Daily Archives: August 22, 2022

Nearly six months after Russias invasion of Ukraine, there is still widespread disagreement in the west on Vladimir Putins motives.

This is of more than academic interest. If we do not agree why Putin decided to invade Ukraine and what he wants to achieve, we cannot define what would constitute victory or defeat for either of the warring sides and the contours of a possible endgame.

At some point, like all wars, the present conflict will end. Geography condemns Ukraine and Russia to live beside each other and that is not going to change. They will eventually have to find a modus vivendi. That also applies to Europe and Russia, although it may take decades before the damage is repaired.

Why, then, did Putin stake so much on a high-risk enterprise that will at best bring him a tenuous grip on a ruined land?

At first it was said that he was unhinged a lunatic, in the words of the defence secretary, Ben Wallace. Putin was pictured lecturing his defence chiefs, cowering at the other end of a 6-metre long table. But not long afterwards, the same officials were shown sitting at his side. The long table turned out to be theatrics Putins version of Nixons madman theory, to make him appear so irrational that anything was possible, even nuclear war.

Then western officials argued that Putin was terrified at the prospect of a democratic Ukraine on Russias border, which would threaten the basis of his power by showing Russians that they too could live differently. On the face of it, that seemed plausible. Putin hated the colour revolutions that, from 2003 onwards, brought regime change to former Soviet bloc states. But Ukraines attractions as a model are limited. It is deeply corrupt, the rule of law is nonexistent and its billionaire oligarchs wield disproportionate power. Should that change, the Russian intelligentsia may take note but the majority of Russians those fed on state propaganda who make up Putins political base would not give two hoots.

The invasion has also been portrayed as a straightforward imperialist land grab. A passing reference to Peter the Great earlier in the summer was taken as confirmation that Putin wanted to restore the Russian empire or, failing that, the USSR. Otherwise sensible people, mainly in eastern Europe but not only, held that Ukraine was just a first step. I wouldnt be surprised, a former Swedish minister told me last week, if, in a few years, Estonia and Latvia are next in line.

Given that Putin once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, that may seem to make sense. But he also said: Anyone who does not regret [its] destruction has no heart; anyone who wants to see it recreated has no brain. Leaving aside the fact that the Russian military is already hard-pressed to achieve even modest successes in Ukraine, an attack on the Baltic states or Poland would bring them into direct conflict with Nato, which is the last thing that Moscow (or the west) wants.

In fact, Putins invasion is being driven by other considerations.

He has been fixated on Ukraine since long before he came to power. As early as 1994, when he was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, he expressed outrage that Crimea had been joined to Ukraine. Russia won Crimea from the Turks! he told a French diplomat that year, referring to Russias defeat of the Ottoman empire in the 18th century.

But it was the possibility, raised at a Nato summit in 2008, that Ukraine should become a fully-fledged member of the western alliance that turned his attitude toxic.

Bill Burns, now the head of the CIA, who was then the US ambassador to Moscow, wrote at the time in a secret cable to the White House: Ukrainian entry into Nato is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putins sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything other than a direct challenge to Russias interests Todays Russia will respond.

Successive American administrations ignored Burnss warning and Putin did respond. In 2014, he annexed Crimea; then he fomented a separatist revolt in the Donbas; finally, in February of this year, he launched a brutal, undeclared war to bring Ukraine to heel.

Nato enlargement was merely the tip of the iceberg. Many other grievances against the west had accumulated in the two decades Putin had been in power. By the end of 2020, when planning began for a renewed push against Kyiv, the wheel had come full circle. The young Russian leader who had so impressed Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, who had backed George W Bush to the hilt after 9/11 and who had insisted that Russias place was with Europe and the western world, had slowly morphed into an implacable adversary, convinced that the US and its allies were determined to bring Russia to its knees.

Western politicians dismiss that as paranoid. But the problem is not western intentions, it is how the Kremlin interprets them.

Putins goal is not only to neutralise the regime in Kyiv but, more importantly, to show that Nato is powerless to stop him. If in the process he extirpates Ukrainian culture in the areas Russia occupies, that is not collateral damage: it is a bonus.

Whether he succeeds will depend on the situation on the battlefield, which in turn will depend on the extent of western support over the autumn and winter, when energy shortages and a soaring cost of living risk putting Ukraines western partners under intense strain.

