1,000 Days of War

Cartoon explainer: The rockets are labeled with the Russian words that Putin consistently uses to describe his goals for the Ukrainian war: denazification, demilitarization of Ukraine and protection of civilians in Eastern Ukraine. The last rocket has its true goal - "re-Sovietization."

Today, November 19, 2024, marks 1,000 days since Russia started its all-out offensive on Ukraine. While the UN and other international institutions are slow to define this as a war of aggression that would allow to take more decisive measures to stop it and prosecute the war criminals, Putin still continues to bomb and send rockets and drones into Ukraine. The attacks have intensified in the recent weeks, to destroy the Ukrainian energy infrastructure and food supply and warehousing to make the civilians' lives harder in the winter.

Putin still insists that he has the same goals for his "special military operation" that he now openly calls "war" without the fear of international retribution as they were formulated in February 2022: denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine and protection of the Russian-speaking population in the Eastern Ukraine region commonly known as Donbass (from the "Don River Basin" - Donetzk and Luhansk).

Here are the facts about those claims:

- there were no Nazis in the Ukrainian government, ever in the independent Ukraine's history. Calling Zelenskyy's government (Zelenskyy is an ethnic Jew) Nazi is absurd. Where it all started - the myth of Nazis in the Azov battalion - was inserted and recirculated by the global Russian propaganda machine.

- Ukraine had to militarize to defend itself against the Russian aggression. Yes, it has now arguably the best trained combat army in Europe but it is only because it had to defend its territorial integrity and sovereignty. Putin claims that Ukraine was militarizing before he attacked it. He put forward the condition that Ukraine cannot join NATO as a part of his "Ukraine's demilitarization agenda" for all future negotiations. The truth is that not only his aggressive war did not prevent movement of Ukraine toward NATO, but also the traditionally neutral Finland and Sweden became NATO members in April 2023 and March 2024 respectively. Just this month (November 2024), the US opened a new missile base in northern Poland, which made NATO presence literally on the border of Russia - something Putin apparently was trying to prevent by occupying Ukraine;

- the threat to and discrimination against the Russian-speaking population in Eastern Ukraine was the reason for Russia's hybrid war in 2014. It was bogus then, it stays bogus now. Those territories are now "de-facto" part of Russia, after the illegal annexation of the four occupied eastern and southern regions of Ukraine (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson) through sham "referendums" Putin implemented in September 2022 - the same "legitimization" mechanism he had used to illegally annex Crimea in 2014.

Putin's true goals in Ukraine are imperialist and expansionist - he wants all of Ukraine back in his "sphere of influence," to restore the Soviet Union in its sham glory. He does not need a democratic "westernized" Ukraine on his border. It cost him anywhere between 200-600K of his own troops, billions of dollars in lost and destroyed military equipment, total militarization of Russian economy and an exodus of over a million Russians who did not support his war.

On the Ukrainian side, hundreds of thousands of lives are lost, both civilian and military. Thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped into Russia and Belarus and are being stripped of their ethnic identity, language and culture. The damage to Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and cultural heritage from constant shelling by Russian rockets and drone attacks is immeasurable and will take decades to rebuild. It's a full-on genocide, as the most prominent American historian of Ukraine Timothy D. Snyder correctly called it. But Ukraine is still standing.

With Trump's election, I am worried about Ukraine's future. I can envision that Trump will reach an agreement with his buddy, helper, and handler Putin that would result into partition of Ukraine akin Eastern and Western Germany after WW2, which will stay in the "frozen conflict" status for decades.