Now, we are going through the first day of a new European war.
Most of the citizens haven’t realized it yet, but it’s a fact. We are the citizens of the countries which are at war.
There are explosions all over Ukraine. The government announced martial law.
The Russian troops are bursting through its borders. A peaceful European country turned into a battlefield.
Every hour the news becomes worse and worse. There isn’t any hope or light.
Many times, I’ve said on this channel how much it costs us that the power is not changing.
How much it costs us and the whole region that our political elites allowed an individual autocrat to emerge.
Every day Russia is paying with its life level, political prosecution, censorship and, what’s even worse,
with its own future, in Belarus, except for the police violence, they know that Lukashenko
is supported by the Russian udget and the Russian army.
But Ukraine is paying the most terrible price by losing its territories, by a simmering conflict and a constant threat.
But even knowing that, we couldn’t even imagine such a price just because one person is terrified that he will lose his chair,
and a primitive system where all the institutions are replaced with arrangements can’t do anything about him.
And the price for that is a real war in Europe, not just an aggressive attack
at the neighbor which takes lives of both soldiers and civilians.
The price was a malevolent disruption of the world order
on our planet since the end of two most horrible wars in its history.
Here I’d like to warn the Russian citizens against self-reproach, autocrats can easily emerge
in young political systems with weak institutions. No one among us is to blame. The elites are to blame.
They’ve spent their power resources to obtain personal gain.
They were fine with this lame model which brought them just income without any expenses.
We, the citizens who don’t have such a power resource, are the victims of this regime,
the prisoners of its crazy internal and external policy. Not as much as the Ukrainians today, not even close.
But we are not the authors of this aggression, and we are not responsible for it.
If we could sum up the results of World War II and say one clear thing about it, we would say,
“Hey, we’ve been restoring the historical justice for 30 years since 1914 and recalled
whose ancestors were first to build a shack in a village, calculated a linguistic
and ethnical relation to the nation and enlarged our living space.
Well, we did a magnificent job restoring historical justice or protecting our fellow citizens – the whole continent is in ruins.
Ten more years of such visionary activity, such humanitarian urges, and there will be no one left to protect anybody.
They decided that we wouldn’t move the borders in Europe. That’s enough, thank you! We’ve managed to survive this war,
but it’s not a fact that we’ll survive another one. Such maneuvers are too expensive”.
That is what our world has been standing on for 69 years. Countries emerged and fell apart,
superpowers growled at each other in Africa, Middle East and Asia, but no European country dared
to bite a piece from another country or enlarged itself at the expense of its neighbors,
no one started to restore historical justice.
For the first time, this world was disrupted in 2014 when the Crimea was annexed.
For the first time a big European country seized the territory of its neighbor.
Then the world was disrupted quickly and bloodlessly, without any catastrophic consequences and severe sanctions.
It happened so because not only Ukraine but no one in the world expected that Russia (as a part of the former USSR)
would risk destroying the world which was built and paid for with its own blood and horrible losses.
Because the Russian government represented by the first after-war generation should understand
how easily this peace can be destroyed, how easily you can start discussions about historical justice
and the origin of a foreign land.
And what’s more important, how difficult and dangerous it would be to cancel it in a world stuffed with nuclear weapons.
8 years later Russia once again has crossed this line which was paid with so much blood and horror.
And now it’s not some polite people with no recognition signs,
now it’s tanks and multiple launch rocket systems attacking civil European cities.
It’s not even about the crime against Ukraine, or against Russia but against the whole world.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a unity among the developed countries
when the leaders from the Eastern Europe totally agree with the leaders from the Western Europe,
and with the US, Canada, Japan and Australia as well.
For many years Vladimir Putin’s regime managed to sow division and mutual disagreement
in the developed world and avoid the most severe sanctions and isolation because of corruption,
commercial interests and radicals’ support.
But not this time. This time no thoughts about gas discounts, no increasing of heating rates for 5, 10
or (God forbid) 20 percent will not cancel the fact that there are missile attacks in a 15-hours car trip.
If today, you are waiting for some well-thought analytics or prognoses for the future,
we won’t give it to you as well as anyone else.
There is no template we can use in this situation, no former experience.
We are all even here, we are just the viewers who share the news with each other.
Let’s proceed with today’s news.
The most difficult thing now is to understand what news we get now is true and what news is fake.
As the famous proverb says, the first victim of war is the truth. We will try to use the official sources, but, of course,
they don’t always truthfully reflect reality.
Let’s try to restore the order of events this morning which will surely be mentioned in the history textbooks in future.
At 5:40 Moscow time the Russian channels showed the urgent message from President Putin.
In general, it was another pseudo-historical lecture on the Great Patriotic War, the USSR collapse
and NATO’s malicious plans.
In the end of this lecture Putin announced that LNR and DNR asked Russia to start a special military operation
to protect the republics from Kyiv’s genocide. It’s a quote.
He says that the goal of this operation is the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine
and the prosecution of people who committed multiple bloody crimes against the civilians as well as the citizens of Russia.
According to the President, Russia can’t stand the threat coming from its neighbor.
