Simon Pirani: No Path to Peace in Ukraine Through This Fantasy World

The Russian army’s meagre successes in Ukraine – such as taking the ruined town of Avdiivka, at horrendous human cost – have produced a new round of western politicians’ statements and commentators’ articles about possible peace negotiations.

Hopes are not high, because the Kremlin shows no appetite for such talks. Its actions, such as nightly bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, speak louder than political and diplomatic words on all sides.

The desire and hope for peace is widely shared, and I share it too. How can it be achieved?

Among “left” writers, the “campists” and one-sided “anti-imperialists”, who deny Ukraine’s right to resist Russian aggression, say that peace talks could start now … if only the western powers did not stand in the way. (By “campism”, I mean the view that the world is divided simplistically between a western imperialist camp dominated by the US, and another camp comprising China, Russia and other countries, in which some progressive potential resides.)

*Mariupol, after the siege. Photo: ADifferentMan / Creative Commons*

The “campist” case is made by literally ignoring what is actually going on in Ukraine, and Russia, and focusing – often exclusively – on the political and diplomatic shenanigans in western countries.

In this blog post I will look at seven recent articles by “campist” writers. All of them call for peace talks; and all claim that the main obstacle is the western powers.

I will cover (1) the selection of subject matter by these authors; (2) what little they actually say about peace negotiations; and (3) why the claim that the western powers sabotaged peace talks in April 2022 is less convincing than they believe it to be.

The seven articles are: “Europe sleepwalks through its own dilemmas” by Vijay Prashad (Counterpunch, Brave New Europe, Countercurrents and elsewhere); “Exit of Victoria Nuland creates opportunity for peace in Ukraine” by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies (Common Dreams, Morning Star, Consortium News and elsewhere); “Ukraine: Pope pipes up for peace” by Andrew Murray (Stop the War coalition); “Where are the righteous Ukraine partisans now?” by Branko Marcetic (Brave New Europe); “Diplomacy is the art of compromise: that’s what’s needed for peace in Ukraine” by Alexander Hill (Stop the War coalition); “US repeatedly blocked Ukraine peace deals; is it rethinking its strategy yet?” by John Wojcik and C.J. Atkins (People’s World); and “The Grinding War in Ukraine Could have ended a long time ago” by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin).

Selection of subject matter

None of the seven articles says one word about Russia’s political system, its politicians’ nationalist rhetoric or its war economy, which are among the central causes of the war. Not a word. Only one of the articles (Alexander Hill’s) attempts to assess Russian war aims; one more (Andrew Murray’s) makes glancing reference to these.

Only one of the articles (Hill’s, again) touches on what Ukrainian people are thinking or doing. None of the other six articles says a word about this, despite Ukrainian popular resistance being, by any measure, a key factor in the war.

Only one of the articles (Hill’s, again) says much about what has happened on the battlefield. One more (Branko Marcetic in Jacobin) has one paragraph on Ukrainian battlefield losses, but no mention of Russian losses. Two more (Murray’s, and Wojcik and Atkins’s) have very brief references to this.

While saying almost nothing about what is going on in Ukraine, or Russia, all seven articles discuss statements by western politicians, diplomats and/or military leaders. At length.

Five of the articles (by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, by Hill, by Wojcik and Atkins, and two by Marcetic) focus on a peace deal that was supposedly on the table in April 2022, and claim that western politicians, who twisted president Zelensky’s arm, wrecked it (see last section). On the other hand, only two of the articles (Hill and Murray) make any suggestion about what peace talks might look like (see next section).

Dear readers, I can hear you say: but you have just picked seven articles at random. No. It’s a fair sample. I searched the largest-circulation English language “left” web sites; these were the most visible articles by don’t-support-Ukrainian-resistance writers.

The key point is that none of these writers mention how the Kremlin works. No reference to Vladimir Putin’s attitude to the world, or whether it has changed. No assessment of the deranged nationalist, even genocidal, rants about Ukraine by him, his close colleagues and high-profile Russian TV personalities. No mention of whether Russia can be considered an imperialist power or not. Not a word about the way that its invasion of Ukraine not only breached international agreements and laws, but also offends the principle of nations’ right to self-determination that socialists have held dear since the 19th century.

