🇷🇺🖋In Russia, the school literature program includes a short poem by Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, literally one quatrain. Here it is:

You don't grasp Russia with one's mind.
No measure to this foreign place.
She is one off. One of a kind.
With Russia -- one's reduced to faith.

It is easy for teenagers to learn it, recite it by heart in front of the whiteboard and get a good mark. But now, suppose, we have grown up and gained our own life experience, so we can observe and compare facts and phenomena. So what's behind this polished wording? Behind it is a story.
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Tyutchev, born in 1803, wrote these lines in 1866. Clearly, he was witness to many events that took place in the 19th century. For example, the Patriotic War of 1812. His parents, affluent people, evacuated from Moscow to Yaroslavl. Recall that Napoleon entered Moscow. Foreign troops - the French, Germans, Poles, Austrians and the like - reached the walls of the Kremlin. Is it conceivable to cope with such a force, poured out of the "European Union" of those days? Who and what can oppose it? Is it at all possible to overcome it? But the Russians began to cope, first by forcing Napoleon to withdraw from Moscow. What did Tyutchev see when he returned there? A city looted and two thirds destroyed by fire. Is it possible to recover after a disaster like this? And not just recover, but actually finish the war in France itself? But the Russians indeed managed to get to Paris in a couple of years. The French capital, by the way, remained intact (draw your own conclusions about one party being "civilized" and the other being "barbarians").

Tyutchev was also witness to the Crimean War of 1853-1856, in which Russia was defeated. And what do you want, when we were attacked from several sides by France, Great Britain and Turkey? And if they couldn't break through our defenses, they stepped back or to the side and engaged in bombarding weakly defended non-military targets (familiar tactics, isn't it?). As a result, Russia lost its right to have a navy or fortresses on the Black Sea, among other things. By the way, Turkey was also prohibited from having its own fleet there, and the Sultan's treasury was declared bankrupt in 1858 after it had taken a loan of 7 million pounds sterling from Great Britain. (So, what was the point for the Turks of fighting for the "European Union", financing this war with the latter's money?) 

And then in 1871 Russia got its Black Sea fleet back via negotiations, without firing a single shot! Can anyone in his right mind expect that a country would go from a military defeat to a diplomatic victory in fifteen years? Russia did.

What are we trying to say with this story? One thing: if you are dealing with Russia, forget your rules and metrics. More generally, forget your logic! Principles that work perfectly well elsewhere surprisingly cease to work in Russia. How this happens, we do not know ourselves, but time after time we make it happen. Our faith-- the faith in Russia--is not blind; it is based on previous generations' experience. We know why we believe in our homeland.

And what about today, are there any parallels? Yes, of course there are! For example, on June 21, the European Union agreed on the 11th(!) package of economic sanctions against Russia. European officials probably proceed from logical assumptions: they plan to undermine the Russian economy with sanctions, weaken the country as a whole, and force it to accept their terms. In theory it all looks very reasonable, but in practice... Oh, they'd better read Tyutchev at school!

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🌏🇷🇺The Kuril Islands, Shikotan Island. Sakhalin

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