Smoke and flames rise from the roof of the Dormition Cathedral at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in the early hours of Monday, 15 June 2026, after a Russian strike on Kyiv. Image: Bishop Avraamij/Facebook)
On June 15, a Russian strike set Kyiv’s thousand-year-old monastery ablaze. The act was charged to a country, Russia, and to no one in particular. This is an attempt to reconstruct how such a decision gets made, and by whom.
My feed is on fire, and for once the metaphor is indecent, because the fire is literal. On the night of June 15, the roof of the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra burned against the dark while rescuers climbed toward it. The monastery was founded in 1051, at the dawn of monasticism in Kievan Rus’. The cathedral that burned is a reconstruction; the original was blown up in November 1941, after German troops took Kyiv, and whether the Nazis or the retreating Soviets set the charge has never been settled.
The human cost first. In a barrage of seventy missiles and more than six hundred drones, at least eleven people were killed across Ukraine and more than fifty wounded, Ukrainian officials said. In Kyiv, the dead numbered five and the wounded thirty-five, among them a pregnant woman and two children. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s emergency service said, a second missile struck a rescue site still crowded with the crews working the first, killing four of them for the crime of arriving. The evening before, a one-month-old girl had been among five people wounded when a drone hit the Kharkiv Art Museum.
And the buildings are their own kind of casualty list. The reposts come faster than anyone can read them. The Lavra. The Mystetsky Arsenal, the vaulted hall where the Book Arsenal festival had closed two weeks before. The Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studio, where a single strike destroyed what the culture minister called Ukraine’s oldest and largest costume archive: a hundred thousand costumes, three million items of clothing, the wardrobe of a national cinema turned to ash before morning. The House of Organ and Chamber Music in Dnipro. Karpenko-Kary, where Ukraine trains its filmmakers and its actors. A single day reached all of it.
The films made on those lots are what I study, so let me say plainly what burned. A studio’s wardrobe is the material memory of a national cinema, the actual cloth worn in the films through which a country learned to see itself: the embroidered shirts, the uniforms it had to wear on screen and then subvert, the furs and the partisan coats. A costume archive is the primary source by which a culture studies itself. You cannot reshoot the twentieth century. Some of the garments that burned were older than the younger states now debating how to respond.
Russia says none of this happened, or that something else did. The Defense Ministry called the night a strike with high-precision weapons against the defense-industrial complex, and denied hitting the Lavra at all: the cathedral, it claimed without evidence, was struck by a Ukrainian-operated Patriot interceptor. The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the reports “fakes”. By that account, the cathedral fire was a Ukrainian misfire, the dead rescuers were the fog of war, and the second strike on the Arsenal, launched while firefighters stood exposed at the Lavra, was a coincidence of timing.
Two things are happening at once, and they do not quite match. The grief is public and signed: thousands of people, in a dozen languages, share the same photograph and the same verdict. A Russian strike. Russian barbarism. The attribution is loud, and it is also the easiest one available. It names a culprit and, somehow, no person at all.
What is more, the argument about Russia usually collapses into sentiment. We have learned, rightly, to separate Vladimir Putin from the people we call “ordinary Russians,” many of whom, it is said, do not want this war. But this separation dissolves into the same anonymity that lets a cathedral burn with no hand on the match.
Drone studies calls the drone less a weapon than a chain, an act of violence dispersed across factories, suppliers, programmers, and launch crews until no single hand can be said to hold it, by design. The Shahed, the Iranian-designed drone behind most of that overnight barrage, pushes that logic to its industrial extreme. The burning of the Lavra happened in many places at once, and over many months. In July of last year, a Swiss plant made the microcontroller that would steer the drone. American and German firms, Texas Instruments and Infineon, made the chips that investigators keep pulling from the wreckage. Ukraine’s sanctions commissioner counts more than two million imported components in a single year. Trading offices in Hong Kong and free ports in the Emirates rerouted those parts around the sanctions meant to stop them. In Tatarstan, the Alabuga plant assembled the drone with schoolchildren recruited out of the ninth grade and women brought from Africa through a foreign outreach scheme. And before it ever left the ground, a crew set its route.
And there the trail goes cold. The closest anyone has come to naming the drone operators was for a different weapon entirely. In 2022, Bellingcat, The Insider, and Der Spiegel identified a unit of military engineers inside the General Staff’s Main Computation Centre who program the flight paths of Russia’s cruise missiles, the Kalibrs and the Kh-101s, plotting each trajectory by hand, far from any front. Most are young, many of them former software or game developers. Their commander was an avid coin collector; his phone records show him trading online about an hour before one such salvo hit Kyiv and killed dozens. When reporters reached the engineers, they denied everything, even when shown photographs of themselves in uniform. One said he was a plumber. One said she was a florist. One offered to explain how to butcher a pig. The metadata says these are the people who aim the missiles.
It is worth sitting with how little even that gave us. The Bellingcat investigation is now nearly four years old, and it named the people behind Russia’s cruise missiles, not its drones. The revelation was that a missile had not simply appeared over a city, the way weather appears. It had passed through offices, phones, maps, databases, commanders, and people who could be found, called, photographed, embarrassed, and named. But the war that followed, the Shahed war at industrial scale, has been harder to personify. As the drones multiplied into hundreds a night, the crews who prepare them, program them, and release them into the dark have remained mostly faceless.
The Russian drone operator has become one of the defining figures of the war. He is a technician of distance, converting coordinates, batteries, antennas, video feeds, maps, and orders into impact. Some work near the front, guiding FPV drones and reconnaissance quadcopters by hand. Others belong to more formal formations, including the elite Rubicon drone center, described by Radio Svoboda’s Russian-language investigation as a drone special-forces structure based in the Patriot Park complex, and by the Kyiv Independent as a central feature of Russia’s scaling drone war. But the long-range Shahed crews who send drones toward Ukrainian cities remain almost entirely unnamed. We can follow a microcontroller across three continents and still not put a name to the person who helped send it toward Kyiv. Component-tracing survives because it can be done at a distance. Naming people requires sources, time, physical danger, and the expensive human labor that has been gutted on both sides of the line: criminalized inside Russia, where reporters are exiled or imprisoned, and starved in the West, where the foreign desks that once did this work have been cut to the bone.
If everyone is responsible, it is tempting to conclude that no one is. That conclusion is what the system is built to produce. But responsibility accrues at every link, and it is uneven. It is heaviest where knowledge and choice are greatest, with the engineer who plots the path and the official who signs the order. It is lighter, though never absent, for the smuggled chip and for the schoolchild recruited into what was sold as a college and turned out to be a drone line. The Russia scholar Jade McGlynn, who has argued that this is Russia’s War and not only Putin’s, makes the necessary distinction: not collective guilt, which belongs to individuals tried for their own acts, but collective responsibility, held in different measure by everyone who takes part.
I have no verdict, only a refusal to let “Russia” be the last word. An engineer designed the chip. A broker moved it through Dubai. An official licensed the airframe. A commander signed the order. And a man with a name and a rank plotted the route into a thousand-year-old monastery. The last time it burned, in 1941, the question of whose hand lit it was left to die in the fog of another war. This time it does not have to. The ones who knew what they were doing are not the people we are asked to forgive in advance. So who burns the Lavra? People do, in different measures, with different degrees of knowledge and choice. Naming them scales the act back down from a country to a person and keeps the names where they belong: in the record, and one day, perhaps, in court.
Hassan, a Somali-American airport shuttle driver in Minneapolis, is struggling to make ends meet. When Lloyd, a stranded twenty-something at the airport, offers to pay Hassan to take him overland to Chicago, it seems worth the risk. But as the realization grows that his passenger is not what he seems, Hassan finds himself trapped in a terrifying ride that he can’t escape, knowing that saving himself might put countless others in danger.
[…]
Andrei Kolganov: “Somalis who work instead of living off welfare are not a horror story, but a fantasy!”
Source: Ororo.tv. Racist comment translated by the Russian Reader, who has unfortunately read and heard thousands of such comments in Russian during his thirty-plus years on the Russia desk. Russian Reader No. 2829 was inspired by another such comment. \\\\\ trr
Lena Karbe’s documentary film Inner Emigrants examines what people in Russia think about the war with Ukraine. Deutsche Welle spoke with the filmmaker about making the picture and the conclusions we can draw from it.
One of the psychologists featured in the film “Inner Emigrants” on the job. Still courtesy of Karbe Film GmbH
Lena Karbe’s documentary film Inner Emigrants (Innere Emigranten) is currently playing in cinemas in Germany. Born in Russia, the filmmaker has lived and work in Germany for fifteen years. Her new picture looks at the work of three crisis hotline psychologists in Russia. Viewers see them volunteering their evenings by talking to people in need of counseling.
The film was shot over three years, from 2022 to 2024, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war and people’s thoughts about it are the picture’s focus. Its protagonists oppose the war and wonder whether they can take a stand against the war and society’s attitude to it. Instead of engaging in open protest, they choose inner emigration. Our correspondent sat down with Lena Karbe after a screening of the film in Cologne to talk about how the picture was made and the conclusions we could draw after seeing it.
DW: How and when did you get the idea of making this film?
Lena Karbe: The idea occurred to me immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m a documentary filmmaker, but I have always done projects about other countries of the world—about China, for example. I “transferred” my interest in political topics to other countries because I’m from Petersburg myself and have lived in Germany for fifteen years, and I probably needed the distance to be able to make a film about the country where I was born. The start of the full-scale invasion was the shock that accelerated these processes for me. I realized that I couldn’t make a film about something else at the moment.
As is often the case in filmmaking, I fortuitously happened upon an article about a crisis hotline and got in touch with its coordinator. He immediately took a big interest in the project, probably because at the time (this was April 2022) all of us were in a state of shock and the idea of starting a project like this seemed like a way of finding a constructive channel for all our conflicting feelings. So all the initial steps happened quite quickly.
Meaning that the hotline’s coordinator and the psychologists to whom you reached out fairly quickly agreed to be in the film. What were their motivations? After all, involvement in this project presents a certain risk for them.
In some sense, they were in absolutely the same situation as their callers and I were in—a situation of absolute uncertainty. We were all in a state of shock. It was absolutely unclear what the future held in store.
All my films follow their characters over the course of several years. I said from the outset that I would like to make a record of the time, meaning that it would not be a quick project. I wanted to document the situation over several years, and this was the film’s psychological function for everyone involved in it. It helped us to cope with our complicated states of mind.
So it helped you figure yourselves out?
Yes. And yet, the context is vital: a crisis hotline that anyone whosoever can dial. We thought it would help us find out more about what the country’s populace actually thinks, because information from Russia is quite limited and one-sided in Germany. Like many others, I found it quite hard to deal with the alleged fact that the entire population of Russia holds the same opinion—if you believe the information out there. I wanted to see and hear it for myself.
