The longer we talk about the Ukrainian war, the more clearly we understand that the war is not some separate entity:
it is a reflection of the entire state structure of Russia, all its policies and all practices.
How the state is governed is exactly the same way it fights.
We know that Russia is a highly centralized country.
Centralized in the administrative, economic, cultural and social sense.
We know that all decisions are tied to the federal center.
Even salaries in Moscow are twice the Russian average,
and the quality of public goods and infrastructure is as different from the rest of Russia as if they were different countries.
We also know about the other extreme.
There are about two dozen regions that are united by three common features:
first, shameless and unrestricted election fraud.
The results in them are not even falsified – they are simply drawn.
Secondly, a deaf political cleansing at all levels.
Thirdly, a completely beggarly existence, bordering on a social catastrophe.
These are bearish corners in the most reference sense imaginable.
About 6% of the country's population lives in them, which no one cares about.
In fact, they do not even have what could be considered a normal economy.
These regions are entirely dependent on the support of the federal center,
and the entire working population in them is divided into two categories:
public sector employees and those who provide them with the most basic services – they sell food and fix cars.
These regions are only getting poorer every year, their economic gap with the rest of the country is only growing,
and all capable human capital is trying to escape at the first opportunity.
Just because if your ambitions go somewhere beyond a lifetime job as a kindergarten teacher or a loader in a supermarket,
you have nothing to do in such places.
Naturally, in these regions, everything is very bad with security and even with the limited set of rights and freedoms that remain in the rest of the country.
There are no local media and human rights activists who are able to raise a fuss, if anything,
and independent federal sources simply do not receive information from there.
As a result, the federal authorities are happy to use these regions for any of their unworthy needs.
Get the result in the elections, drive people to the rally, kill the youth in the war.
Because where will all these disenfranchised people, whose beggarly incomes entirely dependant on the state, go?
And even if they try to be indignant, then who will see and hear them?
Buryatia is a classic example of such a region.
National Republic, the poorest region of the Far Eastern District, with one of the lowest levels of urbanization in Russia – only 59%,
with a very high crime rate: third in the country in terms of murders.
One million people, the lowest incomes and the highest crime rate in the Far East.
A quarter of the population are ethnic Buryats.
No one has a more or less intelligible idea about life in the region – news does not reach the center from there.
It turns out an ideal place for recruiting cannon fodder.
And it really works: Buryatia is second only to Dagestan, another republic of social catastrophe, in terms of the number of deaths (at war in Ukraine).
Hundreds (it is possible that thousands) of coffins go to Buryatia –
and there is neither unrest inside, nor any attention from “big Russia”.
But there is a nuance: when you use people in this way, they feel it.
They feel that in peacetime Russia makes them beggars, and in wartime it kills them in the first place.
Just because they don't get angry right away doesn't mean you're not planting a bomb for the near future.
«Mediazona» regularly studies official reports about the death of Russian servicemen, which are published by regional media.
As of May 6, there were about two thousand such people.
It is clear that the Mediazona study does not reflect the whole picture – there are certainly many more dead –
but at the moment it is not the absolute number that matters.
If we calculate the ratio of officially declared dead Russians to the male population in each of the regions,
we will see the following picture.
Such a map was compiled by the telegram channel “Demography has fallen”.
The top ten in terms of the proportion of dead men are Buryatia, Tyva, North Ossetia, Dagestan, the Jewish Autonomous Region, and the Trans-Baikal Territory.
On the opposite side of the list are St. Petersburg, Moscow, the Moscow region, the Khanty-Mansiysk and Yamalo-Nenets districts,
as well as, characteristically, Chechnya.
The difference between Moscow and Buryatia in this indicator is 350 times.
The result surprisingly correlates with the list of Russian regions in terms of gross regional product.
Among the leaders there are the capitals and oil-producing regions,
and among the outsiders are Tyva, the Jewish Autonomous Region, North Ossetia.
Buryatia is in 67th place, and in terms of GRP it is 80 times behind Moscow.
This once again confirms the hypothesis that the war in Ukraine is being waged mainly by the forces of the impoverished national republics.
This happens for several reasons.
Firstly, it is simply much easier to find volunteers there –
those who agreed to fight for insignificant fee.
In regions with a destroyed economy, with non-functioning social elevators,
the opportunity to go to war and solve all their problems looks quite attractive to young men,
exhausted by unemployment, loans and unsettled life.
Secondly, the flow of coffins to Moscow or St. Petersburg would rather quickly cause an uproar and serious public protest.
This happened during the first Chechen war, and even in the totalitarian USSR during the war in Afghanistan.
Right now, we don't see much of a repercussion.
It's also clear why.
People living in the Buryat or Dagestan outback are much easier to intimidate, bribe, deceive
than people living in capitals or large cities.
Their voice is also less audible due to the lesser prevalence of the Internet.
All this allows the Kremlin to pretend that nothing special is still happening.
There is no war – there is a special operation carried out by some abstract professional military.
It happens somewhere far away.
There don't seem to be any significant casualties.
An ordinary citizen is advised to monitor the situation from the couch, like a hockey match,
switching to his personal affairs immediately after the final whistle,
that is, after the end of the “Time” program (Federal news).
In general, this idea seemed promising to Russian leaders.
Take Buryats, Kalmyks and Adyghes and send them to fight in Ukraine.
Whoever survives, well done.
Whoever does not survive – well, no luck, we will pay the family money so that they are not very indignant,
or we will send the FSB officers and threaten to put them in jail under a new article on discrediting the army.
