Recently, something happened that’s impossible to overlook.
A company of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a group of Russian fighters aligned with Ukraine,
crossed from Ukraine into Russia’s Belgorod Region with heavy vehicles, including tanks.
They caused quite a stir, hijacked an APC, engaged in combat, lost several vehicles, and returned to the Ukrainian soil.
Make no mistake: the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) isn’t the so-called Freedom of Russia Legion.
The former is a real unit made up of Russian citizens who’ve been living in Ukraine and flying its color
on the battlefield for quite a while, long before the 2022 invasion.
Its active core fought for Ukraine in the Donbas in 2014-2015, and many members have served
in volunteer forces like the Ukrainian nationalist Right Sector.
It’s unclear to what extent the RVC is connected with the Ukrainian Armed Forces, since there’s no formal relationship.
But they’re definitely controlled and supplied by the Ukrainian army.
The RVC’s public figures are a rather odious batch of Russian nationalists, including radical ones, and the occasional fascist.
Nevertheless, they exist.
Meanwhile, the Freedom of Russia Legion, supposedly made up of Russian nationals and soldiers
who defected to Ukraine after the war began, is a fantasy of former Russian MP Ilya Ponomarev.
For some reason, this fantasy is widely supported by Ukrainian intelligence and public figures.
When we say RVC, we, of course, mean the Ukrainian army.
It’s just that here they’re cosplaying Putin and acting on Russian soil by proxy,
using gangs of adrenaline junkies formally unaffiliated with the official army.
Putin did the same thing in the Donbas 8-9 years ago.
“Don’t look at us, they must’ve bought the tank at the army surplus store.”
Anyway, it was this fun bunch who crossed into the Belgorod Region.
Meanwhile, on Monday night, a drone hit the FSB office in the city of Belgorod.
Why do I emphasize that this glaring incident can’t be ignored yet? Because that’s how this war works.
The first strikes on Russian soil were front-page news, discussed all over the place.
Yet, after about a year, the shelling of border settlements, which kills civilians and conscripts, has become mundane.
Just another piece in the newsfeed.
At first, everyone wondered how Ukrainian drones managed to get so deep into Russia, attacking military airfields
and going down in the suburbs of Moscow.
And then, a drone attacked the Kremlin. How long was that in the news? A mere couple of days?
The same was true of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, the destruction of civilian infrastructure,
Russian bombs dropping on Russian cities.
In this war, the craziest and most unimaginable s**t becomes routine at lightning speed.
The first incursion, which happened in the Bryansk Region and was much smaller than the latest one,
sparked widespread panic. Back then, newsfeeds were filled with reports of troop pull-outs and Security Council meetings.
There was intense media hype.
Today, however, Russian officials are doing their best to pretend that nothing has happened.
We can draw two conclusions from this: first, there’ll be more incursions like this, and they’ll become more frequent.
Second, like all other things in this war, they’ll stop being news very soon.
AIM OF THE MISSION
First, let’s answer the question: What did Ukraine aim to achieve with this raid?
Such a mission can have two goals, and they aren’t exactly contradictory, but rather complementary.
The first one is psychological impact. It’s to show the Russian government, the army, society,
and whoever else is spectating what their regime is really worth.
The regime that, only a year earlier, haughtily demanded that NATO scoot back to its borders as of 1997.
The previous incursion in the Bryansk Region could be dismissed as some kind of fluke.
Yeah, a couple dozen people snuck through the bushes, took some selfies, and left, but that could happen to anyone, right?
By contrast, now a whole company with armored vehicles crossed the border, trashed the border checkpoint,
stole a brand new APC, and enjoyed a neighborhood joyride.
Once again, it became clear that, one, Russia isn’t in control of its own borders and only god knows
where those dozens of thousands of FSB border patrol are.
Two, it became clear that 15 months into the war, after all the shelling of border villages and the previous incursion
in the neighboring region, nobody drew even the most basic conclusions. There was no evacuation of the local residents.
Three, it turned out, quite expectedly, that the only use of “dragon’s teeth” and all the other border defenses,
which gobbled up a whopping 10% of the destitute region’s budget,
was to line the pockets of those who built them and allocated the funding.
Unmanned fortifications can’t protect anyone from anything. At best, they’re useless.
At worst, the enemy will use them.
Moreover, these defenses are quite far away from the border and don’t hinder
the Ukrainian troops’ free passage through border villages.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin and Constitutional Court chairman Valery Zorkin are peering at a 17th-century
French map during a Kremlin meeting, gloating at the absence of Ukraine on it.
While the enemy is driving armored vehicles through Russian territory,
The other objective is practical. It’s to use small-scale raids involving dozens, maybe hundreds,
of people to push the Russian side toward reinforcing its positions.
Make Russia pump the border fullof personnel and materiel, treat it as another frontline,
and take the threat of a full-scale invasion seriously.
After all, if a single company can wreak havoc along the border, then a battalion can take a small town,
and a brigade can occupy the entire region.
The way things stand, with all reserves burned out, there’s only one source of equipment and personnel: the frontline.
Russia would have to pull its fighting troops out of Ukraine and bring them home to protect the
Bryansk, Belgorod, and Kursk regions.
Should Putin decide to reinforce the rear this way, this will significantly weaken the Russian troops in Ukraine.
You can’t plug the gaps on Russian soil without opening them in Ukraine, thus facilitating the Ukrainian offensive.
RUSSIA’S IFFY BORDERS
In addition to attacking Ukraine and legitimizing war crimes, Putin has made another decision that allows Ukraine
to do whatever it wants within Russian borders. Putin undermined the very concept of “Russian borders.”
The phrase “inviolability of Russia’s borders” may not be the butt of a joke yet, but it does beg the question:
“Sorry, which borders are you referring to?” Thanks to Putin, we have four versions of the borders.
Version 1: the internationally recognized borders of 2013.
Version 2: Russia + Crimea. Almost nobody outside of Russia officially recognizes Crimea to be Russian,
but some heads of state do so de facto.
Version 3: Russia + Crimea + those parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions that the Russian
army actually controls. Only Putin recognizes this version.
Version 4: Russia + Crimea + these 4 Ukrainian regions in their entirety.
Even Putin doesn’t believe this version, but it’s the one that he inked into the amended Constitution.
Perhaps Putin hoped to dare or scare somebody, making it sound as if he was ready to fight for
the Kherson Region just as he would for the Belgorod Region. The opposite turned out to be true.
The Russian army is as ready to defend Belgorod as it is to defend Kherson. Not at all, that is.
And since Ukrainian forces can move freely through the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions,
why not do the same in the regions of Belgorod and Bryansk? Putin said they’re no different to him, after all.
ALTERNATIVE TO PUTIN: ANY SANE PERSON
On Feb. 24, 2022, the first day of the invasion, Current Time reporters polled the inhabitants of Rostov-on-Don,
a large city in the south of Russia. They got lots of interesting responses, but I’d like to single out this one.
What’s your attitude toward the war with Ukraine? It’s very bad that Russia has started a war. Very bad.
It’ll be tragic for us. Especially since we’re in the border zone. It’s very wrong for our government to do this.
“We’re in the border zone. This’ll be tragic for us.”
The person who said this wasn’t a renowned political pundit or experienced politician.
It was a retiree with some common sense.
War isn’t like hunting or target practice. Warfare is a bilateral process, where both sides have a license to shoot.
Shells can’t always cross the border in a single direction.
Since last year, all sorts of projectiles have been reaching the border regions of Russia every day.
“Who could be a better president of Russia than Vladimir Putin?”
Well, for example, that older woman from Rostov-on-Don.
She may not be a geostrategist, but she has something that the current president lacks. She recognizes causality.
She understands that actions have consequences.
Putin and his propagandists often say: we haven’t properly started fighting yet, we’re just dabbling and being nice,
but you just wait till those stubborn Ukrainians and NATO provoke us.
If they cross the red lines, we’ll scramble our real army and blow the wraps off our unstoppable missiles.
And the world will wish they’d listened to our admonition.
Up to a certain point, everyone paid attention to those ramblings and even believed them.
Remember how everyone was scared of provoking Putin and triggering an escalation?
Remember how experts couldn’t believe that this really was the fabled Russian army that,
if not the second-best army in the world, was definitely a top-five one. On paper.
In truth, Russia is fighting with everything it can muster. It has emptied all its reserves and exhausted all capabilities.
It’s actually Ukraine who’s not going at it full strength, only fighting to force Putin into peace.
The frontline hasn’t yet extended across the entire Russian-Ukrainian border.
Instead of attacking fortified positions in Zaporizhzhia and the Donbas,
the Ukrainian army doesn’t advance across a virtually unguarded field directly into Russia,
capturing cities at a glance.
Ukrainian long-range precision-guided missiles haven’t yet ripped through warehouses, command posts,
and government buildings in Russia. For Russia, this isn’t a full-scale war yet.
All this is due to the good will of Ukraine and its Western allies.
Russia will have nothing to respond with. Russians aren’t interested in the war because nobody attacked them.
All these tales about how attacks on Russian soil will allow the government to announce an all-out mobilization
drive are just silly.
The average TV viewer doesn’t give a damn about Belgorod, just as they didn’t give a damn about Kherson.
There’s no way of making this a people’s war. Russia has already engaged everybody who was ready to fight.
Besides, people are used to having no say over who’s governor of the Belgorod Region,
so why would they protest a change of its flag?
Since people weren’t asked if they wanted this war and didn’t vote for the politicians who started it,
why would they worry about the failure of a project that wasn’t theirs to start with?
Because of Putin, the breach of state borders and capture of Russian land no longer depend on Russia’s actions.
Russia’s border guards now are Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, and Olaf Scholz.
They’re the ones protecting Russian territorial integrity and imposing constraints on Ukraine.
Never before has Russia’s basic security depended on forces that it’s not even close to controlling.
Never has its very existence depended on someone else’s good will.
This never happened, until one bungling fool of a “successful geopolitician” decided he could partition Europe.
See you tomorrow!