Five days ago I wrote about the dangerous advance of the invaders who approached Liman. My students and colleagues live there. The city is shelled, residential buildings are burning. Volunteer friends are taking people out under shelling. If Liman had been taken, the artillery could have hit Slavyansk from there. But the front line has not moved in the last few days. It may seem like nothing is happening, but it is not. Putin decided to succeed by May 9 at all costs, and all the while a desperate offensive has been going on. I know about this from the constant artillery cannonade. Fights are going on both on the ground and in the air. Today is sunny, the weather is convenient for flights, so the intense work of our air defense is constantly heard.
The occupiers are laid out in full. This is the maximum they can do, but the Ukrainian military successfully repels all attacks. By the intensity of the shooting from our positions, it is felt that the forces of the defenders have grown. In addition, somewhere in the rear, new reserves are being prepared, equipped with western heavy weapons. When they enter the battle, the defeat of the Russian army will be a foregone conclusion. Until recently, so-called oppositionists from Russia explained that although Crimea was seized illegally, it is technically impossible to take it back. It looks like the problem will resolve itself soon.
Today I was extremely surprised. It turns out, as I was told, Russian TV consumers are still sincerely convinced that Russia is successfully advancing and winning! The most critical of them admit that the Russian troops are temporarily bogged down, but they still do not doubt in victory. And we wondered what Putin would present to his electorate as a success by May 9th. It turns out that there is no need to present anything, people already believe that everyone is defeated.
For me, as for everyone in Ukraine, the inevitability of victory is obvious. A month ago, there were fears that the matter would end with a truce and the withdrawal of Russian troops to the status of February 23, 2022, but now the complete liberation of all the occupied territories is only the beginning. Now we are talking about, in principle, making Russia undangerous for the rest of the world. And here we can compare how our faith in the victory of Ukraine differs from the faith in the victory of Russia zombied by propaganda.
In the early days of the invasion, an acquaintance from Russia sympathetically suggested fleeing Ukraine, which would soon be completely captured, another, condolingly, wrote that he did not expect the Ukrainian resistance to collapse so quickly, thinking they would hold out a little longer. These people live in a picture of the world completely divorced from reality, and with them millions more who even now continue to believe in Russia's victory. The essence of this faith is that the believer is in a passive position in relation to the subject of faith. This begs the comparison to football fans watching the match on TV. They believe in the victory of their team, but they cannot influence the situation and therefore only passively watch what is happening.
By the way, military hysteria in Russia is of the same nature as the hysteria of fans who are not able to play themselves. For a complete analogy it should be added that they observe the match on the tape from which the censor cut out all the goals missed by their team.
The belief in Ukraine's victory is also irrational to some extent, as it initially manifested itself in a seemingly hopeless situation, when Kyiv was supposed to fall within four days, and organized resistance to collapse. This is how the ratio of military potentials worked out according to rational calculations by specialists. However, these calculations meant nothing to the Ukrainians, neither military nor civilians, who together stopped the enemy because they believed in victory. And this faith was fundamentally different from that one of those brainwashed by propaganda. The faith of Ukrainians is not based on ideological convictions or on a disconnected picture of the world, but on their own will to victory. It was that will that formed not a passive, but an active attitude towards the subject of faith.
The will to win is such an inner intention that does not depend on external circumstances and is able to change the surrounding reality. It arises in internal free self-determination and is revealed in actions in such a way that at every moment a person feels the power to do the right thing and realizes that this act really changes something. It is namely this realization that becomes the belief in victory. This is a special kind of faith as a form of awareness of one's inner intention, which determines an active attitude to the subject of faith.
The passive faith of those zombified by propaganda is of a fundamentally different kind. It will sooner or later make you feel like a victim of circumstances. If they show you a picture on TV that Russia is winning, then everything is fine, you can be proud of yourself. If they don't show it, too bad, but nothing depends on you anyway. All you have is to bear it and wait for the soothing lies of propaganda, in relation to which an addiction is formed.
