The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the “revolt,” as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the administration’s go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine—appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with his own version of reality: “Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over the weekend they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. . . . It shows real cracks.”
Blinken, unchallenged by his interviewer, Margaret Brennan, as he knew he would not be—why else would he appear on the show?—went on to suggest that the defection of the crazed Wagner leader would be a boon for Ukraine’s forces, whose slaughter by Russian troops was ongoing as he spoke. “To the extent that it presents a real distraction for Putin, and for Russian authorities, that they have to look at—sort of mind their rear as they’re trying to deal with the counter offensive in Ukraine, I think that creates even greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground.”
At this point was Blinken speaking for Joe Biden? Are we to understand that this is what the man in charge believes?
We now know that the chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army. There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule.
Pity the Washington columnists and national security correspondents who seem to rely heavily on official backgrounders with White House and State Department officials. Given the published results of such briefings, those officials seem unable to look at the reality of the past few weeks, or the total disaster that has befallen the Ukraine military’s counter-offensive.
So, below is a look at what is really going that was provided to me by a knowledgeable source in the American intelligence community:
“I thought I might clear some of the smoke. First and most importantly, Putin is now in a much stronger position. We realized as early as January of 2023 that a showdown between the generals, backed by Putin, and Prigo, backed by ultra-nationalist extremists, was inevitable. The age-old conflict between the ‘special’ war fighters and a large, slow, clumsy, unimaginative regular army. The army always wins because they own the peripheral assets that make victory, either offensive or defensive, possible. Most importantly, they control logistics. special forces see themselves as the premier offensive asset. When the overall strategy is offensive, big army tolerates their hubris and public chest thumping because SF are willing to take high risk and pay a high price. Successful offense requires a large expenditure of men and equipment. Successful defense, on the other hand, requires husbanding these assets.
“Wagner members were the spearhead of the original Russian Ukraine offensive. They were the ‘little green men’. When the offensive grew into an all-out attack by the regular army, Wagner continued to assist but reluctantly had to take a back seat in the period of instability and readjustment that followed. Prigo, no shy violet, took the initiative to grow his forces and stabilize his sector.
“The regular army welcomed the help. Prigo and Wagner, as is the wont of special forces, took the limelight and took the credit for stopping the hated Ukrainians. The press gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the big army and Putin slowly changed their strategy from offensive conquest of greater Ukraine to defense of what they already had. Prigo refused to accept the change and continued on the offensive against Bakhmut. Therein lies the rub. Rather than create a public crisis and court-martial the asshole [Prigozhin], Moscow simply withheld the resources and let Prigo use up his manpower and firepower reserves, dooming him to a stand-down. He is, after all, no matter how cunning financially, an ex-hot dog cart owner with no political or military accomplishments.
“What we never heard is three months ago Wagner was cycled out of the Bakhmut front and sent to an abandoned barracks north of Rostov-on-Don [in southern Russia] for demobilization. The heavy equipment was mostly redistributed, and the force was reduced to about 8,000, 2,000 of which left for Rostov escorted by local police.
“Putin fully backed the army who let Prigo make a fool of himself and now disappear into ignominy. All without raising a sweat militarily or causing Putin to face a political standoff with the fundamentalists, who were ardent Prigo admirers. Pretty shrewd.”
There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.
The current battlefield statistics that were shared with me suggest that the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy may be at risk in Ukraine. They also raise questions about the involvement of the NATO alliance, which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with training and weapons for the current lagging counter-offensive. I learned that in the first two weeks of the operation, the Ukraine military seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. I have been told that in the past ten days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way. They have recovered only two more square miles of Russian-seized territory. At that pace, one informed official said, waggishly, it would take Zelensky’s military 117 years to rid the country. of Russian occupation.
The Washington press in recent days seems to be slowly coming to grips with the enormity of the disaster, but there is no public evidence that President Biden and his senior aides in the White House and State Department aides understand the situation.
Putin now has within his grasp total control, or close to it, of the four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Lubansk, Zaporizhzhia—that he publicly annexed on September 30, 2022, seven months after he began the war. The next step, assuming there is no miracle on the battlefield, will be up to Putin. He could simply stop where he is, and see if the military reality will be accepted by the White House and whether a ceasefire will be sought, with formal end-of-war talks initiated. There will be a presidential election next April in Ukraine, and the Russian leader may stay put and wait for that—if it takes place. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said there will be no elections while the country is under martial law.
Biden’s political problems, in terms of next year’s presidential election, are acute—and obvious. On June 20 the Washington Post published an article based on a Gallup poll under the headline “Biden Shouldn’t Be as Unpopular as Trump—but He Is.” The article accompanying the poll by Perry Bacon, Jr., said that Biden has “almost universal support within his own party, virtually none from the opposition party and terrible numbers among independents.” Biden, like previous Democratic presidents, Bacon wrote, struggles “to connect with younger and less engaged voters.” Bacon had nothing to say about Biden’s support for the Ukraine war because the poll apparently asked no questions about the administration’s foreign policy.
The looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call for those Democratic members of Congress who support the president but disagree with his willingness to throw many billions of good money after bad in Ukraine in the hope of a miracle that will not arrive. Democratic support for the war is another example of the party’s growing disengagement from the working class. It’s their children who have been fighting the wars of the recent past and may be fighting in any future war. These voters have turned away in increasing numbers as the Democrats move closer to the intellectual and moneyed classes.
If there is any doubt about the continuing seismic shift in current politics, I recommend a good dose of Thomas Frank, the acclaimed author of the 2004 best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that explained why the voters of that state turned away from the Democratic party and voted against their economic interests. Frank did it again in 2016 in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? In an afterword to the paperback edition he depicted how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party repeated—make that amplified—the mistakes made in Kansas en route to losing a sure-thing election to Donald Trump.
It may be prudent for Joe Biden to talk straight about the war, and its various problems for America—and to explain why the estimated more than $150 billion that his administration has put up thus far turned out to be a very bad investment.
For close to 15 months, the bodies of fallen soldiers have steadily filled up a hillside military cemetery in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Now, the old, unmarked graves of those killed in past wars are being exhumed to make way for the seemingly endless stream of dead since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday afternoon, half a dozen gravediggers took a break in the shade, waiting for the latest coffin to inter at the cemetery, called Lychakiv. Smoking cigarettes and shielding themselves from the sun, they lamented the devastation that Russia had wrought. And they said they were bracing for more deaths as the fighting grew more intense during Ukraine’s counteroffensive…
…The magnitude of the losses is being felt in communities like the one in Lviv, starkly visible in the growing number of military graves in cemeteries large and small around the country.
On Monday, two men who died hundreds of miles apart were buried next to each other. Bohdan Didukh, 34, was killed by a mine last week in the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine, where the first stages of Ukraine’s counteroffensive began. Three days later, Oleh Didukh, 52, died of a heart attack while serving in an air-defense unit in the country’s west.
The men, who shared a last name but never knew each other in life, were united in death. They were honored side by side in a joint funeral in Lviv. Their families were overcome with grief as gravediggers shoveled soil on top of their coffins.
At the funeral service in a Greek Catholic church in central Lviv, incense filled the air. The priest said he had assumed the two were father and son because of their names and ages. Their families were joined by their pain, he said.
After the church ceremony, the coffins were loaded into vans and driven to the central square, where a single trumpeter played. Then the cortege made its way to the graveyard.
Along the route, residents paused to pay their respects. A young girl stood next to her father, a small brown shopping bag in her hand, staring straight ahead as the coffins passed by. Some bystanders fell to their knees.
At the cemetery, Olena Didukh, Bohdan Didukh’s wife, fainted, overwhelmed by grief and the afternoon sun. Her sister steadied her, wrapping her arm around her back. Steps away, Oleh Didukh’s family arranged yellow and blue flowers, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, on his grave.
It has been difficult to pinpoint exact figures of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers since the start of Russia’s invasion in part because of a desire by authorities to keep those figures undisclosed…
The events of the past weekend (June 23 – 25, 2023) were so surreal and phantasmagorical that they militate against narration and defy description. On Friday, the infamous Wagner Group launched what appeared to be a genuine armed insurrection against the Russian state. They occupied portions of Rostov on Don – a city of over 1 million people, regional capital, and headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District – before setting off in an armed column towards Moscow. This column – replete with heavy military equipment including air defense systems – came within a few hundred miles of the capital – virtually unmolested by Russian state forces – before abruptly stopping, announcing that a deal had been brokered with the aid of Belorussian President Aleksandr “Uncle Sasha” Lukashenko, turning around, and heading back to Wagner bases in the Ukrainian theater.
Needless to say, the spectacle of a Russian mercenary group making an armed march on Moscow, and of Wagner tanks and infantry cordoning off Ministry of Defense buildings in Rostov, sparked widespread confidence among the western commentariat that the Russian state was about to be toppled and the Russian war effort in Ukraine would evaporate. There were confident and outlandish predictions pushed out in a matter of hours, including claims that Russia’s global footprint would disintegrate as the Kremlin recalled troops to defend Moscow and that Russia was about to enter a state of Civil War. We also saw the Ukrainian propaganda machine kick into overdrive, with characters like Anton Gerashchenko and Igor Sushko absolutely bombarding social media with fake stories about Russian army units mutinying and regional governors “defecting” to Prigozhin.