How did you manage to do this project? The press release for the film says that it was shot in complete secrecy. At the presentation you said that you shot completely openly in the subway, for example, and on the streets. Didn’t it require a great deal of courage to do that?
As I’ve already said, I’m a documentary filmmaker. It’s my main occupation, and with certain projects it is clear from the get-go that they cannot be done differently. So I wouldn’t call that courage. I think it’s just a consequence of the decisions you make.
Meaning it’s professionalism.
Meaning there’s no other way to do it.
The film is called Inner Emigrants, an allusion to the German term “inner emigration,” which is applied to writers who didn’t flee Germany during the Second World War. Why did you give the film this particular title?
Despite the fact that there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between the realities of inner emigration in German literature and the situation in Russia, there are very many similar elements in this phenomenon and the behavior of many people in Russia now. It was this particular point that aroused my curiosity.
If you believe certain statistical data, the silent majority makes up somewhere around sixty percent of the Russian populace, and many of those people would say that they are inner emigrants.
The poster for the film “Inner Emigrants.” Image courtesy of Mindjazz Pictures
This kind of film, in which I wanted to understand the moods in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, could be made ten thousand different ways. It was vital to me that this wasn’t a journalistic project. I endlessly admire the work of my journalist colleagues, but documentary filmmaking, the genre in which I work, is a more universal approach. Its goal is not to inform people but to delve into a phenomenon and make the viewer feel something. I hope that by film’s end the viewer has come to feel for themself the complexity and ambiguity of inner emigration and the contradictoriness of the term itself.
I saw two important points in the film. The first was the way you showed what lies behind the statistics you cited. The psychologists are a kind of mirror. On the one hand, they are the film’s protagonists, who have their own quite ambivalent thoughts and feelings. One of them is disgusted by people who tell him over the phone that they support the war. This disgust is manifested to a lesser degree in the other protagonists. At the same time, they show us what happens behind the scenes. Do you agree with what I took away from the film?
Yes. I think people’s reactions to this film can vary widely, which is quite important. It’s dangerous to lose touch with Russian realities entirely. I’m speaking now from the perspective of those of us living in Germany. Because even in 2022, coverage of events in Russia—video footage—was already quite limited, and now there’s practically none. I would very much like for this film to lead to a dialogue. It’s obvious, but not so obvious to some, that the Russian-speaking population in Germany is quite diverse. And we don’t talk to one another.
Do you mean dialogue with Russians living in Germany?
Yes. And of course, even though we currently have no contact with Russia, it’s important that we don’t completely shut ourselves off from everyone. It seems to me that generalization is the big problem. When it comes to very strong, extreme emotions, we slip into a childish, categorical mindset and start lumping everyone together.
You mean that we divide everything into black and white, while there are in fact shades of gray?
Yes.
My second takeaway from the film boils down to the question “What should we do?” What should we do ourselves, and what should we do about those who are clearly saying things that don’t align with their own beliefs and values? The film both does and doesn’t give an answer to this question. On the one hand, the final shot shows someone going out in public with a placard and protesting the war. The final shot always serves as a highlight. In this way, you show that something can be done. On the other hand, the psychologists in the film argue that they cannot change how people feel about the war, meaning that changing their minds is both impossible and pointless. Do you think this is really the case? Or is there a point in talking with people, say, with the “Putinists” living in Germany?
Filmmaker Lena Karbe. Photo: Julia Weidner
When I speak of dialogue, I mean first of all that we have set aside hatred, if possible. Hatred is a destructive emotion, and we won’t be able to build a future for Russia based on it. I think there is a type of people with whom it is impossible to have a dialogue, nor is it our task to change their minds. I even had in mind a dialogue with ourselves, so that we don’t stop thinking and seeking the truth, so that we avoid being categorical and generalizing. If we lump everyone together, it’ll be tough.
Do you have the will and the means to keep making films in and about Russia?
Definitely not right now, but we’ll see how things change. I hope that this film can be considered a record of its time. Now, at any rate, I’m taking a professional (but not a personal) timeout from observing the situation.
My background is quite important to me. I wouldn’t rule out [making a new film about Russia], but not in the near future
Karbe spent nearly four years traveling undercover to Moscow to chronicle the experiences of three psychologists maintaining an anonymous crisis hotline at the start of the Ukraine war, while at the same time struggling to reconcile their totalitarian regime’s strict demands with their own beliefs.
Born and raised in Russia herself, Karbe (now a German citizen) wanted to explore why Russia’s silent majority was staying silent as the war on Ukraine took hold. “Are they complicit, or — as many Russians say — ‘neutral’?” asks Karbe.
The director says “Inner Emigrants” is “a cautionary tale.”
“What we see in Russia today is that silence allows the totalitarian regime to grow stronger,” she says. “It shows how quickly civil liberties can be dismantled and repression can become normalized, as the majority chooses to turn inward rather than to resist openly.”
Mindjazz Pictures managing director Holger Recktenwald says the film “offers a rare and intimate insight into the psychological inner world of a society living under massive propaganda and state repression since the invasion of Ukraine.”
It asks the question “what silence, conformism and ‘inner emigration’ mean in a totalitarian system,” Recktenwald adds.
It was a film of “strong relevance for German audiences: it sheds light on the mechanisms of authoritarian systems, highlights the psychological strain in the context of war and propaganda, and at the same time opens up a respectful space for debate about responsibility, complicity, resistance, and empathy — without relativizing or blurring perpetrator-victim structures.”
“Inner Emigrants” is produced by Karbe Film and Macalube Films, in co-production with See-Through Films, in co-production with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, and Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, with the support of Filmfernsehfonds Bayern, Centre National Du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, FFA Filmförderungsanstalt, La Région Île-Defrance and Deutscher Filmförderfonds (DFFF).
It is the second feature documentary from Karbe. Her first film, “Black Mambas” (2022), world premiered at CPH:DOX, where it won the F:ACT Award.
Russia spent approximately 10.9 trillion rubles [approx. 118 billion euros] on military operations against Ukraine in 2025: this is five times the combined income of all Russians living below the poverty line. This estimation is based on Rosstat’s data (as of Saturday, March 14) on the country’s GDP (213.5 trillion rubles), as well as on a statement by Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, who reported at a Defense Ministry meeting that expenditures “directly related to the special military operation” (as the Russian Federation refers to its armed aggression against its neighbor) amounted to 5.1% of GDP. The combined income of all Russians living below the poverty line was less than two trillion rubles.
According to Rosstat, 9.8 million Russians lived below the poverty line in 2025; this is the first time the figure has fallen below ten million. Their percentage of the country’s total population thus decreased from 7.1% to 6.7%. The poverty line, as calculated by Russia’s federal statistics agency, stood at 16,903 rubles [approx. 183 euros] per month.
One-fifth of the cost of the war against Ukraine would thus technically suffice to completely eradicate poverty in Russia—simply by raising the incomes of the poorest Russians to the official poverty line.
Inflation for the poor
The methodology used to define the poverty line raises questions among experts. The index is based on the minimum subsistence level for the fourth quarter of 2020, adjusted for official inflation. For low-income citizens, however, real inflation is generally higher than the average.
TsMAKP (Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting), a think tank with close ties to the Russian government, calculates a separate metric,“inflation for the poor.” It is based on a simplified consumer goods basket which includes a minimal assortment of food, medicines, cleaning products, and housing and utility services, but excludes hotels and transportation. This metric regularly exceeds the average inflation rate for Russia.
TsMAKP calculates that that last year’s actual poverty line stood at 18,311 rubles per month for working-age Russians, 16,621 rubles per month for children, and 13,947 rubles per month for pensioners—which is sixty percent lower than last year’s average pension of 23,425 rubles per month.
Income inequality in Russia has reached its highest level in more than a decade, according to an analysis by the independent research group Yesli Byt Tochnim.
The state statistics agency Rosstat initially published and later removed the inequality measure known as the Gini Index from its January 2026 social and economic report, Yesli Byt Tochnim said.
The group said it was able to reconstruct the indicator using other publicly available data on income distribution.
According to its analysis, Russia’s Gini Index rose 2.2% over the past year, from 0.410 in 2024 to 0.419 in 2025, the highest level since 2012. On the scale, 0 represents perfect equality while 1 represents maximum inequality.
Income inequality in Russia has risen for four consecutive years and is now approaching the record highs of 0.421-0.422 recorded between 2007 and 2010, Yesli Byt Tochnim said.
President Vladimir Putin has set targets to reduce Russia’s Gini Index to 0.37 by 2030 and to 0.33 by 2036 — the final year he could remain in power under constitutional changes that reset presidential term limits.
Other data in Rosstat’s report also point to a widening wealth gap.
The share of total income going to the richest 20% of Russians rose from 46.9% to 47.6% over the past year, while the share earned by the poorest 20% fell from 5.3% to 5.2%.
The average income of the wealthiest 10% of Russians is now 15.8 times higher than that of the poorest 10%, up from 15.5 times a year earlier.
This week, Forbes included a record 155 Russians in its annual ranking of the world’s billionaires, marking the fourth straight year that the number of Russians on the list has increased. Their combined net worth was estimated at $695.5 billion.
Different cities. Different motives. Same profile. White. Male. Armed. Deadly.
The news pretends each act is an isolated tragedy: a troubled man, a random eruption, a community blindsided. But line them up side by side and the repetition is too precise to ignore. These aren’t anomalies; they’re a drumbeat. Churches, schools, bars, government buildings. Nothing is sacred. Nobody is immune. The perpetrators are acting out the same choreography and playing variations on a script that ends with bodies on the ground and their names immortalized in headlines.
Humiliation is the through-line.
Strip away the headlines, the manifestos, the mugshots, and what you see is white men who cannot live with being ordinary, ignored, or denied. White masculinity in America was built on the guarantee of centrality, the right to be heard, feared, and obeyed. When that illusion frays, humiliation takes its place. And humiliation, when combined with access to assault rifles and an internet full of cheerleaders becomes combustible.
Enter Donald Trump.
He is not the author of this script, but he is its loudest hype man. He takes that humiliation and translates it into a politics of grievance. He tells white men their despair isn’t failure, it’s theft. He tells them their rage isn’t weakness, it’s patriotism. He baptizes their sense of collapse as a holy war. Trump doesn’t hand them the gun, but he hands them the permission slip to kill. He turns their humiliation into a rallying cry, their despair into his campaign platform, and their death wish into applause lines.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk proves this. Here was no random eruption in a mall or classroom, but a sniper attack staged at a political rally. What we witnessed was violence designed as theater. The accused, Tyler Robinson, was reportedly obsessed with Kirk, surveilled his movements, and turned grievance into spectacle. This wasn’t just about killing one man, it was about sending a message by inscribing grievance onto the national stage. And while Robinson didn’t appear to seek his own death in the same way as other shooters, the logic still holds: collapse turned outward, humiliation converted into performance, violence as a last-ditch claim to visibility. Whether in a schoolyard or at a rally podium, the impulse is the same — make sure the world cannot look away.
