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Blood on Our Hands

Sep 27, 2016 | Newpathway, Editorials, Featured

September has brought a couple of new examples of the West's inability to stop Putin's war crimes in Ukraine and Syria. First, there was a disgusting attempt by the German and French foreign ministers Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Jean-Marc Ayrault to shove “elections” in the Russian-occupied territories of the Donbas down Ukraine’s throat, without a proper emphasis on the removal of the Russian troops from Ukraine. A week after the two ministers visited the safe areas in Donbas, several members of European Parliament visited the front lines and the hospital in Dnipro which treats the wounded in the fights that continue despite the “ceasefire”. According to the Ukrainian Member of Parliament Mariya Ionova, after their visit, the European MPs shifted their focus from “elections” to the security situation in the Donbas.

Then there was a bombardment of the UN humanitarian convoy in Syria. The U.S. State Secretary John Kerry showed in his speech at the U.N. Security Council session on September 21 that the West knows very well that it’s Russia who bombed the convoy, not the Assad regime. But so far, the only more or less substantial response coming out of the West has been a laughable Joint Statement on Syria by the Foreign Ministers of France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the High Representative of the European Union on September 24, 2016, which for some reason many are calling “an ultimatum”. This “ultimatum” contains the line that has already become famous: “patience with Russia's continued inability or unwillingness to adhere to its commitments is not unlimited.” While the West's patience continues to be not so unlimited, Ukrainians and Syrians continue to die in big numbers. Maybe something will change soon, after the UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson said on September 25 that Russia should be investigated for war crimes?

What is the West afraid of? Putin will not start a war with NATO – the Russian elite has their kids living all over Europe and Northern America, they will not bomb their own kids. The West does not even have to fight with Russia to stop the latter’s aggressive behavior. All the West needs to do, is disconnect Russia from the global inter-bank payment system SWIFT. This measure was first discussed publicly in February 2015. Since then, thousands of Ukrainians and tens of thousands of Syrians have died because of the Russian aggression. Putin has gone into Syria precisely because he was not disconnected from SWIFT. Just like he went into the Donbas because he was not stopped in Georgia and Crimea. Maybe the Western leaders know something and their calculations show that casualties would exceed those tens of thousands if Russia is disconnected from SWIFT? More likely, the Western leaders are just inept and ignorant. The same, unfortunately, could be said about the Western public opinion which does not care enough about such corners of Earth as Ukraine and Syria.

It’s about time those Liberal MPs in the Parliament of Canada, who ran their election campaigns on the issue of disconnecting of Russia from SWIFT, delivered on their promise. This measure would be particularly timely in the light of the Dutch prosecutors report which stated on Wednesday that the missile system that shot down the MH-17 flight in July 2014 came from Russia and returned to Russia afterwards. Although the prosecutors stopped short of accusing the Russian authorities in this hideous crime, no one in the world seems to have any doubts that those authorities are actually guilty of that. In its yesterday's editorial comment, the New York Times expressed the mainstream opinion by saying, “President Vladimir Putin is fast turning Russia into an outlaw nation.” The only correction here could be that this process actually ended some time ago. Ukrainian Canadian voters should resume pressuring their MPs to urge the government to take a more decisive stance on the Russian actions. Our ignorance is making all of us in the West accomplices to Russia’s war crimes.

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