We are approaching the end of the seventh week of the war.
Not much left until May the 9th – the fateful date that everyone is now talking about:only 27 days.
And in the last 2-3 weeks, in fact, we do not recieve many military news.
There is news about the monstrous atrocities of the Russian army in the occupied territories,
there is a mass destruction of civilian objects.
There is a lot more, but since the Russian army retreated from the northern direction, the front-line situation has not changed much.
It does not change in anticipation of what is clear to be a battle of a scale of World War II:
Western intelligence, like the Ukrainian leadership itself, openly talk about a huge concentration of forces to strike in the Donbass.
The Russian army in the very first weeks senselessly squandered the most combat-ready units.
And now it is gathering what is left: the most diverse troops in terms of quality, from elite special forces to recruits, in order to deliver the main blow.
With the depletion of reserves, a very important question arises: will there be mass mobilization in Russia?
We can say no with a probability close to one hundred percent: there will be neither martial law nor mobilization.
To understand why, we need to go back two years to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is not the first time I refer to it, and for a reason.
Then political experts spoke about it, it is all the more obvious now: a pandemic is a rehearsal for a big war.
In a very simplified format, the world received almost everything that happens during martial law:
a curfew, bans and restrictions on the most common household activities, a special mode of public transportation, a travel ban, border closures, location control,
and even some elements of direct censorship - in part of the fight against conspiracy theories.
At that time, everyone was surprised to find that democracies and autocracies were sort of swapped.
In the freest and most competitive countries, citizens were simply restricted from all sides, so that going for bread was like crossing a state border,
and violators of the quarantine regime were detained as terrorists.
And such countries as Russia or Belarus stubbornly pretended that the problem did not concern them,
introduced only nominal restrictions, and they were in no hurry to seriously comply with them.
Back then I explained why this was happening.
Our kindred regimes are built on non-participation, on social passivity.
On the fact that the absolute majority of citizens should consider themselves cut off from the state and from politics.
To induce inaction, for example, by police measures to wean citizens from going to rallies, is a task that can be successfully solved.
But it is the opposite of coercion to active action, and compliance with quarantine measures is an active collective action, exactly what our regimes of citizens weaned from.
The declaration of martial law and mobilization is, firstly, an admission of failure:
you cannot say that everything is going according to plan, and then immediately try to rake all the combat-ready men into the army.
Secondly, it is an attempt to attract a mass of citizens to action.
Thirdly, and most importantly, this is a deliberately failed attempt.
Remember the black market for certificates that appeared in an instant when mass vaccination was attempted?
Now imagine the heyday of corruption that will immediately arise on the basis of evasion from mobilization.
I repeat again and again: citizens are ready, sitting on the couch and looking at TV, to agree with anything,
but even to a safe pro-government rally-concert they need to be forcibly taken by bus.
They are ready to watch, but not to participate.
And the Kremlin understands this as well as we do.
Consequently, in a war against one of the largest countries in Europe, one will have to rely only on those forces that are already available.
Comrade Stalin had tens of millions of young people to pay for his mediocre command.
And Comrade Putin has millions of young people who will stand in line for fake certificates about all the chronic diseases in the world, just to get out of the draft.
- We have beliefs. - What kind of beliefs?
- We believe in our god Govinda, and he doesn't tell us to shoot people.
This is the case when a corrupt informational autocracy wants to act like a real totalitarian machine, without actually being one.
In fact, it is not totalitarian machine not only in the sense of a human resource, which there is nowhere to get in the right amount,
but also in the sense of a clear and unified ideology, which always lies at the foundation of totalitarianism.
Beyond the equator of the second month of the war, in the sense of its public representation,
we are already in a different war – not at all in the one that was launched on February 24th.
Due to the initial senselessness of this war, versions of why Russia got involved in it
were put forward throughout the entire month and a half.
If an outside observer read all the headlines of the state media at once or listened to all the statements of officials,
he would have decided that at least five wars have already taken place between Russia and Ukraine.
In one, Russia denazified and demilitarized Ukraine.
In the other, it was defending itself against a NATO attack.
In the third, it prevented the Ukrainians from creating an atomic bomb.
And so on, until a complete victory over common sense.
The first versions of the reasons for the invasion were announced on February 24, during Putin's programmatic television address.
Remember, by the way? That happened.
What goals did he set?
Protecting the population of Donbass, bringing war criminals to justice, as well as the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine.
