Yes, I am a patriot. I love my country, what remains of it after the tragic dissolution of the Soviet Union, and as the democratic president for life of Russia I’m obligated to preserve our Motherland and, frankly, liberate as much lost territory as possible. If I act with less foresight, hordes from the West will continue to encroach and someday try to strangle us.

Don’t deny it. You know that when the Soviet empire collapsed our adversaries vowed not to expand NATO. Yet, after a decade of plotting, they in 1999 joined unholy hands with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, shoving weapons and hateful intentions closer to our border. Did that satisfy them? No, just five years later they snared Bulgaria and Romania, endangering our fleet in the Black Sea, and grabbed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, imperiling St. Petersburg and our ships in the Baltic Sea. At the same time, in fascist fashion, they lured Slovakia and Slovenia into NATO. Thereafter five more aggressors have rushed into this dark embrace, increasing our enemies’ juggernaut by fourteen nations.

The United States and its allies must have considered us weaklings and fools, but their assessment was flawed as I’ve already shown by taking about a fifth of Georgia and all of Crimea. And today my troops, two hundred thousand strong, and tanks and cyber commandos are poised around Ukraine, once known as the Russian Breadbasket and eternally connected to us by blood.

What am I going to do, the world asks every minute? Does Putin even know what he’s doing? Indeed I do, and your threats of sanctions and Ukrainian guerilla warfare, abetted by Western arms, scare me not. I’m anyway only taking the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, rescuing our comrades there who’re being slaughtered. Don’t try to stop me from assuring the survival of my robust and growing nation or you’ll suffer more than you ever have in your history.

This is a series of stories about the Russo-Ukrainian War