Yesterday was the biggest defeat of the Russian army since the beginning of the war – Ukraine made Russia leave Kherson.
It’s the only occupied regional center, the only city under Russian control which is not in ruins.
It’s the city where Russia promised to stay forever.
It’s the only real trophy propaganda could talk about without any awkwardness.
We need to understand that even in the words of the officials it’s not a maneuver, or a rearrangement,
or a good will gesture – it’s a defeat.
It’s not God’s will, or a natural disaster, or a coincidence, it’s the Ukrainian army which blocked the Russian group around
Kherson, cut it off the supplies and made its defeat the question of time.
For the first time it’s an official retreat announced by the Minister of Defense.
Leaving the area which according to Russian legislation is a part of the Russian Federation is the most significant step
since February 24 which makes us closer to the end of the war.
Today we'll discuss all of that.
Before we start, I’d like to remind you that we have a secret sponsor society here.
As far as we can understand, there are two reasons for the retreat – military and political.
The military reason is that it’s impossible to keep Kherson, which is cut off from normal supplies and when all the passages
through Dnepr are constantly shot at by the Ukrainian artillery.
And it’s so obvious that even the Russian generals managed to convince Putin of that.
To keep the right bank, which is a doomed to fail task, the Russian army has to lock the most capable parts between
Dnepr and the Ukrainian troops, from the western media referencing the sources in the intelligence,
we know for sure that for at least a couple of months the commanders have been trying to persuade
Putin to get the Russian troops out of Kherson.
They have explained to him that this fruitless attempt to keep the only regional center taken since February 24 makes the
Ukrainian army free to go in any other direction.
Because they shouldn’t be scared of the Kherson group – it wouldn’t go anywhere.
Obviously, the generals could explain it properly to Putin, but they wouldn’t succeed unless there was a political reason.
And the political reason is that the government needs to wrap this war up.
Mobilization which intended to change the situation in the front was a catastrophe.
Not a day passes without massive killings of the mobilized people, riots in the training centers
and the protests of the relatives. And it’s clear it’s the beginning.
The system can’t digest so many people – the problems will rapidly grow and very soon they will become political.
Because the deaths of the mobilized people (of the civilians who were made to go to the front)
are not the same as the deaths of contract soldiers or of hired guns.
People would react differently, and the scale would be completely different.
You can’t stop feeling or seeing that not just the army but the whole machine of the Russian government is grunting,
creaking and breaking down under the pressure of the tasks it had to deal with.
Because it has never had to manage anything like this. Each day of war brings serious internal political risks.
When the system works as hard as it can, when managers have to perform tasks they are not used to,
when the citizens are so tired and frustrated that any insignificant event can become a catastrophe
for the whole political regime and Putin himself.
There’s no positive outcome now, a rapid seizure of Ukraine as an election campaign event failed.
The attempt to make the war a routine or get it back to 2015 failed either.
Mobilization hasn’t just failed, it has created more problems that it had to solve.
The situation won’t just get worse, any further decision will make the existing problems worse.
It’s a fact. The only option now is to negotiate.
Somehow.
Maybe not about peace but about ceasefire and the freezing of the conflict.
Just to prevent the situation from worsening and getting out of control.
And to prevent the power from slipping out of their hands.
We know from history that it can happen so fast. When it starts, it’s impossible to stop it.
The task for now is to register the losses and get more time to make a decision.
Because for the first time in this war time is against Putin.
ASKING FOR NEGOTIATIONS
We can see how much the Russian management needs peace,
we can see it from what the most bloodthirsty hawks in Putin’s circle say – Prigozhin and Kadyrov.
Several weeks ago, they called any retreat from the frontline a treachery.
They offered to send the retreating generals to the trenches as privates.
And now, after leaving Kherson, they praise Surovikin for saving the soldiers’ lives.
In the current situation to make this peace conversation possible at least in theory,
we need to offer something to Ukraine.
To abandon the city which will fall anyway, but has an enormous political meaning for both sides,
looks like the first step towards negotiations.
We made the sun rise, made the impossible closer, saved the lives of your soldiers and ours.
