womble

Hi DMS

I know you've grown up with the "NATO wants to eat Russia" narrative, but I'm telling you, person to person, CM-addict to CM-addict that we never did*. When the paranoid thugs that ran the USSR were finally gotten rid of, we looked forward to working alongside former antagonists, for the benefit of everyone.

If you're not familiar with game theory, I'd recommend finding out about a thing called "Prisoner's dilemma". It's a very abstracted demonstration that it's usually better to work together than to constantly work against each other. As an introduction to non-zero-sum "games", it was an eye-opener for me, a couple of decades ago.

That's what the West wanted when the Iron Curtain was drawn back. Russia, with its vast mineral wealth, could have become a truly significant economic power. But the oligarchs stole it all and gave it to their gangster friends. Eventually, they became all we had to do business with, and then they decided to invade Ukraine and we couldn't even, in good conscience, do business with them.

We probably shouldn't have let the kleptocrats do so much business with the rest of the world. They managed to spend their way to a kind of legitimacy that we're only now, belatedly, starting to undo. That's our fault. But your peoples carry the bear's share of that responsibility for letting them get away with it.

What you see in your national news is controlled by your Government. What we see on our internet feeds and on the multitude of independent press and broadcast outlets across many nations never could be. That's why our view of what's happening is closer to the reality than yours is.

Just look at the claims and actions of your Government and its mouthpieces for evidence that they're not telling the truth. A 3-day "special military operation" is coming up on 3 months old, and your leaders keep trimming back their avowed objectives. I know you're not allowed to call it a war, but you're allowed to read the suggestion that this "special military operation" is at least as much a war as the wars in Afghanistan, or Vietnam (which was, I believe, officially a "police action"), and think about it and decide for yourself whether your leaders** are basically taking you and all your countrymen for idiots.

When people talk about "derussification", it's not some sort of wish to see Russia done and gone and replaced with some fractious, easily-manipulated balkanised successor. No, it's a desire for Russian people to be able to move on from the negative habits that generations of suppression and oppression have inflicted on you. It's a difficult concept to handle, and new to most westerners, because we'd largely swallowed the Kleptocrats' lies ourselves. But the "victim mentality" and the continual outward focus of aggression need to stop.

I truly wish you and yours the best. You're in an invidious position that I do not envy, and I can't think of anything I can do to help other than try and explain why what you think about the West seems to be so very mistaken.

Good luck.

* And never had the capacity to. As you pointed out, Russia's a big place! And its folk are determined defenders.

** Who don't give a flying fart about you; they only care about the billions of USD they (used to have) squirrelled away, having misappropriated it from your national wealth.