Lu Xun once said, "Tragedy is the destruction of valuable things in life for people to see." From a historical perspective, the more than three-year-long Russia-Ukraine war, though a delayed story of the Soviet Union's dissolution, does not fit Lu Xun's definition of tragedy, as the value of communism had already faded by then, and what was destroyed was merely a makeshift social order.

For Putin, the most severe geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, a real tragedy for Russians, was the dissolution of the Soviet Union; but in the 21st century, that tragedy is Ukraine, after centuries of bloody conflicts, foreign rule, and division, continuing to be the grinding stone between the differing values of Eastern and Western Europe.