By Aleksandr Dugin
Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin is a highly respected political philosopher, analyst, and strategist in Russia whose reputation in the West is being questioned by legacy media through targeted propaganda.
Because of his philosophical closeness to Vladimir Putin, his daughter Darya Dugina was murdered a few weeks ago by a Ukrainian special agent who in turn got killed later in revenge as well.
Read also: Check out our coverage on curated alternative narratives
Here are Dugin’s thoughts on the present situation in Russia and beyond.
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For Moscow, this is a mortal battle – for us, therefore, everything is at stake.
On the other hand, the Sea (West) would not suffer much even if it were to lose all of Ukraine.
We have been fighting for eight months, spilling rivers of blood, losing many lives, including innocent ones, breaking all ties and agreements, taking risks, advancing, retreating, striking, and taking blows.
And already terrorist attacks on Russian territory have become the norm, and each new attack is getting nastier and harsher, and everyone has the strange feeling that we are waiting for something.
A kind of red line… Everything that could be crossed has been crossed.
In the current situation, it is neither possible to surrender nor to negotiate. Either we will win, and victory will be total, or we will lose, and then we will not even be allowed to open our mouths.
We are not waiting for anything. There is nothing to wait for.
We must join the fight and go to the front; those who are not with us are against us, the front is not only outside the western borders of the Motherland, but it runs inside Russia.
It is now everywhere, and if someone looks like a traitor and acts like a traitor, they are most likely a traitor.
There is no need to wait any longer.
Everything depends on us, on each one of us. Power alone, without the people, without society, in a purely technical, surgically precise, and rapid manner, as it seems to have been planned at the beginning, has not been able to win this battle.
if it is now our war, the authorities also have obligations before the people and society.
Strategies must be formulated clearly and unemotionally.
Then everything will go as it should, and no one will wait any longer. One does not wait at the front; one fights at the front.
In a people’s war, the people are the power. The state ‘is’ us.
The government’s first and foremost obligation to the people is to win the war. Yes, altogether, but to win.
If there are no resources, let’s create them together, find them, and pull them out of the ground.
If there are incompetent idiots at the top, let’s look downstairs, two-story, three-story; let’s turn to those who have been sidelined, silenced, ignored, and feared for various reasons.
This is obviously where the solution lies.
If people are patriotic and eager to participate in Victory, sparing nothing, then let them try; if they fail we will take others.
We have a great nation, but we must open the doors leading to victory and glory and mercilessly weed out those attached to their position.
It is necessary to stop the process of rotation of elites in critical conditions for the country; when one decides to be or not to be, it is in itself a betrayal.
There are no red lines; we are on the other side.
The enemy’s attacks will continue in all directions: the war has been going on for a long time inside Russia and can reach everyone.
Outside Russia, the demonic scum will attack and tear every Russian apart, without listening to their excuses.
The people’s war begins when a deadly threat looms over the entire nation and the part of it that does not consider itself a people or has never thought about it, and this part is now a target.
The front is here, now.
From time to time, we need to call a spade a spade. The unspoken and half-truths produce labyrinths of ambiguity, which in turn create whirlpools and turbulent currents in which truth disperses, and dissolves.
Moving in the wake of the conjuncture, words and discourses degenerate irreversibly. Ultimately, no one believes anyone anymore, and everything comes crashing down.
We are close to this point, so we must have the courage to make things clear.
The limit is the undermining of the Crimean bridge.
Then there is the truth – as hard as it may be – and the hard road to salvation and victory. Or… And this you can guess for yourself, I don’t want to scare anyone – everyone is, I think, sufficiently aware of the gravity of our situation.
There is international law, and there is geopolitics. International law describes how things should look; geopolitics describes how things are.
There is always a gap between ‘being’ and ‘seeming’.
Geopolitically speaking, in 1991 Russia suffered a colossal defeat in the battle of Land versus Sea (Heartland versus Rimland, according to the categories of classical geopolitics, Ed.).
We surrendered, threw down the white flag, and called it Yeltsin (the Yeltsin Centre is the same thing, a monument to defeat and betrayal).
Moreover, we accepted the ‘truth’ of the enemy, its value system, its norms, its rules, parliamentarianism, liberal democracy, the ideology of individualism, hedonism, and comfort, the market.
Thus the Russian Federation was born, as a vassal of the West, and Moscow was forced to recognize the independence of its former territories, the republics, which gained their independence from us and automatically became dependent on the West.
