By William Arkin, Newsweek, 3/22/22

As destructive as the Ukraine war is, Russia is causing less damage and killing fewer civilians than it could, U.S. intelligence experts say.

Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act. If Russia were more intentionally destructive, the clamoring for U.S. and NATO intervention would be louder. And if Russia were all-in, Putin might find himself with no way out. Instead, his goal is to take enough territory on the ground to have something to negotiate with, while putting the government of Ukraine in a position where they have to negotiate.

Understanding the thinking behind Russia’s limited attacks could help map a path towards peace, experts say.

In nearly a month since Russia invaded, dozens of Ukrainian cities and towns have fallen, and the fight over the country’s largest cities continues. United Nations human rights specialists say that some 900 civilians have died in the fighting (U.S. intelligence puts that number at least five times UN estimates). About 6.5 million Ukrainians have also become internally displaced (15 percent of the entire population), half of them leaving the country to find safety.

“The destruction is massive,” a senior analyst working at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) tells Newsweek, “especially when compared with what Europeans and Americans are used to seeing.”

But, the analyst says, the damage associated with a contested ground war involving peer opponents shouldn’t blind people to what is really happening. (The analyst requested anonymity in order to speak about classified matters.) “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”

In the capital, most observable to the west, Kyiv city authorities say that some 55 buildings have been damaged and that 222 people have died since February 24. It is a city of 2.8 million people.

“We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct,” says a retired Air Force officer, a lawyer by training who has been involved in approving targets for U.S. fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. The officer currently works as an analyst with a large military contractor advising the Pentagon and was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly.

“If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”

In the analyst’s view, though the war has led to unprecedented destruction in the south and east, the Russian military has actually been showing restraint in its long-range attacks.

As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). The vast majority of the airstrikes are over the battlefield, with Russian aircraft providing “close air support” to ground forces. The remainder—less than 20 percent, according to U.S. experts—has been aimed at military airfields, barracks and supporting depots.

A proportion of those strikes have damaged and destroyed civilian structures and killed and injured innocent civilians, but the level of death and destruction is low compared to Russia’s capacity.

“I know it’s hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,” says the DIA analyst. “But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.”

Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24 with an air and missile attack targeted against some 65 airfields and military installations. On the first night, at least 11 airfields were attacked. Some 50 additional military installations and air defense sites were hit, including 18 early-warning radar facilities.

In these initial salvos, a total of some 240 weapons were expended, including 166 air-, ground-, and sea-based missiles. Though there were a good number of longer-range bombers (flying from Russian soil), most of the airstrikes were shorter-range and most of the missiles launched were also short-range types of the Iskander (NATO SS-26 Stone) and Tochka (NATO SS-21 Scarab) classes.

The breadth of the attack—north to south, east to west—led many observers to compare the opening bombardment to a pattern seen in U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where large salvos concentrating on air defenses and airfields had the intent of establishing air superiority, a shock strike that would then open the skies for follow-on bombing at will. When it came to Ukraine, not only did many observers “mirror-image” Russian objectives to match U.S. practices, they also made premature (and incorrect) observations that Russia was fighting such a conflict.

Even before Russian ground forces reached Kyiv and other cities, this narrative goes, the air and missile forces would have so damaged Ukraine—including its communications and other infrastructure needed for defenses to continue working—that it would secure victory on the ground.

Russia has not achieved any of these goals. Though the outlines of its first night of strikes suggested an air superiority campaign and an intense and focused destruction of Ukraine’s military, after a month of war, continued targeting tells a different story. Russia still hasn’t completely knocked out the Ukrainian air force, nor has it established air superiority. Airfields away from the battlefield are mostly still operable and some (in major cities) haven’t been bombed at all. The fabric of communications in the country continues to operate intact. There has been no methodical Russian attack on transportation routes or bridges to impede Ukrainian ground defenses or supplies. Though electrical power plants have been hit, they are all in contested territory or near military installations and deployments. None have been intentionally targeted.

In fact, there has been no methodical bombing campaign to achieve any systemic outcome of a strategic nature. Air and missile strikes, which initially seemed to tell one story, have almost exclusively been in direct support of ground forces.

“Think of the Russian Air force as flying artillery,” says the retired senior U.S. Air Force officer, who communicated with Newsweek via email. “It’s not an independent arm. It has undertaken no strategic air campaign as American observers might be used to from the last 30 years of American conflict.”

