Yulia Latynina: Russia volunteered to play a part of a villain

Take a look at an amazing thing that is going on right now in Hollywood: in the last season of Homeland the main villain is a Russian intelligence pitting Americans against each other and the last season of House of Cards will probably have the same theme.

At the same time, Arabic terrorists have fallen into disuse as villains, although they were quite popular in the 80s and 90s. Now it’s not politically correct to make films about good Muslims being able to blow somebody up. More often Hollywood tells stories the other way round – how somebody bad tries to set Muslims up. For example, some bad whites try to kill a President who wants to be friends with Iran.

Everybody always needs a villain and now Russia volunteered to play this part with the words: «here I am!». And of course, it really is a villain – just not that scary as Vladimir Putin wants it to be. But in any case in the near future, we’ll see Putin become that monster to scare children with – and it’s not very well-deserved, because Russia is simply not powerful enough in order to be that monster it’s imagined to be. Putin isn’t Allah, and a faith in him can’t be a serious international problem.

But there are two main factors that like a binary compound act in favour of Russia being the villain.

The first factor is the international hooliganism of Russia that has only intensified after Syria and meddling in the American elections. Kremlin is increasing the dose all the time because apparently, it’s a psychological need to them. The desire to be noticed outweighs any other considerations. It’s something personal.

The second factor is that a Russian problem turned into an internal problem of American politics. This problem became an election instrument. In the US everything depends on the outcome of the elections and if something can be used to discredit an opponent, it’ll be employed.

The alleged dirt that Putin has on Trump became an ace up Democrats’ and the left-leaning establishment’s sleeve, although it’s a very dubious ace. From everything we know so far about Russian meddling in the American politics and its fresh attempts to influence elections, we can see that Russia has supported all marginal, fringe points of view rather than Trump himself.

On one hand, it supported Trump, on the other – Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton. And immediately after Trump had won elections, Russia started to organize rallies against him. Just a day after elections there was a very large rally under the slogan «Trump is NOT my President» that several thousand people took part in, including a film director Michael Moore who looked like a genuine useful idiot.

Russia has consistently supported the movement Black Lives Matter and white radical supremacists, Islamophobes and Islamists. The last portion of the mess that was most likely made by Russia on Facebook consisted of leftist memes and outright anti-Trump texts, texts against colonialism, in support of poor American Indians, women harassed by men and stuff like that. Such texts would be to the liking of the Democratic senator Elisabeth Warren or the socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has recently won Democratic primaries in New York.

In other words, Russia, while openly supporting Trump, at the same time tried to sow maximum division in the American society. This rift already exists and acting this way Russia gave leftists a powerful weapon against Trump. It’s likely that this was one of Putin’s plans all along. But anti-Russian sanctions became a question of electoral politics in the end and it’s absolutely fatal to Russia.

However, Putin who apparently makes all these decisions thinks that he can’t be forced into a corner. As we know, even people closest to him like Timchenko didn’t support the annexation of Crimea. It was the decision of Putin and probably of a group of siloviks closest to him, meaning that he got some papers from Shoigu, Bortnikov and others. Putin is a person who perceives all of his actions as logical and fair and calls any reaction to these actions an aggression. These people are aggressors who consider themselves victims. They are very much like Islamists in that regard – it’s hard to negotiate with people with such an unbending psychological state of mind.

For now, there’s no opportunity for a compromise and Vladimir Putin apparently thinks that firstly nothing will happen to him, and secondly this continuous hysteria about Russia surrounded by enemies amid general impoverishment will only help him to stay popular in the polls. Kremlin seems to bet on the example of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and hopes that the worse life in Russia will become, the more popular its President will be because a poor person who tries to explain why his life is so bad will be satisfied with the simple explanation of getting up off the knees and surrounding enemies. There’s no interest in making Russian life better. What for? It’s easier to explain everything by saying that this country is hated by everybody.