There’s something to be said here about the analytic model that prevails in our time – there’s a machine that instantly springs to life, taking in rumors and partial information in an environment of extreme uncertainty and spitting out formulaic results that match ideological presuppositions. Information is not evaluated neutrally, but forced through a cognitive filter that assigns it meaning in light of predetermined conclusions. Russia is *supposed* to collapse and undergo regime change (Fukuyama said so) – therefore, Prigozhin’s actions had to be framed in reference to this assumed endgame.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we saw some similar measure of aggressive model-fitting from “Trust the Plan” Russia supporters, who were confident that the Wagner uprising was just an act – an elaborate ruse concocted in concert by Prigozhin and Putin to fool Russia’s enemies and advance the plan. The analytic error here is the same – information is parsed only for the purpose of buttressing and advancing a pre-concluded endgame; except it is Russian omnicompetence which is assumed instead of Russian state collapse.
I took something of a middle view. I found the idea that Russia faced civil war or state collapse to be bizarre in the extreme and completely unfounded, but I also did not think (and I feel that events have vindicated this view) that Prigozhin was acting in collaboration with the Russian state to create a charade. If indeed the Wagner uprising was a Psyop (Psychological Operation) to trick NATO, it was an extremely elaborate and convoluted one which hasn’t yet shown any clear benefits (more on this in a moment).
My broad belief is that Prigozhin was acting of his own volition in an extremely risky way (which risked both his own life and a destabilizing effect on Russia). This presented the Russian state with a genuine crisis (albeit one which was not sufficiently severe to threaten the state’s existence) which I think they handled quite well on the whole. The Wagner uprising was quite clearly bad for Russia, but not existentially so, and the state did a good job containing and mitigating it.
Let’s get into it, starting with a short look at the timeline of events.
Anatomy of a Mutiny
The amount of disinformation (particularly propagated by the Ukrainians and by Russian liberals residing in the west) that flew around throughout the weekend was extreme, so it might be prudent to review the progression of events as they actually happened.
The first sign that something was amiss came with a few explosive statements by Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin on the 23rd (Friday). In a rather long and erratic interview, he made the shocking claim that Russia’s pretext for the war in Ukraine was an outright lie and that the war had been fraught with corruption and the murder of civilians. Things then got even crazier when Wagner claimed that the Russian army had struck their camp with a missile. This was extremely weird – the video which was released (purporting to show the aftermath of this “missile strike”) did not show an impact crater, debris, or any wounded or killed Wagner personnel. The “damage” from the missile consisted of two campfires burning in a trench – apparently Russia has missiles that can start small controlled fires without destroying the surrounding plant life?
The video obviously did not show the aftermath of a missile attack, but Prigozhin’s rhetoric escalated after this and he soon announced that Wagner would begin a “march for justice” to gain redress for his various grievances. It was not clear exactly what he wanted, but it seemed to center on personal grudges against Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
Shortly thereafter, a few videos came from the Russian authorities (including one featuring General Surovikin) apparently pleading with Wagner to “stop the movement of their columns” and return to their posts, to prevent bloodshed and destabilization. This validated some of the rumors that Wagner was leaving the theater in force. News that Russian National Guard had been activated in Moscow and elsewhere seemed to vindicate the fear that an armed clash in Russia was imminent.
By the end of Friday, armed Wagner convoys were in Rostov (bearing the red Z mark) and had taken control of several military offices in what amounted to a bloodless coup of the city. The scenes were a bit outlandish – tanks on the city streets and security cordons around key facilities, but seeming indifference from the population. People mingled among the Wagner troopers, street sweepers went about their work, Wagner bought cheeseburgers, and people took pictures with the tanks.
That evening, Prigozhin had a tense but civil face to face meeting with two high level MOD officials – Yanus Evkurov (Deputy Defense Minister) and Vladimir Alekseev (Deputy Head of the military intelligence directorate).
Things really got heated the next day (Saturday the 24th) with the news that two substantial armed bodies were on the move within the prewar Russian borders. One was a column of Wagner personnel and weapons who left Rostov for Moscow, and other was a Chechen force dispatched by the state to Rostov. Amid the news that Russian state forces were establishing roadblocks and defensive positions outside of Moscow, it looked like two separate battles might have been imminent – one by the Wagner column fighting state forces outside Moscow, and another fought between the Chechens and the Wagner remnants for control of Rostov.
It was at this point that Ukrainian disinformation really began to run wild, with claims flying around that Russian military units and regional administrations were defecting to Prigozhin – in effect positing that this was not just an uprising by Wagner against the state, but a wholesale revolt of the Russian system against Putin’s government. In fact (and this is a key point to which I will return later) there were no defections in any regular Russian military units or regional governments and there was no civil unrest. The mutiny was confined to the Wagner Group, and even so not all of Wagner participated.
Be that as it may, by the early evening hours on Saturday there were real reasons to worry that shooting might start outside Moscow or in Rostov. Putin issued a statement denouncing treason and promising an appropriate response. The Russian Ministry of Justice opened a criminal file on Prigozhin for treason. Two Russian MoD aircraft were shot down (an Mi-8 helicopter and an IL-22) by the Wagner column. The global atmosphere became notably more humid from the volume of salivation flowing from Washington.
Then, the Wagner column stopped. The government of Belarus announced that a settlement had been negotiated with Prigozhin and Putin. Lukahsenko’s office claimed “they came to agreements on the inadmissibility of unleashing a bloody massacre on the territory of Russia.” The column turned aside from the road to Moscow and returned to Wagner’s field camps around Ukraine, and the Wagner forces left in Rostov packed up and left. Aside from the crews of the two downed aircraft, nobody was killed.
Of course, speculation immediately turned to the terms of the deal between Prigozhin and the state. Some speculated that Putin had agreed to remove Shoigu, Gerasimov, or both from their posts (perhaps this was the point all along?). In fact, the terms were relatively lame and anticlimactic:
1. The treason case against Prigozhin was dropped and he was to go to Belarus
2. Wagner fighters who participated in the uprising would not be charged and would return to operations in Ukraine
3. Wagner fighters that did not participate in the uprising would sign contracts with the Russian military (essentially exiting Wagner and become regular contract troops)
4. A vague reference to “security guarantees” for Wagner fighters
So, this is all very weird. A genuine armed insurrection with tanks and heavy weapons (not a man in a buffalo headdress) with a takeover of military facilities brought to a sudden resolution by Lukashenko, and all that Prigozhin seems to have gotten out of it was… free passage to Belarus? Odd indeed.
So let’s try to parse through what happened here using an analytical framework that is not pre-deterministic – that is, let us assume that neither Russian omnicompetence nor Russian regime change and neoliberal cuddliness are guaranteed.
I’d like to start by addressing precisely these two ideologically predetermined theories. On one side we had those claiming that Russia was about to be plunged into civil conflict and regime change, and on the other those who think the whole thing was a pre-planned psyop by the Russian government. The former have already been discredited by virtue of the fact that all their dramatic predictions collapsed in 24 hours – Prigozhin did not, in fact, lead a metastasizing mutiny, overthrow Putin, and declare himself Tsar Eugene I. The other extreme theory – the psyop – remains viable, but I think extremely unlikely, for reasons I will enumerate now.
Psyop Scenarios
It’s relatively easy to simply say “the mutiny was a psyop” without elaborating. It’s trivially obvious that the Wagner uprising “fooled” western analysis – but this isn’t ipso facto evidence that the uprising was staged for the purpose of fooling the west. We have to ask for something more specific – to what end might the uprising have been scripted?
I’ve identified what I think are four discreet theories that at least merit examination – let’s take a look at them and talk about why I think they all ultimately fail to explain the uprising to satisfaction.
Option 1: Live Bait
One potential explanation – which I have seen suggested quite frequently – is the idea that Prigozhin and Putin staged the uprising for the purpose of drawing out theoretical networks of seditionists, foreign agents, and disloyal elements. I suppose the thinking was that Prigozhin would create a controlled, but cosmetically realistic sense of crisis for the Russian state, making Putin’s government appear vulnerable and coercing treacherous and enemy parties across Russia into revealing themselves.
Conceptually, this amounts to little more than Putin’s government pretending to be a wounded animal for the purpose of drawing out the scavengers so they can be killed.
I think this theory has appeal to people because it posits Putin as an extremely crafty, Machiavellian, and paranoid leader. This is also why I think it’s wrong. Putin has derived a great deal of legitimacy from his ability to fight the war without disrupting day to day life in Russia – there’s no rationing, no conscriptions, no restrictions on movement, etc. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms of Putin has been from the war party, who allege that he’s fighting the war too timidly for fear and is too preoccupied with maintaining normalcy in Russia.
It seems incongruous, then, that a leader who has taken great care to avoid putting Russian society on a war footing would then do something as destabilizing as staging a fake uprising. Furthermore, if indeed the Wagner revolt was a charade to smoke out other treacherous and terroristic elements, it failed badly – there were no defections, no civil unrest, and no denunciations of Putin. So for several reasons, the live bait theory does not pass the sniff test.
Option 2: Masking Deployments
A second theory is the idea that the Wagner uprising was essentially a giant smokescreen to enable the movement of military forces around Russia. I suppose the thinking here is that if armed columns are seemingly flying around wildly, people might not notice if Russian forces moved into position to, say, attack Sumy or Kharkov. This take was cosmetically bolstered by the news that Prigozhin would be going to Belarus. Was this entire thing a ruse to mask the redeployment of Wagner for an operation in Western Ukraine?
The problem with this line of thinking is three fold. First, it misunderstands the complexity of staging a force for operations. It’s not just about driving a line of trucks and tanks into position – there are enormous logistical needs. Ammo, fuel, rear area infrastructure all need to be staged. This can’t be done in 24 hours under the temporary cover of a fake mutiny.
Secondly, the “distraction” effect is mostly directed at media and the commentariat, not at military intelligence. Put another way – CNN and the New York Times were definitely fixated on the Wagner uprising, but American satellites continue to pass over the battlespace and western ISR is still functioning. Prigozhin’s antics would not stop them from observing staging to attack a new front.
Third and finally, it doesn’t appear that much of Wagner will be accompanying Prigozhin to Belarus – his journey to Lukashenko Land looks more like an exile than a redeployment of the Wagner Group.
Option 3: Engineered Radicalization
This is the usual “false flag” sort of theory that circulates any time anything bad happens anywhere. It’s become rather blasé and trite: “Putin staged the uprising so he could escalate the war, increase mobilization, etc.”
This doesn’t make any sense and is pretty easy to dismiss. There have been real Ukrainian attacks inside Russia (including a drone attack on the Kremlin and cross-border forays by Ukrainian forces). If Putin wanted to intensify the war, he could have used any of these opportunities. The idea that he would choose to orchestrate an internal uprising – running the risk of widespread destabilization – rather than focusing on Ukraine is ridiculous.
Option 4: Consolidation of Power
Of all the psyop theories, this is the one that probably has the most merit. There were two different strains to this, which we’ll treat in turn.
At the beginning, some speculated that Putin was using Prigozhin to create a pretext to force out Shoigu and Gerasimov. I thought this was unlikely for a few reasons.
First, I don’t think there is a valid case to be made that these men deserve to be fired. There were uneven elements of Russia’s war in the beginning, but there is a clear arc of improvement in the armaments industry with key systems like the Lancet and Geran becoming available in ever increasing quantities, and right now the Russian armed forces are making mulch out of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Secondly, if Putin wanted to remove either Shoigu or Gerasimov, doing so in response to a faux-uprising is the worst way to do it, because this would give the appearance of Putin bowing to the demands of a terrorist. Keep in mind, Putin has not publicly criticized either Shoigu or Gerasimov for their handling of the war. Publicly, they appear to have his full backing. Could the president really remove them in response to Prigozhin’s demands without appearing incredibly weak? Far better if Putin simply fired them of his own volition – making himself, and not Prigozhin, the kingmaker.
Sure enough, it does not appear at this point that either Shoigu or Gerasimov will lose their posts. This led the “power consolidation” theory to pivot to a second line of thinking, that Putin wanted to use Prigozhin to essentially stress-test the Russian political system by seeing how regional administration and army leadership would respond.
This treats the uprising like a fire drill – turn on the alarm, and see how everyone responds, and take notes on who followed instructions. To be sure, Russian political figures came crawling out of the woodwork to affirm their support for Putin and denounce Wagner – complete with some trademark Russian flair, like the Governor of Tver calling on Prigozhin to commit suicide. This perhaps lends credibility to the idea that Putin wanted to test his subordinates.
Again, however, I think this theory misses a few key points. First off, Russia appeared to be internally very stable. Putin was facing no opposition or pushback, no civil unrest, no mutinies in the army, no criticism from high profile political figures – it’s not clear why he would feel the need to rock the country just to test the loyalty of the political apparatus. Perhaps you think he’s a hyper-paranoid Stalin figure who feels driven to play mind games with the country, but this really does not square with his operating pattern. Secondly, the trajectory of the war is overwhelmingly in Russia’s favor at the moment, with victory at Bakhmut fresh in the public memory and Ukraine’s counteroffensive looking more and more like a world historical military bust. It makes little sense why at this time in particular, when things are going very well for Russia, Putin would want to drop a grenade just to test reaction times.
Ultimately, I think that all of these “Psyop” theories are very weak when evaluated in good faith in their own terms. Their errors share a common thread. Things have been going very well for Russia, with the army performing excellently in the ongoing defeat of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, no internal disorder or unrest, and a growing economy. The psyop line of thought presumes that, in a time where things are going well, Putin would take an enormous risk by staging a fake mutiny for negligible gains, risking not only civil unrest and bloodshed but also marring Russia’s image of stability and dependability abroad.
The presumption is that the Putin team is omnicompetent and is able to game out a highly complex deception scheme. I don’t think the Russian government is omnicompetent. I think they are simply a normal level of competent – too competent to pull a high risk, low reward stunt like this.
What Prigozhin Wants
I sometimes like to think of western “end of history” predeterminism (in which all of history is an inexorable march towards global neoliberal performative democracy and the final liberation and happiness of all mankind is announced when the victorious pride flag flies in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang) as being essentially a geopolitical corollary to Jurassic Park – a poignant story of hubris and ruin (and one of my favorite movies).
The analytic model of Jurassic Park’s creators presumed that the dinosaurs – creatures about whom they knew practically nothing – would over time submit to control routines like zoo animals. Blinded by the illusion of control and the theoretical stability of their systems (presumed to be stable because it was designed to be stable), there was no appreciation for the fact that the Tyrannosaurus had an intelligence and a will of its own.
I think that Yevgeny Prigozhin is a bit like the Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park. Both the western neoliberal apparatus and the Russian four dimensional plan-trusters seem to think of Prigozhin as a cog that exists to execute the function of their world model. Whether that model is the long march of history towards democracy and the last man or a brilliant and nuanced master plan by Putin to destroy the unipolar Atlantic world, it does not matter much – both tend to negate Prigozhin’s agency and turn him into a slave of the model. But perhaps he is a Tyranosaurus, with an intelligence and will that has an internally generated direction indifferent to our world models. Perhaps he tore down the fence for reasons of his own.
We have to return to who Prigozhin is, and what Wagner is.
To Prigozhin, Wagner is first and foremost a business which has made him a huge amount of money, particularly in Africa. Wagner’s value (in the most fundamental sense) comes from its high degree of combat effectiveness and its unique status as an independent entity from the Russian armed forces. Any threat to either of these factors represents a financial and status catastrophe for Prigozhin.
Recently, developments in the war have evinced an existential threat to the Wagner group as a viable PMC. These are, namely:
1. A concerted push by the Russian government to force Wagner fighters to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense. In effect, this threatens to liquidate Wagner as an independent organization and subsume it wholesale into the regular Russian military.
2. Wagner is losing the manpower surge from last year’s conscriptions (including convicts). These conscripts provided an enormous manpower buffer that allowed Wagner to shoulder the large-scale fighting in Bakhmut, but many have completed their tours of duty.
This means that Wagner faces potential destruction from two fronts. Institutionally, the Russian government wants to essentially neutralize Wagner’s independence by folding it into the MoD. From Prigozhin’s point of view, this essentially means the nationalization of his business.
Furthermore, a slimmed down Wagner (having shed much of the conscripts that fleshed it out to Army Corps size) is not something that Prigozhin wants to send into combat in Ukraine. Once Wagner is stripped down to its core of experienced wet work operators, casualties in Ukraine will begin eating directly into Wagner’s viability.
In other words, Prigozhin and the authorities were at an impasse. What Prigozhin probably wanted most of all, to put it bluntly, was to use the fame won in Bakhmut to take Wagner back to Africa and start making lots of money again. What he did not want was to have his PMC absorbed into the Russian military, or to have his core of lethal professionals attrited in another major battle in Ukraine. The MoD, on the other hand, very much wants to absorb Wagner fighters into the regular army and use them to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield.
So, we have a clear conflict of interests.
But what can Prigozhin do about it? He has absolutely no institutional power, and Wagner is dependent on the Ministry of Defense for equipment, supplies, ISR, and so much more. Furthermore, Prigozhin’s personal wealth and his family are under the jurisdiction of the Russian state. He has very limited leverage. There are really only a few things he can do. He can record videos to embarrass, harass, and degrade the Ministry of Defense. Of course, it’s probably unwise to directly attack Putin in these rants, and it might not play well to insult ordinary Russian soldiers, so these attacks have to be properly targeted at precisely the sort of bureaucratic higher ups that the Russian public is predisposed to dislike – men like Shoigu and Gerasimov.
Apart from these video tantrums, Prigozhin really had only one other play to stop the institutional absorption of Wagner – stage an armed protest. Get as many men as he could to join him, make a move, and see if the state could be rocked enough to give him the deal he wanted.
It sounds weird, of course. You’ve heard of gunboat diplomacy – now we get to see tank-based contract negotiations. Yet it is clear that the dispute over Wagner’s independence and status vis a vis Russian military institutions was at the heart of this. Earlier this month, Prigozhin announced his intention to disobey a presidential order that required his fighters to sign MoD contracts by July 1.
Prigozhin’s statement this morning (Monday, June 26), however, was extremely instructive. It focused almost exclusively on his central grievance: Wagner was going to be absorbed into the institutional military. He doesn’t take this to its conclusion and note that this would nationalize his highly profitable business, but his comments leave no doubt as to his motivation. Here are a few key points that he makes:
– Wagner did not want to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense
– Absorption into the MoD would mean the end of Wagner: “This unit was supposed to cease its existence on July 1.”
– “The goal of our campaign was to prevent the destruction of Wagner Group.”
But what did Prigozhin think would happen? What was his optimistic scenario? Likely, he hoped that general anti-bureaucratic and anti-corruption sentiments, combined with Wagner’s popularity and fame, would lead to an upswell of support for the group which would put the government in a position to acquiesce to Wagner’s independence.
It was a bold decision. Facing institutional absorption, Prigozhin gambled on a measured destabilization campaign that would rock the country just enough to spook Putin into cutting him a deal. Prigozhin might have convinced himself that this was a clever and decisive roll of the dice that could turn things in his favor. I rather think that they were not playing dice at all. They were playing cards, and Prigozhin had nothing in his hand.
Russia’s Crisis Management
This is the part of the article that I suspect will ruffle feathers and earn me accusations of “coping” – so be it. Let’s just get this out in the open:
Russia handled the Wagner uprising extremely well, and its management of the crisis points to a high degree of state stability.
