Former Ukrainian MP and for a decade Russian collaborator Igor Dmitriyev tells a journalist that ‘the only thing Russia can offer the Ukrainians is either total annihilation or the construction of the proverbial DNR’. And he concludes: ‘it doesn't work like that’, referring to Ukraine's fierce resistance to submission. The A journalist asks what he means by the DNR, Dmitriyev replies that it is not just the economic collapse (as Russians traditionally blame it on the war) but, above all, the ‘low level of legal culture’, a euphemism so stretched that he elaborates on it himself and speaks plainly of ‘banditry, lawlessness, taking away companies’. He goes on to say, with regret, that ‘Russia had so many instruments to pressure Ukraine’ into war, but used none of them.

Dmitriyev is, of course, right in the first part, essentially accurately summarising Russia's offer to Eastern Europe as a whole. It boils down to threats of annihilation to force neighbours to agree to the introduction of Russian lawlessness and manual control of everything from the Kremlin. Russia's neighbours remember numerous interventions over street names, monuments, blackmailing over gas and oil supplies, the Mažeikiai refinery affair or attempts to take over Central European companies.

Dmitry, on the other hand, overlooks one minor aspect - after all, this ‘Russian diplomacy’ did not start in 2014 but has continued uninterruptedly, with varying intensity, since 1991. This is why the Visegrad Group joined NATO, the Orange Revolution broke out in Ukraine and then Euromaidan. Its immediate cause, after all, was Yanukovych's change of heart on the EU after his servile visit to Sochi. And then, too, the Russians consistently used violence as a primary means of persuasion - the Euromaidan massacre on 30 November 2013, the kidnappings, killings of participants, beatings by ‘titushkas’ and then the killing of over a hundred protesters by snipers on 18-19 February 2014.

The Russians used such brutal measures because they always work against Russian society, which always gives way after the first blow with a knout (how long did the 2012 protests last? three days). The cognitive error, of course, is in assuming that everyone is as compliant as the Russians, but the Russian elite have been reasserting themselves by repeating for decades that ‘Ukrainian is a dialect of Russian’ and that ‘a chicken is not a bird, Poland is not a foreign country’ (a contemptuous Russian rhyme). So Dmitry, after a decade of war, has understood that Russia's non-alternative diplomacy does not work with countries larger than Georgia. But he still doesn't understand that it was exactly the same ‘diplomacy’ that created Euromaidan and hostility to Russia at a time when he was still pursuing Russian interests in Ukraine.