Today, on the 21st week of war, we’ll talk about the phenomena
which have taken place since February 2022 and which make the current war different from many things
(or maybe everything) we’ve seen before.
The main piece of news at the beginning of the 21st week of war is the attack of Vinnytsia,
the city which is away from all of the operational theaters.
Several highly precise sea-based missiles “Caliber” sent from the submarine destroyed a concert hall.
Its only fault was that it was called “The House of Officers” –
exactly like hundreds of concert halls across the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) are called.
During the attack 24 people died, 3 children among them.
This time the Russian speakers didn’t take the usual path –
first, it didn’t happen, second, it wasn’t us, third, it’s their own fault.
This time propaganda started from the third – if it’s called The House of Officers,
so there should have been officers.
It’s a common thing, you know, like in the Moscow cinema “Kosmos” (Space) there is zero-gravity and vacuum.
Here it is very useful to take a look at the Russian and Ukrainian battle tactics.
Civilians’ death is unavoidable from both sides in highly intense conflicts.
When the Ukrainian Himars hit the ammunition stock, it’s dangerous for those people who live nearby.
Apart from the explosive of the missile itself, hundreds of tons of other explosives detonate.
The difference is not in the picture which follows the attack.
It’s a massive explosion here, it’s a massive explosion there.
The difference is in the news which comes after the explosion.
After the Ukrainian attack we read about killed officers, even about colonels and generals.
We can see a long detonation of a huge ammunition stock.
They show us burnt machinery.
The Ukrainians send a missile and make the enemy lose something more significant than this missile.
After the Russian attacks we can hear news about the death of a 4-year-old girl.
And nothing more
No surnames of killed generals, no burning tanks, no exploded ammunition.
Just killed civilians and regular lies about “the Nazis’ den”.
Murder of a 4-year-old girl is a horrible tragedy.
But from the military point of view, it’s million-dollars missile spent for nothing.
4-years-old girls do not lead the troops, make no strategic plans, drive no fighter aircrafts.
They are not even in a mobilization reserve.
I mean, killing a small child is not only a horrible tragedy –
from the military point of view, it's null damage for the opponent’s fighting ability.
The dry mathematics is that you don’t have anymore several pieces of expensive, highly precise,
uncommon weapons which could be spent for some real military target.
Meanwhile, your enemy still has its valuable ammunition.
This stage is not called “the exhaustion war” for nothing.
Because today it’s literally about this bloody auction – the one who loses the resources first, will lose the war.
It takes seconds to send a bomb or a missile, or lose a tank.
But it takes days, weeks, months and a gigantic budget to produce equipment and ammunition.
No production will be able to follow this intense war, especially the production under sanctions.
That’s the difference in the tactics.
Ukraine fights to win.
In order to win, they need to make the enemy lose its ammunition, weapons and equipment.
They need to kill as many of the valuable officers as they can – the commanders
who cannot be replaced during the mobilization.
And Russia is leading the war for the records.
It doesn’t matter if the House of Officers is a true military object.
It matters that this object can be easily googled and will look fine in the report.
And why exactly does Russia use such tactics we’ll discuss a bit later.
The Russian Federation represented by its Ministry of Defense hasn’t published data about losses for 4 months.
Since March 25, a strategy of making numbers lower has been implemented.
Now they pretend there are no victims at all.
The most serious mistake is to think that anyone knows the real scope of losses at all.
That Putin gets a secret report with all the truth and only then it’s severely distorted.
But in reality it’s a well-known trap of double accounting.
If you want to have double accounting, your primary task is to build a Chinese wall between real and false numbers.
False numbers let you manipulate the third-party observers, the real ones let you manage and make decisions.
In smaller companies you can engage the whole management in this scheme, all the levels of statistics creation.
And the scheme works.
But if your organization is big, the numbers you show to the public
can’t help but influence your internal statistics.
