Nikolai Karpitsky. Will Iran Follow Russia’s Path, or Is There Hope for a Better Future?

Source: PostPravda.info 21.01.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/will-iran-follow-russias-path/

The January protests in Iran were suppressed with inhumane brutality in the name of a regime that proclaims the primacy of religious morality. Yet such brutality contradicts any morality and any religion. At what point does the religious and moral motivation of the Iranian authorities become necrophilic? Is the degeneration of ideological totalitarianism in Iran into necro-imperialism inevitable – by analogy with what has occurred in Russia?

The Scale of Violence in Iran Is Unknown: What We See Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg

The Iranian authorities imposed a strict information blockade and shut down the internet, leaving us without a full picture of what is happening – the true scale of repression and the number of victims. Nevertheless, even fragmentary data indicate that the level of violence and cruelty is unprecedented, even by Iranian standards. The number of those killed is estimated in the thousands, the wounded in the tens of thousands.

According to the human rights network HRANA (Human Rights Activist News Agency), as of January 18–19, 2026, 3,766 deaths had been confirmed during the suppression of the protests; more than 2,000 people were seriously injured, and approximately 24,000 were detained. And this is only the tip of the iceberg: the real number of victims may be several times higher. After the protests were crushed, the death toll is likely to continue rising due to those tortured in prisons and executions.

There is extensive evidence of shoot-to-kill tactics aimed at the head and torso, as well as cases in which the wounded were deliberately shot. One documented incident involved security forces storming a hospital in the city of Ilam, where patients and doctors were beaten. These episodes – mere fragments of a much larger tragedy – demonstrate that the authorities treat their own country as an occupied territory.

Why Does the Iranian Government Perceive Its Own Country as Hostile?

As in the Soviet system, the state in Iran is subordinated to a suprastate ideological hierarchy. Real power belongs not to the president, elected by universal suffrage, but to the rahbar – the supreme religious leader. This position is currently held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He exercises direct control over the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij organization – a youth paramilitary force under IRGC authority – as well as key judicial and religious institutions.

The IRGC functions as a “state within a state,” accountable to neither the president nor parliament. It constitutes a parallel power structure with its own ground forces, intelligence services, and judicial-investigative bodies.

It was precisely the IRGC and the Basij that treated the people of Iran as “alien hostile,” with whom they shared neither a national nor a religious bond. A dictatorship that proclaims the defense of religion and morality as its priority eventually comes to view the population of its own country as enemies to whom moral norms do not apply. This means that there is no longer any shared identity – neither national nor religious – between the Iranian authorities and Iranian society. These two Irans – the Iran of power and the Iran of citizens – are no longer capable of peaceful coexistence.

History has already seen a precedent for such a split in the country: the Red Terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks after they seized power in Russia. They treated the population of their own country as the inhabitants of an occupied territory, physically destroying clergy, entrepreneurs, and other “hostile elements” merely on the basis of their belonging to a particular social group. What distinguished them from the Iranian theocratic regime was only the atheistic nature of their ideology; the structure of ideological power itself was essentially the same.

The Bolsheviks succeeded in destroying old Russia and building a totalitarian Soviet Union in its place, founded on a new ideological identity. However, historical logic led to its subsequent transformation into the form embodied by contemporary Russia.

The historical logic of the evolution of a totalitarian regime can be described as follows:

• an ideological superstructure is formed above the state (the party, the rahbar), which justifies total control over state institutions and the everyday lives of people through some “higher” idea (communism, Shiite theocracy);
• for the practical implementation of this control, a repressive apparatus and security services are created (the Cheka, NKVD, KGB, IRGC);
• over time, ideology loses its capacity to mobilize and subordinate society, while the security services free themselves from ideological oversight and begin to be guided primarily by the instinct of self-preservation and the retention of power;
• representatives of the regime’s security services come to power but prove incapable of solving complex social and economic problems and therefore instinctively seek to simplify the social system through violence and the destruction of the disloyal;
• social necrophilia takes shape – a worldview in which death becomes a universal means of solving problems. As a result, ideological totalitarianism is transformed into a necro-imperialism that is devoid of a clear ideological direction and cynical in its essence.

Iran: Threats and Hope

Historical logic is the inertia of the course of events; it does not determine the specific decisions people will make. It can be likened to the current of a river, which must be taken into account in order to navigate, yet from the current alone it is impossible to predict where and when ships will arrive. That is precisely why one should caution against arbitrary generalizations: in any historical process, different – sometimes opposing – tendencies coexist, and it is only the decisions of people themselves that determine which of them will prevail.

Unlike the late Soviet Union, Iran’s population remains young. This is evident from population growth – from approximately 37–38 million at the time of the Islamic Revolution to 88.5 million today. Political opponents and activists can be destroyed, but it is impossible to destroy an entire generation of youth – active, dynamic, and unwilling to live in a totalitarian society. Whether this new generation will be able to prevail remains an open question.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appears as decrepit as Iran’s state ideology, which in many respects recalls that of the late Soviet Union. However, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other repressive institutions are far stronger and more aggressive than the security services of the late USSR, and in their struggle to retain power they will stop at nothing. It is possible that the authorities will succeed in suppressing the protests and freezing the regime along a North Korean model. Another scenario is also possible – a repetition of the Russian path: after the fall of the dictatorship of the ayatollahs, the country may move for a time toward democratic forms of government, only for the heirs of the IRGC to seize power and establish a new dictatorship, as happened in Russia – one based not on ideology but on a necrophilic instinct.

The historical logic of such a development is not a predetermined future, but a threat we are already confronting today. At the same time, the historical logic in which a new generation rejects the theocratic totalitarianism of contemporary Iran does not guarantee a better future; it merely offers hope for one.

Nikolai Karpitsky. War Against Ukrainian Identity: Why Russians Do Not Believe Even Their Relatives in Ukraine

Source: PostPravda.info 18.11.2024.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/war-against-ukrainian-identity/

Photo by Cédric VT on Unsplash

 
Can a national identity be false? The question may seem absurd. After all, if people perceive themselves as one nation, then that is how it is, and no one has the right to judge whether this is correct or not. But what if a national identity is built on the denial of another identity? Moreover, what if this denial has become the basis for mass support of a war against another people?

If the war against Ukraine were supported only by morally degraded or poorly educated people, this could be explained by propaganda and manipulation. But the war is supported by respectable Christians, by members of the intelligentsia, by scholars. More than that, they trust Putin more than their own relatives, colleagues, or fellow believers who live in Ukraine.

Why Russians Do Not Believe Even Their Loved Ones in Ukraine

In the spring of 2022, many stories circulated in online media about Russians refusing to believe their relatives in Ukraine when those relatives said they were being bombed at that very moment. For example, a daughter calls her mother in Russia from Kharkiv to say that residential neighborhoods are being shelled, that explosions are very close – and in response she hears: “Don’t make things up!”, “No one is bombing you!”, “Our troops will come soon and liberate you – no one will even touch you with a finger!”

Today, such stories are no longer circulating, because Ukrainians have stopped trying to persuade Russians – it is pointless. I can confirm this from my own experience.

In 2011, I was one of the organizers of an interfaith dialogue in the Siberian city of Tomsk. Representatives of different religions shared their spiritual experiences, sought to understand one another’s positions, and tried to find a common ethical foundation in order to overcome xenophobia. In 2015, I went to the Donbas, collected testimonies about the lives of Christians under conditions of war, and wanted to share these accounts with my fellow townspeople. However, participants in the interfaith dialogue said they were “outside politics” and refused to listen to me.

After the full-scale invasion in 2022, it was no longer possible to hide one’s position behind the mask of apolitical neutrality. Some supported Ukraine, but they were forced either to leave Russia or to retreat into internal exile. As a result, only those remained in the interfaith dialogue who believe that there are Nazis in Ukraine and that Putin must therefore carry out its so-called “denazification.”

I suggested that they speak with their fellow believers in Ukraine and learn from eyewitnesses what is really happening. My proposal was categorically rejected. This was strange.

Even if a person is completely brainwashed by propaganda, they still remain a witness to everyday life in their own country. For example, if I were to meet a resident of North Korea, I would not listen to their communist propaganda, but I would try to learn from them – as a witness – about everyday life in their country. If Russian Christians, Vaishnavas, or Muslims believe that all their fellow believers in Ukraine are brainwashed by Nazi propaganda, why do they not at least ask how this supposed “Nazism” manifests itself in everyday life? What is most depressing is the complete lack of such interest, along with the unshakable conviction that they know better than Ukrainians themselves how life in Ukraine actually is.

