opinion
death and destruction
The ugly face of the Putin regime is showing itself in Mariupol
Ukraine, Mariupol: Rubble and ash cover a street. At least 80 percent of the city has been destroyed.
© State Emergency Service of Ukrai / Picture Alliance
350,000 people hold out in the encircled Mariupol while Russian bombs fall on the city. In its rubble are dying those children and women whom Vladimir Putin swore to protect. Mariupol becomes a symbol of what his words are worth.
Leaden ash, black smoke, frozen corpses – the cruelty of the images from Mariupol can hardly be described. About 80 percent of City on the Black Sea lie in ruins. In military hospitals, doctors fight for the lives of mutilated children. The dead are buried in mass graves. The city garden has turned into a nameless burial ground. 350,000 residents are trapped in this nightmare. In their basements, they seek shelter from the ongoing shelling from Vladimir Putin’s troops – while the city’s pocket tightens.
Words and images firmly believed in the past. Now they belong in the present. But the man who is turning Ukraine into a battlefield is washing his hands in innocence. Vladimir Putin, with manic obstinacy, denies the existence of the invasion he ordered. “Russian forces are not bombing cities.” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Svetlana Zakharova came up with this brazen lie on Thursday – just hours after Russian bombs fell on the theater in Mariupol, where hundreds of civilians had taken shelter.
While the world feared for the fate of the buried people, the Kremlin propagandists worked to turn the world upside down. It was the Ukrainians themselves who mined the theater and blew it up, scolded it from TV screens in Russia. It was Russian soldiers who were rescuing children from the cellars who had to hide from the “Ukrainian fascists” for days, according to the news on Friday on Pervyj Kanal, Russia’s largest state broadcaster.
Attack on Ukraine – Faces of War
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One lie replaces the other. When a maternity hospital was reduced to rubble in Mariupol, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said in the morning that Russian troops had whistled at the hospital because imaginary fascists were hiding there. In the evening of the same day, the Russian defense minister claimed that there had been no attack on the clinic. An impressive demonstration of how much the words from the Kremlin are worth.
Mariupol shows what a peace mission looks like to Putin
In Russian there is a word for the world that Putin is creating: zazerkalje (Зазеркалье). It’s a fictional world, a fairyland on the other side of the looking glass. A place where every fact is taken ad absurdum and exactly the opposite of reality prevails.
“A military special operation to protect the Donbass.” That’s what the Kremlin called the war of aggression against Ukraine. The world has now seen what a peacekeeping operation designed by Putin to protect the population looks like. The children and women whom Putin set himself to protect three weeks ago now lie in the mass graves of Mariupol.
The comparisons between Hitler and Putin have now become socially acceptable. The man in the Kremlin is often referred to as a putler. In one thing, however, Putin may have even surpassed the most terrible dictator in history: hypocrisy. It never occurred to Hitler to claim that it was the Russians themselves who once reduced everything between Moscow and Volgograd to rubble.