A disturbing story emerged from Switzerland a few weeks ago. A Russian-speaking Latvian man working in Switzerland attacked a family. The family were speaking Ukrainian amongst themselves. He started shouting at them and threatened to kill them and their baby. It happened on October 13, on the train from Interlaken to Spiez. Ukrainian passenger Olena Dudnyk was travelling with her Swiss husband and their young child. She was speaking Ukrainian, a language her husband understands. A man sitting nearby overheard them. As soon as he recognised the language, he started hurling insults and threats.

The man, later identified as Aleksandrs Vabiks, repeatedly declared that he was “a Russian man” and that “we are killing those like you.” He used obscene language and threatened to harm their one-year-old child. When Dudnyk began recording his outburst, he turned on her, insisting she delete the video, then rose from his seat and struck the phone from her hand. Her husband pushed him away. According to his wife, the aggressor calmed down only after he was pushed.

The Bern cantonal police confirmed the incident and opened an investigation. Both parties have expressed their intention to file statements. The video of the attack quickly went viral, gaining more than a million views online. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry condemned it as an act of ethnic hatred and demanded a full Swiss investigation.

At first glance, this seems like just another clickbait news story, but on closer inspection, it is something more. The attack on the quiet Swiss train isn’t just about one aggressive man. To understand his action, you have to understand where it comes from.

For centuries, the inhabitants of the Russian Empire lived in a world where order depended on fear and the constant presence of violence. The idea that law could protect the weak or limit the strong simply didn’t exist. Of course, this reliance of authority on brute force was not unique to Russia. Until very recently, on the scale of human history, most societies have been governed through violence. But while in many countries the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought a slow transformation – the rise of civic institutions, the gradual idea that citizens could have rights and a voice – in the Russian and later Soviet empires the autocratic patterns hardened, becoming even more total and more internalised.

The 1917 revolution was supposed to emancipate the oppressed. However, the underlying structure of power remained the same, perhaps even intensified. The Stalinist regime, armed with modern tools of control and surveillance, built an entire machinery of fear: secret police, informants, purges, forced confessions, and labour camps. Everyone was both a victim and a potential accomplice. Parents warned their children never to repeat what was said at home. The border between morality and survival blurred. The result was a society where trust, that fragile basis of any civic life, became almost impossible. And while the forms of repression changed after Stalin, the logic remained. The Soviet system continued to teach people that safety comes not from rights, but from proximity to power or, failing that, from invisibility.

In short, the rules were never something people agreed to follow together. Law was something that came from above, to be obeyed when someone powerful was watching, and ignored when they weren’t. So, when a person raised in that kind of environment finds themselves in a place like Switzerland, where rules work because the majority respects them voluntarily, they see the absence of fear and coercion as a sign that anything goes.

There is something in this story that may seem strange to an external observer. The man who attacked the Ukrainian family was not, officially speaking, a Russian. He was born in Latvia and carries a Latvian passport. And yet, he kept repeating: “I am a Russian man.” Why would someone born and raised in an independent European country identify himself this way?

To understand that, one needs to recall how the population map of the Soviet Union was drawn and maintained after the Second World War. When the Baltic states – Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia – were annexed by the USSR in 1940 and again occupied in 1944, their societies were seen as “politically unreliable.” The response was demographic engineering: deliberate, large-scale migration of people from the empire’s Slavic “core” (Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) into these newly absorbed territories.

Factories, ports, and administrative buildings were staffed with (supposedly more) loyal cadres from the Russian-speaking “heartlands.” They were the carriers of imperial “civilisation,” its language, and its norms. Over time, entire urban neighbourhoods in Riga, Tallinn, and Vilnius became Russian-speaking enclaves. For the Soviet state, this was a way of securing control. For those who moved there, it was a form of social promotion. In fact, here “Russian” was not an ethnic category. It was a civilizational rank, a mark of belonging to the centre of power. Many of the settlers were not ethnically Russian, having come from Belarus or Ukraine, but they quickly adopted the imperial identity. To be “Russian” in the non-Russian peripheries meant to speak the language of authority, to be part of the culture that defined what was legitimate.