From this it follows that they believe Kremlin propaganda because they themselves want to believe it, and therefore fear communicating with those who might call that belief into question. In other words, they want their worldview – based on an imperial identity – to be confirmed by facts, and so they deliberately seek out fake stories about Ukraine in order to believe in them. This means that their Russian imperial identity outweighs their religious identity. And this imperial identity is built on the denial of Ukrainian identity.

A similar phenomenon can be observed in the scientific and academic community, where, seemingly, erudition and a critical attitude toward information are cultivated, and therefore this behavior can no longer be explained by the effectiveness of propaganda alone. How many people in this environment support Ukraine? After the full-scale invasion, several of my colleagues from Russia contacted me with words of moral support. Among them was one world-renowned scholar who, through me, reached out to Ukrainian colleagues to apologize for his country. But this was an isolated case: the majority either remain silent or openly support the criminal war.

I asked Anatoly Akhutin, a well-known Russian philosopher who emigrated to Ukraine, whether his colleagues from Russia had contacted him to apologize or to express moral support to Ukrainian colleagues. He replied that, of course, he has friends in Russia who support Ukraine, but that among philosophers and intellectuals no one had reached out to him. On the contrary, many had stopped communicating with him altogether.

To my question of whether the issue really lies in Russian identity, Anatoly Akhutin replied:

“I think the issue is not simply ‘Russian identity,’ but the fact that this ‘identity’ is imperial. I am not talking about political imperialism (of which there is more than enough), nor even ideological imperialism (Moscow as the Third Rome, and so on), but about something much deeper – on an irrational, subconscious level.

Note that the word ‘Russian’ is an adjective, and what kind of ‘substance’ stands behind it is unclear – it can be whatever we like. This imperialism feeds on a messianic idea (stolen from Byzantium), on the self-awareness of a ‘God-bearing people’ (stolen from the Jews), and on reliance on a great history that was stolen – or, in fact, alas, gifted – from Ukraine itself, which makes Ukraine all the more hateful.

Thus, the denial of an independent Ukrainian identity also grows out of a fear of hanging in a historical void – as some kind of bastard offspring of the Horde – of suddenly finding oneself without Roman heritage, without succession to Byzantine Orthodoxy, without one’s own history: an empty adjective without a noun.”

In support of Anatoly Akhutin’s idea, I can cite a story that was told to me at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Before the full-scale war, a Polish Vietnamologist from Warsaw, Leszek Sobolewski, visited the institute. In a conversation with the then head of the department – now the director of the Institute – Viktor Kiktenko, the Polish scholar asked for his patronymic so that he could address him politely. The Ukrainian colleague replied that the form of address “Pan Viktor” was perfectly polite and even sounded better, as it was less formal and more personal.

Later, Pan Leszek recounted this story to his Russian colleague, also a Vietnamologist, Ilya Usov, who reacted with extreme indignation. He was outraged that in Ukraine people use the forms of address “pan” and “pani,” and immediately began to argue that a supposedly Russian-speaking population had risen up in Donbas and that there were no Russian troops there. Pan Leszek was taken aback by this reaction. What business is it of a Russian scholar how his Ukrainian colleagues address one another? And why was he outraged specifically by Ukrainians, rather than by Poles, who use the same forms of polite address?

It should be emphasized that this was the reaction of a scholar who, by virtue of his specialization, ought to understand questions of national identity and contemporary politics. I believe that in the forms of address “pan” and “pani,” the Russian scholar perceived a demonstration of Ukrainian identity as independent of Russian identity – and it was precisely this that provoked his outrage. In other words, the issue here is not propaganda, but a worldview in which Ukrainian identity itself is perceived as a hostile, anti-Russian ideology.

A Worldview Based on the Denial of Ukrainian Identity

Imperialism in the Soviet Union was instilled from the school bench. In school lessons, we were taught that Russian history begins with Kyivan Rus. Its development was supposedly interrupted by the Tatar-Mongol invasion, after which Kyiv somehow ended up outside Russia’s borders, but Bohdan Khmelnytsky later “reunited” Ukraine with Russia, after which their histories allegedly became inseparable. Ukrainian school education eventually freed itself from this false imperial interpretation of history, and imperial sentiments largely disappeared in Ukraine. In Russian schools, however, this narrative is still taught in essentially the same form today.

As a result, most Russians by default accept the pseudoscientific premise of a “triune Russian people” – Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians – as the collective heir to Kyivan Rus, and therefore do not perceive Ukraine as a separate country with its own culture and history. In reality, there was no single people either in ancient times or today. On the territory of Kyivan Rus lived many different peoples, including Slavic tribes that migrated in different waves and were, in essence, distinct peoples.

The concept of the “triune Russian people” is a false construct of imperial ideology that supplants historical consciousness. Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church has invoked this concept to justify claims to Ukraine as part of his church’s canonical territory. Putin, however, has gone further. He adopted this idea from Russian nationalists in a more radical form, according to which neither the Ukrainian people nor the Ukrainian language exist at all, and Ukraine is merely a borderland of Russia.

According to this worldview, the West has always sought to destroy Russia and, to that end, imposed upon the Russian population of Ukraine the idea that they are Ukrainians rather than Russians. Ukrainian identity, in this interpretation, was invented by Russia’s enemies: it is portrayed as an Austro-Hungarian project in which an artificial language was allegedly created on the basis of rural Ukrainian dialects and borrowings from Polish.

Following Russian nationalist thought, Putin perceives Ukrainian identity as a hostile ideology akin to Nazism, from which Ukrainian society must be “liberated” – that is, subjected to “denazification.” In practice, this means the destruction of the Ukrainian language and of Ukrainian cultural and historical consciousness. Consequently, in the occupied territories of Ukraine, all those who in any way manifest Ukrainian identity are subjected to repression.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the formation of new civic nations began in both Ukraine and Russia. In Ukraine, this process advanced at an accelerating pace, and external aggression only hastened it. Because Ukrainian self-identification manifests itself in diverse forms, this process has been accompanied by intense public debate, including mutual accusations that are often unjust. Nevertheless, a shared basis for mutual understanding has already emerged: the Ukrainian civic nation consists of all those who take responsibility for Ukrainian culture and language. In other words, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, a person is Ukrainian if they consider themselves Ukrainian and assume responsibility for Ukraine.

In Russia, by contrast, the process of forming a civic nation was impeded by imperial consciousness. When the security services came to power under Putin, this imperial consciousness mutated into a new form – necro-imperialism. To justify their claims to Ukraine, Russian necro-imperialists portray Ukrainian identity as a Nazi ideology. Yet for such an absurd assertion to be believed at all, one must first transform one’s own identity into an ideology.

It is precisely this ideological transformation of identity in mass Russian consciousness that led to the abortion of a Russian civic nation. Today, nothing unites Russian society except violence and imperial ideology. In other words, in place of a national identity, a void has emerged – one filled by ideology. This void only intensifies fear of Ukrainian identity, especially against the backdrop of the rapid formation of a Ukrainian civic nation. For this reason, many Russians refuse to believe even their closest relatives in Ukraine.

Is There a Way Out?

We can now answer the question posed at the beginning. A national identity can be false when identification is based on allegiance to a political regime or to power itself, and when it depends on the denial of another people’s identity. Such a false identity condemns societies to endless wars: the end of one war merely marks the beginning of preparations for the next.

As long as Russians do not abandon this false identity, they will be unable to believe their loved ones in Ukraine and will continue to support the war. Consequently, it is not enough merely to defeat Russia militarily; it is also necessary to support the formation of new identities among the peoples of Russia – identities that are not bound to imperial ideology.

Nikolai Karpitsky. The Uprising of the Archaic: Why Do People Choose Dictatorship

Source: PostPravda.info 14.05.2025.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/the-uprising-of-the-archaic/

Thanks to information technologies, a global space of communication has emerged. The world is now in a transitional state on the path toward a new information society, in which conflicts over territorial control should lose their significance. It is precisely during this transitional period that an uprising of archaic thinking against modernity has begun.

The war against Ukraine constitutes a second front in a broader war against modern civilization. The first front was opened by international terrorism, beginning with the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. This war confronts us with a fundamental question: Why do so many people choose evil? Is it a coincidence that the establishment of dictatorship in Russia, the rise of international terrorism, and the transformation of the internet into an element of everyday life are all occurring within the same historical period?

What Caused the Uprising of the Archaic?

All transitional historical periods are accompanied by social upheaval. This occurs because many people fail to adapt to change and instead struggle to restore archaic forms of life. One example that directly concerns me is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which led to the establishment of a totalitarian regime with imperial ambitions. It concerns me personally because, just last night, not far from where I am, Geran drones – developed using Iranian technology – once again struck nearby.

Today, it is not a single region but the entire world that finds itself in a transitional state; consequently, there is a danger that local wars may escalate into a Third World War.

