Yesterday evening the second stage of the war officially began.
The Russian army concentrated all the present forces in Donbas and initiated an attack.
At the same time the air-raid sirens were launched throughout Ukraine.
This video was made just 2 hours after Vladimir Zelensky’s speech.
And for now, we just have some protocol reports about the start of active hostilities without any significant details.
Perhaps now more information is available, but we’ll talk about it tomorrow.
The only thing that is clear now is that a change of the Russian command didn’t change the army’s tactics.
Having the huge and armed Ukrainian forces right in front of them,
the Russian side selflessly destroys cities and kills the civilians as far from the front as possible.
It’s unclear how exactly Lviv’s bombing could help with Donbas offense, but it’s still happening.
People who are familiar with the history made gloomy jokes at the beginning that war was a fast rewind
of the “Barbarossa plan” when Germany attacked the USSR where a month felt like a year.
By the second half of April the parallels became frightening – not just in terms
of atrocities on the occupied territory (and we get more and more details about it)
but also in terms of military strategy. The three-directions attack has failed,
the capital they came extremely close to was won back.
The opponent has clenched its fists for a new bound on the South.
The Germans had Stalingrad, the Russians – Donbas.
There are a lot of terrifying parallels indeed – from this horrible letter “Z”
which is repulsive just by association for anyone who is familiar to the world’s history,
and to the direct text borrowings from the classics of national socialism.
Those parallels are not just esthetic ones but practical too – all those stories about rapes,
filtration camps, men’s executions. Everything we learn every day from the independent media
investigations is literally Soviet military prose about the occupants, partisans and underground.
That’s why it’s appropriate to discuss why trying to earn Hitler’s glory, Putin’s regime can’t really accomplish its tasks
It’s quite engaging to draw parallels between Putin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany.
There are a lot of them judging by the looks of it – from Kyiv bombing at 4 am
to the symbol reminding us strongly of a half of swastika.
In 1939 they told the Germans that the war and massive murders were absolutely necessary and without it,
Germany would never become great.
Jewish people are plotting global conspiracy and need to be stopped.
All the countries are united against the Reich and Germany needs to stand up to them.
It’s not Germany who started this war, it just happened this way.
The others are to blame, but we need to win by all means, because it’s a life-or-death matter.
Doesn’t it sound familiar?
It’s like all the propaganda – from the state channels to Alexander Lukashenko – says that
it wasn’t Russia who started this war. Ukraine wanted to attack us first.
And if there weren’t a preventive strike at 4 positions (I’ll show you, I’ve brought a map)
6 hours before the operation, they would attack our troops (of Russia and Belarus)
which were training at that moment.
That’s why it’s not us who started this war. Our conscience is clear!
But if we look “under the hood” we’ll find out that there are more differences than similarities.
And the main difference is the ideology.
If you are a German and live in 1939, you understand quite well why Germany attacked Poland.
You might agree or disagree, but there is no “why” for you.
Hitler’s policy was leading to it.
He has never hidden his intentions to provide the Germans the area for living in the East.
He was quite obvious in his main work Mein Kampf.
Likewise, if you live in Bremen or Munich in 1939, you don’t ask yourself why the Jewish shop
on the ground floor closed and the vendor disappeared together with his family.
Again, you might support it, or you might be secretly horrified by it,
but the Jewish manhunt was openly put into the Nazi ideology. Nobody hid it.
Nazism had a very distinct ideology. It was inhuman and criminal, it implied discrimination,
manhunt and murder of people based on their nation.
It said that one man was better than the other one just because of his skin color and the skull shape.
By the way, Nazism as well as Bolshevism had a solid quasi-scientific base.
Both ideologies had their own theorists, prophets, and sacred books.
Those theorists, prophets, and books were announced absolutely correct and shouldn’t be criticized in any way.
Remember? “Marx’s study is almighty because it’s true”.
It came from the need described by the classics to fight for dominance of the German race and the global proletarian revolution, respectively.
Hitler started “to collect lands” right after he came to power.
At first, he managed to do it bloodlessly.
But when it became impossible for the fuehrer to get away with the annexation of foreign territories, he started a world’s war.
Soviet Russia also started its wars not under Stalin’s rule but much earlier – in 1920 – starting a conflict with Poland.
There’s a reason that the sickle and the hammer on the USSR’s national emblem had a globe on the background
and the official motto of the country was: “Workers of all countries, unite!”.
The USSR was going to rule the whole world, and its ideology was designed for this goal.
Let’s try to walk in the shoes of a German citizen in 1939.
We can easily understand why he supports the government and wishes to join Wehrmacht.
He has seen how the Nazis turned a bankrupt humiliated country in one of the world’s leaders just in 6 years.
It’s quite logical to believe that the ideology is the right one if it provides such spectacular results.
The hangover will come later, but for now he sincerely supports Hitler.
He puts a swastika on his sleeve proudly and what’s more important – voluntarily.
Modern Russia has no ideology.
I’ll explain soon. Let’s have a break for the ad.
I’ll remind you that we put ads even in the videos like this so that our channel could exist and we could create these videos.
Let’s continue.
Modern Russia has no ideology
if we pay no attention to Putin’s lengthy speculations
which are only appropriate in some marginal chat forums for the fans of alternative history or at a family dinner but definitely not in a President’s speech.
