Today’s date, commonly written out as 22.02.2022, will be an easy one for future schoolchildren to remember. Various people will remember it in various ways. The residents of Donetsk and Lugansk, the two formerly Ukrainian, now once again Russian cities that have been subjected to conditions bordering on genocide since the US-instigated government overthrow of 2014 will remember jubilantly dancing in the streets, shooting off lots of fireworks, waving Russian flags and hollering the Russian national anthem. For them, this is the day on which new hope arrived that their eight-year nightmare would soon be over and life would finally return to normal.
The badly informed new German chancellor inadvertently helped to resolve the situation by saying that the idea of a Ukrainian-caused genocide in the Donbass is ridiculous. Given the history of the region, the public spectacle of a German leader using the words “genocide” and “ridiculous” in the same sentence made the moment pregnant with possibilities. Here is the information the seemingly rather dim-witted chancellor was missing.
There were 9,282 dead on the Donbass side (70% of them civilians) and 114 children. The dead on the Ukrainian side (the Ukrainian troops and various assorted mercenaries that had been attacking and laying siege to the Donbass since 2014) numbered 20,186. This was prior to the renewed Ukrainian shelling of recent days. There were also over two million Donbass refugees in Russia, more than one million in the Ukraine and around 50 thousand in Belarus.
Most Russians will also remember this day with relief as the day their government finally—finally! after eight literally bloody years!—determined that a negotiated settlement in the Ukraine would simply never happen and that there was no point in waiting any further before going ahead and cleaning it up.
It was cathartic for them to hear their president unleash a torrent of truth about the Ukraine, calling it a Bolshevist concoction of mostly historically Russian lands that was simply never intended for independent statehood, pointing out that it never paid its share of Soviet-era foreign debt (Russia paid it off on its behalf), that it refused to turn over Russian assets with which it incidentally ended up, and instead soaked up several hundred billion dollars of Russian subsidies, that it extorted money for the use of its Soviet-built gas pipeline that it got free of charge, and that it has squandered and stolen the rest of its vast Soviet patrimony.He also mentioned was the Ukraine’s stated ambitions simultaneously to join NATO and to invade Crimea—automatically triggering a world war. He mentioned its stated ambition to use plutonium from its spent nuclear fuel stockpiles and rockets left over from the Soviet times to concoct weapons of mass destruction—a situation that simply had to be dealt with. Finally, he made clear that all of the Ukrainian war crimes of the past eight years have been carefully documented and that all of these war criminals will be brought to justice.
This speech came soon after a televised session of Russia’s Security Council at which all of the key ministers spoke and all of them spoke in favor of giving recognition to Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Prime Minster Mishustin said that they have been preparing for the inevitable fallout for some time and are ready for it, so let’s just do it
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