Now, what I am not saying is that the uprising was good for Russia. It was clearly a net-negative in several ways. Russian aircraft were shot down by Wagner and Russian pilots were killed. Prigozhin was then allowed to walk away after causing these deaths – a stain on the government. There was widespread confusion which does nothing good for morale, and operations in the Southern Military District were disrupted by Wagner’s occupation of Rostov.
On the whole, this was not a good weekend for Russia. It was a crisis, but it was a crisis that the state handled quite well overall and mitigated the downsides – perhaps even making a glass or two of lemonade out of Prigozhin’s lemons. It’s a bit fitting, perhaps, that Shoigu used to be Minister of Emergency Situations (essentially disaster relief). Disasters are never good, but it’s always better to handle them well when they happen.
The state response was actually pretty straightforward: call Prigozhin’s bluff.
Prigozhin drove toward Moscow with his column – but what was he going to do if he got there? Russian national guard was preparing to block them from entering the city. Would Wagner attack Moscow? Would they shoot national guardsmen? Would they assault the Kremlin or shell Saint Basil’s? Doing so would lead to the inevitable death of every man involved. Wagner, with no supply or procurement of its own, cannot fight the Russian armed forces successfully and probably could not supply itself for more than a day or two.
The problem with Prigozhin’s approach is that pantomiming a coup doesn’t work if you aren’t willing to actually attempt a coup – and a coup only works if institutional authorities side with you. It’s not as if Prigozhin could drive a tank up to Lenin’s mausoleum and begin issuing orders to the federal ministries and armed forces. Coups require control over institutional levers of power – regional governorships, government ministries, and the officer corps of the armed forces.
Prigozhin not only lacked all of these things, but in fact the entire apparatus of power denounced him, scorned him, and branded him a traitor. Having mutinied his way into a dead end, his only choices were to either start a firefight outside Moscow and guarantee that he would die and be known to history as a traitorous terrorist, or to surrender. It is probable that the Wagner column shooting down Russian aircraft (which Prigozhin later claimed was a “mistake”) spooked him and confirmed that he was going too far and did not have a good way out. When your opponent calls and you have nothing in your hand, there is nothing to do except fold.
Consider then, for a moment, the actual scene in Russia. An armored column was driving towards the capital. What was the response from the Russian state and people? Authorities at all levels publicly denounced the uprising and stated support for the president. There were no defections, either from military units or civilian administration. There was no civil unrest, no looting, no loss of even basic government control in the country. Compare the scenes in Russia during an armed rebellion to the United States in the summer of 2020. Which country is more stable, again?
In the end, the government managed to dissipate a crisis situation, which could easily have spiraled into substantial bloodshed, without any loss of life apart from the crews of the two downed aircraft (deaths that we should not minimize, and must be remembered as victims of Prigozhin’s ambition). Furthermore, the terms of the “settlement” amount to little more than surrender by Prigozhin. He himself seems to be bound for a sort of semi-exile in Belarus (potentially awaiting a Trotsky ice-pick moment) and it seems that the majority of Wagner will sign contracts and be absorbed into the Russia institutional military. Based on the speech that Putin gave this evening (fifteen minutes ago as of this writing), Wagner fighters have only three options: sign MOD contracts, disband and go home, or join Prigozhin in Belarusian exile (presumably without their gear). As it relates to the institutional status of Wagner, Prigozhin lost and the state won. Wagner as an independent fighting body is finished.
We must be honest, of course, about the damages of the uprising.
Prigozhin killed Russian servicemembers when his column downed those aircraft, and then had his treason charge dropped. One can say, of course, that bringing a peaceful resolution prevented further bloodshed, but this doesn’t change the fact that he killed Russian soldiers and gets to walk away. This is a failure with both a moral and an institutional legitimacy dimension.
Additionally, this entire episode ought to serve as a poignant lesson about the inherent instability of relying on mercenary groups who operate outside of formal military institutions. There are many such groups in Russia, not just Wagner, and it will be malpractice if the government does not move decisively to liquidate their independence. Otherwise, they are simply waiting for something like this to happen again – potentially with a far more explosive outcome.
On the whole, however, it seems rather undeniable that the government handled an extreme crisis rather competently. Contrary to the new western spin that the Wagner revolt revealed the weakness of Putin’s government, the unity of the state, the calmness of the people, and the coolheaded strategy of de-escalation suggest that the Russian state is stable.
Conclusion: 1917
One of humanity’s most universal and beloved pastimes is making bad historical analogies, and that process was certainly in high gear this past weekend. The most popular comparison, naturally, was to compare Prigozhin’s uprising to the fall of the Tsar in 1917.
The problem is that this analogy is a perfect inversion of the truth.
The Tsar fell in 1917 because he was at army headquarters far away from the capital. In his absence, a garrison mutiny in Petrograd (Petersburg) led to a collapse of government authority, which was then picked up by a new cabinet formed from the state Duma. Coups are not achieved through mindless bloodshed. What matters most is the basic question of bureaucratic authority, for this is what it means to rule. When you pick up a phone and give an order to shut down a rail line; when you summon a military unit to readiness; when you issue a purchasing order for food or shells or medicine – are these instructions respected?
It was trivially obvious that Prigozhin lacked either the force, the institutional support, or any real desire to usurp authority, and the idea that he was attempting a genuine coup was absurd. Imagine, for a moment, that Wagner managed to bash its way through the Russian National Guard into Moscow. Prigozhin storms the ministry of defense – he arrests Shoigu and sits in his chair. Do we really believe that the army in the field would suddenly follow his orders? It’s not a magic chair. Power only comes up for grabs in the event of total state collapse, and what we saw in Russia was the opposite – we saw the state closing ranks.
So in the end, both the neoliberal commentariat and the Russian plan trusters are left with an unsatisfactory view of events. Prigozhin is neither the harbinger of regime change nor a piece in Putin’s four dimensional chess game. He’s simply a mercurial and wildly irresponsible man who saw that his Private Military Corporation was going to be taken away from him and decided to go to extreme and criminal lengths to prevent this. He was a card player with nothing in his hand who decided to bluff his way out of a corner – until his bluff was called.
A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in Western writing about the war in Ukraine. This is the extension of hatred for the Putin regime and its crimes to the entire Russian people, the Russian national tradition, and Russian culture. This tendency is of course bitterly familiar from the history of hostile propaganda, but precisely for that reason we should have learned to shun it.
The banning of Russian cultural events and calls for the “decolonization” of Russian literature and Russian studies recall the propaganda of all sides during the First World War, which did so much to embitter that war and make its peaceful resolution all but impossible.
The latest manifestation of this has been the successful pressure on American author Elizabeth Gilbert to cancel the publication of her latest book, not because it is in any way pro-Putin or pro-war, but merely because it is set in Russia. In another recent case, Masha Gessen, the U.S.-based Russian political émigré, fierce Putin critic and strong opponent of the Russian invasion, felt obliged to resign from the board of PEN America, created as a union of writers to defend free expression, after it barred two Russian writers — themselves emigres who had denounced the war. The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British parliament, Tom Tugendhat, has called for the expulsion of all Russian citizens from Britain, irrespective of their legal residency. The Czech president has referenced approvingly the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Demonization of this sort is morally wrong in itself; it is generally intellectually wrong in its details; it is incompatible with liberal internationalism; it betrays pluralist democracy in Ukraine; it is disastrous for the future peace of Europe; it fuels the paranoia and violent self-righteous extremism that has done so much damage to U.S. policy over the years; and, by helping to block moves towards a reasonable settlement of the conflict, it increases the dangers to the United States, Europe, the world, and Ukraine itself that stem from a continuation of the war. Perhaps craziest of all, while the people who express such feelings about Russia claim to be opposing the Putin regime, their actions and writings in fact provide better domestic propaganda for Putin than he himself could ever have devised.
A particularly egregious example of this sort of chauvinism was written last week by Peter Pomerantsev, whose Russian-speaking family emigrated from Soviet Ukraine when he was a baby, and who now lives in Britain. This article is worth paying attention to both for the wider tendency that it represents, and for where it appeared — in the British liberal newspaper The Guardian. It is fair to say that The Guardian would never have published this kind of hate-filled attack on an entire people if it were directed at any other people but the Russians, and, if it had appeared elsewhere, The Guardian would have (correctly) denounced it as racism.
Pomerantsev takes his cue from the destruction of the Khakovka Dam, which he automatically blames on Russia — despite the fact that, as Kelley Vlahos pointed out in Responsible Statecraft, it remains completely unproven who blew up the dam, and the results could chiefly benefit either the Ukrainian or the Russian side. Adding a whole litany of exaggerated or wholly invented Russian atrocities, he uses this to declare that:
“Beneath the veneer of Russian military ‘tactics,’ you see the stupid leer of destruction for the sake of it…In Russia’s wars the very senselessness seems to be the sense…To Russian genocide add ecocide.”
He references Ukrainian literary critic Tetiana Ogarkova:
“In her rewording of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Russian classic novel Crime and Punishment, a novel about a murderer who kills simply because he can, Ogarkova calls Russia a culture where you have ‘crime without punishment, and punishment without crime.’ The powerful murder with impunity; the victims are punished for no reason.”
Does “literary critic” Ogarkova really think that Dostoyevsky approved of Raskolnikov’s crime, and did not show him being justly punished for it? Or is she relying on a belief that her Western audience will be willing to hate Russian authors without having read them?
Pomerantsev follows this up with an almost unbelievable passage:
“Ogarkova and Yermolenko note the difference between Hitler and Stalin: while Nazis had some rules about who they punished (non-Aryans; communists) in Stalin’s terror anyone could be a victim at any moment. Random violence runs through Russian history.”