That’s why so many of these killings end with the shooter’s own death. Researchers have long noted that mass shooters often carry suicidal intent. Some kill themselves on the spot, others provoke police into finishing the job. Even those who survive often admit they never planned an escape. They weren’t trying to get away with it. They were trying to make sure we all saw them on the way out.
This is suicide turned outward. Instead of a private exit, it is a public performance. It is despair weaponized into punishment. It is a white man who feels invisible deciding that if he must disappear, he will do it in a blaze that makes his enemies, his community, his whole country remember his name. The bullets are not just aimed at bodies, they are aimed at the world that he believes has betrayed him.
“We love and miss Berlin so much that we decided not to wait until we find ourselves there again . . .” Samotechnaya Square, Moscow, April 2025. Photo: anatrrra (used with their permission)
Despite being hit with unprecedented Western sanctions, the war with Ukraine has been accompanied by a noticeable increase in the well-being of Russians. A new study has revealed the extent of the domestic feel-good factor, with economists at the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economics (BOFIT) finding the level of Russians’ satisfaction with their household and personal circumstances has hit its highest in a decade.
To understand how the restructuring of Russia’s economy during wartime affected Russians, economists Sinikka Parviainen (BOFIT) and William Pyle (Middlebury College, USA) used data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Service (RLMS), which has been conducted by the Higher School of Economics almost every year since the 1990s. This research tracks the economic well-being of Russian households and individuals with a sample size of around 6,000-8,000 households and 17,000-21,000 people.
The economists looked at RLMS data from 2013-2023, scrutinising responses to the questions: “how satisfied with life are you right now?” and “how satisfied with your financial circumstances are you right now?”. They also looked at whether households had made large purchases over the past year, how much they spent on cultural events and how long they could maintain their current lifestyle if they lost their main source of income.
They concluded that the first two years of Russia’s invasion — 2022 and 2023 — saw the highest levels of general satisfaction, and specific financial satisfaction had also returned to 2014 levels for the first time. That year is seen as a benchmark before Russia was plunged into an economic crisis following the annexation of Crimea, imposition of Western sanctions and an oil price crash.
Large purchases fell to a minimum in 2022 but demand for non-food goods has since increased faster than inflation and wages, in line with The Bell’s earlier calculations. There was also a sharp rise in the proportion of households spending money on entertainment: in 2023 this reached 2018 levels, the researchers noted. The number of respondents who said they would be able to last more than a few months on their savings reached a 10-year high.
These findings correspond with Russia’s official statistics which also point to improved financial circumstances since the start of the war. In 2023, real incomes in Russia not only returned to 2013 levels after a decade of lost living standards, but surpassed the pre-Crimea level by 5%, the researchers highlighted.
There are no surprises as to the cause — a huge increase in state spending on the invasion and the military-industrial complex that has driven record labor shortages and pushed wages up across the economy. The high salaries offered by the state to people sent to work at the front, as well as those paid to soldiers (from 200,000 rubles a month) have played a big part, and the main winners have been residents of Russia’s poorest regions, which have recorded an unusually sudden increase in bank deposits.
Why the world should care
Putin’s regime is unlikely to face any internal threat as long as Russians’ well-being and overall happiness is on the rise.
KVS, “SouthTown: The Olympic Quarters” (YouTube, 8 June 2021)
Today’s developers pay no less attention to creating comfortable residential environments in their projects than they do to configuring apartments, for example, and sometimes they pay even more attention to this.
In recent years, the concept of beautifying the area around residential buildings has been transformed from elementary landscaping of yards and equipping playgrounds to creating theme parks within residential complexes, divided into different activity zones, as well as designing additional spaces where residents of the neighborhood can gather, get acquainted, relax, play sports, and organize their own or their children’s leisure activities.
The role of such spaces is most often played by neighborhood centers, and planning these centers has recently become a real trend among developers.
The neighborhood center at the SouthTown development, designed by Anton Rudnik. Photo: KVS Group, via Delovoi Peterburg
The reasons
Residents of apartment buildings have always needed to socialize and spend time together. Back in Soviet times, people would often gather in courtyards to play dominoes, bingo, and table tennis. At some point the tradition was lost, but after the restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic were lifted, it literally sparkled with new colors.
In their article [sic: no link in the original] on communities, neighborhoods, and neighborliness, researchers from the Higher School of Economics noted that the first contemporary attempts to unite people living near each other into groups were especially noticeable after 2015, when people all over Russia began celebrating Neighbors Day. From a holiday in the classic sense of the word, Neighbors Day has quickly evolved into a multifaceted know-how for working with residents and getting them involved in such community work as spring cleanups and decorating yards for the New Year’s holidays.
With the emergence of urban agglomerations and the integrated development of new estates by developers, the need for communication among the people living there has increased. There is a logical explanation for this. In her time, Birgit Krantz, a Swedish sociologist, architect, and expert on neighborhood relations, argued that the ideal apartment complex contains between fifty to eighty apartments. If a complex has more apartments, it is difficult to manage it and maintain good neighborly relations.
There are many more apartments in new large residential projects, however, even if they are low-rise developments. This is where neighborhood centers come to the rescue. Consequently, they have become an integral part of people’s everyday lives in entire neighborhoods, functioning, per the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, as “third places” (between home and work or school), as social anchors which facilitate creative interactions among individuals.
A clear demand
Today, the neighborhood centers running in new residential neighborhoods are literally bustling with life, and they are usually open seven days a week from early morning to late evening.
Delovoi Peterburg talked to residents at the KVS Group’s SouthTown development, where such a neighborhood center has been up and running for over six months. The center offers sports classes; clubs for children, including preschool prep; nanny services; rooms for business meetings and negotiations; and movie screenings. A puppet theater also periodically comes to the center on tour, and a planetarium was once even recreated in the space.
According to Anzhelika Alshayeva, director general of the KVS Real Estate Agency, all activities were free of charge for residents during the center’s first three months of operation; the tab was picked up by the developer. Now, the cost of classes is only 200 rubles, and the interest of residents continues to grow. With this in mind, the decision was made to launch the second stage of the neighborhood center — a teen club, which will be equipped with ping-pong and billiards tables, which will undoubtedly appeal to local youngsters.
The teen club at the neighborhood center in the SouthTown development, designed by Anton Rudnik. Photo: KVS Group, via Delovoi Peterburg
An important social role
Most importantly, such neighborhood centers, in addition to creating stable communities of around particular interests and hobbies, offer residents various opportunities for professional and personal growth. As practice shows, neighborhood residents themselves provide professional services, working as nannies, coaches, and teachers. Thus, another important issue for the neighborhood as a whole — job creation — is solved. And the concept of the 15-minute city is implemented in the particular housing complex: without leaving home, a person can comfortably take advantage of the full range of social services and work in the same place.
In this sense, co-working spaces can be an important component of neighborhood centers, serving not only as a pleasant but also as a useful feature for buyers and future residents. In addition, a co-working space can potentially generate revenue, thus covering the costs of its own upkeep.
And it does not necessarily have to be a classic room with computers and a coffee machine. For example, in the aforementioned neighborhood center, in the amphitheater of Olympic Hopes Park, the developer decided to create a beauty co-working space — a space with work areas which can be leased by beauty industry professionals. The project promises to be an important element of the neighborhood’s infrastructure, contributing to the growth of small business and strengthening the local community. This comprehensive approach to neighborhood development and neighborly relations was also recognized by Delovoi Peterburg, which awarded it the newspaper’s award for Residential Environment Project of the Year in Creating Versatile and Comfortable Neighborly Infrastructure.
The beauty co-working space at the neighborhood center in the SouthTown development, designed by Olga Fedotova. Photo: KVS Group, via Delovoi Peterburg
When speaking about the importance of neighborhood centers for residential developments, the experts interviewed by Delovoi Peterburg generally voiced confidence that adding such facilities to residential developments does not make projects much more expensive, but it can increase an an apartment’s per meter cost, as well as make a developer stand out from the competition. The experts recognized that the trend toward neighborliness, according to psychologists, will continue to grow, especially among residents of new neighborhoods.
“A Russia without profanity. The word mom is sacred! Speak without swearing.” Photo: Igor Stomakhin, Moscow, 2025
What can serve as the basis for new Russian post-war identity? What sort of patriotism can there be in a country which has lived through an aggressive war? Of what should the people of this country be proud? What should they associate themselves with? Republic Weekly presents a programmatic text by the sociologist Oleg Zhuravlev and the poet and activist Kirill Medvedev on how the so-called Russian nation came to 2022 and what its prospects are in 2025.
How can Russia get beyond being either an embryonic nation-state or a vestigial empire? People have been talking about this for three decades now. Does it require years and years of peaceful development? A national idea painstakingly formulated by spin doctors in political science labs? A bourgeois revolution? Or maybe just a small victorious war? The so-called special military operation in Ukraine, which has grown into a global military and political conflict, poses these questions in a new light.
In our view, large-scale social changes are happening inside Russia today, changes which could help shape a new national project.
These changes are not always so easy to spot.
According to the social critique prevalent in the independent media, wartime Russian society is organized roughly as follows. Its freedom-loving segment has been crushed and disoriented, while its loyalist segment is atomized and under the thumb of government propaganda, which preaches xenophobia, imperialism and cynicism. Society is fragmented and polarized, suspended somewhere between apathy and fascism. But these tendencies, which are certainly important — and therefore visible to the naked eye, as well as exaggerated by the liberal discourse — are nevertheless not absolute and probably are not even the most important. Society lives its own life, meaning that different groups within it live their own lives and move in their own directions. When you analyze the trajectories of that movement you get a better sense of the major pathways along which these groups might in the future coalesce into a new nation.
Despite the official rhetoric about unity during the war years, the regime has not managed to consolidate a nation, but it has laid the groundwork for its formation in the future. This has been significantly aided by the west’s anti-Putin policies and the information war waged by the new Russian emigration’s radical wing, which speaks of the collective guilt of all Russians, of their culture and language. Consequently, the only alternative to Putinism and war has seemed to be the disenfranchisement of all Russianness, and the only alternative to official government patriotism has been the “fall of the empire.” Meanwhile, there have been and continue to exist images of the country and modes of attachment to it which cannot be reduced to either of these two options.
THE NEW RUSSIAN PATRIOTISM
The idea of a new Russian identity was expressed succinctly by Boris Yeltsin on 22 August 1991, when he said that the attempted coup had targeted “Russia, her multi-ethnic people” and her “stance on democracy and reform.” The new modern Russian identity was supposed to be the result of choosing Europe, overcoming the archetypes of slavery and subjugation, and transcending the legacies of the October Revolution, interpreted as a criminal conspiracy and lumpenproletarian revolt, and of the Soviet nation as a grim community of “executioners and victims.”
