Russia’s War of Self-Destruction I. The Video
Tourists at the End of Empire
Part one of a four-part series examining Russia’s collapse through culture, attrition, and strategic failure.
I came across the video above on r/UkraineWarVideoReport, titled “The First Elite Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces filmed a video while preparing for an assault. Published 11.10.2025”
It was almost certainly filmed by Russian service members somewhere in Ukraine within the past six weeks.
The footage shows a squad of Russian soldiers, at least eight men and possibly nine, packed into two worn-out civilian vehicles with the doors removed: four in a sedan (likely a VAZ-2101 “Zhiguli,” the Soviet-built Fiat-124 derivative) and four or five in a Lada Niva pickup.
The squad appears to be heading out for yet another assault in what Vladimir Putin still calls his “Special Military Operation,” now a nearly four-year-long failure to extinguish Ukrainian identity and reassert Russian control.
Given the outcome of most such attacks, it seems likely that most of the men in this video are now dead or wounded, even if the end result for the day was for Putin’s horde to gain a bit of ground.
Drawing on daily frontline media and broader anthropological OSINT research, I have been revising my assessment of the war and, more specifically, of the Putin regime’s prospects for re-subjugating Ukraine as a dependent vassal state. This brief clip, in its rawness and absurdity, stands out as the “essence” of the war in its current phase: horrific, futile, and nihilistic all at once.
The video’s soundtrack complicates its meaning. Someone has overlaid “Туристы” (“Tourists”) by Kasper (feat. SKWLKR), a track that mixes swaggering beats with lyrics portraying Russian mercenaries as “musicians and tourists on safari in Africa.”
Musicians and tourists, Go on safari in Africa. The real elite, Even if they don’t drive Ferraris.
They chase off the shepherds, Show no pity to the Azawadians. If you can keep up this pace — Welcome, to punish the bastards.
Throw your junk in the duffel, And take more ammo with you. They were predicted to fall apart, But they’ll still go on to divide Poland.
Doesn’t matter what the day is — A weekday or a Saturday — But one thing’s certain: The white men’s work is waiting.
(Chorus) Musicians and tourists, Go on safari in Africa. The real elite, Even if they don’t drive Ferraris.
They chase off the shepherds, Show no pity to the Azawadians. If you can keep up this pace — Welcome, to punish the bastards.
Be ready — this isn’t a resort, And you’ll shiver like from malaria. But the scenery’s first-class, Just make sure you find some diesel.
Colorful land, So rich in fauna and flora. And, believe me, Pythagoras’ theorem wasn’t much use here.
(Chorus repeats) Musicians and tourists, Go on safari in Africa…
According to the lyrics archive Genius.com, Kasper is described, apparently in his own words, as “a permanent member of the private military company ‘Wagner,’ and now a musician and creator of many tracks.”
I found no public statement of allegiance to the Putin regime or its genocidal war from Kasper or his collaborator SKWLKR. Yet “Туристы” (“Tourists”) superficially glorifies the figure of the roaming Russian fighter: imperial, cynical, and detached under the guise of a travelogue.
The track’s Drift Phonk aesthetic recalls the bombastic self-mockery of Hard Bass, an ambiguous caricature of the gopnik subculture that emerged in late-1990s St. Petersburg. Originators such as XS Project crafted it as hyperactive satire of urban machismo and petty criminality, pairing aggressive beats with ironically wholesome lyrics about sobriety and discipline.
The irony backfired. Much of the intended audience missed the satire and embraced Hard Bass as a genuine lifestyle statement.
What began, at least in part, as social commentary on hooliganism evolved into a self-sustaining meme culture that blurred mockery and participation. The result was a feedback loop of irony and sincerity, an art form that both ridiculed and reinforced the social pathologies it depicted. “Tourists” seems to belong to that lineage: music that parodies imperial delusion even as it superficially revels in it.
While I am not a Russian speaker, the tone and lyrics of “Tourists” channel chauvinistic and imperialistic imagery with a similar surface irony. Kasper’s claim to be a “life-long Wagner” member undermines that interpretation but does not erase it.
Its “tourists” chase down shepherds, loot the African landscape, and, in a delusionally nostalgic nod to Stalin-era alignment with Nazi Germany, fantasize about “dividing Poland.” These absurd gestures toward conquest and imperial revival suggest that the song functions, at least partly, as self-mockery: akin to early-21st-century Hard Bass parody of gopnik excess.
Russian pop culture has long cultivated this ambiguous mode. It draws on traditions of Aesopian language, developed under Imperial censorship to disguise critique beneath loyal form. It also inherits the late-Soviet practice of stiob: a hyper-sincere parody in which power rituals are exaggerated to the point that mockery and worship become indistinguishable, as Alexei Yurchak observed in his study of late-Soviet irony.
The more physically-embodied, social folk-movements of hardbass and gopnik aesthetics of the 1990s and 2000s evolved from this same intellectual and linguistic logic—a carnivalesque embrace of delinquent street codes functioning simultaneously as self-mockery and bravado, critique and cosplay.
Source: Russian Literature, v74 “The Stiob of Ages: Carnivalesque Traditions in Soviet Rock and Related Counterculture”
The variant of modern Eastern European hip hop/trap found in “Tourists” seems to inherit that palette of bombast, parody, and deniable aggression. Read through this frame, “Туристы” exemplifies a 2024 descendant of stiob: it flatters the image of the roaming Russian fighter while satirizing him as a predatory “tourist.” Kasper’s claimed Wagner affiliation pushes interpretation toward ultra-nationalist self-glorification, yet the idiom still provides plausible deniability.
Which is precisely why the same track, applied to this video, can read equally as Russian hubris, or Ukrainian lampoon.
Is Kasper literally advocating imperialism and conquest, or is he participating in the peculiarly Russian tradition of double-voiced performance? The point is not to resolve that ambiguity but to recognize that the tradition itself makes certainty impossible.
As such, the use of this particular song as the soundtrack for this particular video leaves its origin uncertain. It may have been added by Russians out of hubris or by Ukrainians as mockery. My limited attempts to trace the video’s source have been unsuccessful, though I would welcome confirmation from anyone able to determine its provenance.
If a Russian unit selected the track, it likely served as a celebration of their supposed “elite” status—an anthem of cynical bravado masking despair. If a Ukrainian editor overlaid it later, the meaning inverts: the same lyrics become a grotesque parody of delusion, a requiem of self-mockery.
Either way, the coexistence of those readings captures the schizophrenic nature of Putin’s war, where propaganda and irony have collapsed into one another. The result is a scene that could be broadcast by either side—a moral and semantic inversion that epitomizes the degeneracy of Putin’s genocidal war against Ukraine and humanity.
That ambiguity is precisely what makes this video so emblematic of the war.
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Read the next chapter →
Russia’s War of Self-Destruction II. Russia’s ‘Meatgrinder’
In part one of this four part series, “Russia’s War of Self-Destruction | I. The Video: Tourists at the End of Empire,” I examined the cultural and psychosocial character of the brief battlefield clip embedded below.
