The Moskva cruiser, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet that was sunk by Ukrainian missiles, took with it not only hundreds of sailors and officers, missile launchers, planes, stocks of ammunition, and arrogance. There was something else on board, something precious, which to a large extent symbolized Russia's current position – a tiny piece of wood believed to have been a piece of the True Cross.
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According to the stories, the "holy relic" was purchased for no less than $40 million and put on board the Moskva in a grand ceremony to protect it from possible enemy attacks. Now that it failed to do what it was supposed to, Russian law enforcement officials have launched an investigation into whether the sliver of wood had actually been part of the cross and whether tens of millions wasted on it might have gone into the pockets of people close to the military.
The story of the wooden relic includes all the ingredients that go into the recipe known as "Putin's Russia": a hefty dose of destructiveness, a bit of Soviet pretension, a dash of pseudo-religious superstition, and a lot of corruption. All these were on board the Moskva, and they are present in every Russian army unit and in every one of this enormous country's systems.
The loss of the Moskva closes a circle, because shortly after President Putin, who has been in power for 22 years, took office, there was another horrifying naval loss. The Kursk submarine disaster signified the crumbling of what had been a global superpower, and it was Putin who promised that disgraceful sights like that would never occur again. He made the citizens believe that the deterioration would stop and put billions into propaganda that glorified him and how Russia' flourished under him, and into military procurement. The image of a terrifyingly powerful Russia worked fairly well, until the Ukraine invasion exposed the rot behind the imagery.
Anyone who gets their news from sources not controlled by Putin's censorship learns that nothing has changed from the Kursk to the Moskva. The unchecked shelling currently raining down on the residents of besieged Mariupol and its few defenders are an expression of the rage that has engulfed the Russian leadership at the helplessness of its army, one of the strongest of the world, which has turned out to be incompetent in the air, on land, and at sea.
The Russians are failing miserably at every one of their goals, whether they were real of merely an excuse to justify the invasion. Instead of bending Ukraine to their will, they encountered a stubborn country that stopped being afraid. Instead of flattening the Ukrainian army, they found it to be strong, determined, and equipped with the best western weaponry. Instead of fending off NATO, they found it at their borders, with Finland and Sweden now seeking to join.
The big question is what the failure will do to the Russians. Putin tends to tell a story about a rat that reveals a bit of his worldview. When he was little, he saw a rat in the stairwell and attacked it. The rat tried to escape, but he stopped it and cornered it. Then, when he thought the rat was in its power, it attacked him and fought him off. Now Putin is backed into a corner, and his responses will be less and less predictable.
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