By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 8/24/24

In my latest chat with Judge Andrew Napolitano on his program Judging Freedom this past Thursday, I made an off-the-cuff answer to his question about whether Russian society is pressuring Vladimir Putin to be more cruel, more dramatic, more effective in responding to provocations engineered by the West, the most recent example of which is the invasion of the RF province of Kursk by Ukrainian forces.

The show has come and gone but while I was perusing the last, 18 August show of Sunday evening with Vladimir Solovyov before the host went off on summer vacation, I heard a very authoritative answer to Judge Napolitano’s question from, shall we say, “the horse’s mouth.”

https://smotrim.ru/video/2851978

Solovyov is at the apex of Russian journalism and has close ties to the Kremlin. Over time, he has conducted several lengthy interviews with President Putin. Therefore what he said on air in his characterization of Putin’s decision making processes in times of crisis, like in the aftermath of the Ukrainian incursion/invasion of the Kursk province, may be taken to be very well informed.

Said Solovyov: “Our Commander in Chief does not submit to either outside pressure or to his own emotions.” Solovyov insists that Putin’s decisions are made in an absolutely rational way. One might say in an autocratic manner, if we use the original meaning of that word to be self-reliant and independent.

Political talk shows generally do not age well, given that the assumptions of the day rest on ever changing circumstances. However, to my surprise, I found the 18 August edition of Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov to be very useful for coming to terms with a number of other issues surrounding the invasion of Kursk and the Russian response that have developed in the six days since it was aired..

I will set these observations out first and then move on to discuss briefly how and why the Solovyov show differs from the other authoritative state television talk show, The Great Game, which I have used these past several weeks as my principal source of information about Russia’s chattering classes, who are concentrated in the capital and form whatever forces of domestic political pressure may be said to exist with respect to Kremlin policy.

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One of the most valuable insights that I found in the typically long introductory remarks of host Vladimir Solovyov before he turned the microphone over to his guests was a direct answer to the question that several interviewers have posed to me in the past week: namely what were the objectives of the Ukrainian raid into, later invasion of the Kursk province.

I have answered this question by saying that the accounts of Kiev’s objectives have been constantly changing if you take President Zelensky’s words as having any substance to them. We have heard most recently that they wanted to capture some RF territory that might be used to compel the Russians to give back some of the Ukrainian land they have occupied since the start of the Special Military Operation. Thus, the aim is said to have been to prepare for peace talks on a ‘fair basis.’

However, Solovyov presented a different story, one which he surely received from senior officials in the Russian military with whom he is in close contact. He said that the main objective of the invaders had been to capture the nuclear power plant in Kursk, situated perhaps 70 km in from the border.

If the Ukrainians had succeeded on that mission, they would indeed have improved their overall chances of bringing the Russians to the peace table on more favorable terms to themselves. And this logic of their mission is confirmed by the large concentration of the most modern NATO tanks (British Challenger 2) and other heavy equipment appropriate to an irresistible cut through Russian defenses to their target. That equipment was certainly not brought together for the sake of taking and holding the thinly populated farm country which is the predominant character of the 1,000 square kilometers along the Kursk-Ukraine border that the Kiev forces have occupied since the first days of the incursion.

Indeed, the Russians, who were taken by surprise, did scramble to bring to bear their overwhelming air domination and artillery plus drone forces to stop the Ukrainians in their tracks before they got more than 15 km or so inland in Kursk from the international border. They have, by all accounts, utterly destroyed all of the NATO equipment used by the invaders, so that the survivors, i.e., the 7,000 from the initial 12,000 who are still breathing, are scattered in small groups operating on foot and awaiting their extermination or opportunity to surrender, which are sure to come in the days ahead. Their escape routes west, across the border, have been sealed by the Russians.

 By evacuating all the civilian population, Russia made the entire territory of the Ukrainian occupation a free fire zone, thus depriving Kiev’s forces of shelter in residential houses that they enjoy in the territory upon which the Russians are advancing along the main line of confrontation in Donetsk.

