It is likely that most of Russia’s lost paratroopers are told to do what the Ukrainian border guards on Snake Island told the Russian warship that subsequently obliterated them: “Go Fuck Yourself.” The BBC article quotes them as saying “Go to hell,” but that is a sanitized version of what they actually said.
Russia Risks a Bloody War Against Ukrainian Civilians
Butcher Putin wants to get rid of Ukraine’s elected government at all costs — especially the Jewish president of Ukraine who refuses to accept Putin’s accusation of being a Nazi. And so Russian paratroopers have entered Kyiv, and sooner or later they will find out where they are and where they are supposed to form up for the assault.
But if they are confronted by civilians in the hundreds and thousands, wielding rocks, sticks, rifles, molotov cocktails, and any improvised weapons they are able to find, how is the subsequent massacre going to play everywhere in the free world? Every dead civilian becomes a martyr to be avenged. Every Russian man in uniform becomes a target, like the Nazis in the middle of the French resistance.
In that scenario, men from central and eastern Europe are likely to slip into Ukraine for the opportunity to kill a Russian soldier. This will infuriate Putin and Russian imperialists, of course, leading to ever more violent reprisals — just like Hitler against the French resistance.
But how will the rest of the world see it all playing out? No one invited the Russian paratroopers, special forces, planes, helicopters, cruise missiles, and sleeper cells. They were sent to destroy all vestiges of a civil society in a young country trying to gradually break away from the massive corruption left over from its Soviet past.
A freer and more prosperous Ukraine would prove a black eye to Putin, who hates to be criticized and is prone to violence whenever it happens.
Ukraine Still Hopes for Life Free from Russian Tyranny
Ukraine has a long, tragic history of immense suffering under Russian rule. The most egregious example was the plundering of Ukraine by the Bolsheviks, later perfected under Joseph Stalin. Now known as the Holodomor, Stalin ordered the mass starvation of millions of Ukrainians. Ukraine was known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” and — as punishment for rebellion (both real and perceived) — Stalin declared that all food should be confiscated from the country.
A gut-wrenching description of what this was like, based on a book called Red Famine by Anne Applebaum, was published in The New Republic. It reads:
“People crawled into wheat fields to eat ears of wheat before dropping dead. They died from hunger in the act of eating. Children collapsed and died during lessons. A mother took the bread from her offspring to feed her husband (she could, she said, always have more kids, but she could only ever have one husband). A couple put their children in a deep hole and left them there, in order not to watch them die. A father strangled his own children rather than watch them perish from hunger. Communities that had once been kind and welcoming became mistrustful and violent; lynch mobs tortured people. And in the end, most horrifically of all, people began to eat each other.”
The speech Putin gave right before the invasion was downright chilling. In it, he claimed that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified” — perhaps a throwback to the Soviet claim that any mention of the Holodomor was Nazi propaganda. Whatever he meant, it was deeply insulting. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. His grandfather’s siblings were murdered in the Holocaust.
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