Ukraine, vernal equinox edition: David Petraeus sees a “stalemate”; revealing 2018 lecture by Finnish intelligence colonel on Russia

Greetings on the first day of spring, and (for me the two are inseparable) the likely birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach. (The date we know for certain was that of his baptism, March 23, 1685 O.S.)

(a) Remember General David Petraeus (of Iraq “surge” fame, later CIA Director) who got cashiered following a marital indiscretion? Here he is being interviewed about the situation in Ukraine (yes, it’s CNN, yuck): in one word, he says the Ukrainians have fought Russia to a ‘stalemate’.

(b) This lecture from 2018 was very revealing lecture for me. I don’t speak a blessed word of Finnish (other than perhaps the curse “Perkele” — freely “the devil!”) but fortunately there are excellent English subtitles. The speaker, Col. (Ret.) Martti Kari, used to serve in Finnish military intelligence — and Finland, sitting on Russia’s doorstep, and having its own complex history with Russia, has a special interest and view of Russia.

Speedreaders might prefer to click through to YouTube, then click on the “…” [=more options] on the bottom right of the video, then “open transcript”.

Below is a version with synthesized English audio dubbing. It sounds so artificial to my eyes that I actually prefer the Finnish audio, so I can at least hear the inflection as I see the subtitles.

A few nuggets among many I picked up (views paraphrased are his own):

• Russians fear chaos, like during the Mongol era, like during the Time of Troubles, and during the Yeltsin era. They always have to have an autocratic strong leader at the top, whether it’s a Tsar, a Secretary-General, or Putin.
• “Russianness consists of three things: autocracy, orthodoxy, and narodnost” [common people-ness? “There is no word for that in Finnish”] [On the “power distance” cross-cultural metric, Finns, like Scandinavians more broadly, are near the bottom of the scale.]
• Also: the autocrat is infallible [like the Pope]. Whatever errors he makes are always the fault of a Boyar, or whatever name that class goes by in any given era – Nomenklatura, Oligarchs…
• (forgot to mention that lots of words for taxation and torture techniques in Russian are apparently of Mongol/Tatar origin) and “when Mongol rule collapsed, the Mongols didn’t just go away, they assimilated into the population, especially into the Boyar nobility”
• A little warfare in the border regions is good for the patriotic spirit” (Tsar Nikolai I, “but it could have been Putin”)
• ‘There’s always been a tension among the Russian intelligentsia between Zapadniki=westernizers, and Slavophiles’ The latter stress more the Asian features of the Russian soul, the mystical qualities. Think Peter the Great or Catharina II vs. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
• Corruption has been endemic in Russia since Mongol times, when it was a way to survive. There are rules of the game: you are only allowed to steal as much as your rank allows, and you’re not allowed to steal from those above you. Some oligarchs [he mentions Khodorkovsky] got into prison because they stole above their station.
• Understand that Russian has two words for truth. The [formal] “istina” [from a root meaning ‘identical’] for objective truth (A=A, 2+2=4, the Earth revolves around the sun,…) “pravda” [from a root meaning ‘right’, ‘just’] for ‘official’ truth. [Cf.: “pravoslav” = orthodox [in faith]].
• see also the word “vranyo“, freely “[not-so-]polite fiction”, a falsehood that all pretend to accept as truth.
• Speaking in 2018, he predicted that Putin would retire in 2024, and said he was grooming two candidate successors: Alexei Dyumin and Yevgeny Zinichev (meanwhile, killed in an accident last year).

Stay tuned for further updates throughout the day.

Piano arrangement of Bach’s organ prelude on De Profundis Clamavi/From deep anguish I cry out [O L-rd], BWV 687

ADDENDUM: in Der Spiegel, there’s an article about how some expat Russian opponents of Putin are now trying to revive the flag and memory of the Novgorod Republic. I vaguely remembered that Novgorod was the only major Russian town never to be conquered by the Mongols, but did not realize the Novgorod Republic was crushed by Tsar Ivan III and then more-or-less airbrushed from Tsarist Russian history, as a ‘cul-de-sac’ deviating from the supposedly ‘natural’ autocracy of Russia.

