In one of my texts, I spoke about the goals I had set for myself when I provoked my arrest. First and foremost was the goal of attracting additional attention to my publications justifying the need for a radical expansion of military assistance to Ukraine.
I had about a hundred such publications since the treacherous attack of Nazi Russia on Ukraine. In these publications I assess the Putin regime as a new post-industrial form of Nazism, as dangerous to civilization as its historically first form, which requires the same response from the civilized world.
In these publications I analyze Putin’s ideology, which has its roots in the ultra-conservative concepts of the 19th century about a special Russian spirituality, a special Russian civilization, and a special Russian way. This is the ideology of national exceptionalism, national superiority, Russian messianism. And all Russian specialness is reduced to tolerating violence on the part of the stronger and not to limit themselves in violence against the weaker. This, in fact, is Nazism. Its essence is the permissiveness of force.
It is a revolt of archaic, cave instincts against the legal and moral restrictions on violence and cruelty imposed by civilization. We can do anything. What we can do, others can’t. And what others can do, we decide. This is the quintessence of the Putin clique’s program, its project of a new world order. It is a repeat of Hitler’s project of world domination.
Having trampled on the constitution of its own country, the Putin clique has trampled on international law, the cornerstone of which is a categorical ban on annexations.
The dictator does not need a piece of scorched earth on which nothing will grow for another 20 years. He needs to make the world recognize his right to take what he wants.
It is a basic principle of any civilized society. In today’s globalized world, violating the ban on annexations destroys the entire system of international security and stability. It has already led to world wars twice in the twentieth century.
By overturning the ban on annexations, Putin is pushing humanity into a new world war.
I grew up among people who saw the world war not in movies! They all hated war. For my generation as well as for them, the axiom was: it must not happen again. Putin’s clique stole this axiom from us, replacing it with the vulgar “we can repeat it”.
Like Hitler’s clique, it has awakened the darkest, basest instincts in people: the desire to dominate others, to suppress, to humiliate, to torture, to step with a boot on the face of another. It has corrupted my people, turning a significant part of them into a zombified herd, who have forgotten that you can’t take someone else’s property, you can’t attack your neighbor, you can’t kill.
Here sounded the testimony of witnesses from the defense side – people who know me well, have known me for many years. They are all unanimous in saying that I hate violence. Yes, I hate violence. I cannot and will not stand idly by while Putinist gangs of brigands and murderers called the Russian army torture a neighboring people – only because the family rapist sitting in the Kremlin considers this people to be an inferior subnation that escaped from his family.
There is an existential, anthropological gulf between us who hate violence and those who have allowed themselves to bring back to Europe the horrors of war that it has not known since 1945. The dispute between us cannot be resolved in any court of law. It is a civil war. Putin’s Russia has become a generator of absolute evil, a mortal danger both to the outside world and to its own population.
This danger must be eliminated just as the danger from Hitler’s Reich was eliminated. Tanks invading a foreign land cannot be stopped by appeals to peace and conscience. Tanks have no shame. Tanks can be stopped only by other tanks. Therefore – more tanks for Ukraine! Death to the Russian fascist invaders! Death to Putin – the new Hitler, murderer and executioner! Glory to Ukraine! I’m done.
