I arrived home from Voronezh close to midnight and, once in, had a cup of tea, some toast and fell asleep pretty easily. I woke at 2.50, thirsty, drank some water, checked that my alarm was set for 6 a.m. (work at 6.30) and BOOM BOOM, with a flash of light outside the window. It came from the direction of Moscow City, I messaged my friend and colleague, who was in the UK, that the area had been hit again. Moscow City has been attacked regularly and most people react with - Meh. I messaged a night duty editor from an international news agency, based on Kutuzovsky Prospect, with a view of Moscow City. They too had heard it. We both saw smoke rising from one of the towers. I asked:
You’re breaking it? I mean, reporting it?
The reply just took my soul away.
We’ll stick out a line, but we can’t do much. Can’t let on we’re attacking Russia with western drones, now can we?
I will defend this person to the hilt as they have been immensely kind to me when I was looking for work and also gave me a great piece of advice last March - “The truth is not important, just Russia bad, suck it up.” I will defend this person to the hilt because they also were the only person who didn’t lie about Evgeny Prighozhin. I was finishing work when his plane crashed a day later. Within minutes western media, egged on by politicians, were screaming “Putin’s Revenge”. I thought, if they did this about ANY other person in the western world, they’d be sued to high heavens. But Russia and Russians, fair game.
And that’s exactly what Vladimir Zelensky said a month ago. Russians and Russian objects, civilian and military, are fair game. I make the mistake of watching his interviews and nightly videos, along with his head of secret service Budanov. Now Zelensky is aping Budanov, showing less and less human decency and intellect. And it’s terrifying because that’s not the man I spoke with on Christmas Day 2019! Yesterday he said that Russia has done nothing for Crimea and if it is handed back with Donbass, he’ll forgive Putin. There is no tourism, he said. It’s poor and has no jobs. It’s uncivilised. I tried to figure who his audience is, because it can’t be Ukrainians. They know how much better Crimea has become since 2014 - because last year 10’s of 1000’s of Ukrainians visited Crimea, even under pain of arrest back home.
He also said that Ukraine will “cleanse” itself of those who weaken it from within and began by arresting his former paymaster and Azov funder Igor Kolomoisky. It feels like Pinocchio cut his own strings and ordered Mussolini’s mob to sling Geppetto in jail. Though this Geppetto is a massively corrupt criminal who backed ethnic cleansing through paying neo-nazi criminal gangs associated with football clubs. Now that corruption is being made treason, with such crimes investigated by the President’s office, the rule of law has fully collapsed with Germany reporting over 160,000 military age Ukrainian males arriving and staying in Germany from February 2022-February 2023. From that Bild report, 50% of that amount again have arrived in the period to mid-August this year.
When Zelensky is talking about cleansing, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. I know before he said that if people of Donbass don’t like living under Kiev they can just “Go back to Russia”, I believe that was misconstrued. I also don’t believe that he wants to slaughter people who have, since 2014, demanded to be allowed learn in their own language, go to their own church and not be fearful of far right crazies. That’s not him. He grew up speaking Russian, in fact he still mightily struggles to speak Ukrainian and has done well with it given he never spoke it before November 2019. Some of the nutters around him, I’m not so sure of. They’ve been pushing for strikes deep into Russia, something US Defence spokesperson John Kirby spoke against on Friday. He said America does not support striking deep into Russian territory. But, define deep? To Siberia? Pskov?
Because the Estonian foreign minister supports attacks inside Russia and told this at the EU conference in Toledo last week. Margus Tsakhna might have a colourful past, but coming out with such statements jarred with what Hungary’s Viktor Orban told Tucker Carlson - that if America says stop to Kiev, the war ends tomorrow. Orban, for his many faults, is no lover of Russia. He owes part of his education to George Soros, US think tanks and organisations he now speaks out against - he was formerly aligned with Ireland’s Fine Gael! Maybe it’s that I take on board people who call for peace, which has me agreeing with a centre-right (being kind) Orban, a left-wing Michael D. Higgins and a centrist Olaf Scholz. Because there is only 1 hard fact that I know for sure this Moscow Sunday morning - Ukraine cannot win and everybody is losing.