19.05.2026

“Why are you doing this to us? What have we done to you? Enough. Stop it. It’s just a nightmare,” a Moscow resident who complained about Ukrainian drones against the backdrop of the Kremlin became almost a meme due to the stunning ignorance of Russians and the complete lack of self-reflection.

Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, fueled and supported separatist movements in eastern Ukraine, and launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, the Russians have inflicted untold death, loss, and suffering on Ukrainians. Cities wiped off the face of the earth. Hundreds of thousands killed. The largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, when up to 11 million people were forced to abandon their usual lives. Billions of dollars in damage.

Tortured and starved POWs in Russian prisons. Kidnapped civilians. Stolen children. Torture chambers in occupied territories. Drone hunting of civilians in Kherson. Starving Oleszki. Ecological disasters. Destruction of energy infrastructure to freeze Ukrainians in winter. Direct missile and drone strikes on residential buildings, hospitals, schools, and kindergartens. Double strikes. The extermination of an entire generation of the brightest, bravest, and most patriotic Ukrainians who stood up for their land from the very first days, and very few of them are still alive. Thousands of young widows. Nine floors of a high-rise building that collapsed next to my parents’ house after a missile strike that killed 24 people, including two sisters who had already lost their father. The Russians killed their mother’s entire family. I could go on with this list for days – just like any other Ukrainian, in Ukraine or abroad.

So why ask? What could possibly be going through these people’s minds to ask such a question with such sincere lack of understanding?

Can they really not know about the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine? I don’t believe it. They may not know all the facts listed above, but they do know for sure that there is a war going on between the two countries.

Were they ordered by the FSB or someone else to feign this naivety for propaganda purposes? I don’t believe it either. Their reaction seems too natural, and I don’t see how demonstrating the ignorance of the population could help the Russian authorities achieve any of their goals. Will the sanctions be lifted just because the people of Moscow don’t understand cause and effect? ​​I don’t think so.

Do they consider themselves to be some special people who have the right to live, while Ukrainians were created by God only to satisfy their leaders’ thirst for death and destruction, so that their soldiers could earn money and the economy could run on Ukrainian blood? I think that is closer to the truth. Russia became the largest country on Earth by constantly expanding its control over new territories, exterminating a significant part of the indigenous population and assimilating and exploiting the rest. Perhaps many Russians now subconsciously believe that they are destined to be the aggressors and others – Ukrainians in particular – the victims. Why then should the natural order of things change?

However, I believe that another explanation for this behavior lies in the infantilization of Russians, which is described by the writer Elvira Bari, a Russian who tries to explain the nature of Russian government and society to a foreign audience. I found her videos very interesting.

She writes that when she watches videos of Muscovites complaining about Ukrainian drones over Moscow, she doesn’t see adults. She sees little boys and girls.

“Men see something flying in the sky, film it on their phones and curse in confusion. Something has finally broken the boring routine of everyday life, and their reaction is almost childish: ‘Damn. Wow. Look at that.’ It’s the reaction of children. Girls and boys. Girls cry and panic. Boys watch with rapt curiosity to see what’s burning.”

Bari explains that for centuries, Russian rulers kept the population “in a state of artificial childhood.”

“Serfdom meant that you couldn’t do anything without the permission of a father figure – the master. He had the same power over you as a father in a patriarchal family. The Soviet system worked the same way. This infantilism was cultivated deliberately and systematically, because it is one of the foundations of political power in Russia. Otherwise, how could you rule millions of people? If they were truly adults – people capable of making independent decisions – no secret service in the world would be enough to control them.

An infantilized person does not ask the head of the family what he is doing and why. He perceives everything as part of the natural order. The father knows best. The father feeds you, clothes you, punishes you, beats you, deprives you of your inheritance – or, conversely, makes you a favorite child. This is not a question of morality or values. This is a question of social structure. This is one of the reasons why there were no mass protests in Russia against the war in Ukraine.”

In 2014, during the annexation of Crimea, I was shocked when my former classmate, who lives in Moscow, told me that I couldn’t be outraged because “the people above have already decided everything,” “we can’t know everything,” and “who are we to challenge it?” In effect, she completely delegated not only political decisions but also moral judgment to the authorities, refusing to even consider the fact that her country had attacked mine.

We heard similar words from relatives and other people, which can be reduced to the phrase: “We are small people, and nothing depends on us” – the complete opposite of how Ukrainians perceive themselves and their relationships with the authorities.

This may also explain the burning hatred of the popular uprising in Kyiv in 2014 and the desire to punish Ukrainians for “jumping on the Maidan.” The point is not that Russians hate jumping per se, but that Ukrainians acted without the permission of the authorities – and in fact against them – thereby destroying the entire Russian picture of the world.

It also helps explain how easily Yevgeny Prigozhin and his forces advanced on Moscow, unopposed by local residents, and why Caesar, the deputy commander of the Russian Freedom Legion, fighting on the side of Ukraine, speaks so easily of the possibility of taking Moscow. Children simply assume that the adults have already decided everything among themselves – or that whoever is stronger automatically becomes their new dad. “Who are we to even think about such things?”

Sometimes Ukrainians also show signs of infantilism – perhaps a remnant of the Soviet past – in senseless online arguments, the occasional swallowing of the most primitive propaganda narratives, or the demonstration of absurd prejudices and beliefs. However, since 1991, and especially since 2014 and 2022, the Ukrainian nation has grown up remarkably. I only hope that Ukrainians are not the only adults in this room.

https://news.obozrevatel.com/ukr/russia/chomu-rosiyani-ne-rozumiyut-za-scho-ih.htm