Mrs Frank despairs at how her family back home, who are otherwise reasonable people, have become so loyal to Putin. The TV news there is a bad joke, the fake footage they've been using to drum up anti-Ukrainian sentiment is getting increasingly ridiculous but everyone buys it just the same because what else is there?
This is why I don't buy the 'Putin's lost it' angle. If he was just an unhinged nutcase he'd have invaded ten, twenty years ago. What he actually did was spend those years gaining absolute control over the media, civil society and public discourse. Because he needs that level of control to convince Russians that their Ukrainian cousins, and in many Russian families they will be literally cousins, are suddenly an existential threat. Unfortunately to maintain that control he needs to provide some kind of substrate for the heroic national narrative. A vast military apparatus that's woven into the fabric of political and even religious life (Putin's revivified orthodox church is laced through with overt worship of the Russian military) has to be given something to do, lest it become a source of dissent as it has on more than one occasion in Russian history.