Where the Land goes, the Sea comes. That is the law. Three of the Baltic territories were immediately included in NATO; the others fell into line.
Internationally, this was reflected in the Russian Federation’s recognition of the independence of the former parts of Greater Russia, but it was only a reflection of geopolitical realities.
Motherland had lost and was forced to recognize the will of the victorious Sea.
We were further ‘forced’ to give away Chechnya, the North Caucasus, the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East.
Take as much sovereignty as you want,” it said.
At the end of 1993, Yeltsin suddenly realized and decided that he was no longer ‘forced’.
Thus began the first Chechen campaign. It was a terrible, shameful, monstrous campaign, but… it was the first sign that there was something in Russia that resisted its complete occupation by the Sea.
The liberals were on the side of the separatists.
Our reformers saw themselves as a colonial administration, the gauleiter of subjugated areas in a geopolitical war. The Russian Federation was conceived as a colonial entity with minimal sovereignty, and this sovereignty was to become less and less.
The post-Soviet space, and in the plans of Western strategists the post-Russian space, was to gradually come under the direct control of NATO, and the fifth column of liberals ruling in Moscow at the time was to facilitate this process in any way possible.
This included sabotaging the first Chechen campaign.
This culminated in the Khasavyurt peace process and the consolidation of the oligarchs around Yeltsin, who had completely lost the people’s trust and ability to govern.
General Lebed is the prime example of a high-ranking Russian military officer who betrayed the state and went into the enemy’s service.
It all ended in the late 1990s when the Western-controlled Wahhabis invaded Moscow and Dagestan and directed terror (attacks, sabotage, raids).
Russia’s ‘forcing’ towards further disintegration continued. The situation became critical, as it is now, indeed more so than then.
Then came the Putin era, which was a radical change, first and foremost in geopolitics. The Earth refused to disintegrate and began a desperate struggle to regain sovereignty.
This is the second Chechen campaign, very difficult, but victorious.
It forged the phenomenon of Kadyrov and the power of the Mainland, Eurasia, and Hartland, which defended itself against the assault of the Sea.
Putin is now on the road to geopolitical reconquest; this is his mission.
Putin is Eurasia returning to its subjectivity. And nothing else. Everything else is non-Putin.
At the level of international law, Russia’s rise from its knees has already been compressed into a framework of recognition of the independence of the countries of the former USSR, and this form of ‘coercion’ has been secured by the geopolitical potential of NATO.
In a speech in Munich in 2007, Putin challenged this status quo in the geopolitical balance on a theoretical level.
In 2008, in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia challenged the post-Soviet status quo in practice.
That is, the strengthening of our geopolitical sovereignty led us to dare to change the post-Soviet borders. Geopolitics came into play, compressing international law.
Then came Maidan, the reunification of Crimea, and the Donbas rebellion.
Maidan became the Sea’s gesture of attack, while Crimea and Donbas became the Earth’s response. Once again, we have restructured international law to fit geopolitics.
International law contains an ambiguous clause about the priority of the territorial integrity of nation-states and at the same time the right of peoples to self-determination.
In practice, it always results in a geopolitical balance of power between Land and Sea.
The Heartland insists that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are independent, while Crimea, today’s Donetsk and Lugansk Republics, Kherson, and Zaporizhia are ours.
Sea insists Yugoslavia is no more and Kosovo is ‘independent’. Only force. Only geopolitics.
And international law adapts post factum to what emerges in geopolitical practice. Geopolitics is the naked truth, while international law is a superstructure, a suit, a frame.
Now consider the SMO (Russian special military operation): it was initiated because the country decided to take a further step to restore its position in the balance of power.
Moscow’s behavior in the Putin era, and thus in the period of restoring geopolitical sovereignty, has not been very consistent with international law, which established the existence of nation-states in the post-Soviet space.
The difference is that Russia under Yeltsin was semi-colonial, whereas under Putin it has taken the road to true independence.
However, the Yeltsin Centre exists, as does Moscow’s formal recognition of Ukraine as a ‘nation-state’.
There are also liberal reformers in Russia itself, as continuity and even as a compromise between betrayal and loyalty.
This ambivalence led to 2014.
Stopping our eastward movement in Ukraine and trying to settle for Crimea was a mistake. This is now obvious to everyone.
Why keep lying about the ‘cunning plan’?
There was none, but the connection to Yeltsin’s center, the attachment to the 1990s, the West, globalism, and the sea was responsible for this fatal mistake.