All points, except for the first, meant something more ambitious
than assistance to the LNR and DNR within the framework of an allied treaty.
Putin unequivocally assumed the seizure of the territory of Ukraine and its total transformation:
the cleansing of those whom he calls the Nazis, and necessarily the reduction of the armed forces and military equipment.
Trials for all these people were even planned in Moscow.
Putin's mood to reshape Ukraine at his own will was picked up by Russian propaganda.
A radical example of this is the author's article «What Russia Should Do with Ukraine», published in «RIA-news».
It proposes to destroy the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the maximum, create people's republics on the territory of Ukraine,
and then eradicate the Nazi essence along with Ukrainian identity with ideological repression and censorship and at the same time discourage Ukrainians from striving for Europe.
That's the plan.
Soon, the originally voiced reasons were supplemented by a version from the lips of Lavrov and Naryshkin that Ukraine was developing weapons of mass destruction.
The logic here is clear: they say, the United States intervened in the civil war in Syria,
because Bashar al-Assad, apparently, usedc hemical weapons, well, we will do the same.
Ukraine is is even worse, it is developing nuclear weapons.
And there's chemical weapons there too.
In the Russian government media, citing their sources, the thesis was promoted:
if the invasion had delayed for several months, the Ukrainians would have created a dirty bomb at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
This version had to be shamefacedly hidden as soon as Chernobyl was returned under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Otherwise, it would have turned out that Russia voluntarily gave up the main item on the creation of nuclear weapons against itself.
Around the same time, a paradoxical idea developed: they say, this is not an offensive war at all, but a defensive one.
Allegedly, if Russia had not started a war with Ukraine, then very soon the entire NATO alliance would have started a war against Russia.
At the same time, the details of the “great and terrible” NATO plan to attack Russia changed dramatically from speaker to speaker.
Thus, the Russian Ministry of Defense stated that, according to the intercepted secret documents, Ukraine planned to attack the Crimea and Donbass in early March.
According to the ex-Prime Minister of Ukraine Azarov, NATO wanted to get a mandate to invade Russia in the UN Security Council –
in the very one in where Russia has a veto.
And then it was as if they were going to start a nuclear war, the one that, most likely, would lead to the destruction of the biggest NATO cities.
Lukashenka even said that Ukraine and NATO hatched plans to attack not only Russia, but also Belarus.
"And now I will show you from where they planned to attack Belarus."
"And if six hours before the operation there wasn't a preventative strike on the positions: four positions (I'll show you the map now),"
they would have attacked our forces, Belarus and Russia's, that were doing military exercises.
That's why we didn't start the war, our conscious is clear - it's good that we started it."
A little later, an even more insane version was put forward. It justified the invasion by secret American biolabs in Ukraine.
"We know, that they experimented with potential infections, that can target ethnic groups, that live in the east of Ukraine and nearby Russian regions."
These laboratories allegedly create biological weapons against the Slavs and use Ukrainians as guinea pigs.
No, this is not heresy from a conspiracy group in Odnoklassniki.
This is the official position of the Ministry of Defense.
Yes, in all seriousness it gives out funding for Ukrainian institutions for sanitary surveillance and epidemiology,
about which there is even information on the website of the US Embassy, ​​thanks to which hundreds of
scientific articles have been published – this legitimate and necessary activity of the Ministry of Defense
is presented as disclosing a network of secret American laboratories.
All these versions were put forward one after another in a row, not replacing, but complementing each other.
This is an understandable rhetorical device: it is impossible to argue with an interlocutor who continues to throw out arguments one after another.
It takes seconds to come up with nonsense, but it can take hours or years to refute it.
While the latest independent media are trying to explain to the public that it is impossible to create biological weapons
weapons against a certain ethnic group, propaganda is publishing a type of “secret study” on the spread of viruses in bats in Ukraine.
While independent media prove to the public that bats are the main reservoirs for pathogens,
and therefore epidemiologists study them in almost every country in the world, including Russia, propagandists take the words of US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland
out of context to make them sound like America recognizes development of biological weapons.
The strategy of throwing in a lot of crazy versions worked until it became clear that the war would not end with a parade along Khreshchatyk (in Kyiv).
When this became obvious, the style of propaganda and statements of officials began to change.
Denazification was forgotten, because it is obvious that no one will allow purges to be carried out in Ukraine against those whom Putin considers Nazis.