Ukrainian air defenses, both fixed and mobile missiles, have proven resilient and deadly.

“The Air Defense’s survivability and efficacy have surprised many, not only in Kyiv, but also across the country,” Kyiv-based military expert Oleg Zhdanov told the Kyiv Independent.

Ukrainian military reporter Illia Ponomarenko says that the air defense system defending Kyiv from aircraft and missiles “has been particularly effective.

“Most missiles targeting the city are successfully intercepted,” Ponomarenko says.

Russia did not bomb stationary air defense emplacements protecting cities. U.S. analysts say Putin’s generals were particularly reluctant to attack urban targets in Kyiv.

As a result, regardless of the Kremlin’s plans—whether Russia was actually seeking air superiority or intended to limit damage in Kyiv—there is no question that Putin has had to revise the long-range attack plan.

Over the course of almost four weeks, missiles fired at Kyiv have been scarce. Ukrainian media have reported just more than a dozen incidents involving Russian cruise and ballistic missiles intercepted over the city and its closest suburbs since February 24. And all of them, U.S. experts say, have been clearly headed for legitimate military targets.

“The fact that the mobile S-300 SAM systems are still operating is a powerful indictment of Russia’s ability to conduct dynamic or time-sensitive targeting,” the Atlantic Council asserted this week in a military brief.

The DIA analyst disagrees: “For whatever reason, clearly the Russians have been reluctant to strike inside the urban megalopolis of Kyiv.

“Yes they might not be up to the U.S. task [in dynamic targeting] or in establishing air superiority … But this is the Russian air force, subordinate to the ground forces. And this war is different: it’s being fought on the ground, where everything strategic that Russia might destroy in front of its forces—bridges, communications, airfields, etc.—also becomes unusable to them as they move forward.”

From the very beginning of air strikes, both U.S. analysts agree, some of the limited air and missile attacks have also had some internal logic. Take, for instance, the airfield at Hostomel, northwest of Kyiv. It wasn’t directly attacked because Russia initially used it to land paratroopers, with the hope of advancing to the capital city. Instead the airfield and the surrounding countryside became the scene a major battle, as Ukrainian forces mounted a fierce defense.

In the south, Kherson airport also wasn’t attacked. The reason has become clear: Russia is now using that very airfield to stage its own forces.

In Kyiv, only one of the major airports was struck, in Boryspil. The news media reported that the “international airport” was hit, but the dual civil-military airfield is also home to Ukraine Air Force’s 15th Transport Wing, including the presidential Tu-134 jet that might have been used by Ukrainian President Zelensky if he chose to evacuate. The other major civilian Kyiv airport, Zhulyany, has never been attacked. Nor have two civil airports in Kharkiv (Ukraine’s second largest city) been attacked.

Russia started the war with some 300 combat aircraft in Belarus and western Russia within range of Ukraine. Those and other aircraft pulled into the war have been flying about 80 strike sorties (individual flights) daily. Ukraine claims that 95 of those Russian aircraft have been lost, either shot down by air defenders or due to human error and technical problems. (Russia has moved additional aircraft from other bases to replenish most of its losses.)

The strikes inside major cities (Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa) have not only been limited, but the retired U.S. Air Force officer points out that even when long-range aviation—Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers delivering cruise and hypersonic missiles —have flown strikes in western Ukraine, away from the battlefield, they have been directed at military targets.

And there has been strategic logic, at least in Russia’s view.

“They’ve been signaling,” the retired officer says. “Western airfields [at Lutsk, L’viv, and Ivano-Frankivsk] were hit because they were the most likely steppingstones for donated fighter aircraft coming in from Poland and eastern European countries. When those targets were prepped,” he adds, “there was also talk of a western no-fly zone where those [western] airfields might have been essential.

“And the so-called peacekeeper training ground [in Yaroviv] was hit because it was the place where the ‘international legion’ was to have trained,” the officer says. “Moscow even announced that.”

Russia, the DIA analyst adds, has also been careful not to cause escalation onto Belorussian or Russian territory, or to provoke NATO. Despite operating from Belarus, Russian ground and air operations have mostly been confined to the southeastern portion of the country. And the attacks in western Ukraine, have been careful to avoid NATO airspace. For example, the Ukrainian airbase at Lutsk, home to the 204th Aviation Wing and just 70 miles south of the Belarus, was attacked March 13th by long-range bombers. The missiles were launched from the south, from over the Black Sea.

