Moscow Is a Front-Line City
Moscow is also a front-line city, just like Donetsk, Sevastopol, and Belgorod. A country at war cannot have peaceful cities. It is better to realise this now and deeply. Of course, in a warring country, special behavioural measures and rules must be introduced.
The rear territory is not a territory of peace. Here, victory is forged. The victims of Crocus fell on the battlefield. Because Russia today is a battlefield.
Ukraine is also Russia. Russia stretches from Lvov to Vladivostok, and it is at war.
Public consciousness must become the consciousness of a warring people. And anyone who falls out of this must be considered an anomaly.
A new code of behaviour is needed. Leaving their homes, people of a warring country may not return. Everyone must be ready for this. Indeed, at the front, and in Donetsk and Belgorod, it is exactly so. The EU will likely supply long-range missiles to the losing Kiev regime, which, in our eyes, will lose its legitimacy in less than two months. We will finally recognise them as a criminal terrorist formation, not a country. This openly terrorist regime, in its fall, will also likely strike as far as it can reach. What else it might resort to is hard to predict — it is better to assume it could be anything. This is not a cause for panic but a call to responsibility.
Now we are truly becoming a people, beginning to realise ourselves as one.
The people share a common pain. Common blood — donated by the huge queues of empathetic Muscovites for the victims of the monstrous terror attack. Common grief. The people share a common burden, when people transport the injured from Crocus City Hall to the hospital or home for free. It is like on the front — they are our own. What money! In a warring country, there can be no capitalism, only solidarity. Everything that is gathered for the front, for victory, is imbued with soul.
The state is no longer a mechanism but an organism. The state also feels pain, prays in church, serves memorial services, lights candles. The state becomes alive, popular, Russian. Because the state is awakened by war.
Migrants today are called to become an organic part of the people fighting the enemy. To become one of us — donating blood, transporting for free when needed, lining up at the recruitment office to be the first to go to the front, weaving camouflage nets, taking on the third shift. If they are part of society, they too can become a target of the enemy at some moment. To leave and not return. One of the boys who saved people in Crocus City Hall is named Islam. But this is the real Islam, Russian. There is another kind.
Living in Russia, one cannot be non-Russian. Especially when Russia is at war. Russia is a country for those who consider it their Mother.
Now our Mother is in pain.
Translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister