The police officers in black who are dragging away demonstrators in Russia these days now have a symbol on their helmets: the Z. It is also emblazoned on tanks and howitzers from which Russian soldiers are firing at Ukrainian positions and apartment blocks.

The Z is said to be derived from the English transcription of the Russian word "for", meaning "for victory" or "for the president", also for "protection".

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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State officials organize motorcades in the sign of the Z, they let railway workers, students, in Kazan on the Volga even terminally ill children from a hospice line up in a Z formation to show that they support Vladimir Putin's most serious decision to date: the "military special operation" against Ukraine.

In the sign of the Z, the last islands of freedom have disappeared in Russia.

Anyone who does not stick to the Z is considered a traitor.

For many Europeans, the war seems like a rude awakening in a world that they thought was overcome.

Russia itself is only just beginning to feel its consequences, with dead soldiers, economic decline, inflation, new totalitarianism.

Most Russian observers did not believe that Putin would take that risk.

But signs were there, right from the start of his reign and becoming clearer in recent years.

Cities shot up in the Caucasus

When it gets late in Russia, very different men talk about their experiences in Chechnya.

"I served in Chechnya," says the environmentalist in the south, who now takes care of endangered animals.

Says the journalist in the north who, risking his life, exposes the machinations of corrupt civil servants and entrepreneurs.

The men talk about a comrade who just walked in front of them and is suddenly torn to pieces.

Of dozens of enemies shot with the sniper rifle.

Some who experienced violence themselves back then, including the incompetence of the commanders who sent more and more young Russians into battle, now have the Z in their social media profile picture.

War is part of society, like a latent danger in the background that can reappear at any time.

Many are reminded of the images of Ukraine's shot-up cities of those in the North Caucasus republic, where Putin, who became prime minister in 1999 from director of the FSB secret service, waged the war that was to establish his image as a tough doer.

It is still unclear how many tens of thousands of victims the war at that time claimed.

Nothing is regulated, nothing has been processed, as one would say in Germany.

In the end, Putin relied on a rebel leader whose son, Ramzan Kadyrov, still rules the republic to this day, and blames the West for this bloodshed as well.

Money from Moscow was used to build a few skyscrapers and many mosques in Chechnya, where Russian bombs and grenades had destroyed everything, and luxury cars were bought for Kadyrov and his people.

The ruler drives up to Friday prayers in a gold-colored Rolls-Royce in front of the Great Mosque of Grozny, named after his father.

Putin, as his first war showed, relies on violence and on purchased vassals, which they use for him.