I’ve never cared for beets personally . . . to me, they taste like the dirt in which they’re grown. But a great many people love them — particularly my Russian/Ukrainian ancestors, who might not have survived without pots full of borshch (yes, that is the correctly transliterated spelling — it’s not “borscht”).

But this article isn’t about the noble root vegetable; it’s about the ignoble war that has been underway in Ukraine for more than three years . . . and the new usage of the word “beetroot” that I came across in an article about that war, that made me feel sick to my stomach.

It is apparently not a new term at all . . . but it was new to me: “Beetroot mulch.”

It was contained in a CNN analysis on the subject of the United States’ attempt to open negotiations with Moscow and hopefully to bring an end to the carnage in Ukraine. A key point of the U.S. proposal presented in Jeddah on Tuesday was to start with a 30-day ceasefire to allow time to enter into substantive discussions . . . which was not at all to Vladimir Putin’s liking. He predicted that Ukraine would simply use that time to regroup and rearm.

The article read, in part:

“Putin cannot refuse a ceasefire, without losing the fictitious moral high ground. But it is what comes next — or during any pause in hostilities — that will define the outcome of the war.

“Firstly, it is a complete ceasefire, across all front lines, for an entire month. This is, in and of itself, a very big ask. Across hundreds of miles, both sides have for years used armor, then artillery, then drones to hunt each other viciously, amid what is now called ‘beetroot’ — the horrific mulch of corpses discarded in combat — on the zero line.” [Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, March 11, 2025.] [Bold emphasis is mine.]

“Beetroot — the horrific mulch of corpses.” The mental image conjured up by that phrase is almost too much to bear. More than any previous pictures of death and devastation from World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the decades of Middle East conflicts — even the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — this one description most graphically summed up for me the unspeakable horror, and the waste of human life, of war.

And if Vladimir Putin continues to delay putting an immediate end to it . . . and, worse, if Donald Trump continues to make excuses for him . . . then there can be no question that the world’s future is in the hands of two of the most despicable individuals who ever lived.

And Heaven help us all.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
3/14/25