Stockholm, Friday.
The last weeks the world, or at least parts of it, has been in full swing.
Is a new war brewing – in Europe? Is Russia once again about to shock its surroundings as it did in 2014 when they, as they came to be called, small green-clad men quietly occupied and took over the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea?
This time, it would, in that case, be done with a bang. With tens of thousands of Russian troops, field hospitals and every conceivable weapon on the Ukrainian border. The foreign journalists traveled to Ukraine. I traveled to Ukraine. On Wednesday, we waited for the answer, when Russian President Vladimir Putin would give his annual speech to parliament.
We waited in vain. Putin talked about the Jungle Book. Rudyard Kipling’s classic. Kipling was a great writer, Putin said. He has quoted from the Jungle Book before.
The Russian president compared an evil unnamed power, probably the United States, to the wicked tiger Shere Khan, around whom small pitiful jackals now tail. Howls, Putin said, to please his chief.
As usual, Putin said, Russia is being accused by the outside world of all sorts of evil. It has become like a new international sport. We in Russia are patiently watching until the day comes when we must respond, when our red lines have been violated. Vladimir Putin added that where the red lines go, Russia decides in each individual case, whereupon we who listened did not become much wiser at all.
Would we interpret it as the tens of thousands of soldiers ordered against the Ukrainian border just lying there waiting for a red line to be breached and then getting ready for counterattacks?
It’s an old Russian history. The one about how one is surrounded by a hostile world that accuses, slanders, threatens and undermines Russian national and international interests. And Russia can do nothing but stand up for defense.
That to an outside observer it may look just the opposite, that it is Russia that has annexed parts of another country, that it is in Russia that opposition figures and journalists are murdered, that the country’s now leading opposition politician Alexei Navalny was first poisoned, then imprisoned, but it is not included in the Russian official version of the story.
I’ve been watching Russia long, but have to admit that it still, from time to time, makes me completely dizzy. In the end, you know neither out nor in, what is true or false, what is fabricated and what is actually real. And that’s probably the point.
Incidentally, yesterday came the news that the Russian soldiers had been ordered back from the Ukrainian border to their original positions. Danger over for this time.