The transition to an information society is associated with the emergence of a global space of communication in which state borders and language differences have ceased to be barriers to interaction. The human psychotype itself is changing. Modern children are rarely alone – they are in constant contact with one another. No one yet knows how this will transform human nature. Some people use the opportunities provided by information technologies for self-development and creativity, while others retreat into informational bubbles of like-minded individuals, where absurd and dangerous myths are born.

Characteristics of Archaic and Modern Consciousness

The uprising of the archaic encompasses both archaic dictatorships and modern democracies. A defining feature of modern civilization is the priority of the individual over society as a whole. Modern society differs from archaic society in that human rights form the foundation of the legal system, and respect for personal self-identification lies at the heart of morality. A moral attitude toward a person is determined by their individuality, not by nationality, social status, or membership in a particular community.

A hallmark of an archaic worldview is the priority of the collective over the individual. This is expressed in the denial of the right to self-identification: a person is not entitled to independently determine their religious, national, social, or gender identity – these are instead decided by the collective, clan, estate, society, or the state. Even the choice of whom to love in a patriarchal society was determined not by the individual, but by their parents.

Let us imagine the patriarchal life of a village. For centuries, almost nothing changed there: invasions, changes of power, and revolutions passed it by. Yet there is no hiding from the ubiquitous internet, and through it the wider world penetrates this closed environment – bringing with it attitudes toward tradition, religion, upbringing, and sexuality that are alien and unacceptable to it. To the horror of the elders, their children adopt these foreign norms. The most common reaction is denial – a refusal to acknowledge the changes. Yet there are always those who join radical or terrorist movements, believing that the modern world embodies evil and that any crimes committed against it are justified. This is how ISIS, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and similar organizations emerged, in which good is declared evil and evil is declared good.

The Right to Self-Identification

A person has the right to self-identification, including identification grounded in archaic values. Archaic consciousness is neither good nor bad – it is natural. What becomes unnatural is its distortion when it collides with modernity, giving rise to hatred and a perception of the surrounding world as evil. Islamic extremism is no longer archaic; it has nothing in common with traditional Islam. It is a new phenomenon that emerged from the conflict between the archaic and the modern.

However, it would be a serious mistake to divide people rigidly into “archaic” and “modern.” The same individual may be guided by archaic values in some areas of life while being entirely modern in others. Thus, Elon Musk, while modern in scientific and technological terms, has revealed himself to be markedly archaic in aspects of his personal life – specifically, in his inability to accept his child’s gender identity, which has influenced his political views.

Nevertheless, I do not mean to suggest that modern views are inherently “better” than archaic ones. I am generally opposed to such hierarchical evaluations. Both archaic and modern beliefs deserve equal respect. The only unacceptable beliefs are those that lead to harm being inflicted on others. That is why the defining feature of a modern state is a legal system that protects the rights and identity of every individual – including the right to uphold both archaic and modern values.

Fear of Modernity and the Denial of Reality

The conflict between the archaic and the modern continually arises and is resolved with each generational change. This is a natural condition of human history. The problem lies not in the conflict itself, but in the fact that fear of modernity can give rise to new phenomena that transform archaic consciousness into a dangerous form. This fear is reborn as hatred and leads to situations in which conservative people, who previously lived by traditional values, suddenly begin to support evil.

One of the conditions for such a transformation is a defensive psychological reaction – the denial of reality. There is a specific term for this phenomenon: denialism.

Denialism is a worldview based on the irrational rejection of reality, especially when it contradicts a person’s beliefs. It includes the denial of empirically verifiable facts about which there is broad consensus within the scientific community. Examples of denialism include the denial of viruses that cause AIDS and COVID-19, various conspiracy theories, Fomenko’s “New Chronology,” the anti-vaccination movement, the Flat Earth theory, and similar beliefs. Under stable social conditions, adherents of such views are perceived as marginal, but during transitional periods their influence increases sharply.

Why Do Conservative Believers Support Cynical Populists?

One of the most paradoxical phenomena accompanying the uprising of the archaic is the alliance between cynics, the ochlos, and conservatives oriented toward traditional moral values.

The term ochlos is used here to denote poorly educated people focused on immediate self-interest and unconcerned with questions of morality or politics. Until recently, they had little influence on political life; however, once they entered the global space of communication, they instinctively began to support populists, perceiving cynicism and egoism as social norms. This has led to a situation in which provocative behavior – lying, sexual scandals, and public outrage – which once could have destroyed a political career, has now become a key factor in the success of cynical populists.

Why, then, are such politicians supported by representatives of the conservative intelligentsia and religious communities? Moreover, they often justify this support by appealing to moral values. This phenomenon is most vividly expressed in religious circles. Political populists present themselves as defenders of conservative morality – and, in essence, as protectors against change itself. Many believers see such leaders as the last barrier to the moral degradation of society and therefore forgive them personal moral failings and even criminal behavior.

However, not all defenders of public morality possess a personal ethical position formed through inner self-determination. In a religious context, such a position is shaped through personal communion with God. At the same time, religion also confers its authority upon the moral system prevailing in society at a given historical moment. Thus, if in the Middle Ages the dissection of corpses was considered immoral, Christian morality condemned it; today it does not, because society’s attitude toward this practice has changed.

Since patriarchal morality predominated in archaic societies, it is precisely this moral framework that believers who have not developed an inner ethical position of their own often set in opposition to modernity. It is within this milieu that support for cynical politicians emerges – politicians who are perceived as defenders of public morality.

At What Point Does the Position of Conservative Believers Transform into a Rejection of the Modern World?

In 2014, all attempts at dialogue between conservative evangelical Christians in Russia and Ukraine collapsed, even though prior to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine they had been friends and perceived no significant differences between themselves. Russian Christian leaders explained their support for Putin by appealing to conservative values; however, the very fact that they positioned themselves in opposition to their Ukrainian co-believers indicates the loss of a shared religious and moral foundation. Put simply, their religious conservatism was transformed into Russian fascism, also known as rashism.

At the same time, many Ukrainian evangelical Christians supported – and continue to support – Donald Trump, which has drawn criticism from other co-believers. However, within the Ukrainian evangelical community this did not result in a schism, because their conservative consciousness did not undergo the same transformation that occurred among their Russian counterparts.

A similar pattern can be observed in other religious traditions. In 2011, I was one of the organizers of an interfaith dialogue in Tomsk that brought together representatives of nearly all confessions. The goal was to encourage participants to listen to perspectives different from their own and to refrain from imposing their views. This task was handled particularly well by a Krishna devotee, whom participants trusted, sensing her sincerity and openness to dialogue. At one point, she remarked that she wanted a safe world for her children, and that such a world was possible only if there were a shared moral understanding common to all confessions.

However, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, she morally supported Putin’s position and the actions of the Russian army and categorically refused dialogue with Ukrainians – even with Ukrainian co-believers. This led to a rupture in the interfaith dialogue and to its effective transformation into a closed sect.

I recall that in the prewar period, when we communicated quite well, she would sometimes speak out against vaccinations and sometimes against democracy, calling it “demon crazy” (that is, the rule of crazy demons). I regarded this as mere eccentricity and did not attach much importance to it. As it turned out, her moral position was merely a reaction to fear of modernity – a kind of psychological defense mechanism. With the start of the full-scale invasion, another defense mechanism was activated: blind faith in a leader. I observed similar “eccentricities” among other participants in the interfaith dialogue who now refuse to communicate with their Ukrainian co-believers. This was not simply eccentricity, but a form of denial of reality which, under the conditions of a necro-imperial dictatorship, transformed into a worldview so far removed from their religion that they lost the capacity for dialogue even with fellow believers.

What Do Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Xi Jinping Have in Common?

In the politics – and even in the political rhetoric – of these three leaders, the concept of human rights is virtually absent. Yet it was precisely an orientation toward the value of the individual and the protection of human rights that enabled the West to prevail over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. All three leaders operate within the conceptual framework of archaic imperialism.

The United States and India are the world’s largest democracies, and the resurgence of the archaic in these societies will likely continue until a new generation comes of age. China, however, thanks to Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, transformed from a totalitarian empire into an archaic empire. For this reason, it remains unclear how long China can remain in this intermediate state and in which direction it will ultimately move – toward democracy or back toward totalitarianism.

Trump, Modi, and Xi Jinping understand one another well and believe that they understand Putin – but they are mistaken. Although Putin draws on archaic elements, he has come to preside over an entirely new political system: necro-imperialism.

What Is Necro-Imperialism?