It is telling, too, that these “campist” writers have no interest in what Ukrainian people say or do. Nor Russian people. They don’t pretend to look at the interaction of social, political and economic forces. They are concerned largely – some of them, exclusively – with the western elite. They see themselves as its opposite and its nemesis. Russian or Ukrainian soldiers, Russian anti-war protesters, Ukrainian trade unionists on the front line, Ukrainian refugees – these are bit part players in a drama played out in Washington, London and Berlin.

The result is a fantasy world that bears only indirect relation to reality.

When I say “campists”, I mean a very narrow group among “left” writers, who embrace a fake “anti-imperialism”, historically descended from 20th century Stalinism.

They do not speak for the labour movement more broadly, or for the millions of people in western countries who think of themselves as “left wing”, or who vote for Social Democratic parties. These are powerful forces for change. But the “campist” influence is dangerous and divisive.

Of course many journalists in the mainstream press also focus exclusively on this elite world of diplomats and politicians. But they usually see themselves as part of it. The “campists” sees themselves in opposition – but only to the western powers, the US above all. For them, the American empire is the only empire worth fighting.

Whether Russia might have traits of empire, whether China might seek to construct some sort of empire, whether bloodthirsty dictators like Bashar al-Assad are tied to imperial interests – all this is excluded from the conversation. Real struggles that confront the American empire, such as the Palestinians’, are welcomed; those that face other enemies, such as Ukrainians resisting Putin, or Syrians and Palestinians resisting Assad, are shunned.

What could peace negotiations look like

Andrew Murray writes:

Moving from ceasefire to a permanent peace will of course be challenging. Russia will need to accept a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state, and Ukraine will have to accept remaining outside NATO and self-determination for minorities within its borders.

The Stop the War coalition, in which Murray is a leading voice, sets out its policies in the form of calls for UK government action. So it’s fair to assume that this, too, is a call for the UK government to take a particular stance – in this case, the most pro-Russian stance possible. Going through the points in turn:

1. “Russia will need to accept a sovereign and independent Ukrainian state” is meaningless. It did so, in the Belovezha accords that dissolved the Soviet Union (1991), and the Budapest memorandum under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons (1994). Since 2014 Russia has been pounding Ukraine militarily, in breach of those agreements. Any attempts to stop the fighting in Ukraine diplomatically would have to start by recognising that reality – which is why a peace treaty, as opposed to a ceasefire or simply “freezing” the conflict, is extremely unlikely.

2. “Ukraine will have to accept remaining outside NATO” is essentially a demand for NATO to allow Russia to decide which states join (why no objection to Finland and Sweden?!). The UK government may indeed be cynical enough to take such a position, but why should the labour movement encourage it to do so? What sort of solidarity is that with the Ukrainian population – which before 2014 was in its vast majority opposed to NATO membership, but has largely come to see it as the only security arrangement that can prevent their country being invaded again and again?

*President Zelensky in Bucha, April 2022*

3. “Self-determination for minorities within its [Ukraine’s] borders.” This is a distortion of the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, historically embraced by socialists. Self-determination includes the right to secession. (It is relevant that Russia killed tens of thousands of people in Chechnya in the early 2000s, to help ensure that this right would not be exercised.)

From 2014, the extreme right in Russia called for the establishment of a new state, “Novorossiya”, in south-eastern Ukraine, effectively a demand for “self-determination” of Russian people there – but the Kremlin refused to support this. Moscow was aware that the vast majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians neither wanted “self-determination” nor regarded themselves as Russian. The exception was Crimea, where a referendum on annexation by Russia (a strange type of “self-determination”) was held under military occupation.

Long before 2014, there had been support in eastern Ukraine for greater autonomy within the Ukrainian state, and distrust of Ukrainian nationalist politicians in Kyiv. The Kremlin did its best to whip up divisions among Ukrainians on this basis. It engaged in a long campaign of disinformation, claiming to support the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine. (I wrote about this e.g. here.) But on a diplomatic level, until 2022, the Kremlin pretended that the Russian army was not present in Ukraine, although it was, and left the status of the Luhansk and Donetsk “republics” vague. All this changed in 2022, when the Kremlin recognised the “republics” and invaded Ukraine.

In 2022, people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhyia voted – sometimes literally looking down the barrel of a soldier’s gun, and always under the shadow of the biggest military operation in mainland Europe since world war two – on accession to the Russian federation. This is the Kremlin’s version of “self-determination for minorities within Ukraine’s borders”. The Stop the War coalition has been conspicuous in its failure to denounce this violent abomination.

