What Roger Waters still can't get

From Zatybrze to Zaporizhia

Much like agent Mulder, I want to believe that people like Roger Waters act in good faith and they don’t wilfully spread disinformation just for a fistful of roubles. That’s why I started this blog - you can’t convince a professional liar, but maybe there’s hope for someone who simply does not speak Russian, like Mr Waters, and therefore cannot check direct sources, such as Putin speeches?

Tomasz Kurianowicz,Max Kühlem. Roger Waters: „Bringt eure Regierungen dazu, den Krieg zu beenden”. Berliner Zeitung, 03.02.2023. Retrieved from rogerwaters.com.

Let me begin with the infamous interview by Roger Waters from February 5th. You see a snippet when the great musician claims that “Putin has always stressed that he has no interest in taking over western Ukraine – or invading Poland or any other country across the border. What he is saying is: he wants to protect the Russian-speaking populations”.
It is obvious that Mr Waters never bothered to read actual Putin speeches, not even in English translation - let alone watch them or listen to them. Probably not a single one of them, and definitely not a sample large enough to claim that “Putin has always stressed” something.
These speeches are vague. Allegedly: they are intentionally vague. After a year of the invasion, we still don’t know what its the goal was.

via Youtube channel by Julia Davies

On February 7th Margarita Simonyan (the head of Russia Today television channel) explained to her audience that the goals of the invasion were unclear - and this is good. People ask her: “What are our goals? Are we taking Kyiv or not? Will we keep going on to Berlin and maybe Lisbon?”.
Her response: “It’s vague for a reason. Goals change depending on the capabilities”. At the time of writing this, Russia is unable to take small town of Vuhledar which its elite troops have been storming for months. But it’s rather clear they would take Kyiv and keep on rolling  if they simply had the capability (that’s why the countries that might be “next in line” are the most ardent supporters of Ukraine).
You hear pretty often in the Russian media that the goal of the “Special Military Operation” is to reach Atlantic Ocean / English Channel / Washington DC. Below you can see a snippet of the interview by the head of the Wagner mercenary company and a close friend of Putin’s, Evgeny Prigozhin, with Simon Pegov (aka “Wargonzo”), where the former claims to have a plan “how to reach La Manche”. If you want to try to brush up your Cyrillic skills, the last word is “La Manche” in Russian transliteration.

Top Russian TV host Vladimir Soloviev frequently has fits of rage in front of a live camera, where he fantasies about bombing the USA, the UK, Germany, Poland (but also sometimes Moldova, Kazakhstan or just any country that refused to support Russia within last 24 hours). It is often pretty theatrical - he fantasies of torturing Western leaders, such as Scholz, Macron or Pistorius, he pretends to scream for mercy (with a phony German accent, no less!), and then he shouts back at himself (“you don’t like it, eh? Too bad, no mercy for you, svolotch!”).

The world famous “angry Soloviev”, via Youtube channel by Julia Davies

Of course, I’m not talking about Putin yet - only about the people from his closest milieu. But if you are a Russian TV journalist, you simply cannot say anything going against the party line. This is not America, where you can openly mock your president in prime time. Should Simonyan, Soloviev, Pegov or their guests say anything Kremlin does not approve of - they would simply disappear from the media (and maybe even from this world).
Now, back to Putin. On February 23rd, just before the war, he had a public speech when he talked about the “Lenin’s mistake” he is about to correct. It was a mistake of granting the nations conquered by Russian imperialism the right of self-determination.
As the Russian empire disintegrated in 1917, many of such nations indeed formed their provisional governments and declared independence. This includes Ukraine - but also Finland, Poland, Georgia, Armenia, Lithuania, Estonia, etc.
This is understandable that we - people living in these countries - were listening to this speech very carefully. Very, very carefully. I think I could compare it to the level of attention with which I listened to Pink Floyd “The Wall” in my youth.
If Putin wants to correct the “Lenin’s mistake” - and this is precisely what he has declared on the eve of the invasion - this can only mean we are the next on Putin’s list. And Roger Waters is deeply wrong with his “Putin always stressed” remark.

via Youtube channel by Julia Davies

Of course, as long as Putin can’t even take Vuhledar - we can feel safe. But as Simonyan put it, the Russian imperial goals are determined by Russian capabilities. If Russian TV hosts fantasise about attacking London and torturing Western politicians, if Putin in his speeches frequently talks about his will to reinstate the tzarist empire - the only way for us to feel safe is to make sure his offensive capabilities are nullified.
And even the September annexations contradict Mr Waters words. If Putin’s goal is merely to “protect the Russian speaking population of Donbas”, then why annex Zaporizhia? It was a very weird annexation - for the first time in history a country claimed to “annex” an area it was not in physical control of.
As of today, Russia does not control 100% of any of the four “annexed” regions. The case of Zaporizhia is the most peculiar. At the time of “annexation”, Russians at least were in control of the city of Kherson, but they lost it about a month later. However,  they never reached the city of Zaporizhia, where roughly half of the population lives.
Just imagine someone staging a referendum in New York state without the control of New York City or even Albany, just some sparsely populated upstate forest areas. And this vote would be valid for the entire state!
Crazy? Exactly as crazy as Mr Waters acknowledgement of the phony referenda. I would even say, “over the rainbow he is crazy”.
While the word “Zaporizhia” sounds like yet another weird Slavic tongue twister, it is actually pretty  straightforward for any Slav. You just need to understand it in the context of our famous prefixes and suffixes.
Prefix “za-” means “behind, after, over”. Suffixes “-zhia, -shia, -schtsche” indicate this is a name of a place (the exact choice depends of the last consonant of the root word). So “Whateverizhia” could mean “area of Whatever”. The famous Roman district Trastevere (trans Tiberim, behind Tiber) is called in Polish “Zatybrze” (“za - over” + “tybr - tiber” + “rzhe - area”).
The root word of Zaporizhia is “porohy”, Ukrainian for “river rapids”. So this name means simply “the area behind the rapids [on Dnipro river]”. In Polish and Russian we have very similar words for river rapids, so it’s “Zaporozhe” in Russian transliteration.
Now, if you look at a map, this name makes sense if you look at Zaporizhia from Kyiv  - but not if you’re looking from Moscow. Looking from the East, Zaporizhia is not “over” Dnipro, it’s this side of it. By using this very prefix Russians tacitly acknowledge Zaporizhia is Ukrainian.
What was the point of this sham “annexation”, then? Nobody knows. The goals of the invasion are unclear, and - as Simonyan said on TV - this is for a reason. In September Putin still thought he was “capable” of holding Kherson and conquering Zaporizhia.

If they happen to improve their “capability” in the future: will they annex Kyiv? Odessa? Kharkiv? Mikolaiv? Once again, nobody knows. Especially at the early stage of the war, Russian media were frequently publishing “maps of Ukraine after the Russian victory”. Above you can see the last one that I’m aware of, from late December 2022 (published by “Pravda”).
The first maps contained no Ukraine at all - everything was annexed, Kyiv included. The last one contains at least some small area around Kyiv - since it was drawn after the whacking Russians took around Kharkiv and Kherson, when they partially came to senses. Later on, they quit publishing such maps and today indeed they talk mostly about Donbas - but not because “Putin always stressed he doesn’t want to annex anything else”, just because the more Russian tanks burn in the vicinity of Vuhledar, the more surreal is the vision of Russian tanks entering Kyiv (let alone Warsaw).
But unfortunately this means that even Roger Waters shouldn’t feel so secure in his multi-million dollar mansion. Given enough capability they can always amend their goals and annex it, too.