“I think those over there are ours,” said Yuri, crushing social distancing with the report as he leaned against the window of the Boeing-737/800 that was flying over the Black Sea.
“Those” were a concentration of luminous dots in the dark of night not far from the coast of Ukraine, according to the navigation map on the small screen ahead.
Presumably Russian warships prepared for a week of live-fire exercises in the region. “Ours”, Russians, of course, but with a certain disdain on the part of the traveler on the Istanbul-Moscow route.
For the observer who follows the region, less than pleasant memories of the 2014 incident, when a Malaysian Boeing-777 was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile over the troubled areas of eastern Ukraine, were inevitable.
Overkill? Perhaps, but just before boarding, the cell phone brought the news that Ukraine had asked airlines to divert from that stretch that the Turkish Airlines plane would pass through.
Yuri even joked, in broken English: “If one of our people shoots a plane full of Russians, he’s already given Putin a reason for war. Just say it was the Ukrainians.”
Debatable humor aside, to this day there is debate over the responsibility for the 2014 case, largely attributed to an inexperienced operator of the Buk anti-aircraft system loaned by the Russians to the separatists. Everyone denies.
That said, Yuri’s reaction was echoed in sporadic conversations throughout the day with Russians in Moscow, some connected to the political and military area, others not.
The general impression, without any scientific precision, is that the monitoring of the crisis is bureaucratic and filtered by the Russian media – the TVs are mostly state-owned.
In it, according to the Russians consulted, the narrative is monotone: the West is looking for an excuse for a conflict over Ukraine. It seems to work.
According to a survey released last year by the Levada Institute, one of the country’s last independent pollsters, 48% of Russians believe that the West is to blame for the crisis in the region. Furthermore, there is no visible sign that the city is the capital of a country on the verge of invading another, to believe the words spoken day after day by officials in Washington.
The central streets are emptier, courtesy of the freezing cold around zero degrees and the pandemic, which hits the country hard with the new wave of the omicron variant – insufficient, however, to make masks something common on the streets, even because they are not mandatory in open places.
On Monday, Russia reported 180,400 new infections and 683 deaths. It is now the sixth country with the most daily cases in the world.
More objective is the lack of foreign tourists, a result of the combination of plague and cold. At the skating rink and amusement park set up in front of the Kremlin on Red Square, Russian families are in the majority.
The father of two junior skaters in action there, Maxim Ivanov said he was not afraid of war. “If it happens, it will be something localized, far from here. I don’t believe in a Third World War,” he said.
Political scientist Konstantin Frolov, who orbits a field where tension is a topic of conversation, does not believe in invasion. But he says the world is far more dangerous today than it was in the throes of the Cold War, in the 1970s and 1980s in which he grew up.
“There, we knew that the United States could destroy us. But we could do the same. Now everything is more diffuse,” he said, referring to the MAD (“crazy” in English, and also the acronym in the language for “mutually assured destruction” doctrine. “).
