It's about time for the big announcements again.
In less than a week's time, just before the war hits the one-year mark, a string of newsworthy events is about to happen.
First, on the 21st, Putin will deliver his address to the Federal Assembly.
The very next day, we will be treated to emergency meetings of the State Duma and the Federation Council,
a rally-concert at the Luzhniki stadium, and, so that no one gets to complain, a visit from some quasi-state leaders:
Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Thus, we can already psych ourselves up for new unsettling statements and threats,
which Putin and his entourage like to dish out for whatever reason.
In fairness, the number of apocalyptic predictions for these upcoming pronouncements has plunged.
Previously, we would wonder before every Putin speech was about to make what other terrible things
would be announced to Russians: a general mobilization drive, the closing of borders, martial law, or maybe,
God forbid, even a nuclear strike.
But at this point, it’s evident that Putin needs neither announcements nor a festive atmosphere
or memorable dates to bear the bad tidings.
He announces his plans to whack hordes of people the way a public clerk usually explains delays in paperwork:
muttering under his breath in a windowless office.
It begs the question: Since no important statements are on the cards, why all the fuss?
After all, Putin is not Lukashenko, whose mic will rather die before he finishes ad-libbing.
Putin can’t and doesn’t like to speak, so he’s mostly winging it. Only a handful of times has he spoken to a large crowd.
And since the COVID-19 pandemic, his extreme self-isolation routine and his fear of contacting people have turned
into a meme.
Suddenly, for the third time in the past twelve months, the tsar has had the urge to address the crowd in public.
In fact, this burst of activity has a simple explanation.
With each passing day, the fateful date of the “war anniversary” grows closer, with no end in sight to this horror.
Something must be undertaken to quench this atmosphere of gloom and doom and distrust.
Putin must try by all means to offer Russians at least a glimmer of hope, to show them that our country
isn’t in a rut and sinking deeper into a never-ending quagmire.
HOPELESSNESS ON A LOOP
Hell has two main attributes. One, it’s torment, pain, and suffering. And two, they’re endless.
By and large, the ultimate horror of hell is that one suffers forever.
The worst possible court sentence you can be handed in Russia and around the world is life without parole.
As some people believe, there’s no big deal whether it’s a life sentence or 20–25 years behind bars.
It’s virtually impossible to survive this long, especially in a Russian prison.
That said, even 25 years in prison is better than a life sentence.
Simply because it’s a clearly determined period of time — each day spent in prison inches you closer to freedom.
It might be a slim chance, but at least there’s one.
And with no hope of a good ending, it's hard to make a person want to believe in anything.
Putin understands this like no other.
He has been in office for 24 years now, and for all that time, he has wormed his way out of all the disastrous
situations in which he has landed himself.
He has always, more or less, gotten away with it. What happened during the COVID-19 pandemic?
A couple of promises, give or take, big statements and orders to hand out money to everyone.
Russians complained that their allowances hadn’t been paid, that they had been fired from their jobs,
and that their employers weren’t paying them the money.
And so, Putin appeared on TV and scolded the sloppy governors.
While the panic abated, everyone hoped for a quick payout and calmed down for the time being.
And then, the pandemic ebbed.
But war is not a disease for which the public can get a shot and then live happily ever after.
Currently, the approach of “let it slide and wait for it to subside” won’t pan out.
Even the most loyal war supporters now realize that Putin has run out of options and promises.
They tried the mass shelling of the cities and infrastructure; they launched the mobilization drive.
Even the large-scale offensive, which has been talked about for so long, has already begun
but doesn’t really live up to the billing.
From our perspective, the war looks like a pointless, bloody nightmare.
But for those expecting certain results and outcomes, it looks like a meaningless fumble with no end in sight,
with no objective and no distinct gameplan.
In fact, it takes you two months and thousands of dead and wounded soldiers for a 100-m dash at the frontline,
meaning no one alive today will catch the finale.
Meanwhile, Putin himself is adding fuel to the fire. “We are at war with NATO, with the West,
and the entire world is upon us!”
Such statements can work if it’s a quick excuse for failure, intended to explain why Kyiv hasn’t yet been taken
and designated as the capital of the Ukrainian region of the Russian Federation.
But “war with NATO” is an intrinsically horrendous message that will hardly comfort anyone.
We'll pick up right here and discuss what's about to come after a short non-profit ad.
NON-PROFIT AD (with English subtitles)
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Let's continue!
Why aren't the statements about the war with NATO exactly comforting to hear?
Who exactly are those NATO states? Invincible, undefeatable enemies, no less!
The war won’t end with an assault on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.,
and the triumphant signing of the U.S. surrender agreement. This is simply unfeasible.
What is the point of the war, then? What should the Russian army do so that Putin could declare victory over the West?
Are we going to fight to the last man standing? Or until we all die? That’s just as unfeasible.
When claiming that you fight against the whole West on a civilizational level, you’re literally offering
a byword for endlessness.
War with NATO is a substitute for the already mentioned hell or life sentence. There’s simply no off-ramp.
This is a dreadful thought, and one should drive it away both from the citizens and from the elites,
but Putin keeps sticking it all over the place.
Simply because he has no other way to justify his failure.
BRACING FOR NEW ANNOUNCEMENTS
That’s precisely why by the time the war hits the one-year mark, we will see Putin not the first, not the second,
but the third time addressing a large crowd of rally-goers.
He will try yet again to sell the people the hope that this nightmare is somewhat finite,
and that something has really been achieved on the battlefield.
That our army boldly marches toward the goals it will very soon reach.
Sounds familiar. On March 18, at the Luzhniki Stadium concert, Putin was particularly vocal
about the special operation being executed strictly as intended.