Moscow does not have to achieve a great deal for Putin to be able to claim victory. It would be enough for Russia to control all of the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea. He would certainly like more. If Russian troops take Odesa and the contiguous Black Sea coast, it would reduce Ukraine to vassalage. But even more modest gains would show the limits of US power. It is possible that Ukraine, with solid western backing, will be able to prevent that. But it is far from certain.

The war in Ukraine is not happening in isolation. While Russia is contesting the US-led security order in Europe, China is challenging it in Asia. A geopolitical transition has begun whose results may not be fully apparent for decades. But the post-cold war order that has governed the world for the past 30 years is drawing to a close. From its demise, a new balance of power will emerge.

Philip Short has written authoritative biographies including Putin: His Life and Times, Mao: A Life and Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare, following a long career as a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Moscow, Washington and other world capitals

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After six months of bloody and terrible war, what exactly does Putin want from Ukraine? - The Guardian

A unit of pro-Russian militias from the the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) issued a video in which they said they refused to fight in the Donetsk region. The fighters said they had fulfilled their duty in securing the LPR's control over all of Luhansk, which was taken in July 2022. In its daily bulletin on the war, the UK's Ministry of Defence wrote: "On 15 August 22, Ukrainian social media channels circulated a video which reportedly showed elements from a military unit of the self-proclaimed Luhansk Peoples Republic (LPR) delivering a declaration outlining their refusal to be deployed as part of offensive operations in Donetsk Oblast.

"The fighters claimed they had fulfilled their duty in securing the LPRs control over all of Luhansk Oblast, which was secured in July 2022, and were unwilling to fight in Donetsk Oblast despite threats and intimidation by senior commanders."

The MOD's analysts said that the Russian army was struggling to bolster its forces with new recruits in the Donbas.

They claimed that Russian commanders were resorting to direct financial incentives in order to attract new volunteers.

The researchers added: "A consistent contributing factor to these problems is Russias classification of the war as a special military operation which limits the states powers of legal coercion."

Russian commanders have seen their frontline forces seriously depleted after almost six months of heavy fighting.

Putin's army has sustained massive casualties as they come up against determined and courageous resistance from their Ukrainian opponents.

Ukraine's army estimates that around 45,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the invasion on February 24th.

US sources, however, say that between 75,000 and 80,000 Russians have been killed and injured during the course of the war.

The Kremlin has sought to keep a tight lid on the number of casualties.

However, anecdotal evidence continues to emerge of the heavy losses suffered by their troops.

The Russian army has started to hand out funeral notices for its fallen soldiers that were printed during the Soviet era.

READ MORE:Putin's Soviet reunion dream 'will never happen'

Dmitry Kolezev, an editor for the Russian independent media outlet Republic.ru, wrote on his Twitter page: "Funerals printed in 1974 are brought to the families of Russian military personnel.

"Firstly, this may mean that they were not ready for such losses and modern forms quickly ran out.

"Secondly, this is a terrible symbol - young men were sent to fight for the return of the USSR, and funerals for them come straight from there, from the Soviet Union."

The Kremlin has been scrambling to recruit more people into the army, despite its current refusal to implement a national mobilisation.

Reports have emerged of the formation of volunteer battalions in Russia's regions.

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Moreover, adverts have started to appear on utility bills received by millions of Russians.

The adverts promise significant financial rewards for those willing to sign up and fight in Ukraine.

Ukraine's military warned on Monday that the country should brace for an intensification of Russian missile attacks to coincide with its independence day on Wednesday.

Commanders warned that Russia had put five cruise missile-bearing warships and submarines in the Black Sea

They also said that Moscow was positioning air defence systems in Belarus.

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Russia mutiny: Troops refuse to fight- desperate Putin forced to give financial incentives - Express

The Russian army has seen a devastating depletion of its military forces during the current campaign. Fierce resistance by Ukraine's defenders have resulted in massive losses and casualties for the Kremlin. Kyiv estimates that around 45,000 Russians have died since hostilities broke out on February 24.

The Pentagon believes somewhere between 75,000 and 80,000 of Putin's army have been killed or injured.

Despite the mounting casualties, the Russian president has refused to introduce a nationwide mobilisation.

Instead, he has relied on covert conscription carried out by state officials in both remote Russian regions and in occupied parts of Ukraine.

