The first step to understanding Russia is to attempt to do a thought experiment, and take literally "Russian mir (world)".
I have a theory that post cold war time create this alienation of Russia.
Nuclear weapons create of sense of security from "outer space", because "no one will attack us".
All important human interactions was in the Russian world.
What matters was there, because there live together and compete with each other.
West countries they're treated like other planets, oligarchy ("consmonauts") can travel there, but people from other countries are like aliens - we do not understand them, and we do not compare our lives to their lives.
This simplifies a lot of things but helps to understand why Russia does so many things pointless from a Western world perspective. Because there are not focused on competing with the Western world.
They are focused on supremacy in their Russian world, on themselves.
Misfortune for Ukraine their treated as part of their world.
As far as the government is concerned, this is more the result of minor mistakes made earlier. The modernisation of the economy failed, liberal democracy was considered a threat to power, the attempt to regain influence in neighbouring countries went too far and led to the war in the Donbass. All that is left to do politics is power ministries -- a "second world army", a nuclear arsenal, possibly threatening oil and gas supplies. No 'soft power' influence. You play the cards you have.
As for the people, well, they are supposed to be divided on policy, but in an authoritarian state those against have a much less audible voice. Whereas those in favour ... I would say it's quite natural, every nation needs some positive self-image. Some have sporting victories, others economic successes. Russia only has the pride of being a superpower. Well... possibly from the victory over Nazism in 1945. This is toxic, but without Russia's real successes in other fields, it is unlikely to build a different identification of citizens with the state.
I do have a different explanation. Here goes my archchair kremlinology!
In Soviet Union an incredible numer of people went through prisons and Gulag camps. It's impossible to estimate the exact number, but it was millions, maybe dozens of millions. It was definitely the size of some European nation, the question is was it the size of Poland or maybe rather Czechia.
As a result, in 1980's Soviet Union was full of ex-convicts or families and friends of ex-convicts. The Soviet prison subculture became an important part of daily Russian life -definitely in the army, but also among seemingly regular people. You can see it in Russian popular culture (novels, movies, songs). When you try to follow them, you immediately realize your high school Russian is just not good enough to understand all the references to the prison culture. For instance, Prigozhin speeches are full of prison-related insults.
The key element of this subculture is radical egotism. The highest virtue is simply being strong enough to survive the ordeal. In order to be a strong man (nastoyastchi urka), you have to abandon all naive bourgeois altruism. You see another inmate dying? Good. Don't help him, just take his belongings and food ratios, or you die next. On Wagner videos you frequently see looting the corpses (in one of the most famous Prigozhin speeches, some of the dead bodies are half naked, because someone else took their clothes for re-use).
That's what I was trying to describe metaphorically by saying "Russian world is a dog-eat-dog world". Strength is the ultimate rationale for everything - if Russia is strong enough to invade another country, it has the right to do so. Notice that all criticism of Putin (both from Girkin and Navalny) so far boils down to "he make Russia looks weak because we failed to take Kyiv", not to "it was wrong from the beginning".
I see Russia as something that might happen in USA if overrun by its own prison gangs. I see it as a possibility, therre is a convergence between MAGA/Qanon subculture and the prison subculture.
Sounds good, and this can perfectly describe the shape of forces in the Russian world.
Maybe I didn't express myself clearly, but I just meant that people in the West do not understand the actions of the rulers of Russia. The rulers of Russia (on every level) have a very personal perspective, not a state one.
The rulers of Russia are focused to become the head of a strong gang in their gulag (world).
And greenhouse conditions resulted in a lack of external and internal stimulators for the improvement of the shape of this country.
Russia is large enough that the number of people aware of the quality of life in other countries is an insignificant minority - no internal factor of change.
They were not threatened by external forces, which did not require a positive rotation in the circles of authorities.
A lot of blog notes and comments here focus on how barbaric and evil Russia is. I agree with most of it, as do many other people who have their doubts about how much the West should support Ukraine. The target audience seems to be "dumb Westerners", but even very ignorant Westerners have the idea that the standard of living in Russia is way lower than in the West. If they associate Russians with anything, it would be things like the Russian mafia, which doesn't exactly paint a positive picture.
What I am not so sure about is not how bad and evil Russia is, but whether Ukraine is really much better. I (unlike a lot of really dumb Westerners) am not saying that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, but the fact is that these two nationalities shared a country for hundreds of years.
A lot of the problems that you describe are certainly not just results of the last few decades when Russia and Ukraine were politically separated, but have a lot to do with history and the Russian culture, going back at least to the 19th century (I remember there was a discussion about Chernyshevsky under one of the blog posts), and perhaps even further.
And even now, despite 30 years of political separation, there are still a huge number of Russian-Ukrainian family ties, and Ukrainians don't have this kind of relationship with any other nation, not even with Poles, as Ukrainian immigration is very recent there.
You've just written that the Soviet Union in the 1980s was full of ex-convicts. This means that many of them have been living in Ukraine ever since and have shaped the culture there. And that is just one example.
And let's not forget about the language. Speaking Russian doesn't make you Russian, but we can't pretend that language doesn't influence culture. There was a huge cultural space, dominated by Russia, to which Ukraine belonged long after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
In short, I don't buy the narrative that while Russians are barbaric and evil, Ukrainians are just good guys with Western values. Now they have been attacked by Russia and have Western allies, so they have to put on the most Western face they can, but all in all I'm sure that the cultural differences between Russia and Ukraine are much, much smaller than the cultural differences between Ukraine and the West.
When we were discussing about the dam, some commentators said that only Russia was evil enough to breach it. I do agree that Russia is evil in many ways, but if Russia is evil, Ukraine is likely to be evil, too. It's impossible for Ukrainians to have transformed their post-Soviet values into Western ones in one generation. This means that there are potentially a lot of people in the Ukrainian army who would be willing to cause a humanitarian disaster if it gave them a tactical advantage.