But in large cities it will be calm: no mass protests, no picture for Western TV channels that the Russians oppose the war. Very cynical, very Putin-like.
Very cynical, very Putin-like.
Only now this decision will turn and is already turning against Putin himself.
And we can see the first confirmation right now.
Why is the offensive of the Russian army stuck in Ukraine?
Not only because of mediocre command and low motivation of soldiers.
It has stalled primarily because the invading troops are too few in number.
The Chief of the General Staff, General Gerasimov, must remember from his studies at the Kazan Tank School
that in order to quickly break through the defense, the advancing troops must have a three-fold, or better, four-fold advantage.
With the strength of the Ukrainian army at 200 thousand people at the time of the outbreak of the war,
the Russian group had to number 600-800 thousand in order to qualify for a successful blitzkrieg.
But this number was not even close.
The Russian troops, even together with the National Guard and the armies of the LDPR,
were only approximately equal to the Ukrainian ones.
Why did it happen?
Of course, the matter is in the underestimation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in the self-deception of the Kremlin leaders,
who expected a solemn meeting with flowers and the capture of Kyiv in three days.
But now there is no longer an underestimation,
the war has been going on for three months, and in three months the Russian troops have not made much progress,
with the exception of local success in the south in the first days.
What Kyiv in three days are we talking about – would be lucky to take Severodonetsk by autumn.
Why is it not possible now to quickly increase the grouping and create a numerical superiority?
Precisely because the model chosen by Putin is fundamentally non-scalable.
He cannot mobilize in any way,
no matter how much Strelkov-Girkin keeps on demanding it.
As soon as major cities areaffected, the result of public outrage will be unpredictable.
And the search for new recruits in Tyva and North Ossetia cannot continue indefinitely.
So here the snake has bitten its own tail.
They wanted to win quickly and with little bloodshed – it didn’t work out quickly, a lot of blood was shed,
and there was nowhere to take new blood from.
This is an important difference between the situation in Russia and Ukraine.
Theoretically, after all, Russia is larger, it has more resources, and in the long run it should have an advantage.
We have seen how it works in history on the example of the USSR:
in the first months of 1941, Nazi Germany approached the outskirts of Moscow, but in the end our country won.
Of course, Western countries help Ukraine – they provide weapons.
But tanks do not drive by themselves, and artillery has not yet learned how to select targets and fire on its own.
All these cool weapons should be controlled by people, and Ukraine has no problems with them:
many citizens consider it their duty to protect their homeland from invaders.
This is an understandable, worthy and noble goal.
And Russia, although its population is three and a half times larger than the Ukrainian one, cannot quickly increase the number of troops –
it is forced to limit itself only to volunteers from depressed regions.
Therefore, the scales are slowly but steadily leaning towards the Ukrainians.
There is one more long-term consequence.
The war will end, and judging by the way things are going, it will end pretty badly for Russia.
Propaganda will try to pass off anything as a victory: maybe even a parade will be held in the city of Popasna.
But in the end, Putin will be left alone with the country, which he dragged into a bloody losing gamble for no purpose at all.
It will be a country with a destroyed economy, isolated from the world, having lost hope for any development.
And in this country there will be entire regions that feel especially offended.
Why did the whole burden of human losses fall on Dagestan and other national republics?
Why were Buryats and not Muscovites sitting in the trenches near Kharkiv?
The life of a Buryat in Russia, let's be honest, is not sugar.
There are no special prospects in your native region if you are not attracted by a career as a security guard in a supermarket.
Leave to work in Moscow or St. Petersburg?
Even renting an apartment will turn out to be very difficult, because everyone wants the Slavs,
and in the subway the police will check your passport three times a week in the hope of taking a bribe for an overdue registration.
Are you going to the army?
You will not be sent to the Kremlin Regiment to march beautifully against the backdrop of the Eternal Flame –
military personnel of the titular nation are required there.
But to go to war, to burn in a tank – you're welcome.
Such behavior – the division of people according to regional and ethnic principles in a poor, powerless and dependent state –
is at the same time super-cynical exploitation, squandering human resources and literally working to destroy the country.
This is a direction so that people do not see any advantage, except harm, from being in the community in which they are.
Why do the Buryats or Dagestanis need Russia, from which there is nothing good, but if anything happens – they will kill you first?
The republics that paid for the senseless war with the lives of their men will certainly bill for it,
and regardless of the fate of the Putin regime.
So Putin not only deprives us all of the future, but also plants a huge time bomb under the very existence of Russia.
The creation of enclaves on its territory, where the population feels like second-class people,
someone who is not a pity to kill, has never ended well in history.
This state of affairs is not natural.
This is a side effect of a deliberately and artificially created vertical,
a vertical that, in the name of imaginary controllability, always oversaturates the center at the expense of the outskirts.
This is the only good news.
Yes, the damage has already been done, children are already growing up in Buryatia and Dagestan who know that Russia killed their fathers for nothing,
because of their «wrong» faces.
And the kids won't forget it.
Nevertheless, the artificial nature of the humiliated position of these territories in itself
is a chance for their revival in the Russia, which will simply be adequately administratively arranged.
Such Russia, where the heads of regions will be elected,
where they will have financial leverage and incentives for development.
Countries where local authorities will be accountable to citizens who are waiting for a better life,
and not to the Moscow authorities, who are waiting for voting numbers and soldiers in the army.
There is no natural reason for such a terrible condition of these regions.
There is no special “mentality”.
In order for them to get rid of it, it is enough to remove all that layer of administrative slag
that has grown on Russia, which makes life worse for everyone.
See you tomorrow.