That’s why even now, almost two months after this war started, no one can answer the question why it was started in the first place.
For what reason the Russian troops keep bombing the Ukrainian cities?
Why did the members of the crew of “Moscow” and other military men die?
Even the supporters of Ukraine intrusion can’t name the current reason –
denazification, night bats, other birds carrying biological weapons, or demilitarization?
Or it’s a fight against NATO threats?
Or “we have no choice”? What has happened today?
This business with “the Russian world” and its forced expansion
which is close to the Nazi ideology is something that the marginals like Girkin-Strelkov say.
It never comes from the official speakers.
The mandatory thing for the totalitarian regimes like the one the Nazis or the Bolshevists had is a distinct vision of the future.
We’re going to destroy all the Untermensch, and the Arian German race will finally dominate in this world.
Or we’ll explain to the proletarians in the whole world how to fight oppression and we’ll build communism in the whole world
where everything will be for free, for fun and there might not be any need to die at all.
The vision of the future helps the totalitarian states to be stable.
Lenin died – Stalin came, Stalin died – Khrushchev came.
The goals of the USSR didn’t change because of that.
If Hitler hadn’t lived long enough to start World War II, Himmler or any other Nazi leader would have done it.
Putin’s Russia has no vision of the future.
Putin has been strengthening his autocratic power for two decades and it will end with his own life.
Since he’s 70 this year, it’s not the most distant perspective.
Russia is not run by the young totalitarians but by the elderly autocracy with its best years far behind.
There is no vision of the future in terms of the current events too.
What does Putin want to do with Ukraine – annex it, set a dependable regime there or divide it?
When will the goals of this special operation be achieved?
What are the criteria of success or failure?
And what’s more important – why is it necessary?
It’s not clear. And how can you support something which is not clear for you?
That is the reason why we can’t see that this war is massively and voluntarily supported.
The appearance of this support is created by public employees – the pillars and the hope of the regime.
They help falsify the election results, come to “Luzhniki” for a patriotic meeting, and arrange children to form a Z letter and send the photos to the Department of Education.
Putin’s power is not based on the people’s enthusiasm but on the syndrome of learned helplessness.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean this power won’t suck our blood.
It can and it does.
But there’s no point in looking for common traits between Hitler’s Germany and modern Russia.
In the first case, the cannibal ideology started implementing its intention.
In the second, the bureaucracy went crazy because of many years of unchangeable power.
Besides, we should remember that Hitler’s regime existed in a completely different social reality.
For the external observer it might be strange that it’s a problem for a 150-million people country
to find 100,000 of soldiers.
Or that they have to look for people wherever they can, use conscripts,
draw peacemakers from Karabakh and literally hire soldiers via job hunting resources.
The answer is that Russia is a big country in terms of its territories and a small country from the military point of view.
Not every citizen is a soldier and not every citizen can be.
Yes, a 40-year-old woman is an average citizen of Russia.
She is good for writing mean comments in the local social media, but she is no good for dug positions.
Unlike Germany or the USSR in the 30s Russia is an elderly country.
Among 146 million people there are just 6 million men (which is less than 5%) in the age group from 19 to 29 years old.
They are the ones who are fighting and dying at the moment.
Judging by the majority of dead and captives, a fair share of those men are not available for war.
Like in other social strata the majority of men of military age live in big cities
where army is not a social lift and dodging from military service is normal.
Very different Russian men die – men from small towns and countryside.
Yes, these people are a mobilization resource.
After 20 years of oil shower there are too many places in Russia where a man of military age can be just a car washer with a salary of 15 thousand rubles (nearly $200).
These people can be seduced by money and benefits the government promises for participating in a war.
There are a lot of regions like this in Russia – regions of social catastrophe.
But in terms of quantity there are not so many people like this.
Russia is a country of big cities and its metropolitan areas.
It’s a country of educated urban population.
According to the classification by a regional expert Natalia Zubarevich,
in the so-called “third Russia” just 38% of the country’s population live in small towns and countryside.
If we just look at those numbers – for 5% of young men of military age just
one-third lives in the regions where concealed mobilization is possible.
It’s a bit more than 2 million men from 146 million people who can be sent to war. A bit less than 2% of the population.
The engaged forces and losses don’t seem that bad if we look at the whole country – from newborns to the elderly people
But when we distinguish by age and gender this social stratum which really fights,
when we see boys from small towns, settlements and villages looking at us from their military IDs, we can appreciate the losses.
And the deficit of resources and the presence of conscripts become clear.
Both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR had no such problem.
Those were two countries with young populations and rapid industrialization
where people tend to relocate from villages to cities.
There were a lot of young men who, despite the risk, considered the army as a chance to build a career and escape poverty.
Just retired political strategists can dream of the excess of “village people” who do nothing, eat watery soup, support Putin,
dream of global victories and want to die for it.
In reality there is a stratum which considers the army as a nice life strategy but it’s really insignificant.
There are not so many people to lead a frontline war.
Cosplay is always cosplay.
A Superman’s costume might look natural to a comic book fan.
Swastikas on the streets might remind you of Berlin in 1939.
Everything could be filled by gloomy symbols and references.
But as the comic books fan shouldn’t test his superpower by jumping out of the window,
the imitation regime shouldn’t play in real totalism. Both of them are suicidal.
But our wise government decided to try anyway
Till tomorrow!