Why, then, demand that the UK government raise the issue of “self-determination for minorities” in peace talks? Andrew Murray can not believe there is the least chance of them doing so. The point is to preserve the fantasy world in which “campism” lives, in which Russian imperialism, Russian assaults on democratic rights and the Kremlin’s distortion of democratic principles for its political ends do not exist.

Alexander Hill writes:

The key outcome [of peace talks] will be the separation of the Russian-dominated Donbass and Crimea from the remainder of Ukraine – something that will hopefully be the cornerstone of a lasting peace in the region.

Although Hill clearly favours a ceasefire, and the Stop the War coalition opposed the Russian invasion in 2022, that is not what is under discussion here. Hill is envisaging the outcome of peace negotiations. Why endorse the imperial power’s demands in this way? Where is the evidence that, if these demands are met, “lasting peace” will ensue? How is this in the labour movement’s interests or the interests of international solidarity?

What happened in April 2022

The idea that peace talks have been blocked solely by the western powers – rather than by Russia’s war strategy – has been repeated over and over again by the “campists” over the past two years. They claim, in particular, that a deal was on the table in Istanbul in April 2022, that Ukraine was ready to sign, but that Boris Johnson, then UK premier, visited Kyiv and persuaded president Zelensky not to do so.

This version of events was demolished by Volodymyr Artiukh and Taras Fedirko in October 2022. They showed that the single source for the claim, a report in Ukrainska Pravda, had been misinterpreted, and that a mass of evidence suggested that the talks failed due to Ukrainian and Russian political factors, and the dynamics of military operations. Commentators who focus on “a magic turning point when everything could have gone otherwise” ignore that “in Russia’s repertoire, diplomacy has consistently been subordinated to the use of force”, they wrote. I urge readers to read this thoughtful, rounded argument.

Recently, accounts of the Istanbul talks have surfaced from people who were involved: the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, and the Ukrainian politicians Davyd Arakhamia and Oleksiy Arestovich. The “campists” have cherry-picked lines from these sources to revive their narrative.

Branko Marcetic of Jacobin claimed that an interview given in July last year by Bennett, who had been in touch with the Russian and Ukrainian governments, was a “bombshell”. Bennett said that in April 2022 there had been “a good chance of reaching a ceasefire”, and when asked “had they [who?] not curbed it”, “he replied with a nod”.

While it is unclear what that nod meant, and who “they” referred to, Bennett’s statement that the April deal was killed off by the revelation of the Russian army’s massacre of civilians at Bucha, outside Kyiv, is unequivocal. In Marcetic’s own words:

“Once that [Bucha] happened, I [Bennett] said, ‘It’s over,’” he recounts. Bennett pointed to the potential for such an atrocity to emerge and derail the political prospects for peace in Ukraine as proof of the importance of making haste on negotiations at the time. The Pravda report likewise pointed to Johnson’s visit as only one “obstacle” to peace, with the discovery of the Bucha killings the other.

Marcetic, writing in early August last year, chose not to look more widely at the circumstances in which Bennett gave his interview. Shortly beforehand, in June, the leaders of Comoros, Senegal, South Africa and other African nations had met with both Zelensky and Putin to propose peace talks. Putin had told them that one of their proposed starting-points for talks – accepting Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders – was unacceptable. (During this meeting, Putin held up what he claimed was the draft of the April agreement, although this has not been published before or since.)

A proper account of the failure of peace initiatives would mention not only the western powers, who of course influence decision-making in Kyiv (in recent months increasingly to constrain the war effort), but also Russia’s real intentions. Marcetic ignores that.

In November last year, Wojcik and Atkins sculpted another piece of evidence that Boris Johnson, and the western powers, were the obstacle to peace, from an interview with Davyd Arakhamia, one of the leaders of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party. They quoted Arakhamia reflecting on the Istanbul talks as follows:

“[The Russians] were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality like Finland once did. And we were ready to make a commitment that we would not join NATO. When we returned from Istanbul, [then-British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said: ‘Do not sign anything with them at all; just go to war,’” Arakhamia said.

Now let’s look at what Arakhamia actually said, as reported by the Russian opposition web site, Meduza. Wojcik and Atkins have cut out a key passage, after the words “would not join NATO”. I have put it back, in bold type.

“They actually hoped until nearly the last moment that they could press us into signing this agreement, adopting neutrality. That was their biggest priority. They were willing to end the war if we took on neutrality, like Finland once did, and gave assurances that we wouldn’t join NATO. That was essentially the main point. Everything else was cosmetic and political embellishments about ‘denazification’, the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah,” Arakhamia said.

