Argo Ideon: Drinking milk won't protect you against Moscow's official worldview
Following political debate in Russia is a hobby of rather questionable value, because at times you have to check that you yourself aren't starting to lose your mind, writes Argo Ideon.
Take, for example, the long interview with Nikolai Patrushev published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta on June 15 this year, titled "When War Is at the Door."
Patrushev is a longtime senior Russian official, a former head of the FSB security service. At 74, he belongs to the same generation as Vladimir Putin. His current positions include aide to Putin and chair of Russia's Maritime Collegium.
If a European statesman were to announce in a newspaper that our support for Ukraine stems from the same historic anti‑Russian sentiment that was expressed in the national composition of Nazi Germany's Waffen‑SS units during World War II, the first question would be: "Did you forget to take your pills this morning?"
In Russia, such a question never arises, because the supposedly Nazi nature of Europe — and even more so of Ukraine — lies beyond doubt in the mainstream narrative. In this worldview, Russia is in a constant existential conflict with the West, and it makes no real difference whether the enemy is Hitler, Zelenskyy, von der Leyen, NATO or someone else.
The war in Ukraine is therefore just one battlefield of the same war that began on June 22, 1941, and Ukraine's population must be liberated from neo‑Nazi occupation.
Patrushev highlights some details of this worldview: "Europe is once again consciously participating in the destruction of the Slavic population, this time at the hands of Ukrainian neo‑Nazis. In essence, Europe's neo‑Nazis are now doing everything to turn the European Union into a kind of Fourth Reich."
Indeed, after reading such a long text, one should drink at least two glasses of milk, as workers used to do when they were exposed to toxic chemicals. Unfortunately, it has since been discovered that milk doesn't really help.
The best protection against all kinds of verbal nonsense is probably a sense of humor. Armed with stubborn Estonian sarcasm, one can read even the FSB veteran's advice to the Baltic states. He cites Finnish Marshal Mannerheim and Romanian King Michael I as examples — leaders who at one point stopped fighting the Soviet Union. "Modern Europeans should at least learn some common sense from them. Events are developing according to a different scenario now, and some European countries are even impatient. Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but when I see Baltic mice pulling the whiskers of a cat with nuclear claws, that's the impression I get."
This time, Patrushev pays particular attention to Lithuania — perhaps because he believes Lithuanian politicians want to attack Kaliningrad, and the reader is expected to accept this as an established fact. "It is clear that Lithuanian politicians want to push all of Europe into this adventure. But surely they must understand that in the event of aggression, Lithuania's peaceful and carefree life and its sovereignty would be the first to end. And yet Vilnius keeps rushing headfirst into the wall."
His warnings to the Baltic states do not end there. Patrushev also cautions against Brussels, which he claims wants to create colonies in our region, and against the Englishmen, whom he calls the founders of racism and who, he says, have never considered Baltic peoples to be human. "Do you think anything has changed? Never will a graduate of Britain's Eton College consider an Estonian or a Latvian his equal."
This is supposed to imply an unspoken thesis: that Russia's great‑power ambition, unlike that of the Etonians, considers Baltic peoples equal partners. But neither Patrushev's appearance in Rossiyskaya Gazeta nor Russia's broader "patriotic debate" leaves such an impression.
In Russian‑language discussion, a widely used phrase about the Baltic states is трибалтийские вымираты or simply вымираты — a hard‑to‑translate slur meaning "dying‑out Baltic peoples." It appears in the social media posts of former president Dmitry Medvedev and in the repertoire of many Russian war bloggers. So much for comparisons with Eton alumni — among whom, for example, Boris Johnson visited Estonia repeatedly as both UK foreign secretary and prime minister.
Reading Russian sources — whether state media or social media — mainly reveals attitudes toward everything outside Russia's control. Not so much whether Moscow is currently planning some deliberate mischief against the Baltic states.
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