The war coming to the Crimea is the main topic for the 6th month war anniversary.
Someone might say there is nothing new about that because there were attacks and explosions
even at the legitimate Russian territories – in the areas near the border with Ukraine something happens every day.
It’s burning and exploding all the time.
But the Crimea and everyday attacks on it is quite a different matter.
It’s much more important than it might look.
The Crimea is much more important than Belgorod, Kursk, or Rostov.
The Crimea is a trophy, it’s what Putin thinks of as his personal achievement.
The Crimea gave him too much.
It gave him the unprecedented level of support and allowed him to solve the political crisis started in winter 2011
when nothing really helped – neither the collaboration with Russian church nor homophobic campaign
nor the repressions against the opposition.
But what’s more important – the Crimea didn’t allow Euromaidan to become the story of success.
It’s the most horrible thing for Putin when street protests win and overthrow the corrupted power
in the neighboring and very close to us country.
It’s quite clear that the helicopter which helped Yanukovich to run away dragged behind it
a huge banner for Putin saying “You’re the next”.
In Putin’s doctrine when a street protest wins and a corrupt leader is overthrown,
it doesn’t lead to success but to the country's collapse and civil war.
The citizens should never get that protests might do something good to their lives.
Ukraine’s collapse was in the form of the Crimea invasion,
and civil war was substituted by a proxy-intervention in Donbas.
The Crimea changed the agenda.
It was a pure win of propaganda over reality.
People were really persuaded that all those years their problem was not corruption,
the officials' lawless actions, salaries and pensions, but the problem of whom the Crimea belonged to.
They were persuaded that this question didn’t exist just in a distant corner of Russian nationalism,
but it has been disturbing the masses.
Finally, the Crimea created the whole sociological phenomenon where the rating of the head
of the state exists separately from the power apparatus.
The support of the Parliament and the government decreased together
with people’s income and level of life, but not Putin’s support.
His ratings were separate until 2018.
The Crimea was in a very special position.
Infrastructural investments to this relatively small region were thousands of billion rubles.
Moreover, Crimea left VAT for itself and it’s the main budget-building tax.
No one has ever had such a privilege, even Moscow.
It didn’t help the Crime much though.
The Crimea and Sevastopol are the last regions of Russia if we take Gross Regional Product levels per citizen.
There are the lowest salaries in Russia there.
Most of the social and economic figures of the territory annexed in 2014 are on the level
of the Northern Caucasus republics
Considering Russian corruption, low level of management and sanctions which are deadly for a touristic region,
the volume of investment shouldn’t tell us anything about the real economic situation in the region.
It’s telling us something very different.
The Crimea for Putin is his first and primary priority, his personal achievement.
Therefore, the explosions in the Crimea, the destruction of military infrastructure there, the shift of the war
to the Crimea is not the attack on the Russian territories both legally and ideologically.
Those are the attacks on Putin personally, on his backyard.
Note that the explosions of oil and weapon depots, destruction of the bridges in the territories
near the border with Ukraine were accidents according to propaganda.
Even the loss of the cruiser Moscow, the pride of the Black Sea Fleet, was officially explained with the smoking stub.
Just a stub, just set a whole cruiser on fire, no big deal.
Everything to keep the illusion that the war is just on TV and it will never concern its viewers.
However, when dozens of planes exploded in the Crimean Novofyodorovka in the beginning of August,
and then several military storage areas, propaganda admitted that it’s Ukraine
who attacks the territories which Russia thinks its own.
And it attacks it successfully.
Propaganda’s course change is understandable.
It lies nicely about something distant and vague like the global conflict with the US or economic problems in Europe.
But they can’t lie so successfully about personal problems of the viewers, about prices and salaries.
Propaganda itself made the Crimea a personal matter.
For 20 years propaganda has explained that the Crimea is the main achievement
for our state and we should be proud of it.
And now the enemy’s army is attacking this great “mission” of Putin’s.
The Crimea attacks are very painful and here is the reason –
since the beginning of the war the Russian government and its propaganda
have been drawing a red line around the peninsula.
There are constant statements like, “Heaven forbid, just one shot, one tiny explosion,
and we’ll escalate the situation so badly, we’ll respond so strongly that you will pay dearly”.
Dmitry Medvedev said quite plainly that the “Judgment Day” will happen to anyone who attacks the Crimea.
Some bloody clowns who pop up from time to time with some kind of statement try to threaten us.
They mean the attack on Crimea and so on.
So I want to say that they don't understand the consequences of such statements.
The consequences are obvious.
If there is an attack, it will be doomsday for all of them in one moment.
They publicly punched the air a lot, threatening Ukraine and its allies.
Finally, the Crimea attack happened, then the second one, and the third
Now almost every day the air defense system in Sevastopol works.
And…no response followed.
And it transpired that there was something which was clear for many observers from the beginning
and wasn’t clear for the western allies of Ukraine – Putin has no means for escalation.
He doesn’t do it not because he doesn’t want to but because he can’t.
His army did everything it could do for these 6 months.
If Vladimir Putin could arrange a new attack at Kyiv, he would do it.
If he could build a corridor through Nikolaev and Odessa to Transnistria, he would do it.
If the Russian army was able to arrange big attacks 6 months after the beginning of the war, it would do it.
Yes, in theory there is a threat of nuclear attack.
But there is a reason why people stopped discussing it.
Some time later it became clear that the possibility of it is extremely low.
Putin did everything he could.
And it's a bitter piece of truth for him.
Because all this war is based on some nonexistent potential threats.
How is “We haven’t properly started it yet” translated into Russian?
It’s “We can get really angry and then everyone will be in trouble”.