Ironically, the “Russian” flag they are trying to replace was itself a permutation of the Dutch flag: Peter the Great was an admirer of the Dutch, and particularly of their maritime skill and business acumen.

ADDENDUM 2: Former UK veterans affairs minister Johnny Mercer, an erstwhile artillery officer who did three tours in Afghanistan, visited Kyiv/Kiev, and wrote in the Telegraph about what he saw. He is convinced that the hits on civilian apartment buildings etc. are not “collateral damage” of attempts to hit some military target, but deliberate fire at civilian targets.

I was once a “targeteer”; it was my trade. The cruise missiles coming into Kyiv are not clipping high-rise apartment blocks as they zero in on some Ukrainian secret military facility. They are landing right on target – often right through the front door – bottom centre of the block. 

These are no mistakes. It is deliberate targeting of civilians in their homes with the deliberate intent of breaking their will and accelerating the collapse of the Ukrainian state. We cannot let that happen. 

Otherwise, he is full of admiration for the spirit of the defenders.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph, it is noted that Russian state TV cut off transmission while Putin was limping off the stage. Also, that a claimed 200,000+ people attended a speech in a stadium with room for 81,000, and that many people were bused in without their consent.

The BBC, which had spoken to crowds entering the Luzhniki, said many worked in the public sector and had been “pressured” to attend by employers.

“I’ll be here for a while and then I’ll leave … I think most people here don’t support the war. I don’t,” said a Moscow metro worker who insisted he had been ordered to the stadium. 

An unnamed woman told Sova Vision, a Russian media outlet, that she had no alternative.

“We were put on a bus and brought here,” she said. There were claims that some people went, had their tickets stamped and then left immediately without having to listen.

Students said they had been given the day off lectures if they went. Putin’s supporters waved Russian flags and banners with the “Z” symbol that has been painted on all the Russian vehicles that have invaded Ukraine. The event’s hosts even wore ribbons folded in the Z-shape in their lapels. 

Unlike many commentators, I don’t think Putin is insane in either the legal or the common sense of the word. His “crazy” seems to be play-acted for intimidation. His rash decision to invade now — in an attempt to reach what appears to be a long-standing objective — may have been caused by unrealistic intel. (He will have to throw a few security officials off the sled to the wolves if he wants to have a prayer of holding on to power.) But I cannot shake the sense, somehow, that he is acting with the urgency of a man who knows he is living on borrowed time.

ADDENDUM 3: This looks like an unforced error on the part of Zelensky. Then again, he’s been doing a near-impossible job under tremendous stresses — he’d have to be superhuman not to make some slips.

ADDENDUM 4: count on the self-declared champions of the “Palestinian” cause to display their usual appalling taste in allies.

Meanwhile, of all the bizarre conspiracy theories I’ve heard, this one translated by MEMRI takes the cake.

Moscow-Based Syrian journalist Zain[*] Alabiden Shiban said in a March 13, 2022 show on Al-Ikhbariya TV (Syria) that the U.S. has turned Ukraine into an “experiment ground” where it is developing a virus that could “exterminate the Russian race.” He said that America has “thousands of samples from the Slavic race” and is using biological labs in Ukraine to engineer a disease that attacks only Russians.

Er… what “race” does he think Ukrainians themselves belong to? Even assuming that it were technically possible to develop a race-selective bioweapon, this would be just about the equivalent of Flemish people trying to develop a selective bioweapon against the Dutch or the Walloons…

Maybe he can explain this to Putin, who seems to labor under the misapprehension that Russians and Ukrainians are one race, which of course both “deserve” to be “united” under him as their vozhd or neo-Tsar…

Then again, “vranyo” (see above) may be a Russian word, but the concept is thoroughly at home in the Middle East…

And also via MEMRI, “Saudi Arabia and UAE refuse to side with US against Russia because US won’t side with them against Iran“. Is there literally anything Joe Bidet hasn’t turned into a pig’s breakfast yet?

This is likely wishful thinking on the part of Roger Kimball: Biden’s handlers are preparing to eject Biden and Kamala. Could that be why the subject of Hunter Biden’s laptop is no longer off-limits even in the DNC Palace Guard Media?

[*] I do know what the name “Zain” means in Arabic, but its Hebrew meaning “pr*ck” is thoroughly “what’s in a name” in this case.