Article by Andrey Pertsev. Translation by Anna Razumnaya, Meduza, 11/30/22
Russia’s ongoing military defeats in Ukraine and the social burden of mobilization are rapidly cooling the public’s support for the war. Meduza has gained access to the results of an opinion poll commissioned by the Kremlin “for internal use only.” According to the study conducted by the Federal Protective Service (FSO), 55 percent of Russians favor peace talks with Ukraine, while only a quarter of the respondents still support continuing the war.
The FSO poll does not diverge all that much from the results of an October public-opinion study conducted by the Levada Center, Russia’s only large independent sociological institute. In the Levada study, 57 percent of respondents said that they supported, or would probably support, peace talks with Ukraine. Only 27 percent expressed the same range of support for continuing the war.
The FSO’s own polling indicates that Russians’ attitudes about the war have changed. As late as July 2022, only 30 percent of survey respondents favored ending the war by peace negotiations. Comparing the new results to those collected in the summer make the shift obvious:
Two sources close to the Putin administration told Meduza that the Kremlin now plans to limit the polling data that VTsIOM (the Russian Public Opinion Research Center) releases to the public. One source said, “You can get all kinds of results these days — better not to do it at all.” Also speaking to Meduza, a political consultant who works frequently with the Kremlin explained that it’s “best not to reveal the dynamics” of the Russians’ changing attitudes towards the war.
Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, says the share of Russians likely to support peace talks with Ukraine began to grow rapidly following Putin’s September 21 mobilization decree:
“This is sheer reluctance to take part in the war personally. They continue to support it, but they have very little desire to participate themselves. Besides, their support was, from the very start, something they declared with regard to what they perceived as having nothing to do with themselves: “Life goes on — it’s even getting better.” Now, the risks are greater, and people want to start the talks. Still, the majority of people leave this to the government: “We’d like it, but it’s up to them to decide.”
Sociologist Grigory Yudin also links rising public support for peace talks to Russia’s draft. This fall, he says, Russians came face-to-face with the “crumbling of their everyday lives and a sense of danger.” Their “loss of faith in the victory” and the “absence of a convincing account of how exactly Russia might win” also contribute to the shift in opinions, says Yudin. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Yudin added,
“if this turned out to be mixed with an acute sense of danger to the country itself. In this sense, peace talks followed by legalizing the annexations should make the country safer.”
Yudin says the public’s resentment for how the war is going is not far from outright “apathy.” Still, he doesn’t rule out the possibility of anti-war demonstrations in Russia:
“Protests do not occur simply because people think something but because something makes protest possible. Russia’s protest potential is very high. When possibilities present themselves, there will be protests. Quite possibly, we won’t have to wait that long.”
Kremlin insiders who spoke to Meduza, however, said there’s little concern in the administration about potential mass protests, though they acknowledged that “it’s best not to raise the temperature, and not to anger people if not necessary.” Russia’s state media and propaganda outlets, moreover, have already received instructions “not to dwell on the war.” According to Meduza’s sources, the mass media is now being told to focus instead on a “more positive agenda.”
Political scientist Vladimir Gelman says the dynamics of Russian public opinion are unlikely to pressure the Putin administration into honest negotiations with Ukraine. The Russian side, he argues, is “not ready to make concessions,” and the prospects of any peace talks depend largely on what happens in combat — not in opinion polls.
Last October, Meduza wrote about Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness to abandon his claim on the Ukrainian regions he’s now annexed outright. The Kremlin’s recent hints at possible peace talks are likely a scheme to buy time to prepare a new offensive. Meduza’s sources close to the administration say the president still clings to his plans in Ukraine, and officials will reportedly resume Russia’s “partial” mobilization in the winter. Just how many more men the Kremlin hopes to draft remains unclear.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, during a meeting with soldiers’ mothers, that he now regards the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as a mistake. This concession was stark in the context of the possibility of peace negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine.