The goal of archaic imperialism is prosperity for oneself at the expense of others. For this reason, warring empires could negotiate peace once they recognized that continued war was no longer profitable. The goal of totalitarian imperialism, by contrast, is power in the service of an idea, even if that pursuit ultimately harms the empire itself. Peace with such regimes can be achieved only when their ideology and power are fundamentally threatened.

The goal of necro-imperialism is to make the world “simpler” through death and destruction. Any peace agreements with such a system are meaningless. Necro-imperialism can be stopped only by force. This is precisely what Western leaders failed to understand when they attempted to integrate Russia into the international economic and political system. As a result, they were unprepared for open confrontation with a necro-imperial regime whose consolidation they themselves had helped to enable.

Nikolai Karpitsky. Post-Truth and War: How to Distinguish Truth from Lies?

Source: PostPravda.info 16.07.2025.
URL:https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/post-truth-and-war/

Post-truth is a phenomenon of the information space in which emotions and subjective perception become more important than objective facts. Under conditions of post-truth, anyone can create and disseminate fakes, while people consume only information that confirms their own point of view, becoming trapped in information bubbles in which even the most absurd theories circulate. Yet there is a terrible truth — the death of people in war — which Kremlin propagandists seek to devalue through a flood of fakes and false narratives. How, under such conditions, can one find criteria that make it possible to distinguish truth from lies?

Truth — Lies — Post-Truth

In Soviet times, the authorities feared the truth and therefore introduced censorship, banned independent media, and jammed Western radio stations. The Soviet information space was a realm of lies that could be easily refuted by facts. For example, many Soviet citizens sincerely believed that poverty prevailed everywhere in the West and that ordinary people there earned less than they did. In those years, I naively assumed that if people were told the truth and it was supported by facts, they would stop trusting propaganda. For a brief period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when censorship was abolished, I believed that truth had prevailed. However, the era of post-truth soon followed.

How can the essence of post-truth be illustrated with a simple example? If I claim that I play chess better than a grandmaster, that is a lie. If I actually play a game of chess against a grandmaster and lose, that is a fact revealing the truth. But if a multitude of bloggers then appears and floods the information space with interpretations casting doubt on my defeat, that is post-truth. People no longer know whom to trust and therefore choose only those sources of information that confirm what they already want to believe.

Another example. The claim that Chechens blew up residential buildings in Russia in the autumn of 1999 is a lie. The fact that FSB agents from Moscow were caught red-handed in Ryazan while attempting to plant explosives in another building points to the FSB’s involvement in organizing the terrorist attacks. The version promoted by Yulia Latynina — that the FSB planted explosives not to blow up a residential building, but to stage the prevention of a fake terrorist attack in order to receive a reward — already belongs to the realm of post-truth.

Lies can be refuted by facts; however, in the era of post-truth, facts lose their persuasive power because emotional perception becomes more important than knowledge. As a result, many residents of Russia voluntarily relinquish free access to truthful information and continue to believe in the absurd narratives of Kremlin propaganda.
 

Isolated Information Bubbles

Twenty years ago, I regarded the internet as a shared space of freedom. Today, however, I see this space fragmenting into isolated information bubbles. People living within different bubbles perceive reality so differently that they cease to understand one another.

In the era of post-truth, people choose information sources that resonate with their emotional perception of events. If the subjective assessment of an incompetent blogger aligns with the prevailing mood of the majority, their posts may exert greater influence on public opinion — and even on the positions of public officials — than objective scholarly research. Those information outlets that appeal primarily to emotions rather than to facts are the ones that succeed.

An information bubble arises because people process information through the filter of their own prejudices, fears, psychological complexes, pursuit of material gain, desire for social recognition, and need to enhance their status in the eyes of others. They begin to communicate exclusively with those who share a similar worldview, thereby isolating themselves within a single bubble. Inside such a bubble, a shared picture of the world takes shape in which even the most absurd claims are perceived as real. It is impossible to persuade such people with facts: they either reinterpret facts to confirm their existing views or simply ignore them.

Kremlin propaganda deliberately creates such information bubbles, in which people come to believe absurd narratives — for example, that the protests on the Maidan in 2014 were allegedly financed by the United States, that Washington then staged a coup and brought Nazis to power in order to unleash a war against Russia.

Should Eyewitnesses Be Trusted?

In 2015, I was delivering food to people affected by Russian shelling in Avdiivka. Together with a volunteer from a local Baptist church, I entered an apartment damaged by a rocket from a Grad multiple-launch rocket system. Against the backdrop of fire damage, next to religious icons, hung a portrait of Viktor Yanukovych. Through tears, an elderly woman said, “Under him, it was possible to live — and now there is war. At any moment, you could be killed.”

How can one persuade a person who does not understand politics and makes sweeping generalizations guided by fear and emotion?

In the summer of 2022, Russian forces regularly shelled Sloviansk, where I live, using Smerch and Uragan multiple-launch rocket systems. In early September of the same year, Peter Kashuvara and I drove around the city and spoke with residents of a high-rise building that had been hit twice by shelling. The building had no electricity, gas, or water; people were gathering firewood and preparing for winter. Mostly pensioners remained there — people who poorly understood what was happening in the world — but not only them.

A young woman greeted us with, “Glory to Ukraine!” Nearby, an older man deliberately repeated, “Who was firing? It’s unclear!”, hinting that it was Ukrainian, not Russian, forces that had shelled the area. It is to such “eyewitnesses” that Russians appeal when they continue to believe Putin and accuse me of not understanding what is really happening in Ukraine.

A week later, Ukrainian forces liberated Izium. Oleksandr Reshetnyk — a chaplain whom I know personally — posted on his Facebook page footage of destroyed Russian multiple-launch rocket systems that had been shelling Sloviansk from the direction of Izium. Yet his video is unlikely to convince the man who could not believe that it was the Russians who were firing at him — or Russians themselves who continue to believe Putin.

In the 1990s, on November 7, I took part in a Vigil of Memory for the Victims of Bolshevik Terror together with members of the Memorial Society who had survived repression. At the same time, a communist demonstration passed by us, its participants convinced that everything had been wonderful under Stalin. Among them were many people who had lived during Stalin’s time. After that experience, how can one uncritically trust eyewitnesses in the search for truth?
 

Ignoring the Eyewitness as a Person Is a Sign of Fear of the Truth

I believe we must listen to all eyewitnesses, even when they are mistaken. But not merely listen — rather, we must try to understand their lived experience. I have spoken with residents of Donbas who were under the influence of Russian propaganda. Their beliefs are completely unacceptable to me; nevertheless, I tried to understand how they live and what is happening around them. In other words, I treated them as living witnesses whose life experience matters for understanding reality, regardless of their views or delusions.
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At the same time, I know many Christians in Russia who categorically refuse to communicate with fellow believers from Ukraine because they fear that such contact would call into question their faith in Putin. In doing so, they come into conflict with the very experience of church life, where truth is verified precisely through communion with fellow believers. To resolve this inner conflict, they begin to perceive Ukrainian fellow Christians not as living people, but as abstract figures.

From this, one can identify a clear sign of distorted perception of reality: ignoring the eyewitness as a person and denying their lived experience. Of course, an eyewitness may be mistaken, may even be a fanatic or a bearer of a misanthropic ideology. Yet they remain a living person with a life experience to which they can testify.

 

Post-Truth as the Loss of a Monopoly on Lies

The difference between today’s era of post-truth and the reign of lies in the Soviet period is that the authorities have lost their monopoly on lies. The Soviet system imposed falsehoods strictly in accordance with state ideology. Any unauthorized dissemination of lies was punished just as severely as the dissemination of truth.

Recently, I came across an antisemitic article in which the war between Russia and Ukraine was presented as the result of a “Jewish conspiracy.” It cited a fabricated “protocol” allegedly signed by representatives of Russia and Ukraine, who were said to have agreed to jointly destroy civilian populations on both sides in order to resettle the emptied territories with Jews and create a new Jewish state. The authors of this forgery claimed that the plan had been approved by Donald Trump, who supposedly personally controls both Putin and Zelensky as members of his “Jewish organization.”

Despite the absurdity of this fabrication, many ardent opponents of Putin within Russia believe it. Moreover, I have heard similar ideas expressed in Ukraine as well, voiced by ordinary people. Thus, whereas in a totalitarian system fake narratives were produced by state propaganda, in the era of post-truth any blogger can cobble together such a “protocol” and spread it online. The Russian authorities, having prepared the ground for such fakes, are no longer able to control their dissemination.
 

What Should Be Done When Everyone Insists on Their Own Truth?

