Kyiv Independent follows a drone team on the front line in the east. It is a window into a reality everyone should know. This is the new war: The slaughter bench from the First World War is back. The soldiers are defenceless when they are discovered. It happens even inside dense forest. The drones find them.
Those who control the drones sit at a distance and observe how the human in front of the camera looks in his last moment.
Not everyone dies. Some have an arm or a leg torn off and lie bleeding to death.
The balance of power is absolute: One side rules over life and death. This also applies to the other side. The Russians too conduct human hunts with drones. How will this form of warfare change the soldiers? The army? Command? Society?
Norway has contributed 12 billion to Ukrainian drones. Ukraine is building drone factories in both Norway and Denmark. How will that be perceived by the Russians? That we have become participants in the war?
Nevertheless there are two striking features: Politicians such as Defence Minister Tore O. Sandvik speak enthusiastically about everything we can learn from the Ukrainians. But they never talk about what drone warfare looks like. Morality is suspended.
At the same time Norwegian soldiers are taught human rights as part of their education.
It is difficult to reconcile the European Convention on Human Rights with drone warfare. No one reads the rights of Russian soldiers before they are discovered, pursued and hunted, without any possibility of escape.
It is the absolute powerlessness of a soldier, or even a rocket battery, that tells us that war has changed on all levels. This capacity to penetrate everywhere is raw power.
There is no medical service coming to pick up the wounded. It is not for nothing that this is called the kill zone.
The soldiers are reduced to absolute helplessness. But this is a breach of the rules we ourselves have developed for war. Drone warfare dissolves everyone, as in an acid bath.
And no one wants to talk about it.
From philosophy one knows tipping points: A reversal occurs when new factors are introduced. It is quite obvious that the drones change the character of war. Yet we do not talk about it.
Norway’s foreign minister Espen Barth Eide and prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre would like to be “clean”; they are only defending a noble cause. Anyone who watches the attached drone film understands that this is a great lie.
Barth Eide and Støre are deep down in the same muck. The Israelis know what war is. Norway has now become part of a war that has lasted for four and a half years, but we still want to appear spotless.
The left has historically claimed that it stood for conscience.
Now it stands for cynicism and hypocrisy.
This is not good for combat morale, either among the soldiers or in civil society.
No one believes in anything.
But the elite believes it is morally superior. It confuses posturing with conviction.
That is why the USA, which has revived patriotism, is winning, while Europe’s leaders are like old whores
pretending they are still attractive and demanding that you flatter them.
Europe has been here before. The slaughter bench in the First World War was the direct cause of Nazism.
What will arise from the slaughter bench in Ukraine?