It is worth remembering that in 2014, Putin acted on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force “in Ukraine,” not just in Crimea. In fact, Moscow did save the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk from being overrun by Kiev’s army, and defeated Ukraine’s forces, but rather than clearing the whole region of Donbass, Russia stopped, and agreed to a cease-fire brokered in Minsk by Germany and France.
Putin explained to the mothers that at the time, Moscow did not know for sure the sentiments of the Donbass population affected by the conflict, and hoped that Donetsk and Lugansk could somehow be reunited with Ukraine on the conditions laid down in Minsk. Putin might have added – and his own actions, as well as conversations with then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, confirm it – that he was prepared to give the new Kiev authorities a chance to settle the issue and rebuild a relationship with Moscow. Until rather late in the game, Putin also hoped that he could still work things out with the Germans and the French, and the US leadership.
Admissions of mistakes are rare among incumbent leaders, but they are important as indicators of lessons they have learned. This experience has apparently made Putin decide not that the decision to launch the special military operation last February was wrong, but that eight years before, Moscow should not have put any faith in Kiev, Berlin, and Paris, and instead should have relied on its own military might to liberate the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine.
In other words, agreeing to a Minsk-style ceasefire now would be another mistake which would allow Kiev and its backers to better prepare to resume fighting at the time of their choosing.
The Russian leader realizes, of course, that many nations in the non-West, those who refused to join the anti-Russian sanctions coalition and profess neutrality on Ukraine, have called for an end to hostilities. From China and India to Indonesia and Mexico, these countries, while generally friendly toward Russia, see their economic prospects being impaired by a conflict that pits Russia against the united West. The Western media also promote the message that global energy and food security is suffering because of Moscow’s actions. Russia’s arguments and protestations to the contrary have only limited impact, since Russian voices are rarely heard on Middle Eastern, Asian, African, or Latin American airwaves.
Be that as it may, Moscow cannot ignore the sentiments of the larger part of humanity, which is now increasingly referred to in Russian expert circles as the Global Majority. Hence, official Russian statements that Moscow is open for dialogue without preconditions. However, any Russian delegation to talks would have to take into account the recent amendments to the country’s Constitution, which name the four former Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as part of the Russian Federation. As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has put it, Russia will only negotiate on the basis of existing geopolitical realities. It should be noted that the Kremlin has not retracted the objectives of the military operation, which include the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, which means ridding the state and society of ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian elements.
As for Kiev, it has gone back and forth on the issue. Having nearly reached a peace agreement with Moscow in late March, it later reversed course to continue fighting (the Russians believe this was done on Western advice). Having achieved operational successes on the battlefield this past fall, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had all contacts with the Kremlin formally banned and formulated extreme demands which he addressed to Putin’s successors, whenever they may emerge. For the West, this was bad from the perspective of public relations, and Zelensky was asked to make it appear as if he was open for talks, but in reality, nothing changed.
The reality is that the principal parties involved in the conflict in Ukraine, namely Washington and Moscow, do not consider the present, or the near future, as a good time for negotiations. From the US perspective, despite the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia by the West and the recent setbacks that the Russian Army has experienced in Kharkov and Kherson, Moscow is far from being defeated on the battlefield or destabilized domestically. From the Kremlin’s perspective, any truce or peace that leaves Ukraine as an ‘anti-Russia’, hostile state, is tantamount to a defeat with highly negative consequences.
Instead, both sides believe they can win. The West, of course, has vastly superior resources in virtually every field that it can use in Ukraine. But Russia is working to mobilize its own substantial reserves in both manpower and the economy.
Where Moscow has an advantage is in escalatory dominance. For the US, Ukraine is a matter of principle; for the Kremlin, the matter is simply existential – the conflict with the West is not about Ukraine, but about the fate of Russia itself.
It looks as if the war will continue into 2023, and possibly beyond that. Talks will probably not start before either side is prepared to concede due to exhaustion, or because both parties have reached an impasse. In the meantime, the death toll will continue to mount, pointing to the essential tragedy of major power politics. In the fall of 1962, then-US President John F. Kennedy was ready to walk to the edge of the nuclear precipice in order to prevent the Soviet Union from turning Cuba into its missile base. Sixty years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a military action to make sure that Ukraine does not become an unsinkable aircraft carrier for America.
