Tomorrow, April 18, is a significant date, a week before the end of the second month of the war
and exactly a month since Vladimir Putin filled the Luzhniki stadium to capacity with state employees
in order to report that his special operation was going strictly according to plan.
But before moving on to our main topic, we need to briefly return to the cruiser Moskva,
because this is important. Important from a military point of view,
because Ukraine achieved an outstanding victory at sea, which no one could have expected.
It is important from a psychological point of view: the flooding of the Moskva is symbolic,
and the role of symbols in the war cannot be underestimated. Important from a political point of view.
The death of the cruiser Moskva, or rather, the Russian coverage that followed it,
tells us too much about why this war became possible
and why it is being waged the way it is being waged. Let's draw a historical parallel.
August 2000 will not be forgotten by any of the Russians who at that moment were at least in some kind of consciousness,
even if they were a very small child and attended kindergarten.
From the end of summer until the end of the year,
the whole country lived only with the fate of the Kursk submarine and its crew.
Only this was discussed on TV, in newspapers, in smoking rooms, at recess and in sandboxes.
Until now, for the millions of people who remember August 2000, the first association with the word «Kursk»
is not a city near the Ukrainian border, but the largest maritime disaster at the start of Vladimir Putin's rule.
At least thirteen large documentaries have been shot about Kursk, it is mentioned in two dozen songs,
the list of memorials to the nuclear-powered ship on Wikipedia occupies two screens.
This is not just a big and tragic one – it is a very significant page in Russian history,
which at the moment, given the tone of media coverage, could well have cost the young president the position.
Moreover, by the standards of the new barbarian time, which counts from February 24,
almost no one died in Kursk. Only 118 people – yes,
today we have an error in estimates of the victims of a new war ten times higher.
Now, in the 22nd year of the development of authoritarianism,
after 1.5 months of the war, the flagship of the fleet goes under water.
The flagship of the fleet, the full-time crew of which is not 118,
but more than five hundred people. And this catastrophe is not covered at all.
How many people were on board? Who got hurt and who died?
All we can do is use logic and common sense.
And it suggests that if a Ukrainian missile hit caused damage that flooded a huge cruiser
with a displacement of more than 10 thousand tons, then this obviously did not go unnoticed for the crew.
Here, from the difference between “Kursk” and “Moskva”, one can see what happened in these two decades
and why exactly this war became possible.
We have not just passed the years of development of authoritarianism.
Russia in the 2000s and Russia in the 2020s are literally different countries.
The country from the “dashing 90s”, in which, according to the doctrine of propaganda,
everyone who the bandits did not have time to kill died of hunger,
lived for several months with a national vigil for one hundred and eighteen dead sailors.
Such was the level of development of independent media, such was the degree of accountability of the authorities
even for outright force majeure, for which they are not directly responsible.
And Russia in the early 2020s, where the biggest naval disaster of the 21st century is deeply side news,
without any extra details. There is a difference not only in the political system,
not only in the degree of cleansing of public discussion – there is a gulf between a country
that cannot unleash an aggressive war against its neighbor, and a country that does it with pleasure.
It would seem, where is the connection between the cleansing of the media
and the zeroing of the price of human life? And there is a connection, and a direct one.
There is an equally direct connection here with Bucha,
with all the atrocities that Russian soldiers are doing on Ukrainian soil.
One cannot seriously think that if the military leadership is not at all concerned about the lives of its rare military specialists,
the loss of which cannot be replenished in a week, a month, or a year,
then it will, at least for a fraction of a second, think about a foreign civilian population.
We'll have a short break for a commercial, we'll talk about recent war news afterwards
We continue.
On the eve of the second stage of the war, on the eve of the main blow to the Donbass,
the Russian authorities found themselves in a situation that they could not avoid from the very beginning.
For at least some successful continuation of the war, mobilization is needed.
This was talked about from the very beginning, and people who understand the war spoke on both sides.
And this is also a special feature of the current war: in it,
Alexei Arestovich and Igor Girkin-Strelkov say, give or take, the same thing.
It is impossible to achieve a military victory with a force of 150,000 in a country of 40 million
with a regular, combat-ready army, with the hostility of the locals.
Bombing and shelling of peaceful cities is terrible.
But this is not the first war since the invention of heavy bombs and long-range guns.
