Among the twenty-eight points of the peace proposal that has been drafted by the Americans is one that – if agreed upon – promises amnesty to all the participants of the conflict in Ukraine. This point reveals a huge lot.
For a long time now we’ve been fed the narrative that it was the Russian soldiers who were cruel and inhumane. Stories were spun and, indeed, pictures shown in the media about the atrocities committed by the Russians on Ukrainians. Do you still remember the notorious Bucha massacre? The intended pun on words – Butchery in Bucha or Butchers from Bucha – and the village carefully and intentionally selected to make the headlines sound alarming?
At the same time we’ve been fed the narrative that Ukrainian soldiers behave themselves gallantly. They are not the ones who commit atrocities, they are not the ones who assault civilians. Such things are only done by those evil Russians.
Let us assume the veracity of such statements. Then, like a bombshell, we can read one of the points of the peace proposals about pardoning the perpetrators of war crimes or other atrocities. If it was the Russians who committed those crimes, then the pardon extends to them and them alone, right? Why does the United States want to spare the Russian ruffians in uniform? Why such magnanimity? Didn’t the collective West – the United States and the European Union – label Russia’s president a killer, didn’t the commissioners want him on trial in the Hague? They wanted to hold accountable no less a figure than Russia’s president: surely they would be much stricter while handling figures of a lesser caliber!
Reading this point of the peace proposal you suddenly learn that atrocities and war crimes are not worth prosecuting. Are the Americans genuinely trying to shield the hated Russian evil-doers? Do the Americans genuinely suggest that justice should not be done? No, certainly not.
As usual, we need to distinguish between stated goals and genuine goals. The stated goal is the amnesty, something enticing for the Russians who are allegedly up to their hilts in blood. The genuine goal is – yes, you guessed it right – to protect the Ukrainian soldiers and the multiple mercenaries fighting on the Ukrainian side who have committed atrocities and downright war crimes. They are to be shielded from justice, they are to be protected, they are to be saved for future conflicts when they will come in handy.
Barely anyone remembers or, indeed, knows about the 2014 Odessa fire, a fire that burnt fifty or so (Russian) men and women alive in the Trade Union House, which was set ablaze by Ukrainian political activists. Still fewer people took notice when Russia’s President Vladimir Putin announced in one of his speeches at the very beginning of the conflict in Ukraine that Moscow knew the identity of the perpetrators of that fire and was about to track them down with the purpose of bringing them to book. Europeans or Americans may not have taken notice of those words; most probably they wouldn’t have heard them, since they only consume the news from the official channels. Yet, the wrongdoers would certainly have heard those words and consequently must have had the fright of their lives. The influential ones, those with connections to the powerful figures in the West, must have used all their influence to extract that kind of guarantee for themselves from their Western overlords.
