Nikolai Karpitsky. Russian Imperial Consciousness and the Loss of an Adequate Perception of Probability

Source: PostPravda.info 13.08.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/russian-imperial-consciousness-necro-imperialism/

 

Why do Russians believe in absurd things? What seems unlikely in the world-picture of a Westerner appears inevitable in the world-picture of Russians. The mistake made by Western analysts is that they look for a rational motivation behind the behavior of the Russian authorities. Russians, however, assess the significance of events differently and assign different probabilities to them, and this directly affects their imperial consciousness.

Why Did the West Misjudge the Military Threat from Russia?

To avoid getting lost in the flow of information, a person must establish priorities: what deserves primary attention and what should be ignored. This requires a system for assessing the probability of various events – a probability matrix. For example, before Russia attacked Ukraine, Western leaders considered it extremely unlikely that Putin would start a war. This belief was based on a world-picture in which people are assumed to be guided primarily by their own interests, whereas a major war was not in Putin’s self-interest. After all, he already had everything one could wish for: absolute power, stability within the country, international influence, and the opportunity to amass enormous wealth through the sale of natural resources. The war would put all of this at risk.

A world-picture is based on ideas or assumptions that affect the perceived probability of events. At the heart of Putin’s world-picture, as well as that of most Russians, is the belief that the West is inherently hostile to Russia and that the most important thing is to prevail in this civilizational confrontation with it. The advantage will go to whoever starts the war first, while economic interests are of secondary importance. The mistake made by Western leaders is that they arbitrarily project their own assumptions onto Russia.

However, what is impossible within one world-picture may be perceived as inevitable within another. In other words, the structure of a world-picture is itself a probability matrix according to which events are perceived and their meanings identified.

The Imperial Consciousness of Russians Is Based on a Different Probability Matrix

For ordinary Russians, the empire is Russia itself, and Russia is associated with a living space in which they feel secure. This has been the case for virtually the entire course of Russian history. Security within this vast living space can be guaranteed only by the central government; if it weakens or collapses, chaos will ensue: rampant crime, an influx of migrants, and civil war. This outlook is diametrically opposed to the one underlying European democracies, where people defend their autonomy, rights, and self-government because it is precise autonomy and self-determination that provide a sense of security.

Russian imperial consciousness shapes a world-picture based on the following assumptions:

    Russia is a distinct civilization that includes Ukraine and Belarus;
    Russia has never attacked anyone;
    Russia has always won all its wars;
    Russia expanded peacefully, with all peoples voluntarily becoming part of it;
    the West is inherently hostile to Russia, and war with it is inevitable.

Why do Russians accept such absurd beliefs, including educated intellectuals who have access to information and know how to verify and critically analyze it? Moreover, they may believe any piece of propagandistic disinformation as long as it is consistent with the Russian imperial world-picture. For example, people in the Soviet Union were convinced that Soviet troops had entered Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan government in order to forestall the Americans, who allegedly wanted to enter the country without an invitation.

Well, suppose they might not have known that Soviet troops killed Afghanistan’s leader, Hafizullah Amin, by storming his palace. Yet propaganda can be so absurd that no additional knowledge is required to recognize its absurdity. For example, Soviet people believed that Finland had attacked the Soviet Union in 1939. One only needs to look at a map to understand that this is about as implausible as the claim that our planet is ruled by reptilians. Yet human thinking is structured in such a way that even an outstanding scholar, a recognized expert in their field, may simultaneously believe in conspiracy theories or reptilians, or support an aggressive war while placing complete trust in the propaganda used to justify it. If the Soviet Union had succeeded in occupying Finland at that time, those same people would have been convinced that Finland had voluntarily joined the Soviet Union and would have regarded any talk of its independence as hostile activity.

The World-picture of a Paranoid Personality

The word “paranoid” is used not only in reference to a mental disorder but also to describe a particular type of personality that, from the standpoint of society, may be considered perfectly healthy. A paranoid personality is characterized by such qualities as heightened suspiciousness, a tendency to hold grudges, heightened sensitivity to threats, a search for hidden motives, a tendency to systematize and provide logical justifications based on arbitrary premises, a logically consistent but one-sided interpretation of events, a lack of empathy, an inability to understand another point of view, and an inability to critically examine one’s own beliefs. All these qualities result from the breakdown of the probability matrix in paranoid consciousness. A person ceases to distinguish between the most and least probable explanations of what is happening. An unlikely explanation becomes certain to them if it corresponds to their suspicions.

The breakdown of the probability matrix can lead to paranoid delusions, in which a person extracts hidden messages from completely random coincidences. For example, they may see a candy wrapper lying on the ground near their home bearing the image of a “Little Rooster – Golden Comb” and begin to suspect that someone deliberately planted it there as a hint that they intend to “send the red rooster” – that is, set the house on fire. Such an explanation is internally logical, but it rests on assumptions so highly improbable that a mentally healthy person would simply disregard them.

According to the same logic, there are all kinds of conspiracy theories and a widespread belief among Russians that the West has always sought to destroy Russia. Does this mean that all of them are paranoid? Of course not. Most are perfectly normal, healthy people. It is necessary to distinguish between those who construct a paranoid world-picture and the majority of people who agree to live within it, even though they themselves are quite ordinary rather than paranoid personalities. They should also be distinguished from indifferent people who merely pay lip service to propaganda but take no real interest in it or engage with it. Among those who construct a paranoid world-picture, there are both genuinely paranoid personalities and cynical ideologues who promote propaganda merely for the sake of their careers.

Why Do Healthy People Believe Absurd Fabrications?

The most common motivation for believing fabrications is the desire for social adaptation. If a person wants to conform to the expectations of the majority, they will, by default, accept everything that everyone else believes. It is therefore easier for them to deceive themselves than to argue with or come into conflict with those around them. Alongside this, two other dominant motivations for self-deception can be identified: fear and hope associated with a particular vision of the future.

Fear may be caused by insecurity, by the fear of losing one’s sense of security, familiar way of life, job, social status, or self-respect. It may also be connected with a perceived threat to one’s identity, culture, or hopes for the future.

Hope, by contrast, is connected with a vision of the future. Any information that calls this vision into question causes anxiety and other negative feelings, while anything that reinforces hope generates enthusiasm. A person begins to trust not the sources that are most reliable, but those that reduce anxiety and confirm their expectations. As a result, they gradually surround themselves with like-minded people who are on the same emotional wavelength. This is how an information bubble is formed, within which only information consistent with an already established world-picture is perceived.

The Mechanism of Becoming Enmeshed in a Paranoid World-picture

Any fabrication can be perceived as unquestionable reality if it fits into a person’s world-picture. Most Russians live within a world-picture characteristic of a paranoid personality and therefore believe that Russia did not attack Ukraine but is merely defending itself, while the West has allegedly installed a Nazi regime in Ukraine and is using Ukraine as a means of destroying Russia.

An ordinary person does not become trapped in a paranoid world-picture immediately. First, they must enter a common social and communicative environment with paranoid personalities. At this stage, they are still capable of recognizing that the fabrications everyone accepts as obvious truths contradict common sense. However, the seed of doubt has already been planted, and they unconsciously begin to adjust their assessment of the probability of events, treating the improbable as possible and the possible as necessary. Gradually, the probability matrix through which they perceive events begins to change.

Other motives contribute to this process: material gain, fear, the desire to keep one’s job, reach retirement safely, and avoid conflicts. In present-day Russia, this is compounded by the fear of losing one’s freedom, since an accurate assessment of reality is treated as a crime, and many people have received lengthy prison sentences for expressing such views. The desire to suppress feelings of guilt over Russia’s crimes in Ukraine may lead people to try even harder to convince themselves that it was Ukraine that started the war.

After the collapse of the communist system, a new transformation of imperial consciousness began under the influence of two factors: the desire to simplify the world and the loss of a vision of the future. With Putin’s rise to power, a new form of imperialism in Russia – necro-imperialism – became the basis of state policy, and with the beginning of the war against Ukraine, it became entrenched in Russian mass consciousness.