When asked why Ukraine didn’t agree to Russia’s terms, Arakhamia was resolute:

First of all, to agree to this point, we would have to change the [Ukrainian] Constitution. Our path to NATO is written into the Constitution. Second of all, we did not and still do not trust the Russians to keep their word. This would only have been possible if we had security guarantees. We couldn’t sign something, walk away, everyone would breathe a sigh of relief, and then [Russia] would invade, only more prepared this time — because the first time they invaded, they were actually unprepared for us to resist so much. So we could only work [with them] if we were 100 percent confident that this wouldn’t happen a second time. And we don’t have that confidence.

Moreover, when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we wouldn’t sign anything with them at all, and that we should just fight.

Oh dear! The really important part – that Ukraine needed guarantees that Russia would not once again break its word and invade – went missing!!

This reminds me of Soviet censors who, when a Communist party leader fell out of favour, would cut the unhappy has-been out of official photos. Snip snip snip.

Arakhamia’s statement, in full, suggests that, with Russia’s brutal invasion at its height, the Ukrainian side needed a more substantial security guarantee than Putin’s piece of paper.

Of course, what Arakhamia said should be treated with scepticism, as should all statements from all politicians. But it shouldn’t have vital parts surgically removed, to make it say the opposite. All the more care is needed, given the efforts by Russian state propagandists to distort Arakhamia’s meaning.

In March this year, Benjamin and Davies cited a third source – Oleksiy Arestovich, Zelensky’s former spokesman – in support of the claim that Putin’s Istanbul deal had been negotiated and “already had the champagne corks popping in Kyiv”. Again a politician, and one whose words need to be treated with special care. Readers should read his interview themselves.

But to pretend that Arestovich’s account shows that the western powers wrecked the peace talks is deceitful. Asked if Johnson twisted Zelensky’s arm, Arestovich says:

I don’t know exactly if that is true or false. He came to Kiev but nobody knows what they spoke about except, I think, Zelensky and Boris Johnson himself. I think it was the second of April, and I was in Bucha the next day. The president got in [to Bucha] one day later. […]

Arestovich here underlined his point that: “The president was shocked about Bucha. All of us were shocked about Bucha. […] Zelensky completely changed face when he came into Bucha and saw what happened.”

My conclusion is not that news of the Bucha massacre alone changed Zelensky’s mind. My best guess is that Bucha, combined with the other brutal Russian offensive operations in progress – especially the attack on Mariupol – focused the minds of Zelensky and others on the issue of security guarantees outside of NATO. And they could not see clearly what these were.

Despite the importance attached to Bucha by Bennett, Arakhamia and Arestovich, none of the “campists” mention it – except for that one dismissive reference by Marcetic (see above). They live in a fantasy world where Russian imperialism is absent, and its crimes of no consequence.

And that is not really a problem about Ukraine, but about the deep political malaise of a section of the western “left”. There is no path to real international solidarity and effective anti-imperialism through this fantasy world. And no path to peace either. SP, 8 April 2024.

Download this article, and a linked one, as a PDF

□ A linked article: Palestine, Ukraine and the crisis of empires

Source: Simon Pirani, “No path to peace in Ukraine through this fantasy world,” People and Nature, 8 April 2024. Reprinted here with the author’s kind permission.

Buryats and the “Russian World”

Radjana Dugar-DePonte. Photo courtesy of After Empire

As soon as the march “The Slavic Woman’s Farewell” began to play, my mother would cry. She was eleven years old when the Great Patriotic War began. In the small Buryat village of Khandagai, in the Irkutsk Region, all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five went to the front. They were sent off to the strains of “The Slavic Woman’s Farewell.” Few of them came back alive from the war.

Siberian divisions played a key role in the great turning point of 1941, when the enemy was halted outside Moscow. Pride in the deeds of our forebears is a significant part of the Siberian identity, but until recently this pride was suffused with the bitterness of loss. My mother always remembered the price of that victory: she saw them in her mind’s eye, the young handsome lads and men who left forever to the sound of trumpets and timpani. I was told how, in the early 2000s, members of the Buryat diaspora in Moscow were invited to a meeting of battlefield searchers in the Moscow Region to receive a list of dead soldiers whose remains had finally been found, identified, and properly buried. One of the searchers came up to the delegation and said with undisguised respect, “So this is what you are like, Buryats!” It turned out that all the fields near Podolsk, where his search party had worked, were simply littered with the remains of my countrymen.