Now let’s think about how to finish all this. Yes, we’ve lost but let us leave at least with some dignity.
Of course, it’s not an offer just for Ukraine, but for its Western allies too – look, we aren’t just begging for negotiations –
we prove it with our actions that we are very serious about it. Zelensky is just stubborn and doesn’t want peace.
Push him towards us, please. Will there be any result? It’s a question.
First, Vladimir Putin’s word costs nothing – everybody knows that. Second, the whole history of this war says,
“Ignore Putin, ignore his threats, ignore his demands, requests and pleas.
The more you ignore him, the better offer he will make.
Let’s watch the dynamics. During the first months of the war the negotiations with “the Kyiv regime of neo-Nazis
and drug addicts” could be “just about capitulation”.
In September they talked about “the recognition of the territorial reality”,
that means the de-facto fixation of the occupied territories.
And now the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs swears that they are ready for peace negotiations any time
without any preliminary conditions, if Ukraine wants it.
Vladimir Zelensky showed who Vladimir Putin really is very clearly.
For 20 years the leaders of the most powerful countries believed in a fairy tale that Putin never gives up
and never bends, for 20 years everyone has fawned over him, negotiated with him, believed his words
and were happy to be deceived, for 20 years they have guessed how they should behave so
as not to provoke this fierce Russian.
We knew that Putin always gives up, and always bends if he meets proper resistance.
Not everyone can see that – the less you try to pacify Putin,
the more confident resistance he meets, the better his capitulation terms would be.
If we give a street-life example Putin loves so much, he is like a street bully who experienced the worst –
not the eldest, not the strongest guy from the neighborhood who was not a boxer or a karateist kicked his butt.
A common guy who unlike the others refused to play by his rules.
The guy who refused to give his pocket money just because some chap pretended
he was a thug and threatened him convincingly. And it happened in front of everyone.
And everyone understood that he was just a common bully hiding behind the mask and used to obedience.
And everyone who preferred to avoid conflict earlier understood that.
Those who thought it’s better to give him anything he wanted rather than
to explain black eyes and torn jackets to their mothers.
It violates all the rules of diplomacy the whole developed world got used to.
But in Putin’s case, like with any other street bully or a thug, it doesn’t work like with normal leaders.
It’s all the way around. For a thug any negotiations and compromises are escalation, and a rough and early
response is the way to get peace.
Would anyone agree to negotiate with Putin who proved that it’s not effective to settle for anything with him even with these
“goodwill gestures”?
Who uses any negotiations as a respite for a new attack?
Would anyone want to make an agreement with the weak but impudent man?
It’s not a sure thing. A small lyrical digression here.
For any real Russian government official current events should be a catastrophe.
Vladimir Putin has not just killed dozens of thousand people from both sides and made millions of people refugees
from both sides. He has destroyed the very notion of “the border of the Russian Federation”.
The problem is not that no sane government recognizes this border (and almost all the insane governments too).
But the Russian government itself doesn’t recognize it.
Formally, after the troops’ retreat, Kherson has become the territory of the Russian Federation occupied by Ukraine.
But no one even pretends that they take it seriously.
That Russia has some borders and they are unbreakable.
That Russia has some understandable shape on the map.
At least the government should understand it, really.
There is one thing our history is rich with – those are idiots, tyrants, and bloodthirsty ghouls with power.
But to make the Russian border a joke which was immediately forgotten after the concert on the Red Square had ended,
to make the Russian territory a one-time guest on a TV show – I don’t think it has ever happened.
WHO DOES BELIEVE THE REGIME
The story with Stremousov, the deputy Head of the occupational administration of the Kherson region,
is very important here, of course.
Let’s answer this question right away.
Is such a coincidence possible?
Is it possible that several hours before the official retreat from Kherson,
the most notorious speaker of the occupational administration died in a usual car crash?
Well, history knows the most astonishing and surreal coincidences. We should say that it might be a coincidence,
but the probability of it is tiny. We said it when we gave the example of Natalia Poklonskaya.
The Russian regime is intentionally non-ideological. It’s its main strength.
What was the right version in the morning might not be the right version by lunch.
