Putin needs the Ukraine-war to keep going indefinitely to distract Russians from domestic problems.
This conclusion is loosely based on what the russian political analyst Vlad Vexler said, and it matches what I have seen in other russian media.
It basically goes like this:
Russia has been in an on-going cultural crisis since the collapse of the Soviet-Union. They haven't figured out yet, what kind of country they want to be. Capitalism and democracy are foreign concepts, which makes it really hard for Russians to accept them. They want something of their own, something uniquely of russian culture.
THE RUSSIANS WANT TO BE A BETTER COUNTRY... but they don't know how. They can feel that something is missing from their lives, but they cannot tell what.
In this void jumped Putin and his cabal: They concocted this nationalist narrative that Russia is under constant attacks by the West and this FINALLY gave the Russians a sense of purpose.
Who are we?
We are the ones who stand in opposition to the West.
But this narrative has not made the russian desire for reforms go away.
Three days after the begin of the Ukraine-war, the russian newspaper Ria Novosti accidently published a pre-written online-article celebrating Ukraine's capitulation. You could feel the joy and hope in the very first paragraph, where they wrote that now that Ukraine has been brought back into the fold, now is the time for "massive socio-political reforms".
What are these reforms? If they are so important, how come Putin hasn't already enacted them in his 20 years in power??? What do the Russians want????? They don't know.
The Ukraine-war is a distraction to keep the Russians from thinking about their domestic problems, to keep them from following this dangerous line of thought that Russia should be different: a country that celebrates and values its dozens of cultures and ethnicities instead of parading them around for propaganda, a country of economic equality and not of oligarchy, a country where the government doesn't lord over every single aspect of your entire life............
But as long as the war is on, even the tiniest of political reforms is doomed to fail. And any dissent with Putin brands you as an agent of the West.
And the russian media is in on it: They love talking about the present state of the war, but they don't talk about how it started and they don't talk about how it could possibly end.
Russia is now in a PERMANENT state of war that must not be questioned by the citizens and that must never end.
= new reply since forum marked as read
