An Example Of Cannibalism
- Vitaly Portnikov, vilni-media
- 3.09.2026, 9:54
You couldn't put it any better: he's better than the real Tolstoy, not some nobody with a famous last name.
Just a few weeks ago, one could still hear the familiar rhetoric about liberating Ukrainians from the Nazis, about the dominance of the West, which is at war with Russia, and about “one people” forcibly divided by the accursed “nationalists.”
But now, the deputy chairman of Russia’s State Duma from Putin’s United Russia party Pyotr Tolstoy calls for the destruction of Ukrainian cities and claims that there are no innocent people in Ukraine. Meanwhile, a State Duma deputy from another pro-Putin party—Fair Russia—Alexei Zhuravlev calls the potential use of nuclear weapons a duty of the Russian Federation and compares Ukrainians to… the Japanese, who became allies of the United States after the atomic bombings. Although, one might ask, what does this have to do with Americans and Japanese on the one hand, and Ukrainians and Russians on the other? After all, no one has ever referred to Americans and Japanese as a single people, have they?
Putin’s henchmen understand that the war is not going at all as the Kremlin had planned. That the army is not advancing at the pace Putin’s generals promised him. That Europeans continue to help Ukraine even after the United States cut back on its aid. That the blows to the Russian economy are creating serious problems for the future functioning of the Chekist regime. And they’re ready to take out their anger on women and children—literally! After all, the crackdown on Kyiv and the Kyiv region is, in essence, compensation for the inability to force Ukraine’s surrender.
I won’t call this a death throe. The Putin regime is still far, very far, from its death throes, and I do not rule out that, on the path to collapse, the Russian president will unleash several more wars of aggression. But this is a genuine confession before a military tribunal, a frank exposition of Russia’s intentions. What Tolstoy, Zhuravlev, and other Russian propagandists and officials are saying now completely shatters the myth of “brotherhood” and liberation.
Russian chauvinists have never thought this way before, and they have always treated Ukrainians as outsiders; and they have always viewed the seizure of Ukrainian lands precisely as an occupation—one need only read the documents from the time of the Pereyaslav Rada and the Bolshevik assault on Ukraine to see this. But they have always gladly lied to justify the seizure of foreign lands, to explain why they kill, plunder, and burn.
And now they have stopped lying. And they’ve demonstrated that we’re dealing with the banality of pure evil, which no longer even tries to pass itself off as good. And indeed—why would the devil hide the fact that he has a tail, when everyone can see it anyway? So Tolstoy isn’t hiding it anymore either.
Speaking of Tolstoy—that cannibal and scoundrel, who is a direct descendant of the famous Russian writer. Exactly 117 years ago, Leo Tolstoy emphasized in a letter—one that was never sent—to a high-ranking Russian official that he was writing “about a very pitiful man, the most pitiful of all those I now know in Russia. You know this man and, strange as it may seem, you love him, but you do not grasp the full extent of his misfortune and do not pity him as his situation deserves. This man is you yourself… I cannot comprehend the blindness that allows you to continue your appalling actions, for by your current conduct you have already earned that dreadful reputation, by which you will always be perceived as a paragon of rudeness, cruelty, and deceit.”
Today, these words by the Russian classic could just as well be addressed to his deceitful great-grandson, and to those whom he serves—Putin, the KGB and army generals, and all those complicit in the declared murder of peaceful Ukrainians. No one could have put it better than Tolstoy himself—the real Tolstoy, that is, not some nobody with a famous surname. All these people are the embodiment of rudeness, cruelty, and lies.
Vitaly Portnikov, vilni-media