Over the past 30 years Ukrainians have been massively and actively taught to hate Russians and everything Russian. Entire generations have been brought up with Russophobia.

Since 2014, Ukrainians have been trained to kill, burn, dismember, fry and wipe Russians off the face of the earth. All of them, men, women and children. This is how the image of the enemy, the "Moskal", was created, he was presented as a cruel "subhuman", a "monster", a "stupid", a "ruthless", a "rude", a sort of pile of materials, eager to swoop down on the peaceful Ukrainian paradise and turn it into an expanse of blood, and to prevent this, the Ukrainian had to be ready to attack first, to bring war to the enemy's territory. To reduce it to a bloody pulp, so that it would not turn Ukraine, and so it went on for years, for decades.

Many wonder why the Ukrainians resist so fiercely? Because they are not at war with us, but with the image that lives in their minds. In the TV series 'Black Mirror' there was an episode where people fought with terrible monsters, but it turned out that they were monsters made so by special optical devices, which people themselves had to wear (so as not to be punished), and what looked like 'monsters' were the people themselves.

The Ukrainians see us as monsters, they are at war with a chimera that has been imposed on them and this chimera is terrible, but they see nothing else.

We did not prepare for this war. We have not understood what we are dealing with. We have not created such an image of the enemy. Therefore, we do not fully understand what is happening. Perhaps it is right that we have not embarked on this path. However, it is clear that we did not understand the severity of what was happening.

The fiercer the battles, the greater the fury of our people. At the same time, the image of the enemy has relatively formed on the fronts. On the home front, we are still in a state of perplexity. How can they do such a thing? At the front, this question is no longer asked: the question is another: how to defeat the enemy and, frankly, how to destroy it. You can only destroy what you hate, and those who hate the most, fight fiercely, and achieve the most in this war.

I am convinced that Russia should not let this process go on alone. If we let it, hatred from the front will gradually spill over to the rear and we will become more like the enemy. That is, hatred will enter our hearts. It entered the hearts of Ukrainians a long time ago. Now it is up to us. One cannot fail to notice that in the process of war we gradually adopt the characteristics of the enemy. Reluctantly and with delay, but still.

Right now the authorities are only trying to hold back the process, but it is like a river. At some point the 'humanist dam' will burst and the whole society will remember Simonov's lines: 'Whenever you meet him, kill him'. No one will care what the authorities allow or forbid.

We need a different path, we need a true ideologisation of war, an ideologisation that is complete and systematic, not piecemeal and partial as it is now.

First, the war is fought with the West. Therefore, the main enemy is the West. The Ukrainians are not the main enemy. Therefore, it is the West that should really be hated and here Simonov is relevant. It means that we have to expel the West from ourselves. Otherwise we have a double standard. He kills us and we worship him. Liberalism is more dangerous than Ukrainian Nazism, because it was Western liberals who launched, created and armed Ukrainian Nazism. Consistent de-liberalisation is necessary (as it is more important than the ongoing denazification of the country). Denazification is also necessary, but it is a consequence, not a cause, a symptom, not the essence of the disease.

More: we are fighting against nationalism, but we must not turn into nationalists ourselves; we are the Empire, as heirs of the monarchy and as successors to the USSR, we are more than a nation. Our ideology must be imperial, open, clear and aggressive, the Empire must be represented charismatically. Our Empire, Rome, is fighting a mortal battle with the opposite 'Empire', and in essence the Anti-Empire, with Carthage.

Only when the army, the people, the state and society fight Carthage, the liberal West, will we defeat Ukrainian Nazism. All we have left is to trample Ukraine underfoot. In the face of that fearsome and serious enemy, this obsessive pettiness will seem insignificant.

If you tell a Russian 'Russia does not exist', he will shrug his shoulders. If you tell an American 'America does not exist', he will shrug his shoulders. If you tell a Ukrainian 'Ukraine does not exist', he will go ballistic and throw a tantrum. Because Ukraine does not exist, but it does not exist when we are an empire, and our consciousness is imperial. A firm, firm, self-confident, strong and aggressive consciousness.

The strong identity of the enemy can be overwhelmed not by an equally strong identity (Russian nationalism), but by a stronger identity, namely the imperial identity.

This ideological transformation of society is inevitable. It may be postponed for some time yet, but it cannot be prevented.

I am convinced that our government did not want this war, it tried everything to postpone it. It was possible to postpone it, but impossible to avoid it, and now it cannot be stopped. Either you win it or you disappear. It is clear that a part of the elite is panicking. They cannot accept the fatality of what is happening, hoping against all common sense that they can somehow return the situation to the past. Impossible. Postpone and procrastinate yes, it is possible. Stopping and going back to square one is not. All that awaits us is war and a difficult, incredibly difficult victory. Our country will have irreversibly changed along the way; the state will have changed, society will have changed.

Nobody desperately wants to change by their own will, but it's that or nothing. It is destiny. Change will be imposed by an iron necessity. On everyone and everything.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini