Qin Hui, Ukraine 5

Qin Hui, “Will the Bucha Massacre Put an End to Appeasement? Ukraine Series No. 5”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Qin Hui (b. 1953), who taught at Tsinghua University until his recent retirement, is a historian and one of China’s most prominent public intellectuals.  Translations of many of his writings, treating topics as diverse as Thomas Piketty’s Twentieth- First Century Capitalism, “China as seen from South Africa” and “Globalization after the Pandemic:  Thoughts on the Coronavirus” are available on this site.  Qin emailed me in early March, asking me to translate a series of texts he is writing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which are being published in FT Chinese.  I am delighted to do so, because Qin’s voice is certainly unique in China, and perhaps in the world.  I have since learned that FT is editing Qin’s texts, softening some of the rough edges and the implicit criticisms of Xi Jinping, and Qin has asked me to translate his original texts rather than the edited versions. At some point, I will compare the two versions and add footnotes to my translations, so that readers can get a sense of the editing process in the Chinese context.
 
The text translated here begins with the Bucha Massacre which occurred in late March, 2022, in a bedroom suburb of Kyiv.  Qin unpityingly mocks the Russian effort to “spin” the massacre as the work of Ukrainian “Nazis,” as well efforts by Chinese “Putin fans’” to spread the same narrative.    But Qin’s larger point is that he hopes the Bucha Massacre might shake the West out of a stance that Qin sees as “appeasement” and begin to prepare for the longer war that may well be the result of the failure of the initial Russian invasion.  The rest of the text discusses Ukrainian military capabilities and needs.
 
Translation
 
The Bucha Massacre and Illia Kyva
 
I didn't expect that Russian officials would be so clumsy as to come up with the idea of a "staged" video to argue that the Ukrainian side had faked the massacre, nor that "Putin fans" in China would immediately begin spouting headlines like "Ukrainian Politicians Tell the Truth about the Bucha Incident:  With 'Dead People' Coming back to Life One after Another, China Must Get to the Bottom of Things.” In the past few days, journalists from all over the world have flocked to Bucha, and the bloody scenes of the corpses strewn about the town are in full view of everyone.  The only things to argue about are who are the dead people and who killed them.  It makes no sense to put “dead people” in quotations and make crazy remarks about “people coming back to life.” 
 
And in fact even arguing is really hard:  Bucha, a Kyiv bedroom suburb, is not the Katyn Forest.  After their mass slaughter of the Poles in Katyn during WWII, the area was occupied by the Nazis, who also hated the Poles, so the Soviet army was able to blame everything on the Germans for a long time.  But there is no one but the Russians occupying Bucha today.  So they had to turn around and admit that there was a massacre in Bucha, but insisted that the Ukrainians had killed themselves!  

How are you going to make people believe that?  By talking about fake videos and people rising from the dead?  Why would Ukraine kill its own people? The Russians said that it was "Ukrainian Nazis" killing pro-Russian Ukrainians. That's a gross lie.  Didn't the Russians just yesterday say that their "special military operation" had succeeded in "de-Nazifying" the north, so they withdrew their troops and went to "liberate Donbas?" How is it that the “Nazi” situation got worse in the wake of their "successful operation?"
 
Russia used to accuse both the "Azov Battalion" and the “Right Sector” of being Nazis, but aren't these "right-wing" militias operating in the Donbas and in western Ukraine? The forces northwest of Kyiv are regular Ukrainian troops, not militia, so are they “Nazis” as well?  And who were the so-called pro-Russian Ukrainians who were killed? Since they were helping the Russians, they were in danger of being seen as traitors by the Ukrainians, so why didn't the Russians take responsibility for them and take them with them when they retreated? And when the Ukrainian army came back (according to the Russian story), why did those who were killed not hide, but instead went out to buy food and ride their bicycles?
 
And it is even more ridiculous to say that "Ukrainian politicians are telling the truth about the Bucha incident."  The “politician” in question is Illia Kyva. Ilya Kyva is a Ukrainian politician living in exile in Moscow whose politics have been all over the map.  He has jumped from left to right, East to West, was “pro-European,” and now “pro-Russian,” but he is rejected by the world not because of his political views but because of his character. Kyva’s is a strange story: his grandfather was a Soviet hero during the Patriotic War and climbed to the highest ranks of officialdom; but his father was a murderer and was sentenced to death. Before Kyva embarked on his present career, he served time for extortion in 2011, but he was released after claiming mental illness. Later on he had his degree revoked for plagiarism.
 
