They call you to defend the Motherland.

But is the Motherland really these gluttonous embezzlers? Putin's friends and their friends, the frontmen who hold all the national wealth, the entire domestic industry, the resources, transport, media... The thieves sitting in the Duma, the bandits in the Federation Council, the appointees who imagine themselves elected and treat the people like their serfs. Are they the Motherland?

Is the Motherland really the burly National Guardsmen who gang up on female students at rallies, the brazen cops who drag random people into stations and torture them to death, the FSB agents who fancy themselves oprichniki, having built their dream country in Russia on lies, bribery, and fear?

Could the Motherland be the indifferent officials, mired in corruption schemes, who live in fear of exposure and therefore obediently salute the most cannibalistic initiatives of the supreme power? Who eagerly drive people like cattle, whether to sham elections or into the meat grinder of the front, just for the report, for the necessary numbers?

Or their shameless servants—the propagandists who take the people for idiots, the cynical PR agents who despise "ordinary" people, the corrupt sociologists who paint a picture of an enthusiastic majority supporting the authorities in a country where the majority has always hated and feared the authorities? They speak, shout, and scream on behalf of the Motherland more than anyone else; but they simply grovel before the power—for millions, billions of the people's stolen money generously distributed by the embezzlers.

Is the Motherland really the unbelieving priests who call men to their deaths, who promise Orthodox paradise for killing other Orthodox, for submission to a deceitful and thieving power that grew bored with mere theft and decided to entertain itself with a bloody war? Shouldn't the Church have stopped this war, shouldn't it have condemned this power? It should have, but it cannot, because it was created by this oppressive power, because it is fed with stolen bread and human flesh from its hand.

All these people are the current Russian state. They are the ones calling you to the front, they are the ones pushing you into the meat grinder.

They hide behind our Motherland, asking and demanding that you protect it. But our Motherland does not need protection. No one attacked our Motherland; rather, our state attacked another country. A country where people just like you live. And in your name, yes, in your name, it killed them, raped them, destroyed their homes.

Now this state has run out of strength, it has been hit hard, washed in blood, and now it needs to replenish itself with human flesh to once again pounce on our neighbors and swallow them. Do you hear the state roaring? It is calling you. It plans to fortify itself with you. To use your corpse to build a rampart behind which it will hide in the Ukrainian steppe. And then leave it there, in the steppe, because it is sure that the brainwashed and frightened people will never hold it accountable—not for you, nor for the others killed. They aren't even counted, just as no one has ever counted the dead in our country.

But there was a time when people fought and died for the Motherland. When they defended their homes and their families. But now you must go and die for them—for the gluttonous embezzlers and the well-fed oprichniki, for the soulless bureaucrats, for the satanic priests trading your soul, for the unbelieving propagandists trading in death.

You are being set against people who are now defending their families and their homes, and you are being ordered to kill them. To kill so that this state can seize their land and establish its cannibalistic order there too.

And for what?

So that you don't think about why you are poor. Why you are powerless. Why you live in fear. Why the embezzlers thrive. Why the oprichniki have fat faces. Why the officials treat you like cattle. Why those who should save souls have sold theirs to the devil. Why the television lies differently every day, and why you must believe today's lies and forget yesterday's.

So that you are occupied with killing. So that you are stained with murder.

Because then you will be unable to change anything, and they will remain—forever.