Thoughts

The Metaphysics of Scorched Earth and the Historical Suicide of the “Russian World”

The Metaphysics of Scorched Earth and the Historical Suicide of the “Russian World”

фото: Reuters

Source: Author’s Facebook page

On June 15, Ukraine saw not just another Russian attack. We saw a detailed map. Not a military map with positions or echelons marked, but a detailed map of deep, existential hatred.

This is a punitive order that the Muscovite empire is trying to impose on everything that it is unable to conquer, comprehend, or assimilate: on a thousand-year-old temple, on museum silence, on cinematic heritage, on contemporary art, on robotic logistics, on free business, on the civil home, and on human life itself.

The recorded scale of this attack – hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles, strikes on the Assumption Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the Art Arsenal, the Dovzhenko Film Studio, the Kharkiv Museum, the House of Organ Music in the Dnieper, postal and logistics infrastructure hubs and residential neighborhoods – leaves no room for illusions. This is not a misdirection. This is not chaos. This is an attempt to purposefully knock out the cultural, spiritual, historical, economic and everyday axis of Ukraine-Rus. Moscow is not only striking at the physical body of the state. It is methodically striking at its memory, image, prayer, voice, movement and future.

This act requires deep decoding. We must look this evil in the eye and call it by its true name, stripping the enemy of any cover and mythological shields.

When we talk about Muscovites as direct heirs of the Golden Horde, we must reject simplistic biological or ethnic interpretations. It is not about genetics or blood. It is about the political matrix, the state instinct and the algorithm of power.

The Horde is not built on a social contract. The Horde does not conduct a dialogue with the city or a free person. Its only method of communication is the demand for absolute obedience, tribute and fear. If the city does not obey, it is burned to the ground. If the sanctuary does not obey, it is plundered and turned into a stable. If the people do not agree to become a resource and tribute, they try to physically and historically wipe them off the face of the earth. Muscovite statehood was formed as an ideal, ruthless mechanism for collecting tribute and suppressing any subjectivity. Over the centuries, this mechanism has grown with European costumes, imperial facades and stolen Byzantine titles, but its core has remained unchanged: it is the scorched earth algorithm.

Under the guise of “brotherly nations,” this algorithm carries not brotherhood, but a common grave. Under the guise of the “Russian world,” it carries not Russia, but its bloody substitution. Under the guise of “protecting canonical Orthodoxy,” this machine launches kamikaze drones into one of the holiest Christian churches in Eastern Europe. This is the absolute, distilled baseness of the Muscovite empire: it has learned to speak the language of holiness flawlessly, but acts exclusively in the language of devastation. It appropriates Ukraine-Rus in its textbooks and speeches of dictators, but on the battlefield it tries to burn down its real spiritual and civilizational center. This is not a Christian state and not a defender of traditions. This is the Anti-Laura. This is an anti-system that has long lost God, leaving only a church decoration to disguise missile silos.

Assumption Cathedral

The Assumption Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra is not just an architectural monument or a tourist location. It is one of the main sacred nodes of Ukraine-Rus, whose form and spirit have been continuously extending since the 11th century. An attack on it is a multi-layered act of terror, read on three levels.

On a semiotic level, this is an attempt to destroy the sign of Kyiv. The Golden Domes of the Lavra are not just a decoration of the urban landscape, they are a monumental language of our subjectivity. They are a sign that the spiritual center of Rus has always stood and will stand here, above the Dnieper, in the heart of Ukraine, and not in the Moscow swamps. They are an architectural manifesto of the primacy of our Christian tradition. The enemy strikes at this sign because he cannot bear its greatness.

On a symbolic level, this blow exposes the deepest schizophrenia of the Russian imperial consciousness. For centuries, Russia has built its myth on the theft of our history, our name, our princely glory, and our spiritual legitimacy. They shout: “Kyiv is ours,” and at the same time they hit Kyiv with missiles. They say: “The Lavra is the shrine of the Russian world,” and launch drones at it. The truth is hidden in this paradox: Moscow wants Kyiv not as a living city, but as a dead trophy. Not the Lavra as a space of prayer, but the Lavra as a surgut seal on its own false imperial pedigree. But on June 15, they burned this document with their own hands. Because those who consider the shrine their own do not set it on fire. When Kyiv does not submit, the Moscow myth breaks down, and then the empire moves from theft to annihilation.

