Serhii Pohoreltsev
Ambassador of Ukraine to Spain
It is highly unlikely that anyone in their right mind would welcome the plague into their home. For one obvious reason: nobody can negotiate with a plague, let alone reach an agreement.
If anyone still had any doubts —even after the massacres perpetrated by Russian troops in Bucha and Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv and the discovery of mass graves full of civilians in Izum—, once the Ukrainian army has liberated the Kharkiv region, the indiscriminate shelling of Ukrainian cities on New Year’s Eve and after should dispel them once and for all.
Putin’s regime is a carrier of the plague that was able to infest the entire population of Russia with chauvinism, revanchism and chronic hatred of the West, with contempt for its values and praise for death.
Sociological polls in Russia, however unreliable they may seem in a country under a totalitarian regime, show that the majority are sincere in their support for Putin and his aggression against Ukraine. All this despite the fact that the death toll of Russian troops in Ukraine already exceeds 360,000. Putin and his totalitarian and expansionist regime is the answer to the popular demand to correct the “historical mistake” of the demise of the Soviet Union. The massive Russian bombings last week and on 2nd January must bring the West back to reality, which is losing its sense of urgency about Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. It affects all of us Europeans.
The Kremlin shows no sign that it is willing to back down and give up its expansionist plans because it sees the West showing weakness and fatigue in supporting Ukraine by giving it all the tools that would allow the country to cope with this unprecedented invasion. That is why Moscow is intensifying its campaign of terror against Ukraine and blackmail against its Baltic neighbours and Finland.
The West can and has the capabilities to accelerate the additional supply to Ukraine of anti-aircraft systems and related projectiles; to arm the Ukrainian army with all kind of military drones and missiles with a long range of more than 300 km; and to give the go-ahead to use Russia’s frozen assets to help Ukraine.
Finally, but not least, the West can impose absolute isolation without exception on so-called Russian diplomats, denying them access to all public and civilian institutions as representatives of the regime because they propagate the Kremlin’s falsehoods and narratives in the media. Putin’s diplomacy is nothing more than a form of masked aggression that tries to hide, behind a smokescreen created with a mixture of misleading and hypocritical words to confuse anyone, the true purposes of the Kremlin.
Putin’s terrorist regime and the Russian population must learn that the world will not look the other way while Russian aggression is taking innocent lives and ruining an entire country in the centre of Europe.
At times of existential threat to humanity, civilisation has always resorted to absolute quarantine of infested territories to prevent, or at least limit, the risk of the spread of a deadly disease. The time has come to confine Russia until it recovers from its diseases and is ready to coexist peacefully with its neighbours.
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