An uncharacteristically brilliant article from the New York Times, and very ... evenly-balanced one today
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/world/europe/putins-forever-war.html
Here are some quotes:
“My mother gave me the clock 10 years ago because she thought I criticized them too much!” he said. “You know, our usual Russian grumbling, taxes and corruption. We criticize — the czars, Stalin and his gulag, Yeltsin — and we accept.”
More recently, just before Mr. Gorbachev’s death on Aug. 30, 2022, Mr. Muratov, the Novaya editor, visited his friend as he lay in a Moscow hospital ... There was a big TV in his room. On it, playing over and over, were images of bombings and explosions in Ukraine. As Mr. Muratov left the room, he heard Mr. Gorbachev say: “Who could be happy because of this?”
The subway is spotless; restaurants offering a popular Japanese-Russian fusion cuisine overflow; people make contactless payments for most things using their phones; there is a ridiculous concentration of luxury cars; the internet functions impeccably, as it does in all of Russia.
The war is nowhere to be seen, other than in the billboards from the Ministry of Defense and, until recently, Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group (now of uncertain future) that try to lure recruits with slogans like, “Heroes are not born, they become heroes.”
“We did not see the Putin who was on a historical mission of revenge,” he told me. “We thought he was a corrupt guy from a poor family who wanted yachts and palaces and girls and money. We did not see the K.G.B. officer who thought the loss of the Soviet Union was unjust. We thought he was a cynic. In fact, he was a romantic.”