By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 12/20/23

Stephen Bryen, who served as staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, currently is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute.

The British are about to sign a Naval Security Pact with Ukraine, doubling down on their support for the sinking Volodymyr Zelensky-led country.

Meanwhile, Germany is upping its arms commitment to Ukraine, even though its arms stockpile is practically empty. Both the UK and Germany are emptying their wallets and their arsenals while the US is trying to do the same thing.

At the same time, the Washington Times, in an article by Bill Gertz, reports that Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Wi), who is the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, has come up with some novel ideas to help Taiwan make use of otherwise obsolete weapons in the US arsenal, mostly because getting new weapons right now is nearly impossible.

Gallagher says “Recent war games simulating conflict with China over Taiwan revealed that the US would run out of long-range precision-guided bombs and missiles less than a week into the conflict.”

Bill Gertz reports that the Pentagon has a backlog of more than US$2 billion worth of weapons that Taipei purchased, held up by defense industry delays.

Taiwan is currently waiting on 400 Harpoon missiles and 100 Harpoon launchers that the Pentagon announced in a sale over three years ago and which may not reach the island until 2029.

The key point is that it will take five more years (eight years total) to deliver Harpoon missiles to Taiwan. It is even worse for other war stocks such as 155mm and 120mm ammunition.

The weakness and problems of the American defense industrial base pale in insignificance to the manpower shortages affecting most NATO members as well as the US.

Germany’s small army is lacking new recruits. Like the US, Germany has a volunteer force, but things are getting so bad the German government is thinking about some kind of conscription system.

With the current German government already rapidly losing political support, trying to get the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, to vote in any conscription system would be political suicide. Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, understands the problem but has no solution likely to gain popular support.

Politics in Germany is sliding to the right, with the AfD, Germany’s right-wing party, securing growing voter support. The AfD has not yet taken any position on conscription, but it is a nationalist party that would like to see the sanctions on Russia lifted and does not support any European-wide defense initiative.

The total number of armed forces personnel in Germany had dropped to 181,383 as of the end of October, with thousands of vacancies unfilled.

The German tabloid Bild says that the German army has neither the strength nor the equipment required to effectively defend the nation. Yet, at the same time Bild was pointing out the military crisis, Germany announced it is sending a 5,000-strong brigade to Lithuania.

It will be stationed less than 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the border with Belarus. The brigade relocation will start in the second quarter of 2024, with it scheduled to reach full combat readiness by 2027, according to the German Defense Ministry.

But, says German Defense Minister Pistorius, “We do not have an army which is capable of defending the country against a military offensive, a brutal war of aggression.” The contradiction is self-evident.

Britain’s army is also a big problem. Defense and Security Monitor reports that “Long considered a world-class military, the British armed forces are now stuck in a recruitment rut, with planned personnel cuts still to be implemented under the Defense Command Paper unveiled in 2021. There are significant and persistent issues involving dilapidated military housing, depleted ammunition and poorly executed procurement programs.”

Sky News, as reported by The Defense Post, “outlined the scale of the problem being faced by the UK armed forces. It said that the military would run out of ammunition just after a few days in case of an armed conflict. The country also reportedly lacks the ability to defend its airspace given the increasing power and capabilities of today’s missiles and drones.

Additionally, full replacements for aging British tanks and armored vehicles are not due for years, thereby affecting its modernization drive. Sources claim it would take five to ten years for the British Army to be able to field a warfighting division with more than 30,000 troops and backed by high-powered tanks, artillery systems, and helicopters.”

Today, the British Army is smaller than it was at the time of the American Revolution in April 1775. The entire British military is made up of 142,560 members. The British army currently has 77,540 soldiers in all its ranks. This means that the fighting force itself is much smaller, likely around 30,000.

Britain has been Europe’s biggest booster of Ukraine in its war with Russia, emptying its high-tech arsenal to support the Ukrainian army. Britain also is providing field support to Ukraine and battlefield intelligence, along with planning special secret operations such as trying to destroy the $3 billion Kerch Strait bridge connecting Russia to Crimea.

Not much is written about the French army. We do know that French equipment has not fared well against the Russians in the Ukraine war. Its CAESAR (Camion Équipé d’un Système d’Artillerie ) has been a big disappointment on the battlefield, is subject to breakdowns and has been targeted by Russian Lancet drones.