Mythological Consciousness and the Vision of the Future

In archaic societies, mythological consciousness structured both life and the perception of the world. Myth is a non-rational way of making sense of reality, through which everything is endowed with new mythological meaning, allowing people to overcome the fear of the unknown and come to terms with the horrors of the world. Suffering is unbearable when it is meaningless. If it becomes comprehensible within a mythological world-picture, it can be endured. However, myth offered no vision of the future, which is why archaic societies could remain in a static state for centuries without developing.

Modern society is structured differently. Today, the fear of suffering and uncertainty about the future are overcome not through myth but through a vision of the future. People hope that life can be changed, and this hope becomes a source of activity, contributing to the rapid development of modern Western civilization.

In contemporary Ukraine, various visions of the future coexist, engaging in political and societal competition. Which of these models will become dominant largely depends on the younger generation, as it is young people who are most forward-looking. In Russia, however, instead of a vision for the future, a mythologization of the past is offered, which substitutes actual history and thus encourages individuals to reconcile with a tragic reality.

But how can one come to terms with war, suffering, death, and violence? There is only one way: by imbuing them with new mythological meaning. When death, suffering, and violence perpetrated by the authorities receive sacred justification, necro-imperialism emerges.

In reality, the Russian authorities attempted to present a reconstruction of the past as a vision of the future – one in which Russia is a great military power constantly expanding its borders. During the occupation of Crimea, many Russians were galvanized by this image, leading to unprecedented support for the regime. However, as the war dragged on, this vision faded and is now sustained only by projecting mythological notions of history onto it.

Consequently, individuals are left with a choice: either accept this mythology – in which death acquires intrinsic value, making the killing of people in a neighboring country seem justified under the belief that this is simply how the world works, with war and death being natural and self-justifying – or reject it. Yet rejecting it shatters one’s entire world-picture, dissolving any vision of the future and, with it, the capacity to overcome fear of the present. It is precisely in this psychological trap, in my view, that Russian mass consciousness finds itself today.

Necro-Imperialism and the Simplification of the World-picture

Russian necro-imperialism is oriented toward the archaic, and this is connected with the desire to return to the simplest possible world-picture. The most primitive manifestation of the fear of the complexity of the world is the destructive instinct characteristic of lumpenized personalities (chavs/gopniks). People like this can be found in all spheres of society. They do not seek to create anything new or preserve what already exists. Their basic impulse is to destroy everything that seems incomprehensible or alien. Why? So that the world will become simpler. All the complexity of assigning probabilities to events is reduced to a binary scheme: yes/no, with all intermediate possibilities excluded from the probability matrix.

This impulse toward simplification is directly connected with the suppression of empathy. Gradually, the circle of people toward whom a person is capable of feeling compassion becomes narrower and narrower; everyone else is perceived as an abstraction. At that point, it is no longer difficult to accept ideological doctrines that justify their destruction. This attitude becomes an element of state ideology and permeates every sphere of Russian society. Essentially, Putin’s political style is the style of a gopnik who sees everyone who differs from him as an enemy.

If a person becomes an enemy simply by virtue of their existence, then the simplest solution would be to ensure that they no longer exist at all. And when death is perceived as a universal way of simplifying the world, a necrophilic instinct is awakened. The simplest way to simplify the world is through war. According to this logic, not only the deaths of enemies in war but also the deaths of one’s own compatriots are perceived as a simplification of the world, which helps explain the indifference of many Russians to unjustified casualties in the war against Ukraine. Thus, over the years of war, this necrophilic attitude has come to dominate Russian mass consciousness.

It is difficult to say what will happen next. However, the extreme simplification of any social system inevitably leads to a point where, sooner or later, it ceases to sustain itself and begins to collapse under its own weight. In any case, I do not believe that a social system based on necrophilia can remain viable for an extended period of time.

 

Nikolai Karpitsky. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Oleksandr Syrskyi, and Mykhailo Drapatyi: Professionalism or Military Talent?

Source: PostPravda.info 11.08.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/zaluzhnyi-syrskyi-and-mykhailo-drapatyi/

Mykhailo Drapaty – the new Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Photo: АрміяINFORM

Mykhailo Drapatyi is the third Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale war. Russia enjoys military and economic superiority over Ukraine, and confronting such an adversary requires Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief to possess not only professionalism but also genuine military talent. It was thanks to a talented military decision that the Armed Forces of Ukraine carried out their successful counteroffensive in the autumn of 2022, but in the years that followed, they lost the initiative. Ukraine now faces the challenge of reversing the course of the war during the transition to a new technological era, one that demands of the Commander-in-Chief not only experience and professionalism but also talent. Will Mykhailo Drapatyi be able to meet this challenge?

Not Every Professional Is a Talented Military Commander

When I studied history at school, I believed that the genius of a military commander lay in the ability to devise a maneuver capable of defeating a vastly superior enemy, as Hannibal did at the Battle of Cannae or Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gaugamela. Napoleon’s memoirs showed me that every seemingly unexpected military decision rests on a meticulous analysis of countless factors. A mistake in even one of them can turn what appears to be an almost certain victory into defeat. The genius of a commander lies in combining unconventional thinking and a fresh strategic vision with rigorous calculation and the careful analysis of a wide range of factors.

Since it is impossible to take every factor into account, mistakes are inevitable even for the most outstanding military commanders. This is precisely why professionalism is so important: it enables a commander to recognize and correct mistakes in time. The faster the response to mistakes, the higher the level of professionalism. Military talent, however, goes beyond correcting errors – it also consists in anticipating them. This requires the ability to recognize new circumstances and adapt to them, even when they have no precedent in previous military experience.

Typical Mistakes of the Soviet Military School

The operational plan for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 was developed by the General Staff of the Russian Federation under the leadership of Valerii Gerasimov. The plan was professionally prepared in accordance with the traditions of the Soviet military school and, under certain circumstances, might have succeeded. However, Gerasimov failed to foresee new factors that lay outside his previous military experience, which ultimately led to the plan’s failure. Subsequently, he demonstrated an ability to adapt to the changing conditions of the war, but not the ability to abandon the fundamental assumptions of the Soviet military school, according to which success depends on numerical superiority, highly centralized command, prolonged frontal offensives, holding positions at any cost, etc. All of this characterizes Valerii Gerasimov as a competent professional military commander, but not as one possessing exceptional military talent in the broader sense. His approach remains firmly rooted in the traditions of the old Soviet military school.

The Soviet Army achieved success during the Second World War by launching rapid offensives with all available forces before the enemy had time to consolidate its positions. This often resulted in decisive victories, but at times it also led to catastrophic defeats. A striking example is the Battle of Rzhev (5 January 1942 – 31 March 1943), also known as the “Rzhev Meat Grinder,” during which the Soviet Army, under the command of Georgy Zhukov, lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in futile attempts to storm well-fortified German positions.

This approach of ruthlessly expending manpower in suicidal assaults was inherited by the Russian Army, which has achieved military successes in Ukraine at the cost of enormous casualties. Numerical superiority has enabled the Russian military to treat its soldiers as expendable resources. Russian commanders understood that they would not be punished for heavy losses, whereas success on the battlefield would be rewarded. The Ukrainian command, by contrast, could not employ such tactics, both for moral reasons and because of its more limited human resources. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian Army also inherited many traditions from the Soviet military, and there may also be precedents in it for a similar attitude toward the lives of soldiers.