Any set of facts can be connected in different ways. As a result, people often fail to reach mutual understanding even when they rely on the same factual material. Their worldviews are constructed through arbitrary generalizations of those facts. We have already experienced a totalitarian system in which a single opinion was imposed on everyone. Therefore, recognizing the right of others to hold their own beliefs about the world, religion, and history is therefore an undeniable achievement of modern civilization. However, a war is now underway, and mass killings are being justified by narratives built on arbitrary generalizations. If we do not wish to return to totalitarianism, and if we respect a person’s right to their own convictions, then we must find a criterion that both allows us to identify falsehood and avoids imposing a single “correct” point of view.

Suppose the noise of a quarrel between spouses in a neighboring apartment kept me awake at night. The next day, the husband comes by to apologize for the disturbance and claims that his wife was entirely to blame, convincingly supporting his account with facts. After he leaves, the wife herself appears with a similar apology and presents her own version, interpreting the same facts differently. I am faced with two interpretations based on arbitrary generalizations of identical facts, and I have no right to impose my own viewpoint on the neighbors as the only correct one.

However, if the husband were to argue that he is right on the grounds that all women are deceitful, I would call his position into question. I would regard his assessment of the situation as false because it rests on a premise that denigrates an entire group of people. In this way, one can formulate a criterion for identifying falsehood: the arbitrary generalization of facts on the basis of premises that justify evil toward others.

A Criterion for Identifying False Historical Interpretation

Any historical concept involves the generalization of facts, and those same facts can be generalized differently within alternative concepts. We can identify blatantly false interpretations based on falsifications, but we cannot offer everyone a single, definitively correct version of history. Moreover, competition among theories is a condition for the development of scholarship. For this reason, the coexistence of different historical interpretations — even those that contradict one another — should be regarded as legitimate.

However, I unequivocally regard the version of history that Putin presented to Tucker Carlson as false, because it is based on an assertion of Russia’s right to Ukraine — a claim by which Putin seeks to justify the killing of Ukrainians.

In other words, any historical concept that assigns the status of necessity to actions that cause evil is false. This principle can serve as a criterion for identifying false interpretations of events from the standpoint of historical, social, or political theory.
 

A Criterion for Identifying False Understandings of Religion

Every religion possesses its own inner truth, which is validated through religious experience. There are also people who lack religious experience altogether; for them, no religion conveys truth. Nevertheless, in certain cases we can confidently judge that particular religious leaders are speaking from a false religious position, and this judgment does not depend on our own religious beliefs.

Thus, one month after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on March 29, 2022, a number of Russian religious figures convened a roundtable titled “World Religions Against the Ideology of Nazism and Fascism in the 21st Century.” Participants included representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Old Believers’ Church, the Spiritual Assembly of Muslims, the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, the Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Russian United Union of Christians of Evangelical Faith (Pentecostals). Cloaking themselves in religious language, all of them expressed support for the war against the Ukrainian people. During the discussion, there was even a proposal to “cut off heads.”

Although religious experience may serve as a source of truth independent of other religions, that experience itself can be distorted, perverted, or replaced by political ideology — for example, when xenophobia and the imperative to search for enemies are imposed in the name of religion, or when an aggressive war is justified. In the Christian tradition, such phenomena are described as “demonic temptations.”

If a religious authority appeals to their faith in order to justify Russia’s war against Ukraine — that is, if they use religious narratives to justify evil — they thereby pervert their religion, adapting it to a political ideology. Without entering into theological debate, we can assert that such an interpretation is false, and that the authority’s position is not genuinely religious but quasi-religious, because it rests on a distorted form of religiosity.
 

Conclusions

The search for truth is an ongoing process that requires doubt and a critical attitude toward every source of information. At the core of post-truth lies the assumption that emotional perception is more important than knowledge, inner conviction more important than objective evidence, and that only those facts are taken into account that confirm an already established worldview.

In the Soviet period, we sought to uncover and disseminate truthful information. The authorities resisted this because they feared the truth. In the era of post-truth, however, sources of reliable information are drowned in an ocean of content that reflects nothing but subjective perceptions. As a result, today the authorities no longer fear the truth.

When truth is replaced by subjective attitudes toward events, openly false narratives become legitimized amid a multitude of seemingly plausible versions — for example, those propagated by Russian propaganda to justify the war against the Ukrainian people. Yet we do not necessarily need to strive for a single, universal understanding of truth; it is sufficient to identify criteria that allow us to recognize falsehood.

If a person lives in a world in which they believe they are compelled to commit evil, then the problem lies not in the world itself, but in how that person understands it. This indicates the presence of an assumption that justifies evil — an assumption accepted on faith as the foundation of their worldview and used to interpret and generalize all events. It is precisely this circumstance that provides grounds for considering such an understanding of the world to be false.

Nikolai Karpitsky. War as an End in Itself: Why Does Russia Never Run Out of Volunteers Willing to Die in Ukraine?

Source: PostPravda.info 05.12..2024.
URL:https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/war-as-an-end-in-itself/

 

In 2022, there were expectations that if the Russian army suffered unacceptable losses, it would retreat. These expectations were not fulfilled. In the following years, there were hopes that massive manpower losses would soon leave the Russian army without the ability to continue fighting. These hopes were not fulfilled either. Now there is an expectation that, if hostilities in Ukraine cease, Russia will require at least several years to rebuild its army before launching a new war. This expectation, too, will not be fulfilled.

Russia will be ready to attack the Baltic states or Poland as soon as it frees its forces from Ukraine. At present, NATO has little to counter this.

This raises several questions:

Why does the Russian military command ruthlessly expend soldiers and remain indifferent to losses within its own army?

Why does the inflow of contract soldiers into the Russian army not decrease, despite their being mercilessly expended in suicidal assaults?

Why do Russian soldiers not rebel or surrender, but instead obediently go to their deaths when sent into senseless attacks?

Why is Russian society indifferent to enormous military losses and continues to support the war?

War as an End in Itself

We are faced with a unique historical phenomenon: a society supports a war waged against a neighboring people at the cost of the ruthless extermination of its own soldiers. Even the sick and the disabled are sent into suicidal assaults. This is possible only because a form of societal consent to meaningless death exists. Nothing comparable can be found elsewhere. Societies may, at times, accept enormous sacrifices for the sake of victory – but only when those deaths are perceived as meaningful and necessary.

Of course, one should not generalize to all Russians. In Russia, there are tens of millions of people who oppose the war and support Ukraine. However, they are fragmented and do not constitute a collective political subject. By societal consent to meaningless death, I mean a balance of forces within society that makes possible mass support for war as an end in itself – war for the sake of war. I identify two preconditions for such consent.

“The State of Death”: A Social Anti-System in Russia

The first precondition is socio-historical in nature. It was articulated by the Russian historian Dmitry Savromat (Chernyshevsky), who emigrated to Uruguay, in discussions on his personal YouTube channel Total War and History. There, he proposed an interpretation of Russia as a military power – an “Empire of People’s Suffering.”

To become an empire, a state must possess some advantage over its rivals. The Tsardom of Muscovy had no such advantage except one: the ruthless expenditure of human life to achieve the goals of those in power. Nothing comparable existed elsewhere, even in the most brutal empires.

The treatment of one’s own population as a disposable resource has persisted throughout Russian history and made it possible to achieve victories through sheer numbers, without regard for losses. Poverty and the absence of rights are necessary conditions for the functioning of such a state system, which has condemned it to permanent scientific and technological backwardness. Today, however, we are witnessing the degeneration of this cruel system into something even more horrific – a “state of death,” or an “anti-system” (a term Dmitry Savromat borrows from Lev Gumilev).

According to Savromat, the Russian “anti-system” devours itself and leads to death. This is manifested in an “economy of death,” in which revenues from the sale of oil and gas are exchanged for payments to the families of the dead and for the enrichment of those who profit from their deaths. As a result, a powerful social base of support for both the regime and the war has formed.

This base includes representatives of the repressive apparatus – the so-called siloviki – who fear being sent to the front themselves and therefore carry out even the most insane orders without question. They outnumber those fighting against Ukraine by roughly ten to one, which makes any mass protest within Russia virtually impossible.

It also includes the “plebs”: the impoverished population of depressed regions, into which money has begun to flow for the first time because of the war. For them, the end of the war would mean the cessation of these cash inflows and the return from the front of criminals who know nothing how to do except kill. It is precisely this milieu that ensures a constant inflow of volunteers into the army – people who sign contracts not only for the money, but also because they see it as their only chance to rise from the social bottom.

As Dmitry Savromat explains, throughout the entire history of the Russian army, soldiers have been regarded as expendable material. However, within the “anti-system” that has now taken shape in Russia, a new factor has emerged: sending soldiers to their deaths has become profitable. Contract soldiers arrive accompanied by large sums of money. One option is to keep such a soldier in the rear in exchange for a bribe; another is, on the contrary, to send him to his death and report it later in order to continue receiving payments in his name. The more frequently personnel are rotated, the more opportunities arise to profit from them.

