I’ve put a lot of effort into trying to understand this, read their news and here’s my conclusion.
First thing you have to realize is that it’s not just Putin. A lot of Russians think the same way, even Russians living in the west who have access to Western information sources.
The USSR was a mighty empire that lost the cold war in a humiliating manner, by going bankrupt. In the 1990s, Russia suffered another humiliating period of poverty and corruption when it failed to adapt the Western economic and political model. Right now Russia is often described as a corrupt, destitute “gas station with nukes” - not a true partner to the West. Its political system is rejected by the West as a crooked dictatorship.
So if you want to understand the deep nationalist yearnings of Russians, it is these two:
- We want to be respected as an equal to the west
- We want to humiliate the West in revenge
It’s essentially a national inferiority complex:
Now, Ukraine to Russians is “little Russia”. And Ukraine embarked on a path to westernization, including EU and NATO membership.
In the West, it seems like natural progression: that when a country is “mature” enough, it decides to become a lawful, free-market democracy. But for Russia, which has failed on that path, this aspiration by Ukraine is another humiliation, a total rejection of their political model, their philosophies and morality.
Essentially, by choosing West, Ukraine is also telling Russia that they are shit. And that’s hard to take from a country seen as a “junior partner”.
So of course there are many rationalizations for this invasion. That NATO was going to be “too close to Moscow”. That a stable, Russian speaking, real democracy on their borders would lead to dissent and instability in Russia. That Ukraine’s natural resources would compete with Russian resources, undermining its position in Europe. That “Westernization” of countries is really a CIA campaign. And from Putin’s perspective, these are not insignificant reasons to go to war.
There are also some utterly false rationalizations - that Ukraine is a nazi country, that Ukraine planned to attack Russia, was producing anti-slavic viruses, that Ukraine was committing genocide in the Donbas, etc. This you will hear from the hard-line fanatics. I don’t think Putin buys into these much, but I am sure these delusions are helpful to him psychologically.
But I feel that this is the same kind of imperial humiliation that led to the rise of Hitler in Germany. Russia simply has a bad inferiority complex, and this fuels disgusting anti-social behavior on the country level. Just looking at their TV, how incessantly their propaganda stooges scream about their nukes, how they could vaporise countries. You don’t see that on TV in the US, or France, or UK, or Israel. But in Russia they are overcompensating, so screaming “we have nukes” helps to assuage that inferiority complex. And Putin shares that inferiority complex and thrives off of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment