After three hundred days of widespread war, it is certainly a legitimate question. And the answer is simple: the war will surely end when we come to grips with reality. Then, we will accept reality instead of what we wish to be true and decide to hit Moscow with all our might. Yes, that is what we mean. So when will we stop shaking our knuckles and go to open war with Russia?
In those gruelling days, in mid-March this year, near Zhytomyr, the Ukrainian defenders asked whether it was worth thinking about summer camouflage. With all due respect, instead, think about warm thermals for the winter, came the reply. The answer was so blunt, so out of this world, that it made the jaws of high-ranking officers drop.
We see everything clearly. Our straight answer today on the war’s outcome might well have thrown you off your guard – cover your mouths. But unfortunately, we have no other choice.
We are the West.
Why? Is there no peaceful option? Why can we not sign a peace agreement now because it is nearly Christmas?
Such questions are just reluctance to open our eyes and postpone the inevitable until tomorrow. It is the same as avoiding a visit to the dentist or postponing an operation for a bulging haemorrhoid in the knowledge that it could lead to a fatal haemorrhage the next time in the toilet. Today, we must take our cue from the struggling Ukrainians and recognise, like the unpleasant smell coming from the breath of the interlocutor’s mouth, that at the current stage, no agreement with Russia, no peace, no conditional, and even less a real ceasefire, is possible. If there were a ceasefire or a temporary ceasefire, it would only postpone brutal military action until tomorrow. More brutal, more terrible, affecting even larger groups of people, and more devastating.
The hangover of a false peace is always much worse than expected.
And when we talk about Ukraine’s victory, what do we mean? What do we have in our heads? This concept, this ‘Ukrainian victory’, is so amorphous, so vague. What is it? A return to the borders of 23 February? The retaking of Luhansk and Donetsk, without Crimea? This so-called victory in our minds is certainly not what the majority of Ukrainians are now hoping for. Moreover, even if the Russians are expelled from Ukrainian territory, Ukraine’s victory will be very conditional because Russia will not give up its plans to occupy or destroy this country.
We understand perfectly well if you reflexively reject such statements, but try asking yourself whether Putin’s Russia may be losing and giving up? The annexed territories – recognised as part of Russia, albeit illegally – are taken and given away. Is it realistic to think that, after Ukraine has expelled the Russian fascists and marauders from its territory, Putin will throw up his hands, apologise, return the stolen washing machines, handcuff himself and come to The Hague to stand trial?
Obviously, this is complete nonsense.
The other option: Putin is replaced, some other clan overthrows Putin, Putin is defeated, and so on and so forth. And then, suddenly, Russia is struck by an epiphany, repentance and a general prayer, on its knees, with tears of sincerity, asking the Ukrainians for forgiveness. In the name of all the saints and in the name of fraternal friendship between brotherly peoples. That is also foolishness. It is naive to think that, even after the last Russian has been kicked out of Ukraine, Russia will stop shelling towns and killing civilians. It will not stop, just as it is not stopping now, just as it shells Kherson almost every night.
After three hundred days, we have only one real plan to end the war. And that, dear friends, is ‘resolve to support Ukraine for as long as necessary’. What does that mean? Will we support Ukraine as long as Ukrainians are willing to die for our freedom? And what if that resolve fades? What if the will evaporates? What if they all die? Then what?
Today we must make real preparations for war if we want peace in the future. And this is no longer the slogans politicians have been throwing around for years. This is reality. And it’s only a matter of time. The collective Putin has the same goal. Today, that collective Putin has already turned into millions of Russian citizens of various ethnicities living in that country, whose family members are destroying Ukrainian towns. They are killing people, raping mothers in front of their children, and slaughtering dogs before skinning them or crushing their paws with the butt of their rifles. The Russian army, whether mercenaries, newly mobilised conscripts or professionals, is doing this in an extremely brutal, sadistic and ruthless way. They do it deliberately, all the more so because the regime has already absolved them of responsibility for all war crimes. The genie of evil has been released, and only a greater force can push it back in. The horde and the terrorists from Russia like it that we are afraid of them, that we shudder to think what would happen if they came to us. And it would be exactly the same, if not worse because they hate us Lithuanians even more than they hate Ukrainians.
We must also realise that the collective Putin has planned, and is still planning, to turn his hordes against us, the Baltic States. When Putin started his war against the West with the march on Kyiv, he thought the operation would last a few weeks. That is why he called it a ‘special operation’, because he did not expect to be involved in a full-scale war. The gang of war criminals in Moscow expected that under a hail of missiles, air strikes, and rolling columns of tanks, all the Ukrainian defenders would disperse, and Kyiv would be taken in three days. The Messiah and the Führer, out of stupidity and misled by intelligence, expected the Ukrainians to be as meek as they were in 2014 when the invaders seized all the Ukrainian military bases in Crimea without firing a shot. He mistakenly hoped that this time, the Ukrainians would not have the resolve to take up arms against someone with whom they had shared the same trenches in the last war. For this determination, Europe and, in particular, the citizens of the Baltic States must bow our heads to our Ukrainian brothers and sisters because, after Ukraine and Moldova, we should have been next.
This horde’s march into Ukraine is a war against the West, and the ‘special military operation in Ukraine’ is only part of this war. The fact that Russia is stuck in Ukraine does not fundamentally change Putin’s plans for Russia. Whether or not Russia leaves the Donbas or suffers dozens more tactical defeats does not change the strategic plan of the Russian terrorists. Even if the majority were to breathe a sigh of relief at the signing of some new Minsk Agreement on a ceasefire, it would smell like an even bigger disaster for us. A disaster because it would give Russia time to prepare for a new war. For a new leap to the West.
And in the West, there is still a naive belief that Russia will weaken, become financially and economically warn out and somehow surrender. This lack of understanding and the belief that the war will somehow be brought to an end is a very dangerous tendency. Our greatest naivety here is the attempt to understand Russia through the prism of the Western mind. Through the prism of the pampered European who is twice a year in Rhodes or Egypt, who comes to an all-inclusive resort to recharge his batteries and then ploughs back in and saves up for a new house, a car and a child’s education at Oxford.
The matrix of terrorist Russia is different. The Russian matrix is war. Hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens are stained with blood, and the phrase ‘machitj ukropov’ (brutally kill Ukrainians) is their loudest self-description. The whole little world of theirs fits into a stolen toilet.
War makes animals out of people. Today, the whole mishmash of Russian people is being made into such a herd of animals. The collective unconscious of the Russian people is twofold: that of murderers and that of helpless enablers. And it will accept the imposition of martial law throughout the Russian Federation without resistance. This will mean the mobilisation of another 5 million, the subordination of Russian industry to the war effort, repression within the country and… countless casualties in a meaningless war.
This horde will not stop. Even if they are expelled from Ukraine, it will not be long before they start pushing into Kyiv. And then, no doubt, they will move on to the West, where they dream of drinking vodka on the ruins of Berlin once again. Before that, of course, by gang-raping to death underage fräuleins.
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