This pattern didn’t vanish with the end of the USSR. After 1991, the Soviet republics regained their independence, but the Russian-speaking minorities remained, often feeling estranged from the new identity projects around them. For some, their identity became even more rigid, due to defensiveness.. The Soviet Union had given them a sense of superiority, while independence took that away. Many began clinging even more tightly to the idea of being “Russian,” not because they were born in Russia or had ever been there, but because it provided a way to preserve the sense of moral superiority in a society that regarded them as outsiders. Many of these “imperial Russians” living outside Russia were more nationalistic than those inside it. They may have never set foot in Russia, but they defend it as an ideal, as the last refuge of their lost prestige. When that identity feels challenged, especially by those they see as lower on the imperial ladder, the reaction can be violent.

I’ve seen these dynamics countless times, in my native city of Donetsk, for example, where many people who were ethnically Ukrainian and had never set foot in Russia still called themselves “Russian” and despised everything Ukrainian. For them, to be “Russian” meant to belong to a higher order of civilisation. To call oneself “Ukrainian,” on the other hand, was to voluntarily renounce social status and symbolic privilege. Some of these people spoke bitterly about “forced Ukrainization.” In reality, there was no obligation to use Ukrainian, and there were no penalties for not using it, especially in Donetsk. What provoked them was not coercion but equality. The simple fact that the “provincial,” “backward” language was now allowed to exist freely and neutrally in public life felt, to them, like an act of violence, because it reversed the symbolic hierarchy of cultures. Speaking Ukrainian in big Russified cities of Ukraine could sometimes provoke not just contempt but aggression. It violated the invisible social order, the unwritten rule that Russian culture stood above all others. The hostility it triggered wasn’t about language at all; it was about the loss of a status that had once seemed eternal. Astonishingly, this reality is still so poorly understood, when history is full of similar examples of the anger of those who consider themselves part of the imperial master-nation when their privilege is put into question.

It’s probably the same feeling that erupted on that Swiss train: the conviction that being “Russian” gives one the authority to dominate, to despise those who, by the mere fact of speaking their own language freely, challenge the hierarchy that once defined their world. And violence becomes easier when it feels safe to inflict. Having a stable legal status – a European Union passport, a Swiss residence permit, while (wrongly) assuming that the people you’re attacking are refugees, foreigners without the same protection – removes the last moral restraint.

The man on that train was in a setting where no one looked capable of physically stopping him, and he took that as permission to dominate those who, in his eyes, are weaker and unprotected.

This same pattern plays out on a global scale. The Russian state elites see Europe much like that man saw the train: as a place without “real” force, without someone visibly ready to dominate. It looks fake, easy to break, like a house of cards, because it relies on trust, and thus, in their view, on nothing.

You can see this mentality clearly in the story of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. When the Soviet Union collapsed, newly independent Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. It agreed to give up those weapons (over 1,900 warheads) in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Moscow solemnly pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and existing borders. This was a historic act of trust, based on a belief that international law and signed agreements could now replace nuclear deterrence. 

For Russian elites, however, the promise was just on paper. Two decades later, in 2014, it invaded the very country whose borders it had sworn to protect. By annexing Crimea and fueling war in Eastern Ukraine, Moscow demonstrated exactly how little value it places on words unbacked by force. From the Kremlin’s perspective, Ukraine’s decision to trust was not a gesture of good faith but a sign of foolishness. That betrayal destroyed not only Ukraine’s security but also one of the last illusions that agreements could restrain those who rule by domination. The same logic reappeared in the Minsk agreements that followed the first invasion. European negotiators saw them as a step toward peace. Moscow saw them as a temporary tactical pause, a way to consolidate its military position and prepare for a larger war. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was simply the culmination of this logic.

From the Kremlin’s point of view, the European allies of Ukraine have no “real” power. Russian propaganda mocks Western societies for their tolerance, their pluralism, and their hesitation to use violence, all seen as symptoms of decay. In that mental universe, peace exists only when someone is clearly in charge, and if no one is visibly dominating, then the field is open for whoever dares to act. That is why the Kremlin speaks so often of “a multipolar world.” It presents this as a call for equality, but what it really means is a world without rules, a world where no law is higher than raw power, and no one is safe unless they can defend themselves by force. It is the international version of the man on the Swiss train: the conviction that if no one strong enough is watching, you can do whatever you like.

People and societies shaped by fear and domination can’t imagine relationships built on any agreements that require trust. The man on the train and Russian political elites are two versions of the same story. Both come from a social setting that sees respect as submission, peace as weakness, agreements as empty shells and absence of explicit force as an invitation to unlimited violence.