Like Napoleon’s forces which took Moscow in 1812, the Ukrainians in Kursk have degenerated from elite brigades into armed marauders breaking into houses to steal and machine-gunning any civilians who were foolish enough not to heed Moscow’s evacuation orders. We know that from the testimony of some evacuees before Russian television war reporters. Of course, not everyone got out in time, and we heard today about a heavily pregnant Russian woman who was wantonly murdered in the hospital where she lived by the invaders.

We are told by Russian military spokesmen that the toll on the Ukrainian forces in Kursk this past week has been around 2,000. That is a high proportion of the contingent fighting in Kursk. But it is a small part of overall Ukrainian losses on the battlefield in the past 7 days, which these same Russian spokesmen put at 16,000.  Sixteen thousand! This very high number results directly from losses on the main line of confrontation, in Donetsk, and particularly around the city of Pokrovsk, losses which rose precisely because the most capable Ukrainian defenders there were shipped out to Kursk and their places were taken by new conscripts, many of whom were dragooned off the streets of Kiev and elsewhere and given very little training before they were handed their rifles and delivered to the front.

Finally, a word must be addressed to the fate of the surviving foreign troops now engaged in Kursk should they be taken alive by the Russians. As some of my colleagues have said on air in latest interviews, these ‘mercenaries’ will not be dealt with in the same manner as any Ukrainian POWs. They will not be exchanged for Russian soldiers held by the Ukrainians. By international law they do not enjoy the same protection as regular troops. Some of my peers have said these mercenaries will be executed by the Russians. At this moment, that is not true. Russia still has an official moratorium on the death penalty. However, there is currently discussion in the Duma of a bill which would remove the protection of this moratorium from captured foreign fighters.

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There are important differences between the talk shows hosted by Russia’s top journalist Vladimir Solovyov and the talk show hosted by Duma member Vyacheslav Nikonov (The Great Game).

I have not listened to Solovyov for a while because he is an aggressive nationalist, because he takes too much pleasure speaking ersatz German as if every German politician is a practitioner of Hitler’s histrionics, because he is often a bully with his panelists, using some as punching bags, and because he interrupts them, takes them off subject all too often.

However, in his favor, some of his guests are to be seen only on his show. I have in mind chairmen and deputy chairs of key Duma committees such as Finance, Taxation and Defense. He also presents Duma members from the Communist Party, from the Liberal Democrats, and independents, which is a great service to those of us who are interested in the role given to the Duma ‘fractions’ outside of the governing United Russia party. And he has very highly regarded military men, retired colonels who are also prominent in the Duma. In this last category, I would name Andrei Gurulyov, whose views I have occasionally quoted on these pages.

By contrast, Nikonov is very much the gentlemen. He never interrupts his guests. He never puts forward extravagant views or reads lectures to his audience. This is not to say that he does not deliver to his audience clearly articulated views on key subjects of the day, often in a drole manner. I think, for example, of his remarks following presentation on screen of the latest antics at the Democratic National Convention. He pointed out at some length the procedures by which Kamela Harris was anointed as the party’s candidate without ever having won a primary or won a single delegate for that matter. He did not shrink from saying this was a flagrant violation of all principles of democracy. He put up on screen some of the points in her radical economic program such as measures against price gouging. And he concluded that the Kremlin definitely favors Kamala Harris in the election because she and her policies will continue and accelerate America’s precipitate decline as a world economic and military power.

The panelists on The Great Game tend to be think tank senior personnel, pundits and representatives of civil society NGOs, not politicians. That being said, many of the think tank spokesmen and academics are exactly the same people who appear regularly on Vladimir Solovyov’s shows. That conforms to the tradition of Russian political talk shows that I witnessed back in 2016 when I was an invited guest on several of them. There were always these ‘experts’ who seemed to spend their entire days going from one television studio to another to take part in the discussions of current events.