(I'm Russian). This war was started by a single madman. If not him, it would never happen. Even his spy chief was fucked up [0] when he realized what's going to happen.
Yes — at least 70% support whatever he does — and I tried hard to disprove this painful fact to myself. But couldn't.
The only excuse is the 20 years of hardcore TV brainwashing — but it's not too great of an excuse. Better than in nazi Germany, but not enough.
All that cultural banter the article mentions never caused any actual sense of war — it was more like a Texan joking about a Canadian.
I don't know how to live with this shame. Can't even post in Russian, at local forums. All those stupid faces in the 'do you support the war' Youtube steet interviews… Yes, there are others — Navalny was poisoned, and is now behind the bars. Nemtsov was murdered in front of Kremlin long before the war. Kasparov, Nevzorov condemned this crime. Hundreds of thousands of IT left the country — unable to fight unarmed. But still…
Trying to drown myself in English, jokes, work to keep the sanity. Doesn't work half of the times. Jokes clumsy, work fucked.
Ukraine is now a moral leader of Europe. It will be restored — every single broken window. And people will live free and proud. It's my only bright cloud now.
Unfortunately people like him have been leaving Russia in droves since 1917, then in 1990, etc. The popular support for the war is arguably the result of this negative selection.
Imho, it is not just Putin. It is too easy and comfortable of an answer. It is more that Russia never really got rid of old communist structures in secret service, police, courts, you name it. So, the exact same old ways slipped back, although with new ideology. Russia in general never really denounced crimes of communism, it seems to be rehabilitating the regime instead. That despite a lot of Russian victims of communism being there too.
90ties meant more crime and poverty in post-communist countries. But, some countries managed to build democratic societies, even if often imperfect. Russia instead slipped back, because the old acts were more of forgotten then actually talked about and dealt with.
> Even his spy chief was fucked up [0] when he realized what's going to happen.
His spy chief was perfectly fine with quite a lot of things previously. His spy chief likely facilitated both some of the murders you mention and crackdown on political opposition going on for years. His spy chief must knew Russia army behavior (say deliberate bombing of hospitals) in Syria before, with war going on from 2014, with a lot of things you mentioned.
The world is only getting more complicated every day and feeling responsible for its ills is an impossible weight for those with little power to change it. We can only take care of ourselves and be a positive force to those around us. Don't let the weight of problems you didn't cause, or have no direct ability to impact, crush you.
> I don't know how to live with this shame. Can't even post in Russian, at local forums.
i would trade 1 million nutty tweets from americans with one honest expression of your opinion on a russian forum. the voice via the spirit is the boundary between the material and the ephemeral.
apparently the race to the nuclear apocolyse is being lead by the russian orthodoxy, a dark horse. i pray i am wrong.
On a local platform a post like that would live for a couple of seconds. But it's not even the issue.
You simply do not realize the depth of this brainfuckery. I good friend of mine, an objectively smart, logical and rational guy — believed that Malaysia Flight 17 was shot down by Ukraine in 2014. I tried to convince him for hours. Haven't spoke to him since, but have heard which side he's on.
I can accept that old dumbfucked babushkas with iron teeth and 3 brain cells support it — they'd support a war on Alpha Centauri if the magic box would say so.
I can even accept — and I'm really stretching it here — a common working guy being fooled by TV — after all, it's 24/7 on all channels, without breaks.
But interacting with anyone who has both means and capacity to see the real picture is physically painful. It's like you are in some sort of literal… nightmare, where things are out of control, and have no fucking logical explanation.
You talk to a guy. You show this picture. You use this argument. You pause. You breath. You repeat. You look at his face — and see your nightmare.
There are those who are talking to people every day. Nevzorov [0] alone has 1M+ Telegram subs, and growing. But even he — the best Russian journalist — is not trying to convince anyone anymore. He is just laughing at them — at their stupidity, their military fuckups, their slave mindset.
There are others — with different approaches. I support them as much as I can — as people would more likely listen to them than a random guy who could be an American spy.
Putin is an egotistical maniac and started this war with no regard to his own people. I hope he will come to realize his massive fuck-up, but don't think it will happen unless his own trusted friends starts to talk common sense into him.
