A portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin by Ukrainian artist Darya Marchenko is made from 5,000 used bullet cartridges collected at the Russo-Ukrainian front in eastern Ukraine. The portrait is named "The Face of War." The portrait was presented along with a novel which tells personal stories of six people involved in this project including Darya's own story and stories of people who helped her to collect the bullet shells at the frontline. She calls her art approach philosophic symbolism where every element has its hidden meaning. In her works each used bullet cartridge stands for a human life that was brutally ended by Putin's military invasion into Ukraine. (Image: dashart.com.ua)

A portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin by Ukrainian artist Darya Marchenko is made from 5,000 used bullet cartridges collected at the Russo-Ukrainian front in eastern Ukraine. The portrait is named "The Face of War." The portrait was presented along with a novel which tells personal stories of six people involved in this project including Darya's own story and stories of people who helped her to collect the bullet shells at the frontline. She calls her art approach philosophic symbolism where every element has its hidden meaning. In her works each used bullet cartridge stands for a human life that was brutally ended by Putin's military invasion into Ukraine. (Image: dashart.com.ua) 

Opinion, Russian Aggression

The stakes in Ukraine are far higher than most people imagine, Aleksandr Skobov says. Putin’s war there is “only part of his global war against the fundamental principles of civilized relations among states,” and that means any agreement with him that accepts any of his demands will mark the end of the West and the world it created.

“Putin is conducting a war to destroy the world order based on the legal limitations of the use of force developed by Western civilization,” the Moscow commentator says.

“He is carrying out a war for ‘a new world order,’ which will legalize his ‘right’ to dictate his will” to Russia’s neighbors and the world.

The Kremlin leader is saying to the entire world “’I will bomb maternity hospitals but all the same you will come to me and agree about a new balance of forces.’ Analysts are competing with each other to list his miscalculations and failures, but Putin himself is confident that he is closer than ever before to this goal.”

Ukraine should not become a sacrificial lamb to Putin for our illusion of peace

That goal is “to force Ukraine to sign a kind of new Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty” and have the West certify that as a necessary step to end stop the attacks of the Russian army, Skobov continues. If that happens and those who are focused only on ending the fighting currently have the whip hand, that will mark the replacement of the current international order with one of Putin’s design.

“This will mean that Putin’s ‘right’ to dictator to other countries changes in their domestic and foreign policy and also their borders with the help of mass murders of their citizens has now been legalized. This will mean that the world and in the first instance the Western world has proved incapable of stopping an aggressor and a military criminal.”

And all that will mean “the final collapse of the world order and the assertion of ‘a new world order,’ the order of Putin.”

Concessions to Russian demands at “peace talks” will only bring further aggression

In Skobov’s words, “Putin has consistently sought to humiliate the West by demonstrating its inability to stop an aggressor and military criminal. This will mean ‘the exit of the West from world history,’ together with all its global humanistic projects based on the supremacy of law and the priority of human rights.”

“And if the West will continue to avoid a military response to the aggressor with treacherous talk about peace at any price, about compromise, and about a new balance of power, it will truly exit from history.” To avoid that, it must recognize that what is going on now is not a regional conflict but a world war over the international order.

In that war, the West must fight and win “until the complete and total capitulation of imperial Russia,” Skobov says, until Russia is “de-Nazified, that is, de-Putinized and demilitarized, including its complete de-nuclearization – and until Russian imperial statehood based on ‘a vertical of autocratic power’ is liquidated.”

Western policies of appeasement produced a monster… again

If Russia remains an enormous country with nuclear weapons, Skobov continues, “it will always reproduce a ruling class animated by the desire for unlimited power, megalomania, and a sense of absolute impunity. Such a Russia will always be a source of danger of a new war. And this threat to peace must be eliminated.

“A new world order is definitely needed,” he argues. But it must be one in which the international community must “finally secure a monopoly on the use of force” and have “an effective mechanism for responding to those who violate that order.” Those who oppose that goal, like Putin with his “’new totalitarianism’ are the ones who must exit from history.”

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