There is a lesson to be learned from this. Whatever Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev thought about his right to counter US missiles pointed at Moscow from Turkey with weapons of his own targeting Washington and New York from Cuba (with Havana’s consent), and whatever successive US presidents thought about their right to expand the NATO military bloc to include Ukraine (at Kiev’s wish), there is always a horrendous price to pay for the failure to take into account the rival power’s security interests. Cuba went down in history as a narrow success for common sense. Ukraine is an ongoing story, with its outcome still hanging in the balance.
Andrew Beck is Partner at Beck & Stone, a brand consultancy connecting enterprises and institutions to culture.
When missiles struck Polish territory last week, killing two Poles, the world was quick to point the finger at Russia. Despite the danger of magnifying an event that could spark a world war, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy insisted that Russia was behind the strike and called for heightened aggression on his country’s behalf: “This is a Russian missile attack on collective security—a very significant escalation. We must act.”
The Biden administration has repudiated Zelenskyy’s claims of Russian involvement but has simultaneously asked Congress for an additional $37.7 billion in aid to Ukraine. This is the latest of many bipartisan spending bills passed on Ukraine’s behalf by Congress—in addition to aid from other countries.
What drives such strong rhetoric and financing to repudiate and combat one country—sometimes in spite of facts? The clear answer: perception. In September, US News & World Report announced that Russia was experiencing a precipitous decline in its “Best Countries” ranking. Seven months after the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February, Russia saw a 12 percent drop in its year-over-year global standing—one of the largest in the project’s history. The Russians’ lack of international support makes them an easy target for abuse.
This drop in rankings is not surprising when you consider US News’ methodology and audience. The company polls over 17,000 people from regions around the world as to whether they associate a country with terms like “human rights” and “strong international alliances.” According to SimilarWeb analytics, nearly all of the media company’s 20 million readers live in English-speaking countries, and Ukraine makes up just a tenth of a percent—Russia, even less.
But despite the difficulty of measuring something as fluffy as sentiment, Russia’s standing in the international community is a salient question. No country can exist as an island fortress. Without friends and allies, national sovereignty cannot last long.
Seven years ago, I co-founded a brand consultancy that specializes in cultural entrepreneurship—helping companies delve into their local culture or subculture and express themselves in those terms. My work often calls for thinking about how brands can be patriotic, historic, and even mythic—and what each national culture means to the rest of the world.
In America, our national brand—our standing—has long been a political football. President Barack Obama controversially embarked on a European tour during his 2008 campaign to spread the message that under his leadership, America would more closely resemble Europe in diplomacy. A major point of opposition against both President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden was that they have damaged how other countries in the first world perceive us. In every case, Americans seem preoccupied with that elusive prize of being liked by an international, first-world audience.
But how much does this global standing factor into matters of foreign policy? To what extent should international relations preoccupy our country’s leaders and decisionmakers? The answer is the same for nations as it is for brands: what matters most is not being universally liked, but the loyalty of your core audience of customers, stakeholders, and investors. In politics, the focus is on citizens, public servants, and partners—the rest are collateral at best, inimical at worst.
One type of brand that closely parallels the concept of national standing can be found on another US News ranking: universities. Aside from major scandals, universities are generally consistent from year to year in how they are perceived and how they attract new students or donors. Like most countries, universities are led by presidents and an administration with a balance of powers. But the college’s core brand is older, deeper, and stands apart from whichever educrat is currently at the helm.
Ask any development department and they’ll tell you what really matters is how a university is perceived by its most important audiences: prospective students, alumni donors, and prospective employers. This is why Ivy Leagues don’t bat an eye when they’re nipped at by higher education watchdogs or conservative academics. Nor do colleges like Hillsdale or the University of Dallas care when they catch flak from the political left. It takes a long time and consistent adherence to a brand persona to build or destroy an institutional brand; and there is no institution more prominent in the modern mind than national identity.
