Journalist, economist and author Leonidas Vatikiotis recently traveled to Donetsk on a journalistic mission to the region of Eastern Ukraine now under full Russian control. The experience of this trip was an interesting occasion for the Greek Pressenza bureau to conduct the following interview in an attempt to understand what is happening in these regions today.
What do you think about the initiatives for peace that have been taken so far, do you think that this war is close to an end?
The fate of the war has been decided, long before the end of the Ukrainian counter-attack, which failed in its nominal objective, namely to get the Ukrainian army into Crimea. As late as the spring, while the counter-attack was still in preparation, revelations via Discord showed that top US military leaders distrusted its results. I estimate that for the coming months, the war of attrition we see today will continue and at some point, the Ukrainian military will collapse. Shortages primarily of manpower and secondarily of ammunition and weaponry will lead the political leadership of Ukraine to negotiate. Already, the political disintegration in Zelensky’s camp, with his clash with the military leadership and the expulsion of all his staff, heralds a change of baton having at state the management of the day after.
The Minsk Peace Agreements 1 and 2 were a missed opportunity. If they had been implemented, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. The West, however, has led them to disaster. The responsibility for their cancellation lies with Kiev and NATO. Who can forget Merkel’s statement that “with these two agreements we simply wanted to buy time?”
The negotiations in Istanbul, a few weeks after the outbreak of war, were also a missed opportunity. The terms initially agreed upon were mutually beneficial (Ukraine not joining NATO, Crimea remaining in Russia, and Donbas in Ukraine, etc.). Again, the West, especially Britain, prevented their implementation, as the Ukrainian negotiator revealed.
Ηow Putin will use the war given his candidacy in the presidential elections in spring?
Russia so far “has passed through the rain and has not gotten wet”. Despite gloomy predictions, the economic sanctions have not caused any economic damage, its economy is expected to grow by 2.3% this year. On the contrary, the countries that imposed the sanctions, with the European ones leading the way, are paying a heavy price: shrinking growth rates, expensive fuel, loss of revenue and profits for those companies that have withdrawn from the Russian market, etc. And the territorial gains over 30% of Ukraine allow Moscow to triumph over the military aspect of its plan.
In this context, Putin will be elected in March with one of the largest majorities he has gathered in his political career.
What is the perception of NATO and its interference in this war?
NATO continues to arm Ukraine and to keep sending its officers to the battlefield, thus removing the prospect of peace. With its direct and active involvement, the war in Ukraine has gone from a bilateral Russian-Ukrainian war to a global one, due to the proven indirect and direct involvement of over 40 countries!
NATO provoked and continues to support the war even now, even though it seems that as time passes, the terms of Ukraine’s peace agreement with Russia will become more and more a disgrace for Ukraine.
NATO caused the war by adding fuel to the fire for many reasons: First, by creating an enemy it increased the rallying of its members and brought in new members. War organizations such as NATO in times of peace and stability prove to be unnecessary. Instability and conflict are the ecosystem that allows them to grow unhindered and they have proven to create these conditions to continue to be useful. The second reason NATO caused the war is related to the US competition against Russia. NATO provoked a proxy war through representatives, targeting to weaken Russia’s rival. The third reason is related to China. The US and NATO are using Ukraine as a rehearsal for their confrontation with China.
Who is benefiting so far from the war?
The biggest winner of the war is the American war industry.
The vast majority of the funding approved by the US stays in the country: disbursed by the US Treasury and credited to the war industry, which is experiencing a prolonged spring. In this way, the war in Ukraine is a kiss of life for the war industry.
Others also profit by unleashing slander against Russia. Germany, for example, has gone into excessive war spending, using the Russian threat as a justification. Russia as an excuse, a thorn has been overcome on Germany’s side, which is its post-war disarmament treaty. Even Greece found the war in Ukraine as an excuse to demilitarize the Aegean islands, as Turkey has been insisting for years. The Ukraine occasion overcame legitimate domestic reactions.
How do people perceive the war conflict in the places that you visited?
In the Greek village of Sartanas and in Mariupolis, where the war belongs to the past and the echoes of the bombings do not even reach the people, they do not want to talk about the war. Whenever our questions were directed to that period we felt that we were still scratching fresh wounds. And it’s something that in retrospect seemed very human to me.
In Donetsk, however, the war was always present. The Ukrainians did not stop bombing it day and night. They are mainly targeting political targets, such as crowded markets, bus stops, schools, and high-rise buildings. This reality is nothing new. It started in 2014 immediately after the Maidan coup, when the duly elected president of Ukraine was overthrown to the cheers of the US and the EU. Based on exemplarily documented records of the OSCE, which had set up observers in the region, between 2015 and 2021 there were 14,500 deaths! And we all stood by and did nothing, even though missionaries in swastikas opened fire and roamed undisturbed from one end of the Donbas to the other, acting as an occupying army. Our democratic reflexes and I am referring to societies and not to governments, proved inadequate…
How is the war presented by the local press?
We did not see any local press in Donbas. The region is still living under war conditions and the media, at least as we know them, is probably a luxury.
We did, however, meet journalists, and we heard about others.
We met a journalist in Mariupol who is attempting with his team to set up a television set in this multi-ethnic city which has been a model of harmonious coexistence between a multitude of ethnic groups for centuries.
And we heard about another journalist, an editor to be precise, whose tragedy has much to say about the recent, bloody history of the city. This particular editor was kidnapped, imprisoned, cruelly tortured, and executed at the time when Mariupol was controlled by the Nazi Azov Battalion. This publisher’s ‘faux pas’ was the publication of a satirical newspaper entitled ‘I Want to Return to the Soviet Union’. His humor proved to be the cause of his death. One of the many murders that took place in Mariupol at that time was under the encouragement of the Ukrainian government.
Have you met any peace activists or consciousness objectors? If yes, what do they think that we should do as peoples of Europe?
We did not meet any peace activists and as is well known the Russian government has a policy of crackdown on them. Such a policy, which is applied even against campaigners such as the sociologist and communist writer Boris Kagarlitsky, is not necessary. It is wrong!
Russia is waging a defensive war against the new “holy alliance” of the West and all it is asking for is security guarantees, denazification, and neutralization of Ukraine. Russia’s legitimate demand has prompted millions of people around the world to stand by its side in condemning the Zelensky regime and its policy of provoking Ukraine. That said, anti-war voices that are not NATO instruments – and such is the voice of Kagarlitschky and many others, I assume, within Russia – have a right to exist and to stand up.
