You may remember the line from Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” “yet each man kills the thing he loves.” While this may be true for some on the interpersonal level (and this is not true love, of course), I cannot recall a time in history when a country-aggressor other than Russia would systematically destroy exactly that which it professes to “love” and own.
The first indication of this since the start of the war manifested itself in 2014, when the operators of the Russian “Grads,” eager to suppress the poorly armed Ukrainian resistance in the Donetsk oblast, shelled and reduced to rubble the Savur-Mohyla Memorial – a Soviet monument to the fallen heroes of the WWII. This monument to the illusory Soviet “victory over Nazism” cannot, of course, compare in value to the museum of the 18th-century Ukrainian philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda, whom Russians also consider “theirs.” The museum, located far away from any possible military target, was pointedly destroyed by Russians in 2022. But the 2014 destruction of the WWII memorial speaks volumes of the gaslighting rhetoric of the Russian invasion.
Russians are “protecting” no one and nothing in Ukraine: neither the “Russian-speaking population,” nor the legacy of the Kyivan Rus’, of which they claim to be sole and legitimate heirs, nor even the Soviet artifacts, which for them - one would expect - must feel closer home. Is there anything the Russians toot more than the victory in the WWII? Yet, it was more important to them to kill those whom they used to call “brothers” than to preserve the Memorial to this alleged “brotherhood,” which stood in the way: literally and figuratively.
Dr. Hall, who has embarked on studying the cultural genocide in Ukraine, is on the right track: it is imperative to connect all the dots in the long record of Russian systematic erasure of Ukrainian culture to get to the core of this war, which so many observers naïvely call “senseless.” No. If anything, this war is all about the senses; it is semiotic to the highest degree. The aggressor is trying to alter our perception of reality, to submerge us in the Orwellian anti-world, where all basic concepts – love, hate, lie, truth, profane, sacred, good and evil – have swapped their meanings.
“Who needs the world without Russia in it?” Putin asked, flexing the nuclear muscle. It is time to answer, “We do.” The evil empire, stuck in its own gloomy past, must dissipate. Has not their iconic poet (of African-Russian descent) said, “the prisons will fall”? Only God forbid for his next line to come to fruition: no “brothers” should rush to “hand back the sword” to those who will emerge from this prison state.
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