Ultimately, though, it was the reforms themselves, along with the trauma of losing a powerful state, that generated Soviet nostalgia and a new version of Stalinism. [Yeltsin’s] shelling of the [Russian Supreme Soviet] in 1993 and the dubious 1996 presidential election, which many initially regarded as a triumph for the liberal project, proved to be its doom.
Despite the fact that advocates of the radical anti-liberal revanche were momentarily defeated and exited the scene, widespread disappointment and depoliticization was a barrier for further democratization through people’s involvement in politics. The story of 1991 spoke clearly about what the new Russians could take pride in: victory over the revanchists, for which they had taken to the streets and sacrificed the lives of three young men. Subsequently, amid the chaos and bloodshed of 1993, two ideological projects of Russian identity took shape which were mostly in competition with each other, splitting civil society in the period that followed.
LIBERALS VS. THE RED-BROWN COALITION
Vladimir Putin was nominated to strengthen the new capitalism and prevent a “Soviet revanche.” But his most successful project, as was quickly revealed, actually lay in the Soviet legacy’s partial rehabilitation. Putin managed to bridge the gap of 1993: he drew in part of the pro-Soviet audience (by using patriotic rhetoric, bringing back the Soviet national anthem, and taking control of the Communist Party) and drove the most intransigent liberals and democrats into the marginal opposition. The grassroots yearning for a revival of statism, which had taken shape in the early 1990s, was gradually incorporated into the mainstream. Many years later, this enabled things that would have been impossible to imagine even during the Brezhnev era, let alone during perestroika: the erecting of monuments to Stalin, the creeping de-rehabilitation of Stalinism’s victims, the normalization of political crackdowns as the state’s defense mechanism, and, consequently, a greater number of political prisoners than during the late-Soviet period.
Today’s ideal Russians, in Putin’s eyes, are those who identify themselves with all of Russian history from Rurik to the present, see that history as one of continuous statehood, and regard the periods of turmoil (the early sixteenth century, post-revolutionary Russia, the 1990s) as instances of outside meddling which should never be repeated.
The ideological struggle over Russia’s image during the Yeltsin and Putin years was thus rooted in the opposition between the liberal narrative (based on Yeltsin’s reforms) and the Stalinist great power narrative. Putinism, which is institutionally rooted in the Yeltsin legacy, acted as a kind of arbiter in the argument between the Shenderovich and Prokhanov factions, but gradually dissolved 1993’s great power Stalinist and White Russian imperial legacy into semi-official rhetoric.
But was this semi-official rhetoric part of the national identities of ordinary Russians? Or were their national identities not so thoroughly ideologized?
Did most of the country’s citizens even have national identities during early Putinism, which deliberately atomized and depoliticized society?
THE ESCALATION OF NORMALITY
Amid the relative prosperity, socio-economic progress, and apoliticality of the 2000s we see the emergence of a new, rather de-ideologized, “normal” everyday patriotism, involving a decent life, good wages, and an image of the country which made one proud rather than ashamed. Research by the sociologist Carine Clement has shown that this brand of patriotism could be socially critical and emerge from the lower classes (who criticized the authorities for the fact that far from everyone enjoyed good wages), but could also be more loyal to officialdom and come from the middle classes (who believed that the country had on the whole achieved a good standard of living, or had created conditions for those who actually wanted to achieve it).
In any case, early Putinism depoliticized and individualized society, neutralizing the civic conflict between the liberals and the “red-brown coalition,” but one outcome of this ideological neutralization was that it brought into focus something given to citizens by default: their connection to the motherland. This connection is not conceptualized through belonging to one ideological camp or another. It is grasped through one’s sense of the value possessed by a normal, decent life, a life which all the country’s citizens deserve individually and collectively.
This value was politicized after 2011. The Bolotnaya Square protests launched a peculiar mechanism: the escalation of normality. One author of this article recently decided to go back and re-analyze the interviews PS Lab did with people who protested in support of Navalny in 2021. The analysis showed something interesting: the most “radical” protesters, the people most willing to be detained and arrested, who wanted to go all the way and topple Putin, turned out to be the most “normal.” They were middle-class people whose demands were measured and respectable.
They did not dream of building utopias or radically restructuring society, but of a parliamentary republic and combating corruption. Both the Bolotnaya Square and post-Bolotnaya Square democratic movements, including the Navalny supporters, transformed the reasonable demand for a normal, bourgeois, prosperous country into the battle standard of a heroic revolutionary struggle against the Putin regime. Navalnyism, meanwhile, also integrated a measured social critique of inequality into its agenda.
The “normal patriotism” of the lower and middle classes thus became a stake in a fierce political struggle.
The new patriotic pride might have said something like this: “We can expose and vote out corrupt officials, push back against toxic waste dumps and insane development projects, vote in solidarity, and hit the streets to protest for the candidates we support whom Moscow doesn’t like. We have people who look to the west, people who miss the USSR, and people who defended the White House in 1991 and in 1993. We face Putin’s truncheons and paddy wagons together, and together we demand democratic freedoms and social justice.” This was how a civil society made up of Navalny fans, radical communists, and regional movements might have fought together for a “normal” country, how they might have shaped the political project of a vigorous nation pursuing solidarity. They might have done it, but they didn’t have time. They did manage to piss off the Kremlin, though.
In response, the regime launched its own escalation of normality. On the one hand, it responded to the protests with radically conservative counterrevolutionary propaganda and crackdowns. On the other hand, behind the façade of radical conservativism, Putinism erected its own edifice of “normality,” which would prove to be truly durable. Beginning in 2011, the Kremlin appropriated part of the Bolotnaya Square agenda not only in its slogans but also in practice by improving the quality of the bureaucracy, raising living standards, technocratically upgrading public amenities, and advancing technological progress. Sobyanin’s Moscow was the testing ground and façade of a new normalization which involved no democracy at all.
But the real escalation of normality on the Putin regime’s part occurred when the special military operation kicked off in 2022.
WAR, (AB)NORMALITY, AND PATRIOTISM
The war has been something profoundly abnormal for many people. It has meant a break with normal life and with any hopes for a normal country. This is what the war has meant for many people, but not for all of them.
PS Lab’s research has shown that a segment of the Russian populace, the middle-class economic beneficiaries of the new wartime economic policy, argue that Russia is now approaching the image of a normal country, even if they do not support the war. According to them, it is not the war per se but the concomitant economic progress (visible, for example, in the growth of wages and the creation of jobs) and the strengthening of national identity which have finally put paid to the period of crisis and launched a stage of growth.
Their argument goes like this. They do not know the reasons behind the tragic special military operation, which has taken tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives, but in trying to cope with this tragedy, they have strengthened the Russian economy and become more patriotic.
What matters is that the idea of growth is firmly separated, in the minds of such people, from the official “goals and objectives” of the special military operation and its ideological framework. It transpires that heavyweight official patriotism is digested by a significant part of society in a milder form. PS Lab’s respondents claim that they do not support violent methods of resolving foreign policy conflicts and are indifferent to the annexation of new territories, but that it has been a good thing that they have begun to think more about the motherland.
Wartime Putinism has two faces, in other words. On the one hand, we see war, increasing crackdowns, and spasms of neo-imperialist ideology. On the other, Russians are not overly fond of those things. They value other things more, such as economic growth and the strengthening of national identity, which unites the segment of society who feel alienated by the state’s ideological and foreign policy projects. When thinking about their own patriotism, many Russians underscore the fact that it is not defined by imperialist ideology. The country is going through a difficult moment, so would it not be better for Russia to take care of itself, rather than worry about acquiring new lands? This has been a leitmotif in many interviews done by PS Lab.
Economic nationalism in the guise of military Keynesianism and the sense of community experienced by citizens going through trials (in their everyday lives, not in terms of ideology) have thus laid the foundations less for an imperial project, and more for the formation of a “normal” nation-state.
Nor is the issue of democracy off the table: it has been missed not only by the opponents but also by the supporters of the special military operation. We welcome the growth of a sovereign economy, but if Putin strangles civil society and lowers the Iron Curtain, we will be opposed to it, say the quasi-pro-war volunteers. For them, however, Putin remains the only possible guarantor of a “normal” future. Many Russians who want an end to the war and a future life without upheaval have pinned their hopes on the president for years.
This focus on gradually developing and civilizing the country is nothing new. Since the 1990s, part of the intelligentsia and, later, the new middle class, pinned their hopes first on the reforms of the pro-market technocrats, then on the successes of a then-still-liberal Putinism, then on Kudrin’s systemic liberals, then on Sobyanin’s policies, and so on.
Something went wrong, and many of these people are now in exile, but it is quite natural that images of a normal life and a normal country, albeit in radically altered circumstances, continue to excite Russians. Normality can be politicized, however, as it was between 2011 and 2022.
The social movements and the independent opposition which emerged after the Bolotnaya Square uprising have been virtually destroyed by the regime: the last bright flashes of this tradition faded before our eyes at the 2022 anti-war rallies. Nevertheless, the tradition of democratic protest continues. As before the war, the latter can grow from the demand for normalcy.
Moreover, the demand for normalcy can sound particularly radical in wartime.
The hardships of war have given rise to movements such as The Way Home, whose activists, wives of mobilized military personnel, have evolved from human rights loyalism to collective protest as they have demanded a return to normal life. Starting with individual demands for the protection and return of their loved ones from the front, they then arrived at a national agenda of fighting for a “normal” and even “traditional” country in which every family should have the right to a dignified, happy and peaceful life.
After a period of struggle between the two versions of patriotism born in the 1990s, liberal and neo-Soviet, the time for everyday “normal” patriotism has thus dawned. Initially, it existed as a public mood which was not fully articulated, but subsequently we witnessed a mutual escalation of normality on the part of warring protesters and the Kremlin.
The “post-Bolotnaya” opposition, led by Navalny, launched a revolutionary struggle with the regime over the project for a “normal” bourgeois country, attempting to create a broad movement that would reach far beyond the former liberal crowd. In response, the Kremlin unveiled its neo-imperialist militarist project with one hand, while with the other hand it satisfied the public demand for normality on its own after the opposition had been defeated.
TWO SCENARIOS FOR A NORMAL RUSSIA
The above-mentioned contradictions of the Putinist discourse and the complex realities of wartime (and the postwar period?) allow us to imagine two scenarios for society’s growth, the realization of two images of Russian patriotism. In other words, we see two scenarios for a socio-political dynamic which could culminate in the creation of a new nation.
Military Putinism, contrary to its radically imperialist image, has in terms of realpolitik and public sentiment put down certain foundations for the formation of a nation-state in Russia.
If economic growth, redistributive policies, and the strengthening of everyday patriotism continue after the end of the war and captivate the majority or at least a significant segment of society, the project of turning Russia into a nation-state from above will have a chance.
