https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G5v2Xx7JOk

This video is from iEarlyGray, the YouTube channel of a British man living in St. Petersburg, Russia.

RT.com, 6/18/22

The head of the Security Council criticized Mikhail Podoliak for becoming the self-proclaimed “voice of the army”

The head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), Alexey Danilov, has called out presidential adviser Mikhail Podoliak for making statements on behalf of the military.

Earlier this week, Podoliak unveiled an arms wish list for the West, saying Kiev needs 300 multiple-launch rocket systems, 500 tanks, and 1,000 howitzers to achieve heavy weapons parity with Russia.

On Saturday, in an interview with news outlet Liga, Danilov stressed that only senior military officials can make statements like this, questioning why Podoliak “is now the voice of the army.”

“I don’t understand why Podoliak makes such statements. Is he a representative of the General Staff? I only saw him on the stumps of Yanukovich,” Danilov said. By ‘stumps’, he was apparently referring to a path at former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich’s country residence. In 2011, Yanukovich showed off the residence to a group of journalists, telling them that every morning for half an hour, he would run up and down the stumps – comments which inspired numerous internet memes.

Asked about the duration of the military conflict with Russia amid Kiev’s shortage of weapons, Danilov said it’s important for Ukraine “to end this war with a victory as soon as possible.”

“The longer it lasts, the more the degree of perception in the West will fall. Domestic problems, domestic politics, elections… They will switch to the domestic agenda and pay less and less attention [to Ukraine]. There will be a certain weariness from the war,” he said.

He echoed the remarks of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who warned on Saturday of “Ukraine fatigue,” which he said is growing around the world, while stressing that this should not prevent the West from conveying its support for Ukraine at this “particularly critical time.”

The Ukrainian military earlier revealed that Ukraine has lost up to half of its heavy weapons, including 400 tanks, and Western supplies are unable to fill the gap as they cover only 10-15% of the country’s needs.

Russia attacked the neighboring state in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 6/23/22

Alexander Sladkov has been covering military conflicts for Russia’s main state TV channel for three decades. The burly, bearded, motorcycle-riding ex-military officer is considered by many to be Russia’s top war correspondent.

Now, he’s one of dozens of reporters, including several women, who have been embedded with the armies of Russia and its Donbas separatist allies to report on Russia’s war in Ukraine over the past four months.

Millions of Russians see the conflict, often in detailed and graphic daily reports, through the observations, assertions, and basic narratives formed by these reporters who travel with Russian forces, follow military guidelines, and appear to fully support the Russian cause. Opinion polls suggest that majorities of Russians increasingly trust these reports.

While a handful of independent Russian journalists, such as Meduza’s Lilya Yapparova, have produced some compelling alternative coverage by striking out on their own in Ukraine, the Russian reporters mostly offer a view of the war at odds with that of their Western counterparts. But their coverage is nonetheless more than simple propaganda; it reflects a combination of journalistic methods and a Russian understanding of the world.

“Everyone knows that I’m a person who wouldn’t report anything that I’m not 100% certain of,” Mr. Sladkov says. “I am not an information warrior – I know that there are lots of such people – but I am a reporter. These days I get a lot of time [on the premier Channel One news program] because interest is very high. Nobody tells me what to report.”

“No need to explain … what war is”

Mr. Sladkov, who intensively covered the devastating two-month siege of Mariupol, a Donbas port city on the Azov Sea that was defended by Ukrainian forces for the past eight years, spared his viewers – and the subscribers to his Telegram channel – none of the horrific destruction and gruesome scenes of a city in flames amid brutal street-by-street combat. He actually went out of his way to show the forests of sad, temporary graves of civilians caught in the crossfire that sprang up in apartment courtyards amid the smoke and relentless gunfire.

He says it’s not surprising that Russian audiences can look at all that horror without flinching, much less questioning their state’s purpose. “Russia has been constantly at war for decades. There is no need to explain to society what war is,” he says. “Every schoolboy can tell you the difference between a tank and an APC [armored personnel carrier], and identify all different sorts of weapons and what they are for.”

There was the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, two devastating wars in the separatist Russian region of Chechnya, a brief but bloody conflict with Georgia in 2008, a highly kinetic Russian intervention in Syria since 2015, and an ongoing war against Kyiv in the Donbas for the past eight years, which the Russians claim the present “military operation” is designed to bring to a victorious end.

Mr. Sladkov has covered most of those wars. He was also embedded with United States infantry in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he says he learned much of what he knows about his trade.

Though he served 10 years in the Soviet army, he insists that he is not a soldier. And he says that his relations with the military are often “complicated” regarding where he can go and what he can report. “Of course there are military secrets, and you do need to keep a balance. If I have a weakness, it’s that I probably haven’t looked hard enough at the people, the civil population, who are trapped in the middle of the war. It’s not just about the troops.”

A supportive public

Though embedded journalists like Mr. Sladkov and Alexander Kots, another leading war correspondent interviewed for this story, enjoy massive advantages in terms of access to the troops and the front lines, as well as mega-audiences at home, nobody denies that the format is restrictive.

