One year and one hundred and ninety-three days of the war have passed. Judging by the ISW maps, today again the AFU advanced a bit in the Melitopol direction – both towards Verbove and south of Robotyne. Otherwise, I saw no serious changes in the front line during the day.
Today Putin again told his old mantra about the “ethnic Jew” Zelenskyy, who “heroizes” Bandera Nazis on the orders of his “Western curators”. Meanwhile, these same Bandera Nazis (according to Putin’s version) murdered one and a half million Jews.
I do not consider the Banderites angels, but as one of the authors (together with the famous Holocaust expert Pavel Polyan) of the book “Denial of Denial”, devoted to the statistics of the Holocaust, I can say that (as usual) the figures are taken by Putin from the ceiling.
Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, three million died in the death camps (Auschwitz, Majdanek, Chelmno, etc.). The Banderites had nothing to do with this. The rest were killed on the spot at the behest of the German authorities, either by SS units or with the involvement of the Wehrmacht and police. A textbook example is Babi Yar.
(The geography of these murders goes far beyond Ukraine and extends also to Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, France, the Balkans, and generally all countries under German occupation. And, of course, considerably less than half of the murdered Jews were killed in Ukraine).
It is also known that many locals (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians, etc.) served in the police under the Germans. But they were not Banderites! After all, they were persons loyal to the German occupation regime. And the Banderites (more precisely, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) were engaged in guerrilla warfare with this regime almost from the very beginning of the war!
Of course, anti-Semitism was widespread among the Banderites (it was common everywhere at that time), but they could not kill one and a half million Jews. Even if they had specifically set themselves such a task. (Spoiler: they didn’t). In any case, it would have been simply impossible: they didn’t have that many Jews around at the time!
There were hardly more than a hundred thousand Jews living in the zone of active UIA operations (and this was only a small part of Ukraine) (and even then, almost all of them had been driven into ghettos). The rest either managed to evacuate to the east, or were sent to death camps, or had already been exterminated by the occupation authorities (the mass extermination of Jews in Ukraine occurred almost immediately: in the fall of 1941).
And then there’s this trademark Putin science: “Ethnic Jew”. What kind of fruit is this? How does an “ethnic” Jew differ from an ordinary Jew? Why this addendum – “ethnic”? Why not just say: Zelenskyy is a Jew? Or, okay, Zelenskyy is a Jew from Ukraine. A Ukrainian Jew.
But why this “ethnic” bullshit? In honor of what? He puckered his lips and played a smart one: “Ethnic Jew”… And with his eyes around: here and there. Look how I can do it! “Ethnic”, not a bug sneezed. Fima Sobak was an educated woman…
And let Putin explain: why would Zelenskyy’s “Western curators” want to glorify the Banderites? Let him name one reason! I quietly suspect that the White House doesn’t know who they are… For them, the Banderites are like the Zaporizhzhyan Cossacks, like the Makhnovists or the Petliurists… It’s all the same: pants, a cap, a saber, an oseledets and a long mustache. And, of course, a sea of lard and gorilka. That’s all. Some kind of Ukrainian cowboys or something? Or Indians…
Putin’s thought has long been devoid of elementary logic and always hits the senses rather than appealing to reason. The main thing here is to pedal key words: Zelenskyy, Jew, Bandera, Holocaust, Western curators. So that the listener develops a clear, instinctive reaction: Banderites – the Holocaust, Zelenskyy – Western curators, Jews – Banderites, Zelenskyy – the Holocaust, Western curators – Jews…
What else was interesting today? Oh! The results of a sociological survey caught my eye. So: only three percent of Russians considered the dollar to be a reliable currency. The rest, to a greater or lesser extent, believe that the dollar is in big trouble and that it will collapse today or tomorrow.
At the same time, about 60 percent of Russians keep their savings in dollars, and the total amount of these savings is a record 226.6 billion… dollars!
So much for polls in the era of totalitarianism… Who pulled their tongues? What were they afraid of? They weren’t afraid of anything. That’s what they really think. It’s just their way of thinking. A peculiar way of thinking. That’s the way they are. We can’t understand them.
This is the same as “we did not attack Ukraine, but on the contrary, NATO attacked us” or “we came to save you”… And in general, Russia has never started any wars, and has never lost a single war…
What I want to say? I, for example, know one war that Russia will definitely lose. It’s going to be this war. Russia will lose it, because our cause is right, the enemy will be defeated and victory will be ours.
Glory to Ukraine!🇺🇦