No response for the Crimea attack, not for the attack of the Russian territory, but for the Crimea, means just one thing –
we shouldn’t take Putin’s threats seriously.
Putin has no extra army, he can’t perform mass mobilization.
Everything he had he used during the first months of the war and there’s nothing left by now.
He sends into battle 50-years-old clients of microcredit organizations with the traces of professional alcohol abuse.
Viewers of wildlife TV programs know this joke of evolution –
there are poisonous animals with bright coloring which scare the enemies off, and there are more sly animals –
their evolution branch decided that there is no need to spend resources to produce venom,
you just have to look unappetizing copying the colors of poisonous species.
This phenomenon has a name – Batesian mimicry.
Putin is an example of such mimicry in international politics.
He looks like someone you should never dare to bite, like danger himself.
He has very bright aggressive colors, you can only compromise with him and kneel down before him.
But it’s quite clear that when you are publicly bitten, and quite painfully so, and your response
is just to crawl back to the bushes, mimicry stops working.
Everyone, even the most careful and indecisive guys from democratic governments,
will realize that you’ve invented those “red lines” and they matter just for you.
The Western governments are not limited in terms of helping Ukraine.
Each new attack, each unfulfilled threat helps them to understand it better.
It’s even more interesting from the point of view of the Crimea itself.
In 2014 everyone bought the idea that the citizens of the Crimea had always wanted to belong to Russia.
Both the supporters and the opponents of Putin bought it.
Like the Crimea invasion is illegal and not right at all, but people there really wanted it.
It’s not quite clear why they were so confident about that.
I’m not trying to say if it’s true or not true.
But we don’t have any objective data about it.
We know that the party “Russian Unity” under the leadership of the current head of the Crimea Aksenov
(the largest pro-Russian political force in the republic)
got 4% of votes during the last election before the annexation.
We know that the so-called “referendum” in 2014 was a joke
even in terms of low standards for Russian electoral activities.
So, it’s useless to trust the results.
After the annexation “the Chechenization” of the Crimea happened almost immediately.
I mean the region was completely in the power of security agents.
All non-loyal political forces were wiped off, and the activists who disagreed either moved
to Ukraine or were welcomed by FSB and got sentences.
Moreover, all the significant opposing forces in Russia excluded Crimea and Sevastopol
from their activities for understandable reasons.
Because if you work in the Crimea and have election and social campaigns there,
it means you recognize it as a part of Russia.
Sociology in Russia died on February 24, 2022.
But in the Crimea it died immediately.
What would you ask from people of the region where a foreign army came and changed the national colors?
I mean the Crimea is an unknown area in terms of social mood.
We know nothing, except for the idea promoted by propaganda that all the Crimean citizens
have dreamt to reunite with Russia for 23 years.
But also they haven’t taken any political steps to change the situation for 23 years
while they had free election and competition.
Moreover, they gave a pro-Russian party just 4% of votes.
It's easy to imagine such a picture –
there were and there are two active forces – pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian.
All the others (the majority) just took the situation as is.
The change of national colors didn’t affect their lives at the moment.
But now it’s changing.
It’s clear that the Ukrainian government of 2013 is not a dream come true.
We know about its corruption and inefficiency.
But whatever bad it was, all the problems they had were true for Russia too.
And second, there was no war in the Crimea while it was in Ukraine.
Yes, there was a corrupt guy from the Vehicle and Road Inspection (Yanukovich),
there was a regulatory hell and poor legislation.
There were bad roads and communal problems.
But no storage areas exploded, no airfields burnt, and no children died at the front or drowned on the ships.
The Crimea had 23 years of peaceful life under the Ukrainian national colors.
Perhaps, it wasn’t a very wealthy life, but still peaceful.
Their life didn’t become wealthier for 8 years in Russia if we count money
in people’s pockets instead of built roads and bridges.
But the war came.
As we said in one of our previous videos, you can pretend there’s no war if you are in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
But it’s becoming more and more real for the Crimea.
There is danger from both sides.
First, the majority which took the change of power indifferently might think now
that it didn’t really change or good 8 years ago.
They had a normal life and any bank could issue any card, McDonalds and net hotels worked just fine.
There was no legal ambiguity, a legitimate territory issued legitimate documents which were accepted everywhere.
And what’s more important, there was no war, no threats, no bomb pieces could hit your house.
The roads are better.
That’s a good thing.
But the time when there was everything and no war looks like a nostalgic past it would be nice to return to.
Return back to normal.
Second, all those people who were loyal to Ukraine and have become radical
under the pressure of the secret services for those 8 years,
have a real opportunity to show themselves.
Now their friendly army is fighting the Russian army, now they need the help of tippers-off,
diversionists, agents in governmental offices and army.
During all that time the Crimea was occupied de jure, but de facto it wasn’t the territory of occupation.
They just changed the national colors, really.
But this war activity can really make this territory occupied retrospectively.
It will be the territory with no loyal majority because they are tired of being a toy
in Putin’s hands and want to get back to normal.
It will be a territory with an active minority which has all the instruments to fight the occupant.
And there is real force behind this minority – the Ukrainian army.
I’ve already told you that during this war Putin acts like a player who can’t stop.
He was lucky in 2014.
There were unique historical circumstances and he left the casino with a whole peninsula,
and the rest of the world thought that they’d better stay away from him or he’ll kill them.
But it wasn’t enough for him.
He didn’t believe it was a coincidence.
He decided that he had a system, and he would be able to deceive and frighten people forever.
Without even realizing it, he bet everything he had for this war.
First, his jackpot of 2014.
And right now we can see how he is losing it.
Because the regime which is good enough to steal from people and frighten
them turned out to be not so good at leading the war.
And the more people understand it, the worse it is for the regime.
Till tomorrow!