Sasha Lensky

Don’t blame us Russians for Putin’s war

Demonstrators protest against war in Tbilisi, Georgia (Getty images)

Thousands of Russians who have fled to Georgia in the wake of Putin’s crackdown are receiving a poor welcome. ‘F*** Russia’ and ‘Russians go home’ are scrawled on the walls, and there are campaigns to boycott Russian goods. A Russian girl asked in a local chat about the best way to transfer money, and received several responses of roughly the same content: ‘Get out, lousy occupants, no one wants you here.’

In the US, owners of Russian restaurants (even if they are non-Russians) have received bomb threats or seen their premises vandalised. Even the pianist Alexander Malofeev, who took to social media just after the invasion to declare that ‘every Russian will feel guilty for decades’ for this ‘terrible and bloody decision’, has been cancelled by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra for the crime of his nationality.

All this, one should point out, suits the Kremlin very well. When internationally condemned for some crime, be it the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury or Litvinenko in London, Russian officials have put the accusations down to ‘Russophobia’, insolently equating the Russian government with the Russian people. Now, as this blanket dehumanisation sinks to new depths, it will only be natural for Russians to coalesce around Putin like children around an abusive father: ‘You see, no one in the world cares about you but me.’

This is not to say you can’t understand – even if you don’t condone it – this new and acceptable form of racism, especially coming from Ukraine. The Ukrainians, under relentless, brutal attack from Russia, can hardly be blamed for feeling this way, no matter how many ethnic Russians, citizens of Ukraine, are clearly fighting in places like Kharkiv and Mariupol against Putin’s invasion. With Georgia too, the strength of feeling isn’t hard to decipher: the closer a country is to Russia and the more under threat it feels, the likelier such feelings are to flourish.

GettyImages-1239295205.jpg
A pro-Putin rally in Moscow (Getty images)

There has not been a single spontaneous pro-Putin rally since the beginning of the war

But elsewhere? Western newspapers are fond of quoting the 70 per cent support figure to prove this is Russia’s, not just Putin’s war.

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