“Like it or not, put up with it, my beauty.”-Putin, using a Russian phrase for rape, on Ukraine

 

Ominous rhetoric gains grounds in 

Russia as its forces founder in Ukraine 

After a month of fighting, the architects of Moscow’s war against Ukraine had to explain to Russians why Kyiv had not fallen. That’s when the most menacing rhetoric began.


On state television, a military analyst doubled down on Russia’s need to win and called for concentration camps for Ukrainians opposed to the invasion.

Two days later, the head of the defense committee in the lower house of parliament said it would take 30 to 40 years to “reeducate” Ukrainians.

And on a talk show, the editor in chief of the English-language television news network RT described Ukrainians’ determination to defend their country as “collective insanity.”

“It’s no accident we call them Nazis,” said Margarita Simonyan, who also heads the Kremlin-backed media group that operates the Sputnik and RIA Novosti news agencies.

Nazi! Nazi Partners! Uncle Joe💘Uncle Alf!

 “What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.”

Russia’s astonishing shift toward genocidal speech has been swift and seamless. ...

The change of gears, signaling a brutal occupation, appeared deliberate and coordinated in a nation where detailed Kremlin orders on messaging are handed down regularly to state media.

Eugene Finkel, an expert on genocide at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy, said the rhetoric isn’t just “a few crazy hard-liners” spouting off. It’s coming from prominent government officials, showing up in the press, being heard on state television — and is “clearly genocidal.” 

 

“They’re talking about destroying Ukrainians as a group, Ukraine as a state and as an identity community...we are going to destroy this national community as it exists and create something new that we like instead, no matter how many people we kill in the process.”

...

The chances that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man with no history of reversing course when cornered...after Moscow’s failure to take Kyiv, the shift to a harder line in state media suggests that the Kremlin is girding the population for a tough and potentially long fight in Ukraine’s east, one that could see even greater destruction and casualties.

...a punitive path should Russia win: potentially partitioning Ukraine, crushing its military and civil society, and occupying it for years.

A former Kremlin adviser, Sergei Karaganov, has said that the country would be left as a rump state — or perhaps as nothing at all — after Moscow is done. Russia, he made clear in an interview with the New Statesman, “cannot afford to lose.” 

... Last week, RIA Novosti ran a prominent opinion piece by pundit Timofei Sergeitsev, an outspoken supporter of Putin, that urged the liquidation of the entire Ukrainian elite, the division of the country, destruction of its sovereignty and even the abolition of its name.

“Denazification will inevitably be de-Ukrainization,” Sergeitsev wrote...

 

Sergeitsev's speech was reprinted in its entirety here.

Ordinary Ukrainians were complicit and must suffer the “inevitable hardships of a just war” before total submission to Russian power “as a historical lesson and atonement for their guilt.”

...

Ruth Deyermond, a Russia expert in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, said such arguments are “hard to read in any other way than a justification for mass killing. It’s extremely disturbing language and clearly has genocidal overtones. ...

... 

[Russian civilian Valeriya] has begun seeing social media posts in support of genocide and fears that the sentiment might intensify.

“In our country, we were brought up with the idea that we should fight Nazis,” Valeriya said. “If state television keeps calling for the continuation of war and to kill the last Ukrainian, then maybe ordinary people will start believing it and lots and lots of people will think that that’s what we should do.”

 ...

The Tass news agency reported last week that Russian officials said 674,000 Ukrainians had been moved to Russia — voluntarily, they claimed. 

 

Less than two weeks before the invasion, Putin used a crude reference to express his determination to force Kyiv to accept Russia’s terms for peaceful coexistence: “Like it or not, put up with it, my beauty,” a term associated with rape for many Russians. Ukraine’s resistance has only toughened the Kremlin’s mood.

 

...Finkel fears that a Russian victory would not only destroy Ukraine but upend the post-World War II global order.

 

That is where we are. Putin wants to rollback NATO and create a new Russocentric world order. It is not "just" Ukraine, that is, horrific as Ukraine is. Is the United States ready to wage war, likely nuclear war, with Russia? No. President Biden is not ready and has ruled it out, the American public is not ready, the American military is not ready and is outgunned in nukes by Russia. I guess we have no choice but to "put up with it", the rape and genocide of Ukraine. That goes down hard, boy that goes down hard. Maybe we could be venturesome? Intervene conventionally in Ukraine? Biden has ruled that out. Are we just to "put up with it" then? Goes down hard.