The Ukrainian Counteroffensive of 2022: A Demonstration of Exceptional Military Talent

According to the principles of the Soviet military school, an attacking force should possess at least a three-to-one numerical advantage at the point of breakthrough. During the autumn 2022 counteroffensive, planned under the leadership of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukrainian forces attacked an enemy that actually outnumbered them – a highly unusual departure from conventional Soviet doctrine. Moreover, the Ukrainian leadership openly announced preparations for an offensive in the Kherson region, which at first glance contradicted the basic military principle of concealing the direction of the main attack. Yet this very announcement diverted the attention of the Russian command and enabled Ukrainian forces to launch their decisive offensive in an unexpected location – the Kharkiv region. The offensive began on 6 September. On 8 September, the first town, Balakliia, was liberated, triggering the collapse of the Russian front in the area. On 10 September, the largest cities in the occupied part of Kharkiv Oblast – Izium and Kupiansk – were liberated, allowing Ukrainian forces to continue their advance.

Valerii Zaluzhnyi. Photo: Official Facebook page of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

 Knowing the outcome today, this decision may appear obvious. At the time, however, it involved enormous risk, as the success of the operation depended on a multitude of unpredictable factors that had to be anticipated. Any overlooked circumstance could have caused the offensive in the Kharkiv region to fail, which in turn would likely have undermined the offensive on the Kherson axis as well. Yet it is impossible to know in advance which particular factor will prove decisive. This is precisely why even the greatest military commanders occasionally make mistakes. Valerii Zaluzhnyi was required not only to recognize the opportunity for an unconventional military solution and possess the determination to implement it, but also to analyze a vast array of interrelated factors. In accomplishing this task, he demonstrated exceptional military talent.

The Offensive on Lyman: Professional Judgment or a Mistake?

The Kharkiv counteroffensive was directed operationally by Oleksandr Syrskyi. Overall, the operation was conducted professionally. However, a commander’s level of professionalism is measured not by the absence of mistakes but by the ability to identify them in time and adjust one’s actions accordingly. Oleksandr Syrskyi is a professional commander of the old military school, one characterized by a particular pattern of recurring errors. His operational concept was to disrupt the Russian force’s command-and-control and logistical systems as quickly as possible rather than to destroy each of its individual units.

After the liberation of Izium, the Ukrainian command faced two possible approaches to capturing Lyman. The first called or a direct assault on Liman from the direction of the Seversky Donets River — that is, from the south and west. The advantage of this option was that the assault could begin immediately, preserving the rapid momentum of the offensive. The second option was to bypass Lyman from the northeast and create the threat of encirclement. This course of action would have virtually guaranteed success but at the cost of slowing the advance, thereby giving Russian forces time to establish themselves on new defensive lines.

Oleksandr Syrskyi. Photo: Official Facebook page of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

A Soviet commander trained in the tradition of Georgy Zhukov would likely have attempted to seize Lyman through a frontal assault at any cost in order to preserve the momentum of the offensive, much as Zhukov himself did during the Battle of Rzhev. Within the Soviet military tradition, in which success is judged primarily by the outcome than by the losses incurred, such an approach is not always regarded as a mistake. This helps explain why, during the initial stages of the war, Russian commanders repeatedly launched frontal assaults on Ukrainian cities with little regard for casualties.

At that moment, Oleksandr Syrskyi could not yet know how stubbornly Russian forces would defend Lyman, although he was fully aware that the city was heavily fortified. The problem is that the decisive factors determining the success or failure of a military operation become obvious mainly in retrospect. Before an operation begins, they are concealed among countless other circumstances whose significance cannot always be assessed accurately in advance. For this reason, military art consists not only in the ability to make bold decisions but also in the willingness to abandon them timely when the course of events demonstrates that the original plan must be revised.

Following the liberation of Izium, Ukrainian forces launched an offensive against Lyman from across the Siverskyi Donets River, attacking from the west, south, and southeast of the city. This phase of the operation lasted approximately from 12 to 22 September. After the loss of Izium, the Russian command had enough time to reinforce the Lyman sector with additional troops. Unlike other parts of the front, this area was not thrown into chaos by the rapid Ukrainian advance, and Russian forces conducted their defense in an organized manner. The offensive was further complicated by the terrain: extensive forests and a limited road network favored the defenders. Although Ukrainian forces succeeded in liberating several villages in the area, the offensive from across the Siverskyi Donets River failed to capture Lyman.

Assessing the situation, the Ukrainian command abandoned further attempts at a frontal breakthrough and shifted its main effort to the north and northeast. This enabled Ukrainian forces to cut the Russian force’s lines of communication, place Lyman under operational encirclement on 30 September, and completely liberate the city on 1 October.

This raises the question of whether the frontal offensive against Lyman from across the Siverskyi Donets River was a sound professional military decision intended to pin down Russian forces, or whether it was, in fact, a mistake. Likewise, was the subsequent offensive from the northeast, which resulted in the operational encirclement of Lyman, merely a response to the failure of the original plan, or was it instead a planned continuation of that strategy? I have been unable to find definitive answers to these questions in open sources. The opinions of various authors largely depend on subjective interpretation. I believe historians will continue to debate this issue for years to come, yet historians themselves are not immune to subjective judgments. For example, some historians argue that even the disastrous Battle of Rzhev had positive strategic value because it tied down substantial Wehrmacht forces.

The Opinion of an Eyewitness

To gain additional insight, I spoke with an eyewitness to those events – retired officer and volunteer Oleksandr Palchenko from Kramatorsk, who at the time was delivering humanitarian aid and communicating personally with soldiers on the front line. He told me: “I cannot speak about the situation around Lyman as a whole, but I know the situation near Yampil very well because I was there myself. There was a bridge in Torske over the Zherebets River carrying the road to Kreminna. Instead of bypassing Yampil from the east along the old railway line from the direction of Ozerne, reaching the village of Torske, and cutting off the entire Russian force in Lyman, they began a frontal assault on Yampil, and the whole operation dragged on for ten days. The enemy managed to evacuate from Lyman and withdrew toward Kreminna.”

Yampil is a settlement southeast of Lyman. Had it been captured quickly, Ukrainian forces would have gained access to Lyman from the south. The experience of the Second World War suggests that Soviet commanders consistently favored the option promising the quickest immediate result than the one that was strategically more effective, and this preference often led to costly mistakes. Oleksandr Palchenko believes that it was not even necessary to wait for the northern offensive, which ultimately liberated Lyman. In his view, it would have been sufficient to advance from the south, bypass Yampil, and seize the bridge over the Zherebets River at Torske, thereby cutting off the Russian lines of retreat and trapping the entire Russian force in an operational encirclement. According to his assessment, such a success would have enabled Ukrainian forces to advance much farther east and liberate several additional towns.

Eyewitness Oleksandr Palchenko points out the site of the fighting near Sloviansk during the 2014 Russian invasion of Donbas to PostPravda.Info contributors Yuliia Fil and Jędrzej Morawiecki. Photo: Nikolai Karpitsky

Oleksandr Palchenko’s testimony leads me to conclude that the subsequent Ukrainian offensive from the north was a response to the failure of the original plan rather than its intended continuation. A professional military commander is capable of recognizing in time that an original operational concept requires adjustment, whereas a truly talented commander is able to foresee potential mistakes before they occur. Since overall operational responsibility for the campaign rested with Oleksandr Syrskyi, I can acknowledge him as a professional military commander of the old Soviet school. However, I cannot describe him as a commander with military talent.

For its part, the Russian command, in its determination to turn Lyman into a stronghold from which to stabilize its collapsing front, committed another error typical of the Soviet military school – it chose to hold the city at any cost. As a result, on 30 September, Lyman found itself under operational encirclement, and during the night Russian forces were forced to break out along a road that was under Ukrainian fire control. On 1 October, Ukrainian forces entered and liberated the city. It should also be acknowledged that commanders within the Ukrainian Armed Forces who had been trained in the traditions of the Soviet military school occasionally made the same mistake, leading to unnecessary casualties.

Mykhailo Drapatyi: A Representative of a New Generation of Ukrainian Military Leadership

On 22 July 2026, Mykhailo Drapatyi was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He represents a new generation of Ukrainian military leaders, and the types of mistakes characteristic of commanders shaped by the Soviet military tradition are generally absent from his record. Unlike many staff generals, Drapatyi developed as a commander through direct leadership of troops in combat, beginning in 2014. His appointment was welcomed enthusiastically by Ukrainian society, where many associate him with a break from the Soviet command culture and with hopes of improving the situation on the battlefield.

