Nikolai Karpitsky. Trilateral Peace Negotiations on Ukraine: Participants Seem to Be from Different Parallel Worlds

Source: PostPravda.info 27.01.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/freedom-of-speech-en/trilateral-peace-negotiations-on-ukraine/

The trilateral negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States on settling the war concluded on January 24, 2026, in Abu Dhabi. The parties agreed to continue the talks on February 1. But is peace possible if the sides fundamentally fail to understand one another – because they think differently and inhabit different worldviews?

The participants in the negotiations perceive reality differently

Before the war, Europe believed it was living in the same world as Russia – a world in which wars of conquest were impossible. On this assumption, it did not prepare for war and even helped Russia grow stronger. Europeans proceeded from the idea that wars are meaningless because property rights and borders are determined not by force, but by legal recognition.

For a modern, civilized person, it does not matter whose soldiers are present in a given territory: its legal status does not change as a result. If someone seizes another’s property by force, they still do not become its owner. In Russia, however, a different notion prevails: whoever has force owns the territory and everything on it. Hence, for example, the widespread belief that the United States fought in Iraq for oil. When I asked how that could even be imagined – after all, American soldiers themselves cannot pump oil; it would first have to be purchased – people simply did not understand the question. For them, the very idea that ownership does not depend on military presence was incomprehensible.

This difference in perception became clearly evident in 2014. Most Russians believed that Crimea became Russian because Russian troops were stationed there. From the standpoint of international law, this is not the case: legally, Crimea remains part of Ukraine, and only Ukraine has the right to make legitimate decisions concerning it. A telling example is that of Alexander Butyagin, a Russian archaeologist from the Hermitage Museum, who conducted excavations in Crimea without Ukraine’s permission and later traveled to Poland, where he was arrested on December 10–11. It never even occurred to him that, under European law, he was committing a crime.

Even after the occupation of Crimea and part of eastern Ukraine, Europe for a long time regarded what was happening as an anomaly and continued to believe that an agreement with Russia was possible. After all, even the USSR recognized the principle of the inviolability of borders in 1975, and the last attempt to annex another state – the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait in 1990 – ended in severe punishment.

Russian public consciousness, however, remains largely archaic. In it, force is more important than law, and therefore the aggressive ambitions of the Russian authorities are understandable, while Europeans’ faith in the rule of law is not. In this worldview, Russia has the right to any territories that ever belonged to it, and if it can send troops there, the territory is considered its own – regardless of international law.

Negotiations: A Search for Solutions within the Legal Framework, a Venue for a Deal, or the Legitimation of the Aggressor’s Gains?

Europe’s profound misunderstanding of Russia’s position led to its diplomatic defeat in February 2015 – the signing of the Second Minsk Agreements with the participation of France and Germany. Under these arrangements, Ukraine was supposed to hold elections in the occupied territories before regaining control of the border, and then legalize the pro-Russian armed formations it had previously repelled by force. France and Germany insisted that there was no alternative to the “Minsk format,” failing to understand that this was not a political dispute within the framework of law, but the seizure of a country in the barbaric, medieval sense of the word.

Today the question arises: what can Ukraine actually negotiate with Russia, which recognizes neither Ukrainian identity nor Ukraine’s right to exist? In reality – only a ceasefire, because the parties’ conceptions of peace are so different that agreeing on a full-fledged peace treaty is impossible. But even a ceasefire is not on the table: Russia continues its offensive, and the United States has done nothing to force the war into a positional stalemate, without which ceasefire negotiations are impossible. Worse still, the current U.S. administration has its own vision of the world order – different from both the Russian and the European ones – which has turned the prospects for agreements into a mirage.

Russia’s vision of the world order has rolled back to the Middle Ages: the world is ruled by violence and cruelty. The European approach is the opposite – it is based on law and values that matter more than expediency. Donald Trump’s worldview is also archaic, but not to the same extent: it more closely corresponds to the logic of the nineteenth century. Trump does not perceive values as foundational; he believes that the world order rests on deals based on advantage and that stability is ensured by the dominance of the strongest power. He does not want wars and tries to force the parties into agreements through pressure, seeing this as grounds for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Europeans do not understand Trump, and he does not understand Putin: can negotiations be effective?

Discussions about the terms of peace are taking place between parties that perceive reality differently. European leaders do not understand Trump and believe that he is destroying the world order. Trump, for his part, is convinced that he is proceeding from self-evident truths and believes that he understands Putin. But this is a mistake: Putin’s reality is even more archaic than Trump’s.

This misunderstanding is clearly visible in concrete examples. Europeans cannot grasp the meaning of a “Peace Council” led by Trump with a one-billion-dollar entry fee, especially when similar tasks are already performed by the UN. To them, it appears to be a substitution of international institutions with personal dominance. For Trump, however, international structures cannot stand above national ones, and the “Peace Council” is simply a deal-making club in which the host sets the rules and charges for entry.

Europeans are also perplexed by Trump’s claim to Greenland – the very fact of which calls NATO’s internal logic into question. Trump is convinced that the world rests on the right of the strong, and that his claim to Greenland, as the leader of the most powerful country, should be self-evident. He considers it unfair that only Putin, and not European leaders, acknowledges this. Within this logic, his demonstrative friendliness toward Putin becomes understandable: if Europe is a competitor in the Arctic, then Russia is a military counterweight to Europe, useful for pressure and deal-making.

Perhaps the strangest episode was Trump’s taking of the Nobel medal from María Corina Machado. This provoked ridicule, but Trump sincerely believes that the medal belongs to him and that this should be obvious to everyone, since it is precisely his strong leadership that, in his view, stops wars. Therefore, he feels obliged to take the medal so that no one has any doubts about it.

Ukraine proceeds from European values and a legal world order. Trump operates within an archaic nineteenth-century worldview; Putin’s is medieval, rooted in the era of the Muscovite Tsardom. What, then, are the chances of successful negotiations under such conditions? Some may exist, but the overriding priority remains the strengthening of Ukraine’s defensive capacity.

 

Nikolai Karpitsky. Life in Occupied Kherson: An Eyewitness Account

Source: PostPravda.info 12.01.2026.
URL: https://postpravda.info/en/stories/frontline-stories/life-in-occupied-kherson/

I spoke with Vitaly about life under occupation. He is known on social media under the nickname “Vital Ustas.” Before the war, he worked in the police. After retiring, he became involved in the scouting movement. He lived through the occupation of Kherson, in the Korabel housing estate on Quarantine Island.

Russian Occupation: Only Death Is Worse

When the full-scale invasion began, what I feared most was not the shelling, but the occupation itself. At times, the electricity was gone for long periods, and with it the connection to the outside world – you don’t know what is happening on the front line near you. There is only one thought in your head: anything but occupation. After the liberation of Izium and Kherson, I realized that reality was far more terrifying than even the darkest images my imagination had conjured. In conversation, a resident of Kherson told me that Russian occupation is a state of absolute lawlessness; only death can be worse.

Russian occupation is not simply a change of power. It is the transformation of a person into a thing – something to which anything can be done. It is impossible to hide from occupation or simply wait it out at home. The occupiers will come into your house and decide whether you live or die, and that decision may depend on the mood of drunken soldiers. In addition, the occupiers deliberately hunt down those who, in free Ukraine, openly expressed their views or demonstrated a Ukrainian identity.

Lawlessness

Vitaly from Kherson (“Vital Ustas”) speaks about everyday life in the occupied city.

– In the first days of the occupation, we were in shock. Two or three days – and they were already here: flags everywhere, military vehicles driving through the city. We thought there would be some kind of defense… How did they end up in Kakhovka on the very first day?!

– This was right at the beginning. An armored vehicle pulls up to a mother and her son who were simply walking down the street. A soldier points a machine gun at them and says nothing. She told me about it herself later. The street was empty. The mother stood there, not knowing what to do – whether to walk or not. They stood there, trembling. Finally, the son said, “Well, let’s go, Mom.” “Let’s go.”

The right to life is like air: while it exists, you don’t notice it.

– Without documents, you are a piece of meat, – says Vitaly. –Compared to this, the gangster 1990s were a children’s fairy tale.

Like Vitaly, I too remember the lawlessness and crime of the early 1990s, but even then I knew for certain that I was considered a human being regardless of whether I had my passport with me or had left it at home. Under occupation, however, even having documents guarantees nothing – even if they are perfectly in order.

