Ukraine’s loneliness

A lot of people are talking about Putin’s defeat. They try to mock him: he did not want a NATO base in Crimea, he got one in Estonia. And this is exactly what Putin needs. Since there would be no bases in Crimea, and he needs them as close as possible. Former dissidents can never understand that propaganda was their main promoting agent, and KGB was their curator. Thanks to them, the Fifth Chief Directorate appeared, money started flowing, more stars landed on shoulder straps. Propaganda received its due too. Wrathful responses and exposures were a profitable business. And of course, dissidents did not shake Soviet government a bit. It was replaced by a more modern one with the efforts of the ruling elite.

But what about the bases? What about Reagan, who crushed the evil empire in the arms race?

It does not matter what happened. How it happened does. The realization that neither he nor Thatcher would budge was principal. And not only because they possessed profound courage. Roosevelt was courageous in the 1930s too, but he would not have defeated isolationist sentiments in the American society without Pearl Harbor. And Churchill was to have been tried before the war as an instigator and warmonger. This is what democracy is for. Reagan knew he corresponded to the state of American voters. And Obama corresponds now. Americans might not like his healthcare reform and other things, but they are perfectly fine with his unwillingness to interfere in some Eastern European affairs, especially when they have to fight everyone in the Middle East, albeit reluctantly.

And Europe does not rush to spoil relations with Russia too. Let Putin eat Ukraine. Perhaps, he will be bogged down in it. Or maybe even choke.

But how, how can it be? Boris Nemtsov listed several reasons that show Putin’s complete defeat.

Judging Putin by external criteria is a conventional and typical common error, while he is an absolute winner according to his internal criteria. Millions of lives have changed and will continue to change, depending on his actions, which will lead to long-lasting and hard deformations. And first of all, these are the deformations of Russian identity, Russian life, Russian nation, which has consolidated around the government.

So far, there is nothing to counteract this. Of course, the progressive community admits that the USSR started World War II in alliance with Nazi Germany, and this community reveres Churchill and Roosevelt. But another thing must be admitted: the Soviet Union’s determinant contribution to victory over the Nazis is not a propagandist cliche. With all due respect for Western democracies, it is impossible to deny that in many aspects World War II was a clash of two totalitarian systems. Russian totalitarianism defeated German totalitarianism, because it did not have limitations democracies have. As well as those preserved by the Nazis.

It was not brutality towards the enemy, but complete disregard of life and dignity of its own population. In the meantime, Russia hypocritically        condemns the nuclear attack on Japan, which saved millions of lives of Soviet soldiers. Americans did not pity the enemy, Russians did not pity their own compatriots.

Now the civilized world alone opposes Russian totalitarianism which is just taking shape. This has not happened before – since mid-1960s Mao opened the second front of the Cold War, thus exhausting the Soviet Union. The pointless Baikal-Amur Mainline cost a pretty penny. And the Kremlin’s current regime is capable of everything, including being the first to use a nuclear bomb or using it as a suicide belt. There is no help from a competing totalitarian state. It is also impossible to oppose Russia within the framework of law and morality. Same applies to resisting it without victims and losses.

But even within the framework of law and morality Europe and America have hardly done anything. Moreover, their behavior is questionable in terms of morality. They could have at least used other words, something less pathetic and shallow. But they are afraid to personally offend Putin, they shake with fear after receiving loutish notes and statements from Russia’s MFA.

It is a fear of acting beyond ordinary routine. A bureaucrat’s fear of reality: “Will I really have to work?” They have no sympathy for Ukraine. Nor have they sympathy for their own people either, just as Daladier and Chamberlain had no sympathy for Czechoslovakia, the French, and the British.

Only several days ago, the only source of legitimation of reshaping the world according to Putin was the Russian army. Now it has been legitimized by the global community, just as it happened with Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia. Nobody in the civilized world seems prepared for resistance. A part of Ukrainian society, which projected its mood to the rest of the nation, was an exception. It was a result of euphoria after Maidan, the withdrawal of Yanukovych by the Kremlin, and the Brussels syndrome, euphoria of European Association, which did not protect Ukraine from annexation and aggression. On the contrary, it legitimized Russia’s actions. I speak about this in past tense, because it happened in a past world and a past lifetime. New world is created by the Airborne Pskov Division in our view. It dreamed about this ever since it was created. And it was not the only one. Putin is realizing the ancient dream of the Russian people. Of course, now it is high time to read Orwell and Voinovich. But Viktor Suvorov and Shalamov are even more relevant.

I do not believe there will be at least some kind of clear-cut conclusion on the shot Boeing, just as I do not believe in the investigation of the Litvinenko case. Putin does as he pleases, because he deals with a union of the fooled and misled. This also happens within the country. Of course, the situation is more complex than in The King’s Camelopard by Mark Twain. It can be compared to the beginning of Medvedev’s presidency when Russian liberal intellectuals opposed the demand to investigate explosions in buildings in 1999, saying this might startle Medvedev’s thaw and still would not unite people around this cause. There would be no gain from it.

Indeed, we will not unite them even now. If only we think for a moment that... no, to hell with your Ryazan exercises, you cannot bring dead back to life with that, and those who live will feel extremely uncomfortable. So, it turns out that all these years...

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This is a union of political losers, who brought the world to the state it is in now, just as the losers of the 1930s led it to World War II. These are the Kremlin’s main allies, just like status liberals within the country. Its key accomplice in Russian public opinion and that of the whole world is the inability to comprehend the real sense and meaning of anything committed by Russia’s government, as well as the ones it is yet to commit.

Russian intellectuals and Western politicians slowly shift to the opinion “Ukraine itself is to blame.” It will be curious to watch them do it to other countries Russia will attack. Of course, 86 percent of the population believes in Russians’ sacred right to aggression. And we will see how the Russian progressive community and the Western establishment will find a way out.

The events in Ukraine and around it acquire a disgusting twang of a plot. A plot of elites. And not only elites. A plot of elites is clear, but invaders conspire with the population even without confronting it. It silently agrees to everything that is going on.

Until this plot is a fact, Putin’s victory will not become Ukraine’s defeat. So, history and current politics are full of such paradoxes. Putin’s victory does not equal Ukraine’s defeat. And it will remain like that if Ukrainians do not pin their faith exclusively on what the Kremlin is trying to achieve, if they do not turn their country into anti-Russia. That is, if they do not completely give in to Russification, since Russia lost itself in this war. It became anti-Ukraine.

Human loneliness is not absolute evil. Sometimes people experience it to provide a better understanding of themselves. The same happens to a nation. Ukraine’s current loneliness is a part of development for the country itself as well as for Europe, the community of European nations, for which, it seems, the time has come to question the adequacy of their political elites.