May 26th 2025

Yuriy explores the disturbing trend of boasting memoirs emerging from the Russians during the ongoing conflict. He contrasts these narratives with historical justifying memoirs from WWII, highlighting how Russian authors take pride in war crimes and attribute their failures to anything but the Ukrainian resistance.

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TRANSCRIPT: (Apple Podcasts & Podbean app users can enjoy accurate closed captions)  

It is May 26th.

Second World War gave bir to an entirely new, literally genre: the justifying memoir. Hundreds of former- and in some cases not-so former -Nazis wrote about the participation in the war in an attempt to justify the crimes they committed during it. Most of these books rely on a single excuse. "I was just following orders, so I cannot be held responsible."

Today's war has also spawned a new genre: the boasting memoir. Hundreds of Russian occupiers have already written and published their accounts of killing Ukrainians, looting Ukrainian cities, torture and prisoners and kidnapping children. The authors of these books take immense pride in all of it. The main message of these books is simple. They, meaning Ukrainians, deserve it. They deserve it because they refuse to give up their culture and identity, refuse to submit to the rule of Russian maniacal tyrants, and simply want to live by their own minds.

I sincerely hope that the entire war underground in Russia, if it exists at all, is buying, collecting, and preserving all these books so that one day where offers can be held accountable for genocide and war crimes. From what I've seen- and I do occasionally read Ukrainian reviews of this grotesque material- the Russian army is portrayed in these books as an invincible force, able to overcome anything. One book even includes a scene from the early days of the invasion where soldiers from a unit advancing on Kyiv draw lots to decide who will get the honor of raising the Russian flag over the Ukrainian parliament building. In other words they were sure that taking the Ukrainian capital would be a walk in the park, just a short trip toward medals and promotions.

The fact that they never took Kyiv, that they we were forced to retreat from Chernihiv and Kharkiv, but they had to surrender the city of Kherson that they had once occupied- Russians try to explain with a thousand excuses: poor planning, bad timing, betrayal by commanders, the weather, or whatever else comes to mind. They can come up with a million reasons for their failures- except for the one real reason.

It was not the weather or bad planning who stopped you, bastards. You did not reach Kyiv or Kharkiv not because you choose the wrong time to attack, you were stopped by the Ukrainian army. You were not greeted with flowers as you dreamed, you were greeted with fire. You are so-called elite, regular army was almost completely destroyed in the first few weeks of the war. And it was my brothers and sisters who burned it down. People most of whom had never even held a weapon before. But in order to destroy you, very quickly learned.

I still remember how three years ago we figured out how to fix a jammed machine gun using a YouTube video, and we did fix it. But for you scoundrels, it's unbearably humiliating to admit that you were crushed by students and cooks, nurses and teachers. That you supposedly unbeatable army was stopped by yesterday's civilians. So you lie about planning and weather, in fact, you lie about everything. Your entire country is built on lies, but we'll fix it. Hope there is a video instruction about it on YouTube.