The court had already ruled that he could not hold public office when they gave him a break and released him for reasons of mental illness, but things changed during the Maidan Uprising in 2014. He was recruited by the far-right organization "Right Sector" because of his extreme behavior in the square and went into politics, and before long was sent to Donbas. This "Right Sector" is one of the so-called Ukrainian "Nazi" groups that Putin has pointed to, whose struggle against pro-Russian forces in the Donbas Putin called a "genocide." By Putin's definition, then, Kyva would be a typical perpetrator of "Nazi genocide."  Kyva claimed in an interview that the inhabitants of the Donbas must be "forcibly Ukrainianized," "even by military means…If you don't love Ukraine, we will force you to love Ukraine." At the time, very few people made such wild statements even among extreme right-wing groups. 
 
But the Right Sector soon found Kyva to be not normal:  "Kiva's personality has puzzled us from the beginning, he an unscrupulous part of the movement, an imposter."  Once the Right Sector expelled him, Kyva suddenly became a "leftist," joining the Socialist Party of Ukraine in 2017 and becoming a "daring" figure in a party that was once a major force, but by this point was fragmented by serious infighting.  

He got together a few people who called themselves “party leaders,” and at a moment when factional struggles made finding candidates difficult, Kyva presented himself as the “party’s presidential candidate,” and as a result, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, once the third largest party which at the time had produced the head of a leftist alliance who once led the parliament, won only 5,000 votes in 45-million-strong Ukraine—a 0.03% share of the vote, the worst showing in the party's history. Kyva’s behavior led to a complete split in the party and considerable turmoil, with most people never recognizing him as the head of the party, and the faction that did eventually expelling him. 
 
Before entering polities, Kyva was already notorious for his misdeeds, and it only got worse .  In 2020, it was revealed that he had defrauded people of 1.2 million hryvnia through "lease fraud", and the Anti-Corruption Court confiscated the stolen money.  In parliament, one scandal followed another:  he fought with people in the cafeteria, and not only flirted with women on the house floor, but even publicly pulled down his pants and masturbated, to the horror of everyone present.  All of this was nothing to the 44-year-old MP, who has never been married but had an illegitimate child at the age of 16, and has had three children with different women.

As for his dirty language, his frequent threats to chop off the heads of his opponents, his undressing and wearing clown masks in parliament…such stories had long been making the rounds. It's not surprising that some third-rate members of a democratic parliament would deliberately fight to gain media attention, but a "parliamentary hooligan" like Kyva is in a class by himself. It must be said that the social mobility implicit in a democracy is indeed stronger than an aristocracy, but while it creates a stage for a remarkable civilian president like Zelenskyy, it also inevitably allows some clowns to profit from it as well. 
 
Having been abandoned by the extremes on both left and right, Kyva took the plunge and embraced Putin outright. His position changed from an extreme hatred of Russia to extreme support of Russia, or as Putin would put it, from someone who committed “Nazi genocide” to someone who was an old friend of the Russian people  In 2019, after he joined Ukraine's main pro-Russian opposition party, “Opposition Platform—For Life,” he outdid all of the veteran pro-Russian figures in the party in his lavish praise for Putin.  He wishes Putin happy birthday every year, campaigns for his party, calls Putin the "Great Leader" and insults President Zelenskyy with profane obscenities. The only function of all of these words and actions is to illustrate that freedom of expression exists in Ukraine. 
 
In June 2020, he announced that he was going to start a new party, but stayed in the Opposition Platform after everyone ignored him.  He eventually lost interest, and on January 30, 2022, Kyva announced that he was moving to Spain.  Yet on February 15, he appeared in Moscow and announced that he would not return to Ukraine, adding that he would not oppose even a full-scale Russian invasion.  On February 24, after the invasion began, he claimed on Russian television that Ukrainians "need to be liberated" and urged Zelenskyy to surrender.