Imagine that you have a large net of shops with chronic negative profit
but every year you constantly report to the investors that you have a billion-dollars profit.
You can’t involve each director of all of your thousands of shops.
Each one of them sees in reports that the net is profitable and all his colleagues reported that they have profit.
Each one of them doesn’t want to look bad
and gives you what you want to see instead of the real numbers.
So you can't see the real business of things, even if you wanted to.
That’s how many big and nice businesses died.
The wish to twist the external statistics a bit gave birth to false statistics on all the levels in several years.
And it became impossible to manage such a business because
no one knew any longer how the company really worked.
It’s clear that officers on the level of battalion commanders know no secret data.
They have the same general losses numbers the Ministry of Defense says in public.
In this case they see no numbers, null losses for 4 months.
They can see their tiny piece of frontline and can’t imagine the whole situation.
They read the same reports of the Ministry of Defense as we do.
They see the same official picture of reality
where the Russian army moves forward victoriously almost without any losses.
No major or lieutenant colonel would ever admit that when everyone is fine and have no losses,
I have half of my people dead, my combat ability is null and I won’t be able to move any further.
If everyone around you reports about their success, you’ll do the same.
That’s how the vertical works.
And no one will ever know what's really going on.
How can you hide the fact that you’ve got half of your battalion left?
It’s a good question if you don’t know how bureaucracy works.
But the question is only rational if you don't know how the bureaucracy works.
First, any bureaucracy (and military as well) will always find a way to manipulate numbers and twist the statistics.
Second, no general above you needs the truth, he needs nice records.
And what’s in the end?
You lie in public, and then the vertical which should provide the commanders
with data and let them make decisions turns into the factory of good news.
The lies are so many-layered that no one will ever find the truth.
By the way, lying in reports is one of the things that killed the Soviet planned economy.
If you say in public that all the plans are fulfilled,
all the needs of Soviet citizens are satisfied, and each year more and more milk, meat, boots and cars are produced,
be ready that all the system will suffocate from added numbers.
The false numbers you publish in the newspapers and the true ones you report
to your superiors will become the same very soon and will be far away from reality.
This effect doesn’t concern just the losses but the whole Putin’s war.
The war should give Russia just good news.
If the news isn’t good (like during the war in Chechnya – just corpses, disabled people,
captives asking to let them go home, dirt, blood and nightmares),
the effect will be the same as with the Chechnya war.
People's support will die out in a month.
Horrible, dirty, cruel war happening right now is shown on TV like in the Soviet films about the Great Patriotic war –
clean warriors with white teeth achieve one victory after another.
Don’t think that Putin and his circle see the war differently.
Like they make decisions based on some different world picture.
Many of the things that look like pointless bloody ecstasy could be explained by this very thing –
you can’t manage properly if you receive the feedback substituted by your own propaganda.
There have been a lot of stories of volunteers who left civilian life, became military contractors and didn’t come back home.
You can make an approximate portrait of such a soldier.
It’s a 30-years-old (frequently 40 years and older) man.
He lives in a small town which is not the regional center.
He does unqualified or low-qualified work.
He is divorced, his children live with his ex-wife.
The image of a provincial man after 40 who is not doing very well working as a guard or a driver
who is drowning in credits is so regular as if it has always been like that.
As if it should be this way.
But in fact it’s a very rare or even unique phenomenon in human history.
When the war is supported by elderly people more than by the youth.
All the big wars we can recall were led by young people.
All the aggressive military ideologies have always targeted the youth.
And it’s quite logical.
Young men tend to support aggressive and adventurous behavior.
They usually don’t have any family, children or property.
They’ve got nothing to lose.
If you want to start a bloody massacre, you need to address this audience
and not people after 40 who have a lot to lose,
who want stability and not some radical changes in their lives.
It's a strict social law – the younger your society is,
the higher is the level of violence and it’s more likely you engage in war.
But we can see something quite the opposite.