Someone witty once very aptly called Putin a reverse Midas. The Phrygian king Midas turned everything into gold with a single touch. Putin turns everything he touches into a foul-smelling brown substance. The regime’s appropriation of the May 9th Victory Day is just one example. The celebration of Victory Day in Russia for me is now associated exclusively with pobedobesie [“victory frenzy”], with vulgarity, and with the slogan “We can do it again!”, whose true meaning dawns on us only today, after the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors of Bucha.

The irony of the current situation, in which members of my nation, the Buryats, are involved in this shameful war for Russia, is that images of Russian occupiers with Asian faces are now being injected into the public’s mind, while in the Great Patriotic War the role of the warrior-liberator was reserved exclusively for ethnic Russian soldiers.

Soon after Bucha, fake reportsw spread online that it was Buryats who committed the atrocities there, and these posts were illustrated by photos of Yakut soldiers holding the flag of the Sakha Republic, taken in 2018 in the military garrison in the Russian Far East where they served. Why would anyone want to shift the blame for the massacres to Buryats? My Ukrainian Facebook friend Dmytro Kanibolotskyy answered this question best of all: “Russia’s attempts to declare ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ guilty or to pass off the footage from the Bucha district as ‘staged’ have failed. Satellite images clearly showed that the bodies of the dead were lying in the same places when Russian troops were still in Bucha. The involvement of ethnic Russians in the mass murders is also evidenced by their intercepted conversations and the testimony of local residents. But now Russian propaganda is trying to tell a different story, to Ukrainian readers at least: the Russian Federation’s ethnic minorities, who got drunk and disobeyed orders, are allegedly to blame for the whole thing. It is convenient to encourage Ukrainians to think that their enemies are not ethnic Russians, but Buryats (as well as Yakuts, Chechens, Dagestanis, and other peoples of the Russian Federation), that they must fight not against Russia or ethnic Russians, but against the nations that Russian has colonized.”

The investigation of the war crimes in Bucha and other towns and villages is already underway. Ukrainian presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych has spoken unequivocally about the preliminary results: the atrocities in Bucha were committed by “burly Slavic guys,” and not by Buryats, “as they like to say.” I am sure there will be a new Nuremberg trial after the war, and if it transpires that there were Buryats among the war criminals, they will have to be punished. But I hope that there will also be room in the dock for warmongering propagandists, and for the Kremlin’s disinformation agents in Ukraine.

Recently, I have often been asked why so many Buryats are fighting in the “special operation.” There are really a lot of Buryat soldiers fighting in this war. The Telegram channel Mongolian Knot reported that “according to various estimates, there are about ten thousand Buryats at the front.” Other sources report that there are five or six thousand Buryats in combat. Most likely, as a percentage per capita among all the peoples of Russia, the Buryats fighting in Ukraine are in the lead.

I have been told that there is not a single Buryat village that does not have at least a dozen or two dozen contract soldiers at the front. The situation is particularly difficult in the Agin-Buryat District of the Transbaikal Territory. The absence of young Buryat men in public places is striking. There are places where Buryat families go in full force — the so-called countryside and the datsan. There are generally few Buryat men between the age of twenty and forty years in the datsans. According to my relatives, none of the ten Buryat families who came to services at the temple had fathers. In the countryside vacation spots, there were at best two men among every three or four families with children.

Buryats make up only 0.3% of Russia’s population, but they make up 2.8% of the official war dead. In terms of numbers of war dead, Dagestan is ahead of Buryatia, but Dagestan’s population is three times larger. The moderators of the Telegram channel Demography by Raksha looked at the stats for Buryats whose age was known at the time of their deaths in the war, and calculated how many men in Buryatia died on average over the same (fifty-three-day) period during “peacetime” (in 2019-2020). On top of this, they sorted those who have perished in the war in Ukraine into the appropriate age groups.

Thus, only the confirmed cases of combat deaths of men from Buryatia in the war in Ukraine increased the mortality of Buryat men aged 18-45 years by 70%, and the mortality of young men under the age of thirty by 270%. Think about those numbers! There are approximately 462 thousand Buryats in the Russian Federation. What will happen to this nation if it loses so many young healthy men of reproductive age all at once — a tenth of the strong young men who could have raised twenty to thirty thousand children?

