It’s the time like this – whatever we talk about, we always get back to the war.
Economy, legislation, repressions, international relations – nothing is isolated anymore.
Everything comes to the fact that we live in the end of the 19th week of a big European war.
Today we’ll make a review. We’ll talk about what has happened and what hasn’t since the end of the winter till this summer.
I’ll remind you several facts we might have forgotten in the middle of things.
Vladimir Putin started a full-scale war with Ukraine for no reason.
Unprovoked aggression took dozens of thousand lives – both of the Ukrainian civilians and of the soldiers from both sides.
It looks like the goal was to change the government in Ukraine, but they failed.
Ukraine managed to fight off, Russia was thrown away from Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Nikolaev and Kharkiv.
It's quite strange to say this but the Russian regime hasn’t changed.
After February 24 it seemed that we’ll see something completely different.
But once again it turned out that it doesn’t work this way.
The signs and the mechanisms of the regime are still the same. We just see it under the new circumstances.
Like two years ago, everybody waited in vain for an emergency state because of coronavirus,
now everybody waits in vain for martial law.
Like with the emergency state two years ago, martial law is being implemented in fact,
but not by the President who should come and say horrible words and take the responsibility.
It is being implemented by legislative acts mysteriously called “On implementing changes”.
Actually, it doesn’t make things easier.
Now the government can make you work on your holiday night or give your products almost for free
or imprison you for anything under those “special measures” instead of martial law.
Informational autocracy is always the same, whatever you do to it.
It’s not important what is going on in reality, it’s important what you call it and how it looks on TV.
Many times we answered the question:
will Russia introduce an emergency state? It makes sense to do it again when we can see it with our own eyes.
There is no country which can lead a big war and keep its internal life the same.
War consumes a lot of resources. Covering the losses after sanctions demands even more resources.
Human and financial resources are nowhere to take from except for the citizens and business.
You shouldn’t expect that one day someone on a big parade
will tell you that the government needs your money or new people in the front.
No, not in our regime. All the horrible news for your life will be on a third page of land utilization law.
Now, all the panic that the West won’t supply guns or that sanctions will not work later turned out to be baseless.
Slower than it should be but guns are being supplied and the ones that were promised. Sanctions are working.
And they are so effective that even the government has to accept it.
And the companies which have stopped working earlier now leave Russia completely.
Import to Russia is twice smaller now.
According to Sberbank’s prognosis which was given during the presentation at “Sberbank’s breakfast”
(don’t mention the rope in the home of a hanged man)
they even tried to be optimistic in front of their employees, partners, and investors.
So, according to the prognosis it’s not like the Russian economy is going to decline by 10% in 2022,
it’s like Russia will recover up to the numbers of 2021 (a COVID year) just 10 years later.
Third, in terms of military actions nothing has changed since the spring.
Since the Russian government has abandoned the ambition to take Kyiv in 3 or 33 days,
since the war moved down to the South and the South-East, we have had two parallel lines:
in Donbas the Russian army is moving forward extremely slowly,
and in the South the Ukrainian army is moving to Kherson with the same speed.
Both sides say loudly about every step forward.
Both sides have made progress, but if we have a look at the map of Ukrainian fronts and compare it with how it looked a month ago,
we'll see that the changes are insignificant.
Meanwhile, 3 months and a half passed since the Russian Ministry of Defense officially published the losses.
Yes, the official numbers were a big fat lie which didn’t reflect reality in the slightest.
But at least the Russian government officially recognized that there are victims in the military.
Since then, the Russian government hasn’t done anything like that again.
And this is now when the toughest battles in Donbas are going on.
The government’s silence about the victims among its own soldiers is good and bad news at the same time.
It’s clear why it’s bad – because this is how much the Russian government is concerned about its citizens’ lives
without even showing the respect and at least recognizing their deaths.
On the other hand, it’s an indirect acknowledgement that the society reacts painfully for military victims and that the war
and its consequences (no matter what social polls say) are not so widely supported.
It’s an acknowledgement that all of that hurts the country instead of helping it.
During those months we made sure that Russia had no allies when it came to military adventures in Europe.
And by “allies” I mean the true military allies, not just the allies who will refrain from voting in the UN.
The only candidate for this role was just one person – Alexander Lukashenka.
First, Lukashenka owes Putin that he stayed in power after losing his election.
Second, the isolated economy in Belarus depends on the mercy of the eastern neighbor.
At the beginning of the war many people expected that Belarus would not be just a base for attack but also an active participant of military actions.
There were a lot of things that pointed at it.
Belarus was the participant of those trainings which were the cover for the preparations to the war,
the Belarus equipment had O-signs like the Russian army had Z- and V-signs on its equipment.
And Lukashenka himself hinted all the time that he was ready to join this war any time.
No doubt that if the plan Putin tried to implement worked somehow, Lukashenka would have joined him at once.
There is nothing better for the regime which has lost the citizen’s support than a successful external aggression.
