The language and memes become ever less elegant as you descend into the vomitarium of Russian state media talk shows and troll farms. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other,” and then earlier this year described Ukraine as being turned into the “anti-Russia” by the West. Thus to justify his annexation of Crimea and invasion of East Ukraine, Putin argued in 2014 that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Then there’s the oft repeated definition of Ukrainians and Belarussians as Russians’ “younger Brothers,” a definition at once patronising and suffocating, with the insistence that all these different countries are actually “one people,” one mass destined to be locked forever in the communal apartment of the Russian state (of mind). Firstly, there’s the obsessive stalking of Kyiv, which is deified as the “mother of all Russian cities,” and then castigated either as a prostitute who has sold out to the West, or a sort of zombie-mummy, manipulated by “dark forces” who have turned her into a tool against Russia.