Ukraine has taken a beating before, and I am optimistic that she'll bounce back, stronger and more connected than ever.
As someone who consumes most information from Russian language I can confirm this is true. Even truer than we Ukrainians learn about us and about Russia on our history lessons in school.
There is a real war between upvoters and downvoters of that comment. Upvoters are slightly winning, but so strange to see number of my karma different on every reload!
I lived in Russia since early childhood till 2007.
When I tell foreigners abroad that Russia has an aggressive, militarist culture in a way an unrepentant Germany was, I am often called a nazi, and a rusophobe.
Welcome to Finland, where being in good graces ("neutral") with the Soviet Union and Russia was turned into a state-level art form.
For nearly a century speaking ill of the Big Angry Bear Next Door was forbidden - not by law, of course - it just wasn't a thing you did and also kept your political career.
This guy's insight has been enlightening, and highlights how alien Russian Authoritarian thought is compared to Western Individualist thought.
One thing that's been especially shocking is the relatively low status the military has, which seems insane to us here in the West. Here, it's "Thank you for your service!", there it's a very low-status thing. It makes more sense once you realize the military represents a coup risk for a dictator, and has to be kept politically weak to preserve the State. Our military's undying loyalty to our civilian governments is something we here in the West take for granted, and is severely underrated.
Kamil has done an excellent job, both in his descriptions of how the military is viewed, with how the Kremlin manipulates and controls the other regions. How the corruption isn't just a new thing, but that it's more of a continuous power struggle in the Russian empire that has persisted since the time of Catherine.
[Edit: As Kamil describes it] the Russian power apparatus is thuggery. It’s a biker gang with nukes. And while Western Democracy hasn’t nearly lived up to the hype, at the very least it is one hell of a lot more lawful.
I believe we are at the crux of an existential dilemma. Law or lawless? Provided rights by an imperfect constitution, held accountable by an imperfect judiciary, and progressing forward through imperfect politicians … or held hostage to a cartel of lawless and largely incompetent gangs of thugs and the mafioso who run the show?
Very interesting taken alongside this strategic analysis of Russian thinking by a former Finnish intelligence officer, from 2018. He's approaching the topic from a bit of a different angle, but coming to very similar conclusions. There are subtitles in multiple languages.
It's the uniform culture of Eastern Orthodox countries. The state pushes a "one and only" historical narrative in the nation-wide educational system. That narrative is internalised by most of the population as hard objective truths, rather than seen as just a subjective view.
The notion that a sub-community may evolve and try to self-identify and govern itself is inconceivable when "history" tells us that they were us, so there must be some decadent external influences affecting them.
There are different kinds of reasons. There are reasons why do anything at all, reasons for doing it now, and reasons for doing this particular thing this way.
While I agree with your point, it is still quite useful to understand the cultural and historical aspects that are constantly evoked, even by Putin himself who puts much emphasis on these points, and they are spread by the media. It's not so easy to see and understand them from outside.
Sources inside Russia claim that even the military and intelligence service didn't see the war coming, and they certainly performed like it. Maybe a few days before it started, but certainly not for weeks or years.
The leader of "soldiers' mothers" committee was guessing it will happen months ago in an interview. If she could do it, the military leaders and intelligence service surely could have a guess too.
To be clear, she did not predicted that "war will continue as is". She said something of the lines of "Of course there will be bigger war in Ukraine. I hear about army moving to the border from all sides. This is not exercise, no, this is not how exercises look like". That was paraphrase, not quotation. But specifically she was guessing based on what she heard about units movements.
And also, as for mass murder, knowing enough about Russia army behavior in past conflicts, it is not like it would be reasonable to expect them to not commit at least some mass murders.
Military not knowing as in "some low level unit" being clueless is perfectly plausible. Military as in "no one in leadership had any idea" is not really.
Not a relevant comment. Many people predicted at the start of 2022 not just that Russia would have a major war, but that is was very likely to happen a) within a few months and b) with Ukraine.
Why? because as parent comment have already explained, Russia was massing troops on the border.
That’s all about timing though. It was obvious Russia hadn’t finished messing with Ukraine over Donbas, and even well beyond just that. What nobody knew was exactly what Putin would choose to do about it and when.
