Just when you thought Putin’s regime couldn’t sink any lower, it somehow manages to. Like something out of George Orwell’s 1984, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov declared that, actually, the Kremlin’s bloody war in Ukraine had had a ‘positive impact on life inside [Russia]’.
Speaking at a foreign ministry press conference, Lavrov said this was because Putin’s ‘special military operation’ had united the country and ‘enabled it to be cleansed of all those who felt no sense of belonging to Russian history or culture’ after thousands moved abroad in opposition to the war. It hardly needs saying that the nearly 20,000 Russians detained for protesting against the war, and the families of the roughly 300,000 Russian soldiers believed to have been killed and injured so far, would disagree that the Russia of today is a better place.
Lavrov carried on, declaring that the war had ‘united the majority of society like never before!’ Quoting the writer and satirist Mikhail Zhvanetsky, he said: ‘Among his brilliant sketches was this one…he had a monologue on the theme of Soviet/Russian society.
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