Some time ago, Vladimir Putin established himself as the protector of “traditional Russian values”. Nobody knows exactly what these values look like. Neither does Putin – the divorced man who had a striptease hall set up in his palace where former gymnast Alina Kabaeva could wrap herself around the pole. In the ears of his followers – mostly middle-aged women from the deepest Russian provinces – it must sound so nice when you talk about “traditional values”, Putin thought. And so he never tires of talking about these ominous values.
Basically and fundamentally in Putin’s value system is the premise that everyone in this world has to identify as either a man or a woman. Putin frankly admitted that he didn’t understand anything else. “Do we want it to be parent #1, #2, or #3 instead of mom and dad? They’ve gone completely insane. Do we really want kids starting in elementary school being forced into perversions that lead to degradation and… lead to extinction?” he asked indignantly last September – just one example of what the Kremlin boss said on the subject.
Sergei Lavrov now took up his master’s indignation. As if by accident, the seemingly eternal Russian foreign minister has also discovered a deep aversion to human diversity. At an international summit meeting in Moscow, he had nothing better to do than rant about diversity in Europe. There are now more than 80 families there, Lavrov explained with incomprehension. He had to experience the consequences of this development firsthand. At a summit meeting of the OSCE Council of Foreign Ministers in Sweden, he encountered “inhuman things”:
“Excuse me for the details, but during a break in the session I asked where the toilet was. They then showed me a door with the letters WC on it. I asked, ‘Is this for women or for men?’ And they answered me: ‘With us everything is communal.’ I didn’t believe it, but it really was like that,” Lavrov recalled, still full of disbelief. “You can’t imagine how inhuman that is! Simply inhuman,” said the Russian foreign minister.
Amazing words from the mouth of a man who has been in government for 18 years in a country where 23 percent of the population has to live without a connection to a sewage system. 18.1 percent of Russians use cesspools as toilets, in rural areas it is even 48.6 percent. And 4.9 percent have no access to any type of toilet. These are official data from the Russian statistical office Rosstat from 2021, whose evaluations and statistics are always in favor of the Kremlin.
As luck would have it, a deputy from Novosibirsk demonstrated the state of toilet culture in Russian society. At the same time as Lavrov was ranting about the “inhuman” conditions in Sweden, a certain Svetlana Kawerzina publicly celebrated the repair of a wooden toilet for bus drivers, which had been repaired on the governor’s order.
“The toilet at the terminus of ORMZ (Bus 23) has been repaired,” she reported. “Without doors it was pretty windy,” wrote the deputy on the Russian social network VKontakte. In addition, the wooden structure was cleaned and treated with disinfectants, she assured, adding: “Our drivers have to work under acceptable conditions.” At least the shack with a cesspool now has a wooden door. Lavrov should definitely clarify whether men and women have to go to the toilet together here. That would be “inhuman.”
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