On a metaphysical level, this is a blow from the empire of death to the Assumption Cathedral. In the Christian tradition, the Assumption is not the end, it is a transition. It is a sign that death has been overcome, that it does not have the last word. And it is here, at the heart of the idea of eternal life, that the state that brought Bucha, Izyum, Mariupol, torture chambers and mass deportations to our land is aiming. They aimed at the roof, but in reality they were trying to hit the very sky of Ukraine. The roof of the cathedral, damaged by 80%, is a wound on the body of sacred history. But Muscovites are unable to understand: a church that takes on the enemy’s blow does not weaken. It passes into the status of a martyr. Its scorched walls become part of the great icon of Ukrainian resistance.

Dovzhenko Film Studio

The second key target was the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studio, where the enemy destroyed the richest collection in the post-Soviet space – almost 100 thousand historical costumes and props. If the Lavra is Ukraine’s prayer, then Dovzhenko is its ability to see itself. With its own eyes, and not through the distorted imperial optics of the “funny Little Russian province.”

Cinema is the most powerful tool for constructing a national myth. Dovzhenko created Ukrainian visual metaphysics: bread, earth, sky, death, birth, tragedy, beauty. A costume in cinema is not just a sewn fabric. It is a material body of historical imagination. It is the shell of an era that our memory dresses in when it appears on the screen. Our hetmans, rebels, dissidents, peasants and princes came to life in these costumes.

Destroying 100,000 pieces of props means trying to literally strip Ukrainian history. This is an act of visual castration, the purpose of which is to deprive us of the material form of memory, to make it impossible to create powerful historical epics about ourselves. This is not a blow to the warehouse. This is a blow to the wardrobe of national identity. They are burning our scenery so that we can never again stage a play about our own greatness on the world stage.

Cultural and spatial vertical

The attack on the Mystetsky Arsenal in Kyiv, the museum in Kharkiv, and the House of Organ and Chamber Music in Dnipro demonstrates that the enemy is striking at the entire multi-layeredness of Ukrainian culture.

The Arsenal of Arts is a perfect metaphor for modern Ukraine: we have taken the space of weapons (the arsenal) and transformed it into a space of culture, thought, exhibitions and freedom. We have filled power with meaning. Russia is doing the opposite: it takes the space of meaning and covers it with fire, turning culture back into a battlefield. A blow to the Arsenal is a blow to Ukraine, which refuses to be just a “front” or a “victim”, but asserts itself as a European cultural state.

The Kharkiv Museum and the Dnipro Organ House shatter another Moscow myth – about “its own, gray Russian-speaking East”. Kharkiv is a city of the avant-garde, the executed renaissance, universities and modernism. An attack on its museum is an attempt to erase the complex identity of Slobozhanshchyna. And the Organ House in Dnipro, located in a former church, is the sound of the European vertical. The organ is not just an instrument, it is the architecture of sound that requires a look up. Moscow hates this multilayered, complex, baroque, industrial, polyphonic Ukraine. It wants to see here a flat territory of mindless slaves, but instead hears the polyphony of a free European city.

Axis of the future

A targeted strike on the sorting centers of the largest postal company in Ukraine – the most modern robotic hub – requires a separate analysis. The conditions of war have transformed mail from a business into the nervous system of the state. It is the blood circulation of civil society, which horizontally connects the front and the rear, volunteers and brigades, the economy and people.

The attack on the Nova Poshta hub is a bold attack on the Ukrainian future and the speed of our nation. Russia is a state that has stopped its time somewhere between 1945 and the Middle Ages. It is irritated not only by the 11th-century Lavra, but also by the Ukrainian business of the 21st century. How can a country that is waging an all-out war for survival be able to build automated terminals, use robotics, ensure energy autonomy, and deliver parcels under sirens? This fact destroys the Kremlin’s basic narrative about Ukraine as a “failed state.” Ukraine is building an innovative economy under missiles, while Russia, with petrodollars, is degrading into a gulag. It is because of this black, ontological envy that they are hitting conveyor belts and postal machines. They want to stop our time.

