On this day, exactly two years ago, Putin invaded Ukraine to “liberate,” as he claimed the previous evening in a long, stern, and bizarre address, the Russian-speaking regions from neo-Nazism! Militarily, he did manage to conquer them and annex them to Russia following dubious referendums.
It’s the first major war on European soil since World War II. It still continues, and its geopolitical and economic repercussions affect the entire continent. All of our lives…
These two years close today with Putin stronger than ever, ready to be formally elected president of the country in early March, without any challenger to contest him.
Fifteen are his running mates. All of them, from negligible to merely decorative. Two are hardline communists, desiring a return to the years of “real” communism, but it’s difficult to differentiate them ideologically from Putin himself. So, why vote for the imitations and not the original?
Of the two who opposed him, one, Boris Nadezhdin, who was against the war in Ukraine, was excluded by the electoral committee for some bureaucratic error in the documents he submitted. And the other, Russia’s strongest opposition voice, Alexei Navalny, was “eliminated” a few days ago by Putin’s regime itself.
The fact alone that the president of Russia didn’t even express his condolences for the death of his strongest political opponent speaks volumes…
As we read from reports by Western journalists in Russia (where their work is extremely difficult), some of the men who were arrested for participating in vigils for Navalny in St. Petersburg received immediate conscription calls to the front lines of the battles, according to a human rights monitoring group. Oh!…
Last Wednesday, learning all the latest news from Russia, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, unleashed and called Vladimir Putin a “son of a bitch”.
However, regardless, on the occasion of those words, I remembered that terrific scene in the movie “Never on Sunday,” where the young teacher, Dimitris Papamichael, was slapping the spoiled rich girls of the college, while the school principal, the unforgettable and remarkable Christos Tsaganas, reprimanded him saying “but this is not allowed, my dear,” many of us identified with Papamichael, but also with another teacher, the great Dionysis Papagiannopoulos, who whenever the younger one slapped, he enthusiastically shook his hand…
Well, many of us felt something like that with Biden’s “son of a bitch” to Putin.
And incidentally, as I read on Wikipedia, in the movie “Never on Sunday,” a total of 17 real slaps were given. They were real because the creators wanted to avoid long shoots for a successful and convincing scene!
“Wind of Change.” The song by the Scorpions, perhaps the most popular of all, written after the band’s visit to the former Soviet Union, in the years of perestroika, that is, its opening towards democracy, when the hostility between the communist and capitalist blocs began to recede simultaneously with the spread of major socioeconomic reforms in the once closed and undemocratic country.
A country that today, so many years later, is ruled by a man who refuses to hand over to his relatives the body of his opponent who died under unspecified conditions in a prison in Siberia. Perhaps, as common sense says, to cover up signs of a possible murder, such as poisoning with toxic substances…
P.S. In tomorrow’s column, we will look at Putin’s invasion through the language of numbers. And on Sunday, we will highlight some figures we distinguished—for good and for bad—from this war.
