Waving flag of the country of the European Union. 3d illustration
In their public message, the undersigned ambassadors of the European countries, EU Member States and the UK claim that the Russian aggression was unprovoked. But the main purpose of their message was to criticise (Critique) a public letter from a group of Slovenian citizens calling for a Stop the War in Ukraine (Letter). As I am one of their signatories, I feel obliged to write a comment (Comment) on their Critique.
The writers of the Critique reproach the authors of the Critique with positions that are not in the Letter! To make this difference clear, let me contrast their criticisms with the actual writings in the Letter:
Unfounded criticisms of the Letter
The criticism accuses the signatories of the Letter of „calling for an immediate halt to military aid to Ukraine“. The record of the Letter reads: ‚We expect you, the governments of the countries of the Russian Federation, the United States of America, NATO and the European Union ( hence), to build an alliance to stop the fighting, to stop further arming and to start negotiations‘. Anyone who can read will see the difference between the accusation and the actual words of the Letter! Ukraine, which is forcibly engaged in fighting with the Russian army, is not among the named addressees of the Letter! Therefore, the accusations that we, the signatories of the Letter, are among those who suggest that ‚we should ignore the will of Ukraine‘, who ‚deny it the help and support it needs to defend itself‘, and who, instead of helping it, ‚force it to enter into peace negotiations with the aggressor‘ are a plant. There are no phrases in the Letter to support these accusations!
The final appeal, which demands: „Stop the war! Stop it now! You have this power! And this responsibility!“ is addressed to the following addressees: first (!) is the Government of the Russian Federation, then the USA, followed by NATO and the governments of the EU. The Government of Ukraine is not the addressee of this appeal, as it is not yet a member of the EU either! The final appeal calls on the addressees to ally for a cessation of hostilities, for a halt to armaments and for the start of negotiations … ! Because there is no such alliance yet! The letter therefore sets out a sequence of urgent actions towards peace: first, an alliance (agreement) to stop the fighting, followed by a halt to armaments – as a prerequisite for entering into peace negotiations! The call „Stop the war, stop it now!“ is a moral and therefore a political imperative!
Such a statement of positions not found in the Letter is in common parlance described as dishonest, but in hermeneutical analysis one has to ask: Is it not a particular ideological blindness? Not seeing what a text actually says. An example is the accusation that the Letter does not answer „the most important question: whether we should take away Ukraine’s right to shape its own future“. The text of the Letter, however, reads: ‚We support Ukraine wholeheartedly in its indisputable right to defend itself‘. Defence means, first and foremost, defending a country’s right to freedom and sovereignty – that is, the right to determine its own destiny!
The criticism of the ambassadors is built on falsifications of the factual claims and hypotheses in the Letter! It even criticises statements that are not in the Letter! Is this therefore a deliberate disqualification of the Letter and its signatories or an ideological reading?
A controversial beginning
Western Europeans and Russians, Eastern Europeans are neighbours! There must be a willingness to communicate and cooperate between neighbours! The logic should work: what is good for us is good for the Russians, what is good for the Russians is good for us.
If we do not define the real causes of a phenomenon and its very nature – say, Russian aggression against Ukraine – we will not, we will not be able to untangle this global war knot.
The first sentence of the Critique reads: ‚Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the unprovoked and unjustified Russian military aggression against Ukraine and its population. Ukrainians are defending their country, their lives, their families and their freedom.“ Yes, they are forced to defend themselves! But the Russian aggression was not unprovoked! On the contrary, it was provoked and finally provoked by the West, the USA and NATO, which did not keep Gorbachev’s (admittedly unsigned) promise not to expand NATO towards the East in the event of the abolition of the Warsaw Pact. But that is exactly what happened! Russia has Western modern weapons on its borders, pointed directly at it!
The second cause is internal, Ukrainian, with the predominance of a nationalist and even neo-Nazi political paradigm. The Russians of Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea did not want to secede from Ukraine until they were forced to do so by the military, social, cultural violence of their own country! When it was too much, they held referendums (in 2014), in Crimea to join the Russian Federation, and in Donetsk and Lugansk to establish republics. All the referendums confirmed the will of the people by around 90%.
The Ukrainian authorities did not recognise the results of the referendums; instead of initiating a procedure to constitutionally guarantee the multi-million strong Russian minority in the Donbas its legitimate minority rights, they even integrated the nationalist and Nazi paramilitary hordes that have been attacking the Russian population since 2014 into the regular Ukrainian army, thus legalising them. The violence was supposed to end with the Minsk Agreement, but the Ukrainian authorities have not abided by it. Not even Minsk 2! On the contrary! Zelenski won the 2019 elections on the promise to end violence against the Russian minority in the Donbas, and he broke that promise smoothly. The eight-year war (before the Russian invasion!) claimed some 14 000 victims, including 250 children. Before the Russian invasion itself, the government sent an army to bomb its own citizens! President Zielinski could have prevented this, but he did not!
Resistance to peace initiatives
Why are EU politicians and diplomats so allergic to peace initiatives, to proposals to open negotiations and to demands for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war? It is because US policy is involved up to its throat in this absurd war that Ukrainians are bleeding instead of Americans! The aim of the Americans (whom NATO and the EU blindly serve) is to maintain world political and economic hegemony. The main say is clearly with the American arms manufacturers, who are generously exporting them to Ukraine. One day they will have to pay for it. It is understandable that the Ukrainians are defending themselves with arms, but the war will not end on the battlefield – every war has ended at the negotiating table!
And there will be no end to the war if each side blames the other, as the ambassadors do in the Critique of our Letter: „Let us be clear: this war could end at this moment. Russia can end it immediately if it stops its attacks and withdraws its troops from Ukrainian territory.“ In short, Russia should capitulate, tolerate lethal weapons/threats along its borders? And leave the Russian minority in Ukraine to be physically and spiritually abused and oppressed?! For this minority the ambassadors have no say, no compassion!
The writers of the Critique claim that the West is not involved in the Russia-Ukraine war: „The EU, the G7 and NATO are not belligerents in this war.“ This is defending the official policy of the „right side“, whether deliberately or blindly. Only sometimes someone tells the truth in a backhanded way, like, for example, German Foreign Minister Annalene Baerbock, who said, as a matter of course, that ‚we are at war with Russia‘ – ‚we‘, that is, we: the US, Canada, the EU, NATO – we, the people of these countries! Yes, sometimes it gets…
Criticism of the writers of the Letter says: „It is a very dangerous, but effective propaganda for the Kremlin to list in one sentence the EU, NATO and US countries on the one hand, and Russia on the other, and to accuse them all of not having a mandate for this war.“ Not propaganda, in fact there are two sides in this war, as in any war – because one side cannot, in principle, go to war, can it? There are two sides, but they are not equally responsible – and, above all, not on the same level. The ambassadors, however, are trying to put all the blame on the Russians, saying that ‚insinuating‘ that both are complicit ‚absolves exactly one actor of responsibility: the country that unprovokedly attacked Ukraine, that started the war, and that keeps it alive every day‘. And then they add: „This country is just Russia.“ So: exactly and only one is to blame! Since this is not true, this way, by deliberately demonising Russia and Putin, the war will not end. Of course, Russia, with Putin at its head, is responsible, guilty of the military invasion of Ukraine and of the terrible destruction of the country! But it is not only its fault! Insisting on one’s own truth as the Truth, as the ambassadors do, logically means denying (the facts of) the truth and results in sometimes quite incredible contortions by the apologists. I will quote just a few of them from the Critique:
„(…) we stand by Ukraine in its struggle for survival, while trying to avoid an escalation of the war at all costs“. Yes, by the self-evident implicit extension of the war by a year, with a newly produced million cannon shells for the war in Ukraine! And this one: ‚The hope for peace, for a negotiated solution, for an end to the horrors and immense suffering is as understandable as the concern that the violence will not escalate later, that it will spread to other countries. That is why a debate on how to end this war is desirable and necessary in our democracies.“ Of course it is a desirable debate – except such debates which fundamentally problematise those who bring democracy even on the front lines. And further: „We will never accept that internationally recognised borders in Europe, or anywhere else in the world, will be moved by force and that untold suffering will be inflicted on millions of people.“ Ambassadors, where were you when the US was doing just that?
Provoked and unprovoked attack
The underlying premise of the Critique is the claim that the Russian attack was unprovoked. Let me illustrate the difference between provoked and unprovoked aggression!
The comparison between Hitler’s attack on Slovenia and Russia’s attack on Ukraine does not hold water! Hitler wanted the physical destruction of Jews, Roma and the mentally and physically handicapped, he envisaged modern-day enslavement for the Slavs, and the abolition of the Slovenes alone as a separate national entity.
In 1941, Slovenia was invaded by three aggressor countries: Germany, Italy and Hungary. Slovenia was not in conflict with any of them, it did not provoke any of them, it did not commit any crimes against any of them; on the contrary, with the Austrian Germans, for example, we had lived in one country for centuries, the Germans had their embassies, their businesses, their culture in Slovenia. Yes, they were masters. But in Kočevje, for 600 years, there lived the Germans of Kočevje, the ‚Kočevaris‘, who voluntarily moved to the ‚Heimat‘ during the Second World War – that is to say, the Posavje region occupied by the Germans – where they moved into houses that had been emptied by the emigration of the locals to Serbia, to Austria, to concentration camps…. So the violence was already in the occupation itself, exclusively in the interests of the aggressors, the occupiers. We Slovenes did nothing to provoke them: they came not only to take our material goods and our working hands, but also to extinguish our soul, our culture, founded in the Slovene language.
This difference between unprovoked and provoked aggression makes it impossible to equate the occupation of Slovenia (and other countries) by the Axis powers with Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The struggle of the peoples of the occupied countries for liberation is legitimate in all cases!
Let me end with a specific criticism of the letter by the Ukrainian Ambassador, Andriy Taran (Večer, 23 February), who said that ’sensible people would never sign such a letter; these are people who are stuck in the past‘.
The Reverend Miloš Šonc, a signatory of the Letter, commented on his statement and at the same time brought back his memory:
„To say in a nicer – diplomatic way that the signatories are stupid does not sustain the right to publish all the views of a foreign representative to us.
Neither does the assessment that we are people who are left in the past. Well, unless perhaps he is thinking of the Ukrainian 14th SS Galicia Division and Hitler’s personal guard, who owe a debt of gratitude to Menina Planina, where a captured partisan courier was thrown alive into a fire by drunken Ukrainian SS men, or to all the victims on Ilova Gora, where they preyed on the villagers.
So, dear Ambassador, some of us really have not forgotten! Not even Srebrenica. Nor the crimes of the Russian Wagner in Ukraine, nor of the Ukrainian Azov against the Russians.
So ‚a little‘ more respect for the hospitality of a country and its citizens!
But perhaps forgetfulness is on your side?“
I subscribe to this assessment by Mr Miloš Šonc!
We must remember and commemorate the suffering of all people in wars and do everything to stop the killing! In this respect, every peace initiative should be taken benevolently and with consideration! No matter who proposes it.
Without compassion for those who suffer – in war, disease or famine – we will not achieve a new beginning in the world. Without compassion, we will indeed remain in the past!
Spomenka Hribar, Tomišelj