Sure, Ukraine is in some ways more Western than Russia, but not as much as people here seem to think.
I just saw an interview (published today on the Volodymyr Zolkin channel) with a Russian POW who was on an island in the Dnieper River when the dam broke. His unit was left on the island, even though there were free places on the boat for evacuation. They were rescued by Ukrainian army boats after spending a night on trees.
The Ukrainians rescued people and animals, and even the enemy soldiers, while the Russians shelled the Ukrainian rescue boats and left their own soldiers without any help.
There is a difference. A big one. Without a doubt.
Lol, yes. My Polish friends tell me that significant Ukrainian immigration is a matter of the last decade or so. And I've had a look at some figures to verify this.
As of 2001, Poles made up 0.3% of the population of Ukraine (for comparison: Russians made up 17.3%). The data is from the only Ukrainian census in 2001, but I doubt there has been any significant Polish migration to Ukraine since then.
In Poland, Ukrainians made up 0.1% of the population in 2011. This means that there were no close family ties between Ukrainians and Poles – you can't have close ties if you don't even live in the same country.
Since then, the number of immigrants has soared, exactly as I've written – Ukrainian immigration to Poland is very recent.
My anecdotal evidence confirms this: I've personally met several Ukrainians who have a family member who's Russian (and we're talking about close family members such as the husband or the father's wife). This is not surprising, given the large Russian population in Ukraine. I haven't met any Ukrainians who have a close family member who's Polish.
You forget such a little man -- Joseph Stalin. It was he who separated the Poles from Ukrainians, deporting them to Siberia, Kazakhstan (just today I was listening to a descendant of those deported to Kazakhstan), or simply murdering them in the 1930s (the main wave of purges began in 1936). After the victory over fascism, a second wave took place - Poles were forced to leave the Ukrainian territories and go to Poland, while Ukrainians living in Poland were sent to the USSR as part of ethnic cleansing ("Operation Vistula"). Mutual resettlement in 1945-46 involved some 700,000 Poles (from Ukraine, not including Poles from Belarus) and almost 500,000 Ukrainians.
At the same time, not only were Russians not expelled from Ukraine, but their settlement was actually encouraged; and in many places Russification helped their advancement.
PS.1.
To be fair, there were Ukrainian attacks on Poles under German occupation in 1943. (Yes, there were also examples of revenge.) In Poland these are known as the "Volhynian slaughter". Some 50,000 civilians were murdered. Many more were forced to flee.
PS.2.
The principle was to expel Ukrainians to Ukraine and Poles to Poland, but if you think that any family could identify itself as purely Polish or purely Ukrainian, you are wrong.
I haven't forgotten anything. Maybe you should read what you're replying to? My point is: "Ukrainians don't have this kind of relationship with any other nation, not even with the Poles". Note the present tense. The fact that Joseph Stalin separated the Ukrainians from the Poles in the 1940s only reinforces this point. Maybe 100 years ago Ukrainians did have a lot of family ties with Poles, I don't know. But, as you say, they were separated about 80 years ago. That means that for several generations Ukrainians had no contact with Polish culture. Maybe some Ukrainians had a Polish cousin or uncle, but they lived in another country and the contact was very difficult.
On the other hand, they were strongly influenced by Russian culture (not just for 80 years, but for several hundred years in most of today's Ukraine), and the large number of Ukrainian-Russian family ties is obvious to anyone who knows some Ukrainians.
Ad PS2: The 2001 Ukrainian census shows that even if there were Poles who avoided resettlement and stayed in Ukraine 80 years ago, they also lost contact with their homeland and over time they and their families even stopped identifying as Polish.
"Ukrainians had no contact with Polish culture" - you are very wrong at this point. With all its imperfection, there was some cultural interchange during the Soviet years. We mutually translated our literature, we did have cultural centers in each other cities. I'm proud to say that the "Polish cultural center" was frequently the focal point for the more "rebellious" intellectuals not only in Soviet Union, but also in GDR.
In 1960's there was a brief period of liberalism in Russian culture and this resulted with intense "mutual friendships". Many Polish intellectual of the boomer generation are nostalgic about this period and they still believe that Russia might become liberal in some unspecified moment in time.
I think Russian liberalism simply died. It's no longer there. Not even in the Navalny camp. But the Ukrainian liberalism continued to grow for many reasons (one of them was simply seeking a way to be "non-Russian").
The Poles in Ukraine are left with material evidence. The memory remains. There is also a discussion (suppressed in the USSR but revived in independent Ukraine) about the heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. These are all lasting (present tense) influences and connections.
PS.
The resettlement concerned (strictly) the areas taken over by Ukraine as a result of the Second World War. The Poles who survived in Ukraine had survived there since WWI -- and it was from that time that they were separated from Poland. It was a long time...
In fact, Operation Vistula was a different action yet: those Ukrainians who had not been deported to the USSR were subsequently relocated to Poland's post-German "Recovered Territories": Lower Silesia, West Pomerania, Masuria, etc. There used to be entire Ukrainian villages out there, far away from their homeland (my father was assigned to a job in one near Szczecin in mid-1970s). Officially, the objective of the Communist authorities was to deny the UPA support from the local population, though the deportations also covered areas in Lesser Poland where the UPA had never operated.
I moved the goalpost? I was clear what I was referring to right from the start. Here is the full sentence: "And even now, despite 30 years of political separation, there are still a huge number of Russian-Ukrainian family ties, and Ukrainians don't have this kind of relationship with any other nation, not even with Poles, as Ukrainian immigration is very recent there."
If we look at the 20th century: most Ukrainians lived in Russia for 90 years, and some Ukrainians lived in Poland for 20 years.
