Mission accomplished, Putin can go

Russia's Vladimir Putin probably believes himself that his mission is to defeat America, to create a new world order in which Russia will be in charge, and so on and so forth. But he is wrong. His mission was to destroy Russia. And he has achieved that. He can now go in peace.

In fact, this is the only thing he has achieved, nothing else. The economy is shrinking, the demographic situation is worsening, technological backwardness is deepening, there is overwhelming hypocrisy everywhere - all these are achievements of his reign. The list could be continued for a long time. War and massacres are the climax.

For the world, a country has disappeared with which to cooperate and interact. Now only a territory remains from which a threat emanates. To ward it off, you have to join forces.

A country is more than a place. The territory is not going anywhere, and the people will mostly stay: even today, it is not a majority that is leaving Russia. A country is a culture, a way of life, an identity, a way of being seen in the world. The country is a link between the present and the past - continuity - and the future concerns both what is today and what was before.

The Land after the October Putsch 1917

Our country has already disappeared once - it was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. After the October coup, there was a territory where a certain madness took place, but it no longer had any relation to Russia, to its culture, to its history, except for the most pathological moments - like the time of Ivan the Terrible's reign.

The country became a negation of Russian history and culture, it killed or exiled those who symbolised the old country, and allowed the memory of those who had died before 1917 to be forgotten or distorted. For decades afterwards, the country underwent a long and painful revival - but it never quite managed to come back to itself.

Now something very similar has happened. Until recently, the word "Russia" was associated with both bad and good things - dictatorship, Stalin, camps, but also Russian culture, departure into space, victory. But that is all in the past. Just as once the words "Germany" or "German" were associated not with Goethe or the great German scientists, but with the SS, the mad Führer and the ovens of Auschwitz and Treblinka, today everything to which the adjective "Russian" is applied is perceived only as death, destruction, aggression and lies. And it will stay that way for a long time!

The country has disappeared. And not only that: everything we have built since the end of the eighties has been destroyed. There is no Russian culture. Yes, the opera season at La Scala in Milan opened with Modest Mussorgsky and Anton Chekhov is staged in all the theatres of the world. But if there used to be something behind these names that was called great Russian culture, today Alexander Pushkin or Pyotr Tchaikovsky stand alone, without reference to a cultural context. They are there, but nothing but emptiness yawns behind them.

There is no Russian army either

There is no longer a Russian army, there is only a dangerous armed group sowing death in Ukraine. For an army defends its country and does not act like bandits in a neighbouring country, without any goal other than the realisation of vague fantasies in the first person. A modern army is a unit and does not consist of warring private armies. A modern army has discipline. There are excesses there too, but it punishes rapists and looters instead of encouraging them to sack a city or giving units of criminals the title of guards. There is no longer an army.

Since Peter the Great, the word Russia has been associated with the idea of military power. Now Putin has shown the world that there is no power at all. This is already dangerous for the security of the territory that Russia was until recently. Stalin's unsuccessful winter war against Finland (it lasted from November 1939 to March 1940 and revealed weaknesses in the Soviet army; ed.) prompted Hitler to invade the USSR - why not attack when the Red Army was weak?

The threat posed by NATO was, of course, invented by our authorities, whereas the threat posed by China or some Taliban is very real. Their decisive action against neighbouring territories has become more likely. There used to be (in the eyes of the world) a militarily strong country and now, no matter how many cartoons are shown about wonder weapons, no matter how many parades are held, all that is left is an area accessible to any aggressor.

Russia no longer has a president

Russia doesn't actually have a president either. It's not that he doesn't have legitimacy through elections. A president, king or sultan is someone who maintains order (not necessarily constitutional order, but some order) and communicates with the outside world and his own country.

Order, like the constitution, has long since ceased to exist - fires, dirty sewage, failure to honour commitments made (soon you will end up in prison if you publish official promises made in recent years, because the state is being discredited).

But Putin refuses to communicate. He did not appear, for example, at the last G20 summit, which would have been a great opportunity to explain to the world that it was wrong, while Putin, on the contrary, was right about everything.

He also does not want to communicate with his own people - he cancelled the press conference and the constitutionally required speech to the Federation Assembly (it consists of both chambers of parliament; ed.), as well as the New Year's reception - he does not even want to speak to "his faithful".

Not long ago, Putin appeared at the Valdai Forum (a meeting of journalists, politicians, experts/scientists and public figures from Russia and other countries held annually in Russia in autumn since 2004; ed.). There he said, "Why do we need a world without Russia?" Exactly this kind of world - without Russia - has come into being thanks to Vladimir Putin's efforts in 2022.