And we know for sure that the concept of “bombing the enemy to the Stone Age” did not justify itself.
Without a ground victory, wars are not won.
Moreover, the bombing of cities in particular causes practically no military damage,
and the morale of civilians is affected in the most counterintuitive way:
people do not change their position, they just hate the enemy even more.
These are not hypotheses – there are studies on this.
You can't win with howitzers, Grads, Sunbakers, Calibers and Iskanders.
You need a victory on the ground.
But for victory on the ground, hundreds of thousands of fresh soldiers are needed to replace the advanced units ground down by the war.
And where to get them?
The only answer is mobilization.
Mobilization, which is impossible to carry out.
The authorities are well aware of what an attempt to shave hundreds of thousands of recruits into the army will lead to.
It will lead to a never-before-seen epidemic of evasion.
Starting with the purchase of certificates – so large-scale that the whole saga of vaccination certificates will seem like a childish prank
and ending with a simple disappearance from the radar of the state.
Yes, there are almost a million police officers in Russia, but even they are not enough to stop endemic corruption,
to pull out young men in the right amount from their parents' houses, rented apartments and country cottages.
But there is something worse:
the official announcement of mobilization, summonses to every door, a massive hunt for conscripts
will turn public opinion upside down in one day.
This will not be a sociologist's question:
are you for the war or do you want to go to prison for 15 years?
It will be a matter of life and death.
And the ability of a Russian person to sabotage the orders of his superiors,
when it comes down to it, we have observed many times, and this is truly an all-Russian bond.
But what can we say about civilians, when the military, up to tens of percent of the personnel,
taking advantage of the fact that war has not been declared, refuse to go to the front.
When the phenomenon took on such a massive character
that the marks were no longer made by hand, but stamps were made.
This, by the way, is another interesting side effect of a comprehensive lie:
as long as the war is not called a war, the soldier doesn’t owe anything to anyone
and may not go to it, citing the lack of a passport.
Without mobilization, one cannot achieve noticeable success on the Ukrainian front,
but mobilization is a real risk of opening a front already inside the country.
The batons of the National Guard are, of course, a terrible thing,
when, on the other hand, there is the option to sit on the couch and not participate in anything.
But when there is no such option,
when on the other hand – sending you or your loved one to a real death,
then everything becomes more complicated.
It was about hypothetical forces that will never appear,
and everyone understands that they will not appear and there is nowhere to take them from.
Now is the time to talk about the apparatus of government and how it reacts to a war
that has reached an obvious dead end
and with which it is absolutely not clear what to do with.
We do not know how reliable all these rumors about the arrest of 20 generals are.
Most likely, they are unreliable – in whole or in part.
When it became clear that the campaign had failed,
we had already heard many stories about the removal of Shoigu, about his heart attack,
but so far there is no confirmation.
Moreover, as I said in the video about loyalty and competence, public reprisal is generally
a rather uncharacteristic thing for regimes like ours.
Massive public repressions against the generals will first of all show
that the attack on Ukraine was a mistake, and our government does not know how to admit mistakes.
Even now, after the defeat near Kiev and the loss of the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet,
everything is going according to plan.
Apparently, this was the plan:
on the 30th day forces retreat, on the 50th we will sink the cruiser Moskva worth 750 million dollars.
Nevertheless, such repressions are quite likely.
Of course, outwardly it will look like a fight of bulldogs under the carpet,
no dirt will be taken out of the hut,
but the high command of the Russian army really has reason to worry about their fate.
These concerns have two reasons.
The first lies on the surface:
any defeat requires the search for the guilty.
Any boss in the Russian power structures knows that you need to have time to find the culprit
of the failure before you are appointed such a culprit.
Someone will be unlucky in this race of outsiders, and his car
will come to Matrosskaya Tishina instead of finish line.
Новая поThis is simply inevitable in a catastrophe of the magnitude that is happening now.дпись
The second reason for the commanders' fears for themselves is a little deeper.
The reasons for the defeat of the Russian army in Ukraine lie primarily in an inadequate assessment of the state of affairs by the country's leadership,
country's leadership, and in the first place by Vladimir Putin.
It was Putin – and, perhaps, several other people along with him – who made the decision to invade.
They overestimated their own strength, they did not know the real state of affairs in the army.
They allowed themselves to be fooled by the fact that the Ukrainians are allegedly only waiting for the arrival of Russia and will meet the army with flowers.
