YouTube link here.

Rumble link here.

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 1/30/24

For over a decade, experts have noted that Russian political culture has been drifting away from the pragmatic, technocratic authoritarianism that characterized the first stage of the Vladimir Putin era, which was open to all sorts of cooperation with the West.

Now, it is taking a more ideological stance that sees the West as not merely a geopolitical foe but also the source of destructive moral and cultural contagion.

Russia is considering a law that will require any foreigners entering the country to sign a “loyalty agreement,” pledging not to defame Russia’s history or state institutions, nor to advocate for any “nontraditional” sexual ideas while visiting the country. Under the proposed legislation, which is being prepared by the Kremlin, there will be legal consequences for violators.

Another bill presently before the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, would target foreigners and Russians living abroad for statements and actions deemed “Russophobic” – expressing hatred or contempt toward Russia or things Russian. Punishments could include confiscation of property within Russia or a ban on entering the country.

In Soviet times, there was a coherent state ideology strictly curated by the Communist Party. But Russia’s emerging order seems a mix of tough but often vaguely worded laws designed to limit critical speech and public protest, strengthen military preparedness, and ban “deleterious” Western influences such as gender-affirming care and public homosexuality. At the same time, the government is pushing an ill-defined campaign to celebrate Russia’s distinctly conservative civilizational qualities, historical greatness, and adherence to “traditional” moral values.

“This is a way of consolidating the ‘good Russians,’ the patriotic ones, around [President] Putin and the Kremlin,” says Maria Lipman, co-editor of the Russia Post, a journal of Russian affairs published by George Washington University. “The government is the main trendsetter, but there are many public actors who put forward their own initiatives, sometimes a bit too much. But in the present atmosphere, it’s unacceptable to come up with any progressive proposal, but perfectly OK to float any socially conservative idea.”

An anti-progressive atmosphere

The Duma has erected a legislative fortress aimed at blocking the penetration of Western influence, beginning in 2012 with laws against foreign-connected civil society groups. Those laws have since led to the banning of most big, internationally connected organizations and the extension of the “foreign agent” label to hundreds of groups and individuals that are critical of authority.

The pace of anti-Western measures has intensified amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has convinced most Russians is a struggle for survival against a West united in its hostility.

While the Kremlin’s legal campaign is sweeping, lower-level officials are often eager to push further with their own socially conservative proposals, says Ms. Lipman. Some regional officials have suggested measures to prohibit young women from wearing pants, while a leading Duma deputy recently suggested the restoration of traditional shop classes in which girls learn to make borscht and boys learn to use tools.

“Some of these ideas are too much, and not likely to get official support,” she says. “But they have the effect of changing the atmosphere, and driving public moods further in the same direction.”

For example, growing calls to ban abortion, despite having support of the Russian Orthodox Church, will probably not go far in a society in which women tend to be better educated than men and have been part of the workforce, with full rights to control their private choices, for about a century.

But the mounting campaign against the “propaganda of nontraditional sexual identity” is another matter. Experts say that LGBTQ+ people enjoy very little public support in Russia, and hence the intensifying measures against them have received no pushback over the past decade. Any open expression of gay identity has been criminalized, gender transition has been legally prohibited, and depictions of any “nontraditional” behaviors have been banned from social media as well as from movies and TV.

Late last year, Russia’s Supreme Court branded the “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization,” a move that suggests authorities believe gay identity isn’t a native trait but must be a destructive import from abroad.

“This would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” says Boris Vishnevsky, a liberal deputy of the St. Petersburg city council. “They banned an organization that doesn’t exist, so no representatives were able to come forward and speak on its behalf. The effect of this absurd decision will just be to further silence the voices of anyone who has what they call a nontraditional orientation. Now they will be associated with that nonexisting extremist organization, and face criminal prosecution.”

Winning converts

Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, which tracks extremist trends, in Moscow, says that much of the official worry over “woke” ideas is, ironically, inspired by Western right-wingers whom the Kremlin sees as a simpatico force.