If we look at the 19th century: Ukrainians lived in Russia for almost 100 years and in Poland for 0 years.
Only earlier was there more significant Polish influence, but even then, in the last 150 years of that period, today's Ukraine was basically split 50/50 between Poland and Russia.
This must have resulted in much more Russian than Polish influence, which is now clearly visible in language, family ties, religion, culture, etc.
I don't say "barbaric", they're no barbarians, they have nukes and tanks. They just have very different attitude - that's why you can't even imagine a Russian commander blowing up a tam with complete disregard for the lives of civilians and soldiers. We can imagine these commanders because we know many stories, from the pillage of Novgorod by Ivan The Terrible.
Ukraine was always a kind of anti-Russia, even in the Mazepa days. So even if they were equally barbaric, they did have a motivation to keep asking the question "how are we different from Russia". You will find this question in Ukrainian culture from Shevchenko to Zhadan.
I can't point you to any better argument than "trust me bro" (or actually, I can: "read Zhadan", etc.), but Ukraine made a tremendous evolution in the last 30 years in defining themselves as "anti-Russians". Sometimes I did have a kind of front-row seat to watch this evolution.
So your question "how are they different" could be valid in 1991, but now they are in a different places. And I think you are completely wrong saying "t's impossible for Ukrainians to have transformed their post-Soviet values into Western ones in one generation". We're talking now of the period of 32 years. Would you say Germany was as Nazified in 1977 as it was in 1945? Make the same comparison for Japan, Italy etc.
To have the feeling of early Ukraine (before Majdan): "Depeche Mode" and "Voroshilovgrad". To get a glimpse of how the country was changing: "Mesopotamia" (a short story collection). A masterpiece asking the question "how are we different from them" about the previous war (it's roughly about the battle of Debaltseve"): "The Orphanage".
But actually as an "esprit d'escalier", I do have a solid argument on "how are they different". Saponkov story is not unique to the Russian side. Other bloggers tell similar stories, how they were robbed at gunpoint by "police". There are no such stories on our side.
I think that main difference between Russian and Ukrainians is imperialism that poisons Russia and is absent in Ukraine. Imperialism leads to comiting and justifying war crimes but also to rejecting western solutions and patterns. Ukrainians have a lot of work to do in their society, but they are aware of that. This is the work we have done in central Europe (e.g. when refugees started to arrive to Poland last year, Ukrainian mothers were arguing with polish drivers when asked to put their children into baby car seats. This is standard in Poland now, but haven't been two decades ago. The same applies to driving culture. We have made big progress recently).
Ukrainians are aware that a lot of things have to change and some behaviours shouldn't be accepted. They can see the effects - central european countries moved to the West, and they want the same for Ukraine. Russians don't see the point with any of these changes, they perceive them as signs of weakness.
- The Germans were in control of the dam and only they could breach it.
- It's impossible to break a dam by bombing.
- The British are good guys, it's simply impossible that they would kill 1600 civilians, most of whom were their allies, just to achieve a military objective.
- The Germans are evil, and are known to do evil things even when it's to their disadvantage, so it's obvious that they caused a humanitarian disaster just for the sake of being evil.
And just to put things in perspective: Operation Chastise killed about 1600 civilians, and the Kakhovka breach – 28.
I literally did refer to this operation in the previous note - I mentioned the "Dambusters". It is indeed impossible to break a dam by bombing. In this particular case, a very special bouncing bomb was created. Ukraine does not have bombers so even if they had a copy of the 1943 bomb, they still have no way to apply it.
I don't think anyone is using here "the good guys" argument, so you're discussing with yourself.
"It is indeed impossible to break a dam by bombing."
Interesting how you can contradict yourself in the very next sentence: "In this particular case, a very special bouncing bomb was created."
"Ukraine does not have bombers so even if they had a copy of the 1943 bomb, they still have no way to apply it."
Unlike the British, the Ukrainians have direct access to one of the shores of the lake. They could have launched it from there.
"I don't think anyone is using here "the good guys" argument, so you're discussing with yourself."
You are apparently so convinced that the Ukrainians are the good guys and the Russians are the bad guys, that you can't even admit that Ukraine is responsible for civilian deaths in shelled buildings in Shebekino, even though this shelling was clearly in support of the "Russian" cross-border raid from Ukraine.
Launch a bouncing bomb from there? I think when you are suggesting that Ukrainians resurrected a 1943 bomb using a, uhm, some unknown contemporary technology, you are oddly close to a plotline of a movie like "Nazi sufers from Moon must die".
I don't describe this war as a "good guy"/"bad guy". Just "invaded guy/defender guy".
"Launch a bouncing bomb from there? I think when you are suggesting that Ukrainians resurrected a 1943 bomb using a, uhm, some unknown contemporary technology, you are oddly close to a plotline of a movie like "Nazi sufers from Moon must die"."
Is this 1940s technology so "rocket science" that it's impossible for a modern state to build something similar? Or even something better. I think engineering has advanced a little bit in the last 80 years.
"I don't describe this war as a "good guy"/"bad guy". Just "invaded guy/defender guy"."
The thing is that these defender guys are invading Russia as a diversion. I'm not saying if that's good or bad (we'll see), but those are just facts.
I understand Formosa's that Ukrainians might have developed different solution to destroy the dam, if British could do that 80 years ago. The problem I see with that argument is that there's no evidence or even idea how they could do that provided by Russians
Formosa said they could do it without a plane, they coud somehow launch the bouncing bomb from the ground. I guess they just built a genetically engineered bouncing trebuchet in one of the CIA biolabs.
Of course, recreating in secret a one-time bomb from 1943 and launching it without detection is much more plausible than simply detonating the charges Russians planted in the engine room. That would be so bizarre! You don't plant explosives just to detonate them, who would do that?
cmos: Do you need a plane if you have access to the shore? Judging from this brief explanation, it seems to me that it's all about the right launch angle, speed and backspin.
