Putin is but the latest in a line of varjagi in Russian history, who tried to ‘bring civilisation’ to the lands across the border and around the world. Today, annexation is calculated not so much in square kilometres, but in sums of ‘traditional values’ such as the socialist revolution or the tsarist defence of autocracies might have been in the past.
A report in Novaja Gazeta documents the dramatic situation of the Russian and Ukrainian refugees. Governor Aleksej Smirnov stated that their number exceeds 150,000 people, abandoned by the authorities as the military defence of the area is already problematic.
The Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow’s main university held a forum on current events in Russia where speakers expressed positions that were not obvious and unambiguous. Without openly criticising the country’s power structure, philosophers show that they do not want to give up on the true dimension of the Russian soul, that of openness to all variants of the spirit.
As pressure grows from Moscow for the only ‘official and patriotic language’, Russian, Tatar intellectuals are discussing the ethnic prospects of their own and other ‘minor peoples’ within the Federation.
In response to Ukrainian raids on Russian territory with long-range missiles, Putin has repeatedly returned to conjuring up atomic weapons. The West is convinced that this is merely ‘psychological pressure’, but it is a belief based on 60-year-old theoretical models. While Karaganov, one of the Kremlin's most senior advisors, while ruling out the use of the ‘most devastating’ weapons, speaks of their use ‘in proportion to the attacks suffered’.
Today, Orthodoxy in Russia is increasingly characterised as a separate religion, which retains the formal aspect of Slavic-Eastern rite Christianity, while at the same time increasingly extending to other ‘patriotic’ confessions, to the point of also associating Islam and Buddhism in the single expression of the trinitarian homeland.
