Russia cannot achieve victory over Ukraine — this is something that we talked about on our channel back in February.
The Russian army will eventually suffer a military defeat in Ukraine — this is only a matter of time.
This was something that we talked about later in March.
We didn’t even use phrases like “most likely” or “with high probability” and were quite unequivocal about it.
Over the following months our opponents — the state media audience
and pro-government speakers — talked differently.
Like, just you wait, the Russian army is still fighting at half strength.
Just you wait and see when it starts to fight for real.
Well, all must realize that, by and large, we haven't even started for real yet.
For a long time in our country, support for the war has been fueled by a simple idea:
like, Vladimir Putin is yet to put all his pieces on the board.
He still has some unpredictable moves or a couple of spare queens in his sleeve which will turn the whole game.
But now we’re at a point where even the last of “arguments of Kings” —
that is, conscripting hundreds of thousands people — couldn’t save the situation.
Russian troops were pushed out of Kherson.
The supreme commander says nothing.
Highest officials in Russia openly talk about negotiations.
Now is the time when not only the people who share our views but also the audience of Z-propaganda begins to realize:
Putin has already put everything he had on the board and is still losing.
It’s not a checkmate yet, but in his position, even a grandmaster would only be able to postpone the defeat
for just a few more turns.
Today we observe the incredibly important moment, when two completely different audiences —
pro-war and anti-war — come to the same conclusion: the war is lost.
MINIMIZING THE DAMAGE
Let’s try to proceed from the premise that even if Russians who hate their own country exist, their numbers are minuscule.
It’s a widespread norm in Russia to be a patriot. It’s quite symbolic that
the letter Z reminds of a crack, among other things.
Since the time that tanks were shooting at the white house, the Russian society was never as divided.
But it would be a mistake to think that the war divided the people into patriots and non-patriots.
It has split the society into two groups that understand patriotism differently.
One group thinks like this: it’s in the best interests of Russia to stop the war immediately and to withdraw troops.
While the other thinks that Russia must win at all costs.
But today even most hardcore militarists see that it cannot win.
There are no more unexploited resources that could be utilized.
Neither the tanks from 1960th, nor howitzers straight from the Great Patriotic war,
nor mobilization, nor the shelling of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine —
none of it could turn the war.
There is nothing else to be put on the altar of war.
The war still continues, but in the nearest perspective, it’s already a lost war.
The war is lost, but the game is not over yet.
If two audiences in Russia hate each other but they now come to the same conclusion, then two logical steps must follow.
First, stop hating each other.
Because the main subject of the dispute is gone: for the most part, both camps realize that Putin will certainly lose.
Second, let’s ask ourselves a question: what a patriot must do when he or she realizes that their country is facing a defeat?
There is only one possible answer: to minimize the damage.
This is something that has nothing to do with your political views.
If defeat is inevitable, you need to be minimizing losses, not burning all your remaining resources.
The number one task for all Russian patriots is to save people. Russia can recover from material and moral losses.
It can make up for the lost time, too, if we put some work into it. But you cannot bring the dead back to life again.
And with the current level of science and technology, you can’t grow back lost limbs.
There is nothing to be arguing about anymore.
The discussion about whether or not territorial gains can justify having a certain number of people killed
in a war is behind us now, of course, there should’ve never been such a discussion in the first place.
But even if we forget conscience and ethics, it’s not about how moral or immoral such a discussion is — it’s just pointless.
We are at a point in which no matter how many people you throw into the fire, you cannot change the end result.
So we must stop throwing people into fire, and need to start saving them.
I’ll quote general Surovikin. In his report to minister of defense Shoigu, he stated that, in the period from August to October,
the AFU lost around 9000 people wounded or killed, while the Russian army lost 7 to 8 times less.
We don’t believe the statistics given by Surovikin, not one bit, but let’s count anyway.
Even according to his own words, our country has lost 1200-1300 soldiers for nothing,
for the failed attempt to take one city of Kherson from Ukraine.
More than 1200 healthy, work-capable Russian men had to die just so that Kherson could from
now on celebrate not one but two liberation days.
On 13th of March — liberation from German troops, and on 11th of November — from the Russian army.
Around 1200 Russian families — according to just the official statistics — had their men returned to them either in caskets
or as cripples that will have to be taken care of for the remainder of their lives.
Or never saw them again at all, we can't even imagine with a bit of certainty how many of the Russian military are missing
in action, and i'm not even talking about how Surovikin is trying to justify the Russian losses with
how they've managed to kill even more Ukrainians; why kill Ukrainians at all anyway?
And no matter how you look at it, it was all for nothing, people lost their lives and their healths,
and burdened their souls for nothing but a piece of land which was later lost anyway.
And let’s be honest: would even the most devoted viewer of Channer 1 believe
that our state will provide every wounded with physical and psychological rehabilitation,
will teach them new professions (taking their disabilities into account) and provide them with high-paying jobs?
Next question: what does Russia have too much of, and what it doesn’t have enough of?
Territories or work-capable men? Well, Russian women die in this war, too.
As part of the army that is for no reason at all killing citizens of Ukraine.
In the context of the impending defeat, a true Russian patriot must categorically
demand the minimization of damage.
Whether you were always against the war or whether you supported it at some point is not important right now.
What’s important now is to create a broad public demand for the Russian army to immediately stop senseless hostilities,
leave Ukraine, return contract soldiers and conscripts to their barracks, and all the mobilized to their homes.
ON HEROISM
Failed regimes that want to postpone their downfall at the cost of the lives of their subjects like to appeal to heroism.