The only way that could be true is that if the “military and intelligence services” of Russia were as wholly compromised and counterproductive as they clearly are in the west. Putin specifically has been talking about the unacceptable nature of NATO expansion in violation of the agreement not to expand east since at least 2008 and the Russian state has been warning about it and aware of it happening at least from the mid 90s.
How the military and intelligence services of the Russian state could not have seen this coming is beyond the credible for anyone that has paid attention to anything for the last 30 years.
Not that it would have really made any significant difference that there were only verbal agreements, since America’s track record and credibility of keeping treaties is approaching zero, but it was agreed following and as an negotiated component of the unraveling of the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand east.
It genuinely baffles me that so many in the general low information public are frequently just sucked in by the very same vortex of manipulation by the US government in particular, regardless of their formal education level. It’s just one “unforeseeable” event after another, and yet it’s always preceded by people loudly trying to warn against it.
What concerns me, as someone who is involved in having an interest in knowing what is actually going on in the world regardless of the propaganda of any interested party and who has a very good track record of accuracy over decades; is that this is all being orchestrated and a consequence of intensely irrational and emotionally disturbed people having taken over in the west in general.
Forget climate change, kids, if you survive the fallout at all, the climate warming will be the least of your problems the way things are going and are being pushed right now. All it takes is a single miscalculation on the part of the western central planners and the west has proven itself singularly competent at miscalculations; even if they are often deliberate and intentional, the most obvious examples of course being Iraq and Libya.
Let me put it this way, folks, things are way more of the rails than people think, and not in a good way, regardless of all the “mean girl” empire propaganda about how the Russian military and intelligence services didn’t see it coming, that is more about filling a competency and intelligence gap through projection. The Russian military has wie literally been preparing for the confrontation of the belligerent USA and those who control it for decades now and they’ve been talking about it for decades now. Just because people haven’t paid attention or want to ignore that, doesn’t change reality.
America is the belligerent in this over many decades now and they forced Russia’s hand in order to claim victim/self-defense status. A phrase describing extreme manipulative and abusive behavior while decrying the consequences of one’s actions comes to mind.
It’s been Americas MO for many decades now because another unspoken pillar of American might and even global financial control, is the ruse of American benevolence and morality, when in reality it is a very psychopathic, manipulative, and abusive national psychiatric profile that has dominated America for many decades, way before anyone alive today.
Just look at American history, America keeps oddly finding itself being victimized into reluctant warfare? Poor little America, always seemingly finding itself being pressed into war where after the fact there is always at best the strong indication that something is extremely not right.
We, all of humanity, are dealing with a psychosis of National Münchhausen Syndrome to garner the attention that feeds the American machine of manipulation. It is actually a very run of the mill toxic and abusive relationship the current form of America has with humanity. However, as with all toxic and abusive relationships, the people in such relationships have an extremely difficult time recognizing it, let alone escaping it.
You are just repeating the points of John Mearsheimer and Vladimir Pozner. I, too, fell in that trap in the early days of the Z-war. Those points are mostly bullshit. Thankfully they do not appear to be as trending on YouTube as they were a month ago.
I will not spend extra time explaining to you why those points are just Russian propaganda.
I think it's deeper than that. There is some truth in the above comment, certainly about the invasion of Iraq [0]. Where it goes astray is doubling down on this model to explain the entirety of the Ukraine situation with the US as the only actor, resulting in ridiculous backfit statements like "America ... forced Russia’s hand in order to claim victim/self-defense status".
Relativism can be handy, helping you see biases and assumptions of your native culture, but you always needs to keep it subordinate to actual reality. The reality here is that Russia has aggressed beyond its borders [1] and is unequivocally committing genocide, at which point I have a hard time being concerned about the ways the West may have effectively hurt Russia's feelings and "made" them lash out. There is indeed a geopolitical game of economic empire that the US/EU have been succeeding at, but that does not justify Russia's flipping the table and reverting to early 20th century style mechanized slaughter.
[0] In fact continuing the tangent, the memetic points of the original article are quite applicable to Iraq. Basically USG forcibly spreading the memes of "democracy", "corporate sanctity", and of course "USD as world reserve currency". Witness the overwhelming popular support for attacking Iraq in 2003 that has now been seemingly memory-holed by its one-time supporters. In 2003, the need to attack Iraq was manifestly implicit based on everpresent memes, which have now been de-emphasized.