“There are a lot of connections between Russian conservatives and especially those in the U.S.,” he says. “It seems they adopt some of their issues, such as opposing abortion and [gender-affirming care], even though these do not have very much relevance for Russian society. But it becomes part of the toolbox for propaganda and indoctrination.”

Opinion polls show that the Kremlin has been steadily winning its argument that the West is an implacable enemy whose malign influence needs to be resisted by means of strong laws, tougher social control, and vigorous propaganda.

“There is no longer a disbelief among the public when the government says the West is an enemy, as there used to be in the past,” says Ms. Lipman. “Most pro-Western liberals have left Russia since the war began and are no longer part of the internal discussion. Meanwhile Western leaders are sanctioning Russia, helping Ukraine, and openly saying their goal is to weaken Russia. Not surprisingly, Putin’s anti-Western stance has never been so convincing to the broad Russian public as it is today.”

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 2/18/24

Russia finally captured the Ukrainian fortress town of Avdeevka following a protracted battle that ended in Kiev’s chaotic retreat and the abandonment of its wounded troops. The timing took place as the Western elite met in Germany for this year’s Munich Security Conference over the weekend, which conveniently enabled them to plan their next moves in this proxy war. No significant financial or military aid is expected, however, despite Ukraine’s newly clinched security pacts with Germany and France.

Rather, as was explained here earlier in the month when analyzing the latest Biden-Scholz Summit in DC, the West’s focus will be on the long-term containment of Russia in Europe beyond the borders of that former Soviet Republic. To that end, Germany’s role as the US’ preferred “Lead From Behind” partner in the EU will become more prominent, which will take the form of connecting the “military Schengen” with the revived Weimar Triangle in order to accelerate the construction of “Fortress Europe”.

The preceding three hyperlinked analyses explain these concepts more in depth as well as their relationship, but they can be summarized as Germany exploiting its comprehensive subordination of Poland to resume its long-lost superpower trajectory after a nearly eight-decade-long hiatus. The reason why the West’s attention will turn towards accelerating this geostrategic shift instead of clinging to its proxy war on Russia via Ukraine after Avdeevka is because it’s now clear that the latter is a lost cause.

Russia already won the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO that Secretary General Stoltenberg declared almost exactly one year ago as proven by the counteroffensive’s failure and the subsequent reversal of this conflict’s dynamics whereby Ukraine is now once again on the defensive. Former Command-in-Chief Zaluzhny’s replacement Syrsky explicitly admitted this last week before the disastrous retreat from Avdeevka, which is regarded as Kiev’s last major fortress in Donbass.  

The stage is now set for a forthcoming Russian offensive that could steamroll through the rest of this region in the best-case scenario from Moscow’s perspective and the worst-case one from the West’s. That’s not to say that this will indeed happen because the so-called “fog of war” makes it impossible to accurately discern Ukraine’s full defensive capabilities behind the Line of Contact (LOC), but it’s not without reason that the West is panicking and Zelensky decided to blame them for his latest defeat.

He complained that a so-called “artificial lack of weaponry” was responsible in an allusion to the congressional deadlock over more Ukraine aid, which Biden agreed with to pressure his political foes. Navalny’s unexpected death on Friday was taken advantage of by anti-Russian hawks to demand that the House pass the Senate’s proxy war funding bill when it resumes its session later this month, but even if it’s approved, the problem is that the US has already expended its stockpiles.

While it’s possible that it could dip into those reserves that it’s saved for meeting its national security needs and coerce its vassals into doing so as well, the fact of the matter is that the counteroffensive’s failure in spite of much larger aid given to Kiev up until then suggests that this won’t make a difference. Whatever might be sent would be used solely to hold the LOC as long as possible and prevent a Russian breakthrough in order to perpetuate the stalemate that Zaluzhny was the first to admit had set in by fall.

Truth be told, that description was inaccurate since the LOC continues gradually moving westward and the pace might speed up after Russia’s capture of Avdeevka. President Putin already signaled that he won’t stop until his security guarantee requests are met through military or diplomatic means after recently regretting that he hadn’t ordered the special operation to begin sooner and saying on Sunday after the fall of that Ukrainian fortress town that victory is “a matter of life and death” for Russia.

It remains unclear when and on what terms the conflict will end, but the writing is on the wall and it clearly reads that Russia’s security guarantee requests will be met to some extent or another, ergo why the West is now planning for a decades-long “confrontation” with Russia per Stoltenberg’s own words. Therein lies the significance of the geostrategic shift that was identified earlier in this analysis regarding Germany’s role as the US’ top “Lead From Behind” partner for containing Russia in Europe.

In furtherance of that goal, NATO’s continental-wide “Steadfast Defender 2024” drills – the largest since the end of the Old Cold War – will be aimed at optimizing the partial implementation of the “military Schengen” between Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands, which France is expected to soon join. The Baltics will likely also participate as well given that they require support for building their so-called “Baltic Defense Line”, which could extend up to the Arctic if Finland gets involved too as expected.

The revived Weimar Triangle comes into play since Germany requires French backing because Berlin can’t realistically do all of this on its own, which in turn necessitated Poland’s military subordination to its western neighbor via the abovementioned logistics pact between them. A military corridor from France to Estonia, which could reach Finland via Denmark-Sweden (the second of whom is a NATO aspirant and expected to join this new “Schengen”), is therefore taking shape before the world’s eyes.

Russia’s capture of Avdeevka will therefore reverberate across Europe by accelerating the implementation of these long-term containment plans seeing as how NATO’s proxy war on it through Ukraine is obviously a lost cause after the fall of that former Soviet Republic’s latest fortress town. It’s this geostrategic dynamic that observers should pay more attention to than anything else since the resumption of Germany’s long-lost superpower trajectory is a development of global significance.

By Riley Waggaman, Substack, 2/7/24

Russia’s upper house of parliament on Wednesday (February 7th) unanimously approved a law that allows for confiscation of property and deprivation of military ranks and honorary titles for activities directed against the state, as well as for discrediting the country’s armed forces. Since the start of its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian government has granted itself a range of new powers to combat information deemed nonfactual and damaging to national security.

Under the new legislation, money, valuables and property acquired as a result of discrediting the military, as well as property used to carry out such activities, is subject to confiscation by court order.

A lawyer who spoke with Fontanka.ru explained how the law works by providing an example of “a person who committed a crime by publishing a message on the Internet from a mobile phone.” In this case, “the smartphone can be confiscated as an instrument of the crime, and if the convicted person received money for this crime, then that can also be confiscated.”

The legislation also permits the stripping of military ranks, as well as honorary and state titles, from those convicted of discrediting the army or advocating for activities that threaten the state.

Speaking at a plenary meeting in January, State Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin said the bill was designed to punish “scoundrels and traitors who spit on the backs of our soldiers, betrayed our Motherland, and transfer money to the armed forces of the country that is at war with us.”

But what constitutes collusion with Russia’s enemies is open to interpretation.

Russia was the main exporter of uranium to the United States in November, and Russian gas continues to flow across Ukraine. On February 3, Gazprom disclosed that 42.4 million cubic meters of gas was being delivered daily to Europe via Ukraine’s Yelets–Kremenchuk–Kryvyi Rih pipeline. The gas transit deal with Kiev is expected to last until the end of 2024.

The new law expands on preexisting legislation that Russian authorities have used to crack down on speech deemed dangerous to national security. Just hours after President Vladimir Putin announced the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor, the federal government’s media watchdog and regulator, warned media outlets that they were required to use information only from official sources when preparing materials about the military intervention.

Less than two weeks later, on March 4, 2022, the Russian government criminalized “the public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in order to protect the interests of Russia and its citizens”, with a maximum punishment of 1.5 million rubles and fifteen years in prison.

Courts have not shied away from punishing the enemies of Russia.

In March, a 63-year-old man was sentenced to seven years behind bars for “posting two comments under other people’s posts on the VKontakte social network, which contained an aggressive attitude towards the authorities of the Russian Federation and hostility towards the course of the SMO in Ukraine.”

