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'On a recent visit to Kyiv I found the war all-pervasive, from the number of young men in uniform – even in hipster cafés – to the regular air-raid sirens. But to most Muscovites the war had been all but invisible before Putin’s mobilisation announcement. Or at least, its consequences were no more than a mild irritation: no Apple Pay or Zoom, no software updates or international banking, McDonald’s and Starbucks replaced with lookalike local clones. But bars, restaurants and theatres were packed. Moscow supermarkets were stocked with every kind of foodstuff – including plenty of goods from sanctioned Europe. After this week’s mobilisation, though, the war suddenly moved from being a distant and ignorable unpleasantness to something that was, to tens of millions of Russians with military-age male relatives, very up close and personal.
Moscow taxi drivers are in rare agreement. They’ll fight if Russia is attacked, but not ‘to take someone else’s house’. A week ago, Putin could have declared victory, proposed a peace plan and split Ukraine’s supporters. But with mobilisation sparking protests in hitherto loyal places such as Dagestan, he’s made regime change a real possibility. I wrote in these pages a few weeks ago that the alternatives to Putin are unlikely to be better. As poet and critic Dmitry Bykov says, Putin is not Hitler, he’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. After military defeat in Ukraine comes a new version of Versailles, Weimar and then the real disaster. ‘I’m not afraid of a corrupt Russia,’ Bykov says. ‘I’m afraid of a truly fascist Russia.’
The Ferris wheel that Putin opened broke down after two days, leaving its passengers stranded, trapped high and helpless in the thrill-machine they’d so trustingly boarded.
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Owen Matthews’s latest book, Overreach, a history of the origins of the Russo-Ukrainian war, is published next month.