Syou don’t learn anything. You don’t perceive anything. But they are convinced. No matter how many corpses of dead Ukrainians may indicate that this is a war of annihilation of genocidal proportions and not a military chess game in which there is a stalemate or one side offers the other a draw.
“Truce now!”, is the appeal by twenty-one signers at the time”. He calls on “the West” to “end the Ukraine war through negotiations”. The authors – from Augstein, Jakob to Zeh, Juli – seem to find that easily possible. The “international community” just has to “do everything to create conditions under which negotiations are possible at all”.
We don’t find out who this “international community” is, but we do know that arms deliveries for the Ukraine are not a good idea because they are prolonging the suffering and that “the Western actors” should state that they have “no interest in continuing the war”. One must influence Russia and Ukraine to “suspend the fighting”. Sanctions and military aid would have to be integrated into a “political strategy aimed at gradual de-escalation up to the point of achieving a ceasefire”.
Military experts consider a reconquest of the areas occupied by Russia to be “unrealistic”, but the “course of the negotiation attempts so far” show an “initial willingness to reach an agreement on the part of both sides, with the objectives coming closer together”. Negotiations are “no justification for war crimes” but necessary “to prevent local suffering and the consequences of war around the world”. The phrase “manifest risk of escalation”, which we know from the open letter in “Emma”, reappears.
What doesn’t show up is what Wladimir Putin as the aim of his war: “denazification”, i.e. the annihilation of Ukraine. Where is “willingness to communicate” to be seen? Do we agree on genocide? What does not appear is the systematic brutality with which the Russian army operates, the unbridled cruelty that shows that the invaders deny Ukrainians their humanity and think they can be tortured, raped, kidnapped, murdered and their culture eradicated . What doesn’t appear in the ceasefire call is Putin’s fascism, his will to follow in the footsteps of Tsar Peter the Great and enslave free Europe. What does not appear are the rights of Ukrainians. What does not appear is that in 2014 they opted for freedom and human rights and against a totalitarian system à la Putin and are now paying for it with their lives.
“Not again”, tweeted the Ukrainian Ambassador Andriy Melnik, “what a bunch of pseudo-intellectual losers” (with two “o”, okay). And further: “All of you Varwicks, Vads, Kluges, Prechts, Yogeshwars, Zehs & Co. should finally go to hell with your defeatist ‘advice’. Bye.”