Mykhailo Drapatyi’s military talent can be assessed by examining the organization of the defense of the Pokrovsk sector. Throughout 2024, Russian forces steadily advanced toward Pokrovsk, and it remained uncertain whether their offensive could be halted. At that stage of the war, both armies were only beginning to master the large-scale use of drones, while Russia continued to enjoy a substantial advantage in artillery and manpower. A rapid fall of Pokrovsk would have opened the way for further Russian offensives on several axes and created the risk of a broader collapse of the front. For Ukraine, it was vital to gain time until the widespread deployment of drones transformed the nature of the battlefield and significantly reduced the importance of numerical superiority in artillery and manpower.

Mykhailo Drapatyi in 2022. Photo: ArmyINFORM

Toward the end of 2024, after Mykhailo Drapatyi was appointed commander of the operational grouping responsible for this sector, the situation around Pokrovsk gradually began to change. The Russian offensive did not cease, but its pace slowed noticeably, and in several sectors Ukrainian units were able to launch localized counterattacks. There are strong grounds for associating this shift with Drapatyi’s leadership, particularly the transition from a predominantly linear defense to an active, maneuver-oriented defense. The objective of this approach is not to hold every kilometer of territory at any cost, but rather to inflict the maximum possible attrition on the attacking enemy.

Ukrainian units in Donbas often sought to hold their positions until the very last moment, a practice that resulted in unnecessary personnel losses. For example, when Oleksandr Syrskyi ordered the withdrawal from Avdiivka during the night of 17 February 2024, some Ukrainian servicemen became trapped in the city and were taken prisoner. Under Mykhailo Drapatyi, by contrast, active defense has more frequently relied on the timely withdrawal from disadvantageous positions, followed by short counterattacks to recapture lost strongpoints. This approach denied the enemy the opportunity to consolidate its newly captured positions and exploit its gains.

Whereas unmanned systems units in many brigades had previously operated with considerable autonomy, after Mykhailo Drapatyi assumed command of the Pokrovsk sector they were increasingly employed as components of an integrated reconnaissance and fire-strike system. As a result, Russian assault groups more frequently suffered substantial losses before even reaching Ukrainian positions. At the same time, the number of FPV drone teams increased, the use of remote mining expanded, and coordination among unmanned systems units, artillery, mechanized formations, and air assault units improved.

A commander’s talent is demonstrated not only through spectacular victories and unconventional operational decisions. The greater part of a commander’s work consists of the everyday, often unnoticed, effort to enhance combat effectiveness and improve the command-and-control system. One of Mykhailo Drapatyi’s important organizational decisions was to abandon the rigid assignment of reserve forces to specific sectors of the front. Instead, reserves came to be employed more extensively as a mobile instrument for rapidly sealing breakthroughs, conducting localized counterattacks, and reinforcing the most threatened sectors. This increased the resilience of the defense and reduced the effectiveness of the Russian tactic of employing small assault groups.

Journalist Peter Sauer wrote in The Guardian about Mykhailo Drapatyi: “He took up drone warfare early, and pushed authority down to junior officers and expected them to answer for their own decisions.” Although I have not encountered documentary evidence showing that this decentralized command system was formally institutionalized, there is abundant eyewitness testimony indicating that this approach was widely practiced.

Following his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Mykhailo Drapatyi faces several challenges that require a high degree of professionalism: stabilizing the front, integrating unmanned systems units into a unified military structure, and optimizing the employment of reserve forces. Above all, however, he must introduce modern principles of command that will enable the Armed Forces to move beyond the outdated Soviet command culture and advance to a fundamentally new level. Accomplishing this task requires more than experience and professional competence – it also demands genuine military talent. Mykhailo Drapatyi has already demonstrated his abilities as a gifted commander at the operational and tactical levels. Whether he can also establish himself as a military strategist capable of planning and directing large-scale offensive operations remains a question that only time can answer.

 

Nikolai Karpitsky. Technology Has Changed Warfare. Will Western Leaders Draw the Right Conclusions from Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s Analysis?

Source: PostPravda.info 23.07.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/valerii-zaluzhnyis-analysis/

 

On July 8, 2026, another article by Valerii Zaluzhnyi was published. He is one of the most rational analysts of modern warfare. The general demonstrated his strategic talent in the autumn of 2022, when he planned and executed a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive that remains one of the most remarkable military operations of the 21st century. The central thesis of the article is that advances in military technology require a fundamental reassessment of conventional ideas about war, including the very concept of military victory. NATO no longer meets the challenges of modern warfare, as it is an alliance designed for a world that no longer exists. Are Western leaders, who bear responsibility for the fate of their nations, prepared to draw the necessary conclusions and rethink their strategic vision of war?

Can Modern Warfare Be Prepared for in Peacetime?

Four years ago, one could say without any doubt that NATO possessed clear military superiority. However, the war has changed its character. Are the NATO countries – which have indeed done a great deal in recent years to strengthen their defense capabilities – ready for this challenge?

The Russian army at the time of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was considered the second most powerful in the world. However, if that 2022-version of the Russian army had faced the modern Ukrainian army, it would be completely destroyed in a very short time. This is because military technology has advanced dramatically over the past four and a half years. The longer countries remain at war, the more experience they accumulate and the more they develop new technologies and methods of warfare. Over the course of the conflict, the armed forces of both countries have reached a new level that remains beyond the capabilities of militaries without firsthand experience of modern warfare – even highly advanced forces such as those of NATO countries.

Many people are now talking about a turning point in the war. However, I agree with the author of the article: what we are witnessing is not a turning point at all, but a natural evolution in the character of warfare driven by new technologies. In the summer of 2024, the Russian army advanced rapidly toward Pokrovsk. Had it managed to maintain that momentum and quickly capture the city, the road to Pavlohrad would have been open across the flat steppe. In that scenario, the Russian army would have had a real opportunity to split the front in two and trigger its collapse. Ukraine was facing a critical shortage of soldiers, and only a technological revolution could have salvaged the situation. And that is exactly what happened. Soldiers on the front lines were increasingly replaced by drones and robotic systems, partially offsetting the manpower shortage. As a result, the threat of a collapse of the front largely disappeared. As General Zaluzhnyi argues, neither Russia nor Ukraine is currently capable of achieving victory on the battlefield.

Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s View of the Modern Battlefield

The author of the article argues that the development of modern technologies has made the accomplishment of tactical objectives on the ground almost impossible. The gray zone along the line of contact has become a kill zone, where drones destroy any moving target. The problem is no longer how to hold a particular position, but how to reach it in the first place, or how to conduct troop rotations and evacuate the wounded. Two years ago, the greatest nightmare for soldiers was finding themselves in operational encirclement, with all lines of communication under enemy fire control. Today, virtually all troops holding positions on the front line are in a situation resembling operational encirclement. Under these conditions, achieving even limited tactical objectives comes at the cost of enormous losses that are disproportionate to the results achieved. However, Russia can afford such losses, whereas Ukraine cannot. For the Russian command, soldiers are treated as cheap expendable resources that can be continuously sent into the kill zone until individual Ukrainian positions are overwhelmed by successive waves of Russian assault troops. This is how Russia’s slow, grinding offensive proceeds – an approach that fully suits Putin.

At the same time, Ukraine has managed not only to disrupt frontline logistics – which has already contributed to a fuel and energy crisis in Crimea – but also to inflict significant damage on the Russian economy, contributing to gasoline shortages. However, Valerii Zaluzhnyi believes that Ukraine’s technological advantage is temporary. Russia will soon begin employing the same technologies and methods of warfare. Since Russia and Ukraine possess roughly comparable capabilities for developing military technologies, every effective solution created by one side will eventually be adopted by the other. It is reasonable to expect that in the near future, frontline cities on both sides of the front will be isolated in much the same way as Crimea. Later, each side will place the entire territory of the opposing state under drone control. As a result, the territories of both Ukraine and Russia could become one continuous battlefield.