But when it became obvious that a small victorious war turned into a tiresome bloody massacre
and the Belarusian army had just one option but to die there,
crossing the border of Ukraine by the Belarusian army was out of the question.
Lukashenka keeps practicing the same behavior strategy as for the last 28 years of his relations with the Russian government –
since his coming to power Lukashenka has been promising his love and friendship,
and the Russian government gave him money in return.
The fantasies that China would help Russia to overcome the sanctions
or that Kazakhstan and Armenia would send their troops to help were ridiculous and baseless from the very beginning.
But in the case of Lukashenka, it seemed that his dependance on Putin was so strong that he had no other way.
And yet, he found this way.
The best part of the last months’ military news is the story about Snake Island.
We can’t fully appreciate it if we keep calling it the island. New Zealand is also an island.
And this word doesn’t help you to appreciate the real size.
Snake Island’s area is 0.2 sq. km. It’s 20 hectares.
Just imagine – it’s the area of a shopping center Europeisky near Kievsky railway station in Moscow
or it’s a quarter of Medvedev’s land in Plyos.
Snake Island is a flat rocky piece of land.
Its size is like a moderately small farm 50 km away from the nearest Ukrainian shore.
This place is conveniently situated right in the middle of the sea. You can see everything there.
There’s nowhere to hide. And if you hit it from heavy arms, most likely, it will kill everybody and destroy everything you have there.
It seems to be some local episode unworthy of mentioning in the intermediate results, but in reality it’s very illustrative.
To take Snake Island, this rock in the Black Sea, on the first day of war they sent the guided missile cruiser Moscow.
It's that "Russian military ship" from a well-known radio communication
For almost 4 months the Russian army tried to settle down there and make a military base on Snake Island.
But the results of those attempts were the same –
Bayraktar flew to the island and destroyed everything that was dangerous in any way.
Now, after losing the cruiser Moscow and the unknown number of soldiers and equipment,
the Russian army left the island not just without achieving any goals
but even without explaining why on earth did they try to send people and equipment over and over again to the place
you can hit even if you are drunk and which has no strategic value or any value at all.
The battles for this island and our leaving it “voluntarily” is a nice metaphor for all that happened since February 24.
There are no goals or aims. They will be invented later as far as our “achievements” go.
There are certain disadvantages in it because it’s difficult for the army to lead the war this way.
But there is the main advantage for our regime – if you don’t know what the win should look like, you won’t have to accept the defeat.
The only thing that prevents us from saving face and finding victory along the way is war imports to the Russian territory.
Since the middle of spring Russian borders have been attacked.
Oil refinery plants burn, armory stocks explode.
For the first time during the last 80 years a foreign country is attacking Russian territory.
Yes, for now, the photos of Belgorod and Kursk are nothing like Mariupol or even the cities of central and western Ukraine.
However, no matter how cheerful propaganda is,
it’s difficult to explain to the people who wake up from explosions
that everything is according to the plan and that it’s not a war at all.
You can call martial law “special measures”,
you can have hidden mobilization promising people 300.000 rubles (nearly $4.700) per month they won’t live long enough to get,
but explosion is an explosion even if you officially call it “a pop”.
In this situation propaganda is in a deadlock.
The first move is clear – we need to bomb Kyiv fascists with triple enthusiasm because they attacked Russia.
It’s not just some car bombed on an empty parking lot before the war, it’s a real attack from Ukraine.
On the other hand, Russian media assured people that the Ukrainian army is already crushed,
and just separate “nationalist battalions” keep resisting. They entertained people by moving from one victory to another.
And the explosions in Russian cities, helicopter and drone attacks don’t look like a win.
So we can see a very unusual picture here –
burning plants and stocks or emergencies are shown with the same emotion as a weather forecast or not shown at all.
From our today’s review it’s easy to understand why we aren’t talking about the war itself but about the related topics.
Because if the decision to start the war was a complete surprise for many people, the course of this war,
on the contrary, is so predictable that you can watch our March videos like fresh news.
The Russian army has had a hard time moving through Donbas like 2 or 3 months ago.
The Ukrainian army, while receiving heavy western armory, is moving to Kherson very slowly.
Since the biggest packages of help are expected by the end of the summer, the forces are almost equal.
The war narrows down to the artillery duels when Russia has more guns and Ukraine uses modern methods of war, first of all, drones.
On the Russian side it’s just the opportunity to spend lives for free,
on the Ukrainian side it’s that the war that makes sense for the soldiers –
each and one of them really fights for his motherland.
Whether there is going to be a radical turning point depends on two things –
on sanctions which are impoverishing Putin’s regime
and making him take unusual legislative measures just to continue military actions and on the volume of military help to Ukraine.
And now it’s impossible to maintain this status quo and have 2014 all over again with humiliating truce and lost territories.
Ukraine is different now and paid dearly for its independence.
And it’s not the results of this war that are in the hands of Ukraine’s allies as much as when those results are going to be achieved.
Till tomorrow!