[travisgriggs]

For me, the humiliation comes to Russian society/governance in general. It’s pretty clear that Putin just wants to be another Czar. And the prevailing “well, what are you going to do” fatalism in Russian society means it’s just going to go on. Post 1990, as a child of the Cold War, I naively believed that “change was afoot.” That there was a desire amongst eastern countries to move beyond mideval behavior. It took a few years, but we’re right back to “I wanna be the boss forever”. People malign Putin for this. I have lost faith in the general Russian system at large that just keeps making one Stalin, kruschev, Putin after another. That the Russian system cannot move beyond this, is to me the real humiliation.