For this reason, Kyva was expelled for the third time from a party, this time from the pro-Russian opposition, after having been expelled from the left and the right a few years earlier. Platform Chairman Yuriy Boyko denounced Kyva as a "provocateur who is attempting to interfere in the peace process" and declared that "those who foment discord between Russia and Ukraine and are incapable of advancing the peace process have no place in our party." The party then publicly condemned Russia's aggression against Ukraine. After Zelenskyy announced the suspension of pro-Russian political parties for the duration of the war (pro-Russian politicians as individuals can still engage in politics), the party's co-chairman endorsed the president’s decision and called on pro-Russians to suspend their activities because “the war changes everything. Before February 24 and after are two different worlds."

On March 6, Ukraine's Prosecutor General announced that Kyva had been charged with treason, violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity, participation in Russian war propaganda, and illegal possession of weapons. Ukraine's parliament then voted to strip Kyva of his membership, a move favored by many previously "pro-Russian" lawmakers. 
 
Obviously, Kyva is no longer a "Ukrainian politician" but a traitor, just like Wang Jingwei[2] (1883-1944) during China's war of resistance against Japan—although course his previous reputation could not hold a candle to Wang’s, but who else is Emperor Putin going to catch in his net?  Still, we can’t ignore what Kyva says just because of who Kyva is, and if he has solid information on Bucha it won’t hurt to give him a listen.  But how could he?  From far-away Moscow, a man who had announced before the war that he would not return to Ukraine "put out a self-published video, in which he said that the Bucha incident was staged by Ukraine with help from the British MI6."  LOL.  “A self-published video!”  This is what China’s Putin fans are calling “the real deal?”  Did Wang Jingwei's "self-recorded audios" back in the day about "Sino-Japanese goodwill" deny the reality of the Nanjing Massacre? 
 
The World After Bucha 
 
In fact, satellite images and drone photos from different sources and at different times, later supplied by different countries, have been verified as confirming what people witnessed on the ground at the site of the Bucha massacre, and proving that the massacre took place during the Russian occupation.  Most questions have been answered and more details are being revealed. And then some professor from Fudan actually came out and said that the Russian army was justified in killing civilians because the Ukrainian government had given civilians guns!  

It is somewhat comforting that the generally mainstream Zhihu discussion platform had a discussion of this, which turned into a nearly unanimous criticism of the professor, and a typical comment was that “the professor skipped directly over the two steps of ‘there was no massacre’ and ‘the Ukrainians did it,’ which amounts to directly admitting that the Russian army did it, and all we can say is that this lap dog was a little too quick to lick his master’s face.”[3] 
 
In fact, Russian massacres of civilians are not limited to Bucha, and Bucha is probably not the most serious, just the most visible.  According to some sources, the most brutal massacre of civilians has been in Mariupol, where, in addition to indiscriminate bombing, we have more reports of Russian troops (especially the Chechen "Net Red Army") burning, killing, and raping in anger because of their slow progress, but journalists left as the siege of the city turned vicious (the last two journalists withdrew on March 15), which means that it is difficult to get our hands on proof, and the outside world sees less of the gruesome footage. True exposure will come after the war. 
 
The brutality of the Bucha tragedy shocked the world, causing a wave of condemnation and pressure to aid Ukraine that finally made Western advocates of appeasement stop and think.  People like Angela Merkel and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier are reviewing their past weak stance towards Putin. The flow of Western arms to Ukraine, which has been proceeding at the pace of toothpaste squeezed out of a tube, is being squeezed a little faster since the Bucha massacre.  In the past few days, the West has started to provide old Soviet-made T72 tanks from the Czech Republic, British harpoon anti-ship missiles and U.S. field information equipment.  And more and more countries are providing arms and protection for individual soldiers, perhaps to the point of overdoing it. However, the biggest problem facing the Ukrainian Army is Russian air superiority, and there is still little progress on this front.
 
