Thread by @amramleifer

What is really at stake.

Possibly the most important outcome to be expected from the Russian defeat - and what will make it fundamentally different from previous defeats against Japan (1905), Poland (1920), Finland (1940) and Afghanistan (1989)... (1/15)

... is that this time, it is the very claim of Russian intrinsic superiority, and the natural inferiority of neighbouring cultures, which is about to be shattered. (2/15)

This claim is so ingrained in Russia's self-image that it survived the fall of the Soviet Union almost unscathed. Even as it was sent fully dressed into third world status, Russia kept seeing itself as the great culture, the great warrior country... (3/15)

... and the nation of scientists, builders and engineers - and all its neighbours as underdeveloped bumpkins, to be treated either as exotic children or as potential threats. (4/15)

This claim of intrinsic superiority prevented Russians from feeling any real remorse - when they even knew about them - for the invasions, man-made famines, destructions and genocides which they repeatedly visited upon their neighbours over the centuries. (5/15)

In their view, the world was a tough place and the superior race had to do what it had to do; the victims, after all, were only Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Balts, Chechens etc - none of them as fully human as only the Russians could be. (6/15)

This worldview was so potent that even the victim cultures were simultaneously rejecting it, resenting it, and yet absorbing it to a large extent. (7/15)

After all, to succeed as an individual, one had to russify one's language, appearance and cultural references. Local elites became steeped in a semi-Russian identity; (8/15)

... and it is only a short way from there to belief, or half-belief, that everything Russian is, indeed, superior. Even when Russia suffered an occasional defeat, this was seen more as a momentary glitch than as a reason to cast doubt on the entire belief system. (9/15)

But this time, the perception has been fully reversed. Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan - and now Uzbekistan -...(10/15)

... are the ones who succeeded in building robust societies and economies, attract foreign capital and build trust within their societies and with partners. (11/15)

Russia, meanwhile, is finally being revealed for what it always was: a semi-civilised, predatory, paranoid horde, a lunatic asylum in which no one can be trusted for a second, a large gang of hooligans pretending to be a nation, relishing in gratuitous cruelty... (12/15)

... incapable of applying simple rationality to the topics that demand its most: manufacturing and war.

Since the world saw how the invasion was going, there is simply no argument left to support the Russian claim to intrinsic superiority. (13/15)

Russians realise it and, with the exception of a virtuous minority, are consumed with rage.

More importantly, the neighbouring nations know this, too. They see that after a long wait of three to four centuries, the time has finally come... (14/15)

...to leave of their feelings of inferiority behind and to take their full place as equal members in the family of human cultures. These are terrible times. But as all Russian claims to cultural superiority collapse in front of our eyes, these are glorious times. (15/15)