France sent 18 of them to Ukraine, 25% of the entire fleet of these mobile 155mm gun systems. According to reports, producing new ones takes years.

Likewise, France’s AMX-10C RC Infantry fighting vehicle has proven to be a death trap for Ukrainian operators who regard its “thin armor” as inadequate for front-line use. Billed as a “tank destroyer”, it is often the one that is destroyed. In respect to tanks, after the bad experience with the AMX and the German Leopard tanks, France decided against sending its Leclerc Main Battle tanks to Ukraine.

In fairness, the US Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle and the German Marder tracked combat vehicle, not to mention the ill-fated Leopard tank, have all been destroyed in Ukraine. A US study by Rand Corporation, an important Pentagon contractor, says that France’s army is a fragile ally against Russia.

The US Army is also facing a recruitment crisis. Not only are there problems filling the ranks, but the Army is having trouble graduating capable non-commissioned officers (NCOs). NCOs are the heart and soul of the American army, they are what makes the army function.

Less than half the slots are being filled. Military.com says “The eight-week Army Recruiter Course at Fort Knox, Kentucky, can train a maximum of 2,866 students across a total of 53 classes. However, data shows that it graduated only 1,336 in fiscal 2023, which concluded at the end of September.”

The Army itself is facing problems recruiting soldiers, this year and last. The Army was 10,000 soldiers short of its goal of 65,000 new troops over the past fiscal year. Last year, it missed a goal of 60,000 soldiers by 15,000.

The Army is trying to fix the problem but a lot of it is based on the strange WOKE approach of the Army’s leadership and myriad complicating issues, particularly since the Covid epidemic when the Pentagon ordered troops to get vaccinations or get booted out of the military. Now there are plenty of lawsuits over the Pentagon’s failed policy.

Beyond deficits in manpower and supplies, NATO armies lack combat experience, although plenty of “advisors” are in Ukraine supporting the Ukrainian military. Advisors never replicate what front-line troops experience so the learning curve may be worthwhile in boosting tactical and operational knowledge but not in warfighting itself.

Ukraine is also facing a huge shortfall in manpower and its use of draconian recruitment efforts is unpopular and could force Zelensky to resign. Impressed and dragooned soldiers don’t fight effectively and are only canon fodder at best.

Worse still, many of those who resisted the Ukrainian draft (some of them paid off draft administrators in amounts typically of $1,000) come from the Ukrainian nomenklatura, namely the upper classes or those with high-level skills or those from politically connected and privileged families.

The Biden administration argues that defeating Russia in Ukraine will protect Europe from a future Russian attack.

The counter-argument is that continuing to support Ukraine could lead to an expansion of the war into Europe. For a long time, the US and its allies have been playing chicken with European security by gorging Ukraine with weapons, advisors, military and intelligence support and lots of cash.

So far at least the Russians have not responded by attacking supply lines outside of Ukraine, nor have they stopped the flow of gas or other commodities (including uranium) to Europe and the United States as a response to Western support for Ukraine.

Most reports show that Russia has gained the upper hand in Ukraine and has started what appears to be a limited offensive that seems to be aimed, so far at least, in securing Donbas. However, armies often collapse quickly once military leaders and soldiers alike think they are about to be rolled over.

In Vietnam in 1975, US military leaders thought the Army of South Vietnam would be able to hold I-Corps, the northern part of South Vietnam, against attacks launched by the regular North Vietnamese army (NVA). It was a pipe dream. I-Corps folded in a few days and the NVA moved quickly southwards, heading for Saigon. The rout was on.

Fixing NATO is a very difficult problem because it has been pretending to be an offensive alliance and not a defense system. With its mission corrupted and its border with Russia vastly expanded (almost all of Eastern Europe and Finland), NATO’s ambition to add Ukraine is a country too-far because this time the Russians did not accept NATO’s expansionism goal.

If Ukraine capitulates, which is now what Russia says it wants, NATO will suffer a major defeat, the first defeat since the alliance was set up in April 1949.

Asia Times, 12/22/23

Recent articles in several leading US newspapers followed a statement from National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson saying that Russia had suffered “staggeringly high losses” in the Ukraine war.

