OpEd-
BOGOTÁ — A Ukrainian soldier at the front walks across a snow-covered field. He has one of the saddest smiles one could imagine. There is a photographer nearby, Alex Lourie, one of those people who risk everything to show the truth, who hears the soldier speak a language he knows. Both have been in Iran and discover they can understand each other in Persian. So the soldier recites him a verse: “I wonder at times / Who will tell you of my death?”
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He is not a soldier by profession. He ran a business and was forced to fight. He feels a moral obligation to defend his country from the Russian invasion. His wife and child stayed home. Who will inform them of his death?
The same may be said of thousands of Russian recruits, aged between 18 and 20 years, whom Putin has sent to be slaughtered because of an obsessive delusion that Ukraine is not a country, is run by Nazis, and is making weapons of mass destruction to attack Russia.
Extremists in Europe
Even some of my own colleagues repeat his idiotic ideas, preferring to believe an autocrat’s fabrications over the United Nations, the WHO or any independent media that can see how Putin’s Russia is using lies and threats.
In Mariupol, Putin is recreating the hell he made before in Syria and Chechnya
Who are Russia’s remaining allies in the world? Which countries voted with Putin at the UN? In the European Union, his friends coincide precisely with right-wing extremists, like Viktor Orbán, who would not allow arms for Ukraine to pass through Hungary. They are the likes of Italy’s Matteo Salvini, French politicians Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, and Spain’s Santiago Abascal — the denizens of the sordid, anti-European world of right-wing extremism.
And his allies in the Americas? They’re also of the extreme Right: Trump called him a genius. In Brazil, Bolsonaro is awed. Then there are the tin-pot dictators who claim to be socialists, in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. As the novelist Javier Cercas said, “The Russian invasion is the first, large-scale martial confrontation between national-populism and democracy.”
Kramatorsk train station aftermath
Murderer in the Kremlin
At the start of his tale, Taras Bulba, the 19th-century writer Nikolai Gogol explains the role of the Ukraine’s cossacks in European history. In Ruthenian, cossack means a “free man,” and his tale shows just what it means to “drink like a cossack.”
The cossacks, he wrote, arose in the 15th century, in a corner of Europe “devastated and pillaged by the Mongols,” where men had to become “brave and forget there is fear in the world.” These became the warriors of a once-peaceful land, and an unyielding rampart for Europe against the ruinous invasions of the East.
Today, the invasion, as well as the bloodstained imperialism behind it, come from a fascistic autocrat. He showed his colors in a recent speech, urging a purge of “Russian traitors” who oppose his “military operation.” He wants to pummel those “who live in Russia but think like Europeans” and deny this is a war to “denazify Ukraine.” He wants them spat out like “a pesky fly in your mouth.”
Putin spouts a Nazi-style jargon, and confirms it with vile deeds: bombing hospitals, schools, theaters and residential blocks. In Mariupol, he is recreating the hell he made before in Syria and Chechnya, sending thousands of civilians — and hundreds of children — into mass graves. In more recent days, we have seen the atrocities in Bucha and the massacre at the Kramatorsk railway station.
This is Putin the murderer, a hero in the West to the extremists on the right.
