The rupture that could trigger Putin’s worst riot

Supreme Executioner of the Kremlin Crimea I am not humbled by having slaughtered some 70,000 of my neighbors.

“We need a ruthless and constant fight against the snake that hides in secret,” Rosalia Zemlyachka told Sevastopol newspaper. vremia“We must annihilate them and sweep the sea of ​​blood with an iron broom.”

Russian opposition leader Sergei Mergunov, who witnessed the Zemlyatka massacre firsthand, said the lampposts in Crimea’s largest city were “richly decorated with corpses swaying in the wind.” At a beach resort near Feodosia, Melgunov and other officials said they observed Zemlyatka occupying the city’s well as a burial pit. When shafts filled with tortured soldiers and civilians, Melgunov added that he tied victims to planks and roasted them alive in furnaces or drowned them in barges. Black Sea.

“It’s a shame to waste cartridges,” said Zemlyachka.

Just in case, Western leader Now grappling with the question of whether to encourage and fund Ukraine’s intention to take back Crimea, I am familiar with a Kyiv-born secret police woman known to locals as ‘The Devil’. It may not be.

Top secret mission to retake Crimea from Putin’s hands

But back in Moscow—a century after Zemlyatka oversaw the extermination of a population nearly three times larger than Key West by the Bolsheviks at the end of the Russian Civil War—the devil still remains the people’s darling. . President Putin of Russiaa superstar at KGB headquarters and a poster ghoul for what Russia could do if Ukraine marched into Crimea.

“Ukraine will be liquidated” is the phrase used by alleged war criminal Vladimir Solovyov on television almost every night to awaken the spirit of Zemlyatka in Putin’s famous golden hour guise.

“Russian military thinking is always annihilation,” says a veteran Kremlin expert who spent years in Moscow and works for Western intelligence. “What is noteworthy since the fall of Kherson, I never have We hear Russian politicians and propagandists pushing their terrorist campaigns to a level reminiscent of the Bolshevik Revolution. ”

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People arriving from Kherson await evacuation to the depths of Russia at Dzhankoy railway station in Crimea on October 21, 2022.

Stringer/AFP via Getty Images

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Oleksandra Matviichuk, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is not surprised by this.

“Russians can tolerate war criminals who have won,” Matovichuk told the Daily Beast at a recent dinner in Paris. “Russians can tolerate war criminals who have lost.” You can not.”

Matvichuk, director of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, said her organization has so far enumerated more than 21,000 cases of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The blasphemy in Bucha, Izium and Kherson is so appalling that she and other human rights lawyers are now calling on UN member states to “develop a new definition of war crimes and ways to prosecute them.” she says.

Olena Tregub is dedicated to ensuring that Putin’s war criminals are losers. She’s also a woman who knows guns and ammo. Treguv is a vociferous member of the Ukrainian government’s Anti-Corruption Commission, and her work has focused on the use of foreign aid and foreign aid to sustain the war effort aimed at the eventual deployment of the country’s flag in Crimea. It’s about securing every penny in the weapon’s caisson.

“We’re going big,” Tregub says. “We will take back Crimea. This is the only way to punish Russia for Putin’s crimes in Ukraine.”

For centuries, the bright vision of defeating Russian imperialism has captured the Ukrainian imagination. “Shivash’s fortresses are so powerful that the Red High Command has neither the men nor the machines to breach them.” vremia Assures readers in 1920: “All Soviet armies cannot frighten Crimea.”

In fact, General Pittor Wrangel, the German-Baltic commander in charge of the defense of Crimea, was so certain of victory that he created a new medal of honor called the Order of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker. – Paul II and Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman sent into space.

Back on Earth, French Lieutenant General and former NATO commander Michel Yakovlev says, “I’m not convinced Ukraine needs to restore Crimea.” In an interview with the Daily Beast beneath a crystal chandelier and a mural of a naked angel inside the French Senate, a combat-hardened veteran of Operation Desert Storm and NATO’s campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo said he had spent the past nine months in Ukraine. spent time with politicians and military strategists.

The Antonovsky Bridge, which was allegedly demolished to prevent Russian troops from crossing the Dnieper after they withdrew from Kherson, Ukraine, on November 14, 2022. The transport road from Kherson to Crimea was the Antonovsky Bridge.

Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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“We do not know how many Crimean residents want to return to Ukraine,” warns Yakovlev. “An internationally-sanctioned referendum could be a diplomatic move to respond to the thousands of Russians who were involuntarily brought in after Russia’s annexation in 2014. Internal problems arose.” Taking back Crimea can be a blessing in many ways.”

The reaction of Andriy Yermak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, pretty much sums up Kyiv’s position on which side will ultimately control Crimea. “Does anyone seriously think that the Kremlin really wants peace?” wrote on twitter“It wants obedience.”

But as the chaos continues into winter, the only certainty is that on the Moscow peninsula Pigeony Or “the stylish one” refers to the Russian Riviera as the eye of the storm brewing between Ukraine and its Western allies.

“We don’t offer policy,” says the Western intelligence operative. “We know how Russia operates, its military capabilities and capabilities. We still have a lot of airpower and other dirty tricks to trick us in. Too many people struggle to accept this reality.”

The irony of the situation is obvious. “Russia has also been digging deep into eastern Ukraine for eight years,” he adds. “So it would actually be easier to retake Crimea militarily than Donbass.”

On the one hand, leaving Crimea to remain Russia and home to the Black Sea Fleet could be a tranquilizer for Putin to stay calm and make peace while staying in power. Intelligence analysts have suggested that no peace could be negotiated through such mediation.

“Strategically, we tear the Russians to pieces because we don’t want them to have time to rebuild and come back,” he says. “The longer we can force Russia to rebuild its military, the better off Europe and the rest of the democratic world will be.”

On the other hand, on the bloody side, how much can Ukraine absorb the trauma caused by Russia? Holodomor, Ukrainians are dying at a rate of 28,000 per day, bringing the total death toll to nearly 4 million. Yakovlev argues that history guarantees Ukraine’s victory this time.

“Putin is being defeated by the most powerful army in Europe,” says Yakovlev. “If Putin survives, he will be the only Russian leader to survive a defeat of this magnitude. His personal fate is sealed.”

Meanwhile, Hannah Sherest, director of the Kyiv-based security and military analysis group Prism, has good reason. “At War College she trained NATO officers,” she explains. “In my office there was only one map of Ukraine. Not a single student knew the distance between Crimea and the nearest NATO member. It’s the same thing,” Sherest added. “NATO has no strategic vision for Crimea.”

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