None of this is to suggest that Russia is not at fault in its invasion, or that the destruction and the civilian deaths, injuries and dislocation aren’t due to its aggression. Evidence on the battlefield, where there has been grinding fight for territory—in Kharkiv, in the contested front line towns like Mariupol, Mikolaiiv, and Sumy in the east; and Chernihiv northeast of Kyiv—indicates that civilian deaths have been much higher where ground forces are operating.

Even though the majority of Russian airstrikes have taken place in these areas, the increased civilian harm is due to the use of artillery and multiple rocket launchers, not Russian air or long-range missile strikes.

“People are talking about Grozny [in Chechnya] and Aleppo [in Syria], and the razing of Ukrainian cities” a second retired U.S. Air Force senior officer tells Newsweek. “But even in the case of southern cities, where artillery and rockets are within range of populated centers, the strikes seem to be trying to target Ukrainian military units, many of which by necessity operating from inside urban areas.”

The officer requested anonymity because he is being privately briefed on the war by the Pentagon and is not authorized to speak to the news media.

He and the other analysts who spoke to Newsweek argue not only that the destruction is only a small fraction of what is possible, but also that they see a glimmer of hope in a fact-based analysis of what Russia has done.

“I was initially puzzled as to why more long-range missiles haven’t been sent into Kyiv and other major cities such as Odesa, and also why long-range aviation hasn’t been used more in strategic attacks,” says the second senior officer. “But then I had to shift to see the war through [Vladimir] Putin’s eyes.”

“Caught with his pants down, perhaps Putin indeed pivoted after he realized that Ukraine wasn’t going to be a cakewalk and that Kyiv wasn’t conquerable. Maybe he decided to solely focus on taking territory along the periphery and linking up his consolidations in the south, to be in a position to hold enough territory to extract concessions from Ukraine and the west—security guarantees or some demilitarized zone.”

The second senior officer says that Putin obviously continues to apply pressure against Kyiv, but Russia hasn’t shifted much of its own forces and has continued to back off bombing in the city proper.

“In that, maybe he is leaving room for a political settlement,” the officer says.

Sunday, Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN he is prepared to talk to the Russian president. “I’m ready for negotiations with him. I was ready for the last two years. And I think that without negotiations, we cannot end this war,” said Zelensky.

The fact that both sides are talking, experts say, indicates not only how shocked they are by the destructiveness of a land war in Europe, but are also stymied in achieving their military objectives. As Russia advances, it is running out of supplies. Its forces are also exhausted. As Ukraine continues its valiant defense, it too is reaching the limits of human endurance, facing major losses and running low on ammunition.

It is now absolutely clear, all U.S. observers agree, that Putin and his generals overestimated their own military prowess while grossly underestimating Ukraine’s defenses.

“I’m frustrated by the current narrative—that Russia is intentionally targeting civilians, that it is demolishing cities, and that Putin doesn’t care. Such a distorted view stands in the way of finding an end before true disaster hits or the war spreads to the rest of Europe,” the second U.S. Air Force officer says.

Heartbreaking images make it easy for the news to focus on the war’s damage to buildings and lives. But in proportion to the intensity of the fighting (or Russia’s capacity), things could indeed be much worse.

“I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so,” says the DIA analyst. “In fact, I’d say that Russian could be killing thousands more civilians if it wanted to.”

“I’m no com-symp,” the analyst says. “Russia is dead wrong, and Putin needs to be punished. But in terms of concluding the war in a way that both sides can accept and where we don’t see Armageddon, the air and missile war provides positive signs.”

Every war is unique and awful, and Ukraine is no different. But Russia’s choice to modulate its destructiveness is an important counterintuitive element. Vladimir Putin can’t easily win; he can’t accept loss or retreat; and he can’t escalate. He has to keep destruction and pressure at a very careful, just-bad-enough level to keep some advantage.

“I know it’s thin consolation that it could be a lot worse,” the DIA analyst says, “but to understand how that is the case should really change people’s perspectives, even inside the U.S. government, as to how to end this.”

A video of Gennadiy Druzenko’s remarks were much talked about in recent days on social media. After claiming he’d received death threats, Druzenko apologized for the remarks and said they were made due to high emotions and that he and his colleagues had never and would never castrate POW’s. This comes after remarks by another Ukrainian, Fahruddin Sharafmal, last week on Ukrainian television where he advocated for genocide against Russians, with a focus on Russian children. You can read more about both cases here.