Civil space

Alongside sacred and cultural targets, missiles are tearing apart residential buildings. For the empire, the civilian home is also a target, because in Ukraine everyday life has become an absolute form of resistance. The enemy seeks to destroy the sense of normality. Their goal is to drive Ukrainians into a state of permanent animal terror, where there is no place for planning, creativity or dreams, but only a survival reflex. But they are losing this battle every day. When a child goes to school after a sleepless night in shelter, that is resistance. When a coffee shop opens against the backdrop of ruins, that is resistance. When a museum evacuates its collections, and a church holds a service under a cut roof, that is state-level disobedience. Every nail hammered into a damaged roof is an act of asserting our right to life.

Darkness of oblivion

UNESCO statistics, indicating hundreds of destroyed churches, museums, libraries and theaters, are not dry numbers. They are a detailed map of culturicide. Russia is systematically waging war against the form of Ukrainian presence in the world. But in this darkness lies our greatest victory: a state that chooses scorched earth tactics signs a sentence on its own historical legitimacy. On a metaphysical level, the Muscovite empire is already dead. Every icon they destroy, every burnt suit, every murdered civilian bears a leaden seal of curse on them. This is not mysticism, this is an inexorable law of history: a civilization that feeds exclusively on destruction condemns itself to decay and collapse. It may temporarily sow death, but it will never give birth to anything again.

Rebuild the Axis

Our response to this terror cannot be limited to pain or reflexive anger. It must be cold, strategic, and statesmanlike.

1. We are obliged to document every fragment, every fresco, and every torn-out bathhouse as an evidentiary basis for the future trial of Russia for the destruction of identity.

2. We must totally digitize our heritage. Every drawing, costume, painting, and text. A digital copy will not replace the original, but it will become a bulletproof vest for our memory that no “Shahed” will pierce.

3. The best restoration is a downed missile. Protecting culture starts with air defense systems, and the world must understand that Patriots are not just protecting concrete, they are protecting the European civilizational heritage.

4. We must forever stop being ashamed of our own historical scale. Ukraine is not a “post-Soviet space”, but a thousand-year-old civilization that has Lavra and Sophia, the genius of Dovzhenko and the power of innovative business, a fearless army and an indomitable people.

Instead of an epilogue

They came as a Horde – and will remain in the garbage dump of history as a Horde, cursed and forgotten. They wanted to destroy our axis, but they only lit up their own irreversible wasteland. Moscow can burn the roof, but it will never reach our sky. It can destroy movie costumes, but it will not erase our ability to create great meanings. It can smash postal terminals, but it cannot stop the unstoppable movement of our nation into the future.

Ukraine-Rus will stand. We will rebuild the walls, preserve the memory, take revenge with the cold truth, and win with irresistible force.

Seal of Eternal Curse

Analyzing the events of June 15 at the highest, metaphysical level, one thing becomes obvious: Muscovy has finally signed its own sentence before Eternity. Killing innocent people, erasing thousand-year-old shrines from the face of the earth, burning cultural heritage and destroying the economic future of an entire people, the Muscovite horde received an indelible seal of curse. For the tears, for the blood, for the death of born and unborn generations of the Ukrainian people.

The world order does not forgive such a concentration of evil. The metaphysical law is inexorable: a nation that makes the death of foreigners its sole purpose will inevitably attract death to its own home. All that black energy that they have directed at the Ukrainian people, at the peaceful homes of people, is already working against them. They have planted a time bomb under their own statehood that will tear their empire apart from within. I hope to live to see the remains of this archaic otherworld buried before our eyes, which can no longer exist in nature at the expense of the misfortunes of other nations. Muscovy must be demilitarized, denuclearized, and deoccupied.

For destroying our sanctuaries, for attempting to steal our memory and kill our future, this entire untamed horde is doomed to centuries of misery, isolation, internal slaughter, and absolute historical decline. They will become synonymous with world evil, an exiled nation whose name will only evoke disgust.

And Ukraine-Rus will stand. Having gone through this hell, we will become harder than steel. In place of the burned costumes, we will shoot a new great movie – about our Victory. In place of the destroyed hubs, we will build new innovative cities. And over the rebuilt domes of Ukrainian shrines, the sun of the nation that has overcome the darkness will always shine. Because with us is our righteous truth, our spirit, and our inevitable Future.
I love you, dear Ukrainians. Wake up, get up, there is a lot of work ahead.

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