Russian President Vladmir Putin appeared on a huge billboard in Moscow on the third day of fighting with Ukraine. "The real power lies in the justice and truth that is on our side. I believe with this support, in this invincible power that gives us our love for the homeland."
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Or as George Orwell put it in "1984": "War is peace."
In 1999, when then-Prime Minister Putin was planning his big move toward the presidency, he told CNN host Larry King Russia's path was one of democratic development.
Russia is a very diverse country, he said, but was still part of Western European culture: "We are European."
What has happened to Russia since? 2022 will go down as the year that shocked the European continent, a year in which Russia attacked Ukrainian cities with missiles and sent in tanks. How could the man who promised stability and economic growth start a war with the West and trigger the toughest sanctions Russia has ever faced?
His critics and enemies in Russia and the West will say that as a former KGB officer who served in East Germany and saw the dissolution of the Soviet empire that left him and his friends behind, this was always Putin's way. He was part of the vast security establishment that decided to take Russia's affairs into its own hands when the communist party fell apart, leaving the oligarchs to take over the banks and natural resources and become the lords of the land.
Two years after coming to power, Putin and his childhood friends from St. Petersburg began to attack the oligarchs and the huge companies they had established. At the same time, journalists and editors began to feel the weight of the new president's arm.
The opening shot was fired in 2007 when Putin challenged the West and warned against the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. NATO situated its forward forces on our borders. We are not responding now to this activity at all, the Russian leader said.
Eight years later, mass rallies were held in neighboring Ukraine that resulted in the ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Putin, who had tried to prevent his removal from office, was overcome with shock.
He saw the Ukrainian move as a Western initiative. Anti-Ukrainian incitement was rampant in Russian media reports. Russian propaganda channels broadcast threats to Ukraine, which was now a "bastion of neo-Nazism and antisemitism," and the treacherous West from morning till night.
The anti-West rhetoric has increased in the eight years since Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Military parades have become more ostentatious, and the persecution of opponents of the regime has intensified.
My friends in Moscow could not believe what was happening when I spoke to them in the weeks leading up to the war. They had become so desensitized to the violent propaganda pouring out of state TV media outlets that they no longer noticed. Like so many in Ukraine, they did not believe Putin would actually cross the Rubicon. Was it his many years in office, his inner circle that provided one-sided intelligence, or a change in his personality that let Putin to order the invasion of Ukraine and even threaten to use nuclear weapons? We may never know.
What can be said for certain is that for far too long, the West ignored Putin's Russia and the internal processes taking place there. The future will not look like the past. The shock of the invasion has destroyed concepts and theories whose times have past. A new world order is now taking shape.
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