06/16/2026
Silicon Bites Ep352 | 2026-06-16 | This is the doctrine. The doctrine is the Empire of Savages. Savagery in this analytical frame is not the absence of values. Savagery is the active deployment of an alternative value system that treats the protections of international humanitarian law, the heritage of pluralistic civilisation, the existence of the autonomous nation, and the sanctity of religious and cultural sites as enemy property to be destroyed. The Russian state has not failed to understand the laws of war. The Russian state has rejected them — actively, doctrinally, and operationally — in favour of an alternative imperial framework that celebrates the destruction of pluralistic heritage as the restoration of properly-Russian civilisational primacy. It is still a crime.
The vertical mindset— the vertikal, the Russian-imperial framework of centralised authoritarian rule under a single sovereign — is the political-structural correlate of this doctrinal framework. In the vertical mindset, values do not exist as independent constraints on power. Values exist only insofar as they serve the sovereign’s project. Ukrainian democracy, Ukrainian pluralism, Ukrainian European-civilisational orientation are, in this framework, not alternative legitimate value systems. They are contempt-worthy errors that the sovereign’s project is justified in correcting through violence. The Russian state’s contempt for Ukraine — visible in every speech, every targeting decision, every cultural-heritage strike — is operationally informed by the perceived inferiority of pluralistic-democratic values of the West and Ukraine compared to the vertical-imperial framework.
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