The causes of this catastrophic situation can be discussed endlessly. The Buryat territories, consisting of the Republic of Buryatia proper, as well as parts of the Irkutsk Region, the Ust-Orda Buryat District, the Transbaikal Territory, and the Agin-Buryat District, are a large economically depressed region. High unemployment, meager salaries, and the indebtedness of the population have led to the fact that almost the only choice a young man faces in finding a way out of economic impasse is either illegal migration or contract military service.

The traditional upbringing in Buryat families also plays a big role in the conscious choice of a military career. Boys are taught from an early age to be independent, work hard, stand up for themselves, and protect loved ones. Traditional sports are very popular in Buryatia, especially the national form of wrestling, buhe barildaan.

A young guy from a small Buryat village, accustomed to harsh living conditions, hard work, getting up early, and discipline, adapts easily to military life, and after signing a contract, receives a preferential military mortgage (which is almost the most important factor for young families) and a guaranteed salary that is decent by the region’s standards.

Buryat tank crewmen were involved in battles on Ukrainian territory long before February 24 of this year. One of them, Dorzhi Batomunkuyev, who suffered severe burns in the Battle of Debaltseve in 2015, gave an interview to Novaya Gazeta’s Elena Kostyuchenko in which he called Putin “cunning” and admitted that he and his comrades had painted over the numbers of their tanks and removed the chevrons and stripes from their uniforms to “disguise” them before being sent to Donbas.

Dmitry Sapozhnikov, a Russian national and the commander of the DPR’s special forces, told the BBC Russian Service that the role of Buryat tank crews in the battle for the Debaltseve bridgehead had been decisive. Even then, the Buryats were the most combat-ready segment of the Russian army. It was not for nothing that a Buryat crew won the international tank biathlon shortly before our contractor soldiers were deployed to Donbas.

Thus, their professionalism, a respect for elders laid down by their upbringing, their strict adherence to orders, and the way they perform in combat, including their willingness to sacrifice themselves, all make the Buryats excellent soldiers. In 2010, news came of the heroic deed of Aldar Tsydenzhapov, a 19-year-old sailor from the Agin-Buryat District. On September 24, 2010, the crew of the destroyer Bystry was on board and preparing to sail on a combat mission to Kamchatka. Aldar and four of his mates took over the watch. When a fire broke out in the destroyer’s engine room, Aldar rushed to its epicenter and shut a red-hot valve with his bare hands.

The ship and more than 300 crew members were saved, but Aldar was fatally burned and died in a military hospital. The then President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev considered Aldar unworthy of the title of Hero of Russia. Initially, the authorities planned to award him only the Order of Courage. Only after public outrage, a petition campaign on Change.org, and appeals from parliamentarians and party officials, was he posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Russia.

I understand perfectly well that many readers will now accuse me of trying to whitewash my own people. There is most likely some truth to this. I will repeat once again that if it transpires that there are war criminals among Buryats, I will be the first to demand that they be punished. In the meantime, I will give some first-hand evidence of the behavior of Buryat soldiers in occupied Ukrainian territory.

In the first days of the war, in the comments under a post in the Facebook group Buryatia Is Our Home, someone mentioned that the Buryat tank crews were not marauding, but instead were going house to house and trying to buy food from local residents. They said that they were going on maneuvers and had not known about HQ’s plans to cross the border with Ukraine. One Buryat contract soldier said the same thing in a telephone conversation with his family on the eve of the invasion: he had been looking forward to coming home soon, but instead he ended up at war.

A woman from Ukraine, whose brother and niece had spoken with the tank crews, wrote on the Buryat group page that they were hungry since they had been issued dry rations for only one day; they were not aggressive, and wanted to go home. Many of them were conscripts, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old lads who had urgently been “made” contract soldiers. A resident of Chernihiv region wrote about an incident in Mykhailo-Kotsiubynske: “Belarusians, who are stationed there as occupiers along with Buryats and Muscovites, took a horse from a villager, slaughtered it, and ate it. Like in the First World War… And what to do if the Muscovites simply confiscate food? Buryats are the most cultured among the occupiers, they buy [food] for money, while the Belarusians say they are ‘peaceful people.'” (My translation.) There was the testimony from a resident of Bucha that Buryats had tried to warn her to be careful when “they” (probably Pskov paratroopers or Wagner Group mercenaries) came. And in Borodyanka, people said, “The Buryats did not shoot.”

