The Kremlin needs a new PR agent.

Moscow would have us believe it is fighting a life and death struggle in the muddy trenches of Donbas. But what do we get to see on the inauguration of its president? Glittering gold chambers and goose-stepping soldiers. 

No doubt there is some deep cultural reason for this ostentation – something along the line that  traditionally a display of wealth was needed for past rulers to impose authority. But the Russia of today should know that for most of us ostentation and goose-stepping solders are ugly reminders of wars with past fascistic dictatorships. Why go out of your way to make us think you and your war in Ukraine are of the same ilk?

Why even have a war? It is common knowledge that in February 2022 both sides in the present Ukraine conflict would have reached a compromise solution but for the intervention of a buffoonish Boris Johnson. In that case declare war on him. Or even better on the NATO hawks and Ukrainian neoNazis who helped Boris to pressure Kiev into its fatal decision not to compromise in February 2022.

For Ukraine, going back to 2022 would not mean any loss of territory. It would only mean confirming the promise of autonomy for its Russian-speaking provinces (oblasts) of Donetsk and Lugansk, something it agreed to back in 2014.

And something would be needed to cure Ukraine’s obsession over Crimea, with which it has absolutely no historical, ethnic or linguistic connection. 

In fact, the two sides in this war have had little or no historical, ethnic or linguistic reason even to be fighting each other.  Those name correspondents from mainstream Western media who venture into Ukrainian trenches to report the war may not realise it, but the soldiers they are usually talking to are speaking Russian as pure, if not purer, than that spoken by the enemy soldiers in the trenches only a few100 meters away.

So if they are looking for a story it should be: why are they fighting each other?

True, any war-ending agreement now would require Moscow to give up its belated demand for ownership of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson provinces. But in exchange it could regain autonomy promised for Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk provinces and the large amounts of territory they lost to Kiev’s neoNazis since 2014. 

Some compromise there could easily be reached, if only Joe Biden and the Western military/industrial complex plus its army of media, political and other hangers-on could be persuaded to back off for a moment.

That is all the time it would take for both sides to realise the stupidity of the slaughter and reach a compromise.