The images from Ukraine are horrifying: the missile strikes; burning apartment buildings, broken bodies, exhausted refugees at the border, families sheltering in metro stations. Last week, the most shocking image yet was of a car being purposefully bulldozed by a tank. That action expressed pure sadism and diabolical aggression, born of an indoctrinated, narcissistic longing for a bygone time. That image has since been overtaken by countless new images, if possible even more horrifying.
Do the Russian soldiers know what happened to their former colleagues? How the Russian prisoners of war of the Second World War were seen by the motherland as traitors and were exiled to the Gulag after the war, sometimes for up to 15 years? Only the most formidable propaganda machine can make a nation forget the suffering of its grandparents.
An image that has been causing shivers for the relatives of the MH17 disaster for years is the face of Vladimir Putin. I think I am not exaggerating when I say that for us he is the personification of evil. I am not a violent person, but I dare to admit that I often fantasized about his death. That fantasy is the imagination of a primitive impulse, evoked by feelings of sadness, anger, frustration and powerlessness that have been hooked in a person for too long.
The disaster with MH17, an incident that resulted from the Russo-Ukrainian war that raged around Donetsk in 2014, gives the current images from Ukraine an extra horrifying layer. No, that doesn’t cover the charge. The images are literally sickening and sickening, because they bring everything back to the surface.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine feels like the beginning of Putin’s endgame. It is what he has worked towards in his decades-long political career, the poisonous icing on the cake of his autocratic presidency.
On social media, some describe Putin as “senile”, “paranoid” or “megalomaniac”. Who knows, it may play a role that he is now 70, no matter how much he tries to disguise his age with botox. Perhaps he feels the need to make one more big statement as president of a crumbling nation, in order to realize his perverse dream of a restored mighty Soviet empire. But maybe, probably, it’s just about the wealth of gas under Ukraine’s soil. Soon, when the whole country has been bombed to the ground, he can easily reach it.
Be that as it may, as long as Putin is in control, it is naive to hope for a recovery. And that’s exactly the damning thing: hope. The families of the occupants of MH17 have been hoping for some form of compensation for years. No, it doesn’t exist, but the judicial processes have been underway for some time, despite all the thwarting attempts from Russia.
Under the guidance of persistent teams of lawyers and with the support of the Dutch state, an exhaustive legal process has been launched that should lead to the recognition of the facts of that fateful 17th July in 2014. We demand a form of accountability, but this seems war crime further away than ever.
Compensation, recognition, accountability; these are fine words, but somewhere we realize – and I am speaking for all the relatives of the 298 victims of the disaster – that it will never come. Not from a country with a leader who lies and manipulates the way he breathes and eats. A former spy, who, out of his own frustration, anger and impotence over his motherland’s supporting role on the world stage, waltzes like a tank over a democratic neighbor, over the lives of people who have only one wish: to live in freedom.
And the rest of the world? He shudders at the images, but watches. Ukraine is not a NATO member, its importance is not great enough to risk a new world war. The same was true after the downing of flight MH17. Putin has a stranglehold on the world, as I sometimes fantasize about doing to him. Now I know that fantasy is the last straw of a desperate person.
Remco de Ridder is a journalist and copywriter and the author of the novel ‘A sky full of extinguished lights’ (2018).