[1] We can examine the modern notion of the nation-state with fixed borders as itself being a modern-Western invention, but it's likely better described as a quality of the "centralized state" of the article. And pragmatically the concept seems to function as a reasonable Schelling point.
I think it is way more wrong then that. It is fundamentally absurd way to interpret Russia even in theoretical alternate reality where Russia did not tried to commit genocide in Ukraine. Even if they won within 3 days, happily replaced government and executed/imprisoned "only" a few politicians/intellectuals. Because, that analysis is completely ignoring history of Russia itself, political system in Russia, prevalent ideologies there, the type of society, values, everything.
You can not legitimately analyze a any state or group of people without engaging with those.
> that does not justify Russia's flipping the table and reverting to early 20th century style mechanized slaughter.
The "some truth" part in it is true only to the level of "yes, west done bad thing there". The claim that Russia would somehow behave much differently had Iraque not been invaded is not convincing at all. It is not just missing justifying power. It does not have explanatory power at all. It does not explain Russian return into authoritarian state over last 20 years.
It is talking point targeted at people who do know American history and who do criticize those actions as bad - but who never really cared about Russian or Easter European history at all.
> It is talking point targeted at people who do know American history and who do criticize those actions as bad - but who never really cared about Russian or Easter European history at all.
Guilty as charged. I've never particularly focused on understanding Russia, apart from family stories about Russian occupation after WWII before they got out of East Germany to the West and ultimately the US (watching The Lives of Others is like the life I missed). So that talking point is targeted at people like me. And the points do resonate with me somewhat, since I do consider USG an empire. An economic empire that mostly keeps its territories in line through market effects and treaties, fundamentally nicer than an army-first directly-commanded empire of old, but still an empire.
> You can not legitimately analyze a any state or group of people without engaging with those.
I don't disagree, however earnestly engaging with those is a lot of work to sift through various opinions. What we're dealing with here is an ongoing torrent of superficial analysis that destroys consensus truth. So while I think most experts on Russia would seemingly agree with your analysis, a propagandist can stand up an equally-plausible expert that says the exact opposite. Without any social proof (eg in-depth study of Russia in school or independently), there's little way for an individual to sort through that muck. Enter relativism.
> It is fundamentally absurd way to interpret Russia even in theoretical alternate reality where Russia did not tried to commit genocide in Ukraine
Sure, but that wouldn't stop such analysis from carrying the day with many people. In order to eliminate relativism, one either needs to become an expert in the field (what I described above, impractical for most), or one needs to find objective points that can't be relativized away in our postmodern media environment. The blatant mass slaughter of civilians is such a touchstone - it puts all of Russia's countervailing narratives in stark relief.
I am not "an account", I am very much a real person, living in Europe.
Disinformation, american "бдительный гражданин" (do look up the meaning, it might widen your horizons), is to speak of "genocide" perpetrated by russians in Ukraine.
I'll speak of the Genocide your buddies are committing in Ukraine as much as I want. It's utterly disgusting and if you had a sense of right and wrong you'd be protesting in your streets because these crimes are committed in your name too. But hey, it's only Ukrainians right? Not even 'real' Russians so let's not make too much of a fuss about it. /s
As for your words regarding Dutch collaborateurs during WWII, yes, we had those, and we dealt with them, but you weren't there (and neither was I) so I don't see why you would even bring it up.
FWIW: I actually like lots of Russian people, but the way you guys govern your country really has to improve, this won't end well. Already you have moved yourself to 'pariah' status and I'm pretty sure it's possible to go lower still but why would you?
So, the fact that Russia has been against NATO expansion... and has consistently spoken and acted against it including in Georgia is "mostly bullshit"? Ok.
Russia invaded Georgia to grab a piece of Georgia, full stop. Russia invaded Ukraine (multiple times) to grab pieces of Ukraine (including the Crimea), full stop.
Yes, the talk about NATO expansion was bullshit all the time. Neither Georgia nor Ukraine were going to be admitted, and all that Putin achieved was forcing at least Finland and Sweden to actually join NATO and the rest of NATO to continue to outspend Russia on military hardware...
