There is not and cannot be a neutral position in this war, there are only two camps. That is all. Anyone who hesitates or is undecided, sooner or later (I think much sooner than it seems) will be forced to take up arms and simply go to the front, and the front today is everywhere. It is impossible to bring this long, difficult and terrible war back to where it was before 24 February 2022, nor can it be stopped, it can only be won. Or it can still be consigned to human history. Then there are no winners. Death will win.

For now, the war. Which means we are still alive.

If you are not for SMO, you are not for Russia, you are not for the state, you are not for our people, then the time will come when you will have to kill Russians, destroy Russia as a state, blow up cars, houses and railway tracks, hide terrorists in your homes, be a gunner. There is no more security.

So it’s better to make a decision now, this applies to all Russians, but it also applies to the rest of the countries.

If you want to preserve sovereignty, it is consciously impossible under the aegis of the collective West, liberalism in International Relations denies sovereignty and only recognises World Government, i.e. Western hegemony, and for a multipolar world, where sovereignty is possible, you have to fight with the West, and that is what Russia is doing now. It is doing it for everyone.

This is what World War III is all about. Anyone who really cares about sovereignty must either side with us or give it up deliberately and forever and submit completely to the West, and the West is now at war with Russia and will force others to do the same.

This is what has happened to Ukraine, what is happening to Georgia and Moldova, what is threatening Turkey and even China.

Us and them.

For the past 30 years Ukrainians have been taught massively, actively, obsessively and continuously to hate Russians and everything Russian. Entire generations have been raised with Russophobia.

Since 2014, Ukrainians have been trained to kill, burn, dismember, fry and wipe Russians off the face of the earth. All of them, men, women and children. This is how the image of the enemy, the ‘Moskal’, was created. It was presented as a cruel ‘subhuman’, a ‘monster’, a ‘stupid’, a ‘ruthless’, a ‘rude’, a kind of material heap, eager to swoop down on the peaceful Ukrainian paradise and turn it into an expanse of blood, and to prevent this, the Ukrainian had to be ready to attack first, to bring war to the enemy’s territory. To reduce it to a bloody pulp, so that it would not turn Ukraine. And so it went on for years, for decades.

Many wonder why the Ukrainians resist so fiercely? Because they are not at war with us, but with the image that lives in their minds. In the TV series ‘Black Mirror’ there was an episode where people fought with terrible monsters, but it turned out that they were monsters made so by special optical devices, which people themselves had to wear (so as not to be punished) and what looked like ‘monsters’ were the people themselves.

Ukrainians see us as monsters, they are at war with a chimera that has been imposed on them. And this chimera is terrible, but they see nothing else.

We did not prepare for this war. We have not understood what we are dealing with. We have not created such an image of the enemy. Therefore, we do not fully understand what is happening. Perhaps it is right that we did not go down this path, but it is clear that we did not understand the gravity of what was happening.

The fiercer the battles, the greater the fury of our people. At the same time, the image of the enemy has relatively formed on the fronts. On the home front, we are still in a state of perplexity. How can they do such a thing? At the front, this question is no longer asked: the question is another: how to defeat the enemy and, frankly, how to destroy it. You can only destroy what you hate, and those who hate the most, fight fiercely and achieve the most in this war.

I’m convinced that Russia should not let this process go on alone. If we let it, hatred from the front will gradually spill over to the rear and we will become more like the enemy. That is, hatred will enter our hearts. It entered the hearts of Ukrainians a long time ago. Now it is up to us. One cannot fail to notice that in the process of war we gradually adopt the characteristics of the enemy. Reluctantly and with delay, but still.

Right now the authorities are just trying to hold back the process, but it is like a river. At some point, the ‘humanist dam’ will burst and the whole society will remember Simonov’s lines: ‘Whenever you meet him, kill him’. No one will care what the authorities allow or forbid.

We need a different path, a true ideologisation of war, complete and systematic, not piecemeal and fragmented as it is now.

First, the war is fought with the West, so the main enemy is the West. The Ukrainians are not the main enemy. Therefore, it is the West that should really be repudiated. This is where Simonov is relevant: he means that we must expel the West from ourselves, otherwise we have a double standard, he kills us and we worship him. Liberalism is more dangerous than Ukrainian Nazism, because it was Western liberals who launched, created and armed Ukrainian Nazism. Consistent de-liberalisation is necessary (as it is more important than the ongoing denazification of the country). Denazification is also necessary but it is a consequence, not a cause, it is a symptom, not the essence of the disease.

Furthermore, we are fighting against nationalism but we must not turn into nationalists ourselves. We are the Empire, as heirs to the monarchy and as successors to the USSR, we are more than a nation. Our ideology must be imperial, open, clear and aggressive. The Empire must be charismatically represented. Our Empire, Rome, is fighting a mortal battle with the opposite ‘Empire’, and in essence the Anti-Empire, with Carthage.

Only when the army, the people, the state and society fight Carthage, the liberal West, will we defeat Ukrainian Nazism. All we have left is to trample the enemy. In the face of that fearsome and serious enemy, this obsessive pettiness will seem insignificant.

If you tell a Russian ‘Russia does not exist’, he will shrug his shoulders. If you tell an American ‘America does not exist’, he will shrug his shoulders. If you tell a Ukrainian ‘Ukraine does not exist’, he will go ballistic and throw a tantrum, because Ukraine does not exist, but it does not exist when we are an empire and our consciousness is imperial. A firm, strong, self-confident, determined conscience.

The strong identity of the enemy can be overwhelmed not by an equally strong identity (Russian nationalism), but by a stronger identity: the imperial identity.

This ideological transformation of society is inevitable. It may be postponed for some time yet, but it cannot be prevented.

I’m convinced that our government did not want this war. It tried hard to postpone it. It was possible to postpone it, but impossible to avoid it. And now it cannot be stopped. Either you win it or you disappear. It is clear that part of the elite is panicking. They cannot accept the fatality of what is happening, hoping against all common sense that they can somehow return the situation to the past. Impossible. Postpone and procrastinate yes, it is possible, but stop and go back to square one no. All that awaits us is war and a difficult, incredibly difficult victory. Our country will be irreversibly changed along the way. The state will have changed, society will have changed.

Nobody is desperate to change on their own, but it is already impossible. It is destiny. Change will be imposed by an iron necessity. On everyone and in everything.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini