Those two questions prevented me from sleeping during the seven days of a Russian invasion. [Також переклад Українською]
It is the seventh day of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
There was a lot of work, thoughts, experiences, disappointments, and excitements during these days.
But here, I would like to share two main questions that did not allow me to sleep those nights.
How did it happen that the Russian troops were entirely unprepared for such resistance from the Ukrainian army and people?
In my opinion, the root of this problem lies in the totalitarian and dictatorial regime that prevails in Russia.
If you are a totalitarian leader, you cannot surround yourself with capable people because each of them is a threat to your rule.
Accordingly, you surround yourself with people who do not threaten you and will always indulge you. And all these people follow this example; as a result, we will get a cretinism system of organisms without balls for the sole purpose — to make the boss happy.
So, let’s play a scenario in this system: Vladimir Putin wants to know what resistance Russian troops will face in Ukraine.
He asks his intelligence chief: What percentage of Ukrainians will support Russian troops as `liberators`?
Let me remind you — the same head of intelligence, whom he publicly shamed as a second-grader who forgot his diary at home.
The head of intelligence asks the chiefs of the intelligence staff responsible for Ukraine, their little fractal with a close to none will or opinion. Those ask the spies — information is collected.
And everyone in this system knows what answer will make their boss happy.
So, the information on the ground is collected and begins to consolidate
Local spies have determined that 90 +% (abstract figures) of Ukrainian citizens will resist, but they know that the head of the local unit will not like it, so they do magic on the numbers and say — 50/50 support expected.
The head of the local unit receives this information and understands that they will not like this in the center and he will not receive a medal for it, so they do magic again, and now 75% percent of Ukrainians would support the invasion.
The intelligence chief looks at this figure and understands that it is not bad in general. Still, they would not receive an order, so they add a bit more and report 95% support with just limited resistance from nationalistic units.
Putin is delighted, everything as he thought, as he expected, it is possible to order troops in and give dry rations for three days, the rest of the soldiers will take bread and salt from Ukrainian villages.
This is just one of the imaginary examples of how building a totalitarian system with powerless flexible nerds creates the reality he expects for the leader of this system, and the objective reality no longer matters.
This is how this crazy machine of the totalitarian vertical works, inherited from the times of the Soviet Union, where to complete the five-year plan for grain in three years was an achievement even if 20 years after nothing can be collected because the lands are ruined.
This system works well for authoritarian leaders until their reality crashes into the objective one. Unfortunately, in our case, the reality formed by Putin’s vertical is trying to reshape our world with tanks and missiles.
Why do people in Russia believe in all this propaganda, do they not see what is really happening?
When the war began, I was sure that a few days would pass and Russian society would come to its senses — overthrow the dictator, that would be the end. How naive it was…
For the last three days, I have been doing a comparative analysis of the Ukrainian and Russian media spaces on the topic of war. We will publish this study in detail soon, but I am quite shocked by the results.
Western and Russian media spaces (news, telegram channels, comments) are like two parallel planes, and most of their inhabitants are objects that have chosen themselves to 2 dimensions and have chosen never to leave their environment.
There is no Ukrainian society, culture, or shelling of Kharkiv in the Russian media.
In the Russian media space, the war is disappearing at the flick of a finger, it existed on February 26, and there is no war on February 27.
In the Russian media space, Zelensky was long ago taken to a bunker in Lviv by American special forces on the orders of Soros. And behind the ordinary “Malorosses” are barricading detachments of nationalist members who do not allow them to surrender to the Russian army. Funny, right? And it should not be, because this is another reality that has crashed into ours and is trying to reshape it.
It is ridiculous and strange for Ukrainians to read this because we are not even trying to believe in any of this; we know that Zelensky is in Kyiv and that Yanukovych has zero support, not 50 +%.
But imagine that someone lives in all this for 30 years and then suddenly falls (because of the comment left by the Ukrainian `cyber troops`) into our reality, where everything he knew and read is a lie. It is an incredibly painful and difficult effort — to try to comprehend another reality, believe me — I tortured myself by reading Russian channels to understand the punctures of propaganda. It is rare for a brain to make such an effort under normal circumstances.
But circumstances cease to be normal when corpses go to your villages, when you can’t fly anywhere from the country, or when your ruble salary is halved over the weekend.
But when circumstances cease to be normal and the brain seeks an explanation — this is the only chance in a million when he can try to comprehend another reality.
Unfortunately, this process is not as fast as I thought, but it was naive to believe that it would be fast — 20–30 years of propaganda does not disappear in a few days. However, this propaganda is doomed — now it will not be possible to do everything right, and more and more people will start looking for answers and in despair, will let in another reality.
In conclusion, 30 years ago, all the republics of the Soviet Union got a chance to build their new home. Everyone got a lot of bricks.
And I am incredibly happy, oh God, how glad I am that, unlike our northern neighbors, we did not choose to build a colony out of this brick, close ourselves in it and hire guards with machine guns.
Now it is dangerous to protest in Russia; for this, they are taking people away in police vans, but those people can’t just complain as they are to blame for 30 years of locking themselves in a colony.