Experienced propagandists never react to news immediately – they wait for instructions.
Because the party’s line might turn in another direction any time and quite unexpectedly.
Natalia Poklonskaya and all the other heroes of “the Russian spring” were smart enough to shut up
in time and realize that the season of the Crimea and Donbas made the audience sick of it
and it was no longer in the official agenda.
Some of them were lucky to lose everything they had, and their careers died as fast as they were built.
But more often, it was completely different – from the first generation of field commanders and higher officials
of the separatist republics in Donetsk and Luhansk almost no one is still alive.
The worst thing that can happen to a person in our system is that this person gets an opinion,
that he starts believing in something.
It might look like that his beliefs are agreeable with the government, but it’s never true.
Any beliefs constrain the government, and it wants to be free in its actions.
It doesn’t need any imperials, or monarchists, or communists, or the orthodox, it doesn’t need any liberals, or statesmen.
It doesn’t need any pro-West people or pro-Slavic people.
You should believe in what your superiors say while they say it. That’s the only virtue.
Today we’ve got an episode about the USSR – let’s remember tasty ice-cream,
miss the unforgiving Stalin’s hand and be proud of industrialization.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about our tsars – we’ll curse bloodthirsty Bolsheviks who arranged a coup for the western money.
In the world where the head of the Communist Party and the head of the Orthodox Church give medals and orders to each
other, no one with consistent beliefs will survive.
He will not survive in the world where Tsarskaya Street (with the church built on the spot of the royal family’s murder)
crosses Dzerzhinskaya Street (Dzerzhinsky was a revolutionary).
And this church is in Yekaterinburg but in the Sverdlovsk region (Sverdlov was a revolutionary too).
You should never ask how a revolutionary, an extremist and just the head of a terrorist organization Koba Dzhugashvili
became comrade Stalin, the creator of the Russian statehood?
The main task of a person from the system is to switch from forever-Russian Kherson we would defend with nuclear
weapons to Kherson no one really needed, so there’s no point to defend it.
We don’t know what happened to Stremousov.
Is he dead or did he get himself a new name and documents to allegedly live somewhere in Naryan-Mar and work in
a local Gazprom branch?
We know one thing.
A public populist politician with a bunch of really exotic views (but those are still views)
who told everyone about it definitely doesn’t fit the situation anymore. And now he’s gone.
Why are we talking so much about Stremousov in this video? He is definitely a freak, one of the leaders of anti-vaxxers
in Ukraine, a supporter of all possible conspiracy theories. Because it’s not just his story.
It’s a story of everyone who was stupid enough to believe Putin’s regime.
Either it’s an inspired fighter for Holy Russia who started working for the occupants voluntarily.
Or a soldier who went to the trenches voluntarily believing propaganda that his Motherland is in danger.
You will never know or be able to predict when the concept makes a 180-degree turn, when you become
that endless TV-series’ character people are sick of.
Usually, the screenwriters make sure that this character gets into a coma and never appears on the screen again.
You might really think that Ukraine is a province of the Russian Empire.
Or that Russia is leading a war against the alliance of NATO, LGBT or Satan.
Or you perform no military aggression in the neighboring country, but you fight for your native land.
But you should remember that those people who sent you to fight, work, or manage something,
those people who pay you for the management of a Telegram channel don’t believe a word they say.
Polls, ratings, views, coverage, future election and its results – that’s their religion, their KPI.
You can understand it beforehand or when you become its victim. Or not a victim – just a waste.
In 20 years, the Russian government has shown this attitude way too often.
But never as often as during the last 8 months.
Almost every month of this war brought piles of corpses and broken lives of those
who were surprised by new front alignment or by a new goodwill gesture.
This regime architecture led him to the place where he is now.
We are in a kakistocracy and there is a reason why the worst of the worst are in power.
We are there because just crazy psychopaths with no moral code or beliefs would agree to work in this regime.
Or poor urban madmen who were stupid enough to believe in something.
If you put such people in the system, it’s not important how much oil dollars you have got.
Sooner or later you will be where you are – inside the war you can neither win nor lose keeping your dignity.
Till tomorrow!