Before launching his ill-fated rebellion, Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin said, "The evil embodied in the [Russian] military leadership must be stopped." Since he failed, we are left to guess who will stop him. In this endeavour, the armed forces of Ukraine are playing a leading role, while the Ukrainian people are making huge sacrifices. However, in addition to their courage and determination, there is another factor at play: the self-destruction of evil. The Russian leadership is not only losing control; things occasionally turn out to be in direct opposition to his intentions. Driven by fear and mistakes, Russian leaders act against their goals and ambitions. It is nemesis, as important to politics as mimesis is to art.
In February 2014, Vladimir Putin started the Russo-Ukrainian war by invading the Crimean peninsula. Then he said that he wanted to save the people there "from nationalism". And in fact, the invasion launched a militant nationalism not seen since the 1930s.
The Russian government has promised that the annexation of Crimea will bring an economic boom to the population with a sharp increase in income - by 500% within seven years. And in fact, real wages in Crimea have hardly changed since the beginning of the occupation, while subsidies from Moscow now make up three quarters of the regional budget. Life in Crimea directly depends on the large canal from the Dnieper River, which historically provides 85 percent of the peninsula's water needs. When Russian troops destroyed the Kahovka Dam on June 6 this year, the canal dried up.
When Putin annexed Crimea, he expressed his desire to create a "Russian Mecca" there: according to his personal version of history, Russian statehood began in Crimea, and he envisioned endless rivers of pilgrims pouring into the region. In reality, the tourism industry is experiencing a steady decline. Nine million people used to come to Crimea a year (five times more than the population), mainly because of the Crimean beaches. Before the invasion, it was cheap and easy for Russian tourists to visit the Ukrainian Crimea. They did not need visas, borders practically did not exist. Now planes no longer fly, some other things are transported by rail, and if a loyalist tries to come by car, the military checkpoint on the Crimean bridge will hold him for five hours or more. Since 2014, Russian tourism in Crimea has declined by about a third every year, although there are still those who want to spend their holidays in the occupied country.
Do we care about those fanatics? Not particularly, but they illustrate a key issue. Simply put, there are two kinds of evil: smart and stupid. They are usually mixed up, but the difference is clear. Smart evil can only be stopped from outside. Stupid evil destroys itself, with multiple mistakes that doom every endeavor to failure. However, such nemetic self-destruction takes time. In the process, many people die. External forces should count on the wrongdoers' mistakes and amplify them. The effect of nemesis is difficult to predict, sometimes even to explain, but it offers hope. When the force of evil is overwhelming, it is the only hope.
In 2014, Putin ordered his troops to expand operations to the vast areas of the Donbass on the eastern Ukrainian mainland. To justify a new invasion, he claimed that the Ukrainians had committed genocide by eliminating the Russian population and culture from those areas. These fabricated accusations had no legal consequences. In 2022, Russian troops launched another invasion and committed more crimes in the areas they occupied near Kiev. The then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that these crimes fit the definition of a deliberate massacre "not so far from genocide". Human Rights Watch said Russian forces showed "disdain and disregard for civilian life and basic principles of the rules of war." Putin is accused of organizing the illegal deportation of children; a warrant has been issued for him. When they committed their heinous acts in Bucha and Mariupol, the Russian soldiers had no idea that they had materialized the very claims of genocide that their leader had earlier attributed to the enemy. It is nemesis: the action diverted from the object to the actor. While we mourn the victims, we hope that Putin and other criminals will get what they deserve. Nemesis gives hope, but only justice allows resolution.
The Russian-Ukrainian war is full of examples of political nemesis. Putin was so afraid of NATO that his actions practically brought it to the doorstep of his hometown of St. Petersburg. Finland joined NATO because of Putin's war, followed by Sweden. With their accession, NATO will be much closer to the vital centers of Russia than it would be in the case (which was greatly questioned) of Ukraine's accession to the alliance.
The same nemesis story played out with gas pipelines. Putin wanted Russian gas to bypass Ukraine so badly that, with the cooperation of Germany, he built two extremely expensive gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea. In September 2022, someone – maybe Russia, maybe its enemies – blew up those pipelines. Meanwhile, Russian gas continues to flow through Ukraine, which only recently announced that it will stop the flow next year. Having reportedly spent between $2022 billion and $20 billion on Prigozhin's activities since XNUMX, the Russian leadership has watched as his armed paramilitary formations leave the front and march through undefended areas of central Russia. These troops, consisting mostly of convicted criminals, were determined to take Moscow by force. Their aborted rebellion set a precedent for future criminals.
Putin and his people were very concerned about the status of Russian culture and language in Ukraine, Europe and the world. Because of the war, many Ukrainians, whose mother tongue was Russian, switched to Ukrainian. In Russia and abroad, the purveyors of Russian culture - both those who support and those who oppose Putin - have lost their jobs and audiences. Concerts are canceled, exhibitions are suspended, and projects are postponed. Russian culture has never been so unpopular, and the Russian people have never been so hated.
Extremely conservative, Putin and his followers worry about the influence of European culture, which they see as infected with LGBT+ ideology and drug addiction, on supposedly more moral, Orthodox Russia. In reality, Russia will gain from the conflict a large number of military veterans – several hundreds of thousands – with severe trauma and various addictions, having both suffered and committed horrific crimes. We learned from Prigogine what these soldiers thought of their superiors. There is no plan to provide these men with appropriate treatment, retraining and care, similar to the American post-war veterans law that allowed for the education of those returning from the front in World War II. Former Russian fighters will wreak havoc in the few places where they can get money and excitement, in Moscow and other big cities.
Russian leaders are most afraid of breaking the Russian Federation into its constituent parts. They know very well how it happens - they saw it when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. They are so afraid of it that they call their political party, which has been in power since 2001, "United Russia". However, they mostly recruit their soldiers from the Russian peripheries, thereby further fueling the traditional hatred of these regions towards Moscow. To stop Prigozhin, the Kremlin sent in a private Chechen military squad - clearly they trust them more than Russian troops. Like an overheated pot, the Federation is on the verge of implosion. We don't know what will emerge from its ruins, but it will be something deeply foreign to the current power structures in Moscow.
All of this would not have happened if Russia had not started the war. This country has a long history of violence, exploitation and imperialism, but rarely, if ever, have things looked as irrational and nasty as in the current war. If Putin had not started his war in 2014, the Russians would not have committed genocide against Ukrainians. Finland and Sweden would remain neutral. Russian gas would flow through Ukrainian pipes for another decade. Prigogine would manage military canteens, gold mines and troll factories, and many of his soldiers would serve sentences in prison colonies. Russian culture would continue to participate in dialogues and discussions in Ukraine and around the world. By trading in oil, arms and culture, Moscow would retain power over its exploited provinces. But because of a nemesis, the criminal creates exactly what he fears, only bigger and more terrifying than he could have ever imagined.
Nemesis is different from revenge and far from justice. Revenge and justice require external action, but in nemesis the evildoer destroys himself in the very process of inflicting evil. It is a loop in which the action is directed against its perpetrator. Nemesis grows out of fear and greed – fear of the Other and greed for influence. In an attempt to deprive the other actors of their effectiveness, the criminal turns the entire action against himself.
As he unsuccessfully tries to exert his influence, he encounters resistance and revenge - victims and survivors or their descendants - which curb the evil, but also create a vicious cycle of violence, directed at the criminal. Heroic resistance channels the nemetic consequences of self-destruction. Together, they pave the way for what will happen next. But only justice prevents the spread of evil, and its time will come.
Prospect, 19.07.2023.
Translated by Milica Jovanović
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