"The thing is that these defender guys are invading Russia as a diversion" - there's a great WW2 quote about that. "The Germans entered the war under rather childish illusion that they will bomb everybody else and nobody will bomb them".
1. Military operations may cause civilian deaths, even if the military - like Ukrainians almost always do - tries to avoid them. The difference between law-abiding militaries and Russia is that the latter simply doesn't care about collateral damage or actively targets civilians like in Syria or Ukraine.
2. The requirement for Ukraine to avoid striking at Russian territory while defending itself against Russian invasion is absurd, of course they have every right to strike back at Russian land to prevent it being used as a launchpad for attacks on their own land.
3. Ultimately the party responsible for deaths in Shebekino is Russia, because it invaded Ukraine, forcing it to defend itself by force.
Even the Russian sources report shelling in Shebekino (and elsewhere) usually adding "there were no casualties" or at worst, "one person was wounded". Either the "separatists" have very bad aim or they do not aim at civilians.
The Kakhovka breach killed more than 28 people: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/russia-blocks-un-aid-for-kakhovka-dam-collapse-victims/ar-AA1cITKP "The death toll from the disaster has risen to 52, with Russian officials saying 35 people had died in areas under its control and Ukraine’s interior ministry saying 17 had died and 31 were missing." and more will die because Russia obstructs relief efforts ("Moscow has rejected United Nations’ offers to help people in Russian-occupied areas affected by flooding from the collapsed Nova Kakhovka Dam.")
Very interesting. So we have a car packed with explosives parked at the top of the dam. And the previous explanation was that Ukrainians couldn't have done it, because a bomb blast on the dam wouldn't break it – the explosives had to be planted in the machine room.
It just reinforces my comparison with flat-earthers: y'all start with the axiom that the Ukrainians didn't do it (they're good guys, so how could they?), and then come up with various mutually exclusive explanations as to why it surely was the Russians.
"A Ukrainian special forces communications official told the Associated Press he believed the car was there to stop any Ukrainian advance on the dam and to amplify a planned explosion originating in the machine room."
Wherever these explosives ended up, they were brought there by Russians. For what purpose?
To destroy something moving on the road on the dam.
But as an engineer (not in construction, but still an engineer), after seeing many photos of the dam, I believe, that an explosion was not necessary, it could be bad handling of the dam by Russians. Open question is, if it was intentional or just stupidity.
It is that way: The dam has 28 water gates. According to hydro-engineers, such gates should be opened symmetrically starting from the center of the dam to avoid problems.
After the evacuation from Cherson the Russians opened two outer gates near the power station - it couldn't be worse - and didn't change anything until the disaster. The water level during winter was low, but later it rose above the maximum level defined for the construction. At the time of the accident, the water was already flowing over the top of the closed gates. Again, according to hydro-engineers, water moving rapidly far from the axis of symmetry of a dam for an extended period of time could cause structural stability problems.
The day before the disaster, one span of the dam road near the powerhouse, over the open gates, broke. Yes, this span had been shelled by the Ukrainians before, but many months before. It can be a sign of structural problems of the construction.
There is also a photo, where the dam is already broken, but the machine room is still intact. You can see it in the analysis by Ruslan Leviev of the Conflict Intelligence Team, unfortunately in Russian, but the photo is shown at 12:45.
This means, that an explosion in the engine room couldn't have been the first cause of the disaster. But it doesn't mean, that the Russians are innocent here - they had control of the dam, they had to handle it properly.
Interesting! What happened to the crown argument that it was 100% a deliberate action by the Russians, because the dam could only be destroyed by blowing up the engine room?
It shows how ridiculous the position of the most commenters here has been, arguing as if everything was completely clear, even when the US and the UK said there were still a lot of unknowns. Do you guys think you have better information than the CIA & MI6? Or do you think the US & UK said that because they are secretly pro-Russian?
" What happened to the crown argument that it was 100% a deliberate action by the Russians, because the dam could only be destroyed by blowing up the engine room?"
You only need to blow up the engine room if you want to destroy the dam with an explosion.
There are also other ways to destroy it. But I cannot imagine any way to destroy such a dam without having direct physical access to it.
I think, you missed the last sentence of my comment - the Russians are guilty in this scenario as well.
There's an update on Saponkov's vans. That final weird institution that was supposed to hand them to him - simply refused to do so. "Nyet!". They also refused to provide any explanation. It seems that's it.
In related news, rumours are swirling that the krisha of another Russian milblogger, the infamous War Gonzo, didn't survive the encounter with Ukrainian special forces clearing a trench. It's a dangerous occupation, being a Russian milblogger.
My opinion on things like death of "mayor" of Kherson was that he was executed more spontaneusly by armed thugs he was giving orders to just few days earlier. He surely was given a small detachment of "security". They might not have had any orders but their leader decuded this annoying office worker thst ordered him around no longer has any backing.
The first step to understanding Russia is to attempt to do a thought experiment, and take literally "Russian mir (world)".
I have a theory that post cold war time create this alienation of Russia.
Nuclear weapons create of sense of security from "outer space", because "no one will attack us".
All important human interactions was in the Russian world.
What matters was there, because there live together and compete with each other.
West countries they're treated like other planets, oligarchy ("consmonauts") can travel there, but people from other countries are like aliens - we do not understand them, and we do not compare our lives to their lives.
This simplifies a lot of things but helps to understand why Russia does so many things pointless from a Western world perspective. Because there are not focused on competing with the Western world.
They are focused on supremacy in their Russian world, on themselves.
Misfortune for Ukraine their treated as part of their world.
I would disagree.
