100 days of ATO claimed as many lives as 10 years in Afghanistan
Alexey Blyuminov, political commentator, Kyiv-Lugansk
The war in eastern Ukraine, bashfully referred to by its organizers and supporters with the euphemism “ATO,” recently passed its first hundred days. Started it as acting President Turchynov, continues the seemingly full-fledged President Poroshenko, and there is a suspicion that if politicians in Kyiv do not come to their senses, some next president will pick up the baton.
During this time, it seems that even the most convinced supporters of the war realized that what was happening was not an “anti-terrorist operation”, but a real war. Journalists, politicians and ordinary people talk about this. The only differences are in the assessments. For some, this is a civil war, which was a direct consequence of the coup on the Maidan and the reluctance of the Kiev authorities to listen to Donbass and compromise, and for others, it is a “holy war with Putin’s Russia, “which attacked us.”
Moreover, what is most surprising is that in the heads of supporters of the war two seemingly completely contradictory versions coexist. They sincerely believe that they are fighting with FSB special forces. And at the same time, they consider the opponents to be “a bunch of terrorists” who “flee in panic to the Russian border, dressing in civilian clothes and throwing away their weapons” as soon as they see the approach of the valiant Ukrainian army.
Naturally, none of the anti-Russian citizens can logically explain why the battalions of Kolomoisky and Lyashko, recruited from the pine forest, are pushing elite Russian troops out of the cities. After all, otherwise we would have to admit the obvious fact: that the entire Ukrainian state and military machine, fueled, moreover, by military and financial assistance from NATO and the United States, is opposed to a much smaller, order of magnitude poorly armed rebel army.
And the fact that the entire state has been unable to cope with the few rebels for four months now only indicates that these rebels are supported by the local population. But fighting millions of people militarily is pointless.
The evolution of sentiment in society can be easily traced using the example of changes in the mindset of Maidan supporters. At first, volunteers lined up at the military registration and enlistment offices. The war was perceived by yesterday's office clerks as a kind of adventure, like a computer shooter transferred to real life, where a patriotic hero (all in white, of course) kills hundreds of enemies with one click of the mouse.
When the first funerals came from the war zone, the mood changed. Now the new battalions being formed in western Ukraine cannot find anyone willing to go to the front, and the state, in order to recruit cannon fodder, has to use the entire arsenal of obligations and coercion, including repression against draft dodgers.
And the queues at the military registration and enlistment offices gave way to protests against mobilization and pogroms of mobilization points. The attitude towards war is most clearly demonstrated by a series of demotivators distributed on social networks. The general meaning is this: before receiving the summons, the hero shouts “Glory to Ukraine!”, and after receiving it, “How can I buy a ticket to Bryansk?”
What can we say, if even the most ideological and motivated activists from the Maidan had to be kicked to war. And the most persistent still prefer life in a tent in the center of the capital to life in a trench somewhere near Shakhtarsk or Donetsk.
And they can be understood, because one hundred days of the ATO claimed as many lives as 10 years in Afghanistan. The figures for the losses of the Ukrainian security forces fluctuate between the absolutely ridiculous official 363 “two hundredths” and the ten thousand killed recently announced by deputies from the parliamentary group “For Peace and Stability”. This includes civilian casualties. You can't bring these people back. And their surviving relatives will hate the killers for the rest of their lives, deepening the already deep ditch of hatred dug between different parts of Ukraine.
Today, one hundred days after all this began, the Ukrainian authorities do not have a clear answer to the question of when it will all end. Cheap PR with instructions to “clean up the Donbass” in two weeks or by August 24 does not count. The ephemerality of Poroshenko’s hopes for a victory parade on Independence Day is understood even by those who today defend their right not to leave the Maidan. Poroshenko's propaganda is more deceitful than Putin's propaganda. Such voices can be heard there.
As the date of the final resolution of the “Donbass issue” moves further and further beyond the horizon, misunderstanding of the goals of this war is growing in society.
Now no one understands why some Ukrainians kill others. Time and numerous sacrifices on both sides only lead to a deepening of the split in society and to the radicalization of sentiment. Not only the fighters of the pro-Kiev volunteer battalions, but also the rebels are posing against the background of enemy corpses.
Those who started with demands for federalization today do not want to hear about it, insisting on the impossibility of living in the same state with those who bomb Lugansk and Gorlovka. But those who started with calls to “not give up even an inch of their native land” are increasingly talking about the need to “separate Donbass.”
Only the oligarchs are happy with what is happening. As it turned out, war is not only a bloody event, but also full of corruption. The more funds allocated from the meager budget for the war, the larger the size of the kickbacks that officials and businessmen share among themselves. War is an ideal mechanism for making money from other people's corpses and blood.
I’m not even talking about the truly cosmic prospects for budget theft that are opening up in the field of the “restoration of Donbass” announced by the authorities. That is, first the government allocates billions to destroy the infrastructure in Donbass, and then new billions to restore everything destroyed and destroyed. It's not hard to guess at whose expense. We pay for it all.
But any war, even this one, is finite. All the same, sooner or later one of the warring parties will defeat the other. And here the question of goal setting arises again. If the rebels win, the project of a “united Ukraine” in the sense that is being imposed today by nationalist Kyiv politicians will become a thing of the past. It turns out that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers will die in vain. If we imagine the ideal option for Kyiv with a military victory over the rebels, then this will not give Ukraine either peace or unity. Ukraine will get a destroyed region with a partly dispersed, partly embittered population, which will quietly hate the victors and serve as an ideal breeding ground for the emergence of not propaganda, as now, but real terrorism, which will put an end to peaceful life in the country and region for many years. The price of the forceful conquest of Donbass will be the transformation of Ukraine itself into a police state with a harsh anti-democratic regime.
I’m not even talking about the fact that even in the event of a “victory” in Kiev, the army will have to remain there for an indefinitely long period, since neither the loyal police nor the loyal civil administration in the required quantity will be able to find a “united Ukraine” tailored according to Maidan patterns in this region of eight million people. . And for those who agree to serve the blue and yellow flag at night, the ghost of Erich Koch will appear.
And this is something that can be perfectly calculated now, based on the results of one hundred days of war. I’m afraid to even imagine what the results of the next military day will be.
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