Three reactionary security officials dedicated to “traditional values” and restoring Soviet glory will figure prominently in the decision whether to invade Ukraine.
The West is legalizing marriage between people and animals. Ukraine’s leaders are as bad as Hitler, and the country’s nationalists are “nonhumans.”
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In remarks published by the Russian news media in the last year, these powerful men — largely born in the 1950s Soviet Union, as Mr. Putin was — have staked out even more reactionary positions than their president has, a sign of the harder-line turn that the Kremlin is taking as it escalates its fight with perceived enemies at home and abroad.
It is also a story of the Kremlin’s yearslong struggle to craft an ideology to underpin Mr. Putin’s rule: one that increasingly relies on a picture of the West as an enemy, of Ukraine as a threat and of Russia as a bulwark of “traditional values.”
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Mr. Putin is known for indulging misleading, anti-Western tropes, but his main national security adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, espouses them with even greater ardor. Mr. Putin paints a picture of enemies bent on falsifying Russia’s glorious past, but his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, has taken on the fight over history as a special priority.
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Many signs, however, point to the “radicals” gaining sway. ...
As they work to crush dissent, the hard-line security officials are also at the forefront of espousing “traditional values” as Russia’s superior alternative to a morally decaying West. ...
“Father and mother are being renamed parent number one and two,” Mr. Patrushev said in a September interview, describing the West’s “foreign” values. “They want to give children the right to determine their own sex, and in some places they’ve gotten to the point of legalizing marriage with animals.”