This is the same old nauseating hypocrisy. They are nationalists; we are patriots. Their bombing of civilians reflects a blind urge to destruction rooted in their national character, ours is either purely accidental or an unfortunate part of a just struggle. Their torture of suspected enemies is due to their innate collective savagery. Ours is “not who we are.”
This is a classic example of what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error” — the tendency to rationalize our own transgressions as the product of difficult circumstances, while explaining the sins of others as the result of their malevolent nature.
In attributing Russian atrocities in Ukraine to permanent, quasi-racial aspects of the Russian national character, these writers seek to present Russia as uniquely mad and evil; whereas in fact the crimes committed by Russia during the Ukraine War have also been committed by several Western states in modern wars, the United States among them. Some were indeed wholly gratuitous. Others, as General Sherman reminded us, are innate to war itself. Pomerantsev and his like do not need to be professional historians to know that. They could simply watch the film “The Battle of Algiers,” or any good film about the Vietnam War.
Those who have attributed this to unique features of American and European traditional culture and called for the whole of that culture to be junked as a result, have been rightly rejected by majority opinion in these countries. Would anyone with an atom of decency or common sense suggest that we should not read Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne because the U.S. military bombed civilians in Vietnam and illegally invaded Iraq?
It might be noted by the way that at the height of the Cold War, Hollywood produced films of “War and Peace” and “Dr. Zhivago,” and Soviet cinema produced fine versions of “Hamlet” and “King Lear.”
Eruptions like Pomerantsev’s in The Guardian can be attributed to blind but understandable anger at Russia’s invasion and the destruction it has caused. However, they also have very practical and disastrous results. They not merely discourage the search for a compromise peace today, but by presenting Russia as permanently evil, they suggest that any future peaceful co-existence with any future Russian state will be morally wrong, and therefore should be permanently impossible.
In his great work “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (La Trahison des Clercs), written in the aftermath of the First World War, Julien Benda denounced the willingness of too many liberal intellectuals to succumb — whether from emotion or opportunism — to political and especially national hatred; and he warned, all too presciently, that this fostering of hatred could lead to still greater disasters in the years to come. He predicted that the 20th Century “will properly be called the century of the intellectual organization of political hatred.”
We should take care that our descendants, if there are any, do not say that of the present century.
I think this is an important article and would love to hear thoughtful comments from readers below. – Natylie
Riley Waggaman (aka Edward Slavsquat) is an American writer and journalist who has lived in Russia for close to a decade. He is currently marooned in the Caucasus but hopes to return to the Motherland in the nearest future. He has contributed to many websites, including Anti-Empire, Russian Faith, Brownstone Institute, Unlimited Hangout, and Geopolitics & Empire. He worked for Press TV, Russia Insider, and RT before going solo.
On Friday, Brian Gerrish of UK Column joined Jesse Zurawell on his TNT radio program to discuss how Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine is reported (both in mainstream and alternative media), and in what ways this coverage might affect our perceptions of this conflict.
First, I want to say that I think they both did a great service to the “alternative media ecosystem”. They hold very different views about this war, and their conversation, on the whole, was civil and respectful. I hope similar dialogues will be organized in the future, in an attempt to bounce ideas off each other, and find common ground on this very contentious and divisive topic.
This blog post, which is extremely long (sorry, but there was no other way), is my response to their discussion. Actually, it is an attempt to answer a question that they touched on, but didn’t expand upon, possibly due to time constraints.
Most of their talk focused on casualty figures, and what they may (or may not) tell us about the progression of this war, and who is “winning”. The reason for this is that Jesse, in a Telegram post, criticized UK Column’s coverage of the conflict (which places a lot of emphasis on casualty numbers), and Brian requested an opportunity to respond to this criticism.
To summarize their discussion: Brian believes these figures (which, we must point out, are difficult to independently verify, but can certainly be estimated using various techniques) are of the highest importance, and conclusively show that Ukrainians are being slaughtered for no good reason, constituting a horrific crime perpetrated by Kiev and its Washington/NATO sponsors.
Jesse, on the other hand, questions the relevance of these figures (partly due to how difficult they are to verify), but also because they may not be the best way to gauge who is really “winning”—an argument we will return to shortly.
I would like to briefly address Brian’s perspective about the importance of casualty numbers.
UK Column’s reporting on these figures largely relies on data released by Russia’s Ministry of Defense, which Jesse didn’t like very much. Jesse argued that, just like the “official” figures from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, these numbers can’t be considered objective or impartial.
As someone who follows Russian-language media very closely—especially commentary coming from patriotic voices inside Russia—I would like to point out that many Russians view the “official” casualty figures from Russia’s MOD (Ukrainian casualties, of course—Russia’s MOD rarely speaks of Russian dead/wounded) with extreme skepticism. Actually, these figures are often openly mocked.
For example, in June 2022, Military Review (Russia’s most popular national security news portal, edited by pro-military hardliners who regularly refer to Kiev as a den of Nazis, and do not consider Ukraine to be a legitimate state), published a scathing op-ed, which contained some “constructive criticism” for Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov, the chief spokesman for Russia’s MOD:
[If we trust the figures given by the Russian MOD], it turns out that all Ukrainian heavy equipment has been destroyed (even “with a margin”), and the Armed Forces of Ukraine cannot continue hostilities. In reality, however, we see a completely different picture. […]
We do not know what methods the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation uses when counting the destroyed military equipment and combat aircraft of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, these methods raise serious questions regarding the reliability of the announced figures. If the numbers of destroyed [Ukrainian] weapons, given by General Konashenkov, were true, then the Ukrainian army should no longer exist.
In general, there are certain questions about [the Russian MOD’s] information policy.
In short: If you take the statements from Russia’s MOD at face value, it appears Ukraine’s military no longer exists. Well, it existed in June 2022, and it certainly exists today.
Jesse mentioned Military Review, and its views, to Brian. I was surprised by Brian’s response, though. Brian suggested—in an unhelpfully vague way—that Military Review might not be reliable, because we don’t have a clear understanding of who (or I guess “what”) is behind it.
Since I consider this outlet to be an invaluable “window” into how patriotic, pro-SMO Russians view this conflict (after all, if you are deeply invested in the destruction of “Nazi Ukraine”, what possible reason would you have to unfairly disparage or discredit the Russian MOD?), I would greatly appreciate if Brian could reveal to me why he might think Military Review is untrustworthy. I cite this outlet on a semi-regular basis, so if he has information that raises legitimate questions about its “true motives” it would help me a lot.
But actually, the accuracy of the Russian MOD’s casualty figures is not my main concern with using these figures to assess how this conflict is playing out.
My main objection to focusing on casualties is that the number of dead or wounded Ukrainians does not provide a clear picture of whether or not Russia is achieving its stated goals in Ukraine.
This is a point that Sergey Glazyev (who is held in very high esteem in Western alt media circles; Pepe Escobar referred to him as the “Russian geoeconomics Tzar”) made, in a rather eloquent way, in January:
The uncertainty of the coming year lies in the lack of strategy from Russia.
Our leadership tried to seize the strategic initiative from the United States by accepting the LDNR, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions as part of the Russian Federation.
But it is impossible to keep [the initiative] without a clear ultimate goal, a clear ideology, and a full-scale mobilization of resources to win this hybrid war with the Collective West.
The prolongation of the Special Military Operation (SMO) fully fits into the strategy of Washington and London, who are escalating the war with each passing day at the expense of the EU.
Their puppets in the EU leadership demand a war to defeat Russia, regardless of its negative consequences for Europe. The calculation of the American-British secret services to wear down the forces of the Russian people in this fratricidal conflict is confirmed with each passing day of its continuation.
Worse, the reports of our Ministry of Defense have been reduced to stating the number of Ukrainian servicemen killed, which allows the enemy to interpret the goals of the SMO precisely in this indicator.
The transition to a long trench war, like the infamous Verdun meat grinder, which claimed the lives of a million French and Germans in the First World War, is fraught with disaster for the Russian world.
When high-ranking generals of the Ministry of Defense report on television the daily results of hostilities, citing the number of Ukrainians killed, millions of Russian citizens with relatives in Ukraine clutch at their hearts.
The lack of a clear strategy and ideology for the whole of society, in this world hybrid war, allows the enemy to interpret the SMO in the Russophobic terms he needs, plunging the Russian public consciousness into a depressive state, and undermining trust in the authorities.
The prolongation of hostilities until next year creates the prerequisites for a political crisis in Russia.
Yes, those are the words of Sergey Glazyev.
But Glazyev has a larger, more profound observation: Preoccupation with the number of dead Ukrainians obfuscates a far more vital metric: Namely, progress towards achieving outcomes that are beneficial to both Russians and Ukrainians.
And it is this subject—assessing Russia’s progress towards achieving its stated goals in Ukraine—that I would like to focus on for the remainder of this blog post.
What are Russia’s objectives in Ukraine?
First, let’s refamiliarize ourselves with Putin’s February 24 address. I am going to quote directly from it, highlighting what I believe are the justifications that Russia’s president gave for launching the Special Military Operation:
“Any further expansion of the North Atlantic alliance’s infrastructure or the ongoing efforts to gain a military foothold of the Ukrainian territory are unacceptable for us. Of course, the question is not about NATO itself. It merely serves as a tool of US foreign policy. The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile ‘anti-Russia’ is taking shape. Fully controlled from the outside, it is doing everything to attract NATO armed forces and obtain cutting-edge weapons.”
“For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty. It is the red line which we have spoken about on numerous occasions. They have crossed it.”
“The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.”