Subsequently, videos with blaring titles like “The Buryats are worse than the Kadyrovites,” etc., were dumped on the web. When you watch the videos, however, it transpires that the most terrible crime of the alleged Buryats (soldiers of Asian appearance, whom the interviewee called “flat–faced”) was shattering a door with an axe, which is not a good thing, of course, but not remotely as bad as torture, rape, and summary execution.

Outright fakes and “crucified boys” have now come into play, like the video featuring a volunteer who allegedly survived Bucha, which was thoroughly and expertly demolished by Dmitro Kanibolotskyy. Such sleaze is manufactured in an attempt to “save face” for ethnic Russian soldiers. This is the point of the image of the savage Buryat, who allegedly slices flesh from live dogs in order to “chow down.” A post containing such outlandish content actually has been making the rounds on social media.

Unfortunately, involvement in an unjust war of conquest eventually hardens and corrupts even the most steadfast and moral people. In such a war, there are no soldiers in clean white jackets, if HQ encourages looting and violence against civilians. The Russian army and the people of Russia are guilty of the aggression unleashed by Putin. The blood of thousands of Ukrainians will remain on our conscience forever. The war has brought shame on Russia. But this inglorious coin has another side. The Russian leadership is responsible not only for criminal aggression against the people of Ukraine, but also for the death of thousands of its own soldiers, especially non-ethnic Russian soldiers whom the Kremlin obviously feels less sorry for, regarding them as cannon fodder that can be dumped on the front line.

It is possible to understand on a personal level the Ukrainians who believe that the majority of war crimes have been committed by Buryats. They are under stress, they are distraught and grief-stricken, they are not up to rational arguments now. Some Russians comport themselves much worse in this situation, and I’m not talking about Putinists and my completely brainwashed fellow citizens. I mean the so-called “cultured” liberal crowd.

Many people today are wondering why so many Buryats are fighting in Ukraine. Video blogger Karen Shainyan even bothered to go to Ulan-Ude to get an answer, where he shot a video that has racked up almost 300 thousand views on YouTube. Shainyan sought out a wide spectrum of experts, only Buryats themselves were not invited to his intellectual symposium. However, we Buryats were still shown in the form of visual aids, as illustrations to the expert opinions of the sahibs. It is simply impossible to imagine a whole ethnic group, outside of Russia, being so unabashedly deprived of its subjectivity.

A few days ago, the Buryat political exile Dorjo Dugarov and I had a chance to speak on the same topic – “Why are Buryats going off to fight for the Russian army?” – on the Ukrainian TV channel FreeDom. I saw Shainyan’s show literally the next day after our broadcast, and I couldn’t help but notice a parallel: Shainyan denies the subjectivity of Buryats in about the same fashion as Putin denies the subjectivity of Ukraine! That is why it is not surprising that Ukrainian TV journalists bothered to invite Buryats to talk about Buryatia, while a Moscow blogger could not or did not want to find a single Buryat in Ulan-Ude! It is the same imperial rationale, the same disrespect for “inferior” nations as Putin’s. And until Russians rid themselves of imperial thinking, Russia will keep stepping on the same bloody rake over and over again.

Alexander Nevzorov, Russian imperialist and erstwhile champion of Russian armed force in Chechnya, but now an idol of the Russian opposition crowd, has since the beginning of the war repeatedly allowed himself statements suggesting that “the Buryats don’t care who they rape.” The views of the flip-flopping hybrid democrat are especially congenial to those who, wrapped in the redesigned flag of “the other Russia, the good Russia,” want to shift the collective blame for all crimes onto the country’s minorities. But no, the shame of this war will have to be shared equally by our whole country, which has gone off the rails.

Source: Radjana Dugar-DePonte, “Buryats and the ‘Russian world’: ‘The shame of this war will have to be shared equally,'” Sibir.Realii (Radio Svoboda), 12 May 2022, and the slightly different version of this article published on the Radio Svoboda website on 17 May 2022. Radjana Dugar-DePonte is a historian and exiled Buryat political activist. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

Ivan Astashin: Violence Is the Norm

I’m not surprised by the violence. I am not surprised because I know about the violence that occurs in Russia every day. Senseless cruelty is seemingly the norm for some Russians. I don’t have a ready answer to why this is the case. It’s worth asking sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists for an explanation.