>it was agreed following and as an negotiated component of the unraveling of the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand east
That's an absurd re-writing and re-ordering of events. In 1990 the US secretary of state and the USSR foreign minister agreed to allow NATO troops to be stationed in East Germany but no further east. This was a verbal understanding. At the time the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact still existed and it was in that context.
Once the Soviet Union dissolved and the former eastern bloc countries applied to join, that discussion was irrelevant. It was never a treaty, just an agreement based on the situation at the time in the context of German unification. As a matter of policy NATO has always had an open door and has a standing set of criteria for any nation to join that chooses to apply. That was in force then and is in force now. In fact in 2000 Putin suggested Russia join NATO, apparently not as a joke.
If Russia's treatment of Georgia and Ukraine isn't enough to fully and completely justify and vindicate Eastern European nations joining NATO, I don't know what does. Fortunately it seems Finland and Sweden have also woken up to what Russia has become.
It may explain why there are some Russians that are expressing such blind hatred towards Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a people. Just referring to some of the media personalities that express this frequently.
Read through your article, can't help thinking you may find and conclude the same from a similar "analysis" of North Korea. Rather than an "improvement", it'd be a nice supplement.
The point is, OP's article is much enlightening to audience who's not familiar with that part of world, or as much of medieval European history. The breadth and width is much more above and beyond you've scratched.
I do not find these kind of rants very informative regardless which direction they come from. I can give many such examples featuring similar uprooted emotional selectivists, even hateful stories marginalizing (or extolling) entire cultures/nations from nearly any country (most being familiar with Palestine, Israel, Poland, Slovakia, Czech, Germany, Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam, US, and few others). If one wants to cherry-pick on atrocities one-against-the-other for the above examples there are libraries and archives which, I guarantee, will break any sane person's heart. Those are real things that happened and they are just as well lessons to us, individually, of what any of us is capable of doing under the "wrong" circumstances. And we have to guard our humanity, individually, against indiscriminate hate -a poison that corrodes the soul - no matter how noble the perceived goal].
However, the weight of my comment is to be put somewhere else. I observe that in majority of such opinions (that serve its function as an outlet, but nothing more) there is simply no actual conceptual understanding (at least as reflected in the articles) of culture, society, state in relation to the individual as a process. This lack of concepts just digs a proverbial hole for the speaker/persuator from one cannot asses the past-present relation properly from principled laws of organization. Then we have over-emotional individual reactions to propaganda (on either side) which invites to such unstructured one dimensional banal analyses. There is no acknowledgement on limits of knowledge and validity of simply having different opinion on the matter, no distinction of what is personal, what is political, what is bureaucratic, what is a comment, opinion, what is propaganda, instead just thrown everything into one big flux, the antithesis of what intellect needs. No lessons, just brute misplaced hate, almost as if to confirm ones own feelings looking into the mirror; exemplified in the silly conclusion:
... that "Russians hate that Ukraine exists" ... (such sounds are produced also by the archetypal propagandists)
I agree you can always find nutcases in any country that will talk crap about other nations and ethnic groups.
However, when a head of state says that a neighbouring nation isn't a real country, and this opinion is broadcast repeatedly and discussed in depth on state media to justify an ongoing invasion of that nation, it's interesting to try to understand why they are saying that and why anyone would believe it.
I hesitate to invoke Godwin, but when Hitler talked dirt about jews and folk identity in a beer hall in Munich that was one thing. When he was doing so as Chancellor and his ideology was official state policy, it was something else.
It appears that emotions are just not under control across the board to discuss any matter seriously. Any post of emotional vomit of how much one hates Russia and how pure and morally, politically, culturally purified Ukraine elites are it has immediate upvotes. An attempt of reasoned out opinion to balance the scale is downvoted. Im sure a thinking person clearly seas how infantile our western collective behavior is on this topic. One even observes that we so readily embrace and give up o states (our governments) a responsibility to protects us from "disinformation" which is everything not on BBC or CNN. [shame on us for standing down to this and even cheering it...]