Now let’s distill these statements into concise objectives:
To prevent Ukraine from becoming a hostile “anti-Russia” state, armed with NATO weaponry.
To reverse or halt the policy of “containment” carried out by Washington, which poses an existential threat to Russia’s “historical future as a nation.”
To protect the people of Donbass.
To “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine, and bring to justice those accused of carrying out crimes against civilians.
Which of these objectives have been accomplished, after almost one-and-a-half years of hostilities?
Because there are four parts to this answer, some aspects are open to interpretation, while others have only one logical conclusion. Obviously, I fully recognize that the current status of these objectives are subject to change.
I will provide my own answer, based on my understanding of the current situation.
To prevent Ukraine from becoming a hostile “anti-Russia” state, armed with NATO weaponry
Ukraine has never had more NATO weapons than it does now. It doesn’t matter how many Leopards have been vaporized, the fact that Ukraine is swimming in NATO weapons is not up for debate.
Pre-February 24, the Ukrainian military had received training from NATO, as well as arms, but nothing compared to what is has now. Of course, maybe the Collective West will eventually pull the plug, but for now, the weapons (including advanced systems, tanks, and hardware) are flowing into Ukraine at a rather alarming rate.
Gauging progress towards preventing the formation of a permanent, Washington/NATO-backed “anti-Russia” in Ukraine is not so straightforward, as there’s no way to definitely answer if this is achievable—time will tell. But as things currently stand, it’s difficult to envision how this objective will be accomplished. If anything, the creation of an “anti-Russia” is rapidly accelerating in areas under Ukrainian control (which is still the vast majority of the country).
I firmly believe an impartial assessment of the current situation would result in this conclusion, for host of reasons.
First, Ukraine has never been more hostile to Russia than it is today. The milquetoast “pro-Russia” elements in the country (in the form of opposition parties, public figures and activists) that existed pre-February 24 have been outlawed by Kiev. Any Ukrainian who is suspected of even timid support for Moscow risks serious retribution, either at the hands of the SBU, or from angry mobs.
In fact, many pro-Russia Ukrainians have expressed bafflement, frustration, and outright anger at how the SMO has been executed.
Strana.ua, which was targeted by Kiev for its “pro-Russia” editorial line, published an eye-opening article about this phenomenon in March 2022, which I encourage you to read (the link is to an English translation).
These misgivings were further exacerbated by the Russian military’s “regroupings” around Kharkov and Kherson, which essentially threw locals who “collaborated” with Russia under the bus. Some were evacuated, others got a knock on the door from the SBU. Either way, it’s quite understandable why Ukrainians would be hesitant to welcome Russia as a liberator if there’s no guarantee that the Russian military will stay. To make matters worse, Moscow has been very tight-lipped about what its true intentions are in Ukraine. (In fact, Putin declared in his February 24 address that “it is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory.”)
The incorporation of several Ukrainian regions into the Russian Federation helped clarify these nebulous, mixed signals, but the “regroupings”, and the fact that the Ukrainian military is still entrenched in all of Russia’s new territories (including Lugansk, although the AFU only control a sliver of this region), has undoubtedly created a rather precarious situation for locals—and I’m being charitable with my word choice.
Secondly—this point ties directly into the first—the war has been a boon for Ukrainian nationalists, and has been used by Kiev as the genesis story for a distinct Ukrainian state, separate and openly hostile to its shared past with Russia and the Soviet Union. The birth of this new Ukraine can be traced back to Maidan (further back than that, actually), but a war with Russia serves as the ultimate nation-forming moment for Ukraine. From the perspective of Ukrainians who disown their common history with Russia, there cannot be anything more visceral.
The evidence for Ukraine’s increasing intolerance for Russia, on a civilizational level, is overwhelming, and would require a separate blog post to detail in full. But I would point to the active campaign of “de-Russification” and “de-Communization”, which has led to all sorts of troubling activities, including the banning of Russian literature, and the destruction of Soviet and Russian monuments and statues. Of course, all of this began in earnest after Maidan—but the SMO did not stop it. On the contrary, it’s become much, much worse.
As the Strana.ua article pointed out, before the start of the SMO, pro-Russia Ukrainians were hoping for “a change in the external and internal political course of Ukraine, the establishment of good neighborly relations with the Russian Federation. That is, essentially, a return to the model Ukraine had in 2013. Putin’s attack, in the eyes of ‘pro-Russian’ Ukrainians, leads the country in the opposite direction—to a sharp increase in the nationalist vector.”
What are realistic, achievable scenarios that could stop and reverse everything listed above?
Not an easy question to answer, because people have vastly different views about what is actually happening on the ground in Ukraine. But actually, the military situation is only part of the equation, because preventing the formation of an “anti-Russia” cannot be achieved militarily, and I cannot italicize that enough.
Nonetheless, let’s begin with two main military scenarios that might help Russia get closer to achieving this objective.
The first scenario involves the complete exhaustion of the Ukrainian military—it collapses, or loses backing from Washington/NATO, essentially neutering it as an effective fighting force. In this scenario, probably Ukraine’s best hope would be to take a permanent defensive stance to prevent Russia from gobbling up more territory, but likely it would mean Ukraine would lose its footholds in the Donbass, Kherson, and Zaporozhye.
My assumption is that this scenario would force Kiev to the negotiating table, and Moscow would be able to dictate the terms. Undoubtedly, these terms would include Ukraine’s neutral status, as well as the reversal of various “anti-Russia” policies.
The problem, however, is that none of this would actually make Ukraine a neighborly state, because neutrality and friendship cannot be decreed via treaty. Even if Ukraine is neutral on paper, that in no way means Ukrainians will hold warm feelings for Moscow. And there’s not a lot Moscow can do about that. There will be bitterness and resentment, and I guarantee Ukrainian nationalism will continue to lurk under official pronouncements of neutrality. This will inevitably lead to difficulties down the road.
On the plus side for Moscow, this scenario would very likely end the bloodshed in Donbass, as well as in the other regions incorporated into Russia, which would fulfill several of Putin’s stated objectives. Serious problems would persist—and would likely lead to conflicts down the road—but it would still be a partial victory for Russia.
The second military scenario is far more extreme. In this hypothetical scenario, the Russian military would find a way to reach Ukraine’s western border, and Moscow would essentially absorb the entire country.
Alexander Dugin recently advocated for this plan of action in an article calling for “preparation for total war to the end”:
What we require now is not a ‘cunning strategy’ but a rational and carefully calibrated plan for victory. Every necessary action for its execution, even those measures that might be ‘unpopular’, should be enacted as swiftly as possible. In the context of modern warfare, speed often dictates the outcome. We cannot afford to be swayed by anyone or anything at this juncture. It is definitely not a time to be preoccupied with elections or popularity ratings.
Here is our situation: a truce appears highly improbable, while the likelihood of an all-out war seems almost inevitable.
You will find similar arguments put forward by Russia’s “turbo-patriots” (most notably Igor Strelkov and his Club of Angry Patriots), as well as various Western alternative media pundits.
Let’s assume such a scenario is militarily feasible, and that Russia’s armed forces push all the way to Lvov.
Putting aside the inevitable mass carnage and ghastly destruction that would be required to make this happen—what would come next?
There would likely be insurgencies and a steady stream of terrorist attacks (probably NATO-backed … have you ever heard of Operation Gladio? Fun times). Would Ukraine become the frontline of a “shadow war”, as Russia implemented various security measures (martial law, “red level terror alerts”, etc.) to try to restore order and stability? Is it unreasonable to presume that these policies would lead to tensions between Ukrainians and the Russian military? Undoubtedly, efforts would be made to stamp out Ukrainian nationalism, and “anti-Russia” activism, but would these policies ultimately backfire?
In this scenario (“total war”), would we see brotherly reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine, or would it create a hornet’s nest of “anti-Russia” sentiment? For Moscow, Ukraine would be “liberated”, but for Washington and NATO, it would become an “occupied” nation, and serve as a breeding ground for arms smugglers, sleeper cells, saboteurs, assassins, etc. Whether you want to admit it or not, probably a nontrivial number of Ukrainians would welcome these undesirables, and might even collaborate with them.
And let’s not forget that the Republic of Ukraine, Russia’s new federal subject, would be surrounded by… NATO. This would also lead to unpleasantness—and would create the conditions for new geopolitical standoffs related to the provocative placement of long-range missile systems, and so forth.
Basically, the “total war” scenario would very likely create years of ceaseless bloodshed and internal unrest, and would probably only galvanize NATO’s attempts to annoy and destabilize Russia, resulting in a very large (and potentially unmanageable) headache for Moscow.
Now let’s briefly examine the less violent paths to preventing the formation of an “anti-Russia” in Ukraine. Again, there are two main ones.
The first scenario is colloquially known as the “I really hope the other side will collapse into its footprint like WTC 7” plan.
This scenario operates from the premise that Ukraine and/or Russia are under serious internal strain—that the proverbial wheels are coming off, economically, socio-politically, etc. etc.—and the conflict will come to an abrupt end after one side is adequately demoralized and destabilized.
Brian made this argument during his conversation with Jesse. He pointed to several socioeconomic indicators that supported the view that Ukraine was “losing”.
I don’t know how anyone could deny that Ukraine’s economy and war effort is basically entirely reliant on Western charity. Well, it’s not really “charity”, because whatever happens, Raytheon and BlackRock will be handsomely rewarded. They always are.
In fact, Kiev’s near-total dependence on Western handouts seems to be an obvious and highly exploitable weak point for Ukraine’s war effort—so why isn’t Moscow taking full advantage of this vulnerability, by severing all energy and resource deliveries to the Collective West? I mean, c’mon, Moscow is paying Kiev to transit Russian gas THROUGH Ukraine. Is this okay? A conversation for another time.
