These are the words I’ve been looking for. Going back to Russia after surrendering to Ukraine is going to be such a weird experience. These are people who have grown up their entire lives being tortured by their government. These are people who have tortured their POWs in an act of theater to make them fear being captured because they know how awful being tortured must be because they’ve seen it. And then they got captured and experienced… A brief reprieve. What will they experience when they go home? Will anyone listen to them? Or will the friends and relations they return to be too stuck in their ways of their thinking and think that these former POWs were brainwashed by the Ukrainian therapists who are helping them navigate the disorienting nature of not being tortured?

And the thing is… No matter what, these are still the seeds of something because a few people will listen, and suddenly the Siberian, Ukrainian, and Chechen separatists and anarchist terrorist cells will seem less like fringe groups bent on destruction, and will seem more like the only reasonable people around. I don’t think it will all happen fast enough for Ukraine to be who dissolves the Russian Federation, but the people who will are fighting alongside them now. They’re in their POW camps. They’re people who aren’t of fighting age yet, but whose fathers will come home and tell them what they saw in Ukraine