Thread by @Joanna_Szostek

The infamous "ideologist of the Russian World" Aleksandr Dugin has given a long interview to the Russian tabloid MK.
If anyone in Russia has given up on capturing Kyiv, it is definitely not Dugin.
A 🧵, if you can stomach it.

He says: Russia has been battling for Kyiv since the middle ages in a "conflict between Great Russians and the Galicians", so "Kyiv will be ours".

He says: "The siege of Kyiv is a battle for the unity of Eastern Slavs and the creation of a sovereign civilization of the Russian World, which is directed against the West."

He says: "We are waging an eschatological military operation, a special operation between Light and Darkness in the sitution of the end of times..."

He says: "Truth and God are on our side. We are fighting the absolute evil, embodied in Western civilization, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism..."

Asked about nuclear weapons, he says: "We are always balancing on a tightrope. Any weapon is created to be fired... nuclear weapons in certain circumstances, if it's a clash of civilizations, can become offensive weapons. Of course, Russia will never fire first."

He says Russia is "an empire in a sense, which absorbed everything... it won't be complete until we have united all Eastern Slavs and all Eurasian brothers into a common big space."

Asked "how to explain to Russian mothers from Mariupol that it's all a blessing", he says explanations will follow "as soon as the flag of East Ukraine, Russia, freedom and independence is raised over Kherson and Novorossiya" and republics are created in other Ukrainian regions.

Asked if Putin reads his work, he says: "I think we read the same letters written in gold in the sky of Russian history".

Now would be a good time for someone to reassure us all that Dugin is not as influential as his reputation suggests. Please?

For several thousand more words of this toxic, terrifying BS, see mk.ru/social/2022/03…