The casualties are a vital part of understanding the war not only because the subject speaks to the future of Ukraine and Russia, but it also, if the losses are as severe as some insist, speaks to the issue of just how long the war can continue.

Every number cited below is from the Internet. There is no controlled, classified or proprietary data. The US National Security Council may know things that we don’t know, but this wouldn’t be the first time in history that casualty reports were inflated up the chain of command.

What we do know is that casualty ratios are fairly consistent across a large number of wars, and this helps us use public source data effectively. We have very little hard data. But what data we do have suggests that Ukraine’s casualties are higher than Russia’s.

The little hard data we have on Russia comes mainly from one source, an anti-Putin group who have people in Russia who have, since the beginning of the war, continually searched local newspapers as well as thousands of websites all over Russia looking for obituaries or blogger “memorials” to family members or friends.

They have been able to find about 36,000 documented deaths. They estimate that they are missing nearly 50% and currently place their “guesstimate” of total Russian deaths at “47,000 – 70,000.” What does this imply for total casualties, that is, killed/wounded/missing/prisoner?

Prisoner numbers are low. The best published data suggest that there are currently fewer than 5,000 Russians held by Ukraine and fewer than 12,000 Ukrainians held by Russia.

For purposes of calculation, we designated all Russian deaths as “Killed In Action” (KIA). This is, of course, not (and never is) technically correct.

In Vietnam, the US had 58,000 killed (58,220). In fact, only 47,434 were combat deaths; the others were from a host of other causes. Anecdotal reports suggest that a significant percentage of Russian deaths are not, in fact, combat-related.

The number of missing is also a mystery. There must be some, but those numbers are unknown. We do know that there is a very large number of people, virtually all young men, who have fled the two countries. This number is (another guesstimate) roughly 350,000-400,000 Russians and over 650,000 Ukrainians.

Wounded in Action (WIA) figures have, again based on spotty reporting, averaged between 3 and 4 times the KIA numbers. 3.5 is a good rough estimate for both sides.

By Prof. Nicolai Petro, Foreign Policy, 12/18/23

During the latter half of 2022, when Ukrainian victory over Russia seemed a distinct possibility, voices questioning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic policies were sparse. Today, however, while outright criticism of Kyiv’s military strategy remains taboo, we are beginning to see frank debate on Ukrainian social media about the country’s postwar future and who will be left to build it.

Ukrainians across the political spectrum—former officials, political allies to the current administration, longtime critics, and western Ukrainian intellectuals among them—are questioning the long-term social merits of wartime policies that effectively relegate Russian speakers to permanent second-class status. It should be noted that almost all of these critics reside in Ukraine and are fiercely supportive of Ukrainian independence. But they worry that the government is squandering its chance to forge a durable post-invasion social consensus by adopting policies that will alienate, criminalize, or deport a significant portion of the country’s population.

The debate over Ukraine’s freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and minority rights—about which very little is known in the West—reveals that even if Ukraine manages to win the war, it still has a long way to go in becoming a truly open and pluralistic society.

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FREEDOM OF RELIGION is protected by the Ukrainian Constitution. But since the outset of war, this freedom has taken a sharp turn for the worse for groups symbolically linked to Moscow. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), one of the country’s largest denominations, has borne the greatest brunt of this crackdown. The Ukrainian government sees the church as an agent of Russian influence, despite the fact that the UOC cut administrative ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1990 and ended all formal canonical ties with it in May 2022.

Regardless, UOC property, assets, and holy sites have been seized even years before the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, and members of its clergy are being investigated for crimes against the state—many argue on trumped-up charges. In October 2023, Ukraine’s parliament took the first step toward banning the church entirely by approving a bill that bans religious groups “affiliated with centers of influence … located outside Ukraine, in the state conducting military aggression against Ukraine.”

The main lobbyist for the elimination of the traditional UOC has been its similarly named rival, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which was founded in 2019 as a nationalist alternative to the UOC. In 2019, the Ministry of Culture issued a decree requiring the UOC to rename itself as the “Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine,” a thinly veiled—and largely unsuccessful—attempt to trigger mass defections.

Many have pointed out the legal, ethical, and theological problems with these moves. Surprisingly few, however, seem concerned about the domestic political turmoil that they might unleash. Framing the UOC as an illegal and hostile religious organization risks inciting violence against the church and its members. Kyiv University professor Andrei Baumeister has suggested that accentuating religious animosities at a time when the country so desperately needs unity could further erode public trust in the government, creating a slow-boiling “legitimacy deficit” that could explode five or even 10 years down the road.

