19 June 2024 — The photo above was taken from a Ukrainian drone. On the front of an armored Russian vehicle you can see the head of an executed Ukrainian prisoner of war. It is a story I reported earlier from several of my OSINT sources, and I am not going to show the original photo.
This is disgusting and brutal and it shows you what the Ukrainians are up against. Prisoners of war are protected by the Geneva convention. But Russia has never shown any respect for international law, has absolutely no respect for international law.
And yet in a month Russia will be taking part in the Olympic Games in Paris, where every Russian athlete is a member of the Russian armed forces, and every such athlete should be kicked out.
When you do not have any respect for the civilized world you should not be allowed to take part in it.
But the West has lost the plot, still believes there is a “rules based order” and things are “normal”.
For the last few years we have had front row seats to watch the post-Cold War era get dismantled. The geopolitical dynamics have been altered and we are not going back.
And China and Russia and North Korea will gleefully march down that new road, triumphant, because the West has neither the ability nor the political will to fight them.
We have forgotten our history – assuming anybody has actually read it. The arc of the moral universe DOES NOT bend toward moral progress and justice. Freedom, democracy, liberalism are mere blips on the screen of humanity. Autocracy, totalitarianism and dictatorships have long ruled the roost. We are merely reverting to the mean. What we see today is merely the localized spikes on the longer sine wave of history.
And the tech nerds among us make the constant mistake of correlating advancements in technology with moral progress. And twaddle on about the importance of AI and technology.
The emergence of liberal democracies was associated with ideals of liberty and equality that seemed self-evident and irreversible. But we now know those ideals were far more fragile than we believed. Their success in the 20th century depended on very unique social, political and technological conditions. All of those conditions have proved ephemeral, have all evaporated.
PS: the Ukrainian intelligence services were able to identify the 4 Russian soldiers who did this crime, and they also identified the Ukrainian POW. When my time permits, I will write a post on the methods used to make such identification possible.