UKRAINE TODAY – A VIEW FROM AUSTRALIA

In 2022, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky became the unlikely hero of the second decade of the twenty-first century. He led and inspired his country—and the entire free world—in the fight against the Russian invasion that began in February 2022, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin became regarded as a war criminal. The war in Ukraine became the first recorded in real time and broadcast on TV and across social media. Journalist Andrew L Urban is the author of Zelensky – The Unlikely Ukrainian Hero Who Defied Putin and United The World. Pete Shmigel is a writer and former political advisor with a background in Ukrainian affairs who spoke widely on returning from Ukraine after working there for two months in early 2022. On Tuesday 12 July 2022,  Andrew L Urban and Pete Shmigel addressed The Sydney Institute to give an update on the war in Ukraine.

UKRAINE TODAY – A VIEW FROM AUSTRALIA

Peter Shmigel

Thank you to the Sydney Institute for the invitation to speak about the situation in Ukraine or more accurately, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s war on the West.

Gerard and I have known each other for some 30 years. Gerard has been fostering discussion about Ukraine since before the fall of the Iron Curtain. That is consistency and commitment. And, it is appreciated by those who have long argued Ukraine’s importance to the often indifferent ears of policy makers. Thank you, Gerard, Anne and team.

I acknowledge we are on Indigenous land.

Having recently returned from the better part of three months in Ukraine and Poland, where I was engaged as a writer and in humanitarian efforts, I will share some views with you based on four questions: (1) Why is there a war being waged on Ukraine and Ukrainians?; (2) How is that war being waged?; (3) What is the current situation?; (4) What may the future hold?

In addressing those questions, I will challenge myths that come up when discussing Ukraine – which is no surprise given Putin and the Russian Federation publicly hold that propaganda is a weapon of war equivalent to bombs and bullets. Indeed, as the liberal democratic West, including Australia, responds to the very serious threat that this war is to our way of life, it is vital to call things by their real names. Clarity is crucial for ending this war and ensuring a more stable and prosperous global order. Or, as one Ukrainian said to me, “war leaves no space for bullshit.” Along the way, I will introduce some brave individuals who daily stand for the values that we in Australia might be accused of daily taking for granted.

Let’s start with Kateryna Halushka, a 25-year old woman. Raised in a small village, she has university qualifications in liberal arts and communications. Prior to the invasion, Kateryna worked for a UN program for women’s rights. She has long, flaming red hair and her tattoos are the mark of her modern millennial generation. She could have easily left Ukraine from February onward.

Kateryna instead chose to become a combat medic attached to the Armed Forces of Ukraine operating in the Donbas region. Her daily task is to evacuate injured soldiers from front-line positions to medical care, often under both small arms and artillery fire. Near the start of the invasion, Kateryna’s soldier-partner was killed in action; her current boyfriend is a POW who fought to the end at the Avozstal plant in Mariupol.

While she was on a break after three 24-hour days at the front, I asked Kateryna why she has chosen as she has. She told me that she cannot accept Russia’s view that she, in identifying as Ukrainian, and her nation do not exist or do not deserve to exist. Kateryna rejects being called heroic and refers only to her duty. She didn’t mention her personal suffering during our interview.

Herein lies a key understanding as to why this war is taking place. Very simply, its root cause is Russian imperialism as fostered and fomented by the fantasies and fascist practices of Vladimir Putin. Part of Putin’s arrogance and cowardice is that he seldom admits his motives. Instead, he uses the old KGB trick of maskyrovka or intentional deception. (And remember when reading reports about Ukraine that intentional deception is also part of Russian military doctrine since World War 1.)

Those who know the history of the region, know Russia has invaded Ukraine at least once per century since the twelfth century. Those who know history, know that the rulers of Moscow, founded long after Kyiv, have consistently denied the distinct culture that is Ukrainian and the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine. Those who know, know that the current aggression of Putin and his partners in crime is more of the imperial same. As Australian political strategist Mark Textor once famously said on Ukrainian television: “Kyiv was a sophisticated civilisation for hundreds of years while Moscow was a mud puddle.”

It follows that this war isn’t about deNazification. Ukraine has a president who is Jewish and an immediate past prime minister who is Jewish, and a far-right that is electorally much smaller than that of France or the UK. This war isn’t about NATO incursions on Russia’s security. Ukraine voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons in the misplaced hope of pacifying its larger neighbour and receiving Western security guarantees.

An example of this tension is reflected in my own story from experience. In the early 1990s, I was translating for Andriy Cheremsky, a young, newly elected Ukrainian MP visiting Australia. The renown Tim Fischer asked him what Ukraine would do with its nukes. Cheremsky said “we will point them at Moscow”. Then involved in politics, I “diplomatically” translated this as something like “we will use them to strategic advantage in the national interest”. Cheremsky, whom I didn’t know spoke English, stopped and said to Fischer: “No. I said we will point them at Moscow.” In retrospect, he was exactly right and I was a fool.

This war isn’t about defending ethnic Russians or about some form of separatism. Many of Ukraine’s front-line soldiers since 2014 have been Russian speakers and there were no internecine inklings before Putin’s incursion. These are all lies to justify an unprovoked invasion. I was voluntarily working in Ukraine’s government in 2018 when a British colleague aptly described Putin’s Russia as “lying on an industrial scale”.

The truth is that what we have seen, since the occupation of Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, and the ramping up of war since February, is a continuation of an historical arc. It is a sequel of sequels, albeit with deadlier weapons, digitised disinformation, and, arguably, fewer if any moral constraints on the part of the invading fascistic force.

What Putin hopes to achieve, with sadly strong support by mainstream Russians, if polling is to be believed, is what his Tsarist, Bolshevik and Soviet predecessors failed to achieve: the full subjugation of the Ukrainian nation within the political and cultural fold of some “greater Russia”. In a limited moment of candour, Putin has now spoken of himself as continuing Tsar Peter’s imperial purpose. And perhaps someone else’s too. In the 1930s, Stalin attempted to starve Ukrainians out of existence and he killed some five million during his forced famine. Nearly 100 years later, there are strong similarities in the sinister ethnocidal strategies of Putin and his sycophants, right down to the theft of some 20 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain.

While in Ukraine, I visited a major agri-business in Pervomayisk which was formerly a collective farm. The owner is accommodating refugees even as market conditions are awful. He’s created work for some of them renovating the local village church. During the works, along the fence line, shallow graves with the skeletons of famine victims were discovered. It was a reminder to me that this period is no exception.

Given such aspects, some in the West – be it the Chancellor of Germany who sells arms to Putin and buys energy from Putin, or even in the centre right of the Australian commentariat – should be ashamed of themselves. Under the guise of “realpolitik”, they amplify the Kremlin’s pseudo-arguments and advocate appeasement, whether it is providing “off ramps” for Putin, or curtailing military support, or permanently ceding Ukrainian territory – and millions who live there – to authoritarian occupation. The political progeny of Henry Kissinger do not have qualms about handing over Ukrainians’ freedoms and lives to satisfy Putin. These elites think accommodation will lead to non-interference in our societies, in international norms like territorial sovereignty, and in global energy and food supply chains.

It’s not surprising that privileged policy sophisticates are amoral. What is bizarre, though, is that they calculate their “concoctions for compromise” will convince a dictator who romps all over our retreats. I sometimes wonder: is it harder to pardon downright strategic and policy stupidity than moral turbidity?

I now introduce to you Pavlo Kovtonyuk, who runs a healthcare think tank in Kyiv, and was Assistant Health Minister of Ukraine from 2016 to 2019. Kovtonyuk’s job then included funding construction of brand-new health facilities; his mission now is to chronicle their destruction by Russian forces for the purposes of war crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Convention.

With Kovtonyuk, and on my own, I visited healthcare facilities shelled out of existence. Kovtonyuk has collected evidence about approximately 170 facilities, including a proportion intentionally destroyed.

One is a former new family medical centre in the Kyiv region where we documented how mortar rounds were methodically “walked in” by ten metre increments. All that remains is a banner urging COVID vaccination. When people tell me that Putin somehow solely carries the blame for this war, I remind them of the dozens of decisions a Russian mortar team and spotter would have made to intentionally strike a medical centre in Makariv. Another place I visited was the childcare centre for workers’ kids on the grounds of a general hospital in Mykolayiv. It was destroyed by one aimed round in a district of no military targets.

