Crimes on such a scale as the missile attack on Kryvyi Rih destroy the cozy, false concept that many political immigrants are so comfortable believing in: as if it were just “Putin’s war. As if there is Putin – and there are some “good Russians” who were deceived, who had no choice. But there is always a choice. Those who aimed a missile at a playground had a choice. Those who pressed the trigger – with a clear understanding of where the missile would go and who it would kill. Putin sits somewhere upstairs, but behind every order there are specific people. And they are the ones who killed Ukrainian children.
In World War II, there was Hitler, Goebbels, Eichmann. But there were also those who cracked skulls with rifle butts, who pulled the trigger, who personally killed. Of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, almost a third were killed not in gas chambers, but by the hands of people who were “just following orders.”
The war in Ukraine is not just Putin’s war. It is Russia’s war. And every day it becomes more and more terrible and more and more obvious. There is no turning away from it. There is no silence from it. Blaming Putin alone will not work. This war has become a way of life. They make money from it, they are proud of it, they make it part of the national idea. And there is no truly mass, conscious anti-war resistance in Russia.
Someone will say, “But there are political prisoners.” Yes, thousands. But among them, only a few consciously chose the path of resistance. Aleksandr Skobov, Aleksei Gorinov – such heroes can be counted on one hand. A few people in a country of 140 million people is not even a drop in the ocean.
