The end result is a psychopathic nation-but one that is still supporting a commander in chief who is holed up in his besieged fortress with nowhere to flee. Putin is using hatred of Ukrainians as a form of group therapy and playing up the sheer absurdity of the whole situation as anesthesia. In various media there are frequent mentions of Ukrainians who survived World War II only to die in or suffer during Putin’s “special operation.”Īfter 80+ days of all this, Russians are now frightened and becoming hardened by what they are witnessing. Many of them assume the fetal position, using hatred for the enemy to protect themselves from their own conscience and lack of desire to understand what is happening around them. He shows them missiles soaring toward “military infrastructure,” but for some reason he prefers not to mention that those very same missiles have ended up killing three-month-old babies and “de-Nazified” elderly survivors of the Holocaust who live in Ukraine. Putin spends a lot of time trying to show the Russian public who they are fighting: Banderites (supporters of the World War II –era Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera) and neo-Nazis. And the longer the conflict goes on, the more important it becomes to demand that Russian citizens consolidate around a leader who is constantly warning of imaginary “security” threats. But in the worldview of aging, middle-ranking KGB operatives, life is one long covert battle against the West, an artificial conflict with normal people. From a child’s point of view, of course everyone should live in peace and harmony. If anything, the current “special operation” has plenty of similarities with the Afghan War in terms of the pointlessness and the destructiveness, not only for Ukraine, but for our country, too.Īfter Putin’s speech on Red Square on May 9 and the extravagant celebrations for Victory Day, when Russia marks the Soviet victory in World War II, my twelve-year-old daughter asked me: “Dad, did he not say anything about the peace talks?” No, my child-and nor will he. It’s enough for Putin simply to equate it with the sacred Soviet victory in 1945, though these two events have absolutely nothing in common. Now, by launching a “special military operation” in Ukraine, Putin has given people a much simpler goal: “victory.” It doesn’t matter over whom, or how such a victory is supposed to be achieved. Citizens naturally asked, what is it all for? Where are we going? We once tried to build communism. Then we tried to build capitalism (although it turned out to be the nomenklatura-oligarchic variety).Įventually, we even took Crimea-and still we’re not happy. But as time dragged on, such targets became a two-edged sword. Vladimir Putin’s regime in recent years used to pride itself on goal-setting. This article was originally published in Russian in the New Times.
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