In December, a 28-year-old woman from St. Petersburg was sentenced to six months of “compulsory treatment” at a psychiatric hospital after she was convicted of posting fakes about the military on social media.

At the end of January, a 72-year-old pensioner received five years in prison for posting “information about the number of dead Russian military personnel” and an “emotional video.” The elderly woman admitted guilt but said she had acted emotionally after her brother, who lived in Ukraine, was buried under the rubble of a building that collapsed as a result of shelling. A Rostov region court ruled that she had been motivated by political hatred.

Fines are given for less serious offenses. In March 2022, a St. Petersburg court fined a resident 35,000 rubles for holding a sign in public that read “No to war”. The defendant was found guilty of “expressing his opinion and forming the opinion of those around him about the participation of the Russian Armed Forces (AF) in a war, and not in a special operation.”

In November 2023, a resident of Kamchatka was fined 30,000 rubles after a “linguistic study” determined that she had “denigrated” the Russian military in a social media post. Russian media has reported dozens of similar cases over the past two years.

Punishment is not reserved for those deemed “anti-war”. In September, A former member of a volunteer detachment in Donbass was fined 20,000 rubles for hanging a banner with the inscription: “Freedom for Strelkov”, and scattering leaflets demanding the release of the ex-Donetsk commander from a pre-trial detention center in Moscow. The defendant was found guilty of discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

In December, retired GRU colonel Vladimir Kvachkov was fined 50,000 rubles for discrediting the Russian army. Like Strelkov, Kvachkov supports military intervention in Ukraine but has been highly critical of the SMO’s execution.

A month later, Strelkov himself was sentenced to four years in prison, purportedly in connection to several Telegram posts he wrote. The evidence against Strelkov was deemed a “state secret” and his trial was closed to the public.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained in a November interview that “certain censorship” is required during “wartime”. He acknowledged, however, that the rules against dangerous speech are somewhat ambiguous.

“Where is the line? I can’t answer this question. [The line] is very thin. And therefore, I would advise all those who speculate indiscriminately and throw words of criticism towards our army without understanding the essence of the matter … to think ten times,” Peskov advised.

The line is constantly moving. On February 15, 2022—a week before Russia launched its special military operation—Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned reports about Moscow’s impending military intervention as “information terrorism”.

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 2/10/24

I watched with interest evaluations of the Putin interview last night aired on Russian state television’s Vesti program, read assorted articles on this subject published in yesterday’s Johnson’s Russia List and the comments which readers posted on my website or sent to me directly via email.

I think the issues are worthy of further discussion and that is the objective of today’s essay.

It should come as no surprise that yesterday’s Vesti only sang the praises of the interview and of Putin’s performance in particular. In that context they put on air the very complimentary remarks of two Americans from the intelligence community who in recent months have become the darlings of Russian television:  Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson. I will only say that both showed poor judgment in giving unqualified thumbs-up.  Why?  I hope that will become clear from what I have to say today to amplify and dig down deeper into the critique that I sketched yesterday.

By its nature, a website like mine attracts a goodly number of Russia-cheerleaders who don’t want to hear any sour notes. Many of these folks know little or nothing about Russia and rely on guesswork that ignores highly relevant facts available to Russia speakers.

The question of who was the target audience for the Tucker Carlson-Putin interview is critical. Was it the United States? the Collective West? the Russian domestic public? China, India and the Global South?   

As I said yesterday, the Kremlin elites hoped that the interview would get around U.S. censorship and bring the Russian perspective directly to the ears and eyes of the broad American public, which also, of course, includes American elites. It is highly likely that Tucker Carlson was on the same wave length, since Americans are the folks he hopes to entice to become paying subscribers to his Network and also because he likely believes he can influence the course of history by waking up his compatriots. Each time Carlson brings in 40 million viewers he puts to shame the likes of CNN whose viewer numbers are ten times less, if I may be generous to them.

