Good morning, dear reader,
in times of constant disaster, the senses become dull. Some events, however, are so outrageous that even a world public accustomed to violence and meanness elicits an outcry. Just like a year ago, when the first photos and videos from the Kiev suburb Butcha went around the world. After the failed attack on the Ukrainian capital and the retreat of the Russian soldiers, the scene was horrific. Whether revenge, frustration or sadism incited the perpetrators cannot be traced in each individual case, but the horrific result of the terror campaign is clear: 458 murdered civilians, almost all shot or tortured to death, many with their hands tied, lay in the streets and in hastily dug graves. The hordes also raged in other towns, the total number of dead civilians is given as 1,137.
The Bucha massacre was the moment when even in Western Europe the last observer should have realized the nature of Putin’s reign: A ruthless regime whose henchmen terrorize people, burn down cities, and don’t give a damn about the law. You could have known that beforehand, see Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Libya, but when the pictures from Bucha flickered across television screens and smartphones around the world, nobody could ignore it – actually. But because the ability to empathize is just as varied as the gift of rational analysis, because the Kremlin is also agitating in the social media in this country, because it denies its own crimes and spreads lies about opponents, unfortunately there was still a long way to go. Only gradually did the general German public realize that this regime could not be placated with concessions. To this day, people who understand Putin sit on talk shows and parrot the Kremlin’s propaganda. Sometimes one wonders whether these people would talk the same way if they weren’t sitting in a comfortable armchair in the studio light, but in a bombed-out house in Mariupol, Bakhmut or Avdiivka.
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According to the military administration, there is not a single undamaged building in Avdiivka in the Donetsk region. Ukrainian soldiers are trying to prevent the city from being encircled by Russian troops. 2,000 civilians are still living in the desert of rubble, mostly elderly people, but also six children. What threatens these people if Putin’s henchmen win? Looking for an answer, one can look to Bucha or Irpin, or to the “children’s transports” that the Kremlin used to kidnap Ukrainian children to Russia and put them in re-education camps. Putin has therefore been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court.
The war in Ukraine has been going on for 400 days, every single one is hell for the people affected: the Ukrainian civilians and soldiers, of course, but also many Russian soldiers who are burned as cannon fodder, sedated with drugs and die in frozen trenches or are shot by their own officers because they don’t want to give their lives for a criminal war. More than a million Ukrainians have fled to Germany, and it is a great achievement of our country and our society that most of them were taken in relatively easily. But tens of thousands of Russians have also left their country, fleeing conscription, fear of persecution or because they no longer see any prospects for themselves in the increasingly paranoid dictatorship.
Meanwhile, the regime is lashing out more and more brutally. The Russian spring offensive got stuck in the barrage of cannon around Bakhmut, in oligarch circles the dissatisfaction with the mafia boss, who bunkers himself in his residences, only lets a few confidants near him and haunts his own reality, is growing. Putin obviously imagines himself as Tsar Vladimir the Great, a revenant of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. In order to distract attention from the disaster on the battlefields, he fires political alarm shots at ever shorter intervals, with which he tries to intimidate the Europeans and convince his own population of the alleged hostility of the West.
He wants to set up nuclear missiles in neighboring Belarus, the tsar. Today his bailiff is turning Alexander Lukashenko in a speech to the Belarusian population, most of whom do not want to be drawn into this conflict and would probably prefer to get rid of the dictator. The Russian Secret Service FSB in turn arrested a correspondent for the American “Wall Street Journal” in the Urals. The accusation is “espionage,” but we can assume that the Kremlin chief needs a hostage again. “Putin is losing his nerve,” comments my colleague Patrick Diekmann.
What’s next in this European catastrophe? Military experts, politicians and commentators express their views every day, sometimes the Russian defeat is only a matter of months, sometimes the Ukrainians are about to withdraw from the eastern Donbass. The truth is: we don’t know. The decision as to how long this madness will last may be made on the battlefield, perhaps in a back room in the Kremlin where someone may be secretly sharpening a knife. Probably not yet at a negotiating table. But one thing is certain, regardless of whether you approve or reject arms deliveries and regardless of what other news is flickering across the screens: The oppressed Ukrainians need our attention and our empathy every day. Especially today, on the anniversary of the Russian withdrawal from Bucha.
The sultan may compete
The thought was seductive and the argument perfectly plausible: The renewed candidacy Recep Tayyip Erdogan Several opposition parties had complained that Turkey’s presidency was unconstitutional because he had already been elected head of state twice. According to the constitution, a person may only stand for a third time if parliament forces new elections. However, the upcoming elections on May 14 were ordered by presidential decree. If anyone was hoping that the Sultan of Ankara’s name would be missing when Turkey’s electoral authority announced the final list of candidates for the election today, yesterday they were disappointed: The authority rejected the objection.
