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After a year of silence, another old acquaintance from #Russia wrote to me, this time from the Caucasus 
He too is absolutely convinced that soon #Ukraine will ‘give back the four oblasts and there will be peace’ (maybe that’s why there is such a mass awakening among my old Russian contacts recently).
He, unlike everyone else, doesn’t have chat deletion enabled after 24hrs, so he must have seen the previous discussions and didn’t even try the ‘denazification’ fairy tales just wrote straight ‘we have lost so much resources and people that now we can’t back down’. This is a popular argument with them, a kind of the last line of defence. People from the military or the government sometimes add ‘…because we will end up in The Hague’.
I asked if he was aware that he too was a ‘resource’ for his country and could also be ‘lost’. He didn’t answer directly, he just goes on in this line of argument - ‘I know one thing, if my state loses now it will be pizdec for my family’ (pizdec=swear word meaning a terrible disaster). So I ask him, in all honesty, to explain to me, a simpleton - how exactly is his family going to face ‘pizdec’ if the Russian military withdraws from Ukraine? What exactly will happen to his family?
Sadly, he then disappeared. He needs to think for himself, I guess.
My apologies to you T. for shattering your peace of mind despite the mattress of sophisms you have surrounded yourself with to keep your spirits up while living in a country that is heading towards a demographic and economic abyss. It will only get harder further down the line. Your grandparents and parents built themselves this mattress for 70 years and that is why it was so difficult for them in 1991.
@kravietz where do you take the energy to talk to them? I simply blocked anyone who showed any sympathy to the Russian regime or any negativism toward Ukraine. I used to chat a lot with this kind back in 2014, but I quickly realized it's not worth my time. I better focus on doing the right thing and helping Ukraine survive.
I talk to them because I’m genuinely curious how they explain the war to themselves. There’s a significant share of Russian society who is simply in the “kill, kill, kill” mode and these are not interesting.
But there’s also a certain share of intellectuals - and these make me curious because their ways of thinking display some extraordinary features of human mind plasticity.
It intrigued me since the Soviet times, because my brain simply rejects Marxism-Leninism due to its logical inconsistency and vagueness, but I can’t deny that there were thousands of people who made their PhD specifically in the style of “dialectical materialism” and I’m curious how their minds worked when they wrote it.
@kravietz nah, it's all dead simple. Those who don't want to kill Ukrainians, find all possible ways to convince themselves that the war is not that bad, and probably Ukraine provoked it, and a thousand other reasons to justify it. I had really enough of this crap.
@kravietz I know only two persons in Russia who completely realize what's going on and they want Russia to lose the war and they realize that a few generations into the future they will have to pay for it. But it's an exception.
There’s also one guy like that I know in Russia. Interestingly, he’s 70+ and former border guard (=KGB) but all his life he’s been going to Europe for various sport events which was abruptly closed by the war, his son lives in France and he’s got many reasons in general to hate Putinism.
@kravietz so, he enjoyed the benefits of the system, and now he hates it? Very consistent :)
No, I was not very precise here - he started going to Europe on military pension, which was in his early 40’s or something. Before that he served on some God forgotten border with China, then for a while in border force communications unit in Moscow. He finished service in 1990’s and moved to business which involved many trips to Europe, so he was quite cosmopolitan already. But he may be not representative because he’s got Ukrainian origins, has still some relatives in Ukraine and - unlike many Russians - did not take the Russian bullshit about “we are not targeting civilians” for granted.