Those of you who were born in the early 1990s or earlier probably know about the brutal executions, tortures, and rapes of the Chechen population by Russian soldiers. Some of you will say that the Chechen militants were cruel too. Yes, they were. But it is always worth remembering that it was the Russian troops who invaded Chechnya, and not vice versa. Another big question is who was the first to employ torture and execute the so-called enemy using elaborate methods. To refresh your memory of those events, I would remind you of several well-known cases. The bombing of Katyr-Yurt. The murder of six dozen civilians in Novy Aldy by the Petersburg riot police. The abduction, rape, and murder of the 18-year-old Chechen girl Elza Kungayeva by Colonel Yuri Budanov. In addition, human rights defenders, journalists, and the European Court of Human Rights have reliably verified a huge number of abductions and the cruelest tortures of Chechens by Russian forces.

I remember the first time I found out about these tortures at school. A classmate told me that his brother had “fought” in Chechnya and brought back a videotape showing the torture of local residents. I didn’t watch the tape: what my classmate told me sufficed. A few years later, in the ninth grade, I met a Chechen boy my age, who told me about similar tortures to which his relatives had been subjected. I was told the same thing about men who had been involved in the Chechen campaign whom I met in prison. Only Chechens themselves do not like talking about the torture and rapes; therefore, the information found in open sources details only a small portion of the crimes committed by the Russian security forces in Chechnya.

‘Post-Soviet visual. An unknown activist’s protest performance titled “Bucha-Moscow” against the war crimes of the Russian army in Ukraine. Images via Холод.’ Courtesy of Soviet Visuals. Thanks as well to OG for the heads-up.

In addition to war, there is also quite enough cruelty (sadism, I would even say) both in the army and outside it. By the way, it is quite logical that since Russian soldiers bully and actually torture their fellow soldiers, they would not have any moral barriers vis-a-vis the enemy and the “enemy” civilian population. The infamous story of Private Andrei Sychev, who was tortured by his mates on the occasion of the New Year, is an eloquent illustration of relations within the army.

As probably everyone knows now, there are whole torture “conveyor belts” in the Russian penitentiary system. In such places, prisoners are tortured with extreme cruelty. And, it seems, with a particular relish. They are tortured both by Federal Penitentiary Service employees and by other prisoners who have signed contracts with the wardens. They torture and rape prisoners, and sometimes they kill them. Moreover, this goes on in both adult and juvenile penitentiaries.

And the cops? They also enjoy torturing, beating, and, on occasion, raping detainees in police departments.

However, cruelty is found not only among the security forces. Due to the fact that I was reputed to be a “lawyer” in the penal colony, many prisoners brought their verdicts to me to “have a look.” I wish I hadn’t seen them. Out of greed, in a drunken stupor or out of fear, these seemingly utterly ordinary people had done terrible things.

I also remember the stories of some of my inmate friends about how their fathers had “raised” them. “My dad beat me with a stick.” “Mine whacked the fucking hell out of me with a hose.”

As for these last arguments, you might counter me by saying that they are criminals from difficult backgrounds. Perhaps.

What about domestic violence? According to the Consortium of Women’s Non-Governmental Associations, at least five thousand women were killed as a result of domestic violence [in Russia] in 2018 alone.

Once in power (whether as conferred by epaulettes or as the “head of the family”) and believing in their impunity, many, many people in Russia become executioners, sadists, and rapists. And if this is also bolstered by xenophobic propaganda and strong alcohol, the monsters begin doing the unimaginable. Since the regime in Russia gives some people the authority to inflict whatever they want on those in their jurisdictions, and forces others to go along and not to rebel, violence becomes commonplace.

Now it has spilled out of Russia. The whole world has now seen what had been happening on the sly during “counter-terrorist operations,” in police departments, in secret prisons and the Federal Penitentiary Service’s unclassified institutions, and in the army, as well as on the streets and in home. [Bucha] is undoubtedly a terrible tragedy and a huge grief for the victims and all decent people. But I hope that over time it will lead to society’s re-examining the policy of giving people uncontrolled power. Ridding the world of violence seems to be an almost unmanageable task, but I think that when Russia doesn’t have policemen who “Putin told to beat the holy fuck” out of someone, when it doesn’t have military men whose crimes will be “written off by the war,” when it doesn’t have security officers who “defend the motherland,” and when there is no support in society for patriarchy, racism, and xenophobia, there will be much less violence.

Source: Ivan Astashin, Facebook, 5 April 2022. Mr. Astashin is a former political prisoner. Translated by the Russian Reader