(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

Many of the numerous commentators on the Russia-Ukraine war who wouldn’t know their Glock from their Arsenov (which includes this correspondent) seem to be very confident in pronouncing the Russian campaign to be a failure.

This seems to be based on a presumption, on little evidence, that Putin had expected a rapid victory somewhere between the 1990-1991 US invasion of Kuwait to drive out the Iraqi army (four days), and the 2003 invasion of Iraq proper (four weeks).

The invasion of Ukraine is now in its third week. Four weeks is ludicrously short for any invasion, so if that was expected it is a measure of the delusional space to which Putin is said to have retreated. More likely, it is the ever more rapid circulation of the news cycle which has shifted our expectations of a narrative.

There is scarcely a campaign from 20th century wars that did not take at least weeks, and usually months, and this is the neighbourhood of Stalingrad. If Russia didn’t anticipate at least the possibility of a longer campaign, it doesn’t know its history. That seems unlikely. 

Having spent the past six months or so saying that the Australian press gallery should spend more time thinking about the systemically distorted perspectives Australian politicians are working off, it might seem perverse to insist that it is best to look for the rational aspect of Russian action. But this is necessary because the Western assessment of Putin is so saturated with what we call “Orientalism” — the attributing to non-Westerners of passionate emotion, myth and “the Russian [Arab/Chinese/Burkina Faso] mind”, while the West works off cold reason. 

Thus whatever the Russians might have done in underestimating Ukrainian resistance, the West seems to have stumbled in a campaign in which its political leaders have summoned up public emotion (which is also coming genuinely from the grassroots) for joining a wider war of solidarity, while then having to tamp down any enthusiasm for the means — a NATO-Russia air war, described as a no-fly zone — that would be its only means of being achieved.

As NATO’s commitments have become steadily less compelling — with the promise, then cancellation of a supply of MiG25 jets from Poland — Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s demands for a moral response from NATO have become more all-encompassing. His irritating (to Western leaders) desire to take them at their word has made him increasingly angry in his statements — that anger is then taken as a refreshing passion and directness we so rarely see in politics these days, his video appearance before the UK Parliament taken as a dose of political Viagra for a jaded and cynical West. 

Now he may have overshot the mark, and started to become an inconvenience. For a brief moment it seemed likely that Western public anger, in conjunction with the urgings of think tanks and emigres might have made an air war/no-fly zone something that would be taken up by a majority of politicians, creating its real possibility. The sudden realness of that reality might have been enough to take it off the table; now, a few days later, it is a distant memory.

As the possibility of armed action for a moral cause has faded, Zelenskyy, whether from desperation or strategy, has upped the moral demand, labelling the deaths at a maternity hospital in Mariupol as “genocide”.

At the moment, the truth of the maternity hospital episode remains unknown. Pro-Ukraine Western media have portrayed it as a targeted attack, when it appears to be part of general urban shelling. Other sources have suggested it was no longer operating as a maternity hospital, and Russian media is more or less labelling it a “false-flag” operation. The usual wilderness of mirrors begins to flash.

Unless one is a willing sentimentalist — say, much of the Western general public and numerous compliant journalists — an attack on a maternity hospital has to be assessed with some critical scrutiny.

Ukraine, having been a Western encampment of political shonks and agencies for years, has some powerful PR spinners. The “maternity hospital” attack, bloodied bedding et al, combines causes dear to both Western conservative and progressive hearts — an attack on family, and an attack on women — and reminds one of the PR campaign run during the Kuwait war in 1990-1991 by Burson-Marstellar, when we were told that invading Iraqi troops had ripped premature babies from humidicribs so that the equipment could be sent back to Iraq. 

That was an earlier era, when people were less sceptical of such (as yet unnamed) memes; more sophisticated methods must be used. The Mariupol hospital attack is unlikely to be made from whole cloth, but it seems very likely to be some sort of construction. Brutal and criminal as shelling civilians is, it does not constitute “genocide”, and Zelenskyy is attempting to up the stakes by using terms that the West has turned into a form of moral licence for intervention in non-Western societies without consideration of limits of damage. 

That is now taking the war into some strange places.

While the Russian invasion remains unjustifiable and unlawful, news is seeping through of the prominence of neo-Nazi groups such as the Azov brigade in the east, their prominence within the oligarch-funded politics of Ukraine, the war on ethnic Russians in the east, and the deployment of a notion of western Ukrainianism against Asiatic barbarity in their rationale.

This is the point the hapless questioner was trying to make in Q+A, before Stan Grant and the ABC enforced the Western party line and booted him out. (Imagine describing Q+A as if it were a Russian show: “The state broadcaster runs the program, which selects audience and guests according to a set political formula; questions from the selected audience are then prescreened, and no deviation from the wording is permitted, on pain of begin expelled from the studio. This is what they call ‘free speech’ …”) 

The struggle against fascism thus involves the funding and supply of weapons to well-organised groups that are openly fascist and anti-Semitic, blaming the Jews in the usual fashion for the problems of decent nationalist Ukrainians. This is setting the stage for continued regional instability and civil war, even after the war proper has been resolved. Which, some suggest, has been the US/NATO game plan all along as a way of hitting back for Russia’s extension of influence into Syria.

But another paradoxical effect goes the other way, and that is a reflection back on Western standards of actions in other countries. For if the bombing of Mariupol constitutes a genocidal attack, what does that say about Israeli collective punishment attacks on Gaza? Hamas’ few rockets do not even approach the level of provocation of attacks on ethnic Russians that Putin has used as pretext, and the destruction visited by Israel on Gaza is far closer to genocide than Russia’s still-limited war in Ukraine. This is one reason why Israel has been slow to criticise Russia; it wants to reserve the right to knock the neighbours around from a position of overwhelming power and call it justice. 

What also of our active support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, where we are far more enabling than in Ukraine? Does our support of mass civilian bombing and engineered famine reach the level of genocide when applied to a distinct ethnic population, one targeted for its religious-political differences with the Sunni Saudis? Is this why Western powers appear to be quietly, gradually trying to disengage their publics from full identification with the Ukrainians and their suffering?

Above all, will the “whiteness” crowd who made a few noises about selective sympathy at the start of the war have the courage to speak the deeper truth that will not be popular — that much of the solidarity of this war draws on whiteness, and extends and rejuvenates its power in the world?

Will they take the opportunity to turn it into an opportunity to make the difference between Western and non-Western suffering starker in the public mind or, by silence and omission, allow that difference to be elided and the notion of legitimate differentiation between white and brown victims of violence to be restored?

Or will they stick to the easier task of policing who writes about whom in middlebrow novels? 

Daily the war is twisting and changing our conception and the reality of the world in ways that peace cannot. And there are, quite possibly, months to go …