Whether it materializes depends on many unknowns. Will the government be able to maintain economic dynamism after dismantling the wartime economy? Will everyday patriotism turn into a solid ideological edifice? Will the end of the war be followed by a liberalization of political life? (Is this possible at all?) Will the current pro-war and anti-war volunteerism serve as the basis for an industrious, widespread civil society? Will there be a change of elites?
Russia’s transformation into a nation-state under these circumstances would constitute a serious paradox. It would thus emerge not after a lost imperialist war or a war of national liberation, but in the wake of a partly successful war, which evolved from an imperialist war into a nationalist war. What would hold such a society together?
It is easiest to envision an identity based on Russia’s opposition to the west on the basis of geopolitical confrontation or economic and technological competition, especially if a fierce struggle between newly emerging geopolitical blocs lies ahead. This confrontation with the west, which we allegedly have pulled off with dignity (even if we are willing to recognize the special military operation itself as a dubious event), will be accompanied by various practices and emblems of cultural uniqueness.
But will this new nation be capable of producing a powerful culture, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Or will this future Russia be doomed to cultural and intellectual degradation as presaged by Dugin’s philosophy and pro-war poetry?
There are serious doubts that the grounds listed above would be sufficient for a multi-ethnic and multicultural entity like the Russian Federation to turn into a national community united by an understanding of a common destiny and values. The USSR as a community was based on the complex mix of the new Soviet individual and Russocentrism that took shape in the Stalinist period. The roles of this dynamic duo are currently played by the adjective rossiyskiy, which is a designation of civic membership in a multi-ethnic community, and the similar-sounding adjective russkiy, which is a grab bag of several easily manipulated meanings.
Putin is responsible for regular messages about multi-ethnicism, while numerous actors in the government and the loyalist media are charged with sending signals about Russian ethnicism. In this bizarre system, ethnic Russians, on the one hand, constitute a “single nation” with Belarusians and Ukrainians; on the other hand, they vouchsafe the coexistence of hundreds of other ethnic communities, supposedly united by “traditional values” (and, no matter how you look at it, the most important of these values is the rejection of homosexuality); while, on the third hand, they have a special message for the world either about their own humility, or about the fact that they will soon “fuck everyone over” again.
This complex edifice has been looking less and less persuasive. The zigzags and wobbles of the political top brass — Russia has swerved from alliances with North Korea and China to newfound friendship with the United States; from casting itself as a global hegemon to posing as an aggrieved victim — do nothing to help Russians understand who we are. They have, however, stimulated the growth of local, regional, ethnic narratives and identities which are much more reliable and comfortable. Ethnic brands, music and art projects involving folkloric reconstructions, the vogue for studying the languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation, and the plethora of Telegram channels about ethnic cultures and literatures are all outward signs of the new ethnic revival. Although they do not seem as provocative as the forums of radical decolonizers, they correspond less and less with a vision in which ethnic Russianness is accorded a formative role, while “multi-ethnicity” is relegated to a formal and ceremonial role.
When we draw parallels with the Soviet identity, we should remember that it was based not simply on a set of ideological apparatuses (as the current fans of censored patriotic cinema and literature imagine), but on a universal idea of the future, on the radical Enlightenment project of involving the masses and nations in history (including through “nativization” and the establishment of new territorial entities). The project had many weaknesses from the outset, and it was radically undermined by the deportation of whole ethnic groups and the anti-Semitic campaign (for which the current regime has less and less desire to apologize), but as the British historian Geoffrey Hosking has argued, the fundamental reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse was the lack of civil institutions in which the emerging inter-ethnic solidarity could find expression.
If an ethnic cultural and regional revival really awaits us amid war trauma, confusion, possible economic problems, and the deficit of a common identity, how would Moscow handle it? Would it try to control or guide the process? Or maybe it would focus on loyal nationalists and fundamentalists in a replay of the Chechen scenario? This may turn out to be a prologue to disintegration, or it may serve as the field for establishing new community. The radical democratic opposition, once it has a chance, would simply have to combine local, regional, and ethnic cultural demands with general social and democratic ones.
It is for the sake of this that we must rethink the imperial legacy, the Soviet project with its complex mix of colonialism, federalism and modernization, the way communities have lived together for centuries on this land, sometimes fighting and competing, sometimes suffering from each other and from Moscow, sometimes evolving, and sometimes coming together to fight the central government (as during the Pugachev Rebellion).
This combination of civil struggle and intellectual reflection can not only generate a fresh political counter-agenda but also reanimate the worn-out leitmotifs and narratives of Russian culture.
It can reintroduce the productive tension and contradiction, the universality inherent in a great culture, which the regime, while oppressing and exiling critical voices, has been trying to replace with an emasculated, captive patriotism.
***
We want a quiet private life without upheaval, the life which generations of Russians have dreamed of; we want to be independent, stick to our roots and remain who we are, says one group of our compatriots.
We want to overcome dictatorship, political oppression, inequality, corruption and war; we want to live in a society based on freedom and solidarity, says another group of our compatriots.
Interestingly, both of these scenarios are revolutionary. The first scenario, despite its adoration of technocracy and the petit bourgeois lifestyle, is the result of an anti-democratic revolution from above, during which the authoritarian regime has been transformed from a predominantly technocratic to a counter-revolutionary one and has challenged both the world order and the domestic political order. The abrupt transition to a redistributive military Keynesian macroeconomic policy, which was unthinkable ten years ago, and which fuels the current workaday patriotism, has emerged as part of the war. The war itself has been the decisive event of Putin’s counterrevolution, which, like any counterrevolution, always bears certain revolutionary traits.
But while the first scenario (albeit with a new, rather sinister twist) epitomizes the long-standing dream of a bourgeois life based on comfort and tradition, the second draws on a more grassroots and rebellious vision of social progress and related practices. It hearkens back to the defenders of the Russian White House in 1991 and 1993, the protesters against the monetization of benefits and the Marches of the Dissenters, the radical segment of the Bolotnaya Square movement, and the street movements in support of Navalny and Sergei Furgal. History, including Russian history, knows many such examples of new national communities emerging in radical joint struggles for democracy and justice.
Both scenarios could be generated by the current catastrophic reality, and both are fraught with fresh dangers: the first with the threat of a new descent into fascism, the second with violent civil conflicts. In our opinion, though, it is these two scenarios which shape the field for analyzing, discussing and imagining the country’s future.
Kirill Medvedev,* a poet, publisher, and member of the band Arkady Kots, left Russia in 2023 and returned in late 2024. At Republic Weekly’s request, he explains his winding road, what Moscow looks like when one hasn’t seen it from the inside for a long time, and what remainers have to say about leavers.
After a year and a half of living in other countries for personal (but, of course, political) reasons, I have been living in Moscow for several months now. Despite certain risks, I really don’t want to leave, and I am terrified of everything having to do with living in exile. I’m willing to speak in allegories or even to keep silent altogether just to be able to live in my hometown. Although what could be more important than waking up in the morning and smacking the Putin regime in the face without pulling your punches?
Everything in Moscow is still familiar and homely. I am indifferent to Sobyanin’s renovations. Things have improved in some places, while in other places it’s the reverse. Half-abandoned spots have suddenly emerged even in the most expensive neighborhoods, as if the money had suddenly been hoovered out of them. I’m certain that’s literally what happened.
I don’t see any particular feasting amid a plague, but I guess I’m just not hitting the right spots. Moscow has become more desolate and wild on the whole. When the capital is finally moved to Siberia, the Moscow I know and love will look even better. But for now, it is still what it is: a crazy quilt fashioned from Eurasian chaos, absorbing a million shades of the glitz and poverty of the entire country and its neighbors, and tempting us with new revolutions somewhere in its squares and back alleys.
All of Russia can be found in Moscow, and yet, as everyone knows, Moscow is not Russia. Thanks to this fun fact, it is easier for Muscovites than for anyone else to love the entire country, albeit an imaginary and unfathomable country, shaped from different scraps. “I stand as before an eternal riddle, / Before a great and fabulous land,” sang one remarkable Muscovite. I repeat another poet’s line about another city, thinking that love for one’s capital city and one’s country is an enormous, complicated privilege: “May it not be my lot / To die far away from you.”
Online public communication habits have actually changed a lot because of the risks involved. It no longer feels like your event didn’t happen if it wasn’t written up online and if you didn’t post a photo of yourself with a crowd of happy spectators.
There are [now] more personal channels of communication within communities and more word of mouth. Reactions are more reserved in public and more emotional among friends. Pardon my sentimentality, but there is little to compare with physical hugs with friends and family in a city charged with your own and other people’s memories.
Of course, there are a lot of new problems, and I’d rather deal with some variety of internet addiction than the nightmare in which everyone has found themselves. And yet there is the perception that the war has ushered in the degradation of all ways of living in Russia. This is not true. Humans are ultra-creative and crafty creatures. Violent shocks do not neutralize life but propel it into new forms. A caveat: no new ways of living and creating can justify the mass murder of people who will never wake up to life again. But cultural, activist, educational, and other communities who persist and change, albeit semi-clandestinely, albeit at the cost of compromise or risk, increase our chances of transitioning to a different way of living in this country in the future. The more allies we have here at home now, the more likely they are to be in the right place at the right time—that is, if the first flights our friends who have been shoved out of the country plan to take are delayed a bit.
Irony or irritation towards the people who have left [Russia] for one reason or another is evident among almost all those who have stayed, except for those who are definitely planning to leave. One of the frequent complaints is “They left to live in safety, and they did the right thing—they just shouldn’t pass it off as a political act.”
That is true, though with many caveats. Bravo, of course, to the activists who have been helping people who have to leave to get out of the country and to adapt to life abroad. Bravo to the journalists who have moved to relatively safe places and continue to fulfill their professional obligation to their fellow citizens. Regular albeit serious news, reported with respect for themselves and the audience, without unnecessary harshness (“so that you can send it to your grandmother”) is needed desperately: almost everyone talks about it. But pessimism and aggression about life inside the country on the part of fellow citizens who have left the country is completely out of place. It is clearly old-fashioned exile self-therapy and should be practiced in private.
While the demand for alternative information is great (many people in the USSR who were not necessarily anti-Soviet also listened to Voice of America), one can see skepticism or simply a lack of interest in émigré politics. Why is this the case? There seem to be many examples in history when political émigrés came back home, were involved in great transformations, or even spearheaded them. Escaping from prison in Russia, making one’s way abroad, drinking to a successful adventure with comrades in Geneva, discussing future strategies in a relaxed atmosphere, and soon returning home to work underground was a typical trajectory for Russia’s radical democrats in the early twentieth century.
Things have changed since then, although today many also travel back and forth. You can talk at length to those who have stayed in Russia about the hardships of emigration, and they will agree and sympathize with you, especially if you were actually in danger here at home.
For the most part, though, people still see someone else’s moving abroad as their means of upgrading their private existence.
