Dear X, you rather flatter me in enquiring what my thoughts may be on the subject of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I trust you don’t need me to join the chorus to know where I stand on the subject of a warmongering autocrat who would use psychotic ramblings and lies to start a cowardly war against a sovereign and peaceful nation. In the words of Kingsley Amis, “Let’s not round up the women and the children. Let’s not go over the hill and fuck up the people in the next town along. Let’s not do any of that ever again.”

Senselessness of this war challenges even the most ardent apologists of a small man, whatever his reasons. Any hope of a peaceful coexistence with a subjugated Ukraine went up in flames when military aggression became a reality. Ukrainians will never forget that they had to hide their children in subway stations and cower in fear as their cities were being bombed, orphans will never forget losing their parents to senseless aggression. Just as Polish people will never forget that Soviet Union has sentenced their state to destruction and violence when it joined Nazi Germany in invasion of Poland at the outbreak of WWII. “After such knowledge,” as T.S. Eliot asked in “Gerontion,” “what forgiveness?”

To understand how we got to this appalling chapter of Late Putinism we’ll need to go back to Russia of 1830s when Nicholas I ruled Russia and Count Uvarov came up with a political doctrine that would guide Russia’s internal politics to this day - “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality”. Orthodoxy serves to make church subservient to the state and offers divine protection and justifications to the actions of the state. Look to any meeting of church and state in modern Russia and you will see Putin adorned in the patriarchal robes like Russian tsars of old, while Russia’s leading Orthodox Bishop preaches conquest of Baltic states. Autocracy enforces unconditional loyalty to the state, and Russian state is a model student in a school of subjugation. Nationality recognises Russian nationality as a founding nation of the Slavic people and gives Russian state paternalistic claim on the destinies of nations it deems to be in its sphere of influence. If you ever wondered where Russian state gets the guile to claim that Ukraine and its people belong to Russia, now you know. It’s not for me to accuse anyone of needless extravagance of language but Count Uvarov could as well have written “Submission, Submission, and Submission”.

Fast-forward to 1917 and the motto flying on the banners of Bolshevik’s during Russian Revolution was “Peace, Land, and Bread”. Such was a dire condition of a starved and dying nation under doctrine of submission that people took up arms against their leaders for a loaf of bread. They weren’t seeking prosperity; they were seeking subsistence. The difference in intention is particularly apparent when it is contrasted with another famous national tripartite motto that had its origin in French revolution – “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. By the end of that sorry and dishonest century, that saw two world wars, Russian people were exhausted from living under this and that crazed strongman full of cruel ideas. Their only plea was stability. So, when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and signalled that Putin was to be his successor their choice was to either endure another political power struggle or accept Putin. It was an aesthetic choice not a moral one.

That Russian government does not represent the will of the Russian people is not disputed, that such perverse transgressions are in part sanctioned by the apathy of Russian people is an immutable fact. Having said that, don’t be too quick to judge people for political apathy. Corrupt elections and political repressions work to convince the populace that their vote doesn't matter and so it ceases to exist. In a country where state is a king, a priest, a policeman, and an employer, apathy is just a way of making it to the next day. When we praise Nemtsov, Politkovskaya, and Navalny, among many others, for willing to speak truth to power, we highlight the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most oppressive of circumstances, rise to superhuman heights. Instead of blaming the system and the people guilty of propping up and maintaining it, we blame those who are powerless to resist. Anyone who may be disheartened to hear that public support for Putin has increased following the invasion or that majority of Russians support war, would do well to read Noam Chomsky’s book “Manufacturing Consent” and remember that Russian propaganda under Putin had 22 years to stamp out its mark on Russian people.

It won’t escape your attention that I seem to be dragging my feet though the past. You are not wrong. I fear the conclusion of everything. When a zealot with a nuclear button is pressed into the corner, he just may use it. If the war in Ukraine seems too far, consider that in the light of a nuclear threat you and I are in effect sitting in a very exposed trench. Your life and lives of everyone we know are at the whim of people whose power to annihilate all present, past, and future forms of life on Earth does not derive from our consent. Supposing of course that you or I had the right to grant such consent on behalf of posterity to begin with, which I do not for a second believe that I do.

The war started by Putin will devour generations of Ukrainian people and despite their heroic resistance to date, the rockets continue to fall on peaceful cities. On Sigmund Freud’s memorial in Vienna appear the words “The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.” When Putin’s war comes for Russian people, it will be for them to stop him. Just as war in Afghanistan became the graveyard of the Soviet Union, war in Ukraine must become the graveyard of Putinism.

“The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last

We have not reached conclusion”.