We are back to the same point, only in a much worse starting position, which could have been solved by the success of the SMO in its first phase, but this did not happen.
From a geopolitical point of view, Russia cannot even allow the very existence of Ukraine as the bridgehead of the Atlantic, Sea, and Western Terrorist Organisations.
All geopoliticians – from the founder of this science, Mackinder, the former Entente Commissioner for Ukraine, and Zbigniew Brzezinski to our Eurasians and the modern Russian school of geopolitics – have understood this very well.
Russia is a subject, an empire, an independent geopolitical force only together with Ukraine (at least together with Novorossia).
This is… the law. Mackinder and Brzezinski have concluded that the West must get Ukraine out from under Russia’s feet at all costs.
Russian geopoliticians have come to the exact opposite conclusion: Ukraine and Russia (as well as other parts of Greater Russia, the post-Soviet space) must stand with Russia or at least be neutral.
Direct hostility and control over them by the Sea is ruled out, and no international law is an obstacle here. If we are indeed Russia, then there should be no anti-Russia along our borders.
In other words: the Belovezh Accords (Minsk agreements) as a signature of our loss only exist as long as Russia remains under the Western rule, weak and basically occupied, led by a colonial elite.
If Russia is truly sovereign, it is the only one that should be so in the entire post-Soviet space.
This is what the SMO is all about.
When diplomacy, economics, and international treaties begin, all this no longer matters. Only geopolitics remains. Only victory, at all levels and on all fronts.
This is the first time that Russia intends to review the geopolitical results of the Cold War on a large scale.
It means that Russia has decided – it has already decided, we are talking about the recent past and the present, not just the future – to change the unipolar world order and enter into direct conflict with the Sea Civilisation, with its Anglo-Saxon core.
It is a mortal battle for Moscow – but only for the requirements to become an empire.
For us, therefore, everything is at stake. On the other hand, the Sea would not suffer much even if it lost all of Ukraine.
There will still be many ways in which the West will try to stifle it with sanctions, trade restrictions, and technological starvation.
But for us, the weakness of the SMO is simply fatal.
It is impossible, nor necessary, to explain to anyone that we were forced to initiate it and that we were guided only by humanitarian considerations. This is rhetoric. We have staked everything on the real sovereignty of civilization.
It is, therefore, necessary to realize this. Russia has decided to change the world order and now the entire society must be quickly rebuilt in a new Eurasian and patriotic way.
It concerns the power structures, where obviously many problems accumulated during the semi-colonial era.
In part, there is real sabotage – the skillful promotion to key positions of blatantly inept figures, the marginalization of deserving and strong leaders, the deliberate immersion in countless technical details, and, finally, outright corruption – effectively legalized by capitalism and the ‘Yeltsin Centre’ era.
We see this in the behavior of Voentorg during the partial mobilization and everywhere else.
The main problem today is our energy potential, the roots of which lie in society, the absence of ideology, the comfortable and decadent lifestyle, and the reality imposed on us after the defeat and capitulation of the 1990s.
We are reaping the fruits of a paradigmatic mental occupation of Russia.
Putin has already given the end signal, but to whom has he given it?
If not the direct influencers, then the products of this long-term sabotage – the spoiled, corrupt, cynical, and often simply incompetent and intellectually inferior (in caring for their own bellies, however, they are quite complete) representatives of the elite that developed in the black 1990s.
And this rubbish is designed to ensure Russia’s victory in the most difficult confrontation with a monstrous enemy, resolute, technically equipped, and maniacally convinced of its rightness…
This is certainly not about the Ukrainians, who are zombified victims among the Eastern Slavs, and who are our brothers.
It is about the West, about the Sea civilization, about the plans of the globalist elites to turn world domination into a triumph of Satan’s civilization, and they are determined to do it.
Look what modern Western gender and post-humanist culture and philosophy have turned into, a veritable direct chanting of hell.
In Russia itself, a moment of radical, rapid, and urgent change has arrived.
A moment when the words ‘brothers and sisters’ rather than ‘dear Russians’ come from the heart.
“All for the front and all for victory” rather than the pathetic babbling of officials trying to unite the inseparable.
The sacred war of the entire nation not for life but death, and the rules of international law that no one respects.
To break through the fronts, we must fight hard within. The era of half-measures and compromises is over, and our battle has every chance of being, this time, the last.
Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini
This post is mirrored and was published first in Russia.
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