As far as the government is concerned, this is more the result of minor mistakes made earlier. The modernisation of the economy failed, liberal democracy was considered a threat to power, the attempt to regain influence in neighbouring countries went too far and led to the war in the Donbass. All that is left to do politics is power ministries -- a "second world army", a nuclear arsenal, possibly threatening oil and gas supplies. No 'soft power' influence. You play the cards you have.
As for the people, well, they are supposed to be divided on policy, but in an authoritarian state those against have a much less audible voice. Whereas those in favour ... I would say it's quite natural, every nation needs some positive self-image. Some have sporting victories, others economic successes. Russia only has the pride of being a superpower. Well... possibly from the victory over Nazism in 1945. This is toxic, but without Russia's real successes in other fields, it is unlikely to build a different identification of citizens with the state.
I do have a different explanation. Here goes my archchair kremlinology!
In Soviet Union an incredible numer of people went through prisons and Gulag camps. It's impossible to estimate the exact number, but it was millions, maybe dozens of millions. It was definitely the size of some European nation, the question is was it the size of Poland or maybe rather Czechia.
As a result, in 1980's Soviet Union was full of ex-convicts or families and friends of ex-convicts. The Soviet prison subculture became an important part of daily Russian life -definitely in the army, but also among seemingly regular people. You can see it in Russian popular culture (novels, movies, songs). When you try to follow them, you immediately realize your high school Russian is just not good enough to understand all the references to the prison culture. For instance, Prigozhin speeches are full of prison-related insults.
The key element of this subculture is radical egotism. The highest virtue is simply being strong enough to survive the ordeal. In order to be a strong man (nastoyastchi urka), you have to abandon all naive bourgeois altruism. You see another inmate dying? Good. Don't help him, just take his belongings and food ratios, or you die next. On Wagner videos you frequently see looting the corpses (in one of the most famous Prigozhin speeches, some of the dead bodies are half naked, because someone else took their clothes for re-use).
That's what I was trying to describe metaphorically by saying "Russian world is a dog-eat-dog world". Strength is the ultimate rationale for everything - if Russia is strong enough to invade another country, it has the right to do so. Notice that all criticism of Putin (both from Girkin and Navalny) so far boils down to "he make Russia looks weak because we failed to take Kyiv", not to "it was wrong from the beginning".
I see Russia as something that might happen in USA if overrun by its own prison gangs. I see it as a possibility, therre is a convergence between MAGA/Qanon subculture and the prison subculture.
Sounds good, and this can perfectly describe the shape of forces in the Russian world.
Maybe I didn't express myself clearly, but I just meant that people in the West do not understand the actions of the rulers of Russia. The rulers of Russia (on every level) have a very personal perspective, not a state one.
The rulers of Russia are focused to become the head of a strong gang in their gulag (world).
And greenhouse conditions resulted in a lack of external and internal stimulators for the improvement of the shape of this country.
Russia is large enough that the number of people aware of the quality of life in other countries is an insignificant minority - no internal factor of change.
They were not threatened by external forces, which did not require a positive rotation in the circles of authorities.
And I agree the USA is way in the same direction.
A lot of blog notes and comments here focus on how barbaric and evil Russia is. I agree with most of it, as do many other people who have their doubts about how much the West should support Ukraine. The target audience seems to be "dumb Westerners", but even very ignorant Westerners have the idea that the standard of living in Russia is way lower than in the West. If they associate Russians with anything, it would be things like the Russian mafia, which doesn't exactly paint a positive picture.
What I am not so sure about is not how bad and evil Russia is, but whether Ukraine is really much better. I (unlike a lot of really dumb Westerners) am not saying that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, but the fact is that these two nationalities shared a country for hundreds of years.
A lot of the problems that you describe are certainly not just results of the last few decades when Russia and Ukraine were politically separated, but have a lot to do with history and the Russian culture, going back at least to the 19th century (I remember there was a discussion about Chernyshevsky under one of the blog posts), and perhaps even further.
And even now, despite 30 years of political separation, there are still a huge number of Russian-Ukrainian family ties, and Ukrainians don't have this kind of relationship with any other nation, not even with Poles, as Ukrainian immigration is very recent there.
You've just written that the Soviet Union in the 1980s was full of ex-convicts. This means that many of them have been living in Ukraine ever since and have shaped the culture there. And that is just one example.
And let's not forget about the language. Speaking Russian doesn't make you Russian, but we can't pretend that language doesn't influence culture. There was a huge cultural space, dominated by Russia, to which Ukraine belonged long after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
In short, I don't buy the narrative that while Russians are barbaric and evil, Ukrainians are just good guys with Western values. Now they have been attacked by Russia and have Western allies, so they have to put on the most Western face they can, but all in all I'm sure that the cultural differences between Russia and Ukraine are much, much smaller than the cultural differences between Ukraine and the West.
When we were discussing about the dam, some commentators said that only Russia was evil enough to breach it. I do agree that Russia is evil in many ways, but if Russia is evil, Ukraine is likely to be evil, too. It's impossible for Ukrainians to have transformed their post-Soviet values into Western ones in one generation. This means that there are potentially a lot of people in the Ukrainian army who would be willing to cause a humanitarian disaster if it gave them a tactical advantage.
Sure, Ukraine is in some ways more Western than Russia, but not as much as people here seem to think.
I just saw an interview (published today on the Volodymyr Zolkin channel) with a Russian POW who was on an island in the Dnieper River when the dam broke. His unit was left on the island, even though there were free places on the boat for evacuation. They were rescued by Ukrainian army boats after spending a night on trees.
The Ukrainians rescued people and animals, and even the enemy soldiers, while the Russians shelled the Ukrainian rescue boats and left their own soldiers without any help.
There is a difference. A big one. Without a doubt.
"Ukrainians don't have this kind of relationship with any other nation, not even with Poles, as Ukrainian immigration is very recent there."
