With this war Putin is destroying the last remnants of a warm memory of the Soviet Union. The atrocities of Bucha are the final nail in the coffin of the fantasy that the Soviet Union could be resurrected. Putin is instead living out sheer neo-tsarist violence. The Kremlin's claim that Belarus and Ukraine (and other areas of the old tsarist empire?) are Russia's little brothers can now only be understood by an old generation zombified in front of Russian state TV. The invasion of Ukraine is a terrible display of past imperial thinking that Russia's young generation cannot possibly accept.
Is this categorisation into an old and young generation too clichéd? On thing is for sure: Lukashenko and Putin both belong to an old generation that feeds on rotten nostalgia.