Alexei Navalny was slapped with a 19-year prison term yesterday. It’s clear that figures don’t really matter here.
What’s more important is sending Alexei to a supermax facility.
They’ll be able to cut off his ties to the free world that they had to let him maintain
while he was in a maximum-security prison. We’ve had a whole video on that.
Treating his archrival this way shows Vladimir Putin for a mingy, vengeful, and depraved guy that he really is.
We’ve recorded this intro separately.
The power in Russia wasn’t usurped by a hardened criminal but by a petty thief.
This thief doesn’t have a code of honor he’d swear by and has no respect for his enemies.
We’ve recorded this intro separately.
But it fits the subject we wanted to discuss:
how the government tries to hoodwink you while pretending to be honest as a robin.
Rumor has swirled that the fall session of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament will be inaugurated
with a slew of amendments introducing felony charges punishable for up to 5 years for mobilization dodgers.
Why do we use the word “rumor”? It’s simple.
There’s no potential draft bill as of yet. Nor is there a formal approval from the Government.
However, a potential bill was commented on by MP Andrei Kartapolov,
head of the Defense Committee who has risen to a role of a major legislator during the war.
Over the past year, the government has been consistently cementing all sorts
of loopholes for draft dodgers
But one thing it could’ve done but still hasn’t is bring real charges against them.
Today, we’ll discuss the nature of this odd duality: on the one hand, they want to reel in more people;
on the other, they shy away from dishing out the punishment.
WAR AS AN OBSTACLE
The biggest mistake one can make assessing the behavior of the Russian political system
is thinking of it as a single whole.
Yeah, while the war is in full swing and things are going wildly sideways, everything may seem to have changed.
In reality, nothing has changed. Every agency keeps sticking up for their interests.
For one, there’s a political faction of the Presidential Administration.
They are tasked with one thing only: breeze through the September general election
and March 2024 presidential vote.
For this faction, the war is merely a political factor to consider.
Here’s a set of circumstances that must be taken into account.
The executive of this faction live in a parallel world of opinion polls and election campaign guidelines.
For them, a full-blown war with a snowballing death toll is just a challenge.
They stand for the loyal core voting for the big guys because they are the big guys that can be relied on.
From this faction’s perspective, all weakness should be s__tcanned at all costs.
The war interferes with their job duties. It doesn’t help them at all.
So, the war must be shepherded out of the public domain.
News bulletins from the battlefield are upsetting the voters and depressing the heck out of them.
It’s not just that there is no good news.
There can be no good news. No one gives a hoot in hell about the land grabs or land losses.
Thus, for political execs, the war incurs losses without conferring any gains.
On this worldview, no war, let alone no compulsory tours of duty, should be around by the fall.
Let it all be a background process and not mess with the voters.
These are the goals political managers have in mind.
Their one and only KPI and, naturally, their meaning of life is extending the regime ad infinitum.
But there are those whose job is strikingly different.
There’s the Defense Ministry, for one. This agency isn’t just responsible for the war — throughout the hostilities,
it has devolved into its main lobbyist as well as the major legislator.
WAR AS A BOOSTER
You’d be remiss if you thought the Defense Ministry were pushing for these bills just to cozy up to their higher-ups.
The more the government is forcing people to interact with a bureaucratic entity,
the more powerful this entity becomes.
The ministry will hit the public with a choice: either you interact or you’re going to jail.
Even on the surface of it, just imagine the level of corruption
and illegal enrichment dovetailing the new legislation.
Suppose you’re running a large company. You aren’t exactly a tycoon.
Those are a separate class having other ways of solving their issues.
But you’re a regional businessperson running a company of several thousand personnel.
Your regional army draft officer reports to his higher-ups in terms of the intake.
He doesn’t give a crap where these recruits are coming from.
Moreover, if they are facing a five-year prison term, they won’t be holding up in tornado shelters.
Chances are, they’ll voluntarily join the army.
The draft officer just doesn’t care.
