Since 1991, Russians have undergone transformation, intensifying worst instincts – Ukrainian writer

This was stated by Ukrainian writer and translator Yuriy Andrukhovych in an interview on Espreso TV.

The host asked: “In one of your interviews, you said that at the start of the full-scale invasion, you thought — and now admit you were wrong — that after the first thousand Russian soldiers were killed, people would wake up and say, ‘Listen, enough.’ But they didn’t wake up. Why? Why is this happening to them?”

“My mistake in those expectations was that I believed this community of people we call Russians had changed — that the process of social transformation and simple technological progress had turned them into people who also valued comfort, people who didn’t want to die. But it turns out, no. Moscow and St. Petersburg are still islands of that comfort, and probably a few other major cities too,” Andrukhovych said.

He noted that people from those places don’t really sign up for deadly military contracts. “I didn’t factor in that there’s still this vast space full of poverty, backwardness — including mental backwardness — degraded human qualities, and generational alcoholism going back 10 generations. Basically, it’s a kind of zombie community. I was also basing my assumptions on what I remember from my own lifetime, like the so-called special military operation in Afghanistan. Back then, the Soviet Union still had other nations of the empire to draw on. But the point is, by the late 1980s, the Soviet empire was forced to pull out. There was real social pressure from within,” he explained.

Andrukhovych recalled that the soldier’s mothers were among the leaders of that movement.

“It was a powerful grassroots movement — the Soldiers' Mothers Committees. And they first emerged not somewhere else, but in Russia. These were Russian women who went to protest at military recruitment offices and elsewhere. And I thought — well, that was really not so long ago. Or at least it seems recent to me because it’s all within my lifetime. But now I don’t see even a trace of that in today’s Russia. Any anti-war activists were arrested and jailed within the first weeks or months,” he added.

In his opinion, that number of people today is just statistical noise.

“So, some kind of powerful transformation happened to this community after 1991, deepening all those terrible instincts that had always been there. And they’ve technologized them. It’s brought them to this state of constant looting — a technologized Middle Ages,” Andrukhovych said.

However, he believes there still has to be some kind of limit.

“When the guy in the Kremlin tried a full mobilization once, it didn’t really work out for him. It scared his people a bit. So they do want to live, after all. And if they sign these contracts, it’s only for big money. My hope is that you can’t just keep printing money forever. At some point, economic laws have to kick in. When they start offering 2 million rubles for a contract, but it’s basically just worthless paper. Maybe we’ll live to see that moment,” the writer concluded.

• Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna went to Russian-occupied territories to uncover the truth about the abduction of Ukrainians. Instead, she became a victim of captivity, torture, and a mysterious death just before her exchange.