Threats, Attacks, Propaganda, Change to this Newsletter

Hello subscribers!

Another week of war in Ukraine has passed and it’s looking increasingly grim, despite the remarkable resilience of the Ukrainians.

This in a way is not just a “local” conflict but indeed a world war, even though military fighting is limited to Ukraine, but the whole world is affected. And the whole world is also threatened. Last Sunday, just after I had sent the previous DT Newsletter, I read that Putin announced that he’s ordered his nuclear forces to go on some sort of “high alert”, upping the open nuclear threat he had also already hinted at in his initial “war address” on 24 February. This really shook me up – as I am a child of the Cold War, those ominous feelings of a threat of the end of the world came back to me, feelings that I hadn’t had since the early to mid 1980s! The spookiest of déjà-vus.

Because of this I prepared a new Blog post entitled “Nuclear Threat” that went online on Tuesday. It featured a series of photos taken at a very special dark-tourism site in Ukraine, namely the former strategic missile base of Pervomaisk south of Kyiv. I visited this site prior to my last trip to Chernobyl in November 2018. It includes one preserved ICBM silo, although empty and partially flooded, as well as a completely preserved Launch Control Centre and various top-side exhibits on open-air-display along with a small indoor museum.

Then on Thursday I uploaded another new Blog post, this time about Babyn Yar. That site, also spelled “Babi Yar”, is Ukraine’s most significant Holocaust memorial. On Tuesday the Russian military launched a missile attack aimed at Kyiv’s TV Tower (pictured above), which is directly adjacent to Babyn Yar. It is not clear whether the memorial site became the victim of “collateral damage” or not, but the attack was vehemently condemned, by the Jewish community in particular, and that worldwide … except I presume in Russia where there won’t be a word about this in the tightly state-controlled media.

The Russian media aren’t even allowed to use the words “invasion” or “war” (doing so is even being made a criminal offence for everybody in Russia!). Instead Putin decreed that it is to be called a “special operation”, despite the heaping-up of evidence that this is a full-blown war against civilians including indiscriminate shelling of residential areas and hospitals, even with cluster munitions – quite the opposite of the alleged “precision weapons only” that Russian propaganda insists are being used and solely against military targets. So this is also a disinformation war (Orwell will be spinning in his grave). Within Russia, whatever independent media were still operating have been silenced one after the other. Apparently social media access, as well as access to international media (such as the Russian BBC service) are also being restricted, going by some reports.

Overall, getting reliable information is a knotty affair, as always in wars, where, it has been said countless times, truth is the first victim. But apparently a fact-finding mission by the ICC is under way to investigate possible war crimes.

The latest such crime is widely seen in the attack on Ukraine’s largest nuclear power station, fortunately one less at risk than Chernobyl had been, but still, it’s against international law and there had never been such a violation before. Another first.

At the same time, a clearly out-of-his-mind Putin (where does he get his information from, you have to wonder) declares the Ukrainians “brainwashed” (while it increasingly looks like he is … and ordered all Russians to be too), and calls NATO an “aggressor” … in the midst of a war he has started, outside NATO, and in which NATO is not even a belligerent (yet … and I hope it stays that way, otherwise the end of the world could be upon us in no time …).

Personally I continue to be quite shaken by all these developments that in many ways have turned the world on its head, including mine. I haven’t written a word for my main website since the start of the war (except for a few more short update notes for Ukraine chapters as well as a general update on my home page). My whole mission suddenly seems so insignificant. I feel totally off course and without a steering wheel.

I may therefore also reduce the frequency of these DT Newsletters, and definitely end the regular weekly (every Sunday) regime I’d been running since I started the DT Blog in May 2020. I’ll still send out occasional Newsletters, but it will be irregular, as and when I see fit. I also want to avoid this Newsletter and my Blog turning entirely into war-correspondent-like content; but I find it hard to read or think much about anything else at the moment, including about dark tourism …

But enough for now.

Best,

Peter