No matter, they're only Russian
Thousands more will die as the West numbs itself with moral righteousness.
Screw them, they're only Russian, after all. That's what we're supposed to believe of the young men who find themselves dying because of that country's mobilisation drive. If they were real men – so the comfy keyboard warriors of the West claim – they would be on the streets in revolution.
Once fair minds targetted Putin and his government. Now people loathe the Russians themselves. They have so much to learn from the likes of us, they cosily pronounce. We, lovers of freedom, who were locked in our homes for two years without a whimper and who continue to watch our liberties stripped away by the day. Anaesthetised and servile, we presume to lecture to others atop our high horse of complacency.
But what of the young men who do not want to go to war, who do not want to have the sum of their young lives be an inglorious and pointless fight over a few miles of some Eastern European dump? What of my Russian friend now in hiding? Or of his friend who cut off a finger to avoid the draft?
They're just Russians. They're just the Untermensch who inhabit the tanks blown up by NLAWs and who get eviscerated by our ordnance. Bad luckt; they shouldn't have been there in the first place. Not to be cried for, lamented or thought about. Just more rubbish for the landfill, to the ever-compassionate Westerner, who is seemingly gripped by joy whenever a Russian body is shattered to pieces in Donbass.
They get what they deserve. They are aggressors, in lands they should not enter. Memories of our own excursions abroad and our dead soldiers need not cloud complacent minds. Iraq and Afghanistan – all forgotten. But that was different, somehow, depending on who you ask. The probity of enjoying the deaths of others is merely a question of perspective. The cheers of locals when our lads died were disgusting; our whoops when Sasha has his leg blown off are fine.
Each burnt-out vehicle and each disembowelled conscript – oh Slava Ukraina! - they're just Russians after all. Online, each opinion piece and every comment under the line positively ecstatic in this obliteration of human potential. War is grim, and death its inevitable bedfellow. Do not imagine that because of your British passport you are more human than they.
The newly bellicose are never keen for peace. The stakes grow higher by the day. No price is too high to secure the borders of Kiev's government – even our own impoverishment. Having believed in nothing for so long, they have found their crusade. A hard winter stares us in the face. Having shied from each issue for decades, resulting in the constant degradation of our nation, we now find this hill to die on.
Still, it won't be as hard a winter as those sitting in the trenches and fighting a war which nobody wants to end, and which we have no long-term interest in. Thousands more will die as the West numbs itself with moral righteousness. Inflation and poverty – a small price to pay for an assuaged ego. All over a border war in somewhere of little consequence.
For now others die on our behalf. Not shivering in a shell-scrape and hiding from the mortar blast, we stay comfortable. Yet with the fires of conflict forever being stoked, and with no opinion permitted other than wild pro-Ukrainianism, the possibility of things spiralling out of control grow.
Naturally if and when that happens it won't be the cretinous keyboard warriors who put on their uniforms and start cleaning their rifles. They will leave it to others to die on their behalf.