Are European Countries Prepared for This Type of War?

The development of combat drones has reached a new level, and Russia was unprepared for it: Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries caused gasoline shortages and fueled public discontent. However, at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine itself was not prepared for systematic attacks on its energy infrastructure. Oil depots burned, fuel storage facilities were destroyed, and logistics were disrupted. Over time, every country at war adapts to the enemy’s most painful strikes – and this is only natural. Equally natural is the fact that countries not at war cannot adapt to this new type of warfare.

Many Europeans still hold the outdated view that, in the event of further Russian aggression, the combat zone would be limited to NATO’s eastern flank – Poland and the Baltic states – while the rest of Europe would remain deep in the rear. However, in the near future, the autonomy and large-scale deployment of unmanned systems will increase to such an extent that the very concept of a “deep rear” will lose all meaning. In the event of a major conflict, targets across Europe – from Portugal to Iceland – could come under threat. Moreover, Europe’s infrastructure is, in many respects, more vulnerable than Ukraine’s.

Over the years of war, Ukraine has learned to disperse critical infrastructure, create redundant capacity, and rapidly restore damaged facilities. There is no such experience in European countries. On the contrary, a significant share of their energy, transport, and industrial infrastructure is highly concentrated, which, under conditions of the mass employment of long-range drones, could make it a relatively easy target. Although Russia does not yet possess all the necessary capabilities to exert such pressure on Europe, at the current pace of technological development it will gain this capability in the foreseeable future. At that point, the main priority will no longer be holding the front line, but preserving the state’s ability to maintain the functioning of its economy, critical infrastructure, and system of governance under constant precision strikes.

Is Victory over Russia Possible?

It is impossible for Ukraine to defeat Russia on its own. As Valerii Zaluzhnyi argues, the war of attrition is now being waged far from the front line. The objective is no longer primarily to defeat the enemy on the battlefield, but to destroy logistical routes and critical infrastructure. This dramatically increases the threat to the civilian population, yet so far it has not brought the war any closer to an end. As Zaluzhnyi writes: “Talking about achieving political goals, winning the war through tactical actions on the battlefield, or even through effective strikes against logistics and critical infrastructure – clearly goes beyond the bounds of common sense.”

Western countries have ruled out direct participation in the war and, until recently, have helped Ukraine only to defend itself, not to win. Within the prevailing paradigm of Western public consciousness, peace is regarded as the normal state of affairs, while war is viewed as a temporary and exceptional event. Consequently, many believe that it will be entirely possible to reach a peace agreement with the Russian regime if the war becomes sufficiently hopeless and costly for it. This misconception is doomed to fail.

Within the prevailing paradigm of Russian public consciousness, by contrast, war is regarded as the normal state of affairs. The Russian authorities are largely insensitive to military losses and are prepared to continue the war regardless of the economic damage. Russia cannot coexist peacefully with Europe for long because the very structure of governing such a vast territory relies not on the rule of law, but on force – which sooner or later leads to renewed military expansion. Russia has now entered a phase in which it can no longer halt its aggression, and even in the event of a temporary truce, it will continue waging a hybrid war.

A reassessment of the war in Western public consciousness is a necessary precondition for victory over Russia. The new type of warfare also requires a new understanding of what victory means. Military success should no longer be measured by the amount of territory captured or liberated, but by the extent to which the enemy’s system of state governance is disrupted. The war will not end when the Russian authorities recognize the futility of continuing it, but when the Russian state loses its capacity to govern effectively – and this is precisely what Western leaders fear.

Is this achievable? In reality, Russia has significant structural vulnerabilities. All of Siberia is connected to the rest of Russia by a single railway line. If this vital link were severed at any point, neither cargo nor troops could be transported. Will regional elites take advantage of such a situation? Anything is possible if internal contradictions within Russia intensify – between business and the state, between regional bureaucracies and the central government, and between public expectations and reality. Deepening these contradictions is also an integral part of the struggle against Russia.

Ukraine is doing only its part of this effort, but that alone is not enough. Therefore, without the involvement of other European countries – at least in the form of hybrid warfare – this objective cannot be achieved. However, the NATO alliance is unlikely to be an effective instrument, as it was created for different challenges in a different era. As Valerii Zaluzhnyi aptly observed, NATO is an alliance of the old world that no longer exists. Europe must therefore find new forms of military cooperation. But for that to happen, it is first necessary to convince Western societies, which, unfortunately, still fail to recognize that Russia has long been waging not only a conventional war against Ukraine, but also a hybrid war against Europe as a whole.

 

Nikolai Karpitsky. Is the State an Instrument of Law or an Apparatus of Violence? Russia, Poland, and Ukraine: Historical Contradictions Can Be Overcome, but Civilizational Ones Cannot

Source: PostPravda.info 17.07.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/the-state-instrument-of-law-or-of-violence/

 

At the core of political conflicts between Poland and Ukraine lies a divergent understanding of history. However, these contradictions can be overcome if historical disputes are not politicized but are instead approached through a shared understanding of the state as an instrument of the legal system designed to ensure normal social life. Political contradictions with Russia, however, are fundamentally irreconcilable. Even if enlightened liberals were to come to power in Russia, they would not be able to change the historical fact that Russia developed as a militarized state whose essence is not law but a mechanism of violence.

The Russian State and the Value of Its Citizens’ Lives

A war with Russia is like fighting a giant whose pain receptors have been switched off; one must strike in such a way that it loses the ability to move. This metaphor helps explain why many familiar mechanisms of pressure on Russia prove ineffective. Ukrainian strikes on Russia in the summer of 2026 led to a gasoline shortage and growing public dissatisfaction, but at the same time they also created new opportunities for enrichment for Putin’s associates. Over the years of war, the wealth of these elites has increased sharply, so they are not interested in ending it. Popular dissatisfaction is of no concern to the Russian authorities; what matters are only strikes that physically impede the Russian war machine: disrupting logistics, as well as the production and delivery chains of weapons.

We can see how democratic states make every effort to save their citizens who fall victim to terrorism or to actions of other states. This reflects an understanding of the state as an instrument of law, ensuring social life and the protection of citizens. Refusing to protect one’s citizens calls into question the very purpose of the state’s existence. However, in Russia the situation is different: citizens are treated as a resource and expendable material for the state. I will provide the examples.

On August 24, 2004, two Russian passenger airliners were blown up in mid-air, killing 89 people. The investigation was based on the assumption that they were blown up by suicide bombers. There were no reports of attempts to negotiate with the hijackers. However, I recall television statements arguing that this was the correct approach–that in the event of a terrorist hijacking, aircraft should be immediately destroyed. Overall, society reacted calmly to such statements, although there were occasional doubts about the risk of falling debris if planes were shot down over cities.

A week later, on September 1, 2004, Chechen terrorists seized a school in Beslan. This time, they managed to make a demand: the end of military operations in Chechnya. In response, Russian forces started shooting at the school, not caring that there were children inside. Once again, Russian society reacted calmly to these actions. After that, terrorist attacks of this kind eventually ceased, as even the terrorists came to realize that the Russian authorities were indifferent to the deaths of their own citizens.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian leadership faced a choice: allocate resources to support the population or conserve them for the war against Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, the authorities chose the latter. As a result, over the two years of the pandemic, Russia’s natural population decline exceeded by more than one million the level that could have been expected had the average trend of 2017–2019 continued. Russian society also reacted calmly to these losses, while the authorities appeared to regard them rather positively – as the removal of a burden that imposed additional social costs on the state.

The authorities view military losses in much the same way: the more people die from economically depressed regions, the lower the state’s social burden becomes. People are treated as a cheap, replaceable resource that can be expended without hesitation. This mindset is reflected on the battlefield. For example, the Ukrainian side believes it is better to sacrifice a robot than a soldier. From the Russian perspective, however, both are expendable assets; the only question is which is cheaper.