Lol, no.
Lol, yes. My Polish friends tell me that significant Ukrainian immigration is a matter of the last decade or so. And I've had a look at some figures to verify this.
As of 2001, Poles made up 0.3% of the population of Ukraine (for comparison: Russians made up 17.3%). The data is from the only Ukrainian census in 2001, but I doubt there has been any significant Polish migration to Ukraine since then.
http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/nationality/
In Poland, Ukrainians made up 0.1% of the population in 2011. This means that there were no close family ties between Ukrainians and Poles – you can't have close ties if you don't even live in the same country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Poland
Since then, the number of immigrants has soared, exactly as I've written – Ukrainian immigration to Poland is very recent.
My anecdotal evidence confirms this: I've personally met several Ukrainians who have a family member who's Russian (and we're talking about close family members such as the husband or the father's wife). This is not surprising, given the large Russian population in Ukraine. I haven't met any Ukrainians who have a close family member who's Polish.
You forget such a little man -- Joseph Stalin. It was he who separated the Poles from Ukrainians, deporting them to Siberia, Kazakhstan (just today I was listening to a descendant of those deported to Kazakhstan), or simply murdering them in the 1930s (the main wave of purges began in 1936). After the victory over fascism, a second wave took place - Poles were forced to leave the Ukrainian territories and go to Poland, while Ukrainians living in Poland were sent to the USSR as part of ethnic cleansing ("Operation Vistula"). Mutual resettlement in 1945-46 involved some 700,000 Poles (from Ukraine, not including Poles from Belarus) and almost 500,000 Ukrainians.
At the same time, not only were Russians not expelled from Ukraine, but their settlement was actually encouraged; and in many places Russification helped their advancement.
PS.1.
To be fair, there were Ukrainian attacks on Poles under German occupation in 1943. (Yes, there were also examples of revenge.) In Poland these are known as the "Volhynian slaughter". Some 50,000 civilians were murdered. Many more were forced to flee.
PS.2.
The principle was to expel Ukrainians to Ukraine and Poles to Poland, but if you think that any family could identify itself as purely Polish or purely Ukrainian, you are wrong.
I haven't forgotten anything. Maybe you should read what you're replying to? My point is: "Ukrainians don't have this kind of relationship with any other nation, not even with the Poles". Note the present tense. The fact that Joseph Stalin separated the Ukrainians from the Poles in the 1940s only reinforces this point. Maybe 100 years ago Ukrainians did have a lot of family ties with Poles, I don't know. But, as you say, they were separated about 80 years ago. That means that for several generations Ukrainians had no contact with Polish culture. Maybe some Ukrainians had a Polish cousin or uncle, but they lived in another country and the contact was very difficult.
On the other hand, they were strongly influenced by Russian culture (not just for 80 years, but for several hundred years in most of today's Ukraine), and the large number of Ukrainian-Russian family ties is obvious to anyone who knows some Ukrainians.
Ad PS2: The 2001 Ukrainian census shows that even if there were Poles who avoided resettlement and stayed in Ukraine 80 years ago, they also lost contact with their homeland and over time they and their families even stopped identifying as Polish.
"Ukrainians had no contact with Polish culture" - you are very wrong at this point. With all its imperfection, there was some cultural interchange during the Soviet years. We mutually translated our literature, we did have cultural centers in each other cities. I'm proud to say that the "Polish cultural center" was frequently the focal point for the more "rebellious" intellectuals not only in Soviet Union, but also in GDR.
In 1960's there was a brief period of liberalism in Russian culture and this resulted with intense "mutual friendships". Many Polish intellectual of the boomer generation are nostalgic about this period and they still believe that Russia might become liberal in some unspecified moment in time.
I think Russian liberalism simply died. It's no longer there. Not even in the Navalny camp. But the Ukrainian liberalism continued to grow for many reasons (one of them was simply seeking a way to be "non-Russian").
The Poles in Ukraine are left with material evidence. The memory remains. There is also a discussion (suppressed in the USSR but revived in independent Ukraine) about the heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. These are all lasting (present tense) influences and connections.
PS.
The resettlement concerned (strictly) the areas taken over by Ukraine as a result of the Second World War. The Poles who survived in Ukraine had survived there since WWI -- and it was from that time that they were separated from Poland. It was a long time...
In fact, Operation Vistula was a different action yet: those Ukrainians who had not been deported to the USSR were subsequently relocated to Poland's post-German "Recovered Territories": Lower Silesia, West Pomerania, Masuria, etc. There used to be entire Ukrainian villages out there, far away from their homeland (my father was assigned to a job in one near Szczecin in mid-1970s). Officially, the objective of the Communist authorities was to deny the UPA support from the local population, though the deportations also covered areas in Lesser Poland where the UPA had never operated.
You have silently moved the goalposts from cultural similarities&differences to "family ties".
I moved the goalpost? I was clear what I was referring to right from the start. Here is the full sentence: "And even now, despite 30 years of political separation, there are still a huge number of Russian-Ukrainian family ties, and Ukrainians don't have this kind of relationship with any other nation, not even with Poles, as Ukrainian immigration is very recent there."
before that you wrote "the fact is that these two nationalities shared a country for hundreds of years"
Well guess what, Ukrainians and Poles also shared a country. For hundreds of years. And even a few decades in the 20th century.
If we look at the 20th century: most Ukrainians lived in Russia for 90 years, and some Ukrainians lived in Poland for 20 years.
If we look at the 19th century: Ukrainians lived in Russia for almost 100 years and in Poland for 0 years.
Only earlier was there more significant Polish influence, but even then, in the last 150 years of that period, today's Ukraine was basically split 50/50 between Poland and Russia.
This must have resulted in much more Russian than Polish influence, which is now clearly visible in language, family ties, religion, culture, etc.