In a comment on my recent article “Feedback from My Contacts in Russia,” which also was cross-posted at Medium.com, writer Dan Kadlec told me in response to my mention of the thousands of Russians who’d been hurt by the closing of western businesses in their home country: “I have been meeting some of these folks in Dubai.” Below are some excerpts from his article. – Natylie

By Dan Kadlec, Medium.com, 3/19/21

….Much is written about where Russian oligarchs are parking their superyachts and Gulfstream jets under threat of sanctions from the west. Dubai is one of those places. With a lot of Russian money, the yacht-building industry here has doubled the past eight years, and in recent weeks yacht traffic between Bluewaters and Palm Jumeirah in Dubai Harbor has felt like the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. Clashing wakes from floating 250-foot behemoths toss novice jet skiers like dinghies in a hurricane.

But ordinary Russians are on the move too. The families and the reuniting couple I saw were not oligarchs — and they were not on vacation. They were among the estimated 200,000 working-class folks who fled to Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Much of the UAE flow has been into Dubai. Demand has been so strong that one-way coach air fare from Moscow has risen five-fold to $1,800.

I continue to encounter Russian emigres and speak to them when it feels appropriate. In the elevator, I commented on a small poodle that a middle-aged man was about to take for a walk. I’m big on elevator convos; I enjoy interacting with strangers and have largely perfected the timing and how to graciously butt into someone’s life. But this man was in no mood. He mumbled something in Russian without making eye contact. I knew that my gregariousness had failed and that his mind was heavy and far away.

“Oh yeah,” a little voice in my head said. “Not everyone here is on a holiday.”

….The Russian refugees I have encountered are still in shock and largely reluctant to share details. In my limited sampling, their livelihoods had been tied to western companies with offices in Moscow that shut down with little warning. The lucky ones were given 48 hours to accept a ticket out, leaving almost everything they owned behind. Some hope to return one day.

Dimitri, a young man, left his mother and father behind. With no time to think the matter through, he hopped the next flight believing this nightmare would pass soon enough and he could go back to them. Yet hundreds of international companies are preparing for permanent shutdown. At last count, 159 western companies had made a clean break from Russia while 182 had suspended all operations and may never resume.

When might Dimitri go home? Possibly never.

Alina and Ivan have two young children. But they only had a passport for one, so the other child stayed behind with grandparents. They didn’t know what else to do and had no time to consider their options. Their days are now consumed with searching for a path to reunite the family — whatever it takes. These are heartbreaking stories to hear first-hand…

Read full article here.

I have generally found Anatol Lieven to be a good analyst on Russia issues. I will withhold my opinion on this particular article for the moment, but think people should read it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section. – Natylie

By Anatol Lieven, Financial Times, 3/11/22

In describing Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, I have often thought of a remark by John Maynard Keynes about Georges Clemenceau, French prime minister during the first world war: that he was an utterly disillusioned individual who “had one illusion — France”.

Something similar could be said of Russia’s governing elite, and helps to explain the appallingly risky collective gamble they have taken by invading Ukraine. Ruthless, greedy and cynical they may be — but they are not cynical about the idea of Russian greatness.

The western media employ the term “oligarch” to describe super-wealthy Russians in general, including those now wholly or largely resident in the west. The term gained traction in the 1990s, and has long been seriously misused. In the time of President Boris Yeltsin, a small group of wealthy businessmen did indeed dominate the state, which they plundered in collaboration with senior officials. This group was, however, broken by Putin during his first years in power.

Three of the top seven “oligarchs” tried to defy Putin politically. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were driven abroad, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed and then exiled. The others, and their numerous lesser equivalents, were allowed to keep their businesses within Russia in return for unconditional public subservience to Putin. When Putin met (by video link) leading Russian businessmen after launching the invasion of Ukraine, there was no question of who was giving the orders.

The force that broke the oligarchs was the former KGB, reorganised in its various successor services. Putin himself, of course, came from the KGB, and a large majority of the top elite under Putin are from the KGB or associated state backgrounds (though not the armed forces).

This group have remained remarkably stable and homogenous under Putin, and are (or used to be) close to him personally. Under his leadership, they have plundered their country (though unlike the previous oligarchs, they have kept most of their wealth within Russia) and have participated or acquiesced in his crimes, including the greatest of them all, the invasion of Ukraine. They have echoed both Putin’s vicious propaganda against Ukraine and his denunciations of western decadence.

