Telegram Chronicles — Day 15

I don’t know why I was hopeful about the meeting between the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia. They met, sure, but the meeting achieved exactly nothing. As Meduza reports, the foreign minister of Ukraine said his main goal had been a 24-hour ceasefire. Didn’t happen. As he discovered, “other people in Russia make this type of decisions.” The Russian foreign minister, on the other hand, said that the ceasefire wasn’t even on the agenda. And here’s your quote of the day: asked if Russia is planning to attack any other countries, the Russian foreign minister said, “We haven’t even attacked Ukraine.” Um, yeah, okay.

But wait, it gets better (or worse). Biological weapons! Who has them? I first heard about this conundrum on Wednesday. Someone sent me a link to an article claiming that by attacking Ukraine, Russia might have saved the whole world. Literally, this was the title. The article, published in one of the official government-approved Russian newspapers, asserted that Ukraine has been developing biological weapons (under the guidance of the US, of course), that it has dirty bombs, and that it’s been also planning a military attack on the Donbas region. In case you’re wondering who the source of this wondrous information was, the answer is… Russian Ministry of Defense. (Yes, the same ministry that had promised for days that no conscripted soldiers were in Ukraine, before admitting that oops, sorry, mistakes were made.)

By today the story of the alleged biological weapons has ballooned, thanks to the efforts of the Russian propaganda machine. One Russian official even suggested that the goal of the US and its allies is to create a new kind of biological weapon that can target specific ethnic groups. (From what I understand, this is in the realm of serious science fiction.)

So now, the west is concerned that Russia itself has biological weapons and is planning to use them. Russia, meanwhile, has requested a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to, you know, discuss the alleged development of the biological weapons by Ukraine and the US. (Is that like gaslighting? Kind of?) Some worry that Russia might be planning a false-flag operation in Ukraine.

The second outrageous story of the day also comes to us courtesy of the Russian propaganda machine. It’s about yesterday’s attacks on the children’s hospital and maternity ward in Mariupol. Russian government wants you to believe it didn’t happen. Meduza writes that in the face of the world outrage, various Russian officials have tried to present the attack as “a fake.” Each had a different explanation, though. Some claimed the attack was staged, because one of the women caught in it happened to be a (pregnant) blogger from Mariupol (How dare a blogger gets pregnant!). Others, however, admitted that the attack did happen but argued that the hospital in question had been turned into a base for a nationalist military group — so, there could be no civilians there. Problem is they’re talking about a *different* hospital in Mariupol, and that other hospital, Meduza writes, is indeed being used as a base for the Ukrainian army (though not for a nationalist group). In any case, the Russian officials appear to be contradicting each other all over the place. Facebook and Twitter have removed the posts made by the Russian consulate in the UK claiming that the hospital attacks had been faked. (For the record, three people, one of them a child, were killed in those attacks. Seventeen were wounded.)

Overall, UN reports that 549 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since the start of the war. 957 wounded. 2.3 million people have left the country. But here’s another mind-boggling thing I read today: Russia has announced that it will open a “humanitarian corridor” between itself and Ukraine (one-way, naturally), meaning that the same Ukrainian civilians Russia’s been bombing and shooting at are now encouraged to find refuge in… Russia? Who in their right mind would take advantage of such an offer?

Mind-boggling, illogical, ridiculous — yes, and perhaps some of us find laughing about it cathartic. But then I’ve stumbled onto something sad and profound that journalist Maksim Trudolyubov posted on Telegram earlier today. He wrote that when Russia’s foreign minister says, “We didn’t attack Ukraine,” everyone laughs. But it’s not funny. Rather, it’s another reason for the world to distrust Russia. Even when it gets a new president (hopefully sooner rather than later), no matter how smart and remarkable and democratically-elected that new president might be, the distrust will remain.

#telegramWarChronicles