By Sushil Kutty

It’s been a month since Russia invaded Ukraine. So long in the battlefield and even Changez Khan’s hordes would have ended their campaign and returned home to the Manchurian steppe. But Putin’s army is not returning home even as we are being told that the Russian troops do not have their hearts in the war because it’s not their war. It’s Putin’s War!

The reality is, the last one month has seen several Ukraine cities reduced to smithereens. Now, in the last week of the first month, bombs have been piercing through to basement bomb shelters, spilling out the wounded, the dead lying where they died.

Putin calls the “invasion” a “special operation”. For the rest of the world comprising America and Western Europe, it is an invasion. For the rest of the ‘rest of the world’ including India, Africa and South America, it is invasion, same as for Europe and USA, because that is what America wants us to put our stamps on.

The reality is we don’t have the guts to admit that this is America’s, and Western Europe’s, War, as much as it’s Putin’s War and they want India to kowtow. These western democracies have co-opted the overwhelming majority of countries to toe their line or face Visa and Mastercard deprivation.

The first one month of the Ukraine invasion came with lessons galore, top of which is the reassertion that the world continues to be dominated by the erstwhile colonial powers aided and abetted by the New World comprising USA, Canada and Australia.

This bunch of vulturists control the fate of the rest of the world. It wouldn’t matter a whit whether China gets to become “No.1 Country”, or India is spoken of as an economic superpower. America and the western European nations can coerce any and every country to fall in line as and when required.

Another lesson learned is that the financial well-being of almost the entirety of the countries making up the United Nations rests on the say-so of the West which controls the instruments of global financial transactions, from Mastercard to Visa, Swift to the slowing down of the economies of countries which dared to rebel and stand with the rebels!

One month of the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine have also told us that we Indians have learned that the Indian media’s nationalism is a sham, especially the electronic audio-visual media, which have gravitated to the side of America and the Europe, after starting off recalling Russia’s long-standing ties with India.

Today, all we hear, dawn to dusk and beyond, is how Russia is about to annihilate Ukraine, and is killing Ukrainian babies even as they’re being breastfed by their pale mothers in underground shelters in Ukraine’s bombed cities and coastal towns.

The reporters hired to report for Indian TV channels are more European and American than Indian, and it’s almost like there is no media in Russia. ‘RT’, the Russian TV channel with which Republic TV signed a tie-up, was summarily “shut-out” and hasn’t been heard of after the first week of the first month of the war!

The point is, America and the so-called enlightened Europe (including the United Kingdom) control everything including the narrative set for the rest of the world. One month of the “Russian invasion” and Prime Minister Narendra Modi stands with Russia as much as he can with Ukraine, but for how long?

Modi and India, and Xi Jinping and China, both have been told rather mildly but firmly that they were risking not being “on the right side of history”, and the “right side of history” translates freely to sucking up to the West. Let’s not be fooled, this bunch had never ever cared to be on the right side of history, and would never be in the future.

The final lesson learnt is that if today it’s the turn of Russia to be stripped of its face, and suffocated with sanctions, for pursuing an independent foreign policy, tomorrow it would be China’s turn; and the day after tomorrow, it would be India if India so much as tried to buck the old world order. The reset of the world order, which we keep hearing about, is a chimera—a pipedream, and farfetched.

India so far has refused to toe the West’s Ukraine line, opting to abstain from censuring Russia in the United Nations, not once but twice. That hasn’t gone down well with certain countries and people. The question is, should India care? The answer is India cannot be up to its game, not as long as it’s only the West that can threaten and slap sanctions. (IPA Service)

The post President Putin Is Still In His Own Created Mess In Ukraine After One Month Of War first appeared on IPA Newspack.