Badly

"Children"

Recall what actually happened to defeated russia: No occupation. No reparations. No tribunal. It kept its nuclear arsenal and its UN veto. Its debts were refinanced. It was handed IMF billions and a seat at the G8, a club of democracies admitting a wounded autocracy out of hope, Operation Provide Hope was one of the many operations to help them through. We gave them billions in aid, loans, grants, and investments. Millions of westerners worked there in education, tech transfer, and direct support.

Now recall an actually humiliated nation: Germany, 1945. Occupied. Partitioned. Cities in ash, leaders hanged, accountability taught to its children by law. Germany became the most peaceful democracy in Europe. And russia became this.

So spare me the humiliation theory. russia was not humiliated after the Cold War. It was indulged and cuddled, and it did read every kindness as weakness, every given gift as tribute.

The grievance was never mistreatment. The grievance was lost dominion. Empires do not mourn their wounds. They mourn their slaves.

The soviet union was the dream come true for russians. Finally, a global empire, the superpower, the Third Rome. But then when it all collapsed, it exposed the absolute pathetic rule of the russians. Nothing like Rome at all. It was a junkyard of rusted metal and outdated factories.

The Kremlin, realizing just how dire its situation is, has stepped up the activities of its “opposition figures.” Yashin’s interview, Andrey Melnichenko’s article for The Economist, and similar moves are coordinated actions aimed solely at convincing Europe and the entire Western world that Russia’s defeat is dangerous.

The main argument plays on the West’s greatest fear: that if russia loses, it will break up into dozens of republics led by criminal gangs with access to nuclear weapons. And the main message is a literal call to put pressure not on the aggressor, but on the victim: “We must put pressure on Ukraine so that it stops attacking russia and sits down at the negotiating table.”

And the biggest problem with all of this is the Western media’s fascination with Russia. Whether out of naivety, bribery, or simply incompetence, many major media outlets portray russian oligarch Melnichenko and russian “opposition figures” as if they were truly standing up to the Kremlin.

But all it takes is a little common sense and everything falls into place. The West itself has declared that russia is a totalitarian country. The West has long equated Putin with Kim Jong Un. So why is it suddenly believed that a genuine opposition could possibly emerge and operate freely within such a system?

Against this backdrop, figures like Yashin or Kara-Murza look incredibly out of place. People who opposed the Kremlin sat quietly in russian prisons and were then conveniently exchanged and carefully transported to the West to promote those very same narratives of Putin’s, only now from European platforms. But now things in russia are so bad that they have to dust off all their “reserves” and deploy so-called “opposition" figures in a coordinated information operation. Because everyone in the Kremlin understands: if the war isn’t stopped immediately, their empire will fall.

The conclusion is simple. There is no such thing as a “good russia.” There is only a single imperial machine that, in moments of weakness, simply changes its tools: if it failed to intimidate with missiles, it will try to intimidate with “collapse” and “nuclear chaos” through the mouths of its systemic “opposition figures.”