Thoughts on what’s going on in Ukraine

Today there was a parade for “Victory Day” in Moscow and Putin laid flowers to a Soviet times monument for the towns that suffered during the Nazi invasion in the Second World War, the Hero Cities, including Kiev and Odessa, while the very same day his Russian army was bombing the very same towns, in a war that he started 75 days ago. What a farce.

The human suffering that he’s causing is horrible, he deserves to be punished, but the reality is that no punishment for him will equal the pain and damage that he caused: deaths, bombings, destruction, torture, rapes, thefts, millions of people displaced. It’s going to be long. Putin is in his 70s, this might take 20 years to solve.

On the surface it does not make sense. Russia is the aggressor, no one was attacking it. Also Russia has a demographic problem of a large country with a decreasing population, sending young men to die will only make it worse.

The true rationale for his actions is the survival of his political regime: use war and violence to scare everyone, concerned that otherwise the Russians will protest and remove him from power. They’ve seen recently that people in Belarus protested against the fake election, they send their armies there to maintain the local dictator, but their concern is that they are next. Underlying it is the nostalgia of the former KBG of their good times in East Germany as power projection of the Soviet Union.

The Russian propaganda is caught in irrational contradictions. E.g. one refutation to the Ukrainian sinking of the Russian flagship in the Black Sea was that it was a triggered by an accident on board: in other words it was not the Ukrainians, the Russian navy was plain incompetent.

The Russian propaganda is aimed to two audiences.

First, to the population of Russia, it aims to deal with the problem of lack of support. It does not call it a war, but a special operation. The downside is that it is clear to the Russian soldiers in Ukraine that they are lied to, lowering their morale further. Another example if the denazification story, a attempt to give it some legitimacy, that again is idiotic, the Ukrainian president is Jewish, how can he be a Nazi? This misinterpretation of meaning of words is truly Orwellian.

Second, to the population of the Western world, the Russian propaganda tries to aim with aims to brake the resolve in helping the Ukrainians by: threatening with atomic weapons, picking smaller targets to intimidate (e.g. via threats to cut gas supplies) and propagating myths. In particular that inaction would be beneficial (it would be to Putin, that’s true), that it’s NATO’s fault, that providing weapons to Ukraine prolongs the conflict, ignoring that Russia can very easily stop the conflict itself. The idea of letting Russia invade countries was tried after War War II and none of the invaded countries liked it.

It will be a long conflict, but in fact, Putin has already lost. Ukrainians will never forget and forgive the Russian invasion, and Putin’s legacy will be that of a minor KBG agent turned grand scale criminal. It did not had to be this way, but he found that reforming Russia would remove him from power, so instead he decided to become a dictator.