Two days from now, Russia will stage a massive celebration of the 70th anniversary of VE Day, the country’s defining triumph of the communist era. The U.S. and British governments are boycotting the event, declining to send high-level representatives, in response to Vladimir Putin’s repeated acts of aggression against neighbouring states.
Thoughtful people in the West will say: quite right too. What Putin started in 2008, by launching tanks to support separatists in a province of Georgia, he continued with last year’s annexation of Crimea, and now through his military backing for east Ukraine’s separatists.
Last July, just ten months ago, Russian missiles destroyed a Malaysian airliner over separatist-held territory, killing 298 passengers and crew, most of them European citizens.
Putin is a dictator, albeit an elected one, whose critics are murdered in the streets of Moscow or dispatched to rot in prisons on trumped-up charges. Yet we should be in no doubt about the anger the West’s snub for Saturday’s Moscow parade will provoke not merely in the Kremlin but among the Russian people at large.
In a fashion that we find hard to comprehend in the 21st century, they have swallowed the big lie propagated by Putin’s ruthlessly state-controlled media. They see themselves as the victims of a Western conspiracy to encircle and ruin Russia.
The ruler of Russia has turned back the clock, recreating the mindset of the old Soviet Union half a century ago. This is both tragic and dangerous, because he has unleashed nationalist forces that he may prove unable to control, especially as his country’s economic plight worsens.
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