Both “the war electorate” and the people in recruiting centers are adult
or even elderly people which is nonsense.
This nonsense can be partially explained by social and economic factors.
Contracts for military service are signed by people with low income, usually with plenty of credits.
Usually, they have difficulties moving or changing professions because of their age.
But it’s not the only problem.
Russia is a poor country.
People in the regions have lots of credits,
and the government promises plenty of money for participating in this war.
If it were just about money, the age breakdown would be more even.
t wouldn’t tend to 40-years-olds.
There is one, apparently, important but unnoticed factor in the peaceful times
which can tell us about sickness of the society.
It’s an immediate success of the so-called popadantsy literature in the early 2000s.
Popadantsy literature is a very old and quite respectable movement in science fiction.
It is based on unexpected travels of the character in time and space.
But now we’re talking about the separate sub-genre,
the Russian popadantsy which literally invaded the editorial market.
Those books are edited and sold in Russia in amounts
which exceed even Darya Dontsova’s print runs when she was at her best
(Russian detective writer who is very prolific and popular)
All of them are united by some common plot – the main character
(usually, a 50-years-old military officer or a security officer)
goes back into the past where he amends a huge injustice.
Prevents the CIA from screwing up the USSR, for example.
The amount of authors and books written by them, or their print runs are just huge.
These are huge numbers.
It’s easy to understand that revanchist literature
based on the idea of amending some injustice in the past is very popular in some part of the audience indeed.
We should admit that ressentiment propaganda,
when people develop the inferiority complex and get the idea of amending
a huge mistake in the past and returning to the golden age, has found its supporters.
And how peculiar those supporters are.
When it came to going to war, it wasn’t young Red Guards or blood-thirsty youth
who agreed to go to the war, but literally the parking lot guards.
It’s because we don’t have a totalitarian ideology.
We are not offered with some image of the future.
We are fed with the idea of bringing the past back.
I mean, current militarism is an astonishing thing –
it’s not a classic revolt of the youth against the fathers.
It’s not children’s refusal to lead calm and ordinary family life
for the sake of a great future which can be reached on the battlefield.
No. It's a father's revolt against children.
It’s fathers who think the current situation is wrong, unjust, and humiliating.
It’s them who think that we need changes and those changes should come from the past.
The USSR built a new society which couldn’t have been compared to anything.
And the Third Reich enlarged its living space.
Both ideologies targeted the youth and looked into the future.
And now they just say that in 1980 ice-cream was tasty.
The elderly don’t like that the youth sits in Starbucks and refuses
to hear anything about Soviet ice-cream, or to think the Americans are enemies, or consider NATO as a threat.
They don’t want to restore the country from the previous millennium they didn’t even see.
We should admit that in some way Vladimir Putin managed to restore the USSR for a short period of time.
We’re dealing with the war which isn’t led for some real achievements
or for winning it, but for the sake of reports and statistics.
It’s a war just to tell tall tales to the superiors while the superiors tell tales to people.
The whole Soviet government worked this way – made reports, achieved goals,
took too much responsibility, exceeded plans,
fought against faulty production and reduced container breakage.
Everything was just fine everywhere except for the shelves in the shops.
On paper any citizen was provided with anything he needed.
But the citizens didn’t notice this abundance.
Today it’s the Soviet people who go to war and support it.
People whose life is in the dead end, who want to come back to their 20s.
Each initiative during the war is the initiative looking back to the past.
Have a look at the law on “Putin’s pioneers” which has been signed recently.
It’s not pioneers as they used to be.
It’s not a project to bring young communists up who will build a great future.
It’s not an initiative looking into the future.
It's a memorial to the pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s.
It’s like we’ll tell children about green grass
50 years before they were born when there were no iPhones and Internet
but everyone went hiking and warmed up near the fire.
If you keep reconstructing something long enough, you’ll finally manage to reconstruct something.
The trouble (or the good thing, really) is that we know how it ended.
Till tomorrow!