The Winter Games in Sochi are just the latest episode in the fictitious construction of Russia's new leadership in the world that Putin needed to prevent the same thing from happening in the Red place as happened in the Maidan in Kiev. In fact, this internal propaganda has precedents in the last ten years, which have allowed Putin to take control of the media and film Structures .

Since 2005, the day of the Revolution is no longer commemorated in Russia and has been replaced by November 4 as the National Unity holiday. The film 1612 (Vladimir Khotinenko, 2007) reminds Russians themselves what their new national holiday consists of, celebrating the day when the Poles were expelled from Moscow in that year of degree scroll. It symbolizes the end of the turbulent years and the beginning of the Romanov dynasty and thus of Russian Imperialism. It is a certain subject of cinema made according to the most commercial parameters of Hollywood that seeks to rewrite the history of Russia (let's not forget that historical cinema speaks above all of the present) from the nostalgia for the old imperial ways, for which it is always important an enemy that unites all the different identities (in a country of enormous racial, cultural and religious differences). Before it was the Nazis, later, in the Cold War, the Americans and now it is the Poles.

It is clear that the growing development of Poland and other countries recently joining the EU seduces the republics of the former USSR, and Russia cannot afford to lose its economic and political leadership in them, Ukraine in particular. These two powerful ideas reaching Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Orthodoxy and the link to Moscow - and not to Warsaw, or Brussels - are also very clear in another recent major historical blockbuster made in Russia. This is the latest version of Taras Bulba (Vladimir Bortko, 2009), a Ukrainian national hero re-appropriated for Russian identity, a production that has counted on the most expensive budget in the history of Russian-Soviet cinema. In this film, Catholic Poland is the enemy of the Ukrainian people, of course; a temptation to be resisted in order not to lose the Russian-Orthodox identity. The message comes across with particular force to Western Ukraine, but it is directed against the other, predominantly Greek-Catholic Ukraine (disparagingly called Uniata), that of the Carpathians and Lviv Galizia, the cradle of the most belligerently anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism, whom Putin demonizes especially in his current TV propaganda (shown as anti-Semites and murderers of Russians in Maidan, when the problem was that those who shot people were Russian soldiers in Yanukovych's service, or so the new Ukrainian parliament claims).

In the political and imagological-identity field, Kiev cannot compete with this enormous cultural force of Russia, which influences almost half of the population of Ukraine, Russian-speaking in the first place written request. That is why Yanukovich's party made Russian language co-official with Ukrainian; his party did not control the media and relied on Moscow's propaganda to entrench its Russophile position in Ukraine. Yanukovych's next step was, emulating Putin, to try to take control of the Ukrainian media as well, which he failed to do. In fact, Yanukovich's downfall was largely precipitated by these same media, which have made known to the whole world both his mafia-like methods and his life as an oligarch in the most crassly Asian style.

But the puppet's deposition has provoked the wrath of his godfather, who has decided to take action, taking advantage of the moments of uncertainty in the Kiev Rada and the support that the Russian-Soviet empire has always had in the Crimean areas. It is easy to take military positions but it will not be so easy to prevent a generalized uprising of the population. Ukraine, unlike old Europe, has a lot of young people with nothing to lose and ready to start a resistance, first, and then continue a chain of revenge that you never know how it may end. The risk of Ukraine becoming Yugoslavia is quite possible.

At the moment it is difficult to know what is really happening in Ukraine, and it is well known that the first victim in any war is the truth. The propaganda battle is very reminiscent of what happened in Yugoslavia, when the first images of violence and death were used in all the autonomous TV channels of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, changing only the side of the victims according to the interests of the audience, to whip up revenge. Civil war was thus as inevitable as it was terribly cruel.

Let us hope that Russia will be more prudent now than it was in the Balkan war, unconditionally supporting Serbia's imperialism, with the serious consequences known to all. Otherwise, instead of maintaining those cultural ties it claims to be trying to protect, it will raise deep generational hatreds, and contribute to creating new enemy countries on its borders. Putin may keep Crimea and other parts of Ukraine, but he will be isolated from a Europe to which it is in his interest to belong, for the sake of his own people, and for his own survival as a leader.