Thus, an army system has formed that exterminates its own soldiers first and only then the enemy’s. In Russian society, volunteers are not regarded with sympathy, which is why society is largely insensitive to military losses. For the state, the deaths of soldiers at the front also reduce the social burden: the dead do not require medical treatment or long-term social support.

The Foundation of the Social “Anti-System”: A Worldview in Which Good and Evil Are Reversed

The second precondition for supporting war as an end in itself is a particular attitude toward life that shapes patterns of behavior in Russian society – or, more precisely, a particular attitude toward death. It has an existential character and is formed on the basis of a worldview in which any phenomenon or event is explained by the presence of an enemy who embodies primordial evil. In relation to such an enemy, all moral constraints are lifted. Any good deed toward the enemy is considered evil, and any evil deed good. For the bearer of this worldview, all notions of value, goodness, and justice are inverted: amorality is treated as a virtue, and atrocities as a benefit.

History shows that such a worldview tends to emerge when a community finds itself in an alien cultural environment or fails to adapt in time to rapid changes in the world. In other words, its condition of emergence is the perception of the surrounding world as alien. Two variants of this worldview have arisen, embodying two different emotional dispositions: Manichaeism and Gnosticism.

Manichaeism proceeds from the idea that our bright world has become mixed with a world of primordial evil and that, therefore, we are doomed to eternal struggle. Gnosticism, by contrast, proceeds from the idea that our world was created by mistake or by the will of an evil god; therefore, everything in it is meaningless, there is no distinction between good and evil deeds, and hence no point in resisting evil. On the basis of these two outlooks, various doctrines and quasi-religious teachings have emerged; most often, however, they have generated destructive tendencies within existing religions – most notably Christianity and Islam.

The ruthless attitude of the Russian authorities toward their own population led to the emergence of a Manichaean disposition within Orthodoxy. One symptom of this disposition was the seventeenth-century church schism over ritual disagreements which, from the perspective of Greek Orthodoxy, were not even worthy of attention. In Russia, however, the ferocity of the schism led to collective self-immolations. Clearly, the issue was not the ritual differences themselves, but the perception of the surrounding world as alien and hostile.

In terms of values, Manichaeism is the opposite of Christianity, and therefore of Orthodoxy as well. When the Bolsheviks launched their struggle against religion, they embodied in their doctrine of class struggle the Manichaean attitude toward life that Orthodoxy had previously restrained – however imperfectly – like a leaky dam. The Bolsheviks saw their mission as liberating the world from exploitation – that is, from evil – and establishing a just society – that is, a kingdom of good. Moral obligations applied only to those who were close in class terms; toward enemies, everything was permitted. This logic served as a justification for mass repression.

However, communist ideology had two sides. First, there was ruthless class struggle against enemies; second, there was a utopia of a just society – a bright future, the conquest of space, progress, and the like. With the onset of the era of oil-fueled prosperity, class struggle became less relevant, and society fell asleep in a utopian dream, believing it lived in the freest and most humane country – until the collapse in oil prices woke it up.

The ideology of class struggle gave rise to social necrophilia, which was reflected even in Soviet symbolism. Yet class struggle was waged for higher goals, albeit false ones – for the sake of establishing justice and happiness – which fully corresponded to a Manichaean worldview. Today, however, a different mood prevails in Russia. There is no longer faith in either the future or justice. Although Western countries are regarded as hostile, one’s own country has also become alien. There is no longer a bright idea worth fighting for.

Of course, people differ, and in Russia as elsewhere they think and feel in different ways, so it would be impermissible to generalize about all Russians. But the issue here is not the population as a whole; it is the dominant mood that determines the course of social life. This mood no longer corresponds to a Manichaean worldview, but rather to a Gnostic one. Since everything is perceived as meaningless, there is no difference between doing good and doing evil. All that remains is to acknowledge this meaninglessness of life, do whatever one wishes, and then die just as meaninglessly. Thus, social necrophilia in today’s Russia is grounded not in a Manichaean worldview, as in the Soviet Union, but in a Gnostic sense of the world.

Gnostic Fatalism Among Russian Soldiers at the Front

But if everything is meaningless, why do people join the army to fight against Ukraine? Let us imagine an ordinary person from a depressed region. There are no jobs, there are constant conflicts at home, and in the eyes of those around him he is nobody – an empty space. This produces a feeling of personal insignificance, as if one does not truly exist. The most difficult part is having to expend all one’s strength merely to sustain existence in a world that appears meaningless – for example, earning money only to return to a home filled with constant quarrels.

Of course, it is easier to escape into alcohol or drugs. Such a condition suppresses the instinct of self-preservation, and death is no longer perceived as an evil, since the distinction between good and evil has lost its meaning. The simpler the world, the less effort is required to live in it – and war and death make the world precisely simpler. This is the necrophilic mood rooted in a Gnostic worldview.

And so such a person is offered the chance to go to war in Ukraine. By default, he accepts Russian propaganda as truth, although in reality he does not care who is responsible for the war. What matters to him is something else: a sense of his own significance and impunity. He is promised that if he survives, he will be respected as a veteran. In simple terms, he – someone whom everyone had previously regarded as a nobody – will be able to commit acts of arbitrariness, and others will be forced to reckon with him. But for that, he must be ready both to kill and to die.

A psychologically healthy person would hardly agree to this. But in a Gnostic state of mind, in which the instinct of self-preservation is suppressed and the distinction between good and evil has collapsed, agreement comes easily. There are tens of millions of such people in Russia, which is why the flow of volunteers into the Russian army does not run dry.

There was social necrophilia in the Soviet Union as well, but of a different kind: there, people went to kill and die for an idea, whereas in today’s Russia they do so for the opportunity to exercise arbitrary power. If everything is meaningless, then no moral constraints remain – not only in relation to others, but even in relation to one’s own people. This Gnostic form of social necrophilia is accompanied by Gnostic fatalism.

A Ukrainian officer I know once referred to this as “Russian fatalism” after being struck by wartime footage showing two Russian soldiers squatting down to smoke. At that moment, one of them had his head blown off by shrapnel. The other did not even flinch and calmly finished his cigarette.

Fatalism takes different forms. There is Stoic fatalism, in which a person accepts their fate but still acts honestly, in accordance with rational nature and participation in universal Reason – or in God. What we are dealing with here, however, is something entirely different: a Gnostic fatalism in which a person sees no meaning in life and has come to terms with death – both their own and that of others whom they have come to kill in a foreign country. In place of God there is a black hole that sucks meaning out of existence. It is precisely this fatalism that drives Russian soldiers to march into senseless, suicidal assaults instead of rebelling against commanders who profit from their deaths.

Can the Russian Army Be Stopped?

History repeats itself. When Russia has won wars, it has done so through sheer numbers; when it has lost, it has done so because of technological backwardness. Neither Ukraine nor Europe possesses a mechanism for mobilizing the inhabitants of depressed regions in a comparable way, so the numerical balance of forces will continue to shift in Russia’s favor. Of course, NATO’s militaries are far more technologically advanced and, in the event of a war with Russia, could inflict colossal damage. But what happens after NATO’s high-tech weapons are depleted, while the Russian army continues to be replenished by volunteers?

It is already evident that military strategies for confronting Russia must be rewritten with this distinctive mode of warfare in mind. I very much hope that the development of drones and artificial intelligence will gradually replace soldiers on the battlefield, just as the development of robotics displaced workers in industrial production. In that case, Russia would lose its only real advantage over more technologically advanced societies.

A professional contract army could have become a formidable force; however, within the anti-system that has taken shape in Russia, it can only degenerate. The money that contract soldiers bring with them into the army fuels corruption and drug trafficking within the Russian military, which remains operational only because the constant influx of fresh manpower continues to compensate for these processes of internal decay. For this reason, Ukraine must be supported so that it can withstand this most dangerous period – defending not only itself, but Europe as a whole, from further Russian aggression.

Nikolai Karpitsky. Russia Lives in a Looking-Glass World. There, it is already at war with the West

Translation from Russian: Postimees.ee 12.11.2025.
URL: https://rus.postimees.ee/8359583/mnenie-esli-rossiya-reshit-napast-na-strany-baltii-my-uznaem-ob-etom-zaranee-no-ne-ot-analitikov

Russia continues to retain the initiative and achieve successes on the battlefield not only because of its own actions, but also because both Ukraine and Western countries repeatedly find themselves unprepared for each new round of military escalation in Europe. Four such rounds can be identified: the occupation of Crimea (2014), the invasion of eastern Ukraine (2014), the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2022), and the transition to a war of attrition (2023). Will there be a fifth round of military escalation – an invasion of the Baltic states?

