A good week everybody. Just a few quick takes before I run off for work:
(a) De Standaard (in Dutch) reports on Putin’s speech at a giant sports arena in Moscow. A claimed 200,000 showed up, but the paper reports that many were government employees told to attend with their families.
They also report on the hunt for scapegoats and “fifth columnists” in progress (edited DeepL translation):
[…] More and more stories are circulating in Russia that Putin is not at all satisfied with the way the war is going. He had expected the Zelensky government to be eliminated in a few days. That plan failed, and some high-ranking military officials are being presented with the bill for it. They are paying the price because they misinformed Putin, according to Kremlin analyst Andrei Soldatov.
Already last week, the Kremlin-critical news site Meduza reported that Sergei Beseda was being interrogated. Beseda is the commander of the 5th Service, a special branch of the FSB intelligence service. He was reportedly placed under house arrest, although this was later denied again. Then this week the news buzzed – it was confirmed yesterday by the newspaper Kommersant – that Roman Gavrilov, the number two in the National Guard, has been fired. The National Guard was already suffering heavy losses in Ukraine.
It is certainly too early to speak of a purge in the Kremlin, but unrest in the upper echelons seems to be growing. It also became known on Friday that Arkady Dvorkovich has resigned as chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation, which is investing heavily in the tech industry in Moscow to develop a Russian equivalent of Silicon Valley. He is also president of the international chess federation Fide.
Dvorkovich was deputy prime minister between 2012 and 2018. He had spoken out against the war this week, to which an MP accused him of treason. Putin’s message, earlier this week, that traitors are also in his own ranks and must be fought, clearly did not fall on deaf ears.
Der Spiegel (in German) reports on more astroturfing
[…] However, the enthusiasm for war displayed with the “Z” is likely to be genuine joy only in rare cases. As in previous years, entire public sector workforces were bused to Lushniki Stadium in the Russian capital to celebrate the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Western correspondents confirmed this on the spot Friday. Pressure from superiors and financial incentives likely prompted most to wave flags. Students who posed in flash mobs told the independent online media “Meduza” in Riga that they had been asked by deans to participate. According to research by “Meduza,” city administrations, veterans’ associations or youth organizations loyal to the Kremlin were often behind the actions.[…]
Now to what degree will the population “swallow” the propaganda? A decent proxy is what sources they get their information from. Again the same Der Spiegel article, citing research by Radio Liberty (formerly Radio Free Europe):
Quite a few Russians are likely to support the war because they are lied to by their own president and the state media and have no access to independent information. What is there to object to a courageous rescue operation by Russian sisters and brothers in eastern Ukraine who are being threatened by far-right Ukrainians? The fact that many interviewees feel pride has to do with the fact that Russian propaganda constantly draws historical parallels between the Soviet army’s victory over Adolf Hitler and the current mission in Ukraine. A longing for old greatness has long been expressed by many people in Russia. Three-quarters of respondents in the poll cited by Radio Liberty said they watch television to learn about the war, 87 percent of them on state television. Only just over five percent of respondents used VPN servers to access independent information media blocked in Russia, according to the report, eleven percent watched videos on YouTube, and seven percent used the previously unrestricted Telegram news service, where independent information can be found.
Fear of persecution and personal consequences also naturally affects the willingness to answer truthfully in a survey. The questioners noted concern and reticence especially among respondents who were skeptical or critical of the war.
(b) Irene Kenyon at Into The Void — who spent much of her youth in the then-Ukrainian SSR — offers a take that’s both contrasting and complementary. I’ve been wondering for a while if a protracted, stalemated conflict would actually serve Putin best on the domestic front — cf. the permanent 3-way conflict in George Orwell’s “1984”. She quotes Commentary’s Noah Rothman as pretty much writing that. But she adds:
I would disagree with the assessment that Putin is somehow pleased with himself or that he really considers the return to the bad old Soviet days a success. My assessment is that he’s desperately trying to pretend this is what he wanted from the start because he cannot appear to be anything other than strong and flawless.
Putting his foreign intelligence team on house arrest and blaming them for providing bad intelligence about Ukraine (after all, the Russian forces are still unable to topple major cities, including Kyiv and Russia calling in Chechen thugs and Middle-Eastern “volunteers” as reinforcements) is particularly telling about just how bad this invasion has been for Russia. Yes, Putin wanted to transform Russia back into a superpower – a derzhava. However, although he spent years integrating Russia into the global economy and ensuring that the West was dependent on Russia’s energy exports, he still never let go of the old Soviet notions about defense spending, approving a significant state armament program in 2011 to modernize the Russian armed forces, and prompting the resignation of widely respected Finance Minister Alexey Kurdin that year. He wanted a military superpower as well as an economic one.
