Weeks Turn into Months
Russia’s genocide handbook. Russia’s genocidal identity. The words that lead to mass murder. The novel that mapped out Putin’s war plan.
Why do any Russian-speakers outside Russia support the war? It’s incomprehensible, right?
Why do Russians support the war? An important read, even if the Google translation is sometimes stilted [edit: here’s a subsequent direct translation]. This closing observation will sit with me for a while:
People in Russia are accustomed to consider war as a sacred experience that can wash away everything and return them to some kind of true meaning, to themselves. They think that the war will free them from what they find themselves in. The whole country repeats the words about “denazification”, “demilitarization” and “liberation”. The thought arises that these words did not arise by chance. People really subconsciously want it, but they can’t get it. And they express it in the form of aggression towards those whom they consider as similar to themselves as possible. Russia is doing to Ukraine what it would like to do to itself.
An editor who has been shaping Russian propaganda narratives for years will now be covering Ukraine and Russia for a German media outlet. Looks like that was the plan.
Russia is “not a country, it’s a prison”.
Challenging Russia’s imperial innocence.
Russians “did whatever they wanted” at Chernobyl.
The man who swam to safety from Mariupol.
Russia is attempting to replay the Donetsk and Luhansk playbook in Kherson.
“My world died, killed by a Russian missile.”