A huge sign by Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on the third day of the fighting in Ukraine over an office building in central Moscow.
"The real power lies in the justice and truth on our side. I believe in the support, in this invincible power that gives us our love for the homeland," the caption said.
"Peace is war," as George Orwell put it.
In 1999, when he was prime minister and was already preparing to take the big step and be elected president, Putin replied in an interview with Larry King: "Our path is a path of democratic development. Russia is a very diverse country, and at the same time - we are part of Western European culture. "No matter where our people live - in the Far East or the South - we are Europeans."
What happened in Russia between 1999 and 2022, the year that will go down in history as the year of the greatest shock on the European continent, a year in which Russia attacked Ukrainian cities with missiles and flowed its tanks into its territory?
How did the man who carried with him a promise of stability and economic growth start a war against the West and bring about the harshest sanctions ever against Russia?
His critics and enemies in Russia and the West will say that Putin was never anyone else: a KGB officer who served in East Germany and was horrified by the disintegration of the Soviet empire that left him and his comrades behind, part of the mighty security establishment that decided to take matters into Russian hands. Became lords of the land.
About two years after coming to power, Putin and his teenage friends in St. Petersburg (Leningrad in the Soviet era) began to attack the oligarchs and the mighty societies they had formed.
At the same time journalists and editors began to feel the comfort of the new president's arm.
Artillery shelling strikes Donetsk // Reuters
The opening shot was given at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 when Putin first challenged the West and warned of NATO expansion toward Russia's border. "NATO has deployed its front forces within our borders. The Russian, in whose eyes the Cold War has not yet come to an end.
Eight years later, huge demonstrations took place in neighboring Ukraine, during which Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president who fled to Russia, was ousted.
Putin, who was trying to prevent his overthrow, was struck with shock and astonishment.
He saw in the Ukrainian course an anti-Russian conspiracy of the West.
The Russian media was filled with anti-Ukrainian incitement, the propaganda channels broadcasting threats from morning to night against Ukraine, which suddenly became a "stronghold of neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism", and against the treacherous West.
Anti-Western rhetoric has intensified over the eight years since the annexation of Crimea, the military parades have become more ostentatious and the persecution of opponents more intense.
My friends in Moscow who I spoke to in the weeks leading up to the war did not believe this was what would happen.
They were so accustomed to the violent propaganda spilled from the state channels that they no longer saw it and were not sensitive to it.
They, as well as many in Ukraine, who were also accustomed to the daily poisoning, did not believe Putin would cross the Rubicon.
Satellite images of Russian convoys en route to Kiev, Photo: Reuters
Was it the prolonged sitting in the presidency, the close circle that provided unilateral information or a personality change that led Putin to order an invasion of Ukraine and even to threaten the use of nuclear weapons?
We may never know.
But what can be said with certainty is that for too many years the West has ignored Putin's Russia and the internal processes that took place there.
The future will no longer look like the past.
The current shock is breaking old-fashioned theories and concepts.
A new world order has been created in these very moments.
The author is a former MK, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy and the director of a program for Israel and the Middle East at the Mitvim Institute.
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