Evidence has now emerged of the desperate measures being used by Russia's army to meet its recruitment needs.

Anecdotal reports suggest that officials are raiding hospitals to round up patients receiving treatment and sending them to enlistment camps.

A woman recounted how her husband was collared by recruitment officials, while receiving treatment in a hospital in the the city of Alchevsk.

The industrial city is located in Luhansk province in the Donbas, which was captured by Russia's army at the end of July.

She wrote: "Today, they rounded up my husband and sent him to the front.

"He was receiving treatment at the hospital in Alchevsk. After being given a drip, he was discharged by the hospital and told he could go home.

"He was detained on the street (by enlistment officials) and despite his protests was sent to Beloe.

"They also nabbed a young lad with a broken foot, who has to use crutches to get around!

READ MORE:Cannon fodder! Desperate Putin seeks new recruits

The militia has also issued adverts in which they say people from the Commonwealth of Independent States, (former Soviet republics), between the ages of 24-52 can apply to join the group.

Adverts for the army have been placed on utility bills that millions of Russian receive every month.

The Russian president seems to be afraid of provoking a significant social backlash if he introduces a general call up to the army.

A national mobilisation would make a mockery of the Kremlin's claim that it is not fighting a war in Ukraine.

Putin and his acolytes have insisted that their forces are only engaged in a "special military operation".

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Putin desperation: Army sends men in 'plaster casts' with 'flip flops and shorts' to front - Express

Every nation has its founding myths and narratives, usually starring historical figures we know almost nothing about; absurd stories even to the schoolchildren to whom they are usually peddled. Think Alfred and the cakes or Robert the Bruce and his study of spiders. For Russia, it has long been Grand Prince Vladimir, who had 800 concubines and wives before choosing Christ over Muhammad at the end of the first millennium for the very Russian reason that Islam did not permit alcohol. In truth, Vladimir (or Volodymyr to the Ukrainians) is a classic founding figure, now a saint, about whom almost nothing is known. Yet according to President Putin, unveiling a monstrous statue to him in 2016, he gathered and defended Russias lands by founding a strong, united and centralised state.

As Orlando Figess new history methodically lays bare, this is both myth-making of the first order and of profound importance to understanding Russia today. From Ivan to Peter, Catherine to Nicholas, Russias rulers have reforged these myths to suit their own purposes, sometimes as a defensive standard for the people to rally round, sometimes as a badge of celestial honour to cement Moscows place as the saviour of the west. Often both at once.

In July 2021, Vladimir Putin published his own story of Russia, a 5,000-word essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which can now be read as his justification for the invasion he launched seven months later to bring his brother little Russians back into the arms of big brother Rus. Reaching back into the mists of myth, he sees the idea of Ukraine as a Trojan horse, an anti-Russian project since the 17th century and that the present state is on historically Russian lands. As Figes makes clear, anyone with the most elementary grasp of the shape of Europe, from Berlin to the Urals, would know that borders are determined by raw power, not some mystical racial bond. Flip through any historical atlas of the past 1,000 years and states appear, disappear and move around with astonishing but telling regularity. Empress Catherine, a German, may have founded Odessa (Figes interestingly uses Russian spellings for Ukrainian cities) to capture the worlds grain trade in 1794. But just years before that, the Black Sea coast had been part of the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth.

This historical primer has only traces of the original thinking that Figess other important works on Russia have displayed, but it does effectively lay out with important clarity the structural continuities of power, how the state and the ruler, be that a tsar or Stalin, are united in the body of a single being... the sacralisation of the tsars authority. He takes us on a chronological journey, in the process highlighting the way Putin and his propagandists have filled the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union with what Figes calls the debris of Russian history. Pride, fear and resentment, aggression and defensiveness have coalesced into the toxic present, which offers a retreat into a conservative celebration of communal sacrifice, with little vision of any constructive future.

In his brief post-invasion update, Figes points out the significance of the speech given by Patriarch Kirill on the day of forgiveness, in which he labelled the war in the Ukraine a crusade for human salvation, reminding the people that Moscow and the Orthodox church are the saviours of Christianity, the last bastions of true morality. Russias soldiers, it emerged, are giving their lives to hold back the onslaught of gay pride parades, a Kremlin obsession of the past 20 years. The church yet again has nailed its colours to the authoritarian mast, turning away from European concepts of government and thought and undermining any serious development of a civil society able to challenge central government.