You do, though. You’re fretting about whether the army shuttle buses screech
to a halt at the front door of your office and halve your personnel in a flash.
What can you do to throw the Grim Reaper off the trail?
How much are you willing to pay to prevent the draft officer from wrecking your people and your business?
How much more are you willing to pay to help hit the regional mobilization targets
at the expense of your rival, enemy, or ill-wisher?
The answer is simple. You’ll max out on your credit cards to pay.
The more power the Defense Ministry gains, the wider their wiggle room for illegal enrichment.
The current scope of this process is anyone’s guess,
but it must be huge as it involves those who are empowered
to send 10s and 100s of thousands to their deaths.
AT ODDS
The Defense Ministry has amassed a lot of power in a long while. Perhaps it’s even unprecedented.
Yeah, the generals used to be lording over their soldiers and treating them like trash.
But from the resource distribution standpoint, their power was may be more limited than
that of a regional Investigative Committee honcho, let alone the FSB.
Spy agencies and law enforcement have always boasted a powerful lobbyist potential.
But that’s not the kind of lever the army ever had.
In Russia’s decision-making structure, the army was viewed as more of a threat than a prop for the regime.
But things are different, and we are embroiled in a war. Political leadership may be skeptical of their generals,
but now they’re the ones playing first fiddle.
However disastrous the top brass’ failure, no one is capable of hitting back at them at the moment.
That’s why the military can be kicking the parliament doors wide open and getting whatever they want.
However, their wants is something the political factions execs have to deal with.
They’d be elated to be able to forget about the damn war.
They’ve set their sights on the upcoming elections, and their interests are absolutely out of step
with those of the military leadership.
People were never particularly enthusiastic about repression.
Contrary to what some may think, people don’t like eye-watering prison terms handed out
to political opponents and the insane legislation, either.
A year before the war started, opinion polls showed people being more concerned
about the state-mandated violence than the mounting crime rates.
Mass repression is more frightening than an armed assailant.
When the parliament is considering a felony charge bill for draft dodgers,
it is at odds with the political leadership’s two major goals. One is drafting those who don’t mind it.
Two is the lack of punishment for those who opt out of leaping into a trench.
If these two conditions are met, any mobilization drive or other form of the war seeping
into people’s everyday lives becomes background noise.
It doesn’t distract from political objectives, nor is it jarring on people’s nerves.
But the military don’t give two s__ts about this logic. They are strangers to political interests.
The only interests they are preoccupied with are those of their own agency.
They seek more clout and better performance in terms of the intake numbers.
Simply put, the Presidential Administration is interested in live voters — the military are interested
in expendable manpower. This is where the two forces of seemingly the same political system are at odds.
The balance between the two is frail. It hinges upon the current situation.
The closer election day draws, the more the influence of the political faction. Generals don’t win elections.
On the other hand, the worse the battlefield plight, the more the influence of the military leadership.
Domestic policy wizards won’t hold the Melitopol front together.
They did their job a year ago as it rigged the referendum vote. But they are garbage at shooting firearms.
When you have two polarly different sets of goals, the public outcome of your efforts
will likely be dualistic as well.
Do you know why? 17 months into the war, the political system has yet to be confronted
with the question regarding their actual goals.
Yesterday, you were storming Kyiv and reviving the Russian Empire.
Tomorrow, your sole intention is to suffer through the election campaign.
If you think that madness only governs propagandist federal TV networks with mutually
exclusive statements bundled together in the same sentence, that’s not true.
The propaganda merely echoes the mess the current power system finds itself in.
There are no shared goals and no capabilities to reach them.
This mess paves the way for individual goals that one can only reach on their own.
Some strive for a clean election blowout.
Others yearn for a drawn-out war and seek additional 100s of thousands of Russian souls.
Amid this mess, each side is seeking to reach their goal on their own.
But they are blind to the fact that their goal doesn’t align with the objective of the system as a whole.
After all, people have lost track of this objective, and we doubt if there’s any at all.
See you tomorrow!