Freedom of the press, and of political expression more generally, has taken a similar beating. A new media law, adopted in March 2023, extends the censorship purview of the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting beyond its namesake mediums to include print and online media. This eight-person body, appointed jointly by the president and by the parliament currently controlled by the president’s party, now has the authority to review the content of all Ukrainian media, prohibit content it deems a threat to the nation, and issue mandatory directives to media outlets.

In 2024, the council’s powers over language usage in the media are set to expand further. For example, as of January, the minimum percentage of Ukrainian language on television will increase from 75 to 90 percent; in July, the use of non-Ukrainian languages on television will be prohibited entirely in certain contexts. This law has been strongly criticized by journalist groups; Harlem Désir, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s representative on freedom of the media, called it “a blatant violation” of the freedom of speech.

Iconoclastic public philosopher Sergei Datsyuk has warned that the government’s efforts to ensure an indefinite monopoly on information will only lead to higher levels of public disaffection with political authority. He fears that they could eventually create such a high level of social tension within the Ukrainian polity that “it will be unclear which is more dangerous for us, war with Russia or internal civil war.” Oleksiy Arestovich, a former presidential advisor to Zelensky, has voiced similar concerns.

In Ukraine, the freedoms of religion and the press are deeply intertwined with the issue of minority rights, specifically with the treatment of the country’s largest minority, Russophile Ukrainians—those who identify with Russian heritage, be it through language, culture, history, or religion.

The vast majority of Russophile Ukrainians refuse to categorize themselves as a minority. They see themselves simply as Ukrainians citizens, and as such, they argue, they have a constitutional right to speak any language and espouse any religion or culture that they wish, not just the ones endorsed by the state. But Ukrainian law does not recognize Russians as indigenous to Ukraine, or even as a minority within Ukraine. They therefore have no claim to legal protection of their cultural heritage and language, a direct contradiction of Article 10 of the Ukrainian constitution.

In a now-infamous survey taken just six months before the Russian invasion, more than 40 percent of Ukrainians nationwide (and nearly two-thirds in the east and south), agreed with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” Surveys taken since then show that this figure has fallen sharply, though even now, political analyst Kost Bondarenko estimates that at least 8 to 10 percent of Ukrainians can be considered “pro-Russian.”

This precipitous drop has encouraged Ukraine’s more nationalistic lawmakers to think of new ways to transform these problematic citizens into proper Ukrainians, particularly in terms of language. A 2021 law fines the use of Russian in the service sector, while other laws have targeted Russian-language media, books, films, and music, even when they are produced in Ukraine. One way or another, according to Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, “the Russian language must completely disappear from our territory, it being an aspect of hostile propaganda and the brainwashing of our population.”

The tensions surrounding minority rights will only be exacerbated further once the war is over. As part of its accession negotiations with the European Union, in 2022, Ukraine passed a law outlining the rights of national minorities, but it specifically exempted Russian speakers from protection during the period of martial law and five years thereafter.

Although the EU had asked that this latter period be shortened, the final version, recently signed into law, while significantly expanding minority language rights for official languages of the EU, eliminates them entirely for Russian.

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MOST OF THESE RESTRICTIVE LAWS were first proposed well before 2022. But since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, their implementation has been accelerated to hasten what nationalists like to call the start of a new “post-colonial” era of Ukrainian history. However, this transition is likely to be a long, costly, and dangerous process.

While there has been a sharp spike in anti-Russian sentiment during the war, prominent scholar Ella Libanova has argued that pro-Russian sentiments will inevitably rise again after it ends. Of course, no one can predict public opinion, especially if the war continues for several years.

One thing that seems certain, however, is that the populations of eastern and southern Ukraine, Russophile or not, will not take kindly to being made the scapegoats for this conflict and denied civil and political rights en masse. The extent of what is being contemplated by Ukrainian lawmakers is staggering. According to Tamila Tasheva, Zelensky’s representative in Crimea, if it were liberated tomorrow, at least 200,000 residents of Crimea would face collaboration charges, and another 500,000 to 800,000 residents would face deportation. Refat Chubarov, the chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars, says that more than 1 million people—more than half the current population—will have to leave “immediately.”

