As early as Feb 28, Major General G. D. Bakshi had set out the basic truths about this tragic conflict. While his military analysis may or may not be astute, it is the moral picture that he paints that is of the greatest significance. He salutes the bravery of Ukrainians but points out that it is immoral to press on with an unequal fight in which there will only be destruction. His most damming indictment is of the USA and the West who, for their own strategic ends, are inciting the Ukrainian to fight to the last man, while they themselves will not come into the fight directly.
Tag: ukraine
Ukraine: Russia’s Military Objectives
Major General G. D. Bakshi, is a retired Indian army officer of great distinction and a prolific military analyst. In a 4th March interview he suggests that, despite Western media cheerleading of the Ukrainian resistance, Putin is steadily achieving his stated objective of demilitarising Ukraine and that, most likely, he has no intention of capturing and holding much territory in Western Ukraine. He suggests that the main objectives are Eastern and Southern Ukrainian nuclear plants (Chernobyl, Zaporizhzhia, etc.), Southern Ukrainian seaports (Mariupol, Odesa, etc.), and Eastern land that will give Russia a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula. He even speculates that the assault on Kyiv might even be a deception operation, a distraction that has enabled them to make swift progress on their true objectives. He believes, however, that they will devastate Kyiv in due course.
Ukraine: Tatlin’s Constructivist Tower
Soviet Constructivism was on the avant-garde of the Bolshevik Revolution that burst upon Russia in 1917. At the heart of this movement, was the question of the imbrication of art as a part of proletariat life. Constructivism eschewed the elitist concerns of the academy and the museum, in order to embrace the technologies and the process of the Industry.
In 1920 Vladimir Tatlin presented the exemplary Constructivist work, A Monument to the Third International, or, as it is best known today, Tatlin’s Tower. This hybrid of art, architecture and communication design, was meant to be used as a propaganda platform that would drive the spread of the Communist revolution across the world. Although it was never built, this design had a profound impact on the revolutionary art of the Soviet Union and on the international modern art that followed.
Although Vladimir Tatlin was born in Moscow, he grew up in Kharkiv. He studied art at the Kharkov Arts School and then become a merchant sea cadet at Odessa. Having established himself as a leader of the Moscow avant-garde, Tatlin moved to Kyiv in 1925, to become chair of the theater, film, and photography department of the Kyiv State Art Institute. During this time he established connections with Mykhailo Semenko and the Nova Generatsiia futurist group in Kharkiv.
Image: https://humphries346.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/soviet-constructivism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Tatlin
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CT%5CA%5CTatlinVladimir.htm
Ukraine: Yanis Varoufakis’ View
In a stirring conversation with Russell Brand, Yannis Varoufakis offers the most heart I have come across in the ubiquitous commentary on the Ukraine crisis, and some sound mind too! He notes,
1. When there is an invasion we must always take the side of people who are facing troops with direct orders to destroy the circumstances of their lives.
2. We must support all defenders of neighborhoods and homes across the world without prejudice without making a distinction between fashionable victims (Ukraine) and unfashionable victims (eg Palestine, Yemen).
3. The only question is how to stop the carnage and how do we get the Russians to withdraw.
4. There is a serious moral problem in supporting the Ukrainian fighters as we know that Russia is unstoppable, that Putin is ruthless (eg Grozny), and that NATO will never intervene directly (for fear of starting World War III).
5. While we cant ask the resistance to stop resisting, we, from the comfort of our homes, have a moral obligation to find a solution.
6. Such a solution might involve the US and Russia arriving at a quid pro quo somewhat like the following-
I. Russia withdraws from Ukraine
II. there is a demilitarization of Donbas and border regions
III. there could be bargaining about specific areas like Crimea
IV. the US and Russia guarantee the neutrality of Ukraine.
7. The alternative is carnage, a prolonged occupation, the permanent division of Ukraine, and the toxification of politics both in Ukraine and Russia.
Ukraine: Stop the War!
Stop the War in Ukraine. Russian Troops Out. No to NATO expansion.
The coalition CODEPINK, No to NATO and Stop the War, was initiated by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 120 cities participated in their Global Day of Action on March 6. CODEPINK, No to NATO and Stop the War is calling for demonstrations against the war.and a massive, unified response by peace-loving people around the world saying No to War in Ukraine; Yes to Negotiations and Peace!
Image: https://twitter.com/LynneSachs1/status/1501136610699714560
https://www.peaceinukraine.org/
Ukraine: The MI6 View
Former MI6 chief offers his perspective on the Ukraine crisis at the Oxford Union on 1st March 2022. He seems very objective, but note –
- He sits on the board of BP
- Suggests that Putin may have lost his balance.
- Overlooks organized neo-nazi militia in Ukraine.
- Ignores the Ukrainian civil war.
