President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman informed Russians this week that the “special military operation” that Putin launched in Ukraine in February 2022 was set to go on much longer because it is now “a war against the collective West.”
That’s right: a war.
It was remarkable to hear that word from Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Journalists were explicitly banned from using it as the invasion began and thousands of Russians have been detained, fined and imprisoned for telling the truth about a war which has now been raging for almost two years.
“Moscow deputy Aleksey Gorinov was sentenced to seven years in prison for saying ‘war,’” Sergey Davidis, head of the Political Prisoners Support group, told The Daily Beast. He said over 20,000 Russians have now been detained and punished for protesting against the war. “That includes 131 Russians who have been sentenced to long prison terms in punishment for peaceful or for more radical anti-war actions,” he said. “I don’t think punishments against the war will now be milder after the Kremlin openly says ‘war.’ Putin will be next to declare it.”
Alexei Navalny Sacrificed Himself to Show Russia That Putin Is a Monster
The rhetorical escalation came in the same week that Alexei Navalny, Putin’s biggest domestic challenger, died in a Russian penal colony in mysterious circumstances. Weeks before the presidential election, the autocrat is flexing his muscles.
It’s not every Wednesday that Moscow says it is at war with Washington.
By “collective West” the Kremlin traditionally means 31 NATO countries and the 28 nations of the European Union. “This is a war when the countries of the collective West, led by the United States are directly involved in the conflict,” Peskov said.
Russia’s leading journalists, analysts and human rights defenders both outside and inside the country are frantically debating the thought-process behind declaring this to be a war now. “The Kremlin is deeply disappointed in Washington being unwilling to negotiate a deal for Ukraine without Ukraine’s participation. Nobody wants to sit down with Putin for the dream negotiations; Yalta-2,” Insider’s editor-in-chief Timur Olevsky told The Daily Beast that Putin was obsessed with the idea of revisiting the height of Soviet influence at the 1945, post WWII peace talks. “Somebody flicked him on the nose, it looks like, so the Kremlin finally marks the failure of all their efforts to negotiate with the West.”
The Kremlin’s big declaration of war took place on the day when Ukrainian intelligence said they had destroyed a large and expensive Russian landing ship. “By the resources spent on the war Russia has caught up with what the West has been spending on aid for Ukraine,” Olevsky said, adding that the poorest regions suffer most within the faltering Russian economy, which is smaller than that of California.
Russians have been increasingly growing impoverished, according to analyses published Novye Izvestia this week, the average monthly income has fallen to parity with figures from 2013. Even before Putin invaded Ukraine, more than 16 million Russians lived on less than $200 a month. Any professional reporter, if they were in Tucker Carlson’s position earlier this month, would have asked Putin: “With all of Russia’s natural resources, why is your population so poor? Can you really afford this war?”
In 2021, Putin claimed poverty and problems in the healthcare system were “the main enemies” of Russia. But instead of solving them, the Kremlin has been reportedly spending one third of its income on the war in Ukraine….
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