Howls of triumph in response to President Putin's demonstrative demonstration of the western states trying to engage in diplomacy can also be heard in Russia outside of the state propaganda media.

Imperial-leaning journalist Maxim Shevchenko exulted on liberal radio station Echo Moskvy that Russia's recognition of eastern Ukraine's "People's Republics" had irrevocably changed the world.

Shevchenko, who believes that “Project Russia” is incomplete without Ukraine, is enthusiastic about how Putin has shown Europeans that their gossip is worthless because it has no consequences, and how he has addressed his history lesson almost exclusively to the United States with whom his relationship is as complex and passionate as that of the spouses in Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage".

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Critical voices have also weakened as a result of the repression of civil society.

After all, the popular journalist Yuri Dud notes on Instagram – for his children, he notes – that he did not vote for these rulers and does not support their imperial fury.

Dud describes the members of Putin's Security Council as the tsar's entourage, whose opinion and will were "amputated" and who sweetly advocated war, enriched themselves on Russia's raw materials instead of helping up precarious regions like Kamchatka, Nikel and Zapolyarny.

Dud professes to be a Russian patriot, who at the same time shows solidarity with Ukraine and wishes her peace.

State television does not report on Russia

Corruption fighter Alexej Navalnyj, who is currently being tried again in the penal colony, has also spoken out on Facebook.

He is forced to only watch state news, he reports, and there are no reports at all about Russia, only about Ukraine, America and Europe.

Navalnyj calls the members of the Security Council thieves, and his anti-corruption foundation FBK, which has since been dissolved as "extremist", has published research on almost every one of them.

Many Ukrainians and Russians could die because of Putin's fault, said Navalnyj.

Putin will not allow Ukraine to develop.

He pulls the neighboring country with him into the swamp, but his own as well.

In Novaya Gazeta, the fantasy author Dmitry Glukhovsky, who divides his time between Moscow and Barcelona, ​​reflects on how his generation, who grew up in the late Soviet Union, is currently being taught the kind of inhumanity they had never experienced before Stalin times but was customary.

"We learn to be indifferent to the injustices committed before our eyes, in the hope that it won't happen to us," says the 42-year-old Glukhovsky, describing this attitude to life of late Putinism.

"We train ourselves to have sympathy for the victim and sympathy for the aggressor because it might make him feel good and you can get a few crumbs out of his throat." The forefathers who lived through the Stalin era would have known what it was like,

to destroy someone's life on orders and to pretend not to notice how the homeland is becoming more and more like a fascist dictatorship.

Later, most contemporary witnesses would not have wanted to talk about it, and many younger people would rather not know, according to Glukhovsky, but now the old ghosts are coming back to life.

Putin has once again given the western world a resounding slap in the face and is very pleased with himself, says writer Viktor Erofeev, who describes his president as a street-boy tsar (tsar-pazan).

Accordingly, he is also proud of having found a "key" for why it is actually not a state with his thesis that Lenin made Ukraine a state in the first place - which simply ignores the old Kievan Rus.

According to Erofeyev, the prospect of EU membership would be of real help to Ukraine in the current situation.

The street boy tsar is delighted that this is hardly possible.

The economist Vladislav Inozemtsev is worried about the flimsy sanctions imposed by the West in response to the recognition of the "people's republics".

The Kremlin has once again tested the West's patience and its "red lines," but in its estimation has not really crossed them, says Inosemtsev, who regrets that the world has so little to counter Putin's manipulations.