When the “global standing” of Russia becomes a news item in the Western press, readers wearing American-centric spectacles might see a drop in a US News ranking as signaling the impending doom of Vladimir Putin’s regime. It is a validation of what they saw unfold in the weeks after the war began, with companies and institutions and celebrities across the global American economic and cultural empire “canceling” Russia for its actions, some with punishing sanctions and divestment, the majority with projections of solidarity with Ukraine and high-fisted moral outrage at Russia. Who does not like to see proof that their distant participation in an active war is working?
But the opposite is closer to the truth: Russians are more likely to treat the Western media’s approbation as a badge of honor than a sign of their nation’s decline. They have built themselves an identity for a hundred years around the idea that Russia is the alternative to, if not the antidote for, the United States and the broader cultural trends we represent. Moving further away from America’s ideal is closer to the ideal they want for themselves. What appears to be a civilizational decline in the eyes of Americans is validation for Russians.
Many years ago in Russia, there was a sense of economic superiority: America was greedy, hierarchical, and oppressive—stealing from the poor to give to the rich. Russia and its Soviet Union were the champions of the downtrodden and had real equality under communism.
Eventually, after much pain and suffering, Russians let that particular farce fade away, but that did not mean they believed themselves to be defeated culturally. Their national myth is just as strong as that of Great Britain and perhaps stronger than that of the United States. As the American cultural empire became increasingly more modern and less traditional, Russia emerged from communism with a zeal for a pre-Bolshevik past. They doubled down on distinctly Russian sentiments by investing in cultural institutions like the church, the arts, and the academy, to restore their ties to each other and protect themselves from America’s soft power of cultural influence.
These institutions have in turn reaffirmed Russia in its identity as a fundamentally good nation with a storied history that uses setbacks as stones to build on their great inheritance. In the later 2000s, Russia found herself rising economically with America, but going in the opposite direction of America’s depleted, secularized, progressive culture.
This narrative has accelerated under Putin, a figurehead of cultural resistance who conducts the pieces of a national orchestra playing to an appreciative audience. Thus, his leadership fuels Russian resolve to be more “on brand,” leaning into the identity that their enemies wish to pillory them with.
We saw this same dynamic play out in the 2016 presidential election, when a supposedly brilliant diplomat, Hilary Clinton, called anyone who would vote for Donald Trump a “deplorable.” Everyone remembers the result: what was meant to be an epithet turned into a trademark banner to rally the Trumpist troops, uniting them against a common foe who openly despised them. The lesson here is that being disliked by the “right” people has the opposite effect intended.
Ultimately, neither America, the United Kingdom, nor any other nation can browbeat Russia by attacking their national brand. Putin’s core customer base—Russia’s voting public—affords him astounding levels of support that haven’t been seen since Ronald Reagan in the United States, even taking the country’s election integrity concerns into consideration. And internationally, Russia suffers from no shortage of friends: major players like Israel, Turkey, China, and India have not fully bought into the West’s renewed crusade against Russia. Perhaps they are pragmatists, not wishing to permanently destroy an economic ecosystem that was starting to reap rewards, or maybe under the surface, they know their own sensibilities are more closely aligned with old, familiar identities held together by borders, language, local customs, and self-interest.
The diplomatic tidepools that pit Russia against certain geopolitical foils and pair her with confederates are inevitable. Every brand eventually establishes a position in the public’s mind, and no amount of censure or promotion can forestall this inevitably. It is the law of perception. Russia’s brand draws crude lines in the international marketplace, a perception that Putin has not only exacerbated, but given the Russian people a cause to glory in: fighting against the perennial enemy of American global influence. The Western elite polarizing their institutions and media organs against Russia will not influence Putin or Russians to change their brand trajectory, but steel their resolve to triumph with it intact.
November 28 marks the 200th birthday of Russian thinker Nikolai Danilevsky. Relatively unknown in the West, Danilevsky is extraordinarily influential in modern Russia, and understanding his ideas is essential to grasping the essence of the current political conflict between Russia and the West.
In the early 1990s, two theories of humanity’s future competed for the attention of those interested in international affairs. The first was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which predicted that every country in the world was destined eventually to adopt the same social-economic and political system, namely Western-style liberalism. The second was Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which stated that rather than converging, the countries of the world were separating into distinct civilizational blocs.
To Russians, none of this was remotely new. For the Fukuyama-Huntington debate did little more than echo a long-standing argument that has been raging among Russian intellectuals since the infamous debate between the Westernizers and Slavophiles in the 1840s.
The Westernizers were Fukuyama-ists before Fukuyama. They had what academics like to call a “teleological” view of the world, considering that the iron laws of history dictated that all societies eventually converged on a common end (telos in Greek). For them, this end was synonymous with the West. As the mid-19th century liberal Russian thinker Konstantin Kavelin put it, “The difference [between the West and Russia] lies solely in the preceding historical facts; the aim, the task, the aspirations, the way forward are one and the same.”
The Slavophiles countered this argument by contending that Western civilization had peaked. Russia, by contrast, still had much to offer the world through its own unique, Orthodox, culture. Only by developing this uniqueness and avoiding assimilation into the West could Russia contribute to universal civilization.
Interestingly, this argument still viewed Russia and the West as connected. Russia, by protecting its Orthodox heritage, was seen as being able in due course to export it to the West and so save the latter from itself. Slavophilism did not reject the idea of a common future.
It is here that Danilevsky stepped in, making the decisive break with teleological thinking. A biologist by profession, he adopted an organic view of the world. Human civilizations, he maintained, were organic beings that were born, matured, and died. None could be said to constitute the “End of History.”
In his most famous work, entitled Russia and Europe, he outlined a theory that Russia and Western Europe were entirely distinct “cultural historical types.” Different cultural historical types, he said, developed in their own separate ways. In opposition to theories of cultural convergence, he compared the world to a town square from which different roads (i.e. different civilizations) moved out in different directions. Each cultural historical type was inherently distinct, and consequently it made no sense to try to force it to develop along the path of another.
Other Russians built on Danilevsky’s theory. Late nineteenth century philosopher Konstantin Leontyev, for instance, postulated that civilizational life cycles had three stages: primary simplicity, flowering complexity, and secondary simplicity (the period of decay). Flowering complexity represented the peak of development. On an international scale, this meant that one should avoid the alleged homogenization that would come with everybody adopting Western-style liberalism, and instead celebrate a multiplicity of different civilizational types. The “End of History” would quite literally be the end of human development, and was thus to be avoided.
Later, Eurasianist thinkers used geology, botany, linguistics, and other fields of study to try to provide a scientific basis for the idea that the space of the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union constituted a coherent entity distinct from those around it. Originally devised by Russian émigrés in the 1920s, Eurasianism crept into the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era, influencing among others the ethnographer Lev Gumilyov. Gumilyov argued that ethnic groups (etnoi) were a natural phenomenon and that what suited one group did not suit another, although those with certain complementarities could form a superetnos. The superetnos that was the Soviet people was entirely different from the superetnos of the West and as such should develop entirely in its own separate way.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, civilizational thinking has become de rigueur in Russia. A study by San Francisco State University professor Andrei Tsygankov showed that the most cited Russian authors in Russian academic articles on topics of international relations were Danilevsky and Leontyev. The idea that civilizational differences are real and can be objectively determined is now widely accepted outside the very narrow circle of Russia’s few remaining liberals.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was rather late in coming round to this point of view. In the early 2000s he was a traditional Westernizer, speaking of Russia’s eventual integration into Europe. More recently, however, his tone has changed. Speaking to the Valdai Club at the end of October, he used the words “civilization,” “civilizations,” and “civilizational” some 20 times, and commented that “real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation—I emphasize—any society or civilization to follow its own path.”
