The British mainstream media, led by the appalling Daily Mail has, from the start of the war in Ukraine bigged up Russian Casualties, bathing in the blood of every dead Russian. Day after day there are videos straight from Kiev showing Ukrainian snipers getting kills at record distances, drones blowing up Russian tanks or some other heroic act meaning more Russian mothers will be mourning their sons this Christmas. But there is a big omission.
Be under no illusions that this is a deliberate narrative set by Kiev with the West complicit. I was assured by a Sandhurst officer as long ago as June that the kill ratio was 10-1 as “that is the standard losses when one side is attacking” and thus we were all lead to believe that eventually Russia would have to give up. The press delighted in footage appearing to show Russia hiding the number of body bags being shipped home. Thus, all it needed was another few billion quid, none of which would be stolen and sent to Swiss bank accounts, and lots more armaments and the job would be done. The scale of Russian casualties would force it to give up.
Thus, this week we see Justin Welby, the wretched leader of the pathetic CofE of in Ukraine lecturing us folk back home that we should stop griping about higher fuel bills and other costs and think of Ukraine, back the war because all it needs is one more push. That is the GroupThink default position.
But, as ever, in this horrible war the “information” fed to the media from Ukraine was not entirely accurate. This week the Pentagon blew the lid on that by admitting that Ukraine combat casualties were essentially the same as those for Russia. Not that the mainstream media had much to say about these shocking numbers.
Okay, Ukraine has been doing more attacking since September but most of the front line is barely changed as troops dig trenches and prepare for the ever deepening snows. So that 10 for 1 statistic was always a lie. The reality is that Ukraine, with a population 2/7 of that of Russia, has suffered very similar combat casualties. Actually it is worse…
The Pentagon also says about 40,000 civilians have died. Russian war crimes you scream. I suspect some were. Both sides have committed war crimes but Russia has probably committed more – we operate in a vacuum of impartial evidence, but one suspects it has. Most of those 40,000 will be civilians just killed as collateral damage as happens in all wars. Before the west shouts too loudly: how many civilians died in our illegal war in Iraq? The answer, for what it is worth, is somewhere between 110,000 and 200,000. Nobody really seems to care that much if its brown folks being killed by the West. Not white Ukrainians killed by evil Russia.
Most of the civilian casualties will be Ukrainian but remember that Ukraine has – during this conflict – also shelled Russian speaking areas of the Donbas region heavily. Indeed it has been doing so since 2014 killing c14,000 folks along the way. But one suspects that this time most civilian casualties, but far from all, were Ukrainian.
All of this must come as a shock to western civilians having been fed a non-stop diet Of Ukrainian combat triumphs. Once one considers that, by Christmas, a quarter of a million bodies will be lying in the ice frozen soils of Ukraine and Russia as a result of this conflict and that most are not Russian, you must surely question the sense of giving a blank cheque to Miami property mogul President Zelensky to fight on forever if he cannot manage to start world war three.
How many more must die before the West tells Zelensky that he must negotiate, before we give Putin a golden bridge to retreat across humiliated but without the complete humiliation that would mean the end for him?
Maybe you are happy being mislead and think that the only good Russian is a dead one, even if he is a poor untrained conscript. For the umpteenth time you do not have to be an apologist for Putin if you object to being misinformed and if you want to see an end to these pointless deaths.