Either Putin will judge Russia, or it will judge him

XHABIR DERALLA

Even Putin’s biggest supporters, who blindly believed in him and in different ways with different motives enabled his totalitarian rule, are appalled by his crimes.

Generals, businessmen, journalists, politicians, intellectuals, artists, citizens from all walks of life have become silent to the news of the systematic destruction of civilian targets. The fate of the “tsar” in the Kremlin is ever more uncertain. He is surrounded by the silence of those who don’t want to have anything to do with this criminal anymore.

 

Like in the darkest times of Stalinism, he makes decisions at least once a day with which decisions someone is either removed, distanced or placed under house arrest. It all started at the end of the first week of the aggression, when it became clear that the “blitzkrieg” had failed. Ukrainian women and men have heroically stood in defense of their domestic threshold against the incomparably stronger aggressor.

No matter how much he tries, Putin, who the Russian pro-democratic public has called Putler since the first day of the invasion, cannot hide the bloody traces of his crime –attack with heaviest imaginable weapons against children, pregnant women, women, elderly people. Unarmed civilians who are hiding in improvised shelters are dying every day and every hour.

Putin is faced with multiple fronts, on two of which he faces devastating defeats. One is on the front in Ukraine where, despite the barbaric bloody attacks against women and children, his military machinery notes no progress. The second is the front with his recent supporters who don’t want to share his historical shame, but also responsibility for the brutality of the aggression against Ukraine, in which a quarter of the population has family ties with the people in Russia.

There is not a person who cannot, if one wants to, break through the information darkness with which Putin has wrapped Russia. Information can be blocked and hidden, but nowadays they manage to penetrate even through the sturdiest barriers. One just needs to want information and will receive information on what is really happening. That’s not easy today in Russia, but it’s not impossible. And the dense smokescreen of lies falls. Even those with a captured or obscured consciousness have not remained indifferent to the immense suffering of innocent people in the Ukraine that is close to them. And they give up the support for the Kremlin criminal.

Such a propaganda has still not been invented that can silence the cries of the thousands of orphans who are wandering on both sides of the Ukrainian borders, the cries of mothers whose children bled in their arms, while bombs and missiles rained down on their homes.

Putin’s days are numbered. He is now protected only by the hardened dogs of war, a team with a criminal mind just like his. But far more numerous are those who want to see Russia back on the world map. Russians who have at least a little dignity and humanity in themselves, don’t want anything else but for Putin to leave and to be held accountable for the brutal aggression. They want to see Russia developed and free, in which the life and dignity of people are invaluable. Some also want to see him dead. But it’s certain that they don’t want to wait for history to judge Putin, and thus entire Russia, but want to see both him and his clique at the prosecutors table.

That energy of people who want to see the end of the war as soon as possible is powerful. And they know. The solution is to stop Putin, for him to be arrested for the crimes against the Ukrainian, but also against the Russian nation. Illusions have been shattered into thousands of pieces. It’s clear: Putin is a criminal and enemy, not just of Ukraine, not just of the West, but also of Russia. Now the choice remains: either Putin will judge Russia or Russia will judge him.

 

 

Translation: N. Cvetkovska