Vitaliy Portnikov: Planet Bucha

Now, for me, and for the whole world, these names will be associated with death.  Murder, torture, abuse, mass graves, corpses on the streets. That's what Bucha, Vorzel, Irpin are now.  Previously, only we knew these names. Now everyone will know them. And they will remember them even when they forget the word "Putin" out of uselessness. And even when they forget the word "Russia". Why not? Who remembers today the names of the countries that exterminated the Jews in ancient times? The Bible keeps mankind only the memory of the extermination itself and those who stopped it.

I cannot say that I am surprised by this news. Dazed, shocked, upset - but not surprised, no. In the 30s of the last century, my colleagues convinced the world that Stalin was talking about the extermination of the Ukrainian people - the world did not believe, many believed that the Holodomor was only "excesses" of the negligent economic policy of the Bolsheviks. The scale of the atrocity became clear only in a decade. A few years later, there were many who convinced that Hitler's goal was the complete extermination of the Jews, but the world did not believe, believed that the Reich only wanted to isolate "gentiles", watched a Nazi documentary from the Warsaw ghetto with theaters and hospitals.  The scale of the atrocities only became apparent when the Allies entered the concentration camps - however, it took years to understand the situation.

From the first days of this war, I have been warning that its main goal is not just the occupation of Ukrainian lands, but the mass extermination and expulsion of the Ukrainian people. No one believed he President of Ukraine when he compared this war with the Holocaust, but in vain. This is the Holocaust and the Holodomor in one pill, because Putin destroys the people and infrastructure at the same time! He does everything so that people are killed and driven out - and so that they do not have the opportunity to survive. Putin does not need Ukrainians, even as a conquered nation, because he fears and hates them. He needs hundreds of kilometers of devastated land to put up missiles - that's all. What for? And why did Stalin need a devastated Ukrainian village in the conditions of an eternal shortage of bread? And why did Hitler need millions of Jewish corpses? So what? Why does Putin need this devastated land when the most provincial Russia in the 21st century still looks like a dump and ashes? Need to find the answer to this question?

If necessary, I will find it. It's my job, I can give a long lecture about this madness.  And the international court will find, they have qualified specialists there. Why try to decipher the logic of the paranoid? Why spend hours searching for an understanding of the goals of an entire state that has taken the path of crimes against humanity and turned into a terrorist organization?

It is important to understand the goal, the goal. The goal is the destruction and expulsion of the Ukrainian people. The goal is genocide. And this became apparent not after a few decades, not after a few years, but after a few weeks. We didn't lie to you when we warned you about this. They didn't exaggerate. It was a statement of facts. And therefore it does not matter what they lie about and even what weapons they choose. Only one thing matters: what they aspire to. Here to this.

And salvation, unfortunately, is not some kind of neutrality of Ukraine or our "renunciation of nuclear weapons" - as if we had it. No, salvation is the demilitarization, denuclearization and denazification of the terrorist community under the loud banner "Russian Federation".

Because we're just top of the list of targets.  But, believe me, not the last. Yes, the existence of the Putin regime is a direct threat to humanity. Absolute danger.

Humanity either understands this or disappears faster than we can imagine. And then the future guests of this disfigured planet may even decide that the planet Bucha was its real name.

Not even Earth.