The rough translation from Putinese goes as follows: don’t trust your eyes, trust my lucky stars, I know my way around.
Later, on September 30, he grandly signed numerous fairly useless orders and declared the annexation
of semi-invaded Ukrainian provinces.
What he was really trying to say was: Quitsies! It’s alright, can’t you see? I conquered something now, didn’t I?
Let’s stop right where we were and break up, thank you very much.
It doesn’t take a bluff master to guess that he’ll again say something along the lines of:
Dear citizens, I really do have a plan B, but you won’t know it. Don’t trust your eyes.
We aren’t disposing of people for nothing.
It’s all still rolling so that I can keep manning the front lines, wave after wave,
while you keep memorizing the map of the Donetsk Region.
That’s why we’re showered with announcements prior to Putin's public appearance every time.
As the fateful date rolls around, they are fluffing the audience with an ever-increasing zeal.
And the number of apocalyptic scenarios we will stumble across is mounting.
All for the sake of disguising the total pointlessness of the gig with anticipation of a grim outlook.
For the sake of the audience thinking, “Well, okay, this could be worse,” instead of, “So, what was it exactly?”
He’s not planning to send us all to take Vuhledar (Donetsk Region) by storm tomorrow, and that’s already great news.
That’s exactly what happened at Putin’s previous two pompous appearances during the year of war:
he said nothing great, but nothing terrible, either. We’ll give him that.
Underwhelming one’s dire expectations is akin to giving them hope.
The grimmer the outlook that they’ve promised you, the happier you will be with a regular,
meaningless speech of a bureaucrat.
The absence of bad news already paves the way for good things to come.
Is it possible that February 21 and 22 will become a new turning point, a leap into the abyss?
Is it possible that the gloomiest predictions will come true? Of course, it is.
And if we’re talking about your life, the one and only life that you have, you shouldn’t be guided by this line of reasoning.
Your only plan, especially if you’re an adult man, is to get yourself a ticket and watch
the highlights of Putin’s performance from the other side of the Russian border.
Right now, the price of such a short journey is low enough to count it as a “weekend trip.”
The price tag of a two-day stay in Yerevan, Almaty, Tbilisi, or Bishkek is on par with that of a weekend
at a health resort in the Moscow Region.
Don’t bank on any assumption, don’t just wait until the price of a plane ticket skyrockets.
Use the opportunity while you still have it.
But personal choices aside, let’s approach this in a little more abstract manner.
Here we have Vladimir Putin, who is obviously driven to another dead end.
None of his cunning plans have worked, and he has nothing to put on the table a year later.
Only a large stadium performance may at least somewhat disguise this “nothing.”
AGE OF IMMATURITY
Putin is constantly up for a historical reenactment and deeply loves to blather on about history, memorials and symbols,
about victories he owns no credit for.
And he yet again prepares an amusing Victory Day. In Moscow, there will be songs, dances, gags,
and giggles, as well as pronouncements about the invincible Russian army.
Meanwhile, at Svatove, near Bakhmut, corpses of the recently alive people will be freezing in the mud at all fronts,
where the Russian army tries to breach the Ukrainian defenses with cannon fodder.
Vladimir Putin intends to get written into history textbooks, and he surely will. Such stories usually take up a whole chapter:
how soldiers become dog food, while a few hundred feet away, the capital city and the ruler of the country
at war are throwing a party. How they celebrate a non-existent imaginary victory.
Modern political scientists call Putin’s regime a “hybrid or information autocracy”, or an “electoral dictatorship,”
but historians will describe our age in absolutely different terms. They will call it the age of immaturity.
The age where nothing is for real, nothing makes any sense. Like a Lord of the Flies role-play game,
when the country is a gerontocracy, but the leaders act as nasty children.
They always dress up and speak in movie quotes and silly proverbs. It’s not the reality that matters to them,
but the appearance, and whether you have the coolest toy car.
They see war as a game with toy soldiers, as a TV show, but not as a reality, where real people get to die.
Because people are something unreal. Just like children only know those kids they study and have playdates with,
the Kremlin elite only makes friends with those around them. Everything else is merely abstract figures from surveys.
If we can cheer those figures with a concert at Luzhniki instead of declaring mobilization and closing borders,
we’ll do it, it’s not rocket science.
It’s most likely that neither in the Address to the Federal Assembly nor at the rally will we hear anything dreadful
or life-changing.
All we will hear, instead, will be indistinct mumbling, which could be easily compiled from Putin’s previous speeches.
You won’t even need a high-end AI engine — a Scrabble set would do.
Instead of dreadful announcements, we’ll witness something even more terrifying.
We’ll see a leader of one of the biggest states, who has gotten so carried away in an imaginary war that he simply can’t stop.
The one who buys time with human lives, hoping that some miracle will save him again, taking away
his responsibilities and making him prevail.
Some Santa Claus or a Tooth Fairy to grant his wishes.
If I close my eyes and hide under a blanket, all that is bad will go away. This is a child’s behavior at its worst.
And if that’s the way an actual child thinks, it’s okay.
Some people deem it foolish, others find it cute, but the main thing is that we recognize this behavior as childish.
But when adults start thinking this way, when the spirit of a child possesses the body of an aged man who seized power,
when adults refuse to admit their guilt and evaluate the consequences of their actions just like naughty children —
that’s where the terror begins. We see in practice what complications such power immaturity has.
They’ll be playing truth or dare at a funeral and celebrating amid an EF-5 tornado.
Nothing scary will happen, but we will all be scared. That’s a favorable prediction for February 21 and 22.
See you tomorrow!