On the economic front, Ukraine is extremely vulnerable—because it is entirely at the mercy of the West.
But this dependency is double-edged: On the one hand, Kiev must rely on the Collective West for its survival.
On the other hand, international banking cartels, and multifarious and highly repulsive corporations, are fervidly eyeing Ukraine as they rub their grubby hands together—in some cases, these sustainable vehicles of profit-extraction have already invested large sums into Ukraine’s “future”. Logically, we must conclude that Western corporations and investment firms will do everything in their power to prevent Russia from robbing them of their various scams and schemes (sorry, “economic development projects”) in Ukraine.
Anyway, to me this suggests Ukraine’s status as a space lizard client state might actually be its “saving grace”, because I doubt Monsanto, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs (etc.) are going to surrender their “investments” without a fight. Or am I missing something?
It should also be pointed out that the “don’t worry, the other side will collapse” theory is also applicable to Russia—although I would just like to stress that I am in no way suggesting it is the most likely outcome. But it’s a possibility that can’t be discounted.
Actually, Strelkov has repeatedly warned about a potential “1917 scenario” taking shape in Russia. What he means by this is that incompetence and feuding among Russia’s upper-management could have catastrophic consequences for Russia’s war effort, and this would inevitably plunge the country into a deep political crisis.
I don’t think it’s necessary to explain why Strelkov thinks this is possible. If you think such a scenario is absolutely impossible, I am envious of your confidence.
Anyway, my point is not that we should prepare ourselves for the inevitable outbreak of (another) Russian Civil War. Rather, I just wanted to point out that there are a number of authoritative, patriotic voices inside Russia who believe the possibility of a “collapse” scenario is not exclusive to Ukraine. Just something to keep in mind.
Returning to how this scenario could help prevent the creation of an “anti-Russia” in Ukraine: Although it would be extremely painful for ordinary Ukrainians (economic devastation can often be just as destructive as bombs and munitions), it might be the least bad option, if we can assume it would lead to a cessation of hostilities, and the removal of the current government in Kiev. It would certainly be preferable to “total war”, for a variety of reasons I needn’t explain.
Of course, the resentment and anger felt by Ukrainians would not dissipate overnight, and many of the problems that I’ve already highlighted—specifically, that you can’t “force” neutrality, even if it’s written on a fancy piece of stamped paper—would still hold true.
(By the way: in a scenario where Ukraine “collapses”, either on the battlefield, or economically, there will undoubtedly be a portion of the population that will blame Zelensky and his cohorts. However, I think it would be very naïve to believe that people in central and western Ukraine would view Moscow as blameless. And what these people think matters a lot, since at the end of the day, the SMO’s success hinges on winning hearts and minds, not “slaughtering” conscripts.)
The second “less violent” scenario that could potentially lead to a neutral Ukraine is a negotiated settlement to the conflict.
I don’t really want to spend too much time hashing out what this hypothetical settlement would entail, but basically, the end result would be everything we’ve already discussed, without the scorched-earth total war, or economic collapse.
Again, the most likely outcome would be Ukraine declaring “official” neutrality, but hopes for brotherly, or at least cooperative, relations between Moscow and Kiev would probably be dashed forever. Or at least for a very long time.
My guess though is that any successful settlement would require serious compromises from both sides, and neither Moscow nor Kiev would be spared a bit of egg-on-the-face. Still, it’s probably the most humane way to end this conflict.
Admittedly, there’s a decent chance that a negotiated settlement would simply be an exercise in irresponsible can-kicking, leading to a resumption in hostilities a few years down the road. (Sigh.)
To summarize, if we look from 30,000 feet at the events unfolding, the prospects of preventing the formation of a permanent “anti-Russia” in Ukraine, backed by NATO weaponry, do not look particularly promising. Hostilities will end eventually, but even a “successful” Russian military campaign in Ukraine will not “win” the hearts and minds of Ukrainians. That task cannot be achieved through bullets and artillery shells.
Objective status: Incomplete. The situation is arguably worse than it was pre-February 24, and it’s unclear how things will get better.
To reverse or halt the policy of “containment” carried out by Washington, which poses an existential threat to Russia’s sovereignty and “historical future as a nation”
The SMO has reenergized NATO—a reprehensible, extortionist arms racket that has spent the last 30 years flattening defenseless nations, because it needs an excuse to exist. Well, now this “defensive alliance” finally has a worthy nemesis, and I’m not sure why people think Washington and its NATO client states would be upset about this. Frankly, I think they are overjoyed.
You can argue NATO is getting cold feet, or that certain members of the alliance have expressed reservations about taking on Russia (Hungary would be a good example), but the fact remains that this rotten club of warmongers has grown in size: Finland, which shares a strategically sensitive border with Russia, recently joined NATO’s ranks, and there’s a decent chance Sweden will as well. There is even a possibility that Ukraine will join NATO, or at the very least, increase cooperation with the alliance (almost redundant at this point). My sincere hope is that this will not happen, because I think it could lead to very terrible things.
I would like to highlight a rather unpleasant reality, which also undermines the notion that this conflict has rebuffed NATO’s deranged fantasy of encircling Russia.
Returning to Putin’s fiery speech on February 24, the Russian leader stated:
I would now like to say something very important for those who may be tempted to interfere in these developments from the outside. No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.
Well, his words were heard—and promptly ignored. And Moscow did very little (to be honest, nothing) to punish this insolence (despite promises that “necessary decisions” had already been taken, and that Moscow would “respond immediately”, resulting in historic “consequences”).
The painful truth is that from the first hours of this conflict, Moscow has drawn line after line in the sand—and Washington and NATO have crossed all of them, with no meaningful repercussions.
Actually, Washington’s chutzpah is perfectly understandable, considering that Moscow is even unwilling to utilize its critical role in the global economy to bring a swift end to the conflict.
There are numerous examples we can point to, the most conspicuous being the (largely) uninterrupted transit of Russian gas across Ukraine, as well as Russia’s continued willingness to sell enriched uranium to the United States.
There are also a number of economic accords that Moscow has agreed to, which are not being honored by Kiev (Washington). The “grain deal”, for example, which was supposed to create a humanitarian corridor so that Ukrainian and Russian grain exports would be provided safe passage.
Ukrainian exports have continued unmolested (and, according to reports, are primarily going to Europe), but the deal has no “advantages” for Moscow, as Russian Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko told TASS on June 16:
[T]he unhindered export of Ukrainian agricultural products through the ports of Ukraine, it is being fully implemented. As for the second part [of the deal]—the connection of Rosselkhozbank to SWIFT, the removal of all restrictions on logistics, insurance of Russian cargo—none of these conditions have been met.
You can argue that this shows Moscow is acting in good-faith, as opposed to its “trusted Western partners”, but if we return to Putin’s stern warning on February 24, it actually doesn’t make a lot of sense. Where are the “historic consequences” for “those who may be tempted to interfere in these developments from the outside”? The grain deal?
There is another related point that I want to underscore before moving on.
Many have argued that Moscow’s reluctance to cut economic activity with the West shows pragmatism, as well as Russia’s belief that Washington’s vassals will come to their senses, and break ranks with NATO’s destructive posturing and machinations.
I don’t find this argument very convincing, mostly because if Moscow’s primary objective was to prevent the needless slaughter of Russians (and Ukrainians), severing economic ties with hostile actors who are actively supporting this slaughter would be a very logical first step before launching into a military conflict.
There’s also a bit of collective, in-group amnesia on this topic.
On December 21, 2021, the well-respected Russia-watcher Patrick Armstrong published a detailed list of what Moscow might mean when it warned of “military or military-technical” measures, as part of an ultimatum issued to Washington.
His article contained a section on economic measures, which included:
— Moscow could break all contracts with countries that sanction Russia on the grounds that a state of hostility exists. That is, all oil and gas deliveries stop immediately.
— Moscow could announce that no more gas will be shipped to or through Ukraine on the grounds that a state of hostility exists
Sending tank columns towards Kiev was not included in his extensive list of possible actions. To Armstrong’s credit, he acknowledged that Moscow could take measures that would surprise everyone—and he was right.
Anyway, his very reasonable article went viral, and many hailed it as highly insightful.
Oddly, the fact that Russia did send tanks barreling towards Kiev, but didn’t cut off gas shipments through Ukraine, has not received the attention I think it deserves. That’s just my opinion, though.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: This is not how you deter an openly hostile threat to your “historical future as a nation”, and if you’ve already decided to take military action to deter this threat, it’s completely nonsensical.
So, with things the way they are right now, I don’t see how you can argue that the SMO has dissuaded NATO from trying to squeeze Russia. In fact, the squeezing has become more brazen, and more dangerous.
I am open to the argument that the SMO has helped Russia reassert its sovereignty by karate-chopping (some) ties with the Collective West, and forcing Moscow to seek out more amiable and cooperative economic partners, but there’s a lot of nuances to this geopolitical pivot. Still, it’s an argument, and I think it’s a valid one.
But, alas, there is still a great deal of work left to be done to declare this objective complete.
Objective status: Incomplete, and the situation is arguably worse (maybe with some caveats) than it was pre-February 24.
To protect the people of Donbass
I won’t spend too much time on this one, because I consider it clear-cut and unambiguous.
The situation in Donbass has never been more violent, destructive, and tragic. The shelling of civilian targets has increased tenfold compared to pre-February 24. The Ukrainian military remains firmly entrenched in large sections of Donetsk (and, as I mentioned earlier, continues to have a small but annoying foothold in Lugansk).