Why Is the Russian State Not for the Benefit of Its People?

Russia embodies a different civilizational model of the state, shaped by a number of historical and ideological factors.

• First, Russia developed as a military power through continuous territorial expansion and conquest.
• Second, the historical self-perception of Russians has been dominated by the messianic idea of “gathering the lands.” In different eras, this idea has taken different forms: the concept of the “Third Rome,” the vision of worldwide communism, and today’s belief in Russia’s unique civilizational mission. What has remained constant is the conviction that the state exists to fulfill a great historical mission, not for the well-being of its citizens.
• Third, Russia’s vast territory required a centralized system of resource redistribution. This model of governance strengthened the vertical structure of power and fostered distrust toward federalism, local self-government, and any independent initiative from below.
• Fourthly, there is the lingering impact of the Soviet legacy of repression and the Gulag camp system, where political prisoners were held alongside common criminals. Mass repression, collectivization, and the subsequent wave of urbanization contributed to the spread of prison subculture, which was adopted by peasants who fled to the cities and later transmitted to their children.
• Fifth, throughout Russia’s history, state ideology has substituted for Russian national self-awareness. In many nation-states, identity is built around the people and their historical territory; however, Russian identity is associated with the state apparatus itself and the space it controls. Therefore, “Russia” is understood not so much as a country conceived as a community of people, but rather as a state hierarchy and the territories under its control.

In this paradigm, citizens are not the bearers of the state but an expendable resource. The paradox is that citizens themselves often regard such treatment as normal, because they do not believe that the state can be organized in any other way. Hence Russians’ ambivalent attitude toward the state: on the one hand, it is viewed as a necessary evil, an apparatus of violence – as they were taught in Soviet schools; on the other hand, it is seen as a means of fulfilling a historical mission, in which individual human lives are not of importance.

The Polish and Ukrainian Alternative to the Russian Understanding of the State

Western countries embody a legal model of the state that constitutes a civilizational alternative to the Russian model. The state is a social system that organizes relations between people through legal mechanisms. It includes a system of institutions that ensure the functioning of law, the protection of individuals, and the regulation of social relations, serving as the instrument through which a national legal system structures the life of society.

In the consciousness of citizens, the legitimacy of the state is inseparable from the legitimacy of the national legal system. Different states may justify their legitimacy in different ways: through history, religion, tradition, culture, or the democratic choice of citizens. For example, historical memory holds special significance in Polish public consciousness. As a result, tragic events of the past continue to be perceived as an important component of contemporary national identity.

Ukrainian political culture, by contrast, is largely shaped by the memory of the struggle for independence. To illustrate this, I refer to the essay “What Is Contemporary Ukrainian Identity?” by my Ukrainian colleague Yulia Fil, who lived in Poland for some time after the full-scale invasion and later returned to Ukraine. Through conversations with her Polish friends, she arrived at several conclusions that she reflects in her essay. I will cite a few excerpts.

Yulia Fil: “Sometime during the second year of the war, in one of the Polish podcasts I had heard the opinion that Poles seem to care more about their past: they enjoy visiting museums, castles, and ruins, whereas Ukrainians are less interested in the past and are more oriented toward the future. At first, this struck me as a somewhat speculative claim, because as someone working in the cultural sphere, I have observed a growing interest among Ukrainians in history and culture as a whole – not only their own. According to my subjective observations, this trend began to emerge after the start of the war with Russia.

…Nevertheless, although Poland lost its independence during several partitions and under the influence of foreign powers, it preserved a certain continuity of statehood and gained experience in extraordinary national consolidation during periods when its statehood was lost. …Ukrainian statehood, by contrast, was short-lived and lacked continuity. Its independent manifestations can be identified mainly in the eras of Kyivan Rus’ and the Zaporizhian Sich. Consequently, when our national identity turns to history, it tends to appeal to a mythologized version of it, because our statehood flared up like a match only a few times over the course of a thousand years, while the intervals between those brief moments were periods of subjugation and foreign domination. Thus, while for Poles the history of the independent and powerful Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth has been passed down from generation to generation, we learn about our own periods of statehood mainly from school textbooks, and even there they are often presented in a mythologized form. Before us stand medieval princes whom we perceive more as characters from a fantasy game than as our ancestors, and Cossacks – freedom-loving warriors with long forelocks – with whom we also have little in common, since the Sich disappeared long ago, and our great-grandfathers could no longer tell us stories about it.

…What is genuinely Ukrainian and resonates with us today is alive – we create it every day through free art. The word free deserves special emphasis, because it means that it emerges from society itself rather than being an ideological construct imposed from above through rigid templates and symbols. It encompasses everything, from classical forms to bold experimentation.

…Once Ukrainians became interested in themselves here and now, an interest in the past also awakened. Historical podcasts have become extraordinarily popular on YouTube. We are rediscovering our past and weaving it into our present. So, was the expert in that Polish podcast mistaken?

I can still agree with him, because although Ukrainians are now developing a growing interest in their own past, it nevertheless plays a different role in the structure of our identity than it does for Poles. For Poles, the past is the foundation of identity. For us, the foundation of identity is the present, oriented toward the future while creatively reinterpreting and reimagining the past.”

I cannot fully assess the author’s opinion, because I have never been to Poland and have no opportunity to visit it. However, I am familiar with the Polish diaspora in Tomsk, my hometown in Siberia. The Polish community there has existed for more than 150 years, dating back to the Polish Uprising of 1863–1864. Throughout that time, Poles have preserved their national identity, maintained their ties to Polish culture and history, and conducted historical research on the Polish diaspora in Siberia. This distinctive attitude toward their own history sets them apart from my other fellow townspeople. Since, in Polish public consciousness, the legitimacy of the state is grounded in history, Poles cannot regard tragic events from their past, such as the Volhynia massacre, as merely abstract historical facts.

The Ukrainian perception of the state, in turn, is closely connected with the heroic narrative of the struggle for independence. At the same time, the country’s long colonial experience has fostered a certain distrust of state institutions as such and a stronger reliance on personal relationships. On the one hand, this enhances Ukrainian society’s capacity for self-organization, as demonstrated by the success of the two revolutions in 2004 and 2014, as well as by the extensive volunteer movement during Russia’s aggression. On the other hand, it also contributes to a tendency to disregard formal rules and to adopt a tolerant attitude toward corruption.

In wartime, any challenge to the heroic national narrative – even one that is well grounded in historical evidence – is perceived in Ukraine as if the country’s very struggle for survival were being called into question. It is precisely this difference in the perception of history that provides fertile ground for historical and diplomatic disputes between Ukraine and Poland, the escalation of which serves Russia’s interests.

Contradictions Between Poland and Ukraine Can Be Overcome

Historical disputes can be overcome; civilizational differences cannot. I possess neither the scholarly expertise nor the moral authority to intervene in historical disputes between Poland and Ukraine or to pass judgment on either side. However, I am convinced that historical disagreements between states can be resolved if they are not politicized but instead entrusted to professional historians. This requires shared academic forums – ideally, an international research institute devoted to disputed historical issues – where scholars from both countries could engage in discussions in accordance with academic standards of objectivity, which are fundamentally incompatible with the dictates of any political ideology.

Despite their historical disagreements, Poland and Ukraine share the same civilizational model of the state, one that differs fundamentally from the Russian model. Because of this, any contradictions between them can be addressed within a common legal conception of the state. The same approach cannot resolve contradictions with Russia, however, because those contradictions are civilizational in nature.

This raises an important question: within this legal paradigm, is it possible to arrive at a solution for how Russia should be dealt with?