Demilitarization was forgotten, because it became clear that – what a surprise! – The Ukrainian military does not surrender
to the Russian army and do not scatter from shots, like African savages.
It turned out that the only way to demilitarize Ukraine is to destroy a significant part of the equipment and soldiers in battles,
and Moscow does not have the strength to do this.
Biolaboratories and nuclear weapons also faded into the background.
Otherwise, any peace agreement with Ukraine, other than its unconditional surrender, will look like a defeat for Russia.
People who believe in propaganda will ask themselves the question: what, besides defeat, can the peace agreement be called
on the terms of people who plan to arrange a total genocide of the Slavs or slander Moscow with a nuclear bomb?
New Caption
Allegedly, the war was started solely to protect the people of Donbass and help the people's republics.
No one ever wanted to change power in Kyiv, but we attacked it, losing thousands of soldiers and sowing destruction, solely to divert attention.
This is such a schizophrenic version of events that is the main one among Russian officials and propaganda today.
It became the main one not from a good life.
It is simply impossible to come up with a more adequate reason why our soldiers invaded the territory of Ukraine.
And further, how the situation will develop in battle will also depend on how the Russian leadership will answer the question “why was it necessary to start a war?”.
However, it will become more and more obvious that the only correct answer is “nothing”.
From the point of view of the war on TV, this is completely normal.
The viewer watches TV for emotion, not for coherent storytelling.
No one will remember tomorrow, when they take Mariupol for the 27th time, that they were taking Kyiv the day before yesterday.
No one will remember that for two weeks Zelensky did nothing but kept running away from Kyiv to Poland.
Moreover, no one will remember what goals and objectives were announced on February 24.
The viewer consumes actions. Something, somewhere, is burning and exploding, and the tireless experts in the studio,
who seem to sleep there between shootings in sleeping bags, shout very loudly and expressively at the camera.
This is a spectacle in itself, looking for a beginning, middle and end in it is as pointless as guessing about the motivation of villains in action movies of the 80s.
The movie villain wants to melt the glaciers because he wants to, and that's it: the film is not about that, it's about explosions.
To achieve the result that is usually required by informational autocracies,
there is absolutely no need to change anything in this flow –
the desired passivity is achieved perfectly.
But in order to drive the people to the recruiting stations, this is not at all suitable.
It's one thing to watch James Bond of domestic localization defeat another Doctor Evil.
But it’s a completely different thing to participate in the show,
starve and freeze in a damp trench, with a real chance of not returning home.
Russia launched a reference war of the 20th century, a war of mass armies,
where, in fact, it is not the army that fights, but the entire population fit for mobilization.
Where for every dead at the front, you can bring another 10 from the rear, and if you need to – even 100.
Where you can lose divisions and armies, quickly making up for any losses.
These are the resources they need right now.
To advance from the Donbass to Kyiv, to break through the echeloned defenses,
which they clearly want and what they directly declare – this is not a mosquito sneezed,
this is really the largest military operation since 1945, not just in Russian, but, apparently, in world history.
It is impossible to carry it out with the tired and thinned troops that are available.
We need a lot of new blood, which is now impossible to arrange.
If we can talk about some kind of global luck of Ukraine, then it is exactly this:
it was not the regime that decided to play in the Third Reich that has torchlight processions,
there are queues at recruiting stations, and over all this hangs a harmonious and all-pervading ideology of expanding living space.
The regime that decided to play the Third Reich, is instead of mobilizing military resources for years,
this resource was seated on the sofa with all its might and kept there.
It explained to this resource that they would figure it out even without it, that nothing depended on it.
So, picking up this resource from the couch now, explaining to it that this time the endless action movie on TV
is serious is not only almost impossible, but also very dangerous.
Our regimes in addition to “hybrid” and “information”, have one more name – “simulation”.
This definition is always understood in the spirit that they imitate democratic institutions while in reality they are autocracies.
This is true, but not the whole truth. In fact, they imitate everything.
Exactly the same way they play democracy, they play totalitarianism.
Now for the first time we see how this game collides with reality, when totalitarian tools and methods for solving problems are really needed,
but they simply do not exist and there is nowhere to get them from.
Tough days are definitely ahead of us until May 9: the Russian authorities really need a revenge.
But the good news is that the revenge will be carried out by exactly those forces –
both army, propaganda, and administrative – that led to the first defeat.
See you tomorrow