It’s a classic, both literally and figuratively.
Erich Maria Remarque described it in his novel “All Quiet on the Western Front”,
and we can also read about it in many other novels.
When regimes lose wars, they try to utilize the most primitive of manipulations:
to shame those who don’t want to fight, and to gold coast its own failures with heroism.
Propaganda does everything to ensure that instead of fearing that you might leave your family without a breadwinner,
or that you may turn the lives of your loved ones into hell after you come back as a cripple,
It doesn't matter that you might be forced into killing people, that you'd get such a life experience
that even if you return home alive and in one piece, you'll never be mentally healthy again,
what's important is to not be called a coward by some strangers!
The regime is putting people into a position where it’s easy to answer the question of “why do I go to war?”.
“For the Homeland”. And no one would ask what this nice phrase, “For the Homeland”, even means.
If you go to war “For the Homeland”, nobody would ask you whether it’s your country, and not the regime,
that wants you to go.
But those who don’t want their families to be left without breadwinners and their countries to be left without
a pair of working hands, don't want to die or to shoot anyone, they’d need much more than three words.
They’d be shamed and forced to explain and defend themselves or even jailed.
And in the end, all their logical arguments will be broken with a few pseudo-patriotic slogans.
Also, heroism is a good cover-up for incompetence, thievery, or any organizational problems.
How? A Soviet film "The train has stopped", which you probably never watched, provides a good example of it.
The administration has created a complete mess in its train depot. The town officials cover it all up.
But after an accident happens and a young train driver dies, they all start to talk about heroism.
They declare the driver a hero, they invite the TV, they hold a big funeral, they erect his statue with speeches
and an orchestra at the opening.
And if anyone tries to say that the driver was not a hero but a victim of other people’s corruption and carelessness,
well it’s just some shameless bastard spitting on the grave of a hero, in a similar manner, a new hero was created in Russia —
this one is luckily still alive.
Let’s see the video.
In the video, there is a helpless wounded soldier who isn’t helped by anyone.
He has a steel helmet straight from 1968 on his head.
He wears a winter uniform from 2010, which has long been discarded for its terrible look and its inability
to keep warm.
Where is the junior medical staff?
Where are all those best-in-the-world Russian composite helmets?
Where is all the personal protective equipment from the famous "Ratnik" kit?
It’s difficult to see in the video, but it looks like the soldier doesn’t even have a bulletproof vest.
Whatever happened to the all-season equipment suits which was a major part of Sergey Shoigu’s reforms?
Why does he wear that old pea coat from the times of Serdyukov, which was the main cause
for pneumonia among soldiers up until 10 years ago?
A single video that is worth an entire anti-war film.
The wounded man, covered in rags, abandoned and defenseless, in clear sight of the enemy,
and all he can do is to throw away grenades with the last of his strength.
That video can’t be just buried and ignored.
And to prevent the society from asking truly important questions,
they’ve turned him into a hero and buried all the important questions under a pile of heroism.
The press around the world admires the soldier.
This video is now being discussed by leading British publishers like the Independent Telegraph and the Sun.
Soldier in a trench throws away two grenades dropped on him by Ukrainian militants from a quadcopter.
The video was published on one of the front pages of a large Arabian TV channel website Alhadas.
Visitors point out the bravery of the hero and his nerves of steel.
Even though there is almost no positive materials in the western media about the Russian army,
this publication may be a "breakthrough". Supposedly, the episode happened back in March.
And of course, by the standards of Russian propaganda, where there’s a hero, there must be a villain who defiles his honor.
A little-known video blogger Nikolai Lebedev played a scene based on the video.
He added a phrase from Boney M.’s Rasputin: “He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow”.
So basically he made a video praising the soldier.
But to distract public attention, someone must be rewarded, and someone must be punished.
Lebedev was attacked by “League for safety on the Internet” headed by Ekaterina Mizulina,
who called him a “degenerate”.
Then police came along with siloviks, and in the end he was for some reason deported from Russia after a beating.
And now, it is this that holds public attention, not the horror that was caught in the video.
WHAT CHOICE DO WE HAVE
The choice that our country must make is not one of winning or losing the war.
The war is lost. So the choice is completely different. Kill all who can still be killed, cripple those who can still be crippled,
and force those who can leave but didn’t do so to finally leave. Or not do that, and try to minimize the damage.
The political regime entered the mode of desperately trying to prolong its existence,
and will be trying to fool us with ideas of heroism and patriotism.
It will be trying to build an alternative reality, in which going to the front and killing Ukrainians
there becomes a good deed, an act of heroism, of patriotism!
Don’t fall for manipulations of those who exposed their own lies so many times in the past.
Our country is losing people at a catastrophic rate. Some are lost in combat.
Some are lost to emigration which turned into a mass exodus. Do not find comfort in the thought that we are 143 million.
143 million is all of us, including children, retirees, people with disabilities. While the war takes all the young and healthy.
They are work-capable people, who were torn out from the economy.
Each new day of this senseless war reduces the chance that they’ll ever come back.
Some will perish in the foreign land, some will lose hope and will be helping other countries’ economies.
Despite all Dmitry Medvedev’s best wishes, their bones won’t be rotting abroad.
Unlike those of our compatriots who were forced to go to war. Don’t mistake fanaticism for patriotism.
Patriotism means thinking about how to make your country a better place to live in.
We need to be thinking in terms of achieving best results, not in terms of empty slogans and abstractions.
The best thing Russia can do is to immediately leave Ukraine and to stop killing our and their citizens.
This is what a true patriot must demand.
See you tomorrow.