Дмитрий Глуховский: "Украина - это конкурирующий проект для России. Путин не может этого допустить"
Лучший вариант для Путина - выиграть войну, но второй лучший вариант - затянуть ее на неопределенный срок, говорит Дмитрий Глуховский, российский писатель и диссидент, в эксклюзивном интервью Euronews. Он объясняет, что Украина как конкурирующий цивилизационный проект - это заноза для Путина.
ЧИТАТЬ ДАЛЕЕ : http://ru.euronews.com/2025/11/14/ru-glukhovsky-interview
Подписывайтесь: Euronews можно смотреть на Dailymotion на 12 языках
00:30Nothing to lose scenario, and then he might push the button.
00:34Anything else does not justify a nuclear war, but nuclear war blackmailing remains a very important, although right now trivial, instrument of the Russian foreign diplomacy and foreign policy.
00:50And every time that Putin thinks that his positions get slightly worse, he begins to threaten a nuclear war or test some new nuclear missiles, and this is what he just did.
01:02You know, like after Alaska, he might have had illusions that he managed to somehow convince, hypnotize Trump and recruit him, you know, to divert him from the support of Ukraine.
01:18And then the recent statements by Trump, including the introduction of the new sanctions, are actually proving that it was not a success.
01:27So he's resorting to his usual thing, the nuclear war blackmailing.
01:31This does not mean at all that he might ever use it, right?
01:34It's just the incident of pressure on both the American side and most of all on the European side.
01:41But, you know, how many times can you claim that you're going to push the button without pushing it?
01:47I think that the sensitivity of both Europeans and Americans to these tests of nuclear power are going down, and this is what we see.
01:56I still do not think that Vladimir Putin will use a nuclear weapon during this war unless he perceives the situation as existential threat to him personally, to his power and to his physical existence.
02:15The purpose of this war is to eliminate Ukraine as an independent country and turn it into a fully controllable satellite of Russia.
02:23It can be, like, invaded and controlled, or it can, because of some kind of inner political change, become just fully controllable by Russia
02:32and stop being a competing civilizational project to what Vladimir Putin is building in Russia.
02:38This entire situation stems from the fact that Ukraine has repeatedly, the Ukrainian people have repeatedly overthrown usurping rulers,
02:49and then the ghost or spirit or the threat of a revolution is the only thing that actually is considered as a real menace to Vladimir Putin's rule.
03:03A peace right now does not help him to achieve it, because it just freezes the situation.
03:08So, meanwhile, he thinks that he's dragging with the negotiations, and meanwhile, his troops are advancing.
03:12So, he thinks that he's winning time.
03:15He believes, maybe because of being disinformed, living in this bubble created by the intelligence services,
03:21that he is actually winning this war, even if the economy is not going as well as he expected,
03:27and with the new sanctions, it will go even worse.
03:30But still, he thinks strategically, he thinks that he has a decade ahead of him, maybe more.
03:35Western leaderships will change because of elections.
03:37Public will grow tired because of paying for this war.
03:40He thinks that he has a lot of time.
03:42Since the big draft of September 2022, where more than 300,000 people have been drafted,
03:57and most of them, if alive, they're still fighting, right?
04:02Since then, they have generally largely changed that by paying the mercenaries.
04:08So, Russians are being paid 2,000 to 3,000 euros, depending on which region they're coming from, with original supplement, da-da-da-da, for months of fighting, right?
04:21And they're getting paid the tenfold for signing the contract.
04:26And it definitely pays off the risks of getting killed, because it's more, actually, than an average Russian man, especially in his 30s and 40s, would have ever been able to earn otherwise in a peaceful life.
04:40So, I think that it will be balancing, depending on the economy situation, because next year, half the Russian budget is going to be directed to the national security things.
04:48So, both special services and the army will eat up half of the Russian state budget next year, which is unimaginable.
04:55And it has not been like that since the Soviet time, and maybe even then.
04:58We know that a lot of expenses of the Russian state budget are getting cut.
05:04The less money they will have to actually buy people into going to the army, kill and get killed,
05:11the more they will have to go through fear and compulsion.
05:16And that potentially will cause some unrest.
05:20But they know about it, so they're preparing both repressive measures, and as much and as long as they can, they try to bribe people into selling their soul.
05:33I don't believe, personally, that it had to do with the ethnic discrimination.
05:39It just had to do with the fact that some of these ethnically populated, like Buryatia regions, are just massively poorer.