I don't say "barbaric", they're no barbarians, they have nukes and tanks. They just have very different attitude - that's why you can't even imagine a Russian commander blowing up a tam with complete disregard for the lives of civilians and soldiers. We can imagine these commanders because we know many stories, from the pillage of Novgorod by Ivan The Terrible.
Ukraine was always a kind of anti-Russia, even in the Mazepa days. So even if they were equally barbaric, they did have a motivation to keep asking the question "how are we different from Russia". You will find this question in Ukrainian culture from Shevchenko to Zhadan.
I can't point you to any better argument than "trust me bro" (or actually, I can: "read Zhadan", etc.), but Ukraine made a tremendous evolution in the last 30 years in defining themselves as "anti-Russians". Sometimes I did have a kind of front-row seat to watch this evolution.
So your question "how are they different" could be valid in 1991, but now they are in a different places. And I think you are completely wrong saying "t's impossible for Ukrainians to have transformed their post-Soviet values into Western ones in one generation". We're talking now of the period of 32 years. Would you say Germany was as Nazified in 1977 as it was in 1945? Make the same comparison for Japan, Italy etc.
Do you recommend anything specific by Zhadan?
To have the feeling of early Ukraine (before Majdan): "Depeche Mode" and "Voroshilovgrad". To get a glimpse of how the country was changing: "Mesopotamia" (a short story collection). A masterpiece asking the question "how are we different from them" about the previous war (it's roughly about the battle of Debaltseve"): "The Orphanage".
But actually as an "esprit d'escalier", I do have a solid argument on "how are they different". Saponkov story is not unique to the Russian side. Other bloggers tell similar stories, how they were robbed at gunpoint by "police". There are no such stories on our side.
I think that main difference between Russian and Ukrainians is imperialism that poisons Russia and is absent in Ukraine. Imperialism leads to comiting and justifying war crimes but also to rejecting western solutions and patterns. Ukrainians have a lot of work to do in their society, but they are aware of that. This is the work we have done in central Europe (e.g. when refugees started to arrive to Poland last year, Ukrainian mothers were arguing with polish drivers when asked to put their children into baby car seats. This is standard in Poland now, but haven't been two decades ago. The same applies to driving culture. We have made big progress recently).
Ukrainians are aware that a lot of things have to change and some behaviours shouldn't be accepted. They can see the effects - central european countries moved to the West, and they want the same for Ukraine. Russians don't see the point with any of these changes, they perceive them as signs of weakness.
If it was 1943, I'm sure you guys would have a lot of arguments as to why it was the Germans who breached the Möhne and Edersee dams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise):
- The Germans were in control of the dam and only they could breach it.
- It's impossible to break a dam by bombing.
- The British are good guys, it's simply impossible that they would kill 1600 civilians, most of whom were their allies, just to achieve a military objective.
- The Germans are evil, and are known to do evil things even when it's to their disadvantage, so it's obvious that they caused a humanitarian disaster just for the sake of being evil.
And just to put things in perspective: Operation Chastise killed about 1600 civilians, and the Kakhovka breach – 28.
I literally did refer to this operation in the previous note - I mentioned the "Dambusters". It is indeed impossible to break a dam by bombing. In this particular case, a very special bouncing bomb was created. Ukraine does not have bombers so even if they had a copy of the 1943 bomb, they still have no way to apply it.
I don't think anyone is using here "the good guys" argument, so you're discussing with yourself.
"It is indeed impossible to break a dam by bombing."
Interesting how you can contradict yourself in the very next sentence: "In this particular case, a very special bouncing bomb was created."
"Ukraine does not have bombers so even if they had a copy of the 1943 bomb, they still have no way to apply it."
Unlike the British, the Ukrainians have direct access to one of the shores of the lake. They could have launched it from there.
"I don't think anyone is using here "the good guys" argument, so you're discussing with yourself."
You are apparently so convinced that the Ukrainians are the good guys and the Russians are the bad guys, that you can't even admit that Ukraine is responsible for civilian deaths in shelled buildings in Shebekino, even though this shelling was clearly in support of the "Russian" cross-border raid from Ukraine.
Launch a bouncing bomb from there? I think when you are suggesting that Ukrainians resurrected a 1943 bomb using a, uhm, some unknown contemporary technology, you are oddly close to a plotline of a movie like "Nazi sufers from Moon must die".
I don't describe this war as a "good guy"/"bad guy". Just "invaded guy/defender guy".
"Launch a bouncing bomb from there? I think when you are suggesting that Ukrainians resurrected a 1943 bomb using a, uhm, some unknown contemporary technology, you are oddly close to a plotline of a movie like "Nazi sufers from Moon must die"."
I can see that this invention went from an engineering paper in April 1942 to a successful deployment in May 1943. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb
Is this 1940s technology so "rocket science" that it's impossible for a modern state to build something similar? Or even something better. I think engineering has advanced a little bit in the last 80 years.
"I don't describe this war as a "good guy"/"bad guy". Just "invaded guy/defender guy"."
The thing is that these defender guys are invading Russia as a diversion. I'm not saying if that's good or bad (we'll see), but those are just facts.
It's not a problem to build such a bomb, and it's not a problem to build the device that's needed to spin it before dropping it.
The problem is having planes, on which you could install the spinning device and attach the bomb, and which could fly low enough and slow enough.
And where would the Ukrainians train to do this drop?
I understand Formosa's that Ukrainians might have developed different solution to destroy the dam, if British could do that 80 years ago. The problem I see with that argument is that there's no evidence or even idea how they could do that provided by Russians
Formosa said they could do it without a plane, they coud somehow launch the bouncing bomb from the ground. I guess they just built a genetically engineered bouncing trebuchet in one of the CIA biolabs.