About Russian Air Superiority
 
To date, virtually all of Ukraine’s airborne activities have been carried out by helicopters, and in the last two weeks, the most outstanding military exploits have been:  on April 1, when two Ukrainian military helicopters crossed the border to attack Russia for the first time, blowing up the Russian army fuel depot in Belgorod; and on March 31, when five Ukrainian helicopters risked their lives to break through the Russian defense and deliver supplies to those defending Mariupol. These two examples were both miracles accomplished by helicopters at great risk and tragic sacrifice.

Normally,  cross-border bombing and siege airdrops are the specialties of fixed-wing aircraft. Given helicopters’ slow speed, the chances of success in long-distance cross-border bombing are extremely low. Compared to conventional transport aircraft, helicopters carry less weight and cannot be used for strategic resupply, and three of the five were shot down, so the cost was high.  But it was this or nothing, because the Ukrainian air force currently has few fixed-wing aircraft, and their long-range medium and high-altitude air defenses are almost non-existent. And aside from the threat of close-range missiles fired by individual Ukrainian soldiers, the Russian Air Force's absolute advantage at medium and high altitudes remains unchallenged.

But in the low-altitude range, the Russian helicopter air combat advantage has been reduced, and fixed-wing aircraft also hesitate to fly low.  These low-altitude missiles have exploited a Russian weakness, and this, coupled with the Ukrainians’ bravery and skill, have allowed Ukrainian helicopters to over perform.  However, not only are helicopters limited in function, but to date the West has as yet to supply a single one, and the longer Ukraine fights the fewer helicopters they have. 
 
People have asked: Why is Ukraine so weak militarily, with so few aircraft and tanks of its own, relying completely on Western assistance? When the Soviet Union's military legacy was divided up after the fall of the Soviet Union, wasn't Ukraine second only to Russia? Doesn't Ukraine also have its own defense industry?
 
It is true that Ukraine has aircraft and tanks inherited from the former Soviet Union, and also has its own defense industry with some production capacity. But first, there is very little left from the former Soviet Union that is still usable after 30 years, and more importantly, the defense industry's supply chain was for the most part paralyzed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a fair bit of this industry has been lost to the rebellious regions of eastern Ukraine.
 
A case in point is the destruction of the Antonov aircraft, which received considerable attention in the early stages of the war. The Antonov Design Bureau, with its headquarters in Kyiv, was the leader of the largest military transport aircraft production system in the former Soviet Union, which produced the world's largest jumbo transport aircraft, the An-225, the only example of which was stationed at Kyiv's Khostomel Airport (and was unfortunately destroyed by the Russian army in an early battle). This would seem to suggest that Ukraine has an excellent aviation industry.

However, what exists in Kyiv is only a "design bureau" and a pilot plant, while the supply chain for the construction of the Antonov chain is spread over a dozen locations in Russia, including Novosibirsk, Voronezh, Ulyanovsk, and Kharkov in Ukraine, and the largest manufacturing plant, which produced the main body of the aircraft, is located in Tashkent in Central Asia.  With the destruction of the An-225, the world's largest transport aircraft still in service is the Antonov An-124, but it is produced in Ulyanovsk, in Russia. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union was an important blow to the Antonov supply chain, but until 2015, when Russia and Ukraine were still able to cooperate, and Antonov in Ukraine was able to maintain a certain amount of production capacity. Russian-Ukrainian cooperation was completely interrupted by Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2015, which meant that production of Antonov aircraft in Ukraine came to a complete halt. 
 
In his February 21 declaration justifying the invasion, Putin mentioned the discontinuation of Antonov aircraft production in Ukraine as one of the arguments that Ukraine is "corrupt and incompetent" and needs to be "liberated" by Putin. But in fact, Russia is little better than Ukraine, and now produces less than two military transport aircraft per year, which is also due to the disruption of the former Soviet supply chain. However, Russia is a very large country, and most of the supply chain is still in its territory, so the Russian military industry is in a much better position than Ukraine to maintain production capacity as under the Soviet Union. This is true not only for transport aircraft, but also for the production of all aircraft, tanks, missiles, and other heavy equipment that rely heavily on the full supply chain. The entire economy suffers from similar problems.
 
