About Ukrainians. I have already said everything about the intensity of mutual hatred in a military situation, but it is vital for all of us to finally learn to respect them.
Just do not think that I "changed sides." My army is the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, not the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and my country is Russia, not Ukraine. I mean something else. While Soviet cinematography was filming bravura jokes about Antosha Rybkin in 41-42, who killed thirty Germans with one spoon, these same Germans reached Stalingrad and ground the entire pre-war Red Army to dust. But when, already in the middle of the war, "Vasily Terkin" and Simonov's texts began to appear, in which the enemy was described adequately to what he really was, ours began to win.
Also to clarify. Now, like millions of my compatriots, I am praying for a speedy peace, but I will never go to "no war" rallies, because it means shooting at the backs of my own people, who are now there and under fire. However, to the understandable question "why, then, are these friendly ones there now, and not here?" I have my own answer: because non-friends have been here for a long time, and not just there.
Yes, now there are no Ukrainian tanks at the interchanges near the Moscow Ring Road, and Gradov, thrashing at each other in the sleeping areas of Khimki. And in the eyes of the entire West - and they will say "the whole world", because in those eyes the West is the world - Russia is the aggressor; and each of its citizens, no matter what flag on the avatar, will pay a harsh price for this.
But for me personally, this war did not start on February 24, and not even on the 14th on the Maidan and in the Crimea. I saw the first blood of this war for myself on October 4, 1993, just in the center of Moscow, when tanks were shooting at the burning White House, the corpses of those killed by snipers lay around it, and I tried to get out of there through underground air ducts.
For me, what is now is not an "imperialist" war about the control of territories and nuclear deterrence. For me, it's a civil war. Moreover, it has been going on all these years in a smoldering mode both for them and for us.
When people ask me "what are Ukrainians?" I always answer: they are us who chose to be anti-us. They are like us in that they are stubborn, inveterate, ready to go to the end. They are superior to us in many qualities - faster, more organized, tougher, more pragmatic. And, of course, more ruthless. This is very evident even in the nature of the current battles.
I remember my first visit to Mohyla in 1994, which had just opened in the buildings of the former military school, and my fellow students from all over Ukraine, from Lvov to Kharkov, the future leaders of the first, "orange" Maidan. Tenacious, smart, cynical and at the same time convinced. In 2004, I saw them there again - already thirty years old, matured, who made fast careers in the newly created country. Some even went through Chechnya by that time - they worked for Zakayev and Udugov. Movladi, by the way, then did our state propaganda with one gate - not without their help. And they built up experience, as later in Serbia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and here in 2011.
Well, in the 14th, already forty years old ... everyone saw everything.
This afternoon (!), walking along Manezhnaya, I saw: people with yellow-blue merch were sitting in a restaurant. Yesterday they rallied for non-war, today they just walk the streets in it - they are tired, they went to eat. The Kremlin is fifty meters away, the State Duma is a hundred meters away. Even in 2004, no one would have dared to walk along Khreshchatyk in white-blue-red: they would have immediately kicked them in the face. And here - now, when hailstones, tanks, sanctions and half a step before the apocalypse.
In this respect, of course, we are not them.
So. What do I mean when I say this is a civil war? In 1993, when Yeltsin shot down the White House, CNN broadcast it live to the whole world, accompanied by brave comments, and Yavlinsky shouted "crush the reptile!", no one in the world stuttered with condemnations - because those who are being shot, were "on the wrong side of history". All our local pacifists know very precisely who can be shot at and who cannot. By the way, there, in the White House, there were - and died - many people from the Crimea, from the defeated Meshkov's "Crimean Republic". Also wrong.
Now they are trying to send all of us, all of Russia, together with Donbass, who paid with blood for the wrong choice for eight years, to the "wrong side of history". The meaning of the "steel curtain" erected by the West these days is to throw us out of modernity as such, only not to "bomb" us, as Vietnam or Iraq once did, but simply to cross it out. With a simple ultimatum - until you finally recognize the 91st completely and completely, you have no place in our world. The key word is "our".
In this sense, Putin, who was born and raised in the USSR, could complain as much as he liked that "Ukraine is being made into anti-Russia." This is not the ultimate goal at all, and the world hegemon does not care about how many corpses of Ukrainians and Russians it will be paid for - the more, the better. The strategy is to turn Russia into anti-Russia. With the invaluable help of Ukraine, of course.
And it is impossible not to admit: it is now very successfully embodied, before our eyes.
What are we going to do?