Now to your comment (if that even is allowed to disagree in a civil way on HN). Im not sure what you suppose is so significant in "not a real country" statement of Putin. Just read the context. I heard and read the speech more than once. In that speech there is nothing sinister about those statements in my view. One can debate their historical degree of validity or whatever, but it is completely other thing to base/justify hate of a culture from an opinion of a statesman. And I have just too many Russian colleagues who harbor no such emotion toward UA and have no trouble disagreeing with their elites (Putin et al). And I also do not consider the parallel with Hitler valid. [Such hyperbolae are employed by state propaganda to reel public to the cause of a state, but such trivialities are not worth discussing [see Goering statement during Nuremberg trials). State is a natural process that can only exists in physical world -- a proof is in the very means of war -- it is physical process (economic and/or armed one). And only elites are in charge and control of this process.]
But whatever argument we may have about those statements, they are not the basis for the conflict what so ever, and the scope of the said conflict is nothing that you find it implies; ... the conflict is a proxy war of US with Russia over geopolitics (this is like the mother of non-controversial truth of the matter as Brzezinski, Freedman, Kissinger, and many other analyst have shown since 2-3 decades until literally days before the armed conflict in 2022. Just open any journal of foreign affairs or international affairs study ... and behold how many peer-reviewed literature there is on the topic of expansion of NATO toward Russia as a bad idea for having peace. [if you feel US patriotic review Rand or Hoover institute publication on the topic of how to leverage that] And even now, it seem that nobody in the west wants peace, while foaming with abstract hate to keep public supporting this insanity.
No single human being I know agrees with this (or any other war as far as I know) in the dimension of a innocent lives suffering. That is without any question and it is, I suppose, not necessary to discuss. However, at the appropriate levels of analysis on which state foreign policy, strategic planning and state interests are relevant, such matters do not enter and are superfluous. State does not have emotions, it is not a human being and has no agency -- states have interests only and interact with each other only on that basis. State is just a correlation cluster of cooperating individuals seeking comparative advantage in natural competition against other such clusters. By the laws of physics, globally correlated cluster could not survive long against energy demands of maintenance.... (but Im diverging here ...)
>the conflict is a proxy war of US with Russia over geopolitics
I don't think so. It's a conflict between Russia and pretty much every country on it's borders.
The Russian leadership believe Russia is already an occupied country. It's occupied by Georgians and Ukrainians living on Russian land. It's occupied by Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians siting on territory rightly belonging to Russia.
If the Russian Federation was satisfied with it's current borders, and trading with other nations equally, there would be no conflict. The US and the rest of Europe have no aggressive intentions towards the Russian Federation as it currently exists. NATO poses no threat whatsoever to the borders or stability of the Russian Federation.
However the Russian Federation is not satisfied with those borders.The Russian leadership believes it's already in a war since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. They believe the territory 'they' lost back then is rightly 'theirs', and this is why they nibbled away at Georgia and Ukraine in the past.
The problem is the Georgians, Ukrainians, etc living on those lands don't agree those lands should be Russian. Hence war. If the US and NATO didn't exist or didn't care, Russia would still have invaded Ukraine, in fact it would probably have done it in 2014. The US is a foe of Russia because it blocks Russian expansionist ambitions. Aside from that the US doesn't give a crap about Russia. Why should they?
Yes — at least 70% support whatever he does — and I tried hard to disprove this painful fact to myself. But couldn't.
The only excuse is the 20 years of hardcore TV brainwashing — but it's not too great of an excuse. Better than in nazi Germany, but not enough.
All that cultural banter the article mentions never caused any actual sense of war — it was more like a Texan joking about a Canadian.
I don't know how to live with this shame. Can't even post in Russian, at local forums. All those stupid faces in the 'do you support the war' Youtube steet interviews… Yes, there are others — Navalny was poisoned, and is now behind the bars. Nemtsov was murdered in front of Kremlin long before the war. Kasparov, Nevzorov condemned this crime. Hundreds of thousands of IT left the country — unable to fight unarmed. But still…
Trying to drown myself in English, jokes, work to keep the sanity. Doesn't work half of the times. Jokes clumsy, work fucked.
Ukraine is now a moral leader of Europe. It will be restored — every single broken window. And people will live free and proud. It's my only bright cloud now.
[0] Fucked up spy chief — https://youtu.be/ucEs0nBuowE