With this objective in mind, I continue to believe that Putin’s decision to deliver a 30 minute opening history lecture by way of answer to Carlson’s question of why Russia invaded was a bad decision. It was bad for several reasons. One is that it was boring for the general public.  Yes, the interview attracted 140 million ‘hits’ on Carlson’s website, but we are not told how long those viewers stayed tuned. Secondly, Putin is not a professional historian and anything he said would be pulled to pieces by academics in the States, not just by the usual journalistic commentators.  Thirdly, the history going back to the 9^th century had nothing to do with the decision to invade Ukraine, which was prompted and justified internally in the Kremlin by reasons of Realpolitik, not by what is called Romantic Nationalism.

As I have said in the past, Realpolitik does not go down well with the general public in Russia as in many other countries whereas Romantic Nationalism does. Mothers don’t willingly send their sons to die for Realpolitik. Hence, the story of how Russians and Ukrainians are just brothers and similar platitudes in many of Putin’s speeches to his domestic audience. But if you have any marketing sense, and I tell you frankly that the people advising Putin seem at times to have zero marketing sense, then you prepare your speech around who is the intended audience, in this case the USA.

Putin’s explanation of why he chose to invade should have started with the year 2008, when the U.S. insisted that NATO offer membership to Ukraine. After all, the trigger for the war in February 2022 was the refusal of the United States to negotiate on Russia’s demand that Ukraine remain neutral and that NATO pull back to its 1996 borders. Note that after one hour of the interview Purin himself says this, but I believe it is too late and many who came to Tucker’s platform will not have stayed with it long enough to hear this.

In the same vein, Putin never answered Tucker Carlson’s reasonable question as to why, knowing as he did that modern Ukraine is an ‘artificial state’ concocted by Lenin and his associates in 1922 to satisfy their own needs to consolidate power throughout what had been the Russian Empire, knowing as he did that the Russian speakers in the Donbas were being persecuted before 2014 and were being bombed and shelled after 2014, why did he wait so long to move against the regime in Kiev.  Fair question, I might add, as I poke back at some readers who insisted that Carlson is just an ignorant clown.

The answer is available and well known among Russia’s foreign policy professionals:  Putin could not dare act until Russia’s armed forces were sufficiently modernized and strengthened, until the Russian economy was made similarly robust to survive any threats coming from the West should Russia forcefully push for regime change in Kiev. That moment arrived in 2018 when Putin announced to the world the serial production of strategic arms including hypersonic missiles that put Russia years ahead of the USA and presented a window of opportunity to act. Meanwhile conventional weapons of superior quality were being delivered to the armed forces and the economy was being readied for the most severe sanctions, beginning with the ‘import substitution’ programs launched in 2014. I do not see why setting out these real motivations on air to the American public was not done.

A couple of readers noted that Tucker introduced his Sinophobe thinking into the interview with Putin, asking pointedly whether Russians are happy to be rushing into the arms of China, whether they understand that Xi is using BRICS to dominate its partners just as Washington has been doing with its allies. Putin responded in line with what he has been saying at many forums, namely that Russia and China have an exceptionally strong cooperation in many spheres that is mutually beneficial. However, he added something that I have rarely heard him say: “Russia and China have thousands of kilometers of common borders. You don’t choose your neighbors, just as you don’t choose your relatives.”  Here is precisely the Realpolitik mentality that I have alluded to above.  The game is not about kissy-kissy. It is about the necessities of life and playing with the hand you are dealt.

If I may expand on the China issue, I believe Russia had no particular interest in how many Chinese or Indians tuned in to watch the interview. The Chinese as a people may or may not have particularly warm feelings for Russians.  I can assure you that the man in the street Russian has mixed feelings about China, of which the most evident are fear and envy. The Chinese loggers who rape the forests of Eastern Siberia are denounced in Russian media, as are the many Chinese farmer settlers in the Far East who find Russian wives and move in permanently, changing the fragile demography.  But none of this can or should influence policy in Moscow, which is focused on the big picture of Russian interests.

China is without question one of the most supportive countries in the world in Russia’s hour of need.  And Xi’s actions are similarly based on realism. As the hero of The Queen of Spades Hermann sings in his last aria, Сегодня ты, завтра я! – Today it is you, tomorrow it will be me!

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024