First off, I want to say thank you again to David for sharing his audience with me. As we approach an assumed win over fascism, Rushists are ironically continuing the slaughter of Russian-speaking minorities. This is happening not just in Ukraine, as we’ve seen in Crimea and Donbas, but also on their own territory. For those who aren’t familiar with the Russian movie Irony of Faith, they comically show that Moscow (originally a swamp) and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) are actually cookie-cutter cities that mirror each other. However, what isn’t shown is that the rest of the country and how Russia’s vast resources worked toward those cities and the henchmen that ran them.
I’ll give credit where it’s due: Russia has done a good job over the last 20 years of increasing jobs and perspectives in these two cities. However, Russia is a massive country with extensive minority groups coming in and out, traveling across borders spanning from China in the far southeast, waving to Sarah Palin from northeastern islands, Mongolia in the south, and many more. Latest estimates project that about 20% of Russians are actually ethnic minorities. These groups tend to live in rural communities and data show they are slowly dying. And this is a perfect image of how they typically live:
Russia stopped caring for these people outside of the main cities a long time ago. So it was no surprise that the majority of Putin’s army and contractors are coming from the far east, and are disproportionately absorbing Russia’s massive casualties, further destroying the aforementioned rural towns, as the men between 18-55 are no longer part of those societies. When we see the atrocities of Bucha, and the people who steal toilets from Ukrainian villages, it showcases how Russia’s neglect of its own people turned them either into alcoholics or just envious and angry to the point of killing and mailing back home looted materials.
The only exception are the Chechens, which Putin controls through their ruthless, NBA bound leader, Ramzon Kadyrov. Putin is actually afraid of Kadyrov and keeps him rich to be loyal. Kadyrov has a massive religious following around him, and if the Russian minorities in Chechnya wake up, another break-up for Russia is quite possible.
To Putler, these people have always had little value, so it doesn’t matter if he sends them as fodder into the grinder in the coal mines or into the war in Ukraine. Putin was supposed to declare “victory” on May 9th, but that day has come and gone. It is no longer a day of remembrance of grandparents like mine who died in WW2, it is now a day that highlights Putin’s deep hate for those who threaten his power, and his disregard for his own people.