By renouncing your past life, it is as if you automatically renounce your past community. The propaganda, of course, does its best to inflate the resentment, but it’s not just propaganda at work. Emigration is indeed an experience of constant self-denial. Especially today, when Russian emigrants are so evidently prodded (gently and not so gently) to cancel themselves in terms of of their citizenship, background, language, identity, or even flag. Moreover, the reanimated ethical-religious discourse of the Cold War, with its confrontation between good and evil on a global scale, has played a considerable role in this.
The field where dialogue should have taken place between leavers and remainers, as well as between moderate oppositionists and hesitant loyalists, has been overrun by moralizers in proverbial white coats and rabid patriots. They are the dividers and conquerors.
The leavers more often argue in terms of negative freedom—freedom from censorship, political crackdowns, and military mobilization, from having to indirectly finance the war or live among its supporters. The remainers stay because they do not see how they can realize themselves abroad, at least not without the sort of superhuman effort and self-denial that many of them find more frightening than living under the threat of arrest or self-censorship. They often speak of duty—to elderly relatives, students, patients, voters, political prisoners, the graves of relatives, the homeland, etc. And they often hear in response that it is immoral to be involved in the normalized life in today’s Russia. The ethical conflict is evident.
I wander the Pokrovkas and the Ordynkas, thinking about where I can get money to pay the bills and pay off my debts. There are posters calling for men to sign up for the army. Somehow I don’t feel more upstanding than the guys who go off to kill for money. I would definitely not go to do that, but this certainty does not raise my moral self-esteem. I think of an old comrade who perished in the “special military operation.” His debts, low social status, and leftist anti-western ressentiment had blossomed into imperialist obfuscation.
I sit in a cafe, thinking about my plans. The people around me talk about different things, while people in a neighboring country are bombed in our name.
I’m good at displacing unpleasant things. We all are good at it.
Being here, dissolving into this life, it is difficult to feel like a member of an ethics committee. It’s easier to realize that all people are basically the same, that there are no insuperable differences between them. All our actions (whether ordinary, shameful, or magnificent), all the passivity of the masses, all the revolts of nations, are manifestations of the same human principle in different historical circumstances. The way humanness manifests itself in our present circumstances, the way my own humanness manifests itself in them, is the most interesting thing to observe. Okay, we’ve established that.
No, of course, there is a huge difference between opposition to evil, passive non-participation, and complicity in it. Putin’s propagandists have been blurring the distinction between the first, second and third to depoliticize and morally degrade society. We know this, and you can’t fool us. In both the secular and Christian systems, a person always has a choice and a responsibility for it. We should not see the individual as a unwilling victim of want and propaganda. But something else is also true: even if you believe that you have made your own super-correct moral choice once and for all, endlessly judging your neighbor, or believing they are made of some qualitatively different stuff than you, or finding them complicit in collective guilt without trial is also a quite devilish temptation, akin to the temptations proffered today in our country by various spiritual and political leaders.
Political evil is countered not by personal virtue, and even less by moralistic posturing. It is countered by political or civic ethics, but our country has a huge problem with that.
All the debates between the leavers and the remainers, all the debates over the slogans “peace now” vs. “war until the dictatorship’s defeat,” all the debates about whether Navalny should have returned to Russia, revolve around the missing answer to the ethical (aka political) question: for what are we willing to risk our private lives, for what collective ideals?
I certainly don’t have a clear answer. Russia is long past the heroic times of liberalism and socialism, when people believed that civic heroism was not weak-mindedness or recklessness, but a deliberate, mature step toward a better future. Popular willingness to take to the streets against war and dictatorship is impossible without the conviction that we are on the right side of history, that we are in a movement that both overlaps with and transcends our private interests.
The Bolsheviks believed in communism’s inevitable advent on a global scale, and were able to convince many people this would happen, which was why they won. In 1991, Russians believed that by defending the [Russian] White House and confronting the coup plotters’ tanks, they were leading Russia onto the road of progress which all democratic nations were already rolling down. Whether we like it or not, Russia is not ready to follow any well-trodden path. There is no single road anymore: the road is just going to have to be paved anew. (I’m reckoning on this.)
Today we see a faint glimmer of hope in republicanism, with its idea that community spirit is not a consolation prize for people who lack professional fulfillment and personal happiness. It is not reducible to a professional or personal virtue and is not a profession itself.
Anyone willing to stand with others to oppose tyranny and then work every day to prevent it from happening again is capable of demonstrating civic valor. And the brighter, bolder and more constructively a person commits to this work, the more they make use of their professional, creative and other kinds of potential, the greater their authority in the community will be and the more likely they will remain in the community’s memory. This sounds good as a motivation, but if the republican ethic is realizable, then it is realizable in the small and medium-size spaces of campaigns around residential buildings, courtyards, neighborhoods, and (at most) cities, where it is possible to find analogues of the ancient Greek square for people to hold meetings.
A national community is imaginary, no matter how you look at it, and it is based on a rather sketchy common historical plight and collective memory. If we do not want it to be the memory of how “everyone was afraid of us,” it should be the memory of how we survived together and resisted—secretly and explicitly, passively and actively—the extermination of others and self-extermination, of how we built ties, engaged in “culture,” taught children, supported political prisoners, and helped the bombing victims and the homeless.
This is the ground of community, a ground not nourished by moral superiority, by denying oneself and one’s roots, or by essentializing differences. It is nourished by responsibility for the people who stand or have stood next to you in the same squares and the same queues, for the people who walk the same streets, who went to the same schools, who share the same hopes for the future.
If we indeed stand on this ground, then it makes sense for us to challenge and set our hearts on something together.
* Medvedev has been placed on the Russian Justice Ministry’s registry of “foreign agents.”
A Chechen refugee in front of her destroyed apartment building in downtown Grozny, February 17, 1995. Photo: Reuters (via Julia Khazagaeva)
On the thirtieth anniversary of the storming of Grozny, the liberal Russian media reminded the Russophone audience that there had been such a war—the Chechen War. When I see this title, I don’t even open the movie, I flip through it. A couple of excerpts are basically enough for me to be convinced that these people have still understood nothing after three decades. Even over the three years of the recent, utterly treacherous imperial war in Ukraine, the obvious facts about what Chechnya means to Russia have not became obvious to them.
Almost any decent Russian would point out to you, of course, that bombing towns chockablock with civilians was a bad thing to do and foul play. Carrying out mop-ups in villages and burying the victims in mass graves was also outrageous. But then the exclamation “but!” is sure to follow. They will tell you about Chechen bandits, forged letters of credit, and the intransigent Dudayev. Yes, it was wrong to destroy a third of Chechnya’s population, this notional Russian would lament, but the Chechens were bad eggs themselves and were asking for it.
If you ever do open a Russian [documentary] film reconstructing the events in Chechnya thirty years ago, you will find that it is about the enlisted lads who on New Year’s Eve 1994 were thrown into the epicenter of hell. Not properly trained to shoot or drive a tank, alone against hordes of heavily armed rebels, they were unfortunate sons of the Motherland: may their memory live forever. This artistic device is deployed, for example, by the Maxim Katz-affiliated project Minute by Minute. The [YouTube] channels Current Time and Popular Politics have also recalled this selfsame “Chechen War.”
Minute by Minute, “The New Year’s Eve Storming of Grozny: A Minute by Minute Reconstruction” (December 31, 2024)
Semantically, the construction “Chechen War” operates the same way as the coinage “captive of the Caucasus.” It conceals the aggressor, suggesting we look at the object of the aggression as the aggression’s cause. In this logical trap, Chechnya seems to have gone up in flames by itself. It was its inhabitants who shelled and bombed themselves silly. It was not Russia that invaded the Caucasus, it was the Caucasus which for some reason held Russia’s soldiers in captivity. It is not without reason that when people say “he was killed in Chechnya,” it is the place where he was killed that appears to be the malefactor. The listener is not prompted to wonder what this soldier was doing under arms in a foreign land. It is as if Chechnya had shown up in Samara and killed an innocent tanker.
When we think, write and say “Chechen War,” we automatically interpret it from the point of view of the colonizer and the aggressor. We accept the interpretation imposed by Moscow, which insists that Chechnya is part of Russia, not a sovereign country it attacked. If Russia is not mentioned in the nomenclaturee of this historical event, Chechnya is automatically read as an undeniable part of the empire, and the conflict itself sounds akin to the November Uprising or the Tambov Rebellion.
In fact, it was the Russo-Chechen War which began on December 11, 1994. The war deserves to be identified as such both in terms of the nature of the hostilities and the status of the warring parties, because by the time the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was invaded by Russian troops, it had been three years since it had legally, by popular vote and a declaration of independence, withdrawn from the USSR on an equal footing with the RSFSR. The Chechens had NOT been part of the newly minted Russian Federation for a single day.
The independent journalist Vadym Zaydman has written about this better and more clearly than anyone else. There is no need to paraphrase him when I can instead quote what he has written:
“At the time of the USSR’s death/colllapse, Chechnya was no longer legally related either to the defunct Soviet empire or to the RSFSR. By that time the Chechen-Ingush ASSR had existed as a Union Republic for over a year. Thus, by definition it could not be a part of the Russian Federation, as proclaimed on December 25, 1991. When the Russian Federation was born, Chechnya was initially not a part of it.
“Russia itself did not regard Chechnya as part of Russia during this period. On March 31, 1992, the Federation Treaty was incorporated into the Russian Constitution. It changed the status of autonomous republics to sovereign republics within the Russian Federation. The treaty was signed by representatives of twenty federal subjects of the Russian Federation. Neither the Chechen-Ingush Republic nor Chechnya was involved in the treaty.
“It was only in the wake of the notorious events of October 1993, when Yeltsin was adopting a new Russian constitution, that he unilaterally incorporated Chechnya into the Russian Federation. In fact, Yeltsin committed a fraud like the one committed by the Russian authorities when, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, they declared Russia a member of the UN Security Council as the USSR’s legal successor, although Russia was not even a rank-and-file member of the UN. Ukraine and Belarus were members of the UN, but Russia aka the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was not! Having incorporated Chechnya, a year later Russia started to establish ‘constitutional order’ in Chechnya as its own fiefdom! Clever, isn’t it?!”
End quote.
The term “Chechen War” is thus as illegitimate as the use of the term “Ukrainian War” is unacceptable. Ukrainians would not allow the latter, and the entire civilized world would not agree to it. For everyone, the current war is the Russo-Ukrainian War. But the same thing should happen in our minds when describing the war in Chechnya. It is the Russo-Chechen War.
Many Russians would understandably prefer it go down in history in a more modest way—ideally, not as a war at all, but as a “special military operation,” or a “counter-terrorist operation,” for it is the security forces, not the simple folk, who are responsible for such operations. “SMO” and “CTO” sound mundane and localized, like a police “amber alert,” nor are they freighted with collective guilt and responsibility. Most vitally, if correlated with these Putinist terms, western sanctions come to be regarded as an exorbitant and unwarranted punishment, since they make “ordinary people suffer.”