I have already talked about as Ukraine as a typical example among the former Soviet states of a failed economic transition. The reasons for this are of course a series of mistakes in Ukraine's transition since achieving independence, but the difficulties caused by Ukraine's unique economic structure are also important. Although the entire Soviet Union was a planned economy prior to the transition, Ukraine, as a medium- to large-sized country with more heavy industry than the Soviet Union on average—and more than Russia—relied heavily on cross-border supply chains, and both upstream and downstream operations are difficult to carry out solely within Ukraine.

This is different from the Russian mega-state, where supply chains are relatively whole, allowing for a considerable degree of "internal circulation 内循环."[4] Nor is Ukraine like the three Baltic states, which are small and can be easily integrated into Western-led globalization (to say nothing of the Baltic states’ institutional integration into Europe), or the Central Asian states, based on traditional farming and herding, with low levels of industrialization dominated by resource and consumer industries with less developed supply chains. Ukraine's process of economic transition did indeed come with its share of mistakes and lessons, and the problems Putin pointed to in his address on the eve of the invasions concerning corruption and oligarchs do indeed exist, but Russia's problems in this regard are no less serious than Ukraine's. 

Russia’s advantage over Ukraine, in addition to energy resources, is chiefly that Russian supply chains remain relatively complete, while Ukraine was hit harder by the disintegration of Soviet supply chains than the three cases discussed above, which widened the gap between the Ukrainian and Russian economies, especially in military industries. Therefore, at present it is not possible for Ukraine to produce heavy equipment on its own.
 
A third reason for Ukraine's serious disadvantage in terms of equipment is the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Important amounts of heavy armaments and equipment were stationed there, but the Russians disarmed them due to Ukrainian unpreparedness.  Aside from a handful of soldiers who defected to the Russians and stayed, most of the troops were sent back to Ukraine, and although there was no war in Crimea, there was a serious loss of equipment. These three reasons put Ukraine at a serious disadvantage in terms of aircraft and tanks, and little help has come from the outside world over the years.
 
Thus the key issue in the upcoming war in eastern Ukraine should be whether outside weapons assistance can reach the level needed on the battlefield, and especially whether it can defeat Russian air superiority.  When the war was about defending Ukraine’s cities, the Ukrainian army's advantage in terms of electromagnetic spectrum warfare and in low-altitude firepower—both helped along with external assistance—could partially offset Russian air superiority, but in the larger war that is likely to break out in the east, a Ukrainian army without air cover will face a serious test. Of course, Ukraine needs tanks, but what it needs more is actually aircraft that can support ground troops, as well as long-range anti-aircraft missile systems that can deprive Russian forces of their air superiority at mid- and high-range altitudes.
 
In the past few days, international fervor to help Ukraine has been growing, and the U.S. has introduced a "Lend-Lease Act" that draws on the World War II experience. Following a recent visit to Kyiv, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that since the war in Ukraine is generally a "defensive war," any weapons needed for the war would be "defensive weapons.” This is a clear break from the past policy of limiting Western support to Ukraine to defensive light equipment and individual equipment, and limiting "offensive weapons" such as aircraft, tanks and surface-to-surface missiles. Time will tell whether the Bucha massacre will incite another wave of international outrage that will truly put an end to the Western policy of appeasement and change the drip-by-drip model of military assistance.
 
It looks as if it is the brutality of the invader and his insistence on pushing people into a corner that finally has led democratic countries to set aside appeasement, which has often been the case in the past.  Looking at appeasement from a historical perspective, there are many deeper issues that deserve analysis. 
  
Notes

[1]秦晖, “布恰惨案能否终结绥靖主义：乌克兰评论之五,” published in FT-Chinese on April 11, 2022. 

[2]Translator’s note:  Wang Jingwei was a Chinese politician, originally part of the Nationalist/Guomintang regime, who headed a collaborationist government that cooperated with the Japanese invading army during the Sino-Japanese War.

[3]Translator’s note:  In Chinese, “只能说这波盘叼得有点太急了.” Diaopan 叼盘 describes a dog holding a Frisbee in its mouth, and is also the derogatory nickname given to Global Times editor Hu Xijin for sucking up to the Party-State.

[4]Translator’s note:  The expression is in quotes because it is part of ongoing discussions in China about the need to develop China’s own independent supply chains, reducing dependence on the outside world.