Why Russians Are Hostages to Putin

Subject: Why Russians Are Hostages to Putin Sat Feb 26, 2022 10:26 am

Please do not judge all people that live in Russia. This article from the Moscow Times pretty much says a lot.

Why Russians Are Hostages to Putin

How the Russian leader turned a hybrid war turned into a hot war. By Andrei Kolesnikov

Russia has begun an invasion of Ukraine. What seemed impossible — “Do the Russians want war? But of course not, never” — has happened. A person who is ready to turn Russian boys into unknown soldiers, and in the absence of aggression against Russia cynically appeals to the memory of World War II, is using it as a historical shield to defend himself.

The “bombing of Voronezh” has begun. The evolution of Russia’s political regime has reached the stage when its authoritarian character has done the impossible — converted a hybrid war with Ukraine, and in fact with the West, as well as with its own people, who for long years knew what war was only from the television, into a more specific hot phase.

Those who suggested that there would be no war and that an invasion was impossible were judging Putin by rational criteria, just as in the fall of 1939 the Finnish leadership judged Stalin by rational criteria before the beginning of the Winter War. But dictators are too irrational by nature.

Putin is an armchair expert with the powers of the president of a nuclear power. And by the way, it was largely because Ukraine turned its nuclear weapons over to Russia that Crimea remained in Ukraine in the early 1990s. For this armchair expert it is insufficient to rule in his own country, where he has completely suppressed the opposition and civil society, he needs the whole world.

For the moment, this world does not live according to his rules, but now there will be an operation to enforce life according to these rules without rules. As Putin has put it, the “Soviet totalitarian regime” incorrectly divided the territory of the empire, limiting the rights of ethnic Russians, and now the time has come to redistribute the territory of the empire — already a former empire — anew.

An “escalation on the border,” a provocation organized by the Kremlin itself, is being used as a pretext for the invasion. That old Stalinist recipe. As in the case of Finland in 1939, the most important task of a military campaign, a minimally rational goal, is absent.

In Putin’s speech there is a motif with historical resonance from that year of 1939, when in September Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia were annexed and Poland dismembered. This is the concept of the “liberation” of fraternal peoples from a hostile government, in Putin’s words, “the protection of people.” In the case of 2022, external force will determine for the people, who chose a president for themselves in free elections, what kind of leadership they should have.

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i really like russian people they are really nice i have a few russian people that i know really well and they also make excellent vodka

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