It would be a mistake, therefore, to imagine that the unity forged in battle has healed all the wounds of the past. As Bondarenko put it, “We are fighting against Russia, but that does not mean we are fighting for Ukraine. That is the problem; that is the calamity.”

All Ukrainians agree that to bring this calamity to an end, normalcy must be restored. But that is where the consensus ends, for if normalcy means better relations with Russia, then it is precisely what Ukrainian nationalists and Western governments fear most. For the latter, it would mean the failure of a decadeslong policy to lure Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence into that of the West. For the former, it would mean the failure of what Ukraine’s first language ombudsman, Tatyana Monakhova, called the nationalist dream: “The dream was always to cultivate, build, or construct a powerful, homogeneous Ukrainian monolith—a society of the like-minded, who speak the state language, having no disagreements on major issues of state.”

Both of these approaches ignore what most Ukrainians actually want: policies that treat all Ukrainians with dignity and afford them equal protection under the law. But this cannot occur, Datsyuk said, so long as the government regards as its enemy not only Russia proper, but also those whom it has labeled “incorrect Ukrainians.” This has created a situation in which, as Ukrainian political commentator Andrei Zolotaryov has noted, “a significant part of the citizenry is in internal emigration and does not consider the state to be theirs. This is a very big problem in a country waging war.”

Ukraine needs a better path, and finding it is not an issue of money or international support. It is a matter of bringing about internal healing so that Ukrainians of all religious, linguistic, ethnic, and political backgrounds can forge a common bond of civic identity. Such an identity can only begin to take shape, however, if the many sub-identities that already exist within Ukraine are allowed to contribute to it. This means abandoning the isolationist calls that “Ukraine is for Ukrainians” and, instead, embracing the possibility of Ukraine becoming a truly open and pluralistic society.

Like all ideologues, Ukrainian nationalists are trapped by the fear that allowing diversity within their carefully constructed society will mean the loss of national unity. But research from international relations professors Barry Buzan and Ole Waever suggests that when a state enshrines the right to diversity, it is able to guide that diversity in ways that can actually reinforce national unity. Nation-states with diverse populations do much better if they permit “a concept of politics detached from the state, and for circumstances in which identity politics [is] about maintaining difference rather than finding a collective image.”

The very fact that resistance to forcible Ukrainianization in education, language usage, internet media, and music has persisted, even as Ukraine struggles desperately for survival, should indicate beyond any doubt that Russophile Ukrainians do not intend to abandon either their state or their identity. Forcing them to choose between the two risks planting the seeds for civil conflict long after the war with Russia is done.

Correction, Dec. 22, 2023: A paragraph in a previous version of this article on the use of Russian in Ukraine today contained several inaccuracies and has been removed. It incorrectly summarized a September 2023 survey question on language discrimination as asking specifically about discrimination toward Russian speakers and stated that 18.3 percent of Ukrainian survey respondents still wanted Russian as an official language. In fact, that percentage of respondents said they would accept Russian as an official language were Russia to end its aggression in Ukraine.

By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, 12/21

Read Part One of this two-part series.

Because of their grossly inaccurate assessments of the Russian president and his country, “Putin Whisperers” in the West have Ukrainian blood on their hands.

Russians who lived through the 1990s remember the decade quite differently from Michael McFaul, the former U.S.  ambassador/Stanford University professor. One such person is Marat Khairullin, a Russian journalist who has reported on Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.

In a remarkable essay published on his Substack account (I urge anyone interested in the reality of modern Russia and the war between Russia and Ukraine to subscribe), Khairullin lays out the connection between the war that McFaul and his fellow critics call Putin’s own, and the Russian people. 

Entitled “Russia I am trying to forget,” Khairullin describes a time — the 1990s— where humanity was put on hold because of the corruption and depravations of the Yeltsin government, and reminds his readers that this is the Russia to which McFaul and the other erstwhile Western Russian “experts” want to return, something which Vladimir Putin has sworn to never allow to happen. 

The goal of the collective West in promoting and sustaining the Russian-Ukraine conflict is to remove Putin from power and install a Yeltsin-like clone in his stead. Arat’s article serves as a stark warning about the consequences of such an outcome for the Russian people. 