As Russia plunges deeper into a military quagmire and economic crisis, a central question is whether — if the war is not ended quickly by a peace settlement — Putin can be removed (or persuaded to step down) by the Russian elites themselves, in order to try to extricate Russia and themselves from the pit he has dug for them. To assess the chances of this requires an understanding of the nature of the contemporary Russian elites, and above all of Putin’s inner core.

By way of illustrating the depth of the Russian catastrophe of the 1990s and identifying with all those who suffered from it, Putin has said that at one stage he was reduced — while still a serving lieutenant colonel of the KGB — to moonlighting as a freelance taxi driver in order to supplement his income. This is plausible enough. In 1994, while I was working as a journalist for The Times in Russia and the former USSR, my driver in the North Caucasus was an ex-major in the KGB. “We thought we were the backbone of the Soviet Union,” he said to me bitterly. “Now look at us. Real Chekists!”

“Real Chekist” (nastoyashchy chekist) was a Soviet propaganda phrase referring to the qualities of ruthless discipline, courage, ideological commitment and honesty supposedly characteristic of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police formed by Lenin and his associates. It became the subject of many Soviet jokes, but there is little doubt that Putin and his top elite continue to see themselves in this light, as the backbone of Russia — though Putin, who is anything but a revolutionary, appears to identify much more strongly with the security elites of imperial Russia.

An interesting illustration of this comes from Union of Salvation (Soyuz Spaseniya, 2019), a film about the radical Decembrist revolt of 1825, made with the support of the Russian state. To the considerable shock of older Russian friends of mine who were brought up to revere the Decembrists, the heroes of this film are Tsar Nicholas I and the loyal imperial generals and bureaucrats who fought to preserve government and order against the rebels.

Although they have amassed immense power and wealth, Putin and his immediate circle remain intensely resentful of the way in which the Soviet Union, Russia and their own service collapsed in the 1990s — and great power mixed with great resentment is one of the most dangerous mixtures in both domestic and international politics.

As Putin’s autocratic tendencies have grown, real power (as opposed to wealth) within the system has come to depend more and more on continual personal access to the president; and the number of those with such access has narrowed — especially since the Covid pandemic led to Putin’s drastic physical isolation — to a handful of close associates.

Five of Putin’s inner circle

Sergei Lavrov, 71, foreign minister

Sergei Naryshkin, 67, foreign intelligence chief

Nikolai Patrushev, 70, secretary of Russia’s security council

Igor Sechin, 61, chief executive of Rosneft

Sergei Shoigu, 66, defence minister

In his first years in power, Putin (who was a relatively junior KGB officer) could be regarded as “first among equals” in a top elite of friends and colleagues. No longer. Increasingly, even the siloviki have been publicly reduced to servants of the autocrat — as was graphically illustrated by Putin’s humiliation of his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, at the televised meeting of the National Security Council on the eve of war. Such contemptuous behaviour towards his immediate followers could come back to bite Putin, as it has so many past autocrats.

The inner core includes defence minister Sergei Shoigu (former emergencies minister and not a professional soldier); Nikolai Patrushev, former head of domestic intelligence and now secretary of Russia’s National Security Council; Naryshkin; and Igor Sechin, the former deputy prime minister appointed by Putin to run the Rosneft oil company. Insofar as top economic officials with “patriotic liberal” leanings were ever part of this inner core, they have long since been excluded.

These men are known in Russia as the “siloviki” — “men of force”, or perhaps even, in the Irish phrase, “hard men”. A clear line should be drawn between the siloviki and the wider Russian elites — large and very disparate and disunited congeries of top businessmen, senior officials outside the inner circle, leading media figures, top generals, patriotic intellectuals and the motley crew of local notables, placemen and fixers who make up the leadership of Putin’s United Russia party.

Among some of the wider Russian elites, unease at the invasion of Ukraine and its consequences is already apparent. Naturally enough, this has begun with the economic elites, given their deep stakes in business with the west and their understanding of the catastrophic impact of western sanctions on the Russian economy. Roman Abramovich, his discomfort clear enough as he sought buyers for Chelsea Football Club, found the sale halted this week when his UK assets were frozen. Mikhail Fridman, chairman of Alfa Group (already severely hit by western sanctions) and one of the surviving former “oligarchs” from the 1990s, has called for an early end to the war, as has aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska.

If there is no peace agreement and the war drags on into a bloody stalemate, the economy declines precipitously and the Russian people see a steep fall in their living standards, then public unrest, state repression and state attempts to dragoon and exploit business will all inevitably increase radically, and so will the unhappiness of the wider elites.

