JRL NEWSWATCH: “Reactionary, obscurantist and having a day in the sun; The new Russian cult of war; It has been growing unnoticed for some time” – The Economist
“… Navalny … was sentenced to another nine years imprisonment[] … probably … [in] a yet harsher maximum-security jail …. [h]is true crime … that for which … Ukraine [is] now suffering collective punishment. The Ukrainians want to embrace many, if not all, the values held dear by other European nations. [] Navalny wants the same for Russia. … Putin cannot countenance either …. [Putin’s] crusade against a liberal European future is being fought in the name of Russkiy mir—’the Russian world,’ a previously obscure historical term for a Slavic civilisation based on shared ethnicity, religion and heritage. The Putin regime has revived, promulgated and debased this idea into an obscurantist anti-Western mixture of Orthodox dogma, nationalism, conspiracy theory and security-state Stalinism. The war is the latest and most striking manifestation of this revanchist ideological movement. … [I]t has brought to the fore a dark and mystical component within it, one a bit in love with death. … ‘[in which] [t]he legitimacy of the state is now grounded not in its public good, but in a quasi-religious cult. …'”