The withdrawal of Russian troops from the western area of Kherson, the left bank of the Dnieper, is a crucial episode in the development of the “military operation” with which Moscow intended to restore relations between those who were near and those who were far away. , which began with the invasion of the already distant February 24 and was aimed mainly at the city of Kherson. This is undoubtedly a strategic node for control of the southern areas and access to Crimea, and it is no coincidence that the Ukrainian counteroffensive was concentrated in this place.
Along with military and political considerations, certainly very significant as an occupied city has been abandoned and “annexed” to Russia, the circumstance also brings to the fore symbolic dimensions of great importance, in a war that emphasizes symbolism even more than in territorial conquests. Kherson is a major city of more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, but its significance transcends its size or its civil and geographical density. Its very name is especially symbolic, in a significant contradiction whereby “kherson” derives from the ancient Greek term “khersones”, meaning “peninsula”.
Tsarina Catherine II, conqueror of these regions at the end of the 18th century and in this sense Putin’s ancestor -who refers explicitly to her- was the one who chose the name of the city, which until then was a simple outpost. The Russian-German descendant of Peter the Great, the Westernist czar, wanted, on the contrary, to “return to the East”, according to the images distorted by the Enlightenment utopias of which she was a fervent supporter. For this reason, the southern areas of Ukraine received names of Greek origin, such as Mariupol, the city that was the salvation of the Crimean Greeks in relation to the Tatar oppressors. And Kherson was to pay homage to Khersones, the ancient Taurian Chersonese, capital of the peninsula where the founder of Rus’, Prince Vladimir, was the first to receive Christian baptism and imposed an economic and military agreement on the Byzantines through of an imperial marriage
Today Khersones is a suburb of the new capital Sevastopol, another name chosen in honor of the Greek world by Catherine’s lover and commander, Grigory Potemkin. There is the archaeological park of the ancient city, which the Russians had later renamed Korsun precisely to distinguish themselves from the Greeks and all other peoples who had passed through or ruled the Crimea. The current Kherson, on the Dnieper estuary, is therefore a city full of evocations, which grants its masters the patent of “ideal citizenship” of this land that many disputed. But it is not the only symbolic value it has, since it is also the meeting place between East and West, which constitutes the very nature of the country we call Ukraine.
Before it became a modern, independent nation just thirty years ago, and even before it was a Soviet republic, as it was called after the Bolshevik revolution, Ukraine was simply “the frontier”, as its name implies. And the border was marked by the waters of the river that runs through their entire territory, the Dnepr for the Russians and the Dnipro for the Ukrainians, whose bridges in Kherson were blown up by the retreating Russians, first of all the great Antonovsky bridge, pride Soviet building built in 1977 in the Antonovka district, where the headquarters of the Nazi occupation forces resided in 1941. Before the revolution, this center was called “Širokoe”, “the Wide”, indicating precisely the wide meeting space between the two shores.
The name of Ukraine had its origin in these lands, precisely to refer to the right and left banks of the river. When the Don Cossacks defeated the armies of the Polish king in the mid-17th century, the Russian tsar welcomed them by assigning them “the right bank”, pravoberezhnaja ukraina, while the part remaining under the control of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania became called levoberežnaja ukraina “the left bank”, and this subdivision remained in force until the time of Catherine the Great, who also imposed herself on the West and defined all the conquered territory as “Ukraina”. In the reign of the Russian tsars, although the term appears in several documents as a geographical-administrative reference, Ukraine nevertheless received the state name of Malorossija, “little Russia”, to reinforce the identity pressure on which they have insisted so much during the war Putin and Patriarch Kirill, for whom “we are the same people”.
Now, instead, we return to the 17th century and to the two opposing shores, the true border of the Russian soul, which is never able to fully explain its role in history, culture and spirituality, and now not even in the war. The withdrawal from the “left bank” is a setback and above all a slap in the face with respect to the claims of annexation with which Putin intended to exalt victory, both military and moral. All the objectives that were proclaimed in February with the “defensive” and liberating invasion have disappeared: denazification provided for the overthrow of the kyiv government to put an end to the uprising that began with the Maidan in 2014, demilitarization sought to stop the siege and the threats of NATO, annexation affirmed the return to the original homeland, and all of that has tragically failed, leaving hundreds of thousands of lives on the battlefield. Volodymyr Zelenskyj has gone from puppet of oligarchs to president of a people proud of its history, NATO has expanded like never before, its member countries supply Ukraine with a continuous flow of weapons, and now a newly annexed city is being abandoned. “to avoid unnecessary massacres”, as the Russian commander, General Surovikin, stated.
That is why Russian war rhetoric and propaganda, beginning with Putin’s wild proclamations, have already abandoned terms weakened by the failed course of the war, to focus on the symbolic goal of the “demanization” of Ukraine and the entire world. world as a whole. As the energetic ex-president Medvedev wrote on Telegram, “Russia’s purpose in this operation is to stop the assault of the supreme despot of Hades, or whatever we want to call him: Satan, Lucifer, Shaitan, Iblis or whatever,” overlapping Biblical terminology and the Koranic. It is no coincidence that the main instigator of Russia’s all-out war, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, defines the goal as dešaitanizatsia, a joint “jihad” of Christians and Muslims. Another “hawk” of the Kremlin, Deputy Secretary of the Security Council Alexei Pavlov, recently wrote an article for Argumenty i Fakty in which he defines Ukraine as a “totalitarian hyper-sect”, where satanists, pagans and sectarians of all kinds reign, including the autocephalous Orthodox and the Greek Catholics, who prepare “dirty bombs” not only as explosive weapons but also as spirit poisons.
The war on the ground, therefore, seems to have stalled in a trench warfare between the two banks of the Dnieper, returning to a condition similar to that experienced in 1480 during what was called the “Meeting of the Ugrá River”, a separation of Russians and Tatars on opposite banks of the Ugra River, near the current Russian-Ukrainian border, which ended two hundred years of “Tatar yoke.” At that moment the two forces of East and West finally chose not to continue the fight, and Russia began its renaissance and even dreamed of becoming the “third Rome”, the bringer of salvation for the whole world, like Russia. of Vladimir Putin. And almost coinciding with the retreat to the East, the Russian president solemnly approved the document “Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values”, which entered into force on November 9. , after the “November bridge” of the national holidays.
In the reiteration of these proclamations in defense of tradition, there is an accentuation of the messianic tones that emerge from the patriotic dimensions, to the detriment even of the Christian-orthodox characteristics of these “moral and spiritual values”. These are incorporated only as a complement to the principles “that guarantee the unity of our multinational and multi-denominational country, and sustain the progress of the life of the people and the development of their human potential,” according to Putin’s decree. Thanks to these foundations, “it is possible to face new challenges and threats, reacting and affirming oneself in the field of geopolitics and social, cultural and technological processes”, for which “civil identity” is exalted even before the religious, giving second place to the importance of “faith in the only God” and the “dogmatic truth of Orthodoxy”.
It is not a political or religious ideology that pushes Russia to wars, it is a self-celebratory “vocation”, an instinct to redefine the foundations of life itself, an exasperated and never achieved quest for synthesis between the two shores of geography. interior, between the two surfaces of the mirror that reflects in an increasingly distorted way the image of themselves. A dream dimension, which destroys real life with the affirmation of a virtual world. Ultimately, it is the prophecy of postmodern civilization, on all banks of the river.
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