We learn via Kovtonyuk’s work and other sources that the main method of how this war is being conducted is what I call “desertification”. The invaders’ idea – implemented through the most intense artillery barrages since World War 2 – is to nullify all necessities for normality. If there is no housing, healthcare, schools, shopping, water, heating, electricity and the like, life cannot be sustained. According to Kovtonyuk, this is Russia’s pattern of behaviour. Kovtonyuk is establishing that the Russians’ pulverisation practice was previously used in both Georgia and Syria.

What is forced in turn is internal and external displacement, or what Kovtonyuk calls “genocide by migration”. Some 10 million (of a population of some 40 million) Ukrainians are now not in their own homes. For scale, think of all of Sydney being forced to move to Victoria, Queensland or New Zealand over five months. And, if one chooses to stay, one risks systematic intimidation, unchecked robbery and mass rape, as we saw from Russian gangster units in the case of Bucha and Irpin. Yet, perhaps, there is a broader justice at work. The unit that butchered Bucha, and received commendations from Putin, was subsequently withdrawn during the Russians’ defeat and redeployed to Ukraine’s east. Apparently, they were annihilated there in battle.

It is extraordinary that many people still choose to stay – in their homes, in their communities, in their jobs as truck drivers or on-line teachers, in their country and in the fight. I have written of how Ukraine’s centuries-long experience of violence and colonisation has distilled a very pure type of strength and courage in many of its citizens, the kind we really haven’t seen since the Greatest Generation. As in their case, trauma isn’t only traumatic; it can be transformative. Values needn’t be only inherited or incidental; they are empowering when they are actively adopted and anointed in sacrifice, such as during a young democracy’s struggles since 1990.

Ukrainian bravery is being put to a new test as the war is shifting shape. After their defeat at Kyiv and Kharkiv and having been reduced from around 125 Battalion Tactical Groups to 75 such units, Russian commanders have done what’s only logical and perhaps what’s only available: concentrate their fire. This has primarily been in the form of artillery barrages, mostly in Donbas, where there are shorter supply lines from Russia.

What we have now is a three-tiered war. The first tier is the war on the eastern front of “attrition by artillery”. Up to 50,000 Russian shells are falling every day; by way of comparison, the US military resupplies about 150,000 per year.

Such broadacre artillery action is because Russia is unwilling to substantially go forward due to its dysfunctional and demoralised mechanised infantry and its sanction-impacted dwindling supplies. At the same time, Ukraine is unable to go forward due to a lack of sufficient arty and air cover.

The second tier of warfare is the continued “random ruination” of Ukrainian towns and cities using long-range missiles. Yesterday, 30 civilians were killed at Chasiv Yar when their apartment building was rocketed; it was one of ten attacks on the day. Random in aim, but for the one to kill and terrorise the innocent. I visited Saltivka, a nearly-leveled part of Kharkiv. There, I saw a 10-story apartment building destroyed by a $6 million Kalibr missile fired from the Black Sea. Later, colleagues and I witnessed an artillery assault by retreating Russian forces on a suburban High Street. In the preceding days, residents had started coming out for coffee, or the pharmacy, or to buy spring flowers, which Ukrainians adore. Several locals were cut to pieces by shrapnel and died on the pavement just trying to be normal. For all that, it’s amazing to see the magnetic pull of normalcy. In Bucha, the locals have taken to covering over bullet holes on their homes with homemade paintings of sunflowers.

The third tier of warfare is “plethoric propaganda”. This means pressuring Ukraine’s allies, through economic and energy threats, to succumb to Russian ambitions. More from desperation than by design, the world’s biggest mafia boss is now weaponising food and fuel. It’s a mobster’s standover tactic. Once frustrated with characterisations of Putin, with help from psychologists and the DSM, I undertook an evaluation of Putin’s behaviours. They closely correspond with Anti-Social Personality Disorder – which is also highly prevalent among Mafia bosses.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s spin servants recently made a big deal of gaining further territory in the east. The two cities in question are the significance and size of Bendigo and Ballarat. It took the Russians two months, some 10,000 of their own soldiers’ lives, and more than half a million shells to take them.