Why do you think various Putinist and anti-Putinist institutions have spent the last three years relentlessly measuring public opinion on whether Russians want war? Yes, it’s simple: because of the sanctions—and Russia’s slightly tarnished image in the eyes of the international community. But if the West is shown the relevant polls quite often and reminded that “public opinion polls don’t work in a totalitarian society,” this mantra will work like a charm the thousandth time. It will then be much easier for Brussels officials to explain to themselves and their electorate why they are lifting restrictions: because they oppress an already “downtrodden” civil society, which in no way wanted war, but which was forced by Putin to want it.
Meanwhile, to answer the question of how much the Russian populace shares its leadership’s imperial mindset, it is enough to take the case of the Russo-Chechen War. From the sociological viewpoint, it is a scientifically pristine experiment. In 1994 (as in 1999, when the second phase of the war began) there was no totalitarianism in Russia. There were no western sanctions, and there were no Russian émigréscriticizing the regime from abroad. U.S. President Bill Clinton expressed “concern” when he learned that civilians were being killed in Chechnya. France supported the establishment of constitutional order on Russia’s own territory. They all thought that the new Russian Czar Yeltsin was better than any Communist, even if he fought like one.
Enjoying the full favor of the international community, Russia razed Grozny to the ground along with the remnants of its civilian population on New Year’s Eve 1994. This did not cause any outcry in Russian society. The first protest rally in Moscow took place on January 10, 1995: organized by Yegor Gaidar, it was a partisan affair and sparsely attended. Noticeable civil protests against the war in Chechnya would not begin until 2001—that is, five years later. [My comrade Antti Rautiainen, who was very much in the thick of things in those years (he was a co-organizer of the first antiwar street protest in Moscow, in November 1999), has pointed out to me (in a comment to Ms. Khazagaeva’s original post in Russian) that the biggest protest in Moscow against the Second Chechen War took place in January 2000, not in 2001 — TRR.] However, even then, according to Radio Svoboda, which interviewed passersby, “Muscovites were in no hurry to join the protesters: everyone was rushing about their business.”
Protests during the first phase of the Russo-Chechen War were isolated and (one might say) personal in nature. From the very first days of the invasion, the Soviet dissident, Russian human rights activist and Russian human rights commissioner Sergei Kovalev traveled to Grozny. He tried to stop the bombing of the city. In March 1995, he was removed from the post of human rights commissioner for supporting the “wrong” side. TV news presenter Svetlana Sorokina took liberties on air: after a commercial break she emotionally remarked that “no laundry detergent can wash clean the conscience of the Russian generals.” Independent Chechnya and its legally elected presidents Dzhokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov were subsequently supported by Valeria Novodvorskaya. Boris Nemtsov tried to stop the war by circulating a petition [which was allegedly signed by a million Russians—TRR]. But there was no grassroots public outrage in Russia, apart from the campaign led by the mothers of the conscripts, neither in the first phase of the war, much less in the second.
This was how sociologist Yuri Levada described attitudes to the war in Chechnya in 2001: “Sentiments against the war are strong in [Russia], but unfortunately we cannot overestimate their significance. The fact is that many people think that more decisive actions, with greater loss of life, perhaps could have led to success. Disavowing the war does not exclude, for example, approving such savage measures as ‘mop-ups,’ which are now quite difficult for the authorities in Chechnya and Russia to cope with. So, an unwillingness to continue the war is an expression of fatigue, not an expression of conscious, directed protest.”
Sociologist Lev Gudkov described Russians who supported Chechnya’s return to the bosom of the empire as follows: “They are younger and better educated Russians who argue that the Chechens must be crushed at any cost and this problem must be solved by force, that no negotiations with Maskhadov are possible, that he represents no one, and that there is only one solution—the total, crushing defeat [of the Chechens]. On the contrary, those who argue that it is necessary to seek a peaceful resolution however possible, including entering into negotiations with Maskhadov, are people of an older age, somewhat wiser and more experienced, and in this sense more tolerant, inclined to recognize Chechnya’s independence as long as the war is brought an end.”
So when Russian liberals, society’s cream of the crop, write and talk about the “Chechen War,” you now know their attitude toward the empire and its conquests. Were it not for the unprecedented western sanctions for invading the European country of Ukraine, you would be surprised to learn what Russians really think about the war. As a gentleman who left Russia twenty years ago once told me in a private conversation: “I still feel sorry for our guys. After all, the Ukrainians have killed more Russians in this war than the Russians have killed Ukrainians.”
For years, survivors of Assad and Russia’s chemical attacks in Syria were silenced. Today, we uncovered shocking evidence that many of these witnesses were forcibly taken to Moscow and pressured to lie – part of an extensive cover-up by the Russian state.
Now, with Assad no longer in power, these survivors are free to speak. In this video, they reveal the horrific reality of the chemical attacks – scenes of unimaginable suffering, children foaming at the mouth, and entire families wiped out.
As someone living in Ukraine, I’ve witnessed Russia’s war crimes firsthand – from white phosphorus to targeted civilian attacks. The patterns of brutality are clear, stretching from Syria to Ukraine.
This story exposes the disinformation campaign that echoed globally, amplified by figures like Aaron Maté and platforms like RT. But the truth matters now more than ever.
Watch as the survivors share their experiences and shed light on the true scale of Russia’s actions – crimes that continue to affect lives across multiple continents.
“Muskovites [sic] celebrating the New Year on Teatralnaya Square.” Photo: Yevgeny Messman/TASS (via Moscow Times)
Victimhood can be a tricky thing. Nobody doubts that ordinary Ukrainians are victims of this war. Russia’s political opposition, in exile, prison or dead, are also viewed as victims. But what of the country’s silent majority? What of the millions who stayed in Russia, kept their heads down and focused on living their ordinary lives, rather than the war and the online space it occupied?
Many things have changed in Russia since 2022. But one of the main constants has been the average Russian citizen’s desire for peace and ending the war. The majority have not been militantly opposed to or cheering the war effort on. Instead, they have been focused on living in the present, trying to salvage what remains of normality and longing for its imminent return – what some are calling the silent majority.
They are not happy with the war or satisfied with the current situation and have few ways of expressing that. Many do feel guilt on a certain (very private) level.
One thing hard not to notice in Russia throughout the conflict is how that silent majority has simply hunkered down and carried on. The war is very much in the background now. When I leave my building every morning, the same middle-aged man is defrosting his car, mothers are walking with strollers and children are heading to the local school.
When you eavesdrop on their conversations or stop to say hello, they sound normal – not like indoctrinated quasi-fascists, as some scholars are suggesting. They sound like any other school child whose teacher is just trying to get through the copious material thrown at them by the school director. The mothers just want their children to grow up in safety and comfort. Cheering on an expensive war pushing up the price of baby food is hardly a means of achieving that.
The war may come to an end in 2025. Negotiations are likelier than at any point since early 2022. And make no mistake, a peace agreement is inevitable. When the war ends, however, on whatever terms, Russia and its population of 146 million will still be there. It will not disappear or suddenly go away. The man defrosting his car as I write these words is not likely to have a huge epiphany when it does. His life has hardly changed since 2022. The increased number of women publicly wearing hijabs in our city is not doing so as a passive sign of resistance.
By living here, watching life unfold how it does, the more one cannot help but think something that many in the West will find unpopular. The war is not their fault. Tens of millions of innocent Russians are victims too. Their freedoms have been curtailed, their movements and opportunities restricted. Did they deserve that by virtue of where they were born? A classic liberal would argue not.
Like millions across the world, the average Russian is just trying to feed and raise their families, and get through the month. Many colleagues in academia have questioned from the comforts of the West, their tenured positions and with nothing to lose why many Russians do nothing to oppose the regime. What they neglect when arguing from their moral high ground is that those people I spoke of earlier do have a lot to lose being critical online. They have about as much power to topple the regime and change its course on the war, as the average Westerner does.
There will be blame to go around. Russian officials and the security apparatus, who carried out the decisions to invade Ukraine and suppress its own population, are obvious contenders. On the Ukrainian side, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals will have to answer for decisions they made. Kyiv’s Western allies clearly could have done more to support Ukraine, yet did not.
Russia’s silent majority will not want to be blamed and they must not be. They personally did not harm anybody or choose the war. Unlike routine acts of everyday life, the war was not their personal fault or responsibility. Collective guilt is too controversial; thousands protested, millions left and staying silent was, in its own way, an act of defiance by refusing to enter the discourse. Guilt by association is also not a tenable position. Not every Soviet citizen was responsible for the Stalinist Terror. Not every Russian citizen can be responsible for the war, especially not on the basis that they refused to cheer on Ukraine and their own country’s defeat.
Blaming those who are faultless will only cause resentment where there was none to begin with. In the long term, it will not make the world safer or more peaceful. Then comes one of liberal democracy’s sore spots that Ukraine, Georgia and even Moldova will have to reckon with on its European journeys: those people in the silent majority will still have a right to have an opinion – as will the pro-Russian segments of their populations. Dismissing these views or people will not make them, nor those in power, more rational.
If the West were serious, it would try to reach out to Russia’s silent majority, who can be won over. The Russian population at large do not hold the same positions as those in and around the Kremlin currently. Most of the population wants Russia to be an open, peaceful country, especially to the West. Make no mistake, westerners, their companies, money and popular culture will be welcomed back with open arms one day. Moreover, this part of Russian society will want to be welcomed back, too. Not doing so only will push the Kremlin into a closer alliance with the likes of China and North Korea.
Moreover, it is absolutely naive to assume that Russia’s social and economic problems will be fixed automatically by the sudden absence of Putin and the return of democracy. Although it stands a much better chance, we have been here before and there is no guarantee of success. Democracy will need to involve this silent majority beyond Moscow and the big cities – felt on the local level – seen to be actually working and fixing the people’s problems. If not, that silent majority will simply resign themselves, remaining disillusioned and ambivalent.
Gleb Pavlovsky once predicted what the end of the Putin regime would look like: it would collapse in a day and be replaced by something exactly the same. He may be proven right. If he is, that is the fault of those in power, not Russian society.
Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in Taganrog (Rostov Region) was a place where, until 2022, minors, women, and mothers with children were detained. After the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine, Russian security forces cleared the detention center to make room for Ukrainian army soldiers and other prisoners of war, including the defenders of the Azovstal steel plant.
Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 gained a reputation as a gruesome torture camp for Ukrainian detainees. Many POWs in other detention centers are threatened with being sent to Taganrog and so forced not to oppose the prosecution. Few people have come forward to talk about the torture.
The story of Ukrainian Dmytro Lisovets was one of the first indications that the detention center in Taganrog had been turned into a torture camp. Lisovets had tried to flee with his family from occupied Mariupol, but failed to get through a filtration point in the Rostov Region. A former member of Ukrainian volunteer units, Lisovets was sent to the Taganrog detention center without being assigned any procedural status.