However, the Kremlin doesn’t set the goal of occupying Ukraine.
In his video Putin addressed several audiences at once. He asked the Ukrainian soldiers
to lay down their weapons and stop resisting.
He also threatened the Western countries with a nuclear war if they responded.
As the journalists of “Novaya Gazeta” found out, if you download this video from the Kremlin website,
you will see in the metadata that this video was recorded on February 21.
It was the day when Putin officially recognized LNR and DNR. As military analysts said, it was obvious
that the decision to intrude into Ukraine wasn’t made in a rush but was planned beforehand and was well prepared.
During those minutes Putin gave his speech on TV, the eyewitnesses started reporting about explosions
in different parts of Ukraine – in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnieper, and Odessa.
In the cities which are far away from Donbas, the Ministry of Defense reported that they attack just the military objects
of the Ukrainian army with high-precision weapons without threatening the civil cities and civilians.
Almost immediately there were videos contradicting this statement.
For example, the video with the pieces of a multiple rocket launcher system
which is not a selective weapon and it can’t distinguish military and civilian objects.
However, for the moment this video is recorded, there’s no official proof for that.
Air space was closed immediately and not just above Ukraine but above the south of Russia too.
The airports of Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Sochi, Anapa, Volgograd and other cities stopped working.
All the planned flights were canceled. Hundreds of planes were canceled or delayed in Moscow too.
And in the Azov Sea they stopped navigation. Ruble crashed as well as the stocks of the Russian companies.
In the morning you could buy one dollar for 90 rubles and one euro for more than 100 rubles.
Sberbank's app offered you to pay 102 rubles per dollar.
Then the Russian exchanges had to stop bidding.
Several hours later they opened and then closed again because of the new demise.
Before recording this video I’ve checked the rate in Alpha Bank. Now you can buy a dollar for 86.5 rubles.
In the morning there were videos of how the Russian roops crossed the land borders with Ukraine –
from the North from Belarus and from the South from the Crimea.
However, at the moment when this video was recorded, at 3 pm Moscow time, there is no evidence
of a collision of the Ukrainian and Russian armies on the land. Though I don’t understand how it can be avoided.
In the afternoon Lukashenko denied that the Belarussian soldiers participated in the operation.
And it’s a clumsy moment when even an illegal dictator who holds the power in his country by force
tries to stay away from Putin’s decision to intrude into Ukraine.
Soon there was news that different villages and settlements in the Luhansk region were seized by the LNR troops.
And again, there is no official confirmation and it’s impossible to say what’s going on there.
As to the losses, there is no verified information about it.
The general staff of Ukraine says that they hit 6 military planes and 2 helicopters.
And under Kharkiv they hit 4 tanks. Russia denies it.
Also, Ukraine’s government gave the first data on victims among the civilians during the shootings.
9 people from different regions died.
Many citizens of Kyiv hid in the subway as in the bomb shelter.
There are many-kilometers-long traffic jams on the roads from Kyiv to the suburbs.
There are queues in the food stores and at the ATMs.
That’s what our friends in Ukraine say, we asked them what’s going on there.
Moreover, the banks blocked credit money in people’s accounts.
The National Bank of Ukraine restricted cash withdrawal and stopped the work of a foreign exchange market.
President Zelensky announced martial law in the country and said that he will make video reports every hour.
In one of those videos he said that the diplomatic ties with Russia are severed and that he proposed
a law on nation-wide mobilization to Verkhovna Rada.
The international reaction to the intrusion is very illustrative. Literally, no one supported Russia.
Even Lukashenko. At the very best they just keep their distance from what happened like Lukashenko or China.
In the worst case they criticize the war mercilessly like one pro-Russian European leader –
the Czech President Milos Zeman.
Zeman demanded to switch Russia off from SWIFT and implement more serious sanctions
than it was discussed before.
He said that insane people should be isolated. It’s a quote from Zeman who has always been a pro-Putin politician.
There are even the ideas to annul all the visas given to the Russians or even close the EU for all the Russians.
However, we’ll know more about specific measures by the evening.
But it’s already obvious that this is just the beginning. The most terrible catastrophe happened.
And we can’t predict or even assess the consequences.
Amidst these horrors let’s try to, well, pull ourselves out from this situation and imagine that we are the observers.
It might be impossible now, but let’s try to analyze.
Almost any war is the continuation of politics by other means.
When the government can’t reach the goal with political methods, it uses its armed forces.
When the leader of the country decides to use the army, he must ask himself
a fundamental question and some additional questions as well, “What is the purpose of military actions?”
The purpose can’t be a motto or consist of philosophic abstractions or imperfective verbs.
The goal should be specific, ending, achievable, and measurable.
And then there are questions, “With what forces and measures will this goal be achieved?
What is the time frame? What is the picture of the desirable after-war order?”
Early in the morning we heard Putin’s message about the start of the war which consisted of mottos, abstractions,
and philosophic ideas.
The problem is not only that we don’t understand Putin’s goal, but the problem is also that Putin himself
might not be able to set a goal which would have an end and would be achievable.