Putin probably assessed that the West had too much vested interest in Russia to do anything but message its displeasure with insignificant sanctions like it did after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. […]
I doubt Putin expected this, nor did he want this. He did not expect the West to say, “Enough is enough!” He envisioned his superpower Russia holding the economic upper hand over the West, while his military forced former Soviet republics back into the fold. Neither is happening, and Putin has to pretend that the Soviet Union was the strength of Russia—its very spirit and power. Russian military vehicles are even flying Soviet flags as they invade Ukraine.
The isolation? It’s good.
The lack of basic products from the West? That’s good too.
Suffering economic decline? Bread lines that were so ubiquitous in Soviet Russia? They’ll make Russians stronger.
And while Rothman is correct when he writes—with a certain amount of almost inappropriate glee—that the Russians are getting what they deserve and want with the return of the Soviet Union, I would remind him that thousands of them oppose Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and are willing to be tossed in jail for their protests. I would also remind him that the “nostalgia” for the Soviet Union is largely based in the crony capitalism and corruption that followed its fall, for which Putin bears a significant amount of responsibility.
(c) So what armament is the US transfering instead of playing shuttle with obsolete MiG-29s? The Jerusalem Post has the lowdown.
(d) The Daily Telegraph has a piece (paywalled; cached copy here) on how Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service is helping Ukraine win the drone war.
TO BE UPDATED with developments today.
ADDENDUM 1: The Daily Telegraph has a long analysis piece on Decoding Putin’s Next Move: (paywalled original; cached copy).
And forget the “official” death toll of about 500 from Russian sources:
The bodies of more than 2,500 Russian soldiers have been transported to Belarus under the cover of darkness to disguise the true number of casualties in Ukraine, doctors have suggested.
Locals in the Homel, a region in southeastern Belarus less than 150 miles north of Kyiv, have told of hospital wards crammed full of “terribly disfigured” soldiers and morgues overflowing with corpses, as Russia quietly transports its wounded and dead across the border.
One doctor at Homel’s regional clinical hospital told Radio Free Europe that, by March 13, more than 2,500 bodies had been shipped by train or plane back to Russia from the region, though The Telegraph has been unable to independently verify the figure.
Another medic in Mazyr, a town home to 100,000 people, added that efforts to transport bodies back to Russia were increasingly taking place under the cover of darkness to minimise unwanted scrutiny. […]
locals in Homel are reporting an influx of bodies in “black sacks”, with Mazyr’s only morgue reportedly overflowing by March 3.
“Passengers at the Mazyr train station were shocked by the number of corpses being loaded on the train,” one man said. “After people started shooting video, the military caught them and ordered them to remove it.”
There have also been reports of a surge of injured Russian soldiers arriving in need of medical attention.“There are a lot of deaths. Limbs are being cut off and there are a lot of shrapnel wounds,” a human rights worker in Mazyr told The Telegraph last week. “All these are mostly very young guys born in 1998-2002.”
The sheer number of patients has reportedly triggered a shortage of surgeons, with locals being discharged to make space. There are also fears that there may soon be a shortage of everyday medications for the general population.“There are so many wounded Russians there – it’s just a horror,” one resident told Radio Free Europe. “[They’re] terribly disfigured. It is impossible to listen to their moans throughout the whole hospital.”
But even in Homel, the exact picture is murky as doctors and nurses treating the injured have been ordered not to discuss the situation – underlining just how desperate officials are to stop casualty numbers reaching the Russian public.
“Those who could have said something, they were fired or they have quit,” the human rights worker said last week. “Those who have remained are forbidden to even take their phones to work. There is total control.”[…] Russia acknowledged on March 2 that nearly 500 soldiers had been killed and 1,597 injured, but has offered no updates since. Meanwhile US intelligence this week put the figure at 7,000 – an estimate deemed “conservative” – while Ukraine claims 14,000 Russians have so far died.
ADDENDUM 2: Zelensky to address Israeli Knesset via Zoom tonight . Will also be livestreamed on HaBima Square in Tel-Aviv. [Update: report on the speech by the Jerusalem Post and by the Times of Israel. ]
ADDENDUM 3: Check out Dave Freer’s take on his public facebook wall.
ADDENDUM 4: Mark Felton on Kyiv/Kiev’s tragic history
ADDENDUM 5: Australian senator Jim Molan (L) thinks China would not be entirely displeased if Russia were bled white in this war.
And on an amusing note, the Belarusian ambassador to Ukraine was given a gift of “thirty pieces of silver” upon his departure.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 