To rub in the point, Putin mentioned Danilevsky and cited his statement that progress lies in “walking the field that represents humanity’s historical activity, walking in all directions,” adding that “no civilization can take pride in being the height of development.” Putin followed this by calling for a “free development of countries and peoples,” in which “primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition.” Though Putin didn’t say it, the language was pure Leontyev.
Some commentators argue that the “New Cold War” between Russia and the West differs from the original in that lacks an ideological component similar to the conflict between communism and capitalism. Others maintain that there is such a component and that it consists of the struggle between democracy and autocracy. Putin’s speech shows that both points of view are wrong.
For the speech reveals a very coherent philosophy well founded in a specific Russian intellectual tradition with origins in Danilevsky. However, this philosophy has nothing to do with autocracy and democracy. In fact, the very essence of civilizational theory is that no system is inherently the best. Putin is not making any claims about how states should organize their internal affairs, let alone promoting autocracy versus democracy. He is, however, making a claim about how the world as a whole should operate, and contrasting the vision of a world converging around Western values and institutions with that of a world consisting of distinct civilizations each advancing towards their own unique destinations. The New Cold War does, therefore, have an ideological component but it’s very different from what most people in the West imagine it to be.
Only time will tell which vision of the world turns out to be accurate. But for now, the terms of the intellectual debate have been set. Two hundred years on, it is very much Danilevsky’s moment.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
Ukraine is rushing reinforcements to Bakhmut to avoid encirclement by Russian forces. One report claims that 30,000 Ukrainian forces are in danger of encirclement. This further confirms the critical importance of Bakhmut to Ukrainian defense lines in the Donbass and further west, despite attempts by western mainstream media to argue otherwise. It is a key transportation and logistics hub. Mercouris has previously noted that the Wagner group is now supported by regular Russian forces and that one reason why the Russian offensive here has taken so long (four months) is because the Wagner group might have bitten off more than they could chew and that it would have been more effective had the regular army contributed more to this offensive and much sooner.
The battle for Bakhmut is the most brutal and cruel of all battles fought so far in this war.
In the event that Ukraine loses the battle of Bakhmut and loses up to 30,000 troops, amid shell shortages and threats to the energy system, at a time when the weather has turned considerably colder, it will have experienced a very major set-back.
Missile Attacks
There are satellite indications of a forthcoming massive Russian missile attack in preparation, judging by activities at the Engels airfield where pictures show two dozen bombers ready for action with very active ground crews. This could be an exercise in Russian misinformation or a signal of some other kind of operation. There have been recent expectations of such an attack. Even following repairs of previous missile attacks (the last one was a week ago), 40% of the energy system remains severely degraded.
Another two to four such raids might lead to a final collapse of the energy system, at which point an overall repair might become impossible. The prospect of western help is not huge, given disparities of voltage etc. between Soviet-era and western standards. There have been multiple attacks by Kalibri and many other missiles, but there have not been any recent sightings of Geranium 2 drones imported from Iran. It could be that Russia is building up a stock of these and other drones in preparation for a terminal attack on Ukraine’s energy system. Lavrov has said that attacks on the dual-use energy system of Ukraine are justified for military reasons. His saying this points towards a Russian intention to knock out energy, rail, communication and transportation systems that might also include the Dnieper bridges.
Storm Clouds
Things are now building up. Shoigu has indicated that training of the 300,000 new reservists and the additional 80,000 volunteers is now basically over and that the soldiers can be deployed in preparation for the Russian winter offensive.
Kharkiv
Other reports talk about a critical situation for Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv region. The Ukrainian forces’ advance has been at a standstill while Russia builds up heavy fortifications and mounts limited counteroffensives. Ukraine says that Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv are running critically short of ammunition, because the railway system is beginning to crumble.
Shortages
Ukraine is in need of far more ammunition at a point in time when they are experiencing a shell shortage on the frontlines and NATO countries are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with their supply. France has indicated that it is now capped out of the military equipment, Caesar systems, multiple rocket launch systems, etgc.,and will not be in a position to provide much more.
