Let me speak about yesterday. Let me speak about my health condition. Let me speak about the political situation. All these things are passing through my mind. But at the moment, I don’t have the strength to write everything down to a really sensful text.
But—no, that’s not right. I do have a good idea.
Yesterday, I listened to a podcast by my favorite analyst, Mark Reicher, and he gave a broad overview of Russian history. In this context, it became clear that Russia is a country that has had a long colonial era, lasting hundreds of years—from the beginning of the 16th century up to today. It’s a power that wants to be enlarged and enlarged and enlarged.
This huge country was built through oppression, expropriation, exploitation and conquest. And it hasn’t stopped this behavior even now—or better said, it resumed this behavior after a short period of going a different way.
The best part of the podcast was a remark—or rather, a critique of a remark—by Putin: that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union as a world power.
He didn’t seem to consider that the real catastrophes were the two world wars—especially the second one—with millions of civilian and military deaths and casualties, including for Russia and the other countries it had occupied: Ukraine, the Baltic states, the Central Asian republics.
But these deaths don’t seem to matter in the ideology behind Russia’s ambition for world power.
I think that’s a very good critique of Putin’s remark, which has been repeated again and again lately—without deeper reflection.