Figes notes the irony that it was the choice of Christianity that opened the gateway to Europe for Muscovy in the first place, which makes Putins pivot from all things western so ultimately destructive. For while geopolitics make an alliance with Beijing an immediate strategic imperative, page after page of the Russian story has been defined by continuous, often highly creative friction between western ideas and Russian Slav exceptionalism. The term Eurasian is bandied around as if the balance of cultural influences were equal, but in truth, after the Mongols had helped establish Muscovy as the primary statelet in the 15th and 16th centuries, what is striking is how marginal the influence of Asia and its culture has been on Russia. However abhorrent the word empire is to Soviets and Russians, Moscow became and remains an imperial power, driving at different times into Europe, into Siberia and later into central Asia.

The present Ukrainian horror is the post-imperial catastrophe of a Russia that is struggling to accept what happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union and that empire in 1991. As always with Russia, the costs on all sides will be huge. 1812. 1917. 1945. These dates point to the astonishing impact Russia always has, twice claiming the role of saviour of civilisation after being invaded itself, as well as being the lodestar of world revolution for over a generation. Add 2022 to that list, as I suspect we will have to, and the long-term reverberations of Putins present destruction of Ukrainian cities and confrontation with the west become clear. Is it any wonder that Russians, both leaders and the people, have struggled to accept a humbler status in the world?

Figes quotes the extraordinary findings of the respected Levada Centre, whose polling suggested that Homo Sovieticus has not died, with his low material expectations, social conformism, intolerance of ethnic and sexual minorities, acceptance of authority. Indeed, reading the catalogue of oppression Russians have put up with, head lowered before their rulers, Homo Rus is not that different from Homo Sovieticus, both before and after the Soviet era. Despite knowing that between 10 and 30 million of their own people were repressed unjustly under Stalin, more than three-quarters polled believe that his policies were a terrible necessity. Figes records how in 2021 Putin directly attacked history by closing Memorial, an organisation deliberately set up to collect information about the past. Who knows now what the people truly feel about their new tsars attempt to re-establish the empire at such cost not just to Ukrainians but to themselves? Reading The Story of Russia you would be betting against history to suggest that Putin and his present boyars are not reflecting something deep in the Russian story. Yet in Kyiv, Putin is now creating another myth that will not easily be forgotten, for a country he does not believe exists: Ukraine.

Film-maker Angus Macqueen has helped create a platform of award-winning documentaries, Russia on Film

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The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes review Vladimir Putin and the power of myth-making - The Guardian

A PRO-Putin pensioner has caused outrage after hanging two Russian flags outside his home in a block of retirement flats.

The resident, who refused to give his name, has been slammed by neighbours as thousands die during Russia's war on Ukraine.

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He admitted being a Vladimir Putin fan when confronted over a Russian presidential flag and the Soviet Union State Emblem which he flew outside his flat in a block for over-60s in Southampton.

Steven Neary, 67, who lives in the block, said he was stunned to see the flags outside his neighbour's home when he flew back from Cyprus this weekend.

He said: "It was a shock when I came back from holiday to see the flags.

"We live in quiet over-60s flats.

"I think that if nothing is done it could cause problems as most people support Ukraine. Youngsters could come and see that and kick-off.

"He must know what he's doing."

Fellow neighbour Tony Johnson, 72, said he has reported the flags to police, adding: "You know what the Russians are doing to innocent people."

Margaret Wragg, 76, "couldn't believe it" when she saw a flag in support of Russia flying on the communal walkway and reported it to Southampton City Council, which manages the flats.

She said: "We are all worried. It needs to be sorted before there's trouble.

"We just want to live our lives in peace, that's all we want to do at our age."

She added that she approached the neighbour who owns the flags and he told her: "Don't touch that, it's Putin's."

The resident who owns the flags told a reporter he wanted to remain anonymous and that although he is a fan of President Putin he "does not agree with the war".

He said he was also a fan of former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and had enjoyed watching the Russians during previous Olympic Games.

He said: "I can sympathise with people who have been killed during the war.

"But Ukrainians aren't the only people who have been killed."

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Neighbours fury as Putin loving local flies Russian flags outside flat and refuses to take them down... - The Sun