Recent days have featured a drumbeat of developments suggesting Russia is preparing for war: Moscow has boosted its military spending, Vladimir Putin has told businesses to go on a military footing, Patriarch Kirill has spoken about a looming apocalypse, and school children are being instructed on how to cope with a military conflict.
The big question is “why?” As Moscow blogger Aleksandr Melnikov points out, “there are no military threats to Russia, no country has territorial claims against our country, and no one is preparing to attack it.” Instead, he suggests, the reason for Putin’s war talk lies within his elite and his inability to offer Russia anything else.
Under Putin, “the rotting Russian system has no other sense.” And it is happening, Melnikov says, because that system has “nothing to offer its citizens, and nothing to offer to the world.” It has led itself into a dead end and views talk of war as the only way to keep its rulers in positions of whatever happens to anyone else.
“The results are well-known,” the blogger continues. “Sanctions, a lack of capital, the rotting away of ‘state companies,’ enormous social differentiation, the robbing of the regions, privileges for the ruling bosses, the lack of prospects for the young, a brain drain, pensions at the poverty level, open deceiving of pensioners, the insanity of the ruling hierarchs. A completely and absolutely poor country.”
Whether there will be a war or not is still unknown. “But to live this war, to make the life of people a preparation for war, having based it on hatred and using it to hide all the failures of the Russian bosses and all Russian society, that will happen,” for the same reasons and with the same short-term effect as the Anschluss of Crimea.
“If a war with the Western world happens, this will be the last Russian war: the country will lose it, with enormous victims and destruction.” But in some respects, the Russian people have already lost because they have shown themselves willing to be driven about in any direction that Putin and his bosses want. “They will agree to anything.”
“What will be ‘the trigger’ of such a war?” That is clear, Melnikov says. “If the Western governments freeze the money and property of the upper Russian rulers and their friends held in the West, then the last thread and the last meaning of existence together with the West will be lost for the Russian elite.”
And then, Melnikov concludes, “the country will still more rapidly head toward the abyss of history,” all to save rulers that have done nothing to save the Russian people.
Read More:
- Russian info war against US, far broader than last year’s elections, an act of terrorism, Latynina says
- Russia recruited over 5,000 mercenaries to fight in its wars abroad, SBU says
- “Zapad-2017”: Russian sabre rattling towards eastern Europe
- Democracies should prepare for the long fight against Russian disinformation warfare: study
- ‘Alternatives to revolution in Putin’s Russia are not elections but more wars,’ Eidman says
- Putin-Trump summit wasn’t a second Yalta; it was Rapallo-2, Abarinov warns
- Ukraine and the US-Russia confrontation
- Putin accelerating his plan for long-term confrontation with the West, Illarionov says
