One year and seventy-three days of war have passed. The Russians have shelled Bakhmut with phosphorus bombs and it is all ablaze with some infernal light, as if the lid of the underworld was ripped off and it is all glowing with its ominous womb. There is no doubt that this is an act of desperation.
Prigozhin needs to take Bakhmut tomorrow by all means. So he just started to burn it. The burning temperature of phosphorus is about 1300 degrees Celsius and it burns out everything alive and even everything dead. Will the Wagner PMC take Bakhmut by tomorrow? It depends on how and what to consider Bakhmut. What it was before – it does not exist anymore. We can speak only about the territory where there was a town with such a name. But today this territory is no different from the one left behind by the Russians.
What’s left and right of them. It’s the same ruins, charred heads and charred corpses. It’s in front of them that they see life, light and future. And what they have already turned into “Russian World” is now the realm of the dead. Homogeneous space where time does not flow, there is no movement and, therefore, no life, no progress, no future. Putin’s “White Walkers” are eager to take over Ukraine as a mythical Westeros. They want to turn it into a kingdom of the dead, into one big cemetery. This is what Putin, whom they have made their god, told them to do. Putin is afraid of old age and doesn’t want to die. So he told them to stop time. He has already stopped time in Russia. But if time is flowing in his neighbors, people will know it is there and will want it back in their own country as well. So he sent his soldiers to stop time everywhere.
But Ukrainians don’t think Putin is God. To them, he is a miserable and vile old man who is disturbing their lives. And so they desperately resist Putin’s hordes. They want to live like all other people: to be born, to work, to raise children, to learn the world, to enjoy their grandchildren and, in the end, to die. They are not afraid to die. They are not Putin. They want time to pass. For it to carry them from the past, through the present, into the future. They want human history to continue.
And Putin doesn’t want it to go on. His main fear is that he will die, and everything will go on. But without him. In the past, when a king or leader died, his wives, horses and slaves were buried with him. These men and animals were his possessions. They existed for him. They lost all meaning without him. They were not needed without him. Putin wants to put all of humanity in the grave with him. He believes that it belongs to him, that without him humanity loses all meaning.
If Volodin’s formula “Russia is Putin” is true, then Putin continued it by saying: “Why do we need a world without Russia?”. This means that he is convinced: we don’t need peace without Putin and it must die with him. Today, the Ukrainian army is resisting not the local aggression of a crazed tsar. It is resisting the onset of entropy. It is defending time. It is defending space. It defends the world in which we live. And so victory will be ours. And the enemy will be defeated. Because our cause is right. Glory to Ukraine!