– You leave your house and don’t know whether you’ll come back, – Vitaly says. – You don’t know where you’ll end up by evening: in a basement, or shot at a checkpoint.

As an example, Vitaly recalls the story of villagers who regularly brought milk to the city and were therefore already well known at a checkpoint.

– Why do you frisk us every time? Who are you looking for? – they ask.
– We’re looking for Nazis.
– And how many have you caught here already?
– We don’t talk to them. If we notice anything, we shoot to kill. Our battalion commander told us: “If you see anything suspicious and there’s no resistance, you’re allowed to kill on the spot.”

Vitaly did not hear of anyone being shot at a checkpoint inside the city itself, but in the suburbs it happened frequently. In the city, checkpoints were more often manned by the National Guard (Rosgvardiya). There, they might still “think” before shooting, but at the slightest suspicion people were detained and sent “to the basement.”

At the Checkpoint

– I lived in the Korabel housing estate, – Vitaly continues. – It’s the island part of Kherson. There’s a shipbuilding plant there; from it, they were firing at Mykolaiv. Our district was cut off from the rest of Kherson by a checkpoint. To get from the island to the city and back, you had to pass through it – traffic jams were terrible.

– When you cross a checkpoint, everyone is tense, like a drawn string. Once you’ve passed it, there’s a collective sigh of relief. In the city, checkpoints were mostly set up at exits: roads were completely blocked. But from time to time, mobile checkpoints appeared inside the city – suddenly they would block a street for two or three hours, set up a machine gun, and start checking all vehicles: documents, luggage.

– Phones had to be “cleaned”: they were checked at checkpoints. They went through everything, which took a lot of time – minibuses stood and waited. Sometimes FSB officers would show up. Using special equipment, they checked phone activity over the previous six months. If they found anything suspicious, the person was taken away. Some later disappeared without a trace. In Bilozerka, for example, a man was taken this way, and later his body – bearing signs of torture – was dumped near his house.

– We’re crossing the checkpoint between our district and the rest of Kherson, and immediately they shout: “All men out! Documents! Strip to the waist!” They checked tattoos. They knew prison tattoos, but if they found Ukrainian symbols or anything resembling runes, they took the person immediately. And after that – torture. That’s why those who had tattoos tried not to leave their homes at all.

Vitaly also recounts another case, retold to him by the mother of two sons. The elder was 22; the younger, 18, had Down syndrome. The older brother was taking the younger one to the hospital. At the checkpoint, soldiers checked his phone and saw messages in Ukrainian: acquaintances from Kyiv had been writing to him on Telegram.

“Ukrainian language?! You bastard!” – they shouted and dragged him out of the minibus. The minibus stood there, the passengers watching as the young man was beaten. In the end, the soldiers decided to take him away, but the passengers began to plead, asking that the older brother be allowed to accompany the younger one to the hospital. Only because of this was the young man released, but his details were recorded and he was warned: if they ever saw Ukrainian-language correspondence again, it would be the end for him.

People could be beaten simply for saying the “wrong” word or for “looking the wrong way.” Vitaly gives the example of a 65-year-old man on a minibus who merely snapped back when soldiers started harassing him. He was dragged outside, beaten with boots and rifle butts in front of all the passengers, and then thrown onto the roadside. Sometimes women were dragged out and beaten in the same way.

Terror

Vitaly says that occupation is a constant expectation of something terrible.

– You wake up in the morning and immediately check the news. One day they announce some kind of “mobilization”: all men must register for military service. Another day it’s forced passportization. Then the hryvnia is abolished. Then they’re searching for someone. Then there are house-to-house raids. Then payment terminals are taken from shops. We paid with bank cards – and that infuriated the “rashists.” By August, terminals had been removed from a number of stores, though not everywhere. The worst thing is that you are completely rightless. There is no protection, no guarantee that you won’t be taken simply because someone didn’t like you.

– Sometimes, to intimidate people, the occupiers themselves posted videos of torture. At the very beginning, someone stole a car from them. They found that person and posted a video showing how they tortured him with electricity – attaching wires to his ears. The pain is unbearable: it feels as if your brain is being boiled.