For Their Miserable Apartments

Khairullin recalls one assignment, in the early 1990s, where he traveled to “a small Ural town” to investigate an allegation of particular cruelty. “Lonely old people who remembered the Great Patriotic War (WWII) were evicted from their apartments throughout all the Russia,” Khairullin recalled. 

“This happened everywhere — Moscow, Balashikha, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Kazan, Vladivostok…but in big cities, old people were spared, forced to assign these damned apartments to new owners and then evicted to live in some abandoned villages. In small towns, old people were simply mowed down.”

Khairullin’s investigation uncovered collusion between the town’s bureaucracy, the local police and the local mafia. “In a very short period of time (just a couple of years) that has passed since Yeltsin’s sovereignty was established in this classic Stalinist industrial town, 136 lonely pensioners had gone missing, and their apartments had changed ownership.” 

The local police had a list of pensioners and their apartments. This list was turned over to the mafia, who simply took the pensioner out to the edge of town and murdered him or her. “The person disappears,” Khairullin noted, “after that they immediately clean the apartment up, and the next day they move in, the body of the person has not yet cooled down, but they are already in charge.”

Khairullin had to flee the Ural town in the trunk of a car to avoid being killed himself by the local mafia, who took umbrage at his investigation after being tipped off by the local police. 

Khairullin condemns Yeltsin “for the death of these hundreds of thousands of old people abandoned to the mercy of fate,” and believes that the current Russian-Ukraine conflict is being fought in part “simply to make sure that our lonely old people would no longer be killed in the thousands for the sake of their miserable apartments.”

Dec. 9, 1993: Yeltsin, second from right, in Brussels to visit NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner, on right. (NATO)

Khairullin tells of other experiences gained traveling “around the once great country where Democracy and Yeltsin had won.” One in particular hits hard. “I was a very callous person then,” Khairullin writes. “I almost never cried.”

And then he met Kuzmich, Aksa, and Sima.

Kuzmich was the local senior police officer of “some kind of God forgotten town, an eternal ‘polustanok’ [waypoint] on one of the endless outskirts of Russia.” He took Khairullin on a tour of the local train yard. 

“And suddenly,” Khairullin writes, “Kuzmich rushed somewhere to the side, between the carriages, we caught up with him only when he was already dragging a kicking lump out of some hole. ‘Don’t you scratch, little devil, you know I won’t do anything…’ Kuzmich groaned, bringing out a grimy kid at most 8-10 years old into the light of the moon.”

This was Aksa. 

Kuzmich took Aksa and Khairullin to the basement of the police building, where he sat the boy down at a table and fed him a sandwich. 

“’Wait, that’s not all…’, Kuzmich said. “The door suddenly opened slightly and a girl of about six slipped through the crack and sat down next to Aska and took his hand. ‘Here, meet Sima,’ Kuzmich grinned: ‘I have about thirty of them running around the station here, but these ones are in love … Real love, they hold on to each other — she works in the carriages with shift workers, and this one guards her…Yes Seraphim? How much did you do today? Come on eat…’. Sima just bowed her head and began to smile at the floor quietly…Even then I noted what a nice, childlike smile she had.”

Khairullin and Kuzmich smoked cigarettes while Aksa and Sima ate and drank tea, before falling asleep in their chairs. 

“That’s how it is here, correspondent,” Kuzmich said. “The nearest orphanage is half a thousand miles away … Yes, they escape from there…Where to place them…No one cares about them.” Khairullin writes:

“As far as I remember, starting from year 1997, the U.N. annually issued a special report on torture in the police (‘militia’ at the time) — this, of course, was an unfriendly move by the United States, nevertheless, it spoke about the state of the law enforcement system in the country. At the same time more than a thousand people annually died from the bullets of murderers on the streets of the capital city of my tortured country.

And in the very year when Putin became prime minister [1999], another terrible study was released which stated that every third girl in Russia under the age of 18 had the experience of ‘commercial sex.’ This is how Western researchers found a tolerant term to label prostitution in our country.

And there also used to be a slave market in Russia (about 15 thousand Russians were sold annually without their consent) and a special market for sexual slavery — according to various estimates, up to half a million of our girls were held ‘against their will’ in foreign brothels…”

Khairullin also says an unverified number of people, likely in the thousands, were victims of human organ traffickers every year during the 1990s. 