These, however, lack the collective institutions and, perhaps more importantly, the collective identities that would allow them to combine easily to unseat Putin. The Duma, or lower house of Russia’s parliament, was succinctly described to me by a Russian friend as “a compost heap full of assorted rotten vegetables”. This is a bit too unkind — the Duma does contain some decent people — but it would be futile to look to it for any kind of political leadership.

The army, which elsewhere in the world would be the usual institution behind a coup, has been determinedly depoliticised, first by the Soviet state and now by Putin’s, in return for huge state funding. It is also now committed to military victory in Ukraine, or at least something that can be presented as victory.

On the other hand, Putin’s ruthless purging of the upper ranks of the military, along with the apparent incompetence with which the high command has steered the invasion of Ukraine, could lead to considerable future discontent in the army, including lower-rank generals. This means that while the military will not itself move against Putin, it is also very unlikely to move to save him.

Some of the most effective pressure on Putin’s elite may come from their own children. The parents almost all grew up and began their careers in the final years of the Soviet Union. Their children, however, have in many cases been educated and lived largely in the west. Many agree, at least in private, with Elizaveta Peskova, daughter of Putin’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who protested against the war on Instagram (the post was quickly removed). Dinner conversations in the Peskov family must be interesting affairs these days.

The siloviki, however, are so closely identified with Putin and the war that a change in the Russian regime would have to involve the departure of most from power, possibly in return for a promise that they would not be arrested and would retain their family’s wealth (this was the guarantee that Putin made with his predecessor Yeltsin).

Yet this change may be a long time coming. The siloviki have been accurately portrayed as deeply corrupt — but their corruption has special features. Patriotism is their ideology and the self-justification for their immense wealth. I once chatted over a cup of tea with a senior former Soviet official who had kept in touch with his old friends in Putin’s elite. “You know,” he mused, “in Soviet days most of us were really quite happy with a dacha, a colour TV and access to special shops with some western goods, and holidays in Sochi. We were perfectly comfortable, and we only compared ourselves with the rest of the population, not with the western elites.

“Now today, of course, the siloviki like their western luxuries, but I don’t know if all this colossal wealth is making them happier or if money itself is the most important thing for them. I think one reason they steal on such a scale is that they see themselves as representatives of the state and they feel that to be any poorer than a bunch of businessmen would be a humiliation, even a sort of insult to the state. It used to be that official rank gave you top status. Now you have to have huge amounts of money too. That is what the 1990s did to Russian society.”

The siloviki are naturally attached to the idea of public order, an order that guarantees their own power and property, but which they also believe is essential to prevent Russia falling back into the chaos of the 1990s and the Russian revolution and civil war. The disaster of the 1990s, in their view, embraced not just a catastrophic decline of the state and economy but socially destructive moral anarchy — and their reaction has been not unlike that of conservative American society to the 1960s or conservative German society to the 1920s.

In this, Putin and the siloviki have the sympathy of very large parts of the Russian population, who remain bitterly resentful — both at the way they were betrayed and plundered in the 1990s and what they perceive as the open contempt shown towards ordinary Russians by the liberal cultural elites of Moscow and St Petersburg.

On one memorable occasion in the mid-1990s, I was asked to give an after-dinner talk at a conference held by a leading western bank for western investors and Russia’s financial elite. The dinner took place at a famous Moscow nightclub. When I ran out of time, there was no question of a polite note from the chairman; instead, a jazzed-up version of a Soviet patriotic song started blaring, and behind me on the stage appeared someone in a bear costume waving the Russian military ensign and leading a line of dancers clad in very abbreviated versions of Russian national dress.

Faced with this competition, I didn’t even try to carry on with my carefully considered summing-up, but retired bemused to my table. Then, however, I began to get a distinctly cold feeling. I remembered a scene from the 1972 film Cabaret, set in a nightclub in Weimar Berlin not long before the Nazis’ rise to power, in which dancers perform a parody of a parade before a giggling audience to the tune of a famous German military march. I wondered whether in Russia, too, there was going to be a terrible bill to pay for all this jollity — and I fear that Ukraine, and Russian soldiers, are now paying it.

