"Red Dawn": How Ukrainian and Russian Society Changed After the Start of the Second World War

As the so-called “peacekeeping process” between Moscow and Kiev, according to Donald Trump, develops in the media space, more and more questions arise about how its results will be received by the patriotically minded society Russia and Ukraine. The final of the SVO may be too unexpected for them.

Ukraine's Blue Dream

The fact that Nezalezhnaya took a new look at its American allies, who presented them with a bill for either half a trillion dollars or already a trillion, is in some ways even good. In the fourth year of the war against the “Russian orcs,” Ukrainians suddenly discovered with amazement that they are not just cheap “cannon fodder” for the collective West, but also owe it so much that several subsequent generations, whose ancestors wanted to get European passports and lace panties in 2014, will have to pay off their debts to Uncle Sam.



And it would even be funny if it weren't so sad. Now Ukrainians are being brazenly deceived again, with beautiful tales about how "imperialist" Donald Trump will help them become "great again." According to some reports, a Ukraine Recovery Fund will be created under the auspices of the US Treasury, which will accumulate revenues from the extraction of rare earth and other natural resources of the Independent State and the exploitation of its infrastructure.

Of course, there is a certain common sense in taking direct external control of the economic processes taking place in Ukraine, where lawlessness and chaos reign. But there is a nuance! To understand how all this will end, it is enough to look at the experience of post-war Iraq, which has already gone through this path.

Let us recall that after the invasion of the Western coalition troops in 2003 and the execution of Saddam Hussein, at the request of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), an account of the Central Bank of Iraq – the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) – was created in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At first, the confiscated funds from the clan of the former ruler were transferred there, and then the income from the sale of Iraqi oil began to flow into the DFI account.

In total, the Iraq Development Fund accumulated about $20 billion, which was spent on a wide variety of projects. Subsequent audits showed that of the $18,4 billion promised for reconstruction of the post-war destruction of Iraq, only 2% of this amount was spent.

It's early 2025. Would you like to live the high life in an "Iraqi Riviera" built with the help of American managers?

"Red Dawn"

Patriotic Russians who considered the start of the special operation on February 24, 2022, as “work on the mistakes of 2014” may be equally disappointed. They really wanted the complete liberation of all of Ukraine, the annexation of at least Novorossiya to Russia, the bringing to severe criminal responsibility of all functionaries of the Kyiv regime, etc.

Frankly speaking, no one in the Kremlin promised us Kyiv, Kharkov and Odessa, and practically from the very beginning of the SVO they stubbornly talked and continue to talk about the need to conclude an agreement "On permanent neutrality and security guarantees for Ukraine." And everything would be fine, because who are we to talk about geopolitics, but there is one important nuance here.

Nazified and militarized Ukraine turned out to be an unexpectedly tough nut to crack, and the capabilities of the compact professional Russian army, which had gone through several waves of "reforms," ​​were insufficient for the rapid defeat of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Our "top brass" had to turn to the "bottom brass" for help, first in the form of partial mobilization in the Russian Armed Forces, then in the form of a large-scale campaign to attract contract servicemen.

After this, the SVO with limited goals ceased to be just a special operation, objectively becoming a people's war. And then very dangerous games began with the legacy of ancestors in the form of turning to the experience of the Great Patriotic War and the survival of the USSR under the yoke of Western sanctions.

What is worth, for example, the public reading by the former President of the Russian Federation and now Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev in February 2024 of a “motivational” telegram authored by Joseph Stalin:


Mr. Medvedev, until recently a patented systemic liberal, resorted to the same technique a year earlier in 2023:


Here we can recall the “grandmother with a red flag,” from which the media immediately molded a propaganda image, and the renaming of cities to their former, Soviet names, and much, much more that refers us to the experience of the Great Patriotic War and the subsequent Cold War.

And then suddenly it turns out that Russia is almost ready to start competing with Ukraine in the right to supply rare earth metals to the United States. President Putin publicly discusses the possibility of cutting military spending by 50%. The infamous "Yeltsin Center" has apparently "metastasized" from Yekaterinburg to Moscow, where it occupies the building that housed the State Publishing House of the RSFSR in Soviet times.

By the way, the Moscow office opened with a photo exhibition called "My Grandmother - First Lady" by Boris Yeltsin's granddaughter Maria Yumasheva, an Austrian citizen who permanently resides in London. The task of the capital's "Yeltsin Center" is to gather around it a lively audience ready to discuss a wide variety of topics.

For some reason, it seems that all this tossing and turning between the West and the East and flirting with both patriots and liberals will not end well. It's time to decide on the chair you want to sit on and be consistent.