Common Sense Is Inapplicable to the Analysis of Russia’s Actions

At each stage, Russia could have been stopped. In 2014, Russia was not yet ready for a full-scale war, but the West, instead of providing military assistance to Ukraine, pushed it toward capitulation within the framework of the Minsk process. The Russian army as it existed in 2022 could not threaten the West and was defeated in Ukraine; however, the West failed to seize this opportunity and allowed the conflict to turn into a prolonged war of attrition – for which Ukraine was also unprepared.

Today, the balance of military power has shifted in Russia’s favor, and once it completes a large-scale reform of its armed forces, Europe’s military lag will grow even greater.

Professional analysts, the broader public, and political leadership – both in Ukraine and in the West – have all made misjudgments because they assumed the applicability of common sense: the belief that political actors understand their own interests in light of reality and act accordingly. War is disadvantageous not only from the standpoint of Russia’s interests, but even from the perspective of the narrow, self-serving interests of Russia’s ruling elites.

From the standpoint of common sense, it seemed that Putin would not start a war, since he already possessed everything he could want: enormous revenues from hydrocarbon exports, vast international influence, unchallenged personal power, and an economically dependent Ukraine. What sense was there in risking everything by launching a war that could bring only losses?

Any assessment of events – whether at the level of everyday assumptions or scholarly analysis – is always made within a particular worldview. It may seem obvious that people do not want war; yet we observe that the flow of volunteers into the Russian army has not dried up, nor do we see mass condemnation of the war within Russia. Without this passive support, Russia would not be able to sustain the war for so long. Support for the war is explained by the fact that Putin’s worldview has already taken hold in the mass consciousness of Russian society.

The Worldview of the Soviet and Russian Looking-Glass Reality

There are two types of worldviews.

1. A worldview adequate to reality. This type is based on the principle of correspondence to reality itself. For example, the physical worldview is grounded in correspondence with the results of observation and experiment, while the worldview of contemporary Western politicians is based on aligning actions and beliefs with economic and political interests.

2. A worldview detached from reality. Here, the truth of any judgment is tested not by its correspondence to reality, but by its correspondence to the worldview itself. If facts cannot be fitted into it, they are ignored. Such a worldview must be internally coherent in order to replace reality.

In the first case, human consciousness is directed toward reality itself; in the second, toward an image of reality. Let us draw an analogy. Some operating systems work directly with a computer as a physical device; others operate through a virtual machine – an image of that computer created in a virtual environment.

At first glance, such an operating system may appear to function independently of the physical computer; however, if the hardware fails, the entire virtual environment ceases to function as well. Something similar happens in the social realm.

A worldview detached from reality may be entirely fantastical, as in the case of the “Flat Earth Society,” or it may mirror reality and, for that very reason, be sufficiently coherent to compete with a worldview that is adequate to reality. The coherence of the Soviet looking-glass worldview was ensured by the fact that it systematically reflected external phenomena while reversing their meanings: what was considered unacceptable everywhere else in the world was deemed necessary in the Soviet system, and vice versa.

Freedom of enterprise was portrayed as exploitation, while a one-party dictatorship was presented as popular rule; Soviet censorship was framed as freedom of speech, while freedom of speech in the West was described as manipulation of public opinion, and so on.

However, the fact that the standard of living of ordinary people in the West was significantly higher than in the Soviet Union did not fit into the Soviet worldview at all, so people were simply deceived about it. When, amid an economic crisis, they gained the opportunity to compare their own lives with life in the West, the coherence of the Soviet worldview collapsed – and with it, the Soviet Union itself.

Russian propaganda appears looser and more eclectic than Soviet propaganda, but precisely for that reason it is able to ignore contradictions and incorporate almost any fact into its looking-glass worldview.

Within the Russian looking-glass reality, as the evaluation of facts changes, the facts themselves appear to change as well. For example, Ukraine’s independence is first portrayed as an evil and a threat to Russia; then, in accordance with this assessment, Russia’s attack on Ukraine is perceived as a “response,” as if Ukraine had struck first. In this way, Russia’s own aggression is attributed to the victim.

In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainians were shocked by the fact that the Russian army was deliberately striking residential neighborhoods – but even more shocking was that their close relatives not only refused to believe them, but also imposed their own interpretation: “This is all for your sake! Just wait – our troops will soon liberate you from the Nazis!”

Stalinists preserved the integrity of their worldview either by denying facts or by assigning them the opposite meaning. In response to publications about the scale of Stalinist repression, they would say either, “That never happened!” or, “There wasn’t enough of it – they should have shot even more!”

In the Russian mass consciousness, these two principles operate simultaneously: on the one hand, eyewitness testimony from the war is denied; on the other, the war itself is evaluated positively. As a result, the looking-glass worldview of such Russians is so robust that it is virtually impossible to persuade them otherwise. That is why most Ukrainians consider communication with them pointless.

In the Russian Looking-Glass Reality, the Baltic States Are an Outpost of Western Civilization

While a rational person reacts to an event directly, a bearer of the Russian mass consciousness reacts only after the event has been reflected in the looking-glass worldview. That is, the thought process is triggered not at the moment a person learns new facts, but when those facts receive a new interpretation within that worldview. This delay in reaction is always noticeable and makes such a person recognizable, even if they attempt to pass as rational.

For the same reason, Russia will not attack a country until Russian propagandists place it at the center of the Russian looking-glass – into the position reserved for the enemy. At present, that position is occupied by Ukraine.

In the Russian worldview, the Baltic states are portrayed as an outpost of Western civilization on what is perceived as Russia’s historical territory. Therefore, an attack on them would be supported by Russian society in much the same way as the attack on Ukraine. However, at the moment, the Baltic states remain on the periphery of Russian propaganda, making an attack on them in the near future unlikely – although military preparations for such a scenario continue.

Before any attack, the Russian information space must begin talking about Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian “Nazis.” This propaganda-induced delay makes it possible to recognize Russia’s next military aggression in advance. To assess the real threat of a new war in time, it is pointless to analyze Russia’s economic conditions or political interests, since the actions of the Russian authorities do not follow the logic of rational actors. Instead, one must monitor processes within Russian mass consciousness.

Nikolai Karpitsky. Russian Myths about the Residents of Donbas. Why does Putin’s Empire need Lies?

Source: PostPravda.info 17.12.2025
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/propaganda/narratives-about-the-residents-of-donbas/

The Russian imperial mindset reproduces aggressive myths about the residents of Donbas, which Kremlin propaganda has shaped into a holistic system of narratives used to justify the war against Ukraine. These narratives continue to circulate in the public consciousness even without the direct involvement of propaganda and are already influencing the decisions of people not only in Russia but also beyond its borders. Exclusively for PostPravda.Info, Nikolai Karpitsky commented on the most widespread of these myths, drawing on his own observations of life in Donbas.

 

Whom did the residents of Donbas support after the victory of the Maidan in 2014?

Myth. After the victory of the Maidan in 2014, the residents of Donbas opposed the authorities in Kyiv and called for Russia’s help.

Premise of the myth. Pro-Russian rallies took place in Donetsk.

Commentary. Despite provocations and violence from pro-Russian supporters, mass demonstrations for the unity of Ukraine were held in Donetsk in parallel with the pro-Russian rallies in the spring of 2014. On March 5, 2014, between 5,000 and 15,000 people gathered in Donetsk’s central square under Ukrainian flags “in defense of Ukraine’s unity.” There were provocations and attacks on demonstrators. On March 13, 2014, between 500 and 1,000 people took part in a pro-Ukraine rally in the center of Donetsk. The rally ended in bloody violence from pro-Russian activists. On April 17, 2014, between 3,000 and 5,000 people gathered for a rally called “With Prayer for Ukraine” in Donetsk’s Victoria Park, which passed relatively peacefully.

Most of Donbas’s churches also spoke out in favor of Ukraine’s unity. On February 25, 2014, the Interfaith Council of Churches of Donetsk and Donetsk Region launched an interfaith prayer marathon titled “For Peace, Love, and the Integrity of Ukraine.” Every day in the center of Donetsk, collective prayers were held with the participation of representatives of Orthodox Church, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. The marathon continued until August 2014, when a series of arrests of participants forced them to leave the square.

Myth. The residents of Donbas voted for independence from Ukraine in the 2014 referendum.

Premise of the myth. On April 7, 2014, pro-Russian militants in Donetsk proclaimed the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic”, and on May 11, 2014, they organized a “referendum” in support of their decision. It seems many people took part in the referendum, but the actual number of voters cannot be verified.

