“We are living two realities,” my Russian friend Alex stated: meaning, Ukraine with its supporters and Russia. He observed, “Since 2014 we have lost 14,000” in the war of attrition waged between Ukrainian government forces and troops deployed by the breakaway provinces of Dontesk and Luhansk (known as the Donbas region) which have populations of ethnic Russians.  

In the Ukrainian capital and other major cities large placards with photos of each of the 14,000 fatalities are posted at public sites to remind Ukrainians of their losses on this field of protracted conflict. However, the vast majority of losses appear to be in Donbas.

The Russian side sees these deaths as taking place among citizens of unilaterally-declared independent Dontesk and Luhansk although this has been recognised only by Moscow while Ukraine regards the dead from these districts as its own, creating two dualling realities.

According to a graph prepared by the International Crisis Group, there were 8,096 explosions in Donbas in January 2022 an increase of 5,170 from the 2926 reported in December last year by Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development monitors based in the region. Their one day findings issued on Monday Feb. 21, revealed frequent explosions and snipings largely in Donbas, three days before Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Violence peaked in January 2018 when there were nearly 9,000 explosions.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the rise in attacks on Donbas might have been the trigger that prompted him to launch his ill-advised and, clearly, poorly prepared and badly-executed invasion. But, the world public does not know this and world leaders — for their own political purposes — have not taken this possibility into account when deciding to back Ukraine and wage economic and financial warfare against Russia.

The gulf between the two realities has been widened and deepened by the fog of war which obscures what’s happening on the ground and the highly effective propaganda campaign against Russia waged by Urainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the West and Nato. Thousands of journalists who have flooded into Ukraine since the war began. They have reported from the Ukrainian side which is seen as the victim of an unprovoked war.

Russia argues it was provoked for decades by the West’s refusal to accept its concerns over Nato’s eastwards expansion and Ukraine’s readiness to join the alliance. While Russia was never prepared to accept the stationing of Nato troops and weapons on its border with Ukraine, Moscow should never have launched a full-scale invasion of that country to counter this possibility.   

Russia’s feeble attempts to tell its side of the story have been met by Western bans on its major foreign media outlets, Russia Today and Sputnik, and the absence of foreign correspondents covering Russian operations — with the exception of an Associated Press team and a Chinese journalist in besieged Mariupol. These factors make it nearly impossible to understand what is actually happening on the ground.

The Ukraine conflict is currently being compared to Guernica, Stalingrad and Aleppo. Memorialised in Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting, Guernica was a republican-held Spanish city bombed heavily by the fascist-allied Nazi airforce in April 1937 during the Spanish civil war. Since Guernica was at the time inhabited mainly by women and chidren the atrocity and its portrayal in the painting turned global public opinion against the Spanish fascists headed by General Francisco Franco.

The defeat of Hitler’s forces in the battle of Stalingrad (1942-43), the deadliest of World War II, was a turning point in this conflict.

Finally, the December 2016 rout from eastern Aleppo of groups seeking to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by Russian-backed Syrian government forces was also a turning-point in the Syrian civil war which, like the ongoing Ukraine conflict, also engendered two realities.

During the course of the fighting the government and Russia were attacked in the media and verbally by Western politicians who regarded anti-government forces as heroic defenders and claimed that “Aleppo is destroyed.” The reality on the ground was, however, that the groups holding eastern Aleppo were radical takfiris and Turkish-sponsored militiamen and Aleppo was far from being destroyed. I can testify to both facts.

On March 8, 2017, I went to Aleppo with Joseph, a Damascene tour guide who has conducted journalists during the war. We entered Aleppo from the east, which had been off limits while gunmen reigned, and paused near a flyover where a group of children feasted on fil-a-fil sandwiches handed out daily by a local charity and women collected water from a huge tank donated by the Iranian Red Crescent.

Joseph had been in Aleppo a day or two earlier and suggested we get there in time to visit a school in the east where a fete was being held for International Women’s Day. At the school, unscathed by fighting but furnished only with battered desks and dusty blackboards, we met the principal and watched children practicing their performance in the paved sports ground ahead of their parents arrival. Workmen were repairing the back wall between the school and a slightly damaged neighbouring building. Eastern Aleppo had been battered but not destroyed. We interviewed civilians who had remained throughout the shelling and bombing and refugees who had returned and were rebuilding who bitterly condemned the groups who had waged war on western Aleppo.

When we arrived at the Shahba hotel in western Aleppo we found the parking lot packed with cars. Men, women and childrin had come to shop at the annual bazaar honouring women. More than 300 stalls, many setting out goods which, until the conflict, had been on display in the famous 15th-16th century souqs which had, in truth, been devastated in fighting for control of the city. The battle for Aleppo was also a turning point in Syria’s civil war and, once the country’s commercial capital was back under government control, enabled the Syrian army to claw back territory held by opponents.

Having “won” a brutal war and re-established Damascus’ rule over 70 per cent of the country, Syria has been ostracised and its economy wrecked by US and Western sanctions. This policy — wich has impoverished Syria’s population and harmed Syria’s neighbours — is motivated by unremitting vindictiveness and must not be applied to Russia once the guns fall silent in Ukraine. Enclosing Russia in a new iron curtain and returning to Cold War politics and economics would have negative impacts on the global economy and could precipitate a violent backlash from Russia. The US and Europe should reject subjecting Russia to the treatment meted out to Germany after World War I and provide Ukraine with a World War II-version of the Marshall Plan to rebuild.

Photo: TNS