Nineties Mortality Rates

1992 flea market in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia. (Brian Kelley, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

According to Western researchers, “an extra 2.5-3 million Russian adults died in middle age in the period 1992-2001 than would have been expected based on 1991 mortality.” 

This figure does not include infant mortality rates, the fate of missing children like Aksa and Sima, or the murdered pensioners. Altogether,  it is believed at least 5 million Russians died as a direct result of the chaos that gripped Russia in the 1990’s — a chaos that Michael McFaul derides as “mythology.”

The 1990s is a reality that Khairullin and the people of Russia will never forget, regardless of how people like McFaul, Applebaum, Kendall-Taylor and  Hill try to rewrite history. 

Moreover, the linkage between the 1990s and the present in the minds of the Russian people is visceral — they support Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and the collective West not because they have been misled by Putin, but rather because they know their own history — much better than western pundits such as McFaul and company. 

1998: Russians protest the economic depression caused by market reforms with banner saying: “Jail the redhead!” referring to Anatoly Chubais, the Russian economist who oversaw Yeltsin-era  privatizations. (Pereslavl Week, Yu. N. Chastov, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

These pundits, whom I have classified as “Putin whisperers,” have had a hugely detrimental impact on fact-based discourse about Russia today. 

“Rather than dealing with the reality of a Russian nation seeking its rightful place at the table of a multi-polar world,” I’ve previously noted, “the ‘Putin whisperers’ created a domestic market for their personification of all things Russian into the form of a single man” — Vladimir Putin. 

“Russia stopped being a national security problem to be managed through effective diplomacy, but rather a domestic political issue which American politicians from both sides of the aisle used to scare the American people into supporting their respective visions of the world.” 

What Putin Told David Frost

Gennady Zyuganov in February 2019, during Putin’s presidential address to the Federal Assembly. (Duma.gov.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

On March 5, 2000, shortly before Putin was inaugurated following his victory over Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, in the first presidential election following Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, the famous (and now departed) BBC journalist David Frost sat down for an interview with the Russian president-elect. The transcript of this interview is essential reading for anyone who seeks to “speak Putin.”

“My position,” Putin told Frost, 

“is that our country should be a strong, powerful state, a capable and effective state, in which both its citizens and all those who want to cooperate with Russia could feel comfortable and protected, could always feel in their own shoes — if you allow the expression — psychologically and morally, and well off. 

But this has nothing to do with aggression. If we again and again go back to the terminology of the Cold War we are never going to discard attitudes and problems that humanity had to grapple with a mere 15–20 years ago. 

We in Russia have to a large extent rid ourselves of what is related to the Cold War. Regrettably, it appears that our partners in the West are all too often still in the grip of old notions and tend to picture Russia as a potential aggressor. That is a completely wrong conception of our country. It gets in the way of developing normal relations in Europe and in the world.”

Compare and contrast the tone and construct of Putin’s response to Frost with comments made recently in an interview with the Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin, who asked the Russian leader if he would “have been called a naive person in the 2000s?”

Putin answered:

“I had a naive idea that the whole world — and above all, the so-called ‘civilized’ one understands what happened to Russia [after the collapse of the Soviet Union], that it has become a completely different country, that there is no longer any ideological confrontation, which means there is no basis for confrontation.” 

“If,” Putin continued,

“something negative happens in the policies of Western countries towards Russia — in particular, support for separatism and terrorism on Russian territory was obvious, I, as director of the FSB, saw this, but in my naivety, I believed that this was simply the inertia of thinking and action. This was a naive view of reality.”

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In his discussion with Frost, when the BBC interviewer asked if he viewed NATO as an enemy, Putin answered:

“Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as an enemy. I think even posing the question this way will not do any good to Russia or the world. The very question is capable of causing damage. Russia strives for equitable and candid relations with its partners.”

The BBC’s David Frost interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin on March 5, 2000. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

‘Now We’ll Ruin Russia Too’

In his answer to Zarubin, one can detect the disappointment in Putin’s words once the depth of betrayal by his erstwhile “partners” in the West had become clear.