Commentary. The “referendum” organized by pro-Russian militants was both illegal – since it had no legal basis – and illegitimate – since there was no civic consensus regarding its conduct. A genuine referendum presupposes prior public discussion, which in this case was completely absent. Therefore, in terms of its organization, it was not a referendum but rather a public opinion poll. Moreover, many participants did not understand what exactly they were voting for, each person interpreting the question in their own way. Participation in this event created only the illusion of having influence over the situation – a result of a psychological defense mechanism against fear of the future. For many, this was the only reason to come to the so-called “referendum.”

Who is responsible for terrorizing the residents of Donbas?

Myth. After the victory of the Maidan in 2014, the new authorities in Kyiv began repressions against the residents of Donbas, which led to the struggle for separation from Ukraine.

Premise of the myth. Propagandistic disinformation spread in the media that was never confirmed.

Commentary. There are no recorded cases of ideologically motivated torture or killings of Donbas residents committed by supporters of Ukraine’s unity, whereas numerous examples exist of such acts committed by pro-Russian forces.

The first act of large-scale ideological violence occurred on March 13, 2014, when participants of a pro-Russian rally attacked demonstrators advocating for Ukraine’s unity, injuring several dozen people and killing a 22-year-old man, Dmytro Chernyavsky. On May 24, 2014, militants destroyed the prayer marathon tent, and one of its participants – Serhii Kosyak, pastor of the Donetsk Evangelical Church Assembly of God – was temporarily detained and beaten. On July 4, 2014, the pro-Russian group known as the “Russian Orthodox Army” captured another participant of the marathon, Father Tykhon Kulbaka, a Greek Catholic priest. Suffering from diabetes and deprived of medication, Father Tykhon spent 12 days in captivity, was tortured, and survived only by miracle. On June 8, 2014, in Sloviansk, pro-Russian militants under the command of Igor Girkin (Strelkov) abducted, brutally tortured, and executed four members of the Pentecostal church Transfiguration of the Jesus: two deacons – Viktor Bradarsky and Volodymyr Velychko – and two sons of the church’s pastor – Ruvym and Albert Pavenko. On August 8, 2014, pastor and prayer marathon participant Oleksandr Khomchenko was kidnapped and tortured for four days. His health never recovered, and he died on February 14, 2018. There are many more such detailed cases, though far from all of them were ever reported in the media.

Myth. Ukraine shelled the residents of Donbas for eight years.

Premise of the myth. Stories from Donbas residents claiming that Ukraine shelled them.

Commentary. The pro-Russian forces in Donbas could conduct hostilities only with full supply and technical support from Russia, and it was precisely this factor that caused the fighting to continue. At the same time, there are two main reasons why, before the full-scale invasion, artillery exchanges along the front line often resulted in shells hitting residential areas – including instances of “friendly fire.” First, during such exchanges, both sides actively maneuvered to avoid return fire and often fired “preemptively” in order to cover presumed enemy positions. Second, both sides used artillery shells and multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) missiles that had exceeded their service life, which frequently led to deviations from the calculated trajectory and unpredictable impacts. Many eyewitness accounts are based on arbitrary generalizations – when all shelling is attributed to the side that the witness does not support.

In addition to accidental destruction, there were also deliberate provocations carried out by pro-Russian armed groups to maintain a certain level of combat activity, since their material support depended on it.

Ukraine, for its part, introduced a special legal regime for the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO) zone, which defined rules of service and legal guarantees for military personnel. Russia, however, did not establish a comparable legal framework: payments for participation in combat were issued as bonuses for “special service conditions.” Thus, pro-Russian formations had a financial incentive to maintain the intensity of hostilities – including through shelling of civilians – to provoke return fire.

The tactic of total urban destruction during assaults began to be used by the Russian side in Donbas only after the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. The Ukrainian side has never employed such tactics.

Political Traditions of Donbas Residents

Myth. The majority of Donbas residents have always voted for pro-Russian parties, which proves their desire to be with Russia rather than with Ukraine.

Premise of the myth. In the October 26, 2014 parliamentary elections, the Opposition Bloc – considered pro-Russian – won 38.9% of the vote in Donetsk Oblast. In second place was Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc with 18.2%, and in third – the Communist Party of Ukraine with 10.2%. In single-member districts of Donetsk Oblast, former members of the Party of Regions, considered pro-Russian, often won. In the July 21, 2019 parliamentary elections, the Opposition Platform – For Life, also regarded as pro-Russian, won 41.77% of the vote.

Commentary. These elections did not reflect pro-Russian sentiments, but rather a desire for compromise with Russia – so that people would not have to fear war and could freely visit relatives in the occupied territories. Residents of Donetsk Oblast generally accepted the local political discourse they were familiar with and, within that framework, chose those who in their view held a moderate position. This reflected a utopian dream of restoring a borderless space, as it had been in the Soviet Union. The full-scale invasion has shown many residents of Donbas the utopian nature of their dream of an “open” common space.

The Identity of Donbas Residents and the Influence of Russian Ideology

Myth. The residents of Donbas want to be part of Russia because they consider themselves Russians.

Premise of the myth. This myth was created by Russian propaganda based on the arbitrary generalization of individual attitudes.

Commentary. Historically, local identity has prevailed in Donbas – people tend to identify with their native village or community rather than with a nation. Soviet ideology imposed identification with an artificial collective identity – that of the “Soviet people.” What remains of it today is merely nostalgia for a shared, borderless space where friends and relatives once lived. Just as the dominance of communist beliefs in the Soviet period did not change the identity of Donbas residents, the spread of pro-Russian sentiment also could not transform it or create any genuine Russian or Russian-state identity.

Many Donbas residents still maintain a local identity and evaluate both Ukraine and Russia from the standpoint of what each can offer them. Under the influence of powerful Russian propaganda, some of the population supports Russia – but since the invasion, the number of such people has decreased. Their orientation is more ideological than national: they still do not perceive themselves as Russians. At the same time, the war in Donbas has accelerated the development of Ukrainian civic identity, while volunteerism and the emergence of internally displaced persons have strengthened it and fostered connections between regions.

Thus, there is no ethnic division in Donbas – all are united by local identity, which is becoming the foundation for a new Ukrainian civic community.

Myth. The residents of Donbas are oppressed for Russian language.

Premise of the myth. This is purely Russian propaganda, entirely disconnected from reality.

Commentary. For the majority of Donbas residents, language has never been a marker of identity – neither local nor Ukrainian. They see no problems related to language, they perfectly understand Ukrainian, and in everyday life they speak Russian or surzhyk (a mixed Ukrainian-Russian spoken language). Although not everyone can write in standard Ukrainian, this is primarily an educational issue, which is being addressed: young people in Donbas now know Ukrainian much better than the older generation. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the importance of the Ukrainian language has grown, and it is increasingly used in communication.

Myth. The residents of Donbas support Russia despite powerful Ukrainian propaganda.

Premise of the myth. The residents of Donbas trust Russian television channels more than Ukrainian ones.

Commentary. Before the start of the full-scale invasion, a significant portion of Donbas residents indeed trusted Russian TV channels – this can be explained by several factors.

First, unlike Russia, where political propaganda is centralized, Ukraine’s media space is chaotic and diverse, making it difficult for people – accustomed since Soviet times to a single, unified television narrative – to navigate. Russian propaganda felt more familiar to them because it resembled Soviet media rhetoric.

Second, Russia’s influence in the Ukrainian media space remained even after the war in Donbas began. Until February 2021, several Ukrainian TV channels were under the control or influence of Viktor Medvedchuk, a politician close to Putin – including 112 Ukraine, NewsOne, and ZIK.

Third, Russian propaganda skillfully exploited the fact that the formation of national self-awareness in Ukraine’s regions developed unevenly. Many residents of Donbas retained nostalgia for an open, borderless space – once associated with the Soviet Union, and now projected onto Russia.

All this led to a situation in which a significant part of the Donbas population came under the influence of Russian propaganda – just as it had once been influenced by Soviet ideology. However, this ideological dependence did not change their true identity – neither during the Soviet period nor today – because the nature of identity is fundamentally different from that of ideology.

Ideology requires only external agreement with a particular position, whereas identity is a form of self-awareness. One can renounce an ideology as an externally imposed viewpoint – just as happened during the collapse of the USSR, when many former communists became democrats. But one can renounce an identity only through deep personal transformation.

Russian leaders are incapable of changing or even understanding another people’s identity. They operate on the false assumption that any Ukrainian who temporarily falls under the influence of their ideology automatically becomes a “Russian,” which supposedly grants them the right to occupy the territory where that person lives. However, despite the fact that many residents of Donetsk have indeed been influenced by Russian ideology, the majority firmly oppose the inclusion of Donbas into Russia and are outraged by any talk of “territorial exchanges” as a means to achieve a ceasefire.