05:47And so, the offer to go to the army is much more attractive to them, because the money is just unimaginable.
05:55I think that overall, speaking in terms of whether that provokes a tension between Moscow and the regions,
06:02what we have seen is quite the contrary.
06:06Because of these payments that have not been preceded in Russian history and unparalleled,
06:13a lot of regions were springing back to life.
06:18Also, a lot of the military industry factories that have been neglected during the past Soviet years
06:26and suffered from conversion and suffered from employment,
06:30right now they are remanned, restaffed, and they're getting a lot of money from the state budget.
06:35Basically, I would say that all the surplus that would be before just wasted or spent on the yachts in the French Riviera,
06:46right now, like it's being taken and sent to finance the war and the army.
06:52And this money is lending in the poor and industrial regions.
06:56It's lending with the families who have sacrificed their fathers and sons and brothers.
07:05But the money is there.
07:07So, at the moment, it looks like it has rebalanced in a way, right?
07:11So, there is no massive popular unrest because of the war, because people have been bought and paid for.
07:17So, now, the thing is that money, the nature of money is that it ends up ending, you know,
07:27like, and that is what happens to the money.
07:31It's getting spent and people never return.
07:35And definitely, in the longer term, there's going to be like very severe implications
07:40of luring people to death and tempting them with money in a really satanic kind of, like, deal offered
07:49that they are not able to resist because of their poverty.
07:53People who will return from this war, and there's going to be like millions of them, probably, overall, right?
07:59Some of them maimed physically and some of them maimed psychologically.
08:03They will be present in the Russian cities.
08:05These people will know how to murder, and these people will know how to burn, and these people will know how to rape.
08:12It was that hallucinating case when a former businessman came back from the front line,
08:18and he found a St. Petersburg architect who owed him money, and he killed him.
08:23But in the 90s, this hard killing would be just shoot and run.
08:28Like, he came out of the elevator next to the flat of this architect he was killing.
08:34The architect was with his little daughter.
08:38He put both of them on their knees, and he shot him in the back of his head in front of his daughter.
08:44He was on his knees.
08:45So that the war crime execution style, and that's just a random businessman who learned new things on the front line.
08:53Completely unimaginable atrocity just a few years ago in Russia.
08:59And these people will come back in hundreds of thousands, right?
09:02So this is posing a tremendous risk, not just to Putin's rule, but to the future of the country.
09:10When the war started, I thought, and I was saying that it would last, like, for a decade.
09:23So the basic calculation is that Vladimir Putin cannot really stop this war.
09:29Stopping this war without wanted results means that he lost.
09:32In this case, like, immediately all the support that he has had as a strong dictator turns against him.
09:39We have seen that happening two and a half years ago when the troops of Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner, turned against Putin and were marching in Moscow.
09:49And Putin did not have an immediate response to that, and he hid.
09:52And immediately, the next day, everybody was speaking about the fact that he's not a real emperor, he's not a real czar, you know.
09:58Like, you either project the fear on everybody all the time, but as soon as you show weakness, it all turns against you.
10:06Like, so there is no, basically, the best option for him is to win the war.
10:10The second best option is to continue this war forever.
10:13Because when this war goes forever, there's an ongoing state of emergency, you can do whatever.
10:18So he might say he's happy with taking that, the entire Donbass.
10:23But that would require Zelensky to retreat from Donbass, that would weaken Zelensky's positions inside the country,
10:29and that will ultimately increase Putin's, like, stake in Ukraine.
10:35So a few years will go by, just as it happened with Crimea, then Donbass, and then this incursion.
10:41Russia will rearm, Russia will regroup, and Russia will strike again,
10:46because it cannot afford existence of a competing project with democracy pro-Western,
10:52populated with the same kind of people next to it, borders.
10:55It's the existence of independent Ukraine in the personal life of every Russian
11:00that actually is challenging Putin more than anything else.
11:03All the other elements he has completely under his control.
11:06This is a very unsettling and very challenging thing.
11:09So it has to be dealt with.
11:10And that's the main reason for this war.
11:13It's the threat to the personal power of the autocrat.
11:17Now, as long as he's in power, this war continues.
11:20The next generation will be able to fully reset it,
11:23because it's not about Russian national security,
11:25it's about the security of the power of this person.
11:28As soon as he's gone, for natural or unnatural reasons, everything changes.
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