Commander of the Missile Forces and Artillery of the Southern Military District of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Major-General Stepan Yaroshchuk became known to the general public as the highest head of the Russian troops' shelling of residential areas in Mariupol in January 2015. It is his name called the investigators from the international group Bellingcat, it is his photo appears on the Twitter feed of this organization.
In the photo - a man who could become not only a Russian but also a Ukrainian officer. Simply put, a Ukrainian native of Lutsk, who turned out to be in Russia only because of the turns of his military career. Among the participants in the bombardment, many other officers with Ukrainian names. With all this - also worth mentioning - they fired not just the Ukrainian city. They shelled the city, almost half the population of which is Russian. Perhaps, this is the most impressive portrait of the Russian "hybrid" war against Ukraine - as ruthless as it is meaningless.
In recent decades, we have seen many conflicts between states and peoples, conflicts of ethnic and political. But it is hardly possible to imagine a Croatian officer who commands Serbian artillery and gives orders to fire inhabited inhabited neighborhoods inhabited by Serbs. It is impossible to imagine a Georgian officer who commands Abkhazian artillery and orders to fire an Abkhaz-inhabited settlement. Even a Sunni officer who commands artillery in the Syrian army and orders to fire Alawit quarters, to imagine it is very difficult. And an Ukrainian officer who commands Russian artillery and directs shelling of residential areas half-populated by Russians - and almost entirely Russian-speaking - by the city, is easy to imagine. It is easy to imagine that in the intervals between battles he sings to himself some Ukrainian folk song from the times of his childhood. Well, do not you sing to him the Russian folk song? He might just not know Russian songs. But they are known by those to whom its missile installations are aimed - the installations of the "Russian world". It's strange, is not it?.
And in fact there is nothing strange there. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not at all a conflict between the two peoples. This is the conflict between the Soviet Union and what the Soviet Union does not want to be. That is why relations between Moscow and Kiev began to worsen long before the Maidan 2013-2014. They began to escalate precisely after Russia made a choice in favor of returning to the past, and in Ukraine they did not want to return to this past.
This conflict between the past and the future allows the officer of Ukrainian origin not to see the tragedy in his own participation in the bombardment of Mariupol or another Ukrainian city. This conflict allows journalists of Jewish origin to shake hands and justify written anti-Semites, of which many among their colleagues and representatives of the political elite. This conflict allows representatives of sexual minorities to occupy a high position in the country, driving these minorities underground, and not to notice the ongoing moral disasters in the country. It's not very important whether you are Ukrainian or Russian, Putin or Zhirinovsky, Soloviev or Tolstoy. The main thing is the desire to get into the Soviet Union and to drag all the rest. At any cost. Even at the cost of the bombardment of Mariupol.
And I will not say that on the other hand, otherwise. On the other hand, exactly the same. I remember my astonishment when, in the first months after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, I was on the plane next to the officials of the military concern who were going to one of the European countries to negotiate the purchase of weapons. The interlocutors enthusiastically talked about how the Ukrainian army is arming, how sooner or later it will stop the aggressor. But the most interesting is that both of them were Russian. Everyone was called approximately Ivan Petrovich Ivanov. And they were born not even in Mariupol, but in Samara or Penza.
Yes there are interlocutors! Why should I interlocutors, if during the Maidan I myself explained my presence on the stage next to the leaders of the nationalist party simply and honestly: while these people are ready to fight for Ukraine's European choice, against the authoritarian regime and submission to the Kremlin, I can stand next to them, and they - next to me. With all the diametrical opposites of views on the development of society, on politics and generally on life. We then became allies simply because we wanted the survival of our own country.
A Volyn guy in the Russian general's epaulets Stepa Yaroshchuk turned this country into ruins. Such is the ill luck.
That is why the conflict between Putin's Russia and post-Maidan Ukraine is not at all a conflict between Russians and Ukrainians. This is not a conflict of different ideologies, different visions of the future, it's not a discussion about what language to speak and what songs to sing.
It's just a conflict between the dead and the living..
Original.