By Tarik Cyril Amar, Website, 6/24/24
On 21 June, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin gave an important speech, which, as so often, has been badly under-reported in Western media. That is especially regrettable for two reasons: First, because what Putin had to say concerned two issues that observers and leaders in the West should care about, namely, the ongoing confrontation with what he – plausibly – calls “the collective West” and the way in which Russia’s leaders (and many other Russians as well) see their country’s place in the world. [http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/74363]
Second, as it happens, Putin’s statements were soon followed by two violent events that will inevitably lead to Russian responses, namely, on 23 June, the Ukrainian attack with American cluster munition-carrying ATACMS missiles (and, of course, vital American assistance) on Sevastopol in Crimea that ended with at least 4 dead and over 150 injured civilians on a beach and, on the same day, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in the region of Dagestan.
While these are different events, major Russian politicians see them as linked. The speaker of Russia’s parliament (the Duma), Viacheslav Volodin, for instance, has spoken of them in the same breath, calling both “inhuman crimes” and stating that their “master minds” may turn out to be the same.” It takes no guessing at all to understand that Volodin is referring to the West and its intelligence agencies, in particular to the USA, and perhaps the UK as well.
Whether you agree or disagree with this suggestion, what matters at this moment is that we can be certain that it is shared by the Russian leadership – and, again, many Russians outside it as well – more generally: Moscow sees a pattern connecting the attacks on Crimea and in the Caucasus, and, worryingly, it also sees the West as involved in both.
Formally, Putin’s speech on 21 June was an address to the best graduates (those obtaining either a gold medal or a distinction) of various military academies as well as institutions that train police and security forces, including, for instance, the National Guard, the FSB, and the penal and prison service. According to tradition, as Putin stressed, these elite graduates – the future cadre backbone of the Russian state’s international and domestic hard power – are received in the Georgievsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. In that sense, it was, if you wish, a routine event. Yet Putin used the occasion to go beyond its official purpose. (That, by the way, is an ordinary technique among political leaders. Think, for instance, of Churchill delivering his now famous “Iron Curtain” speech on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.)
Putin began by reminding his listeners of a historical fact, but not – as could have been expected the anniversary of the German 1941 attack on the Soviet Union (22 June) but that of the start of Operation Bagration, a massive Soviet summer offensive of 1944 that, in essence, shattered what was left of the German armies, extending the Soviet reach over most of what was to become Cold War Eastern Europe, and prepared the final phase of the war that culminated in the Soviet capture of Berlin in the spring of 1945.
Bagration – “this bold, large-scale” enterprise, in Putin’s word – was, of course, named after a Russian commander (of Georgian descent) in the 1812 war against Napoleon, as the president also underlined, highlighting the traditions of both the first Fatherland War (against the French and their many European auxiliaries) and the second one (the “Great Fatherland War”) against the Germans and also their many European auxiliaries: talk about a decisive summer offensive and two wars won against, taken together, Paris and Berlin plus various other Europeans…
You cannot say, Putin scrimped on symbolical layers or contemporary allusions there. For one thing, it sounded almost as if he wanted to remind his listeners in the Georgievsky Hall, at home more broadly understood, and abroad (for instance, in Kiev) that, while Russia has done well with its current strategy of aggressive attrition and slow gains, there is another side to its military tradition, namely, sweeping “big-arrow” operations, when the time is ripe.
Putin’s direct statements about the present were no less intriguing Unsurprisingly, he singled out “perseverance” as one of the key virtues of the Russian military (a clear hint to those, in the West, who still hope to see Russia tire of the war in Ukraine before they do – or Trump wins in the US). He also stressed the cohesion of front and rear and national unity in general (a way of telling the West to finally let go of another favorite piece of wishful thinking, namely that – somehow – it can pressure and disintegrate Russian society into regime change). He made it very clear that he considers “Donbass” and “Novorossiia” (yes, that term was back as well) Russian by praising the current Russian military for defending their citizens and emphasizing that for the domestic security forces as well the newly “liberated,” that is, annexed territories are a “priority.”
Putin also offered several remarks on the world beyond Russia and Ukraine, insisting that his country “consistently pursues the strengthening of stability on the planet, for a just and democratic multipolar world order,” with a particular emphasis on creating a stable security structure for Eurasia. In this context, Putin reiterated Russia’s readiness to cooperate even with EU and NATO countries – “once,” he said, “they are ready for it.”
Especially in the context of his recent visit to Asia (he had virtually just returned from there, when delivering the Georgievsky Hall address), the message to the West was clear: Russia – and its partners – will build this new Eurasian structure one way or the other; the question for NATO/EU-Europe is if it wants to be part of it or be excluded. As for the USA, the whole concept is about reducing, marginalizing, and, finally, removing its influence: Make the US dispensable again, so to speak.
Meanwhile, as long as the West shows no signs of being ready to talk on Russian terms, Putin went into remarkable detail – for a short speech – on measures that will be taken to arm Russia more and more effectively, in the conventional and nuclear domains. He stressed cutting-edge technology as well as “effective economic and financial solutions” (a clear hint, again, that Moscow does not have the slightest intention to let the West exhaust its mobilization of reserves through a greatly expanded military-industrial complex, even if there are signs that it makes the national economy overheat). Putin’s new Minister of Defense, Andrei Belousov, who was in attendance and also delivered a speech (more uncompromising than Putin’s, if anything), is, of course, the skilled, incorruptible, and strict technocrat who is tasked with seeing to those “solutions:” Putin’s Witte, so to speak, except that Putin is much better at making good use of talent than Nicolas II. Putin also noted the experience that the Russian military has gained from the war in Ukraine.
Where does all of that leave us with regard to the Ukrainian – really US-Ukrainian, as Russia rightly claims – ATACMS attack on Sevastopol?
A perhaps counter-intuitive aspect of the immediate Russian reaction to the attack has been noted far too little: Russian authorities were quick to publish a short but precise sketch of what had happened: Of 5 incoming ATACMS missiles, Russian air defense had neutralized 4, but the fifth had hit the beach. Very importantly, the Russian authorities added that the fifth missile had also been hit by air defense fire, which made a difference to its trajectory or, perhaps, led to an explosion so close to the ground that it affected the beach.
Yet that does not mean that Russian media and officials have not been crystal clear about their condemnation of the assault and who they are holding responsible for it: On Russia’s most important news show, the Sunday edition of Vesti (which airs at primetime for two hours every week), one of the country’s most prominent media figures, Dmitry Kiseliov, dedicated several segments to the attack, condemning it, unsurprisingly, in harsh terms and stating that a Russian response was inevitable, but would be “asymmetrical,” to be delivered at the frontline of the war in Ukraine as well as via strikes at Kiev’s energy infrastructure and “decision-making centers.”
One day later, the spokesman of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the “direct involvement of the USA in combat activities, as a result of which Russian civilians die, cannot not have consequences.” Despite the careful double negative, the message is clear: Moscow will not let Washington off the hook. There will be some price to pay for going too far with its attacks on Russia, even while they are shoddily camouflaged as “merely” coming from Ukraine. By now, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has publicly characterized the attack as a “terrorist crime” and presented the American ambassador in Moscow with its official assessment that the US is as responsible as Ukraine for “the missile strike on civilians.”
Hence, it is already clear that Moscow will not choose to “overlook” or even downplay American responsibility and that it is classifying the attack as terrorism. But we also know that Russian authorities have chosen to be explicit about the fact that the course of the fifth missile, the one that hit the beach, was influenced by air defense intervention. That says nothing about the original target of that or the other four missiles: it may still have been criminal in the sense of being entirely civilian or so close to civilians that the attack was disproportionate. Anyone who has any awareness of the real (no, not the Kiev-NATO information war version) record of a decade of Ukrainian targeting, especially in the Donbass area, cannot simply assume that the Ukrainian intent was to strike a legitimate military target.
At the same time, we know that Russia has signaled at least the possibility that the beach that was actually hit was not the original target. Likewise, Peskov has also stated that Putin’s peace proposals, as formulated just before his trip to Asia, remain in force, another significant signal that points to Moscow’s intention to control and limit any escalation that may emerge from this event.
And thank God for that: As some commentators have correctly pointed out – including on social media – if the shoe were on the other foot, that is, if Russia had provided arms and essential operating assistance for a bloody missile strike on, say, a Florida beach, we’d be on the brink or in the middle of World War Three already.
But fortunately, the Russian leadership is very different from that of the US. Hence, the question of how Russia will respond remains complicated: What Kiseliov has announced on Vesti – military strikes against Ukrainian targets – will certainly happen. Indeed, it is possible that a large-scale Russian attack on Odessa one day after Ukraine’s Sevastopol strike was already part of that kind of retaliation.
Yet it is hard to tell because this type of retribution will not be principally different from attacks carried out by Russia before. At the same time, Russian investigators and prosecutors will treat the Sevastopol attack as a crime and seek to identify culprits and build cases. Just two days before, in his Georgievsky Hall address, Putin that part of the “priority” tasks of the security forces in the annexed territories continues of “the investigation of the crimes of the Neo-Nazis [yes, the war aim of “de-Nazification” is also in full force] and persecutors, who must answer for their evil deeds, for crimes against civilians, for the shelling of our towns and villages.” Will they do so for non-Ukrainians, too? In any case, these cases will remain on paper, at least for now and perhaps forever.
Yet what will the practical – as it were palpable – response to US involvement look like? Here we should remember Putin’s already famous comment made in Hanoi just before his return to Russia: that the “strategic defeat” that the West wants to inflict on Russia would amount to the “ending of Russia’s statehood”; and, in that case, as Putin put it, “why not go to the end?” Since an existential threat to that statehood is, according to Russia’s current nuclear doctrine, one explicit reason for the use of nuclear weapons, many observers – this author included – have interpreted this statement as a reference to potential nuclear war. Peskov, subsequently, clarified that his president had really meant fighting the war in Ukraine to the end. Kiseliov, however, who also hardly says things that run counter to what the Kremlin wishes to have said, referred to the Hanoi statement in the context of the Sevastopol attack and qualified Putin’s declaration as “mnogoznachitelno,” that is, ambiguous in multiple ways.
Make of that what you will, but, on balance, what Putin conveyed in the Georgievsky Hall address seems more important, even if it may be counterintuitive: It is true that the speech did not give an inch. One plausible way of reading it, is as a condensed list of all the reasons why Russia will not make concessions to the West in general and to the USA in particular. But there was a larger point hidden in some deceptively simple phrases: Russia has a well-developed strategy aiming at the eventual expulsion of US influence from Eurasia, and, if that should prove impossible, its literal marginalization in a weak EU-NATO Europe facing everyone else.
It is that fact that gives weight to the signals of Russian restraint on the Sevastopol issue. Impatient natures may interpret this restraint as a lack of follow-through or even resolve. But arguably, the opposite is true: It bespeaks the fact that Moscow now intends to win a much larger game and will not be distracted or baited to over-escalate where such an escalation would disrupt its own plans. If this is true, and if it is this long game that keeps us all from tumbling into World War III, then, once again, thank God some people still have the brains to play chess.