Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

Det är nog en kombination av klassiskt sovjetryskt propagandaspråk kombinerat med användande av "Västs" egna vapen emot just Väst.

Hat är ofta en av de starkaste känslorna och krafterna. Hat är en drivkraft som kan få många människor att göra saker som de utan hatet sannolikt inte skulle göra.

Att säga att hat alltid är fel är ungefär som att säga att våld aldrig leder någon vart.

Even cynics like to feel moral. Even hard-eyed men who play power politics need to feel that their efforts are part of a great historic mission. So as he has been throwing his weight around the world, Vladimir Putin has been careful to quote Russian philosophers from the 19th and 20th centuries like Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov and Ivan Ilyin.

Putin doesn’t only quote these guys; he wants others to read them. As Maria Snegovaya pointed out recently in The Washington Post, the Kremlin recently assigned three philosophic books to regional governors: Berdyaev’s “The Philosophy of Inequality,” Solovyov’s “Justification of the Good” and Ilyin’s “Our Tasks.”

Putin was personally involved in getting Ilyin’s remains re-buried back in Russian soil. In 2009, Putin went to consecrate the grave himself. The event sent him into a nationalistic fervor. “It’s a crime when someone only begins talking about the separation of Russia and the Ukraine,” he said on that day.

To enter into the world of Putin’s favorite philosophers is to enter a world full of melodrama, mysticism and grandiose eschatological visions. “We trust and are confident that the hour will come when Russia will rise from disintegration and humiliation and begin an epoch of new development and greatness,” Ilyin wrote.

Three great ideas run through this work. The first is Russian exceptionalism: the idea that Russia has its own unique spiritual status and purpose. The second is devotion to the Orthodox faith. The third is belief in autocracy. Mashed together, these philosophers point to a Russia that is a quasi-theocratic nationalist autocracy destined to play a culminating role on the world stage.

These philosophers often argued that the rationalistic, materialistic West was corrupting the organic spiritual purity of Russia. “The West exported this anti-Christian virus to Russia,” Ilyin wrote, “Having lost our bond with God and the Christian tradition, mankind has been morally blinded, gripped by materialism, irrationalism and nihilism.”

The government in Kiev has rushed forces to the border and started mobilizing reserves and a national guard. But many of its supporters in the region believe these measures would do little to stop a determined Russian advance.

Instead, some locals say they’re readying themselves for what they call a “partisan war” — or guerilla war — against their far more powerful enemy.

The Palchenko household counted itself enthusiastically among these ranks. Asked how many of their neighbors supported the idea, Olga, Alexander’s prim and amiable wife, made a fierce chopping motion with her hand: “All of them.”

Russia boasts many supporters in the Donetsk region, where Kramatorsk lies, and many more would be too afraid to join the fight — making Olga Palchenko’s assessment far too optimistic. But sentiments for taking up arms among some residents around the region seemed very real, and some said they were already organizing themselves for the fight.

Sitting at the family’s computer, Alexey Palchenko, 28, said many of his friends had bought guns recently, and he pulled up an article he’d found the day before on a local version of Facebook. Complete with diagrams and lessons on urban warfare from Chechnya, it was titled: “How to destroy a Russian tank.”

More formal efforts were underway — Alexey Palchenko was a member of a local group that claimed about 50 men, and said they’d organized themselves for “self-defense.”

The group’s leader, Vladimir Tkachuk, 42, said he’d made an “evacuation plan” with his family, whom he planned to rush to Kiev in the event of an invasion. He’d then return quickly to Donetsk, he said: “Our organization will go underground, and we will fight.”

A former Soviet ranger who fought in Tajikistan in the early 1990s, Tkachuk had returned from war to become a pastor, and he led a small Pentecostal congregation in the city. He and other locals had organized themselves during this winter’s protests in Kiev, first as medics and then as guards. He was still unsure how they would find the weapons, he said, but was hopeful they and groups like them could make life hard on the Russians if they came to Donetsk. “We understand that the Ukrainian army is much weaker than the Russian army. But if we speak about partisan war, it’s a horrible thing, and they must know it,” he said. “This is not Crimea.”

Others around Donetsk also said they were organizing. In the city of Gorlovka, Igor Slavgorodskiy, the Donetsk head of a powerful far-right political party called Svoboda, said he had organized local cells and secret gathering points around the city. He wouldn’t say how many men he had — hundreds, he claimed, though his reaction suggested the true figure might be lower. He said many more would surface if an invasion took place. They had gathered “some quantity of legal weapons,” he added, but needed more. “If the invasion happens, we are ready to face them,” he said. “How do we react to occupiers? We struggle against them. I don’t think we meet them with flowers.”

By the estimates of Yeltsin's human rights adviser Sergei Kovalev, about 27,000 civilians died in the first five weeks of fighting. Russian historian and general Dmitri Volkogonov said the Russian military's bombardment of Grozny killed around 35,000 civilians, including 5,000 children, and that the vast majority of those killed were ethnic Russians. While military casualties are not known, the Russian side admitted to having 2,000 soldiers killed or missing.[20] The bloodbath of Grozny shocked Russia and the outside world, causing severe criticism of the war. International monitors from the OSCE described the scenes as nothing short of an "unimaginable catastrophe", while former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called the war a "disgraceful, bloody adventure" and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl called it "sheer madness".[21]---

The official figure for Russian military deaths is 5,500, while most estimates put the number between 3,500 and 7,500, or even as high as 14,000.[4] Although there are no accurate figures for the number of Chechen militants killed, various estimates put the number at about 3,000 to over 15,000 deaths. Various figures estimate the number of civilian deaths at between 30,000 and 100,000 killed and possibly over 200,000 injured, while more than 500,000 people were displaced by the conflict, which left cities and villages across the republic in ruins.