Legal Justification for the Deconstruction of Empire

In the legal paradigm, the state can be defined as an instrument for implementing the norms and requirements of a national legal system in the life of society. There are different national legal systems, which include legislation, the system of law, legal culture, and law enforcement. The general principles of national legal systems serve as the foundation of international law, of which Russia is also a subject. However, this creates a contradiction in legal logic, because Russia functions as a non-legal state that systematically violates the principles of law. This means that Russia retains its international legal personality solely through military force, having lost the substantive legal foundations of its legitimacy.

After the Russian legal system was adapted to support aggressive warfare and repression, it lost its legitimacy. At present, Russia is in a condition in which it cannot stop waging war; even if the Russian authorities were to conclude a temporary ceasefire along the front line, this would likely lead to an intensification of hybrid warfare against all European countries. Therefore, these countries have the full right to counter the Russian threat in any form, provided that this does not violate their own legal principles and norms.

Do Russians have the right to self-determination and independence in the post-war period? First, the inhabitants of Russia, unlike, for example, the citizens of Ukraine or Poland, do not possess a unified collective subjectivity. Second, there are no political institutions capable of speaking on behalf of Russians. In the future, social actors may emerge representing specific regions or peoples inhabiting Russia, who will raise questions about the right to self-determination. Within Russia, such questions are structurally insoluble; therefore, the international community will face two problems: on what grounds new subjects should be recognized, and in what form their right to self-determination may be implemented.

Thus, the future fate of post-war Russia should be determined by those who make a significant contribution to its defeat – above all Ukraine, as well as other states and political forces that participate in the struggle against it. Such a coalition will face the historical task of deconstructing the empire so that Russia will never again wage wars of conquest.

Are all participants in such an anti-Russian coalition ready to assume this historical responsibility? I think not sufficiently. However, the situation can be changed if we begin discussing the legal mechanism of imperial deconstruction already now, while Russia is still advancing on the front and the end of the war is not yet in sight. This would provide a clear vision of the goal of the struggle against Russia, which would contribute to additional motivation to overcome disagreements between states and to more effectively mobilize forces for a common victory.

 

Nikolai Karpitsky. Sexual Humiliation as an Instrument of Russian Military Policy

Source: PostPravda.info 17.06.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/sexual-humiliation-russian-military-policy/

 

In archaic authoritarian societies, sexual relations are not regarded as a private matter between two individuals but as an object of public control, where society itself determines their permissible forms and character. Only in relatively recent times in democratic countries have sexual relations come to be understood primarily as a sphere of personal freedom and individual choice. Such an approach is unacceptable to the contemporary Russian authorities, which in their attitude toward sexuality demonstrate not merely conservatism but a drive to revive the most primitive forms of social control. As a result, sexual humiliation becomes one of the instruments used to maintain the system of power and to mobilize society for war.

If one looks at the Russian–Ukrainian war from the outside, a paradoxical picture emerges. A person who, through his behavior and manner of speech, demonstrates a lack of empathy, indifference to human life, and at the same time fear of his own death and loss of power, has found himself at the head of a vast country. His only political talent is the ability to adapt to those above him in the hierarchy. Having come to see himself as a great statesman and conqueror, he has unleashed a war against a neighboring nation.

What is striking, however, is not this, but the fact that, by the will of one person, hundreds of thousands of Russians are sent to kill inhabitants of a neighboring country who have done them no harm. Many go to war voluntarily and are prepared to die pointlessly rather than oppose those who started it. Moreover, a significant part of Russian society has supported the war against a people who were until recently considered fraternal, despite the fact that many Russians still have relatives or friends in Ukraine.

The Formation of a Prison-Camp Subculture

What is wrong with Russians? In fact, the problem is not the nation itself, but the social system that maintains hierarchy through various mechanisms, including sexual humiliation. This involves sexual insults, sexualized violence, the threat of such violence, or its symbolic imitation, as well as the reduction of social status by equating a person with a defenseless object of sexual violence.

In authoritarian societies, especially in wartime, the humiliation of women is more widespread, but under the current Kremlin regime, men have become the primary targets of sexual humiliation. However, one might object that this phenomenon exists only within a prison-camp subculture and is therefore marginal. But is that really the case?

One of the key stages in Russia’s history was the 1930s, when collectivization coincided with mass repression. Millions of people from various social strata passed through the system of labor camps. It was there that the prison-camp subculture was formed, gradually permeating the everyday life of urban residents. For many peasants, moving to the city was perceived as an opportunity to escape the collective farm system. Having lost traditional forms of rural life, they encountered in the city the behavioral norms of the prison-camp subculture, without realizing that anything different was possible. Over time, these norms were transmitted to subsequent generations and eventually began to be perceived not as an exception, but as a habitual way of human interaction.

Perversion of Human Dignity

The goal of Russian policy regarding LGBT people is not, in fact, to combat non-traditional sexual orientation. On the contrary, its purpose is to institutionalize sexual violence as one of the instruments of power. This refers to violence that implies symbolic or real homosexual subjugation. This process is accompanied by the perversion of the very concept of human dignity.

As I understand it, human dignity is the preservation of oneself and one’s personality despite external circumstances: whatever happens, a person remains themselves. Only through the perversion of the concept of human dignity does it become possible for people to mass-support the killing of their friends and relatives in a neighboring country at the whim of a single individual.

In contemporary Russian society, general civic norms are being displaced by norms formed within the prison-camp subculture, in which people subjected to sexual humiliation belong to a specially designated untouchable caste. In terms of social stigmatization, this caste is among the most devalued groups known in the history of various societies.

Sexual Humiliation in “Black” and “Red” Zones

In Russia, penal institutions are divided into “black zones,” where order is governed by criminal authorities, and “red zones,” where the administration dominates. In “black zones,” transfer into the caste of the sexually humiliated is carried out by criminals themselves through physical sexual violence. In “red zones,” this is carried out by the institution’s administration, but most often not through physical sexual acts, but through their symbolic substitution.

In the prison-camp subculture, any equal interaction with a sexually humiliated person leads to the loss of one’s own status. For example, using their dishes is considered a sign of belonging to their caste. Exploiting this, the administration of “red zones” sometimes stages provocations: a prisoner is first deprived of normal food and then offered food in dishes previously used by a member of the lowest caste. If the prisoner cannot withstand it or fails to notice the trick, they themselves are transferred into the caste of the sexually humiliated.

In such a subculture, preserving human dignity means avoiding sexual humiliation at any cost. As a result, betrayal, deception, violence, or the humiliation of others are perceived as acceptable or even honorable actions if they allow one to avoid a decline in status.

The Russian authorities could eradicate sexual violence in the “zones” if they issued the relevant directives. However, they regard the hierarchy based on sexual humiliation as an additional tool for governing society. For this reason, they see the LGBT movement as a threat to the established system of symbolic relations of power and subordination. The Russian authorities are not opposed to homosexual relations themselves; they are opposed to treating the passive participants in such relations as human beings. It is precisely for this reason that legislation targeting LGBT people is continually being tightened in Russia.

The Essence of Russian Policy in the Sexual Sphere

The goal of the Russian authorities is to impose on society a distorted conception of human dignity. According to this logic, any actions – no matter how cruel, immoral, or criminal – are considered acceptable if they allow a person to avoid moving downward within the social hierarchy, at the very bottom of which stands the caste of the sexually humiliated.

After all, anyone can end up at the very bottom. In Russia, any businessman or high-ranking official can be arrested and, if he does not demonstrate sufficient obedience, the prison administration may receive the relevant instructions. Fear of such a prospect pushes people to adopt a distorted understanding of human dignity in order to preserve their social status. Any act, even the most dishonorable one, is seen as an expression of dignity if it saves a person from the threat of ending up at the lowest level of the social hierarchy. Within this system of coordinates, if you are sexually humiliated, it is regarded as a loss of human dignity; but if you do the same to another person, it is instead interpreted as confirmation of your dignity.

Propaganda about the defense of traditional values serves as an ideological cover for Russian policy in the sexual sphere. For this purpose, the Kremlin authorities enlist religious leaders who spread a narrative about a godless and demonic West that allegedly destroys traditional moral norms by supporting LGBT rights. In particular, such claims have been repeatedly voiced in the speeches of Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, neither Patriarch Kirill nor other Russian authorities address the issue of sexual violence in prisons, the army, or in the occupied territories.

