Statement by the Russian Embassy in Vienna w/regard to President Van der Bellen's WW2 Commentary

Read the translated reaction to the comments by the Austrian president while visiting Slovakia and Ukraine on 31 Jan. and 1 Feb. 2023

Huhum, it would almost appear as if my outrage-cum-embarassment of Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen wasn’t singular. In fact, beyond the members of the Western political caste and its willing executioners in legacy media, my reading was, apparently, spot on.

Preliminaries and Background

Please click here for my brief take on Van der Bellen’s statements in Bratislava, Slovakia, on 31 Jan. 2023, in which he called Russia’s military operation in Ukraine a ‘colonial war’.

Please click here for a more extensive coverage of Van der Bellen’s statements uttered during his ‘solidarity trip’ to his new BFF, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which he re-imagined WW2, inverted the perpetrator-victim relationship, and pissed on the memory of those civilians who lost their lives in WW2 and the current conflict in Ukraine.

Among other stupidities, Mr. Van der Bellen said this:

the port city of Odessa, for example, now looks like a German city at the end of the Second World War

Just ask yourself: why were German cities bombed? And by whom? Transposed to the present, would Russia be one of the Allied powers who ‘strategically’ bombed German cities to smithereens? Weirdly, it was the USSR that was attacked by Germany, but then again, facts are, well, ‘troublesome’, if you’re aiming to score cheap political points, I suppose.

If you read German, you may as well venture over to a long-form essay over at TKP—the Blog for Science & Politics.

Russia’s Ambassador to Austria' Reacts

It wasn’t just me who thought this was insane; here’s what Amb. Dmitrij Ljubinskij had to say (via the embassy’s Telegram channel):

During his visit to Bratislava, Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen made a statement that further stretched the limits of Western mythology about the events of the last decade in Ukraine: ‘Russia is waging colonial war against Ukraine.’ Then he explained that everything was happening now for ‘purely ideological reasons’.

In this context, I take the liberty of drawing attention to another example of the radical reversal of concepts and cause-and-effect relationships.

As is well known, it was precisely the supporters of the inhuman ideology of the Kiev regime who openly declared all Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donbass to be ‘brutes’, who no longer had any right to their mother tongue or to their own prehistoric territories. ‘Subhumans’ who, in the best colonial manner, well known to the former colonial powers, were not only exploited for years, but also expelled and simply exterminated. With the quiet hypocritical ignorance of Western pseudo-liberal democracies.

The heroic deployment of Russian forces, on the other hand, bears a liberating and, to use the same vocabulary, a decolonising character.

❗️ To convince oneself of this, however, one must summon up courage and at least look into the eyes of the ordinary inhabitants of the Donbass, the old and the children. Or talk to the Crimeans who made their historic decision to reunite with Russia, instead of repeating Zelenskyy’s crazy, mantra-like demands that Russia should be punished by supplying ever heavier weapons from the EU's ‘peace funds’.

Bottom Lines

Do I buy Amb. Ljubinskij’s statement hook, line, and sinker? Certainly not, and part of his consideration is clearly political in nature.

Yet, on the main issues, he’s spot-on, in particular as regards Western support for the Neonazi formations among the forces of the Ukrainian government. (Note the distinction: the ‘Azov’ formations are not under the command of the MoD, but serve under the Interior Ministry.)

Moreover, the ‘radical reversal of concepts and cause-and-effect relationships’ is also a fair critique, in addition to the strange re-writing of WW2 history.

Also, if Mr. Van der Bellen wouldn’t be the president, one could easily dismiss his comments as the ramblings of a senile, 79 year-old who somehow ended up where he shouldn’t be. Alas, he’s the president, and thus I must draw attention to his utterances.