“Our war correspondents work according to the rules of wartime, and they must know how to behave on the battlefield,” says Viktor Baranets, a former official Russian military spokesman who is now the military columnist for the Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. “The journalist must accept the rules, and never deviate from them. A battlefield is not a playground.”

Mr. Baranets adds: “Personally, I think the Russian public gets more information than it should. As for casualties, I would never declassify this data before the operation ends. Why give the enemy the pleasure of hearing about our losses? We can square everything when it’s over.”

The improving levels of trust in the Kremlin’s decisions, engendered by official war reporting, seem reflected in recent public opinion surveys. A poll published this month by the state-funded Public Opinion Foundation found that 78% of Russians express confidence in President Vladimir Putin, reversing a prewar slide in his standing, while 85% identified themselves as “patriots.”

Another June poll, by the independent Levada Center, found that majorities of Russians pay close attention to events in Ukraine, and growing numbers are turning to state TV for their primary news about the conflict. A study by the internet research firm Mediascope supports that. The Levada poll found that 53% of respondents believe that TV coverage of the war is “objective.” Only a third said they rely on internet sources for their information about the war.

“I didn’t set out to report on war crimes”

There are things that embedded Russian correspondents don’t do: providing information about casualties, or graphically showing Russian losses. Neither will they finger Russian service members for crimes, whether looting, corruption, rape, or murder. Mr. Sladkov defends the record of the Russian military for punishing its own criminals – he cites the case of Yuri Budanov, a Russian officer convicted of murdering a Chechen woman during the first Chechen war – but insists it’s up to courts, not himself, to make such judgments.

When Russian troops were accused of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha in April, Mr. Kots, who had been there at the time of the Russian withdrawal, went public to say that he saw no bodies in the streets. He suggested that Ukrainian punitive squads who entered later actually did the killing. Though evidence impugning Russian troops has mounted since, he still stands by his claim.

Ms. Yapparova, a war correspondent with the Latvia-based opposition outlet Meduza, has a different perspective. She says she went to Bucha following the Russian withdrawal with no intention other than to find out what happened.

“It seemed to me that the priority should be [to document] the human suffering,” she says. “There might be a lot of unclear situations, facts that need to be established, but it was quite obvious what was happening, and who the aggressor is. I didn’t set out to report on war crimes committed by my own country’s army. I just turned on my tape recorder and that’s what I found myself doing. I was doing my job.”

Journalists and patriots

Anatoly Tsyganok, an independent military expert, says it’s a pity that Western countries have mostly banned or curtailed Russian-sourced reportage from reaching their own populations. There is no doubt that the aggregate work of Russian war journalists sheds a lot of light on the nature of the conflict, including the Russian conviction that it is a war to liberate the Russian-speaking people of the Donbas from Ukrainian nationalist oppression, he says.

In the battle of Mariupol as described by Russian war correspondents, it was mainly the forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic who fought their way through the city, which they consider their own territory. Their main opponent was the notorious Azov Regiment, who set up their fighting positions in homes and schools, leading to their destruction. In Russian reportage, the surviving civilian population emerged to express gratitude for their liberation. The degree of truth in this narrative may only be determined by historians, but it’s what most Russians today appear to believe.

“You can’t get a full picture of what is really happening if you exclude what is being reported by one of the sides,” says Mr. Tsyganok. “I get my information from every possible direction, and I can say that Russian correspondents, like Sladkov, are as professional as any in the West.”

Somewhat ominously, Mr. Sladkov and Mr. Kots believe that Russia is locked in an existential struggle against the entire West, not just the pro-Western regime in Kyiv, and both think the war will be long and hard, lasting at least five years.

“I am a patriot of my country, and I understand that there is no choice but to go forward to victory,” says Mr. Kots.

Ms. Yapparova, the independent journalist, says she doesn’t approve of her embedded colleagues. “Sladkov works for a huge, wealthy propaganda machine. I’m just a journalist.” But she does have one essential point of agreement with him. “I still consider Russia to be a great country. And I am a patriot of Russia.”

Link here. Transcript here.

Here is a critical review from The Bell.

I haven’t noticed much media coverage of this story. According to Reuters:

Lithuanian authorities said a ban on the transit through their territory to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad of goods that are subject to EU sanctions was to take effect from Saturday….

…The EU sanctions list notably includes coal, metals, construction materials and advanced technology, and Alikhanov said the ban would cover around 50% of the items that Kaliningrad imports.

While I don’t doubt that Poland and the Baltics might be tempted to do something reckless, I’m somewhat skeptical that the Pentagon would agree to any activity that would call for US troops to actually fight in Ukraine or any other part of eastern Europe. I’ve heard concerns from some observers who are reiterating the fact that neoconservatives and other anti-Russia ideologues litter the State Dept. and could encourage such recklessness, leading to a spiral of escalatory events.

Ultimately, I think Lira is raising a legitimate concern here, but he may be overstating the case. Then again, maybe I’m being naive. I welcome comments from readers.