They built an absolutely unviable campaign plan,
which failed already in the first days, and then continued to insist on its implementation for a long time, despite the monstrous losses.
And if there are people in Russia who understand this with maximum clarity, then these are precisely the highest officers of the armed forces.
They have a specialized military education and must be aware that the order to capture Kyiv in 3 days
was impossible for a group of this size and with the equipment that the Russian army has.
It is possible – we do not know for sure, but it is quite likely – that these people even warned their leadership:
sais that this is unrealistic, this plan is no good, let's develop another one.
But, of course, no one listened to them.
Of course, the negative selection in the Russian army has certainly led to the fact
that the highest offices of the Ministry of Defense are occupied not by the heirs of the military genius of Kutuzov and Suvorov,
but by quite ordinary nondescript officials in uniform.
For years they have been engaged in fraud and the construction of corruption schemes on defense orders.
And that is why they understood with particular clarity what awaits the Russian army in Ukraine.
According to your papers, you have 100 tanks in full combat readiness, in fact, only 10 of them are on the move,
but they will demand to send all 100 into battle – and then they will wonder why the combat mission has not been completed.
If we draw an analogy, we can imagine the head doctor of the hospital, who requires his surgeons to perform a complex operation,
and they do not have anesthesia, instead of modern CT and ultrasound machines, which they allegedly bought, there are only stethoscopes,
and they drank all the medical alcohol just the day before.
So now there are two problems with the military.
First, they know too much.
They saw an illiterate order, they understand its fallacy and even criminality,
they realize that the one who gave it is by no means a great geopolitician who rules half the world,
but an ordinary autocrat who has lost all connection with reality.
The second problem is that for this greatest geopolitician, army commanders will be a constant reminder of his mistakes and crimes.
The fact that he climbed into a knowingly losing war without a plan B
and generally no understanding of what to do next – and lost it.
There is no reason why he should keep such people near him.
It is better to replace them with others.
Those who still believe that the armor is strong and our tanks are fast,
and Putin's decisions are balanced and justified.
Only this will help him to retain, if not authority, but a position in such an important institution for the stability of the regime as the army.
If the current war has any deeply historical role for Russia,
it is that the Ukrainians – the people, the leadership and the army – with their impressive and truly heroic defense
at one moment closed all those discussions that even after the end of Putin's regimes could poison public life for a long time to come.
What is harmful irremovability of power?
The irremovability of power, even the most gray and harmless clerical moth, like Vladimir Putin,
who is not at all a charismatic leader who makes stadiums go speechless, but the commander of paper clips,
can turn into a threat to all mankind in 20 years.
I made about a dozen videos, where I explained in detail and reasonedly
how dangerous this closed world of “classified dossiers” is, where the “staple chief” boils in his own juice.
Now you don’t need to spend 20 minutes of the video for this, now everything is too obvious,
because the world of classified dossiers has left their offices and attacked Kyiv.
And we see how far the control apparatus can go from reality and how expensive it will be.
How bad is corruption?
Yes, I erased the tongue, explaining that the point is not in the palaces – the point is that the construction of palaces parasitizes on the vices of the system,
and therefore – on the preservation and expansion of these vices.
About the corrupt multiplier: to put a corrupt ruble in your pocket, you need to inflict damage on 100 rubles.
Now this discussion is not needed, now we see:
if on the one hand we have the palaces of the Minister of Defense, on the other hand,
on the other hand, there will be stools in military vehicles, and the soldiers will begin to eat expired canned food.
Albeit in a nice package.
And the decision on the war will be made on the basis of fictitious reports written by non-existent agents,
because all the money for their maintenance was stolen and redirected at palaces.
Why do we need independent media?
Again, there was a lot of good reasoning in a past life. But why would we need argumentation now?
Why is it then, when the monopoly on the media has already led to the fact that lives are no longer worth at least something,
whether it be the lives of civilians in Bucha or the lives of sailors from the crew of the cruiser Moskva.
The vices of the Putin regime as a result of this war have now become so obvious and so stuck to Putin himself
that there is hope that he will take them to the grave, that none of them will be an acceptable subject for discussion in the new Russia,
because now we know that they lead to a real disaster.
But the disaster is still in full swing.
People continue to die every day. And, unfortunately, there is no end in sight.
See you tomorrow.