My Russia | The Press

I fell for you long before I met you, my Russia. From early childhood. Later, learning your language, I felt at home. I love that you only have one word – my – to talk about both peace and the world around you.

A word-aspiration to which we toast in well-watered suppers.

In the last hours, my Russia, the men who hide in the high walls of your Kremlin have decided to annihilate the double meaning of this poetic word. Here you are plunged into the middle of a war.

You know better than anyone the deep scars that an armed invasion can leave, Rossiya Moia.

Like so many others who walked on the Mamayev kurgan in Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, I felt the ground shake under my feet. The land of this hill was nourished with the blood of more than 1 million of your people who sacrificed themselves to prevent the troops of Nazi Germany from crossing the Volga to reach the heart of Eurasia. It was one of the most significant episodes of the Second World War, which you, my Russia, call the Great Patriotic War.

I cried when I heard a grandmother from St. Petersburg telling her 24-year-old granddaughter for the first time about the horrors of the siege of Leningrad. She had protected her all this time from this story in the hope of not transmitting her trauma. Impossible to forget, she said, the long teeth of hunger that prowled like a wolf in a city surrounded by the enemy for 872 days. And who chose new victims every night. Again, 1 million deaths among your flock and millions of resisters.

No, not all of your warrior episodes have been so heroic. The generation of young men you sent to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s came back heavily mortgaged.

When I was studying in Moscow a decade later, I was quickly advised to stay away from the veterans of this conflict which turned into a butchery.

There is not much glorious either in the war that you led against your own citizens in Chechnya, except that hundreds of mothers of soldiers, outraged to see their sons, conscripts, sent on the front line, made the journey to the small Caucasus Republic to bring them home.

You know very well, my Russia, that even when it is you who declare war, you also pay the price.

Today, Vladimir Poutine, your president, and his close relations put the finger on your scars of the past and your episodes of heroism to make you support a supposed “military operation of denazification” which is in fact an unprovoked armed aggression.

And he has been preparing the ground for a long time. Since the Maidan protests in 2014, the annexation of Crimea and the ensuing Donbass war, he likes to whisper in your ear that the fascist threat, which the Red Army fought so valiantly 70 years ago , is back. In Ukraine. And that you will have to fight it again.

He tries to manipulate your story like one plays a violin, pressing hard on the sensitive chords.

I think he overestimates his ability to convince you, my Russia.

I think he underestimates you.