Of course, recreating in secret a one-time bomb from 1943 and launching it without detection is much more plausible than simply detonating the charges Russians planted in the engine room. That would be so bizarre! You don't plant explosives just to detonate them, who would do that?
cmos: Do you need a plane if you have access to the shore? Judging from this brief explanation, it seems to me that it's all about the right launch angle, speed and backspin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb#/media/File:Bouncing_bomb_dam.gif
"The thing is that these defender guys are invading Russia as a diversion" - there's a great WW2 quote about that. "The Germans entered the war under rather childish illusion that they will bomb everybody else and nobody will bomb them".
1. Military operations may cause civilian deaths, even if the military - like Ukrainians almost always do - tries to avoid them. The difference between law-abiding militaries and Russia is that the latter simply doesn't care about collateral damage or actively targets civilians like in Syria or Ukraine.
2. The requirement for Ukraine to avoid striking at Russian territory while defending itself against Russian invasion is absurd, of course they have every right to strike back at Russian land to prevent it being used as a launchpad for attacks on their own land.
3. Ultimately the party responsible for deaths in Shebekino is Russia, because it invaded Ukraine, forcing it to defend itself by force.
Even the Russian sources report shelling in Shebekino (and elsewhere) usually adding "there were no casualties" or at worst, "one person was wounded". Either the "separatists" have very bad aim or they do not aim at civilians.
As far as far-right Russian militants go, those are either very civilised or they were told very sternly by Budanov to be on their best behaviour.
There's more and more evidence emerging of the Russian responsibility, so you chose a particularly inconvenient hill to die on: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/19/kakhovka-dam-collapse-image-apparently-explosive-laden-car-ukraine-russia
The Kakhovka breach killed more than 28 people: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/russia-blocks-un-aid-for-kakhovka-dam-collapse-victims/ar-AA1cITKP "The death toll from the disaster has risen to 52, with Russian officials saying 35 people had died in areas under its control and Ukraine’s interior ministry saying 17 had died and 31 were missing." and more will die because Russia obstructs relief efforts ("Moscow has rejected United Nations’ offers to help people in Russian-occupied areas affected by flooding from the collapsed Nova Kakhovka Dam.")
Very interesting. So we have a car packed with explosives parked at the top of the dam. And the previous explanation was that Ukrainians couldn't have done it, because a bomb blast on the dam wouldn't break it – the explosives had to be planted in the machine room.
It just reinforces my comparison with flat-earthers: y'all start with the axiom that the Ukrainians didn't do it (they're good guys, so how could they?), and then come up with various mutually exclusive explanations as to why it surely was the Russians.
"A Ukrainian special forces communications official told the Associated Press he believed the car was there to stop any Ukrainian advance on the dam and to amplify a planned explosion originating in the machine room."
Wherever these explosives ended up, they were brought there by Russians. For what purpose?
"For what purpose?"
To destroy something moving on the road on the dam.
But as an engineer (not in construction, but still an engineer), after seeing many photos of the dam, I believe, that an explosion was not necessary, it could be bad handling of the dam by Russians. Open question is, if it was intentional or just stupidity.
It is that way: The dam has 28 water gates. According to hydro-engineers, such gates should be opened symmetrically starting from the center of the dam to avoid problems.
After the evacuation from Cherson the Russians opened two outer gates near the power station - it couldn't be worse - and didn't change anything until the disaster. The water level during winter was low, but later it rose above the maximum level defined for the construction. At the time of the accident, the water was already flowing over the top of the closed gates. Again, according to hydro-engineers, water moving rapidly far from the axis of symmetry of a dam for an extended period of time could cause structural stability problems.
The day before the disaster, one span of the dam road near the powerhouse, over the open gates, broke. Yes, this span had been shelled by the Ukrainians before, but many months before. It can be a sign of structural problems of the construction.
There is also a photo, where the dam is already broken, but the machine room is still intact. You can see it in the analysis by Ruslan Leviev of the Conflict Intelligence Team, unfortunately in Russian, but the photo is shown at 12:45.
Link: https://youtu.be/HQ5LBb-H2lk
This means, that an explosion in the engine room couldn't have been the first cause of the disaster. But it doesn't mean, that the Russians are innocent here - they had control of the dam, they had to handle it properly.
Interesting! What happened to the crown argument that it was 100% a deliberate action by the Russians, because the dam could only be destroyed by blowing up the engine room?
It shows how ridiculous the position of the most commenters here has been, arguing as if everything was completely clear, even when the US and the UK said there were still a lot of unknowns. Do you guys think you have better information than the CIA & MI6? Or do you think the US & UK said that because they are secretly pro-Russian?
I just can't believe in a secret stealth cannon lauching a 1943 bomb.
" What happened to the crown argument that it was 100% a deliberate action by the Russians, because the dam could only be destroyed by blowing up the engine room?"
You only need to blow up the engine room if you want to destroy the dam with an explosion.
There are also other ways to destroy it. But I cannot imagine any way to destroy such a dam without having direct physical access to it.
I think, you missed the last sentence of my comment - the Russians are guilty in this scenario as well.
There's an update on Saponkov's vans. That final weird institution that was supposed to hand them to him - simply refused to do so. "Nyet!". They also refused to provide any explanation. It seems that's it.
The immortal scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zJFhdZ6Ox4
In related news, rumours are swirling that the krisha of another Russian milblogger, the infamous War Gonzo, didn't survive the encounter with Ukrainian special forces clearing a trench. It's a dangerous occupation, being a Russian milblogger.
My opinion on things like death of "mayor" of Kherson was that he was executed more spontaneusly by armed thugs he was giving orders to just few days earlier. He surely was given a small detachment of "security". They might not have had any orders but their leader decuded this annoying office worker thst ordered him around no longer has any backing.