Evacuations
If Ukraine is indeed worried for its energy system it is the legal and moral duty of the Ukrainian government to organize evacuations of citizens, especially the most vulnerable, from Ukrainian cities. If the transportation system also collapses it will simply not be possible to evacuate. Mercouris wonders whether one of the reasons why Ukraine has not been already organizing massive evacuations is that some people in Kiev are hoping for a humanitarian crisis so that this might elicit more western sympathy.
Diplomacy
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has also talked of the state of diplomatic discussions. He has ridiculed the idea that there are effective discussions taking place, and that there is no indication that Ukraine is in any position for discussion. This points increasingly to the Russians focusing on the military side of the war and discounting any idea of a diplomatic solution.
On the western side there are indications of considerable confusion. Macron is accusing Washington of benefitting from the war, from the sales of US LNG to Europe at very high prices, and complaining that the US Inflation Reduction Act is a mechanism for official subsidies to US industries at the expense of European (long gone the days of World Trade Organization authority, and even of “globalization.” OBB) There is no sign of any real US concession to Europe.
What to Do
There has been much discussion as to what to do to help Ukraine. The US is talking about relatively low levels of training support (2500 men a month, for a month at a time, will not remotely address Ukraine’s problems), talk about more weapons systems, perhaps including Patriot surface-to-air missiles (the Pentagon is strongly opposed, as it does not want to lose what it has), and suggestions about F-16s fighter jets which will only be available in a timeframe of months or years and, if used, will not make much difference.
Infighting
The issue of delivery of Patriots has caused a furious row between Germany and Poland in the wake of the fall of a Ukrainian missile on Poland. Germany offered its Patriots to Poland. The Poles have launched an anti-German campaign because Germany will not allow Poland to pass on the Patriots to Ukraine (which would require a full agreement of the entire NATO alliance). These kinds of quarrel are intensifying. Britain is also sniping at Germany.
Western media carry reports (as in the Guardian) that the USA should send 1,000 Abrahms tanks to Ukraine, that these would be sufficient to achieve victory over the Russian army – in other words, are suggesting that the USA should send a third of its entire arsenal of tanks to Ukraine. There would be enormous logistic challenges, challenges of maintenance (they are very heavy maintenance), and of supplying them with the 150mm tank ammunition, and of supplying fuel for their gas turbine engines. Fighter jets, long range missiles are also talked about.
Mercouris calls such talk borderline irrational/deranged. If and when Ukraine goes down to defeat such writers will doubtless claim that the defeat was because of failure to deliver such systems, that it was all the fault of the weak west and weak western politicians. (Such talk sounds like typicaly neocon double-down mischief, and indicates the extent to which mainstream media are bought and paid for by the neocons. OBB).
Non-Diplomacy
Russia’s intelligence chief has confirmed that he talked about Ukraine in his recent meeting with the CIA chief, William Burns, in Ankara, showing that there is nothing to the US claim that “there will be no talks about Ukraine without Ukraine.” But we dont know the substance of the talks.
Lavrov was clearly not impressed. Russia clearly feels, says Mercouris, that Washington is incapable of coming up with ideas that remotely address the problems. Western diplomacy, says Mercouris, is bankrupt. Attempts to isolate Russia, to implement a sanctions war, achieve military success, persuade China to intervene on behalf of the West, persuade India to stop buying Russian gas, etc., etc, – nothing has worked. The only promising negotiation back in March was wrecked by Washington and Boris Johnson. The price: Ukraine has suffered at least 100,000 dead among its military forces (as stated rather clumsily this week by Ursula von Leyen. OBB). Thousands more will die; many people will suffer extreme cold and similar hardships. Extreme cold, without heat, is unsustainable, despite however much clothing is worn.
The effects will be catastropic, especially for the vulnerable. We will have to go through all of this horror before negotiations begin – an act of tardiness and stubborness that represents political and moral bankruptcy.
(Note. There are western reports of an indication from Washington that Biden is ready for talks with Putin. OBB).
