I honestly can’t remember the number of times I’ve written about Russian peace talks. I could try to look it up, but I suspect it would only depress me. Ukraine and Syria; tangentially Georgia and, I guess, Chechnya. None of them really went anywhere. True, the odd one stopped the violence — although it took Grozny being levelled for that to happen. Georgia, meanwhile, can still explode if correctly prodded, which of course is the point. In Ukraine, the various Minsk agreements that followed Russia’s initial 2014 invasion at least slowed the violence. Until now.
Since Russian tanks and men swarmed across the border on 24 February, we’ve been wrenched back in time. What is happening on the battlefields of Ukraine is something we haven’t seen for over half a century anywhere the Western media really cares about. This is not the tit-for-tat killings between psychotic paramilitaries that was Yugoslavia. It’s not the cave battle of Tora Bora, and it’s most certainly not the counterinsurgency of Iraq. It is two armies facing off in the field; lines of tanks chewing up the sodden earth; phalanxes of soldiers marching step by step; bawling air raid sirens and, of course, bombed out cities mottled with dead kids.
That is to say, it’s World War II redux. Over the weekend, I spoke to a friend in Ukraine who I would accompany to the battlefields of eastern Ukraine when all this kicked off almost eight years ago. She had just got back from Kyiv. “It was hell,” she said. “The east was child’s play compared to this.” Another friend tells me about a local man who has just returned from the front. “They’re animals,” he says of the Russians, adding that he plans to return after a brief rest because he doesn’t want the Russians “to do to his family what he saw they did there”. When I ask what this means, her response is blunt: “Executing people. He said they catch pro-Ukrainian people in Kherson and shoot them. One by one.”
Almost two weeks ago, I wrote that “of all the conflicts I have engaged with or covered in my life, Ukraine is where I most clearly see the unambiguous resurgence of violent, expansionist fascism. Ukrainians are fighting for us all, remember that.” If it was a touch grandiose, it was also, I think, accurate. I believe that what is being hammered out right now on the battlefields of Ukraine is not just its future and Russia’s, but the West’s, too. If the Ukrainians had folded after 72 hours or however long Putin’s lick-spittles told him the “special police operation” would take, then the Spetsnaz and gangs of Kadyrovite scumbags would be halfway to Georgia and Moldova by now. Half the east would now be gone and a new Iron Curtain, though perhaps this time a gold one embossed with the Versace logo, would be descending from Tbilisi to Minsk.
As it happens the Ukrainians — pumped full of Western javelins and stingers — fought like hell. And we finally started sanctioning Putin’s bag men. Poor Roman Abramovich has had Chelsea confiscated. A sad day indeed, but we all have to make sacrifices.
Now, after a month, politicians on each side talk peace. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said everything will be up for discussion. He had first agreed to talks with Russia at the end of February but not to the location the Russians wanted: Minsk. You can see why, what with Belarus being one of the launch points for the Kremlin’s invasion and now de facto Russian territory. Indeed, why bother with Minsk, why not just meet in the Kremlin? Or perhaps even cut out the middleman and just hold the talks in a Gulag?
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