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The killing fields of Bakhmut — what would Vasily Grossman say?

The men killed in war die with the stamp of confusion and terror on their faces, while those who kill them do so terrified for their own lives, writes JOHN WIGHT

AS ONLY he could, famed Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman, himself a son of Ukraine, evoked the brutal and bloody reality of war in his tireless work while following the fortunes of the Red Army on the Eastern Front during WWII.

Grossman: “The head of the driver of a heavy tank had been torn off by a shell, and the tank came back driving itself because the dead driver was pressing the accelerator. The tank drove through the forest breaking trees and reached our village. The headless driver was still sitting in it.”

It is clear from the reporting by both pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian sources that the most brutal fighting of the conflict in Ukraine thus far in has been taking place around the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk these past few months. The resulting heavy casualties suffered by both sides have been acknowledged by Moscow and Kiev.

One can only imagine the terror experienced by the men involved, many of them conscripts and on the Russian side also convicts recruited by the head of the Wagner Group, the thuggish Yevgeny Prigozhin. This is a man whom it would appear is intent on sending any number of men to their deaths in the interests less of Russia and more in service to his own legend.

Prizoghin’s is the ignoble face of a war that could and should have been averted. However the deranged mind of your average Western ideologue could and cannot be shaken from the characterisation of Putin’s Russia as a latter day Carthage and the collective West, led by Washington, as Rome.

Whether it be Nato’s mad eastwards expansion up to Russia’s western border since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the inability of Ukrainian leaders since 2014 to view its Russian minority population as anything than the enemy within, or the virtue ascribed to war at the expense of serious diplomacy in the run-up to February 24 2022, the thousands killed and maimed share the same status as victims of the power-politics that have been played out in Washington, London, Brussels, Kiev and Moscow these past few years.

Grossman: “The earth moaned under the steel caterpillars of German tracked vehicles. These steel caterpillars crawled through marshes and river, tortured the earth and crushed human bodies.”

For the rich and the wealthy, those who so blithely send in the main poor working-class men to their deaths, war is a spectator sport — one they attempt to embellish with words such as heroism and honour and courage.

The men killed in war die with the stamp of confusion and terror on their faces, while those who kill them do so terrified for their own lives. Personal survival in the midst of a cauldron of noise, violence and mayhem dictates that those who manage to make it out alive will never be the same.

More broadly, “standing up to Putin” is the mantra repeatedly espoused by men and women from the comfort of parliaments and staterooms across the West since the conflict in Ukraine began — not in February 22 with the Russian invasion, but in February 2014 with the Maidan Coup, which laid the ground for the madness unfolding now.

In truth, these privileged and pampered politicians and plenipotentiaries are standing up to nothing and no-one, while on the Russian side Putin and his acolytes continue to live in the luxurious and salburious environs of the Kremlin, impervious it would seem to the generational enmity that will ensue as a consequence of Ukraine’s destruction.

Grossman: “This note was inside the improvised locket of Lieutenant Miroshnikov, who was killed: ‘My sons, I am in another world now. Join me here, but first you must take revenge on the enemy for my blood.’”

The conflict raging in Ukraine has pitted Slav against Slav in one of the most ideologically bitter conflicts the world has seen since WWII. Indeed, in many ways, it has been fed by the residual bitterness left over over from that epic conflict in this part of the world. Ukrainian nationhood and national identity since the country became independent in 1991 has for many been interchangeable with the detestation of Moscow over some of the deeds that issued from there during the Soviet period.

Meanwhile, for Ukrainian Russians — for Russians in general — Ukraine had been turned into a dagger pointed at Russia’s heart by the West, cynically stirring up and weaponising the entrenched anti-Russia sentiment so prevalent in parts of the country.

Vladimir Putin is a brutal man leading his country at a brutal time in human affairs. He and his understand the current conflict as part of a wider geopolitical and geostrategic struggle between East and West at a key inflection point in human history.

The demands of a multipolar alternative to the unipolar and hegemonic moment enjoyed by Washington after the demise of the Soviet Union is the wider cause of this bitter struggle, one whose outcome will have far-reaching consequences for the region and beyond for generations to come.

Grossman: “An old woman was constantly asking: ‘Is it true that Germans believe in God?’….We spend the whole evening explaining to them what Germans really are. They listened, sighed, exchanged glances, but clearly did not express their secret thoughts. The old woman said quietly: ‘We’ve seen what’s been, we’ll see what comes.’”

Waiting to see “what comes” has always been the fate of those who don’t make the descisons that lead to war, yet are forced to live with the consequences.

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