Russia has always been a giant with feet of clay

As we mark four years of a brutal and poorly calculated invasion, reality inevitably imposes itself, as recalled this week in the DN Leonídio Paulo Ferreira editorial: the war in Ukraine has been going on for longer than the Soviet participation in the Second World War (1941-1945) against Nazi troops. For those who were raised on the propaganda of the “Unstoppable Army” led by Moscow, all this time is a humiliation. But for anyone who understands the historical reality – at least of the last 150 years – of Russian power, it is just confirmation of a truth, for many, inconvenient: contemporary Russia is (and in fact always has been) a giant with feet of clay.

Russia’s first structural flaw is its disregard for competence. Both in the Soviet mire and in Putin’s kleptocratic regime, the rise to power does not depend on merit, but on vassalage. In a system in which loyalty to the mayor or the oligarch is the only currency, corruption stops being a vice and becomes the very engine of the State. The result is visible: an Army that consumes billions of rubles, but on the ground appears to be a disorganized force, dependent on saturation tactics from the last century, because intelligence and precision were stolen by generals on yachts in the Mediterranean.

Then there is the permanent lie. Even the narrative that the USSR defeated Nazism alone is one of the greatest intellectual frauds in Modern History, still perpetuated today by Western “useful idiots” – the same ones that former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov explained, in the 1980s, would be the first to be executed if communism gained power.

The historical truth is that the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” only succeeded thanks to the program Lend-Lease from the USA. The numbers are objective, although the Kremlin tries to erase them: between 1941 and 1945, the Americans sent more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 planes, 13,000 tanks and almost 5 million tons of food to the USSR. And more than weapons, the US provided the logistics (including 2.6 million tons of petroleum products and 300,000 tons of explosives) that allowed the Red Army to move. Without this Western “oxygen”, the Soviet giant would have suffocated to death. The US provided the logistics that allowed the USSR to hold out and, aided by the fierce winter and heavy human casualties, defeat the Nazis.

Today, history has reversed itself with a biting irony: Ukraine is the new bastion of freedom supported by the West, while Russia begs drones to Iran and obsolete ammunition to North Korea.

This strategic inability of Moscow is compensated by cold brutality. Putin embodies Sowell’s “Vision of the Anointed”: the belief that an enlightened elite can shape the world by force, ignoring the human costs. It is the opposite of the “Restricted View”, which recognizes the sacredness of individual life. The world realized this in 2000, faced with the horror of the submarine disaster Kursk. Margaret Thatcher, in an interview with the BBC, then denounced the nature of the regime, criticizing Moscow’s criminal refusal to accept immediate international aid to save its own sailors. For Putin, like all his collectivist predecessors (with the possible exception of Gorbachev), human beings are just fuel for the empire.

This moral bankruptcy is absolute in the face of any decent ethics, smithiana. Adam Smith taught us that morality depends on the “impartial spectator” and empathy. But in the Kremlin, empathy has been replaced for more than a century by a state psychopathy that sees its own people as nothing more than “cannon fodder”, disposable in the name of territorial delusions.

Unable to win on merit, Russia now uses its last and vilest tool: the deployed population. The forced deportation of Ukrainians and their replacement with Russian citizens in cities like Mariupol is not just a war crime; it is an attempt at profound demographic change. It is the creation of a social time bomb, a demographic cancer designed to prevent peace.

Russia seems doomed to repeat the mistakes of a past that it refuses to bury, preferring to permanently rewrite it. Hence the popular saying: “Russia is a country with a radiant future. It is its past that is unpredictable.” As long as the State is an end in itself and the individual is a simple resource, as Putin and those around him want to perpetuate, the Russian people will never have a future. The giant continues to march, but his trail of blood indicates that his destiny is not glory, but a cyclical collapse that drags the world into unhappiness.