Putin is not Hitler. He has things in common and it's tempting to say that he is. Paranoid, megalomaniac, resentful, he has invaded a neighboring country for no other reason than the desire for territorial conquest and contempt for the Ukrainians, whom he considers to be a Russian subspecies. But he is not Hitler. Not in the depth of his cruelty, not in the scale of his ambition. I know this because on Wednesday I went to Auschwitz and the next day I crossed from Poland to the Ukraine.
This is not "total war." If it were, the Russian air force would be attacking the convoys I saw entering the Ukraine through the Medika border post. There was a three-kilometre queue of trucks on the Polish side, all loaded with food and – presumably – ammunition. It would be enough to launch a missile against a gas station positioned at the beginning of the road that connects the border with the rest of Ukraine, or against a couple of trucks that have recently entered Ukrainian territory, to stop what has become a vital source of supply for the suffering east of the country.
But the Russians don't. In the next few days I will talk to experts in Kyiv and try to find out why, exactly, but for now I am left with the fact that Putin, unlike Hitler, has imposed limits on himself. He fears an escalation that could further anger NATO. For now, Ukraine is two countries: the wild east and the quiet west, whose border I crossed on foot on Thursday.
The experience was easier, less dramatic, impossible, except perhaps for the audacity of a blonde policewoman in her 40s, who complimented me and a couple of foreigners who showed up at the immigration post at the same time. "What three handsome gentlemen!" She told us. If this had been Spain, or England, or the United States, she would have sued her for sexual harassment, of course. She would have insisted at the very least to be fired from her job. But since these poor people are at war, I thought, I'll let it go.
Twenty-four hours later, here in the city of Lviv, 85 kilometers from Medika, I am still perplexed by the supposed reality that I am in the country where the bloodiest European conflict since 1945 is taking place. Lviv is a stately city where people you walk through the streets with the same tranquility as in Madrid and the McDonald's are full to overflowing. I saw a uniformed soldier, yes; I've noticed that there are appreciably more young girls than boys in bars, and the only sign of tension I've picked up is that people don't want to hear the Russian language, even though they all speak it.
I'm traveling with a Russian-speaking British friend and all six times I've called on him to try to resolve a communication problem, people have given him icy stares. Better to babble in English, better not to understand each other, was the message they transmitted to us, than to dirty our mouths with those sounds so familiar, so detested.
Normal. If we are horrified from afar by the news we read about the atrocities of the invaders, how will they react here? In the last week we have learned of beheadings, of deaths by clubbing, of the recorded testimonies of a couple of commanders of the Wagner mercenary group who confessed to having killed more than 20 Ukrainian children or adolescents in the Donetsk war zone.
They said they had also liquidated a group of more than 50 wounded prisoners with grenades and killed some of their own soldiers for refusing to fight. They added that they would do the same again if the occasion were repeated.
This is not Auschwitz, an emblem of absolute evil, a vast cemetery where the ashes of more than a million innocent people are mixed with the rubble of the crematoria that the Nazis destroyed in an attempt to hide the most terrible crime in the history of humanity. humanity. But it is the spirit of Auschwitz.
Those two Russian mercenaries would have carried out the extermination orders of Hitler, Himmler and company. The image that I will never forget of the thousands of shoes of the victims of the gas chambers, including pairs of small children's shoes, can be extrapolated on a smaller scale to the remorseless massacres, seven decades later, of the children of Donetsk.
Another image repeats itself in my head, like in a loop, more than a month ago, this time with Russians in the role of victims. This is a patented Russian military tactic from World War II that has been widely reported in the media.
What Russian officers do in today's battles is first send a wave of young recruits against the Ukrainian lines. The young men obey because they know that if they don't, their own soldiers will shoot them. Immediately afterwards, almost all fall under enemy fire, but that is the plan. The Russian officers have achieved their goal: they have identified the defensive positions of the enemy, which is simultaneously running out of bullets. Now is the time to launch a second attack, but with experienced Russian soldiers, those whose lives are worth the most.
The image that I cannot erase from my mind is one that I imagine of a 20-year-old Russian soldier, with the face of being younger. Skinny, carrying a rifle that weighs almost as much as he does, emerges from his trench and begins to run towards the enemy guns. He knows that he is going to die. I focus on his face and see that he is crying, asking for his mom. An instant later he falls, torn to pieces, into the mud.
Like him, hundreds every day. So that? For a noble cause? Because dulce et decorum est pro patria mori? No. Neither sweet nor decorous. Russian soldiers and Ukrainian soldiers and civilians (some 200,000 to date, they say) die in large numbers at the whim of a man who could put an end to the horror today if he wanted to. Putin is not Hitler, no, not yet, but he has the same imperial impulses and the same disdain for the lives of others. Like Putin, the truth is, there have been many. One must not resort to the extreme of comparing him to the Nazi Führer. He is part of an ancient tradition of tyrants who, as the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi said, express "the barbaric side of human nature", "enter into absolute madness, without any possibility of reasoning."