It’s disheartening to read mainstream journalists who fall for falsehoods. Some write this up as if it’s the twenty-first’s century’s Stalingrad; they remain transfixed by the carefully curated illusion of Russian invincibility. They suggest that Russian victory, while messy, is somehow inevitable. Perhaps, they are ignorant of the fact that – bar World War 2 and the Allies’ support then – every major Russian military involvement since the nineteenth century has been a defeat. It’s journalistic dilettantism. It lazily ignores that the front is thousands of kilometres long, that Ukrainian forces have been taking back villages in the southern part of the country, and the chronic incompetence and corruption of the Russian military. It’s as if major Russian losses in the spring, as well as stalemate over eight years in Donbas, were flukes. They weren’t. NATO senior commanders learn how to fight Putin from Ukrainians – they don’t teach Ukrainians how to do it. Attention blindness about Ukraine – the phenomenon where one looks but does not see – is a bad habit from journalistic institutions like CNN and the New York Times. On the first day of the invasion, a CNN reporter breathlessly indicated to his international viewers – as he reported live on Russian paratroopers trying to take Hostomel airport outside Kyiv – that he didn’t know by what luck he and his crew were on the scene. Just luck? Sure.

Media perceptions aside, it is nevertheless estimated that Russia outguns Ukraine by at least four to one in terms of heavy artillery. Until recently, Russia’s capability at long ranges was basically uncontested. A Ukrainian officer in an intelligence bunker showed me a video screen of all the targets in his operational theatre beyond the reach of Ukrainian guns. He said they were “waiting for Mr Howitzer to say hello”. Without firepower, they could only be hit with special ops missions and homemade “kamikaze drones” (which for $500 are very effective against $500,000 Russian APCs).

The equation is changing. The last month has seen promised Western heavy weaponry arriving and being deployed, such as more than 100 155mm howitzers including six from Australia, which reach up to 40 kilometers, 12 HIMARS rocket systems which reach up to 80 kilometers, and nine MLRS rocket systems with even longer reach. If these numbers were in a physics equation, they add up to “impulse” or change in momentum. Last week, Russian troops seeking a small advance from Lysychansk – call it Bendigo – lost some 10 tanks against Ukrainian defences with improved artillery. Over the last two weeks, the new reach also resulted in some half-a-dozen Russian weapons depots and two major command posts being destroyed, including in Ukraine’s south.

I visited there last month. With the AFU advancing as close as 20 kilometres away, it would be logical to see a further counteroffensive toward Kherson, a major city with active partisans and a stepping stone to Crimea. Is that a portend of the future? Yes, it is. I spoke to no one – in high office, village shop, front-line trench or bomb shelter – who was willing to take a step backward. No one is willing to negotiate with what they see as terrorists.

Indeed, having experienced Russian atrocities, Ukrainian attitudes have hardened from defending their country to avenging human losses, recovering all territories and defeating Putin’s Russia. I asked Kovtonyuk, who is ethnically half-Russian and who might happily be characterised as a progressiv: how do you rationalise now hating Russians? He replied that hatred was an appropriate and proportionate response to evil and an antecedent to justice.

There is also a pragmatic optimism. Ukrainians now know they can fight what was considered the world’s second greatest army. They know Putin has already lost on several fronts. Thanks to him, Ukrainians are more unified in their identity and purpose than ever before. Narratives about the “master strategist” and Russia as a superpower are negated.

Ukrainians are heartened by the West’s support, its re-embrace of its core tenets and by the evolution of the European Union and NATO – but are still concerned about whether the West fully sees the need to defeat Putin’s Russia.

And, what about the future? There are many scenarios, but only one certainty. For the Ukrainians, there can be no giving up.

Finally, meet Dima Sherembei, a leader of the 207th battalion of the Territorial Defence, which is part of Ukraine’s 750,000 strong and growing military. His unit took part in the Battle of Kyiv where it reportedly ran a special operation to ensure battlefield connectivity via Elon Musk’s donated Starlink transmitters. Even now, Dima heads Ukraine’s largest HIV-related social services provider. Dima, who is a Russian speaker, said this to me:

We didn’t just beat the orcs at Kyiv. We defeated the myth of Russian power. We’ve shown the world that modern Russia is an open sewer and that Putin is a political paedophile who preys on those he thinks are weaker. Therefore, there needs to be total operational, economic, and emotional defeat of Russia. Otherwise, it cannot recognise its own paralysis, cannot pay its penance and cannot change for the better.

Ladies and gentlemen, Kateryna, Pavlo, Dima and their countrymen and women are “proxies of principle” for our way of life, our beliefs and our democracy – and I for one feel indebted to them as they fight on to victory.