Germanic culture (Sippenhaft) that the Nazis resorted to and widely disseminated (think of all the massacres of Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Marzabotto, etc.). The collective punishment of Ukraine consists in wanting to free itself from Russia, choosing the path of selfdetermination and European integration. The collective punishment of Ukrainians in Donbass and Kharkiv is that they wanted to greet the military from Moscow who arrived to “liberate them not with flowers and vodka, but with bullets and Molotov cocktails. And the frustration for the Kremlin ideologues and for the Russian commandos is all the greater, precisely in relation to the areas that should theoretically have been closest to Moscow, and hence here is the savage anger at civilians, including, of course, Russians and Russian speakers who did not want to “rebel” against Kyiv and did not join the “liberating” invaders. There is no other explanation for this systematic desire to destroy residential areas, shopping malls, civil infrastructure including hospitals and industries in the supposedly “protected and “liberated areas. I don’t know how this war will end if Russia retreats and leaves this devastation or tries to occupy it and keep it occupied Donetsk and Lugansk style. But I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine will never want to be among these criminals either. Odessa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov, notorious for proRussian positions, has explained it well, so much so that he was part of ousted President Yanukovych’s proRussian Party of Regions and then fled to Moscow.
“I don’t know what an idiot would bomb Kharkiv”
In an interview with The Guardian on March 8, he said: “I don’t know what kind of bastard, idiot or idiot you have to be to push a button and launch missiles at Odessa. It’s beyond my comprehension,” adding on the denazification issue: “Who would bomb Kharkiv? Only the Nazis ». Borys Filatov, mayor of Dnipro, puts it even better in an interview with Corriere on March 18: “I’m of Russian descent, my mother and father are Russian, I don’t even have a drop of Ukrainian blood […]. I can’t understand what Putin thought he was doing with his army and officers when he carried out this invasion. Maybe he thought we were waiting for him with flowers? This situation will have consequences for decades. However this war ends, Putin will not be able to absorb Ukraine, he will not be able to digest the Ukrainian people. He may be half gone, but no one will be happy staying under occupation. Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, who was born in Kyiv, said you can’t talk about peace with someone who wants you dead. We understood that dying with guns in hand is better than surrendering and still being killed […]”.