- Avoids NATO expansionism and the recent militarization of Ukraine
- Reveals that what the West envisages valiant resistance followed by the fall of Ukrainian and a debilitating insurgency against the Russians.
- He offers the image of Putin as a cornered rat!
Very cool, very British, very James Bond!
Ukraine: A Jaffna Tamil View
Poignant, telling and hilarious but unfortunately … its in Tamil with no subs!
Ukraine: Dziga (Vertov) Means Top in Ukrainian
Cinema pioneer Denis Kaufman’s family was Jewish and hailed from Bialystok in what was once Russia, but is today a part of Poland. Kaufman is known to us by his pseudonym, Dziga Vertov, which he seems to have started using as early as the year 1915. According to an entry in momoscope, “Vertov” is a neologism extrapolated from the Russian verb vertit’sia, to spin, and Dziga is the Ukrainian word for a top, This new name carried connotations of the dynamism of the age. Another aspect of this name change is that it was typical of Russophilic Jewish youth of the revolutionary period.
In the light of today’s crisis and conflict on Ukraine, it is significant that being Russophile does not preclude the pairing of Russian and Ukrainian words in the coining of a pseudonym. In fact, much of Vertov’s seminal ‘Man with a Movie.’ Camera was shot in Ukraine. Here is how this seminal work of modernist filmmaking is described in the Telescope International film database, “A man wanders around Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, and Odessa with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention. There are few films that better enable the viewer to feel and understand the power of editing than this towering achievement in cinema.”
Ukraine: The Avant-garde – Malevich
Kazimir Malevich is known in art history as a pioneer of modernist abstraction. Malevich was born in Kyiv to an ethnic Polish family. While he began his art studies in Ukraine, he did his most important work after he moved to Moscow in 1904 and is considered to be a leading artist of the Russian avant-garde. His seminal Black Square (1915) has become an emblem of the abstract tendency that culminated in the post-painterly tendencies identified as color field painting and hard-edge abstraction. Malevich returned to Kyiv to teach at the Kyiv State Art Institute (now the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture) between 1927 and 1929. Along with Alexander Archipenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Sonia Delaunay, and others, Malevich is claimed by Ukrainian art history for the Ukrainian avant-garde.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich
https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/kazimir-malevich-and-the-russian-avant-garde
https://prabook.com/web/kazimir.malevich/3742740
http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.as
Ukraine: The Poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky
Arseny Tarkovsky is one of the leading Russian poets to emerge from the Soviet era. His son film auteur Andrei Tarkovsky used his poetry to profound effect in his 1975 feature film Mirror (Zrekalo).
According to Joseph Nakpil, Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky was born on June 25th, 1907 in what is now Kirovohrad, in Central Ukraine. His father, Aleksandr Karlovich, was a Ukrainian nationalist of Polish origins who was sentenced to five years in East Siberia. As a young writer, Arseny had himself had been involved in Ukrainian nationalism. He was in a group of writers who published a satirical acrostic against Lenin and was sentenced to be executed, but, somehow, he escaped.
One of the poems in Zerkalo is First Dates. The subtitles in the Youtube video above are from a translation by Tatiana Kameneva.
First Dates
Each moment of our dates, not many,
We celebrated as an Epiphany.
Alone in the whole world.
More daring and lighter than a bird
Down the stairs, like a dizzy apparition,
You came to take me on your road,
Through rain-soaked lilacs,
To your own possession,
To the looking glass world.
As night descended
I was blessed with grace,
The altar gate opened up,
And in the darkness shining
And slowly reclining
Was your body naked.
On waking up I said:
God bless you!
Although I knew how daring and undue
My blessing was: You were fast asleep,
Your closed eyelids with the universal blue
The lilac on the table so strained to sweep.
Touched by the blue, your lids
Were quite serene, your hand was warm.
And rivers pulsed in crystal slits,
Mountains smoked, and oceans swarmed.
You held a sphere in your palm,
Of crystal; on your throne you were sleeping calm.
And, oh my God! –
Belonging only to me,
You woke and at once transformed
The language humans speak and think.
Speech rushed up sonorously formed,
With the word “you” so much reformed
As to evolve a new sense meaning king.
And suddenly all changed, like in a trance,
Even trivial things, so often used and tried,
When standing ‘tween us, guarding us,
Was water, solid, stratified.
It carried us I don’t know where.
Retreating before us, like some mirage,
Were cities, miraculously fair.
Under our feet the mint grass spread,
The birds were following our tread,
The fishes came to a river bend,
And to our eyes the sky was open.
Behind us our fate was groping,
Like an insane man with a razor in his hand.
– Arseny Tarkovsky
https://honors.libraries.psu.edu/files/final_submissions/3174
https://kabiraftab.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/first-dates-by-arseny-tarkovsky/
The Koboi Project 
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