“But the reality is,” Putin said, that “later I became absolutely one hundred percent convinced” that his Western “partners,” following the collapse of the Soviet Union, “thought that we [NATO] needed to be patient a little, ‘now we’ll ruin Russia too.’”  Putin said:

“Such a large country by European standards, with the largest territory in the world and a fairly large population compared to other European countries, is generally not needed. It is better — as the famous U.S.  politician Brzezinski proposed — to divide it into five parts, and these parts are separately subordinated to oneself and use resources, but based on the fact that everything separately will not have independent weight, independent voice, and will not have the opportunity to defend their national interests the way a united Russian state does. Only later did this realization come to me. And the initial approach was quite naive.” 

Putin said Russia’s 

“main concern is our own country, its place in the world today and tomorrow. When we are confronted with attempts to exclude us from the process of decision-making, this naturally causes concern and irritation on our part. But that does not mean we are going to shut ourselves off from the rest of the world. Isolationism is not an option. Victory is only possible when every citizen of this country feels that the values we promote yield positive changes in their day-to-day lives. That they’re beginning to live better, eat better, feel safer and so on. 

But in this sense one can say we are still very far from our goal. I think we are still at the start of that road. But I have no doubt that the road we have chosen is the right one. And our goal is to follow this road, and to make sure our policies are absolutely open and clear for the majority of the Russian people.” 

The fact that the layperson would be unable, in isolation, to readily identify Putin’s statement as part of his answer to Frost or Zarubin underscores the consistency of Putin’s position vis-à-vis Russia’s relations with the West over the course of the past 23-plus years. 

It also upends the narrative that Putin has somehow transitioned from one type of leader when he first entered office, to another, more autocratic and isolated leader today. The above quote was from the Frost interview, but it could have been made today, or at any time during Putin’s more than two decades at the helm of the Russian Federation.

Words have meaning. Take, for instance, Putin’s use of the term “Special Military Operation.” It signifies something other than an invasion. Military operations do not rise to the level of full-scale war. 

Putin has always sought negotiations with Ukraine — the proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating: Up until the end of 2021, Putin promoted the Minsk Accords as the preferred mechanism for conflict resolution regarding Ukraine. 

Once it became clear that neither Ukraine, France nor Germany (the three signatories to the Minsk Accords) was serious about their implementation, Russia next sought to negotiate directly with the United States and NATO, promulgating two draft treaties which were turned over to Russia’s Western partners for their evaluation and consideration in December 2021. 

Dec. 7, 2021: U.S. President Joe Biden, on screen during video call with Putin. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Both the U.S. and NATO gave short shrift to Russia’s proposals, leading to the decision to initiate the “Special Military Operation” on Feb. 24, 2023. Here is where the importance of words comes into play — rather than seeking the strategic defeat and destruction of Ukraine, which one would normally expect from a military operation of the scope and scale of the one undertaken on Feb. 24. 

Whisperers’ Malign Influence 

Russia — according to Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of the Servant of the People faction (Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party), who led the Ukrainian delegation during peace talks with the Russians in Belarus and Turkey in March 2022, was willing to exchange peace with Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine refusing to join NATO. Ultimately Ukraine, under pressure from then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, rejected the Russian offer.

The collective West, not fully comprehending the limitations built into the term “Special Military Operation,”perceived weakness from Russia’s willingness to negotiate. The main reason for this lack of comprehension was the influence that the “Putin Whisperer’s” had on those who wrote the lexicon used to define and decipher Russia’s goals and objectives regarding NATO and Ukraine.

Had they “spoken Putin” (as any genuine expert could, and would), there is a good chance the collective West could have avoided the military embarrassment, economic consequences and geopolitical isolation that has taken place in the months since Ukraine walked away from the peace table.

Because of their grossly inaccurate assessments of Putin and Russia, Hill, Kendall-Taylor, Applebaum, McFaul, and a host of other “Putin Whisperer’s” have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians on their collective hands. 

Their crime was not just that they did not know how to “speak Putin,” but rather that they deliberately refused to try, instead choosing a path of deliberate obfuscation and deceit when it came to defining Russia and its leader for the western audience.

When advising on issues of national security involving Russia, the failure to “speak Putin” on the part of anyone charged with influencing and/or making Russia policy, borders on the point of criminal negligence.

And if your job is to provide assessments on Russia of a more commercial nature, the failure to “speak Putin” means not only that you’re not very good at your job, but also that perhaps it is time to begin considering finding another career. 

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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