The situation in Kursk should send chills for anyone who actually cares about the victory over the Nazis
In response to this article by political writer & former diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar
I expected way better from M. K. Bhadrakumar. I normally learn a lot from his writings and appreciate his very skilled ability to write about the inner calculus of political actors without being taken up in them himself. But I heavily disagree with his take and angle here, how he misses what I think are the most important points.
- Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalions targeted **civilians only** in Kursk and shared videos of themselves imitating Nazis both in clothing and insulting Russians in German. There are no military targets in Kursk.
RT
- This is beyond provocation. As many people have had to make this hypothetical example, if Russia/China backed Mexico in a US-Mexico war and supported Mexicans invading Florida or California, it would be an insane provocation. But this is exactly what the US is doing to Russia with Ukraine and probably hopes to do with Taiwan.
- Russia got involved militarily in Ukraine because there was a civil war going on there since 2014 that didn't get resolved even with Russia's best efforts through Minsk I & II agreements. After the 2014 Maidan coup, which orchestrated by the US, the Donetsk and Lugansk regions voted to declare independence from Ukraine. Kiev didn't let them and instead waged war on them, and cut off access to electricity, water, pensions etc for people in those regions. Russia took 8 years, including genuine efforts at diplomatic resolutions for these regions to remain in Ukraine, before being formally involved militarily.
So it's utterly stupid nonsense about Kiev getting some kind of revenge on Russia. The US puppets in Kiev have been the ones attacking time and time again.
And for anyone who actually seriously cares about who actually ended the Holocaust and ended the Nazis, it should give absolutely everyone chills to see point 1 – it made me feel sick to my stomach.
Again, Holocaust survivors like Prof Norman Finkelstein's parents were extremely grateful to the Soviet Union for liberating them, to the point where he would say with a wry smile that while growing up in the US, his parents wouldn't let anyone say a bad word about the Soviet Union in their household – though as he grew older, he learnt more and more himself about criticisms of the Soviet Union and its shortcomings.
(Prof Norman Finkelstein has devoted his entire political career to Palestine's cause. There's also a great clip of him quite a while back in 2008, responding to the "crocodile tears" of other people who invoke the Holocaust to defend the despicable actions of Israel)
This reaction, by the way – indifference to the physical invocation of Nazis upon the successor of the victors over the Nazis i.e. including the current situation in Kursk – is part of the larger reason why I can't take many people seriously on Palestine who point to just the end of Holocaust minus the Soviet Union, and expect that Israel's actions simply amounting to genocide will result in some kind of magical justice appearing as a consequence. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews out of 18 million Jews in Europe in the Holocaust, and the Soviet Union of 200 million people lost 27 million people in defeating them. And then there are all the other settler-genocidal-colonies (the US, Canada, Australia) where the genocidal-occupying force was not defeated.
Palestine has a moral and legal right to armed resistance, and I think that should be the fore. Or it should have been the fore, instead of BDS (Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions movement on Israel). But no one outside of occupied Palestine wants to talk about building armed resistance for Palestine. If Israel is killing 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza (upper bound estimates including deaths through starvation, etc.) out of 2.2 million, you need a very sizeable force to liberate Gaza. Yes those are the logistics.
I think there's a very good point by Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People's Socialist Party when he was criticising the focus of anti-racism, vs. self-determination – "it's not about whether you like us but whether we have self-determination over our own lives".
Back to Ukraine, I think that from the calculus of Russia, I would say this: All the times that Ukraine has been independent – 3 times over the last 100 years – it has let itself be governed by idiots who become puppets for foreign powers trying to attack Russia. It was the same in 1917, 1941 and now.
I like this written by a Ukrainian from Kiev:
My opinion on this has always been the same, before 2022 as well as before. This is a war fought because a small group of Ukrainians - a core of about 20-30% - are dead-set on joining the EU and NATO. United by broadly middle class values and hatred for the poor majority of their own country, they view the EU, NATO, US, or Israel as symbols of bourgeois ‘normality’, as opposed to degenerate proletarian heathen - the Russians, the Arabs, or their own citizens. Plenty of them survive on western funding, or have tied their life to either war or the atlanticist political project. I’m happy to say all this, because my family is filled with these lovely specimens.
Plenty of Ukrainians don’t want to die for this, but they are given no choice. People justify endless, pointless death by moral abstractions. If nothing else, it’s enough to convince one of the moral bankruptcy of moralism.
Events in Ukraine
If I was writing in the style of M. K. Bhadrakumar, I would conclude that given the history of Ukrainian independence over the past century and more, and its tendency to let itself be used as a puppet of foreign powers to attack Russia, Russia may finally decide that it has to take back Kiev after what has happened in Kursk.
I would have expected him to at least touch on those 3 first points, even if drawing different conclusions. A) Ukrainians attacked only civilians in Kursk B) The Western involvement is a very huge provocation to Russia C) The narrative of revenge on Ukraine's part is nonsense given the actual history.
(Russia focuses on military targets in Ukraine. They have no reason to massacre civilians. The Bucha massacre was likely done by Ukrainians given the evidence of those killed wearing white armbands to indicate their neutrality seeking humanitarian aid, and the recent attack on the children's hospital was likely done by Kiev when looking at the missile)
I can't imagine, least of all in fact, cheering on the attack in Kursk.
From the perspective of the calculus of political actors, the situation in Kursk is not really about how it affects Russia's supposed visual of immunity (it is especially Westerners who are always both saying that Russia is supposedly weakened as well as simultaneously more dangerous and powerful than ever and imposes a supposed threat of invading other European countries). Ukraine has been attacking Belgorod, another border region, for a long time now, with drones and more.
To Russia, it's yet another incredibly massive provocation, and the situation should make anyone who actually cared about the victory over the Nazis feel very grim. For the US, Canada, and the UK, etc. it shows that their support for Ukraine has been a thin veil for their desire to strike Russia. (The UK has reportedly provided training for Ukrainian soldiers for the Kursk invasion, Canada has given the greenlight for Ukraine to use long-range missiles, etc.) For Europe, it shows that they are simply increasingly just pawns to the US, if one wants to look it that way, unable to articulate their own interests (which was very clear with the German leadership's nonchalance over the Nord Stream bombings).