Lisovets’s lawyer toldMediazona that the Russian authorities “don’t pull any punches with the Ukrainians in this detention center”: “They burst into the cells in masks and beat everyone indiscriminately.” His client was also beaten and tortured in order to force him to admit that he had been involved in the hostilities. Consequently, Lisovets was sentenced to sixteen years in prison.
Once they were detained at Taganrog pretrial detention center, the Ukrainians were completely cut off from the outside world. According to one of the lawyers defending the prisoners, they were not allowed to talk to their clients in private, only in the presence of a police investigator. Moreover, the detention center staff forced the detainees to sign papers waiving their right to communicate with their defense lawyers.
The detainees were able to talk about the torture only after they had been transferred to other pretrial detention facilities.
“We were thrown from the back of KamAZ trucks—our hands tied and eyes blindfolded—and forced to line up against the wall under a hail of blows, where the beatings continued with hands, feet, batons and electric shockers,” one of the captured Ukrainians told his lawyers.
He also said that “at the offices” (that is, during interrogations) he would be bound with a leather belt, placed on the floor, and have a sandbag placed on his chest to make it harder for him to breathe. He would then be beaten with a rubber truncheon and tortured with a stun gun. “It was during such ‘procedures’ that [the Russians] extracted confessions of ‘war crimes,'” the Ukrainian wrote.
There were also mass beatings, including during rare walks outside in the yard. “At every turn of the walking route, a special forces soldier was stationed and was obliged to hit [the prisoners] with a stick,” said one of the convicts. Some officers were “humane” and did not beat wounded prisoners ands prisoners ofter fifty. “The attitude toward us in captivity depended on who was on duty in the prison. There were wardens who would beat all the prisoners,” saidYuriy Hulchuk, an Ukrainiian marine who spent time in Pretrial Detention Center No. 2.
There was no decent food in the detention center either. One of the defense lawyers of the Ukrainian prisoners, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that once a day the wardens “would feed them cabbage broth and quarters of black or white bread.” Ukrainian military officer Artem Serednyak was detained at the Taganrog detention center from September 2022 to the summer of 2023, during which time he lost twenty-two kilograms.
One of the prisoners calls Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 “hell with all its demons,” where it is scary to return: “Even the definition of ‘concentration camp’ would be too mild for Pretrial Detention Center No. 2,” he said. Human rights activists say that there was also sexualized violence against prisoners at the detention center: for example, prisoners had rubber truncheons shoved up their anus.
It was not only military personnel who were locked up in the detention center. For example, Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who was detained by the Russians in the occupied part of Donetsk Region, was sent to the Taganrog pretrial detention center for a year. She died last year: presumably, she was about to be exchanged for Russian prisoners. She did not have time to provide details about her life in the detention center. It is only known that Roshchyna was held in solitary confinement from May to September 2024.
The Russian authorities have not reacted in any way to the reports of torture. Russian human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova visited the pretrial detention facilities where Ukrainian prisoners are held, but she did not report poor detention conditions either. Human rights activists say that the administrators of the detention centers would get ready for such inspections. “[T]hey prepared for this day: everyone was given new clothes, the grass was painted, the lawns were trimmed, and so on. They even gave them [the Ukrainian prisoners] biscuits, which they were extremely happy about, because the usual diet was very meagre,” [Irina Soboleva], one of the lawyers defending Ukrainian prisoners, says.
In the age of forever war, the use of mercenaries, paramilitary forces, and irregular troops have become increasingly common on the battlefield. But now Russia is resorting to luring unwitting civilians from Yemen and other countries across Asia with little to no military experience to fight alongside its troops in the war in Ukraine.
As reported by Ali Younes, a recruitment network run by a high-ranking Yemeni political and military official with ties to the Houthi government is tricking young Yemeni men desperate for jobs into signing employment contracts for work in Russia, only for them to find once they arrive that they cannot leave and are forced into military training camps and sent to the frontlines.
As the war in Ukraine approaches its fourth year with no end in sight, Russia has turned to recruiting unwitting young men from Yemen and other Arab countries to fight alongside its troops on the front lines. The men are lured under false pretenses, they tell Drop Site News, with promises of lucrative jobs and opportunities for migration, unaware that they are being forcibly recruited as mercenaries to fight in a foreign war despite having little to no military experience.
Two men who fell victim to the scheme told Drop Site they found out they were being sent to fight with the Russian army in the Ukraine war only once they had landed in Russia. Drop Site obtained a copy of an employment contract, corroborating photos and video, and spoke with a human rights organization that has documented the practice.
Mohamad, a Yemeni national who declined to give his last name for security reasons, said he was working in a restaurant in Oman in July when he was approached by Abdul Wali Al Jabri, a high-ranking Yemeni political and military official. Mohamad said they told him about job opportunities in Russia with a good salary and a hefty signing bonus and that he would be working for a civilian company according to his skills. He was eventually convinced to sign up through a company that recruits laborers in Yemen and Oman owned by Al Jabri, who is a general in the Yemeni armed forces of the Houthi government and a member of parliament in Sanaa.
Mohamad said the agreement between the Yemeni recruits and Al Jabri was a monthly salary of $2,500 with a signing bonus of $20,000. A copy of an employment contract written in both Arabic and English obtained by Drop Site lists the Al Jabri General Trading & Investment Co. SPC and Abdul Wali Al Jabri as the company representative. The contract outlines the company’s role in arranging for jobs in Russia “in the military, security, or civil field, based on…qualifications, experience, and capabilities” and says the contract ends after the signee “obtains Russian citizenship.” Mohamad said he was never told that he would be sent to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine and there is no indication in the contract.
Al Jabri has a fee built into the contract, whereby the signee is obliged to pay him $3,000 upon getting employed in Russia. Al-Jabri did not respond to repeated messages of inquiry from Drop Site for this story. However, Al Jabri did respond to questions posed by Tawfik Alhamidi, a Yemeni lawyer and human rights defender based in Geneva, Switzerland who runs the SAM Organization for Rights and Freedoms, and has documented the forced recruitment of poor young Yemeni men into Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Al-Jabri defended the practice to Alhamidi, saying he owns a “travel company” and that people in Yemen have asked him to “arrange for them to travel to Russia and join the army in order to obtain Russian citizenship and earn money to spend on their families back in Yemen.”
He dismissed criticism, adding that “he obtained a Russian approval for the Yemeni men to travel to Russia with good salaries but some political parties in Yemen who are currently fighting Ansar Allah [the Houthis] became worried that they might lose their soldiers to go fight with Russia and therefore created a social media storm over this issue.”
In September, Mohamad traveled to the Russian city of Nizhny [sic] via Dubai. He shared a video of himself with Drop Site on the plane, holding his boarding passes. He and a group of around 20 Yemeni men stayed in Nizhny for 24 hours before being shipped to the city of Rostov, a command base for the Russian army near the frontlines with Ukraine. They also discovered that their salaries were just $300 a month with a meager signing bonus.
Mohamad said that in both Nizhny and Rostov the Yemeni men were met by Russian soldiers. Mohamad said that they were forced to sign another contract, written in Russian, that obliged them to serve in the Russian military. “We were forced to sign contracts in the Russian language that we didn’t understand to serve in the Russian military,” Mohamad said. “We were very afraid.”
He said that in Rostov his group protested to the Russian officers that they didn’t want to fight in the war and demanded to go back to Yemen but they were prevented and ended up being forced to stay in Russia for months where they were forced into military training camps. Mohamed also shared a photo of a Yemeni recruit in full military fatigues and combat gear holding an assault rifle and another of a dog tag written in Cyrillic.
“We were trained by an Arabic-speaking Egyptian Russian military officer who told us that we are in Russia to fight for the Russian army and that we will be deployed to the front lines and not working as civilians,” Mohamad said. He said in the camp he met many men from Iraq, Syria, and Sudan and elsewhere receiving military training. Mohamed was finally able to return to Yemen at the end of October and he spoke to Drop Site from Sanaa.
Another video shared by Mohamed [sic] with Drop Site shows a group of about 10 Yemeni men inside a tent with wooden bunk beds in Nizhny. In the video, one man says, “We came from the sultanate of Oman for civilian work, everyone according their skills,” pointing to each one in turn, he adds, “This man is a metalworker, this man works with hydraulics, this man is an electrician, this man is a driver, this man works with electrical equipment. We are all civilians who work civilian jobs.” He goes on to say they were taken from the airport to Nizhny and they were “terrorized by armed soldiers and forced to sign contracts.” Pointing to a pile of camo backpacks on the floor, he says they were being taken to a training camp. “We are civilians and we know nothing of this,” he says in the video and calls on the Yemeni government to help them. “We are sons of Yemen and we fell into a trap.”
Drop Site also communicated via WhatsApp messages with Jalal, another Yemeni man recruited by the same network who is currently deployed as a soldier fighting for Russia in Ukraine. He told Drop Site he was lured into coming to Russia to escape poverty with the promise of a large salary and signing bonus as well as Russian citizenship. He said he ultimately decided to stay and fight in the war in the hope that he could earn enough money to be able to return to Yemen with savings as well as to possibly obtain Russian citizenship.
Alhamidi characterizes the recruitment practice as exploitative and a human rights violation.
“Dire poverty conditions in Yemen enabled human trafficking and recruitment networks to proliferate and lure young men to go to Russia under false promises of civilian work and high salaries,” Alhamidi told Drop Site, adding that Yemen’s laws contain many loopholes that [allow] Yemeni nationals to join foreign armies as mercenaries without being criminalized. “This has enabled powerful men in Yemen with connections to the Houthi government and Russia to mislead hundreds of young men into traveling to Russia to fight in Ukraine.”
A report by SAM published in November based on interviews with several Yemeni nationals who who were recruited by Al-Jabri and traveled to Russia titled, “With False Promises of Jobs and Attractive Salaries: Recruitment Networks Force Yemeni Youth into the Russia-Ukraine War,” found that: “The forced recruitment of Yemeni youth into the Russian-Ukrainian war through coercive networks constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law and human rights and rises to the level of human trafficking… The organization reported that once recruits arrive in Russia, they are subjected to severe abuses, including being forced to fight under harsh and inhumane conditions, being deprived of food and medical care, and suffering injuries or death from indiscriminate shelling on the battlefronts.”
According to Alhamidi, Al Jabri has traveled to Russia numerous times and has obtained visas to Russia for thousands of Yemenis to lure them into traveling there and forcing them into military training camps, though it is unclear how many have actually made the trip.
Similar recruitment networks in other countries have lured unwitting civilians to Russia with promises of work or other opportunities and then forced them to serve in the Russian army. One human trafficking network in India sent dozens of Indian nationals to Russia for combat training before being deployed to the front. Citizens of Nepal and Sri Lanka have also been illegally recruited in similar ways to fight for Russia in Ukraine.
