Russia sees itself in a defensive fight against alleged neo-Nazis in Kyiv, but actually against the USA, who want to destroy Russia. It seems as if Putin and Lavrov have fallen victim to their own paranoid propaganda.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is a good litmus test of truth: the opposite of what he says is usually true. Again he tried a Hitler comparison. Like Hitler and Napoleon, the US would try to destroy Russia, he said at his New Year’s press conference. In fact, however, it is Russia that wants to annihilate Ukraine.
As evidence for the alleged conspiracy against Russia, Lavrov pointed to Western politicians saying that Russia must suffer a strategic defeat. This logic is as twisted as Lavrov’s repeated reference to Hitler. Of course, Russia must suffer defeat in Ukraine. To say so is not “total Russophobia” that Putin fantasized about in September, but a very rational reaction to Russia’s incursion into the neighboring country.
It would be easy to counter Lavrov’s drivel with the same nonsense. But Putin is neither Hitler nor Napoleon, his system is more in line with the traditions of tsarism and Stalinism: internal oppression, external expansion. “Putinism”, as the Eastern Europe historian Karl Schlögel calls this ideology mix, includes a folkish murmur and an aggressive paranoia: We have to win because the West wants to destroy us!
Putin has been saying for months that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine because otherwise the West would have attacked Russia – most recently on Wednesday in St. Petersburg, at a meeting with veterans of the Second World War. He explained to them that the government in Kyiv was neo-Nazi. From the very beginning, Putin presented the invasion of Ukraine in the tradition of the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany and at the same time as a defense.
If this is meant seriously, Putin and Lavrov are on the same level as Jana from Kassel, the lateral thinker who compared herself to Sophie Scholl at a Corona demo – the resistance fighter who was murdered by the Nazis in 1943. The United States wanted the “final solution to the Russian question,” said Foreign Minister Lavrov, just as Hitler wanted the “final solution to the Jewish question.”
It would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Putin’s Russia sees itself on a historic mission to fight the West and become the power to regulate Europe. Because that is the case, an economic and military weakening of Russia is in Europe’s interests.