Russia Ukraine conflict: What we really know, and what is being magicked away from view

This war has been characterized by stunning news reports that pop up and then mysteriously disappear the next day. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

How is the war in Ukraine actually progressing? Never before has western media shown such solidarity in its reportage and opinion. Vladimir Putin is Voldemort and Volodymyr Zelensky is Harry Potter. And Russia is losing the war. But how true is that?

We have very few ways to know whether this narrative is correct. All opinion that the Russians may not have been doing too badly is being systematically banned, de-platformed or shadow-banned, while Zelensky keeps giving emotive speeches to anyone who will listen, from the United Nations Security Council to the Grammy music awards viewers.

Let’s consider the facts we have. I have no intention to justify the Russian invasion, which has caused enormous death and destruction and brought misery to millions of Ukrainians. The aim is to try to find stories from both sides.

This war has been characterized by stunning news reports that pop up and then mysteriously disappear the next day. For instance, a few weeks ago, we were told that a 40-mile-long Russian army convoy was stuck in the middle of the Ukrainian steppe due to lack of fuel and supplies. But later reports suggest that the convoy reached the outskirts of the capital city Kyiv without much trouble, whereas logic says that if it had been stuck, thousands of Russian soldiers would have been sitting ducks for the Ukrainian air force.

But does the Ukraine air force exist at all? According to a forbes.com analysis, the last time the government of Ukraine mentioned its jets was on March 2, a week after Russia invaded. This was after various videos of Ukrainian fighters taking down Russian aircraft were found to be fake. Since then, there has been no claim and no videos of Ukrainian flying missions.

The Ukrainian air force, or what remains of it, may be completely grounded. This could be due to the many precision attacks that Russian bombers have carried out on airfields and fuel depots.

Western media went into paroxysms about Russian bombs hitting a maternity hospital in the eastern port city of Mariupol. Yet there have also been reports that suggest that the hospital was being used as a military base by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. We will perhaps never know the truth.

Ukraine claims that Russians killed hundreds of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha before retreating. Many of the dead apparently had their heads bound and were shot in the back of the head in classic military execution style. Here again, there are counter-claims. Why were many of the dead wearing white arm-bands that Ukrainians have been using to indicate that they are pro-Russia?

On 7 April, Zelensky addressed the Greek parliament via video. But in his address, he included a message from an Azov battalion soldier based in Mariupol, who claimed to be Greek, though he could not speak the language. This caused a walk-out in the Greek parliament, since Greek-origin residents of Mariupol, who number around 120,000, have been facing attacks and intimidation by the Azov for years. In fact, there have been media reports that the Azov have not been allowing people to leave Mariupol, which has seen heavy Russian bombardment. The Azov may in fact have mined the roads in the corridor that Russia has opened for refugees.

We do not know how and when this war will end, but Putin may have already achieved his basic objectives: to carve out the eastern region of Ukraine and create a buffer zone.

As I, my uncle and everyone else knows, truth is the first casualty in a war. But rarely has the entire western media so unitedly projected one man as the good guy (Zelensky) and another as an out-of-control psychopath (Putin). This, when Zelensky’s actions hardly indicate that he embodies the liberal democratic values that the West claims to believe in. He has jailed opposition politicians, shut down or nationalised private media outlets that he considers to be critical of his policies, and has now banned all Ukrainian men between 18 to 60 years of age from leaving the country.

He has not implemented the terms of the internationally-mediated Minsk agreements that allowed the Russian-majority Donbass region some autonomy, and in fact has been at war with the people there, using heavy artillery and drones. On February 11, in Berlin, despite pressure from France and Germany, Ukraine refused to abide by the Minsk agreements. Over the next 10 days, it shelled the civilian population of Donbass relentlessly, leaving Putin with a difficult choice—he could watch fellow Russians get butchered, or he could move to save them.

We do not know how and when this war will end, but Putin may have already achieved his basic objectives—to carve out the eastern region of Ukraine and create a buffer zone, and establish control over access to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, thus denying Ukraine any naval power. The Ukrainians have proved to be braver and more resilient than the Russians expected, but it may not have been enough.

The unprecedented sanctions on Russia have not been as effective as the West may have imagined. The European Union continues to buy more than a billion euros worth of oil, gas and coal from Russia every day. The ruble, after falling to 145 to a dollar has bounced strongly back to the pre-war exchange rate of about 80. In the long term, the status of the dollar as the global reserve currency may be in peril.

The last weeks have also provided enough evidence that the “rules” of the “rules-based world order” that Joe Biden has been championing are decreed and broken at will by a cosy club of a few countries in North America and Europe. And western hopes of a regime change in Moscow seem to have been wildly misplaced. The Russian oligarchs, whose properties and funds were arbitrarily seized by western governments, have not deserted Putin. Opinion polls indicate that his popularity has in fact risen sharply among his people since the invasion began.

The war in Ukraine will have deep and long-term impact on the world, for it is suddenly shining a very harsh light on geopolitical realities.