The Russian authorities use both prison administrations and representatives of the criminal milieu to maintain among prisoners a constant fear of losing social status through sexual humiliation. They have extended this practice to the army as well, applying various forms of sexual humiliation to soldiers who refuse to take part in deadly assaults.

At a certain point, this fear becomes so strong that it outweighs even the fear of death. Then a psychological mechanism is triggered that transforms fear into a perverted sense of dignity, manifested in a willingness to kill pointlessly and to die just as pointlessly. This contributes to the formation of a form of gnostic fatalism, characterized by a sense of the loss of the value of life and the inevitability of death. However horrific such a worldview may be, its alternative – ending up in the caste of the sexually humiliated – is perceived by Russian soldiers as an even more terrifying prospect.

Yet there are also millions of Russians who support the war while enjoying peaceful life in the rear and do not feel any immediate threat of sexual humiliation. They perceive Kremlin policy in the sexual sphere as liberation from their own conscience and as a justification for any immoral actions, believing that everything is permitted to them as long as it does not lead to a loss of social status.

Nikolai Karpitsky. The Messianic Idea of Russia. Article Two. Is Russia’s Greatness More Important Than One’s Own Religion and the Lives of Fellow Believers?

Source: PostPravda.info 12.06.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/the-messianic-idea-of-russia/

 

It would seem that supporting a war of conquest accompanied by war crimes is incompatible with religious conscience. How can a religious person remain indifferent when the residents of a neighboring country – including fellow believers – are denied the right to live? Before the war, Russian Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Muslims, and Krishnaites communicated with their fellow believers in Ukraine, recognizing a shared identity. Yet when faced with the choice between supporting a war against a neighboring people and preserving fellowship with their Ukrainian co-believers, most of them chose the war. Is it possible to change their minds? How did it happen that the messianic idea of Russia became more important to them not only than the lives of their fellow believers, but even than their own religion?

If support for the war were merely connected to ignorance or misunderstanding resulting from exposure to Russian propaganda, they could perhaps be persuaded otherwise by the testimony of fellow believers and friends from Ukraine whom they had trusted before the war. However, this is not simply a matter of misconceptions, but of embracing a new goal-setting in defiance of their previous religious experience and relationships with fellow believers. This new goal-setting is accompanied by a particular type of collective emotional experience – a quasi-religious experience.

The Goal-Setting of Social Institutions

Why is Russia unable to abandon military expansion? This is connected to its goal-setting, namely the messianic idea of gathering lands. Goal-setting is an orientation toward a goal or mission that gives meaning to existence.

There are two types of goal-setting in social institutions:

The goal-setting of some institutions is expressed through supporting the internal life of a community, communication among its members, and the satisfaction of their needs. Examples include hobby clubs or regional associations, whose existence is justified simply by maintaining a shared space for communication and mutual support.

The goal-setting of other institutions lies in something external to the internal life of the community. For example, a political party has meaning only insofar as it implements a particular political program. If this task is not fulfilled, the party loses its reason for existence, even if its members still enjoy meeting and socializing with one another.

A similar distinction can also be observed at the level of states. Some states are oriented toward internal development, the welfare of the population, and peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. Others structure their existence around a particular mission. Such states are prepared to wage aggressive wars, even when doing so is destructive to themselves.

Every religion exists in two dimensions: in the inner lives of people as a spiritual tradition, and in external public life as a religious social institution. However, as a social institution, religion differs from secular institutions precisely in the nature of its goal-setting.

The goal-setting of secular institutions exists within the social sphere. They address specific political, economic, or cultural tasks and help organize public life. The goal-setting of religious institutions is oriented toward a higher realm – that is, toward transcendent being beyond everyday life. Their ultimate purpose is connected with human salvation, liberation from suffering, or overcoming the meaninglessness of existence through turning toward a higher reality.

Because of this, under normal conditions religion and secular society can coexist without interfering with one another, since they pursue different aims in social life and in relation to transcendent being.

The Messianic Idea of Russia Distorts Religious Goal-Setting

Under conditions of dictatorship, the Russian authorities demand complete loyalty from social institutions, including religious ones, as well as support for the war against Ukraine. In these circumstances, religious organizations face a choice: either adopt a neutral position, thereby risking marginalization and repression, or adapt themselves to the demands of the authorities. However, such adaptation requires altering religious goal-setting in such a way that the goal of religious salvation comes to be viewed as secondary to a supposedly higher objective – the fulfillment of Russia’s historical mission.

As a result, an ideology emerges that is religious in form but political in its goal-setting, and which can be classified neither as a religion nor as a secular worldview. At its core lies a fusion of religious practice with political messianism, allowing it to be characterized as a quasi-religion.

As early as the fifteenth century, during the confrontation between the Principality of Moscow and Novgorod, the messianic idea of the “gathering of lands” began to take shape. Initially, it received Orthodox religious justification through the concept of “Moscow as the Third Rome.” Later, during the Soviet period, it was reinterpreted within the framework of atheistic communist ideology while retaining its expansionist character. The current situation demonstrates that support for this messianic idea is not unique to the Orthodox Church, since it is shared by representatives of many different confessions, including Protestants, Muslims, and Krishnaites.

The Russian Quasi-Religion

Most Russians are convinced that they live in the most peace-loving country in the world – one that has never attacked anyone, but has only repeatedly been subjected to external aggression. In other words, they regard all wars fought by Russia as defensive, while the expansion of Russian territory resulting from these wars is interpreted as the liberation of other peoples and their voluntary reunification with Russia. Put differently, Russians perceive aggressive wars as the just restoration of world order. Only by becoming part of Russia, in their view, do other peoples acquire the true meaning of their existence.

In order to justify war within a religious context, it is necessary to portray the enemy not merely as a political rival, but as the embodiment of absolute evil and an enemy of God. As a result, the surrounding world comes to be perceived as a kingdom of evil opposed by Russia. The West is portrayed as the incarnation of evil forces seeking to destroy traditional values, religion, and the “Russian world.” Consequently, the idea of human salvation is replaced by the idea of struggle against Western civilization.

In religion, movement toward a higher transcendent principle may be accompanied by spiritual struggle against dark otherworldly forces that hinder human salvation. In a quasi-religion, however, the image of these dark forces is projected onto Western civilization as a whole. Ukraine is viewed as an apostate that has fallen away from Russia and sided with evil, and therefore must either be brought back by force or destroyed. For this reason, Russian believers not only refuse to listen to their Ukrainian fellow believers, but recoil from them with religious horror, as though they were people who had crossed over to the side of demonic forces.

As religion is gradually displaced by quasi-religion, inner religious experiences are replaced by experiences resembling psychological dependency. They can be compared to addiction: a person experiences euphoria from participation in a “great mission,” but when confronted with the truth and moments of mental clarity, they undergo something akin to withdrawal symptoms. This, in turn, provokes aggression toward anyone attempting to convey truthful information to them. As a result, they once again return to listening to propagandists in order to regain the euphoric state.

On the basis of this quasi-religious experience, adherents of different religions develop a new shared identity with all those who recognize Russia’s mission as the highest value, while excluding their Ukrainian fellow believers from this community. The round table discussion “World Religions Against the Ideology of Nazism and Fascism in the 21st Century,” held in the building of the State Duma of the Russian Federation on March 29, 2022, clearly demonstrated how representatives of different confessions unite around a dualistic perception of the world based on the opposition between “us” and “them,” good and absolute evil. Through their speeches at the round table, they effectively proclaimed a new quasi-religion in relation to which their traditional religious differences were regarded as secondary. Since these speeches did not provoke any significant critical reaction from their followers, it can be concluded that this quasi-religion has become one of the most important social factors shaping religious consciousness in Russia – a factor that cannot be ignored.