After years of humiliation, Russia feels pride once again. She is finally being taken seriously.

I'm half Russian. My mother is originally from Nizhny Novgorod. I went there for summer holidays all my childhood until I was 15. After that, as an adult citizen of a foreign country, I no longer had access to the city (then Gorky), which was closed to foreigners.

Since then, I have only been able to meet my grandmother in Moscow. In our family, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 were never called an 'occupation', nor was it called 'brotherly help'. Instead, the event had been 'forgotten' (read blocked out). Russians have the ability to ignore unpleasant truths, especially when every family or friendly get-together begins with a glass of vodka.

My grandfather Leonid Jerlygin fought in World War II. He later received the Order of the Red Star for bravery. To this day Russians are proud of the Red Army's victory.

As a little boy, I imagined dying heroically in World War II by diving bravely in front of a bullet directed at a girl I had a crush on at the time.

The young Russian boy's romantic ideas were amply supported not only by Soviet cinematography but the music scene as well. Only later did images of women raped by Russian soldiers and the brutality of the war begin to appear in movies. Russians feel that they saved Europe from fascism and that Europe has not thanked them enough for it.

They consider themselves a nation of winners. If they see the defacing of monuments such as a Russian tank in Prague or Slavin in Bratislava, they see fascism. They do not understand why someone would do that and are convinced that fascist tendencies are really growing in Europe.

The biggest paradox though is that it is precisely extremists and fascists who see Putin as an alternative to a democratic society.

Marian Kotleba does not understand that if the Russians regained control over this part of Europe, his party would be first in line, no matter what the lower floors of the Putinade tell him today. Russian anti-fascism is authentic, and it is exactly this narrative that Vladimir Putin is using.

He describes the Ukrainians as Nazis, fascists and nationalists. The Russian media are repeating the same propaganda, because today they're not allowed to say otherwise, and many journalists even believe that it's true.

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I would like to offer some insight in the form of a few scenes which show how we have reached the point of an imperial war in Ukraine, which shocked all Russians not yet convinced by the propaganda and disinformation campaign that Russia has waged (and continues to do so) for years, while at the same time believing that the refugee crisis will further undermine democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.

Odesa, July 1988 - The Soviet Union

My future wife and I are standing in front of a restaurant in a long queue in today's Ukrainian, then Soviet, Odesa. After half an hour of waiting, they sit us at a table with six other people and pour us shots of vodka without asking, somehow automatically, even though there is a prohibition.

We are served food on plates - not like the day before at the eatery, when we got chicken and potatoes on a paper tray. My future wife says she will never come to the USSR again and she keeps that promise.

Beer is drunk from street vending machines, where you just wash out and share the same cup, there are long queues for everything, the economy is in shambles and Gorbachev is implementing perestroika, which we all applaud.

The Soviet Union makes trips into space, but really, it's a backward country.

Moscow, 1991 - The August Coup

Pavel Juracek - my colleague from Smena newspaper - and I are in Moscow, watching an attempted military coup and removal of the first and soon last USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was interned in Crimea. We are right next to the Russian Parliament, which has been surrounded by soldiers.

Shooting is taking place in the streets of Moscow, tens of thousands of people are defending the parliament and Boris Yeltsin, Russia's President, who has refused to submit to the 'putschists' as they are then called.

'If they attack, we'll probably die, the Russians will not lose time over some journalists,' I say. In the end, the coup fails due to the resistance of the civilian population and tens of thousands of Muscovites say goodbye to the victims of the coup in the Vagankovsky cemetery.

For a while, the democratisation process seems to have begun in Russia and while the Soviet Union crumbles, long-standing national wrongs between the Soviet nations spring to the surface. Russia is not mentally ready for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soon, local wars, in which I myself participated as a journalist, start breaking out. It is then that our hero Gorbachev becomes the anti-hero for Russians, despite the fact that the treaty on the demise of the Soviet Union is mainly initiated by Boris Yeltsin.

The disintegration of the Soviet empire is perceived by the Russians as their defeat and victory of the West. The West. Those are the weird people who accept homosexuality, women's rights and minorities. In Russia, minority opinion is pushed to the margins of society. For example, homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Russia until 1993.

Bendery, Moldova, 1992 - War in Transnistria

'Open the truck and show them the one without the head.' The truck is full of dead people. This is the Transnistria conflict. Similar sights will be seen in all other Russian actions in territories of disobedient states, where a compact Russian minority or a minority that pledges allegiance to Russia lives.

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