Putin talked about pointless wars against Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya with such sincere pain
as if he is not the President of Russia but of those 3 countries.
Of course, it’s not news that the President of Russia is interested in the citizens
of any other country, except for Russia.
On Monday he discussed how bad it is for the Ukrainians to live without a good justice system
and with opposition prosecution and high communal prices. But another thing is important here.
He uses pointless wars which happened in his eyes as a justification of his own pointless war.
Putin recalled how Colin Powell showed a test tube in the UN, allegedly, with a chemical weapon from Iraq.
But he himself shows us the Ukrainian Nazis now. It’s the truth that the US intruded into Iraq to solve a non-existent problem.
And it was a catastrophe for the region.
But Putin makes a bizarre conclusion from the events of the recent past, “I’ll do the same but here, at home”.
According to Putin himself, he wants to denazify Ukraine.
It’s the country which has chosen an ethnically Jewish president who has built a career performing in Russian.
And many of those performances were in Russia and were shown on Russian TV.
He is the person who played in Russian films. And those weren’t non-conformist auteur films
but the films for masses like the remake of the “Office romance” (iconic Soviet film).
Every Ukrainian knew about that and they chose Vladimir Zelensky as a President.
It doesn’t look like a Nazi government which wants the genocide of the Russians.
Then, Zelensky’s party got the majority in the Ukrainian Parliament.
And those who might be called Nazis couldn’t get into it even in a coalition. No Nazi made it to the Parliament.
Putin can’t denazify Ukraine in the first place – there is no Nazism there at all.
And I’m not even talking about Putin’s wish to protect the Russians from (I quote)
“Western values which contradict human nature”.
How exactly is he going to do it with his army? When will he say that the necessary goal is achieved?
Where is he going to shoot to achieve such goals?
Let’s proceed with the next question. With what forces and measures is he going to achieve his alleged goals?
This is the only question we have an answer for.
And again, if we try to observe the situation from the side, during the first hours
of the war we could see that the Russian army was acting pretty smart.
The military actions are hidden from us in the fog of the war. Every bit of fact is piled with a ton of rumors.
The situation keeps changing.
However, we’ve seen the videos when the Russian army hit the landing strips of the Ukrainian
air fields and the stocks of fuel and armament.
The first one disrupts the work of Ukrainian aviation and limits the possibilities of rapid transfer of resources.
The second one disrupts the base for resistance. Both of them are consistent with any military textbook.
But now let’s talk about the most horrible thing – about the questions with no answers.
In what time can you achieve the non-existent goals?
What is the picture of the desirable after-war order? How does Putin imagine it? And does he imagine it at all?
Let’s try to answer those questions ourselves.
But we won’t succeed. We would imagine pictures which would look like Putin described it for Iraq and Libya.
They managed to start the war but it’s a good question how to end it.
Here it’s not democratization but denazification. Everything could have been different.
If in Putin’s world picture full of abstractions and absurd constructs, Ukraine should be together with Russia,
he could have taken specific and logical steps to achieve that 22 years ago.
He should have concerned himself with Russia, Russian state institutions, economy and infrastructure,
with Russian culture, at least.
We are on the verge of a big shock.
And we had all the opportunities to become wealthy, successful and attractive.
Russia could and must have become a center of finances, culture and tourism.
Then, we would be able to offer our neighbors not our great past but a safe present and future.
And our neighbors would be closer to us, and post-Soviet governmental borders would become insignificant.
Like in the Western Europe where you can cross a border without even noticing it.
But we turned in the wrong direction together with Vladimir Putin.
Instead of correcting the initial reasons,
Putin with his threats and literally with the war now is trying to make people move in the wrong direction.
We have no idea what we should expect tomorrow and how far this will go.
Common sense isn’t good enough for making prognoses.
This tool is not on the agenda anymore.
We can only watch how many people will die and what sanctions will be implemented, but we can’t predict it.
The only thing we can say for sure is that we’ve lived in this new world for one day. There’s no return ticket from it.
We would feel the consequences of today’s morning, of war, of strict sanctions, deep isolation for decades.
Now, everyone is discussing the stock and exchange market collapse, share the screenshots.
Dear friends, those are yesterday's discussions. Stock market, publicly traded companies, free rotation
of reserve currencies – all that and the country leading war in Europe are not a plausible match.
We don’t know how the reality will look like tomorrow,
how far in the past we will go from the technical, economic and social point of view.
But we will have to live in the new reality for a long time.
And we won’t be able to restore our current status soon, the status of one of the poorest countries in Europe
with the Bulgarian GDP per person, with a quite developed service area,
with good financial technologies and competent IT.
The country which started a war in the middle of Europe will become an enemy for the whole developed world.
And the developed world, despite all the expenses, will force it to live peacefully with the most strict measures.
And it’s much easier to introduce those measures than to cancel them.
They will not even live as long as Putin, they will outlive him.
The generations which wouldn’t know Putin would be poorer because of the heritage which is being created now.
It will take us decades to come back to the life level we had yesterday.
This is it.
Till tomorrow!