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More than three decades ago, the legendary German rock band Scorpions released one of the most viral songs of all time, the famous “Wind of Change”. The song narrates the feelings of an anguished and, at the same time, hopeful European youth facing the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the “integration” between Soviets and Westerners. The lyrics tell in a very honest way the emotions of the union of two worlds separated by more than four decades, although visibly from a Western perspective.

In December 2023, I was in Minsk, capital of the Republic of Belarus, when, during dinner, the Scorpions song played in the restaurant and immediately all the Russians/ Belarusians started singing it absolutely spontaneously, as a natural reaction to the sound that echoed from the radio. The scene surprised even the few Western tourists who were there at the time.

Even though I already knew “Wind of Change” long before, at that moment, for the first time, I had the curiosity to read the comments on the song’s videos on YouTube and other social platforms. The massive number of comments in Russian language is impressive. Clearly, the song is loved in the “russkiy mir” – which explains the scene I saw in Minsk.

I follow the Moscow and down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change

Months later, I was walking through Gorky Park in Moscow, in the middle of the Russian summer, facing the atmosphere of collective joy that prevails in the Russian capital during this season. Immediately, I remembered the verses of the German band, whose epiphany occurred precisely on a walk through the Gorky Park.

I felt the utopian “wind of change” blowing in my face for a few seconds, but I quickly recalled the recent memory of three visits to the conflict zone on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Immediately, I realized that the “wind” narrated by the Germans was blowing in the wrong direction.

The world is closing in
And did you ever think
That we could be so close like brothers?

To the purest of hearts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world truly seemed filled with an atmosphere of “change” capable of bringing the West and Eurasia “closer.” For innocent hearts, the end of the Cold War would represent the beginning of an era of harmony and cooperation among all peoples.

This was, in fact, a possibility. But the West chose the opposite path. It chose, guided by its megalomaniacal desire for world domination, the path of confrontation, hatred and war with Russia.

After the political, economic and social catastrophe of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era – when the USSR was liquidated and the Russian Federation was founded already on the brink of a civil war – the young Vladimir Putin had offered NATO, innocently or not, the proposal that would define the direction of ties between Moscow and the West: Russia’s possible entry into NATO.

Obviously, the US, already experienced in decades of knowledge of the geopolitical science (unfortunately, ignored in the USSR as a “German science”), rejected Putin’s proposal. In the end, how could Russia, the center of the “Heartland”, enter the Atlantic alliance?!

The tacit condition for Russian access to NATO was simple: Russia would have to divide itself into dozens of countries, forming weak, Western-puppet ethno-states. With its territorial greatness intact, Russia did not give the West a “security guarantee” strong enough to enter the alliance, since, at any time, the largest country in the world could simply leave NATO and become an enemy, having strength enough to face the US and its vassals.

Anyway, Russia and the West were not “as close” as the Scorpions musicians would have liked.

The wind of change blows straight
Into the face of time
Like a storm wind that will ring
The freedom bell for peace of mind
Let your balalaika sing what my guitar wants to say

Many factors prevented the utopian dreams of the German musicians from coming true. In fact, in the Scorpions’ own lyrics, some racist mentality is reflected, seeing Russians as a “primitive” people and ignorant of the cultural innovations of the capitalist West – perhaps they did not know that the rock musical genre emerged in the USSR and West Germany almost simultaneously, in the 1960s, with the electric guitar being as common to Russians in the late USSR as the traditional balalaika.

In a naive way, the song reflects the thoughts of a European youth impressed by the “discovery” of the Russian-Soviet world, as an “interesting novelty” for the bored Western society. The pain of the Soviets who saw their country collapse was never taken into account by Western artists – who, swallowed in the dominant ideology, were convinced that being part of the West was the best for everyone on the “other side of the world”.

Westerners have always had a racist and supremacist view towards Russians, expressed even in the most innocent and friendly works – like this song by Scorpions. Seeing Russians as a “retrograde” and “primitive” people is one of the basic principles of the entire Russophobic ideology that prevailed in the West during the 20th century and remains prevalent now in the 21st century. For NATO, as well as for historical (German) and current (Ukrainian) Nazis, Russia is a barbaric, primitive land, needing the arrival of the “Western civilization”. This mentality prevented any fruitful peace dialogue throughout the post-Cold War years.

Take me
To the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away

Ambitions for world domination and Russophobia – inherited from the Nazis who received asylum in the US and Europe after the WWII – led Western countries to support all forms of measures against the Russian Federation. The promotion of separatism in areas such as Chechnya and neo-Nazism in the Russian strategic environment, mainly in Ukraine, led to successive attritions against Moscow.

Russia defeated the Caucasus’ separatists and neutralized Russophobic threats in Georgia, but was late to pay attention to the Ukrainian problem. After eight years of war in Donbass, Moscow made the right decision to intervene to stop the genocide of ethnic Russians in Donetsk and Lugansk – and several other Russian-majority regions.

In Donbass, the “children of tomorrow” on the Russian side of (then) Ukraine did not have a ludic and kind childhood, but a real hell with Western-supplied aviation, artillery and drones. With broad support from NATO, the Kiev Junta advanced its “de-Russification” plans and implemented an ethnic and cultural genocide in the eastern regions, leading thousands of innocent children and civilians to martyrdom.

For the children of Donbass, there has never been any “glory night” – at least, not before February 24, 2022, when the military forces of the Russian Federation finally put an end to the genocide initiated by the neo-Nazis in 2014. For those children, the actual “wind of change” blew precisely on the night when Russian missiles targeted the bases of Ukrainian fascist militias.

What the Western world called an “unjustified invasion”, the innocent children of Donbass called “hope” – or simply “change”. Undoubtedly, for those children, the early morning of February 24, 2022 was a “glory night” – the first since 1991, when millions of Russians suddenly became foreigners in their own lands.

In the wind of change…

For two years now, the hope of every ethnic Russian in the New Regions – and in all Russian-majority territories – has been Moscow’s military victory. More than that, hope for Russian victory extends to a conviction that the defeat of the Kiev regime will trigger a domino effect of changes across the world geopolitical scenario, bringing about a total reconfiguration of the global order.

The post-Cold War “wind of change” has blown in the wrong direction. The West had never been as Russophobic as it is now. There has never been [in the West] so much demonization and marginalization of Russia as in current times, when the US and Europe are futilely trying to “cancel” the largest country in the world. The end of the Cold War and communism, instead of representing a true “wind of change”, brought with it the rise of racism and fascism as weapons of war in the service of the West’s desire for world power.

And it is precisely the Russian Federation that now shows the world an alternative to change [for the better] the course of humanity. The winds that have blown in the wrong direction in recent decades now finally seem to favor the emergence of a new world, where people can finally be closer and friendlier, through a multipolar system without hegemonies.

It remains to be seen whether the West will accept the inevitable fate of humanity.