One of the worst effects of this war is going to be deep and long-lasting Russian isolation from the west. I believe, however, that Putin and the siloviki (though not many in the wider elites) welcome this isolation. They are becoming impressed with the Chinese model: a tremendously dynamic economy, a disciplined society and a growing military superpower ruled over with iron control by a hereditary elite that combines huge wealth with deep patriotism, promoting the idea of China as a separate and superior civilisation.

They may well want the west to push Russia into the arms of China, despite the risk that this will turn Russia into a dependency of Beijing. And of course they believe the war in Ukraine will consolidate patriotic feeling in Russia behind their rule, as well as permitting them to engage in intensified repression in the name of support for the war effort. This repression has already begun, with the closing of Russia’s last remaining independent media and laws punishing as treason any criticism of the war.

Above all, for deep historical, cultural, professional and personal reasons, the siloviki and the Russian official elite in general are utterly, irrevocably committed to the idea of Russia as a great power and one pole of a multipolar world. If you do not believe in that, you are not part of the Russian establishment, just as if you do not believe in US global primacy you are not part of the US foreign and security establishment.

Ukraine’s place in this doctrine was accurately summed up by former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” The Russian establishment entirely agrees. They have also agreed, for the past 15 years at least, that America’s intention is to reduce Russia to a subservient third-rate power. More recently, they have concluded that France and Germany will never oppose the US. “To the west, we have only enemies,” as one establishment intellectual told me in 2019.

The Russian establishment sees encouragement of Ukrainian nationalism as a key element in Washington’s anti-Russian strategy. Even otherwise calm and reasonable members of the Russian establishment have snarled with fury when I have dared to suggest in conversation that it might be better for Russia itself to let Ukraine go. They seem prepared, if necessary, to fight on ruthlessly for a long time, and at immense cost and risk to their regime, to prevent that happening.

I don’t think we can answer this with certainty at this point, but Blumenthal points out some things that look suspicious. Time will tell. We have to remember that several claims made in this war were later debunked, including the Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island. Even the claim about Russia bombing the Babi Yar memorial site in Kiev turned out to be distorted – the site itself was not attacked but an area near the site. All sides in a war engage in propaganda. We must have skepticism and consider who benefits from a particular claim and whether it can be credibly verified. There is also chaos and confusion in war zones and sometimes information is just mistaken.- Natylie

By Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone, 3/18/22

Testimony by evacuated Mariupol residents and warnings of a false flag attack undermine the Ukrainian government’s claims about a Russian bombing of a local theater sheltering civilians.

Western media have reported that Russia’s military deliberately attacked the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, claiming that it was filled with civilians and marked with signs reading “children” on its grounds.

The supposed bombing took place just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to US Congress for a no fly zone, fueling the chorus for direct military confrontation with Russia and apparently inspiring President Joseph Biden to brand Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, as a “war criminal.”

A closer look reveals that local residents in Mariupol had warned three days before the March 16 incident that the theater would be the site of a false flag attack launched by the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which controlled the building and the territory around it.

Civilians that escaped the city through humanitarian corridors have testified that they were held by Azov as human shields in area, and that Azov fighters detonated parts of the theater as they retreated. Despite claims of a massive Russian airstrike that reduced the building to ashes, all civilians appear to have escaped with their lives.

Video of the attack on the theater remains unavailable at the time of publication; only photographs of the damaged structure can be viewed. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied conducting an airstrike on the theater, asserting that the site had no military value and that no sorties were flown in the area on March 16.

While the Russian military operation in Ukraine has triggered a humanitarian crisis in Mariupol, it is clear that Russia gained nothing by targeting the theater, and virtually guaranteed itself another public relations blow by targeting a building filled with civilians – including ethnic Russians.

Azov, on the other hand, stood to benefit from a dramatic and grisly attack blamed on Russia. In full retreat all around Mariupol and facing the possibility of brutal treatment at the hands of a Russian military hellbent on “de-Nazification,” its fighters’ only hope seemed to lie in triggering direct NATO intervention.

The same sense of desperation informed Zelensky’s carefully scripted address to Congress, in which he invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and played a heavily produced video depicting civilian suffering to make the case for a no fly zone.

By instigating Western public outrage over grisly Russian war crimes, Ukraine’s government is clearly aiming to generate enough pressure to overcome the Biden administration’s reluctance to directly confront Russia’s military.

But Kiev’s most emotionally potent allegation so far – that Russia deliberately bombed innocent children cowering inside a theater – has been undercut by testimonies from Mariupol residents and a widely viewed Telegram message explicitly foreshadowing a false flag attack on the building…

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