Yesterday I watched the “Security Council meeting” — this gathering of senile fools and thieves (I think our ACF, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, investigated every one of them for corruption) — and I thought of a similar gathering of nomenklatura senile fools from the CPSU Central Committee Politburo, who, in much the same way, on their own whim, imagining themselves to be geopolitical strategists at the “great chessboard,” decided to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan. The result was hundreds of thousands of victims, trauma inflicted on entire nations, consequences that neither we ourselves nor Afghanistan have been able to overcome, and the emergence of one of the key causes of the USSR’s collapse. Those senile fools in the Politburo hid behind a duplicitous ideology. These Putinist senile fools do not even have an ideology — only constant and blatant lies. They do not even bother to make their casus belli minimally plausible. Both then and now, they want the same thing: to distract the people of Russia from the real problems — economic development, rising prices, rampant lawlessness — and switch them into a mode of “imperial hysteria.” Have you watched the news on the federal TV channels lately? I watch only them, and I assure you: there is ABSOLUTELY NO news about Russia there. Literally. From the first story to the last: Ukraine — the United States — Europe. Bare propaganda is no longer enough for these senile fools and thieves. They want blood. They want to move little tank pieces around on a battlefield map. And so the head of the 21st-century Politburo delivers a truly insane speech. The most accurate metaphor for it, of course, came from Twitter: “It’s exactly like my grandpa getting drunk at a family party and pestering everyone with his lecture on how world politics really works.” It would be funny if that drunken grandpa were not a 69-year-old man clinging to power in a country with nuclear weapons. Replace “Ukraine” in his speech with “Kazakhstan,” “Belarus,” “the Baltic states,” “Azerbaijan,” “Uzbekistan,” and so on, even “Finland.” And think about where the geopolitical imagination of this senile old man will go next. All of this ended very badly for everyone in 1979. And it will end badly now too. Afghanistan was destroyed, but the USSR received a mortal wound as well. _________________________________ Because of Putin, hundreds could die already now, and in the future—tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russian citizens. Yes, he won’t allow Ukraine to develop, he will drag it into a swamp—but Russia will pay the same price. We have everything needed for strong development in the 21st century—from natural resources to an educated population—but once again we will squander this historic chance for a normal, prosperous life for the sake of war, corruption, lies, and a palace with golden eagles in Gelendzhik. Putin and his senile crooks, thieving allies from the Security Council and “United Russia” are the enemies of Russia and its main threat—not Ukraine and not the West. Putin is killing and wants to kill more. It is the Kremlin making you poorer, not Washington. It’s not in London that economic policy is conducted in such a way that a pensioner’s basic food basket doubles in price—it’s in Moscow. To fight for Russia, to save it, means to fight for removing Putin and his kleptocrats from power. And right now, it also simply means “fighting for peace.”