Even if the “hot” war in Ukraine stops, the economic war with countries that generate more than half of global output will continue, which will bring the Russian economy to recession and a social crisis of failing to meet numerous social obligations to war veterans and their families—and very likely to a political crisis with a change of power.
Thus, Russia has not achieved a single genuine aim of the war and has ended up in a dead-end situation with poor prospects. This war has become the Kremlin’s strategic mistake. And when a strategic mistake has been made, any action, as well as inaction, only worsens the situation.
Let us examine the reasons for this failure of the country’s leadership, its intelligence services, and its diplomacy. Let us examine the Kremlin’s decision-making mechanisms that led to this mistake.

II. THE KREMLIN’S DECISION-MAKING MECHANISMS

It is already obvious that these mechanisms are based on stereotypes of Russian mass consciousness and propaganda and on historical myths, and they exclude the participation of independent, conscientious experts.
The main and most dangerous of these stereotypes is the idea of a “triune Russian people” and that Ukrainians and Belarusians are “artificially created nations.” From this point of view, it means that the mentalities of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples are the same.
This stereotype lay at the foundation of predicting Ukrainians’ reaction to the Russian invasion. But the reaction of the Ukrainian people turned out to be completely different from what had been expected, which indicates deep mental differences between the two nations. The reasons for this difference must be sought in their genesis. In the 9th century Kyiv was seized by the Rus—on the languages of all Scandinavian peoples of that time the word meant “warrior-raider”; that is what the Vikings, the sea robbers of the era, called themselves. They made the city their base for further attacks. Thus “Kyiv and its surroundings” became Rus. Therefore, the only heirs of those Rus today are Ukrainians, who inherited the positive and negative traits of those raiders. Russians have a different origin. Only, please don’t bring up the ridiculous propaganda myth invented later by the descendants of the Varangians to justify their right to rule—the “invitation of the Varangians to Rus.” That would mean Novgorod merchants—harsh, self-interested, and brave people—invited robbers to put things in order in their chests of money and warehouses of furs. Do you really believe that?
Let us turn to the authoritative Russian historian Solovyov, who divided the population of that time into two categories: muzhóv and muzhikí (or smerds). The former were the prince’s druzhina warriors or boyars (then predominantly Varangians)—real men who had weapons, could use them, and were ready to defend their honor, their loved ones, and their property with arms in hand. The latter were “small incomplete people” who could not do this and served only as a “feeding base” for the former. It is deeply symbolic that in Russia a word which before the reforms of 1863 was the name of agricultural slaves remains, to this day, a compliment to a man.
Because of the stereotype of a “triune Russian people,” the Kremlin decided that the descendants of the muzhóv would behave like the descendants of the muzhikí. This is a major mistake. The same mistake is made regarding Belarusians. The topic is so important and dangerous for us that I must dwell on it in detail.
In the penal colony I had a period when for five months they did not issue me books from the local library. So I read whatever I could get from my neighbors. Once they handed me a thick (and therefore very valuable in those conditions) book by one of the apologists of the “Russian world,” Maksim Kalashnikov. The real surname behind this machine-gun pseudonym, as one might easily guess, is the banal Kucharenko.