One year and ninety-seven days of war have passed. Today I do not want to write about the situation at the front. Especially since nothing is happening there anyway. And even about the raids of Russian partisans in the Belgorod region – I don’t write about it at all… It seems that it should be discussed in detail, but I can’t…
This photo of grandfather near corpse of nine-years-old granddaughter still in my mind. And everything else seems completely unimportant, secondary, insignificant. I know it’s wrong. I know that even in this particular bombing of Kyiv this morning more people died. And at the front today there must have been a lot of decent young men who had to live and live…
And lo and behold: this grandfather was sitting next to his dead granddaughter covered with foil and I can’t get this scene out of my mind. So I’ve been walking around with this picture in my mind all day today. Today I also buried a friend I had been friends with for 40 years in St. Petersburg. It was cancer. He was 64. The usual thing. And I couldn’t go to the funeral, say the last sorry, throw a handful of earth on the grave.
And that’s the mood I was in for the evening. As if you’d been poked with sticks all day. They poked and prodded and poked me to the point that I stopped reacting to anything and am sitting like a log, empty and speechless. I don’t want to do anything, and I don’t care about anything.
I know that the world is unfair. I haven’t expected mercy from people for a long time. I don’t expect mercy, I don’t even expect basic logic. I know that we are all going to die. Some sooner, some later. I know that God works in mysterious ways and that God is subtle, but not malicious. But for heaven’s sake! Why does he need a living Putin? What lesson is God teaching us that this scum is still crawling around the earth?
A gray, moth-ridden, banal and yawning little man keeps a huge number of people in fear, and they hate and despise him, but nevertheless do his bidding, take up arms and go to kill total strangers who have done them no harm, even children, all because they do not want them to have problems themselves.
And what kind of problems make people destroy their immortal souls? The kind that can land them in jail. Or get kicked out of work. Or get kicked out of college. So now I’ll close my eyes and kill people for a while, but then, when it’s all over (I wish it were sooner), I won’t have any trouble. And I’ll live like before. And I’ll try to quickly forget how I killed children.
What if I’m killed? “Me? Who everybody loves so much!”. Scary!!! What to do? It’s even scarier to disobey. Everybody’s going, and I’m going. And yes: What are we going to do now, lose the war? Russia has never lost a war… Yeah… Tell me you’ve never started one…
Russia! Lose this war. On your own. Voluntarily. Just take it and lose it. Right now. You’ll be doing the whole of humanity a huge favor. You don’t even know how tired you are of everyone with your naughty, capricious ways. With your complexes and your ambitions. You’d have to be blind not to see how liquid you are. No amount of solovyovs and skabeyevs can disguise the obvious fact that everything you’ve said about yourself has turned out to be a lie and an empty bluster.
The best thing you can do is just go inside your boundaries and shut your mouth for a hundred years. You’ve said all you want to say. There’s nothing more to say. We’ve learned everything by heart: you were wronged, not accepted into your company, deceived, approached NATO, disrespected, want to conquer and take away resources, enslave… What else is there? Why are you allowed and I am not… That’s it… That’s it? Is that why you decided to kill nine-year-old girls? You think if you kill more of them, they’ll respect you?
Or have you decided to live like Caligula: “Let them hate, as long as they fear”? Except that there’s a risk that they will hate, but not be afraid… And it looks like that’s where it’s going. And then what will you do?
You’ve squandered all the moral baggage that generations of Russians have accumulated. You have nothing to say to the world. You’re morally bankrupt. I’m not talking about such giants as Leo Tolstoy or St. Philip Kolychev, but even here I think about people I personally knew: Yegor Gaidar, Boris Nemtsov, Viktor Chernomyrdin… Good thing they are dead and do not know what Putin has turned Russia into.
Russia has become a scarecrow and a laughingstock at the same time. The hypnosis of Putin’s greatness only works when the Ostankino emitters are on. And only for those who can reach their beams. And the rest of the world looks at Russia with bewilderment: aren’t you confused? Is this the same Russia that gave the world Rachmaninoff and Chekhov?
It is already clear to everyone in the world that Russia will not win under any circumstances. Even Putin’s desired peace as a fixation of the current situation on the front is a complete and unconditional defeat for Russia. Because it is now even further away from the goals it declared when it started this war. If this is not a defeat, what is a defeat?
And it will be even worse for her. It certainly will be. And all because our cause is right. The enemy will be defeated and victory will be ours.
Glory to Ukraine!
