In Russia, only a small group calling itself the "Congress of the Russian Intelligentsia" is sounding the alarm about the imminent attack on Ukraine.

Liberal politicians, scientists, writers, among them publicist Lev Shlosberg, sociologists Lev Gudkov and Alexei Levinson, and historian Nikita Sokolov, have signed a "Resolution of the Peace Supporters Against the War Party in the Russian Leadership" which declares: Russia's citizens are effectively hostage to the criminal adventurism of their own foreign policy, which seeks to impose on the country the idea of ​​a holy war against the West.

Russia does not need a war against Ukraine and the West, it will not be threatened by anyone, says the document, which was signed by just over two thousand people.

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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However, anyone watching the Russian news and television talk shows gets the impression that it is not Russia that has moved 120,000 soldiers with the heaviest war equipment to the Ukrainian borders from three sides and is further strengthening these positions, but that the country itself is being threatened by NATO.

"We propose to the West peace and dialogue and a security architecture that does not come at the expense of others," said First State Channel TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov in the latest edition of his program "Abend" (Wetscher).

In response, Germany is sending fighter planes to Romania and reviving bad memories of the Second World War, Solovyov notes with a weary, contemptuous expression;

and England announces confiscation of Russian possessions.

The threat of war is a theatrical play

Another Kremlin agitator, Dmitry Kiselyov, on his Westi nedeli program, chides the United States and the British - who are now fondly pitted together as "Anglo-Saxons" versus continental "Europeans," which includes Russia – because, under the pretext of an imaginary invasion, they armed Ukraine with lethal weapons, which would then spread unchecked throughout the country.

President Putin has now declared that NATO's open-door principle is unacceptable to him, if only because then attempts by Ukraine to recapture Crimea or the occupied People's Republics could eventually draw Russia into an armed conflict with NATO.

Meanwhile, Russian experts are convinced that there will be no new invasion of Ukraine and that the troop deployment is rather a theater game that pursues other strategic goals.

Foreign and defense policy expert Pavel Lusin argues that the establishment of a vertical state structure, which began with the 2020 constitutional reform and has eliminated the remnants of local self-government, has been completed and that the – European – future of the elite should now be secured.

According to Lusin, Russia's claim to have a say in important global issues, despite its comparatively weak economy and population, has been in place since Russia's first democratic president, Boris Yeltsin, especially in the post-Soviet space.