Magical Realism: Russia’s Ukraine Fantasy
Putin has convinced half the world to see the world through his twisted lens
As the world wakes up to the news that Russia has invaded Ukraine in a major way — though you never know the real plan with Putin, his brain so addled with KGB tactics of disinformation and asymmetrical warfare — I can’t help thinking about my experience in Ukraine a couple winters ago. I only spent less than a month there, but it was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. The place and the people left lasting impact on me and I have it on my list of places to call home some day. The war makes me want to return even more.
This is a place with deep, deep soul. The land, the people, the food — it’s all lovingly intertwined and sublimely comforting. This is a place that feels like a babushka in a floor length mink coat has taken you into her arms and squeezed you until the whole world feels more gentle — and you do see a lot of these wonderful women on the streets of the incredible cities of Ukraine.
This is also a place where young people have fully embraced the future. The tech industry, start ups, new coffee shops, excellent craft beer, cool restaurants, small businesses, clubs, and the arts and crafts scene is more innovative and exciting in Kyiv — by tenfold — than it is in Berlin, Paris, or London. These people are natural entrepreneurs who have are living through a currency crisis during a deadly pandemic. And just before that ends (hopefully), an invasion by one of the largest, most powerful militaries on the planet occurs in the dark of the earliest morning. People always say of the underdog: they don’t deserve it. But here, you can say that and really, truly mean it. Ukrainians don’t deserve this, and they literally nothing to cause it.
Why attack a completely harmless country for no apparent reason? Well part of this can easily be blamed on the conservatives in the United States and in the U.K. — who are leading a global right wing movement — who have been towing Putin’s false reality that he’s not an authoritarian since Trump was elected. If you go to Trump rallies these days, there are more people supporting Putin than Macron or Merkel (until she stepped down). People say they’d rather live in Moscow than Manitoba — or the socialist utopia of California. Why would the majority party in the U.S. support and appease Putin and his murderous ways? Because they hate Biden is the answer they would give. It makes no more sense than someone believing that Russia is a strong and open country. Russia is controlled — from the top down — by very powerful and ruthless men who have become unfathomably rich and powerful by exploiting the charred remains and open contracts after the fall of the Soviet Union. They don’t care about anything but their ideology and their yachts.
When American politicians support Russia and Putin over our own ideology — which is supposedly peace and freedom — the people follow. And so do the most powerful media companies on earth. There’s been a slow but inevitable turn to strong men that seems to have been somehow triggered by Trump, Putin, Kim, and Erdogan that has sort of blinded people into accepting that this is a good way to run a country — or run the world.
It’s like this invasion of Ukraine is somehow connected with the trucker protests in Canada — soon to be everywhere — and the rest of the toxic residual waste that Covid left in its wake around the world. It’s all seen through the same insanely twisted, psychedelic lens crafted and perpetuated by some very rich men behind the scenes of the global alt right movement. They just want to fuck shit up. And fuck shit up they will do. Putin is very, very good at creating confusion and distrust in social institutions. Like I said, he’s convinced half the population of the U.S. that the government is evil unless Trump is running it.
But Putin and the other strong men have no idea how to fix what they’ve broken, and sometimes, societies and cultures simply can’t be fixed. Look at Afghanistan. Look at Iraq. These places are charred, dysfunctional shells of their former glorious incarnations. Ukraine could be next, and don’t forget that Zelenskiy is a former actor — he has no actual foreign policy or military experience — beyond doing his national military service time. He must be pissing his pants this morning.
Add to this that there are literally no — none — news organizations in Russia that aren’t controlled entirely by the government. Add a dash of American alt right propaganda like this tweet, in which Maggie Haberman of the New York Times quotes Laura Ingraham, a popular Trumpie figure in the American and international conservative moments, and you’ve got a people completely and utterly abandoned by the world, all because Putin has been working for decades behind the scenes to invent a world in which he’s the good guy and that he knows what’s best for anything within 500 miles of Russia.
I can’t see this ending well for Ukraine. Putin believes in his heart that Ukraine is just a part of Russia that broke away in 1991. Kyivan Rus is the culture that is at the very heart and root and nest of Russia — where it all started. The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv posted this trolling meme just the other day:
Putin surely saw it, and it surely pissed him off, and what he wants to do to distract the Russian people from the reality that Russia is in tatters and controlled by monstrously murderous oligarchs is steal back this most precious heart of Russia for Moscow. Kyiv is the original heart and soul of all things Russian. But Putin better be careful because when you hastily try to steal a cultural heart, that heart often stops beating.
