As the horrors in Ukraine get harder to watch on TV, it’s crucial to not look away

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/04/2022 (1032 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TV footage out of Ukraine this week is ghastlier than any horror movie.

I can’t recall a time when I’ve heard so many anchors warn viewers of graphic and disturbing content that’s about to air. It’s now an hourly occurrence. The rated R atrocities Russia has unleashed on Ukraine are beyond the outer limits of human depravity.

Even Satan must be chugging Pepto Bismol.

Images broadcast around the globe this week show bodies in the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv that was occupied by Russian forces until they retreated. What these Russian monsters left behind was a grim catalogue of undeniable war crimes they have predictably denied as fake news: summary executions, rape, torture, pillaging, wanton destruction.

I can’t unsee the image of one Ukrainian man who was apparently shot in the head for sport while desperately trying to return home with a sack of potatoes. Or the fellow gunned down on his bicycle. Or the person tossed into a well. Or the mass graves.

Or the relentless savagery of it all.

Russia does not have a “military.” It has battalions of stone age barbarians armed with modern day weaponry and rent-a-mercenaries with a moral compass that would give Attila the Hun a panic attack. Even war has laws and Russia breaks them all with brazen disdain.

After this week, it’s astonishing Russia still has a seat on the UN Human Rights Council.

That’s like putting the BTK Strangler on a parole board.

While touring Bucha this week, a distraught Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the brave and righteous president of Ukraine, shared photos with a message to one group: “Mothers of Russian soldiers … See what bastards you’ve raised. Murderers, looters, butchers.”

He’s not wrong. Every decent person not named Tucker Carlson shares his outrage. But the chance Russian mothers of soldiers will hear Zelenskyy — or accept the lethal misery their bastards have inflicted on Ukraine — remains close to zero.

And that’s why this is ultimately a media story. Vladimir Putin has systematically turned Russia into a rogue state populated by zombies. He has devoured brains with propaganda and disinformation. If he claimed his invasion of Ukraine was because Nazi space aliens were harvesting organs and forcing every Russian speaker to adopt an obscure dialect from the Andromeda Galaxy, Muscovites would now be fighting over bags of sugar while hoisting placards of extraterrestrial mother ships crossed out with a giant Z.

They’d lap up his War of the Worlds nonsense. They are conditioned to all his nonsense.

Russians no longer inhabit reality.

And until they lose everything, they will remain a lost cause.

I keep hearing experts on cable spitballing ideas for how we might penetrate the “digital iron curtain” and convince Russians their government is committing evil. That’s not going to happen, not while Putin remains the treacherous Wizard of Oz. I’ve lost count of how many Ukrainians have shared depressing stories about how their own relatives in Russia do not believe them as they relay harrowing tales of siege and bombings and annihilation.

You’re lying! Putin is liberating you!

When a father does not believe his son, there is no hope for a Russian mother of a soldier.

And that’s why we need to remain vigilant in not losing our interest. The images broadcast from Bucha this week are not an aberration. This wasn’t the only city Russian soldiers occupied and there is no reason to believe they were playing hopscotch elsewhere. But as TV cameras gradually roll into other regions the Ukrainians retake, there is a real risk of desensitization. Most news stories have a shelf life in the public consciousness of about one week. Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine is now past the one-month mark. It’s a credit to the Western free press — I never again want to hear an addled dingbat whinge about the liberal MSM — that we are still getting this much footage in real time and at great risk to the correspondents on the ground. Russian “soldiers” are shooting anything that moves.

But this war could linger for weeks, if not years. Just as individuals have an attention span, so does the culture. Even before the devastating images from Bucha this week, you could sense a drift in the news file priority simply because the news never stops.

What’s happening is so hard to watch. And that’s why it’s crucial to not look away.

The images out of Ukraine are borderline unfathomable in 2022. Residential neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Hospitals and schools bombed. A refugee exodus not seen since the Second World War. Endless attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. Murder and mayhem.

This isn’t Putin’s first tango with sociopathic brutality. But TV cameras were not broadcasting 24/7 out of Syria or Chechnya or Georgia as he experimented with chemical and cluster munitions to achieve his diabolical conquests while engaged in mass murder.

Putin should already be an indicted war criminal behind bars. He’s a malignant tumour on our species. He is Stage 4 incurable. But we were always too busy with the next big news story to realize this. So we let his past atrocities slide. We blinked and looked away.

And now, for the sake of civilization itself, we must ensure this war never fades into the background before Ukraine wins. That is the only option.

This is getting harder to watch by the day. It will only get worse if we close our eyes.

Vinay Menon is the Star’s pop culture columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @vinaymenon