Staying sane on Ukraine

BY Savithri Guruge

The Russian invasion of Ukraine (or as Russian President Vladimir Putin prefers it, “the special military operation for the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine”) has given rise to flowery prose in condemnation in the Western media, not known for their objectivity.

Typically, on 26 February Nick Paton-Walsh, the former Channel 4 correspondent deported from Sri Lanka for his prejudiced reporting, editorialised on CNN from Kherson, in southern Ukraine, where fierce battles raged, that “… Putin wants to steal lives here whole, for his wider vision of empire, restored.”

However, if the Western media limited its reporting to fierce invective, that would be an improvement. Its actual reportage of the conflict is solidly anti-Russian. To take a single example, Russian naval units engaged the Ukrainian garrison of the Black Sea island of Zmiinyi (“Snake Island”). The Western media gave full coverage to the Ukrainian statement that 13 border guards had refused to surrender and had died to a man, giving prominence to a report that they had told the Russians to “go f*** yourselves!” The Russian authorities issued statements that the 82 Ukrainian servicemen of the garrison had surrendered, that none had been killed, and that a Ukrainian gunboat flotilla had attacked the ship carrying the prisoners, attempting to sink it. Neither of these statements made it into the Western media, although the BBC, to its credit, did make passing mention of the first.Neither was the Western media objective in the lead-up to the outbreak of the conflict, right from the beginning of the Right-wing, US-backed, 2014 coup d’etat against the democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych – the second such regime change in the Ukraine against a neutralist government. A centrist who attempted to balance Russia and the West by a policy of strict neutrality and supporting the Franco-Russian proposal for a pan-European security structure, Yanukovych had retracted his predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko’s attempts to integrate with NATO and to make a national hero out of the second World War Nazi collaborator, war criminal and mass murderer Stepan Bandera. He had also intended to make Russian, spoken by 30% of the population of the Ukraine, a national language, along with the official Ukrainian language – kyboshed by the coup regime, which outlawed the use of Russian.Under the new regime, statues of Stepan Bandera mushroomed all over the Ukraine, along with the blossoming of neo-Nazi militias, which integrated into the armed forces. For example, the military wing of the White-supremacist “Azov Movement”, the Azov Regiment – a neo-Nazi paramilitary force which has the symbol of the notorious Nazi 2nd (“Das Reich”) SS Panzer Division as its emblem, and which led the attack on ethnic Russians in the Donbass region – has integrated with the Ukraine’s official National Guard. The Regiment’s first commander, Andrei Zeletsky (a neo-Nazi leader, who stated that Ukraine’s “historic mission” is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]”) was released by the coup regime from jail, where he awaited trial for attempted murder. SITE, a private organisation specialising in tracking extremist groups, said that many far-right white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups in Europe and North America had expressed a torrent of support for Ukraine, several seeking to join neo-Nazi Ukrainian paramilitary units.

Very little of this makes its way into the Western media, which portrays the Ukraine as pure as driven snow. Indeed, it has responded universally to Putin’s claim of de-Nazification as “absurd”, somewhat strangely in the face of the evidence above. Facebook has even lifted its ban on posts praising the Azov Regiment. Jerry Harris, National Secretary of the Global Studies Association of North America, has said in Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy that “no matter the exact state of fascism in the Ukraine, the West has largely ignored and covered up their role.”

What are Sri Lankans to make of all this? Well, first of all, our public needs to treat what comes through the Western media with a pinch of salt, a process it should be accustomed to, given the latter’s reportage of the civil conflict in this country and its aftermath – for example inflating arbitrarily the figure of Tamil civilian casualties in the last months of the conflict from about 9,000 (given documentary authenticity by Lord Naseby in the House of Lords) to 40,000 or even 120,000.

However, when it comes to Sri Lanka’s response to the Russian invasion itself, we need to be circumspect. Was Putin correct to invade a nominally independent, sovereign nation?

One might justify Putin’s action by quoting the Ukraine’s non-fulfilment of the conditions of the Minsk accords (which, by the way, the Western media blames Russia for breaking), the continued harassment of the ethnic Russian population in the Donbass, or NATO’s continued determination to expand into the Ukraine in violation of the promises the US made to Gorbachev and others not to go beyond their existing borders with the Warsaw Pact countries. However, in the final analysis, Russia did invade a nominally independent, sovereign nation.

From the West’s point of view, of course, it should be perfectly OK. After all, the US has, in the past 40 years, invaded or otherwise militarily intervened in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Sudan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. It occupies, illegally, the Diego Garcia base, from which the indigenous population were ethnically cleansed. Between 1946 and 2000, it interfered in elections in some 81 countries including Sri Lanka. Or, are there to be two different international laws in the new “Rules-based International Order”, one for the West, one for everyone else?

An individual Sri Lankan may condemn outright the Russian invasion – much as they might, with justification, condemn the US-led invasion of Iraq. However, when considering the stance of the country as a whole, we need to consider realpolitik. Unlike the US, Russia has never interfered with our internal politics. Over the Geneva issue, Russia supported Sri Lanka throughout, whereas (following the West’s lead) the Ukraine voted against Sri Lanka.

In this situation, Sri Lanka could do no more nor less than it did in a statement issued on 25 February, in which it expressed its deep concern about the recent escalation of violence in Ukraine , while blaming no party for the situation, and called upon “all parties concerned to exercise maximum restraint and work towards the immediate cessation of hostilities, in order to maintain peace, security and stability in the region,” and stressed “the need for concerted efforts by all parties concerned to resolve the crisis through diplomacy and sincere dialogue.”

In this, Sri Lanka has shown restraint, and expressed the same sane viewpoint as a growing number of Third World nations, including China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Qatar, the UAE, the ASEAN countries, Paraguay and Peru.

The aim of these countries should be a de-escalation of the conflict and restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty free from interference either from Russia or the West; while ensuring that Russia’s concerns are addressed, including the creation of a new European security architecture – to include Russia and the Ukraine – to replace the NATO dinosaur, within a truly “rules-based” international order.