“House-to-house raids” – this was the name given to planned searches of civilians’ homes, which Vitaly describes:

– A knock on the door, the first question: “Who is in the apartment?” They checked identities and searched everything, overlooking not a single detail. They didn’t manage to search all of Kherson, but in villages I know of houses that were searched several times.

– There were constant reports of people disappearing, – Vitaly says. – Once, young people went out for a walk after curfew – and never came back. In the morning, a mother stands at the police station: “Where is my son?” – “We don’t know.” He might have been sent to dig trenches or something even worse. Sometimes people never returned at all. To this day, no one knows how many people went missing. It’s impossible to count exactly – people simply vanished.

– There was a manhunt for participants in the ATO (the Anti-Terrorist Operation in eastern Ukraine) and members of the Territorial Defense. The rashists had lists – possibly handed over by collaborators. That is how the deputy commander of a Territorial Defense battalion was kidnapped. Two days later, his body, bearing signs of torture, was found in the Dnipro River.

Protests

The threat of occupation is more frightening than shelling – that is exactly how I felt during the bombardments in frontline Sloviansk. That is why I was struck by how the residents of Kherson, from whom the occupiers were trying to take away even the right to life, went out to protest under the barrels of machine guns.

On March 5, the first mass rally of Kherson residents took place on Freedom Square, with Ukrainian flags and slogans such as “Kherson is Ukraine” and “Russians, go home.” The military fired warning shots, but the rally did not disperse. From that moment on, protests in Kherson became a daily occurrence.

Over the next two days, people also took to the streets in other cities of the Kherson region – Nova Kakhovka, Hola Prystan, and Oleshky. On March 6, in Nova Kakhovka, the military used weapons against protesters, wounding five people. On March 13, the largest protest took place in Kherson, with around 10,000 residents participating.

From March 19, violence against protesters in Kherson escalated. The occupiers shifted from tactics of intimidation to outright violence: harsh detentions and beatings, the use of stun grenades, and tear gas. By April, the protests became fragmented and decentralized, shifting toward brief gatherings and symbolic actions.

The last mass protest against the Russian occupation in Kherson took place on April 27. The Yellow Ribbon movement organized a peaceful march under the slogan “Kherson is Ukraine,” with about 500 participants. During the brutal dispersal, some participants were injured.

All of this I knew from social media – at a distance – so I asked Vitaly to describe what he felt as an eyewitness.

– The rashists initially assumed that everyone here would be unanimously pro-Russia. Instead, the people were hostile and tense. A Rosgvardiya officer gets on a minibus and asks, “Why do you all look so sullen?” Everyone stays silent – they know that no matter what, they can’t say anything. Say a word, and they can drag you out of the minibus and tell the driver, “Drive on, we’re keeping him.” When they saw the protests, they realized that this was a hostile environment for them.

– The rallies began on March 5. At first, the occupiers simply observed. Then they started moving closer – fully armed, with assault rifles, masked, riding on military vehicles. People stood there, chanting. At first, thousands gathered; then fewer and fewer. I attended rallies during the second week – it was terrifying. They were filming everything, and a drone was flying overhead. I was afraid I’d end up in some database and then be taken away later for participating in the rally. For about three weeks, the protests continued actively, and then they moved from Freedom Square to Shevchenko Park. There, eight or nine people would gather by the monument.

– There was a hunt for everyone who had “shown up” on social media and taken part in the protests, – Vitaly explains in response to a question about the risks of participating in rallies. – First and foremost, they went after those who had been especially active during the first month of the occupation. One woman I know was noticed at a rally – or perhaps identified through social media. Later, she was detained and taken to a basement. There, they laid a naked young man on a table in front of her, and three soldiers raped him. After that, they told her: “If we see you at rallies or checkpoints again, the same will happen to you.” From then on, she stayed quiet as a mouse until the end of the occupation – went nowhere, afraid of everything.

Collaborators

The occupiers wanted to govern a functioning city, but to do so they needed specialists in many different fields. Vitaly explains:

– Once they realized that the city was fully under their control, filtration measures began. At first, they expected people to voluntarily go to work for them and inform on anyone who supported Ukraine. Some did, but there were too few to quickly build their own system of governance. Then they began deliberately searching for civil servants and municipal workers – at every level.

– They decided to revive the orchestra at the drama theater. This was about two months before liberation. They found the conductor, Yury Kerpatenko, and told him: “Come on, the theater has to function. You’ll work for us.” He refused. An argument followed, word by word – and they shot him right in his own home.

– In July, the rashists began working with children – in a militarized format. In Kherson, they organized the first “Young Army” club and found some teachers. I was afraid they would come after me too, because I had previously worked with the scouting movement in the National Scout Organization of Ukraine. And before that, I had worked in the police.

– If I saw a former colleague on the street, I tried to cross to the other side just to avoid running into them. I didn’t know whether they were “with us” or “with them.” What if he said right there in the street, “Come work with us – the pay is good,” and you replied, “No, I don’t want to”? Then the question would immediately follow: “Why don’t you want to?” That’s how they pressured former civil servants and municipal workers: “Come work for us! … Why don’t you want to? … Out of principle? … Oh, so you’re for Ukraine!” And after that, anything could happen: blackmail, the basement, torture.

– There was a case in Kherson well known in police circles. A retired police officer with the rank of major went to work for the rashists and promised to bring along his co-godfather, Oleh Khudiakov: “We’re co-godfathers, friends – we worked together for so many years. He’s competent; he’ll definitely work for you.” But Khudiakov categorically refused. He was held in a basement for three days – what they did to him there is unknown. In the end, he agreed to cooperate, and they released him. He returned home and hanged himself.

– We were afraid even of acquaintances. There were people we had been friends with for many years, and then suddenly it turned out they were rashists to the core: “Hooray! Hooray! We’re with Russia!” What to expect from them next was impossible to know.

– For example, I know a singing teacher at a cultural college. He never openly declared his political views, but one day acquaintances came to him and said, “We’re going to report you.” – “For what?” – “You taught classes in Ukrainian for so many years!” That was enough to label a person a “Nazi.”

Connection with the Outside World

– In April, Ukrainian internet and mobile communications were cut off, – Vitaly recounts. – The occupiers routed internet access through Crimea – with restrictions similar to those in Russia. Mobile service was switched to special SIM cards on which Ukrainian numbers were blocked, making it impossible to call relatives in territories controlled by Ukraine.

– In March and April, people were leaving en masse via Mykolaiv. My co-godfather was traveling to Oleksandrivka – it’s in Kherson Oblast – and had to pass through about twenty checkpoints. At some, the soldiers were sober; at others, drunk, but searches were conducted everywhere. At that time, there were still no registries of ATO participants at the checkpoints, so many people managed to slip through – even in May, people were still able to leave.

– By June, leaving had become extremely difficult. Huge traffic jams formed in front of the checkpoints, and cars were searched for up to an hour. One acquaintance managed to leave only on the twenty-seventh day. People stood in line a month, renting housing just to spend the night. Sometimes the rashists started shooting – they wanted to scare people into dispersing – but no one backed down.

Schools

– During the occupation, from March until mid-May, schools were not operating, – Vitaly continues. – At the end of May and the beginning of June, about four schools reopened in Kherson – one per district. In those cases, principals made deals with the occupiers. There were few children, and classes were incomplete.

– Lessons did not last long and stopped once the Armed Forces of Ukraine began striking military bases with HIMARS. The occupation authorities started claiming that the city was “dangerous,” although there was no threat to schools: the strikes were very precise and targeted military facilities, including Rosgvardiya bases. We applauded when the Ukrainian Armed Forces struck.

– After that, the schools were closed, and children began to be sent to “camps” – to Krasnodar Krai, to Crimea, to Belarus. Entire classes were sent, and then they were never brought back. As a result, the children either remained under occupation or ended up in Russia.

Kherson. Historical Background

On March 2, Russian troops occupied Kherson. In September, Russia announced a so-called “referendum” and on 30 September signed a “treaty of accession,” declaring the incorporation of Kherson Oblast into the Russian Federation. On November 11, 2022, the city of Kherson was liberated from Russian forces after 256 days of occupation. Before the occupation, Kherson’s population was about 279,000; today it is approximately 60,000.

At the beginning of the occupation, repression was chaotic, and random people became victims. As repression became systematized, a deliberate search for the “unreliable” began. During the occupation of Kherson, the repressive machinery did not have time to complete the transition from mass, chaotic repression to the targeted, systematic persecution of the kind now practiced in Russia.

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.