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Ukraine: ‘No Body Wants to Hear This'

Thanks to James Meek for his long report


Excerpts


The Western companies that make the best prostheses are working flat out. One of them, the German firm Ottobock, is supplying both Russia and Ukraine, a fact Ukrainians blame for the delay in the supply of spare parts, although I wondered if the Palestinians and Sudanese also have a place in the line.

despite efforts at reform, the mobilisation system is corrupt, with the rich and influential able to find ways round it; that the army doesn’t value skills, but is only looking for cannon fodder; that if you lose limbs, you can’t count on being looked after.


The situation is a miniature of the tridentine internal politics of Ukraine since the Orange Revolution of 2004: the archaic, populist, nationalist-patriotic tendency; the geeky, bourgeois strand, people who aspire to what they see as a liberal European ideal of personal freedom, communal fairness and the rule of law; and the cynical, apolitical, transactional, personal loyalty-based matrix of oligarchs, civil servants of varying degrees of integrity, and those who depend on them.


Khvylovy was a Ukrainian nationalist and socialist, whereas his contemporary Mikhail Bulgakov was a bourgeois who regretted the fall of the Russian empire, was sceptical of Ukrainian pretensions to autonomy and put up with communism because he had to. During the Terror, Bulgakov got a phone call from Stalin that was almost friendly; Stalin publicly denounced Khvylovy by name."


In Kupiansk "many of the most forthright anti and pro-Ukrainians had left, and of those who remained, it was hard to know who dreaded the return of the Russians, who hoped for it and who had ceased to care. Overwhelmingly, the feelings of the diehards were less political or ethnic than domestic: they couldn’t bear to leave their homes."


Like so many Ukrainians, "Victoria resisted the fact that in her country at least an individual vote is a means of making a collective decision and is a collective responsibility. What if you were faced with a choice of two candidates, I said, one who was ready to make concessions to Russia to end the war, and one who insisted Ukraine fight to the end? ‘Not fight to the end,’ she said. ‘Because that would be for ever'."


"President-elect Trump and those around him, and, it seems likely, those who voted for him, don’t believe Ukraine being invaded is any of America’s business, especially if it costs America money. Trump’s aversion towards Ukraine, and empathy for Vladimir Putin – like him, a rich, acquisitive, anti-woke, nominally Christian nationalist white man who loathed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and regards the EU and Nato with scorn – is well known. The Trump Republicans share the notion, widely propagated by Western pundits across the political spectrum, that it is Ukraine, and the Western backers who supply it with money and arms, who are prolonging the war in the hope of total victory – a return to the country’s 1991 borders – and the humiliation of Putin."


The is an assumption that "Ukraine would be forced to rein in its ambitions without Western arms, and if it did so, Putin would be content to stop fighting. But why would he?"

War weariness in Ukraine

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