War fatigue as Putin's tactic

Scary figures show the extent of the tragedy of the destruction of Ukraine.

The war in Syria and the refugee crisis seemed fatally terrible, but somehow far away. Cities destroyed to the ground and rivers of millions of tired people whose lives were destroyed, passed under our windows for months.

The Ukrainian refugee crisis is close at hand and looks familiar from the wars of the 1990s. Human pain tolerance is limited, even for media consumption.

The saturation of war in Ukraine has been present for a long time, it is just rude to admit it, just like in the case of Syria. Fatigue arises precisely when the war in Ukraine enters its most dramatic and destructive phase.

Russia's special war against the EU

In the fourth month of Russian aggression, we learn that almost twice as many people escaped from Ukraine than from Syria after four years of active war. According to UNHCR data, since February 24, more than 7.5 million people have left Ukraine, and almost eight million people have been internally displaced. Around four million people fled Syria at the height of the crisis, and 7.5 million people were internally displaced.

There are 3.3 million Ukrainian refugees registered in the EU, the most of them are 1.1 million in Poland. The largest fluctuation of people takes place through that country - almost four million refugees passed through it. Germany is in second place with 780 thousand, and the Czech Republic is in third place with 380 thousand Ukrainian refugees. After pushing the Russian army out of Kiev and Kharkiv, almost 2.5 million people returned to Ukraine from the EU.

The Ukrainian government says that 1.2 million people, including 240,000 children, were deported from the occupied parts of Ukraine to Russia, mostly by force.

The humanitarian crisis by creating refugees is a tactic of the Kremlin, which Joseph Borel called a special Russian war against the EU in the first weeks of the aggression. And this is the method that the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, used against the EU even before the Russian aggression, bringing migrants from crisis areas - Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan - by special airline lines.

War fatigue is also Putin's tactic in Ukraine. Everyone in the EU was relieved when they saw that it was difficult for Russia to conquer not only Kiev, but that it could not occupy and leveled Severodonetsk, a small town in the Luhansk region, for weeks. Europeans are already less afraid of the invasion of the new members Romania, Poland and Slovakia, and no one mentions the nuclear Third World War anymore. The threats to Lithuania due to the blockade of the Suval Isthmus towards Kaliningrad are only the desperate hysteria of the Kremlin before giving Ukraine the status of a candidate in the EU. Some European leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, are impatient and are sending a message - you have fought enough, now come to an agreement.

'Denazification' and the birth of 'New Russia'

During this time, Ukraine is suffering the greatest human sacrifices, while waiting for delayed deliveries of modern weapons due to the slow bureaucracy and political hesitancy of the West. Fear is felt among ordinary people. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office announces that up to 200 Ukrainian soldiers are being killed every day, while Ukrainian negotiators with Russia have reported that up to 500 soldiers are being killed at the front, and the same number are wounded.

Images of the horrors of burned Mariupol are now being transmitted to all places in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, because the Russian artillery demolishes, destroys everything in front of it and occupies Ukraine meter by meter. There is almost no more of that in the media; as if what they saw was enough for everyone. And a long-term war is on the horizon.

In the occupied territories under the control of the Russian Federation, there is total disregard for the life and health of civilians. Phones and internet are not working. There is a general shortage of medicines in Kherson. Due to the alleged occurrence of cholera and dysentery, the Russians closed Mariupol as a collective quarantine.

Medical aid is almost completely collapsed, because the aggressor demolished or damaged all hospitals, many medical personnel were killed. The water supply and sewage system are destroyed, there is no drinking water. Garbage has not been collected since February 24. The downpours scattered thousands of shallow graves in city neighborhoods, parks and ruins, under which not all human remains have yet been removed.

Heat and rains carry this water to rivers and wells, from where the water is used for drinking. Those who survived the terrible destruction by shelling, arrests after the Russian occupation and "filtration camps", can now lose their lives from infections. This is Putin's "denazification" and the birth of "New Russia" in ethnic cleansing and genocide, similar to Stalin's Gladomor in 1932/33. which claimed more than seven million Ukrainian lives.