Paul Goble
Staunton, July 15 – Earlier this year, the Meduza news agency reported that the Kremlin planned to draw parallels between Moscow’s current effort to save “fraternal peoples” in Ukraine with the tsarist regime’s decision in 2014 to go to war lest it leave Serbia at risk (meduza.io/feature/2022/03/10/zachem-putin-unichtozhaet-nezavisimye-smi-i-blokiruet-feysbuk).
In confirmation that this was a genuine Kremlin plan and not some kind of “fake” news, the Russian government in the intervening period for the first time ever has commemorated World War II (rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=115425) and repeatedly drawn this comparison in its ideological messaging (meduza.io/en/feature/2022/08/04/standing-up-for-the-oppressed).
Reacting to this, Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter, said he had to read the original announcement over because he could not believe that the Kremlin would make draw such ana analogy given that World War I led directly to the Russian revolution and Civil War (publizist.ru/blogs/112974/43572/-).
Given that and especially the fact that the earlier conflict began with patriotic enthusiasm but ended with the overthrow of the government, “it is suicidal to draw in this situation parallels between the current Ukrainian ‘special operation’ and World War I,” the commentator continues, particularly when the Russian leadership despite troubles is still predicting victory.
This is clearly another case, Gallyamov says, of the well-known observation that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
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