Taking Mariupol was an important and significant step towards liberating Donbass, but it came at a very high cost, and it almost seemed premature when Donetsk was being shelled on a daily basis.
Of course, the situation could change—as I’ve pointed out repeatedly—but for now, I don’t foresee Donbass being cleared of Ukrainian troops even in the medium-term. Incredibly, a significant portion of Ukrainian positions in Donbass haven’t been pushed back an inch since the start of the SMO.
The “protection of the people of Donbass” was the most concrete, tangible military objective—an objective that could actually be achieved through military means alone.
It has not been achieved, and it’s unclear when it will be achieved.
Objective status: Incomplete, and the current situation in much of Donbass is regrettable and tragic.
To “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine, and bring to justice those accused of carrying out crimes against civilians
This objective is largely a mixture of the previous three stated goals, but I will briefly address efforts to “denazify” Ukraine.
First of all, what does this mean?
Depends on who you ask, but several definitions were offered in the early days of the conflict.
Konstantin Dolgov, Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy, said on March 4, 2022, that “denazification” involved reeducating Ukrainians:
According to him, denazification is not only not only the liberation from symbols or the prohibition of symbols.
“The bulk of the population [should] understand that Bandera is a Nazi criminal, and others like him too. When this understanding comes, then the process of denazification will be basically completed,” Dolgov said.
A day later, Putin seemed to advocate for a more targeted approach:
“So what is denazification. Here I was talking with my Western colleagues: what is it, you also have radicals. Yes, we have. But we don’t have radicals in the government. And everyone admits that there [in Ukraine] is,” Putin said.
He noted that in Russia there are also “some idiots who run around with a swastika somewhere,” but they don’t walk around the capitals with torches, as in Germany in the 1930s, but this happens in Ukraine.
Let’s start with Dolgov’s definition. If Ukrainians need to be reeducated, how does Moscow intend to accomplish this? As I see it, the only way would be to conquer Ukraine, take control of its education system, and then reissue textbooks to Ukrainian schools.
Another possibility is that a negotiated settlement would include clauses prohibiting Kiev from glorifying Bandera, etc. That’s within the realm of possibility, but how this agreement would be put into practice is an open question. It seems like wishful thinking, when you consider how messy and difficult it would be to enforce this policy.
Putin’s definition makes a lot of sense, but what has Russia done in the last 1.5 years to make this happen? None of the Ukrainian oligarchs or political puppets responsible for Ukraine’s “Nazism” have been brought to justice—correct me if I’m wrong.
It would have been cool if a glider full of heavily armed Spetsnaz landed on Igor Kolomoisky’s roof as part of a dashing operation to handcuff Ukraine’s most prominent scumbags. RT could have livestreamed it, too.
Imagine footage of Igor squealing like an obese piglet as gigga-elite Russian soldiers put a canvass bag over his head (filled with spiders, of course) and frog-march him out of his lavish oligarch-condo in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
Still hasn’t happened, and I don’t see any indicators to give me hope that it will happen. That’s a pity.
But there’s more. When Russia did manage to accomplish what we might call “a concrete example of denazification”—the Nazis were released.
I’m of course referring to the very controversial decision to exchange members of the infamous Azov battalion—including a senior commander—as part of a prisoner swap. The fact that oligarch/Putin friend Viktor Medvedchuk was included in this trade was not a good look.
Obviously, securing the safe release of Russian soldiers is important and praiseworthy. But the fact that these Azov guys were slated to be tried by a military tribunal for crimes against the people of Donbass, and yet somehow ended up on Roman Abramovich’s private jet, where they were fed tasty snacks, raises some uncomfortable questions.
Besides, if Putin was comfortable with putting Russian soldiers in harm’s way in order to bring these people to justice, why would you release them once they were captured? That doesn’t make sense to me.
I should add that if you followed Russian-language commentary about this strange episode, you would know that it was almost unanimously condemned.
By the way: One of the most high-profile “catches” from Mariupol—a Brit named Aiden Aislin, who was sentenced to death, but later released—recently revealed he was back in Ukraine.
Some have argued that Russia’s territorial gains in Donbass constitute “denazification”, and I’ll accept that as a valid point of view. However, I don’t see how anyone could claim this objective is anywhere close to being completed.
Objective status: Incomplete, and how to make progress is, at best, unclear, especially when Russia is comfortable trading neo-Nazis for oligarchs.
Lavrov: Do you propose to recognize the DPR and LPR?
Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP): Certainly.
Lavrov: And further?
KP: And then we defend our territory, which we recognized.
Lavrov: And you want to lose the rest of Ukraine, leave it to the Nazis?
KP: I believe that the Nazi regime must be fought!
Lavrov: We will not fight with Ukraine, I promise you this. Sometimes the recognition of independence, as you are now proposing, of the DPR and LPR and the declaration of war—I can’t imagine how it is, how will Russia go to war with Ukraine? Sometimes this is a manifestation of a nervous breakdown and weakness. If we want to keep Ukraine as a normal, sane, neutral country, we must make sure that everyone who lives in Ukraine is in a comfortable state.
Allow me to explain why I am sharing this exchange with you.
What’s done is done. And let’s assume Russia had pressing, time-sensitive reasons to launch the SMO in February 2022—reasons that did not exist in 2018.
Still, what Lavrov said—the thrust of his argument—remains true today. That is, by launching a military campaign against Kiev, Russia would risk “losing” whatever remained of Ukraine after the cessation of hostilities.
To me this actually sums up the entire conundrum for Moscow.
And, unfortunately for Russia, a very large portion of Ukraine is still firmly under the control of “the Nazis”, which means when this war ends—and it will have to end, eventually—there are going to be long-term consequences. The creation of a permanent “anti-Russia” on Russia’s border, for example.
War is a dirty business, and whether or not it is “justified” is secondary to whether or not it creates outcomes that are more advantageous than the pre-war reality.
Observing what has occurred over the past year (plus a few months), it seems that most (if not all) of the problems that existed pre-February 24 have not been corrected—in fact, almost all of these problems have become worse.
However, I want to stress, again, that I acknowledge there is no way to judge whether this conflict will lead to a better tomorrow—both for Russians and Ukrainians—for the simple reason that we don’t yet know how it will end.
But if that is your argument (“it’s too soon to say! You are being very irresponsible by saying the things you are saying!”), then you must also concede that it’s irresponsible to talk about Russia “winning”, because none of Putin’s objectives have been fulfilled, and in some aspects, the SMO has made it more difficult to achieve them.
I would also like to urge people not to assume, or insinuate, that anyone who questions Russia’s imminent “victory” has been blinded by subconscious bias.
In the closing minutes of his chat with Jesse, Brian brought up the fact that Mr. Zurawell was half-Ukrainian. I am not sure what he was trying to get at, but if he was inferring that only Ukrainians (or half-Ukrainians) have objections to the SMO, he is sorely mistaken. A great many Russians have expressed bafflement as to why this war was necessary, and have openly questioned what it is accomplishing.
I will provide a few examples.
There are regular discussions about the conflict at Yaplakal, one of Russia’s most popular internet forums. I would describe this message board as a hangout for “Russian normies”—a place for Average Ivans to vent and commiserate together. Politically, they are mostly centrists, but many of them have no illusions about the West—although the same can be said of their views about the Russian government.
On April 4, 2022, one user posted an article about Putin promising that the goals of the SMO would be fulfilled.
Here’s an excerpt from the most-upvoted comment:
Well, that is, Russia’s population will shrink by a thousand more young, healthy guys, and there will be even more widows, fatherless children, and grief-stricken parents. […]
Can anyone explain to me, after a month and a half of this meat grinder, what we’re doing there? For what did thousands of soldiers die or become disabled? […]
What were the goals, and what did they get in the end?
Almost a year later, on April 18, 2023, someone posted a message from the governor of the Murmansk region, announcing the deaths of six locals who had been fighting in Ukraine.
The top comment:
The young guys died for no reason in this fucking unnecessary war.
Well, you get the idea.
I will now get a bit “personal”. I have several friends living in various parts of Russia. One of them resides in Tatarstan, and is an officer in the reserves. I would describe his political beliefs, and overall demeanor, as quite conservative.
He reported to me that several of his colleagues at work were mobilized, and that one of them did not return. He thinks the war is senseless, and has no possibility of fixing the problems that existed pre-February 24. (He was overjoyed when Crimea reunited with the Russian Federation, by the way.)
My son is a Russian citizen, but he has relatives who live in a suburb of Kiev. When the SMO started, we would Zoom chat almost daily with them. We were all rather confused about what was going on, and together we expressed our hope that whatever was going on, it would end in the nearest future.
These Zoom calls ended about two months later. Our relatives no longer wanted to communicate with us.
What you have to appreciate is that this conflict doesn’t just represent Ukraine’s (possibly irreversible) divorce from the Russian World, but is also a form of family divorce, in the literal and figurative sense.
It is very tragic, and it fills me with great sadness, just typing these words.
In closing, I want to emphasize that I did not write this blog post (which took me way too long, and now I am physically and mentally exhausted; and probably this text is riddled with typos, which I am too tired to identify and correct) as a “dunk” on anyone, or to wag my finger at those who hold views different from my own. I am way past that (although I readily admit I’ve dabbled in that kind of punditry in the past, and for that I am very sorry).
No, that’s not the point of this blog post. I am simply pleading: Isn’t it time we had an open, sincere dialogue about outcomes? What would victory actually look like?
I hope we can start having these conversations, because I think they are very important.
I am terribly worried that, in the end, nobody will win (except for a handful of very, very rich, powerful, and nasty people). It’s happened many times before, and I see no reason why it can’t happen again.
