Counting the years when Russia was not at war with someone is difficult. After all, Russians have always essentially been serfs of their tsars, masters, communists, oligarchs and security services. Most of them traditionally answer in surveys that they are not interested in politics. Now the time is coming in Russia when politics is starting to take an interest in Russians. After all, on behalf of this defenceless people, dictator Putin started his war with Ukraine. The latter knows nothing else but to go to war without complaint, believing that the “tsar” should think for him and that he bears full responsibility for what the Russian Federation is doing.
There is no justification for the people, in whose name their leaders, through their intermediaries, commit lawlessness on Ukrainian lands. And for some reason, they think that they are not to blame for this, so accordingly there will be no punishment for this.
However, it is already quite clear that the production of the myth of good Russians who were misled by the bad Putin will not work. How can war criminals who invaded foreign territories, violated internationally recognized borders and committed blatant genocide of the Ukrainian nation, hiding behind fictitious concern for the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, avoid responsibility?
Although Putin is already running out of money to finance this bloody war, he is ready to stand with an outstretched hand in front of Iran and North Korea to somehow pay for military expenses and delay a little the time of his final defeat in Ukraine.
He decided to hang around with the United States and Europe, which are helping Ukraine, when America alone has a GDP of almost 30 trillion dollars, while its own GDP is just over two trillion dollars. This is even though the Russian Federation has no income from the introduction of big technologies. They have few industries, and only oil and gas, which are becoming increasingly difficult for Moscow to sell every month due to sanctions that are critically narrowing the circle of buyers of its energy resources.
But the problem is that if the Soviet Union was a totalitarian communist state, now Russia has been transformed by its leaders into a totalitarian country where hypernationalism dominates. Which made its ideology much more convincing to the communist population. Otherwise, the number of deaths, which is orders of magnitude greater than the number of those killed in the war in Afghanistan, would have already been able to overthrow Putin’s regime.
For now, the dictator is still able to lure simpletons into his war with huge payouts, just like for Russia. But after a while, Russians may think twice about signing up for it for the chance to voluntarily jump into the meat grinder. What good is a cash bonus for signing a contract if you get maimed or killed? Dead people don’t need money anymore.
So far, Putin’s regime has managed to more or less cope with replenishing its terrorist army, pumping out young men from the hinterlands, and non-Russian provinces, emptying prisons and promising exorbitant bonuses to contract soldiers. However, all these sources of recruits are running out.
Putin is delaying a major mobilization that would bring the reality of war directly to Russia’s core regions, including Moscow and St. Petersburg. That’s why he doesn’t want to demand that the generals dramatically increase their troop levels in this way. Sure, he can get new soldiers, but when Muscovites are suddenly faced with thousands of “Cargo 200s” (the dead) returning home every month, the war will soon become as hateful to them as the despot himself.
It’s easy to be a super-patriot when the war doesn’t affect you personally. But when the Russian soldiers liquidated in Ukraine start arriving en masse in the capital of the Russian empire, their mothers in Moscow will start looking at Putin’s proclaimed so-called SVO with completely different eyes. And after that, his time will be up.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is Putin’s Vietnam. He won’t be able to convince anyone, even with his TV propagandists, that Russia is winning this bitter standoff. He knows that this war is unpopular with his people, and sending recruits en masse to the front lines could provoke protests against his regime.
In the summer, Putin tried to increase the number of his troops by sharply raising the one-time payment to recruits to 400,000 rubles. He believes that these bonuses for mercenaries, equivalent to two to three years’ wages in some rural areas of the Russian Federation, will be enough to recruit enough recruits to cover the losses of 1,000 to 1,100 soldiers who die daily in frontal assaults in the Donbas.
To successfully resist the onslaught of the Moscow horde, the Ukrainians need continued assistance through increased numbers of precision weapons and Western intelligence support. Our allies in America and Europe must redouble their efforts to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs to destroy strategic Russian targets and command posts and choke off the logistical routes that bring weapons, fuel, and food to the front lines.
When Russia is sending 30,000 men every month to serve in the army and war, it is simultaneously taking 30,000 working people out of its economy. The compliance of Russians is astounding, they are constantly exchanging one totalitarian leader or system for another. And now they are again sacrificing their sons to satisfy the ambitions of Putin, who has simply gone mad with his unlimited power over Russia.
The Russians’ “military art”, consists of the dubious tactics of killing their own soldiers during “meat assaults”, which incompetent generals have chosen, to satisfy the hyperbolic pride of the Russian dictator.
Already some representatives of the Russian establishment have begun to realize what a fiasco Russia’s war against Ukraine has become, and what irreparable damage has been done to the Russian Federation in economic and international terms. The price to pay for everything that has been done will be inevitable. After all, the Russian Federation is already short of several million workers, and this trend will only worsen irreversibly. This means that the majority of the workforce in Russia will not be replaced for the next 25 years or more. Especially given the sharp decline in the birth rate in this country.
Arrogant and incompetent, Putin looks powerful when he can silence his opponents. But when he can’t, as in Ukraine, he resorts to nuclear threats, recruiting new young conscripts, and attacking the Ukrainian energy grid. His twisted imperial mindset produces a scorched-earth version of the future – “if I can’t have it, no one else will.”
The legacy of the Kremlin’s top man will be the demographic death of Russia. He will never overcome the Ukrainians’ will to resist, and he could have achieved much more by establishing strong economic ties with Ukraine instead of invading. But Putin decided to act harshly and impudently, the fruits of which he is reaping today. The 19% interest rate is only the beginning. The Russian Federation’s economy is terribly unbalanced, and there is a constant brain drain abroad. After all, educated people do not see a future for themselves in totalitarian Russia.
Before the war with Ukraine, Russia had a fairly powerful army of well-trained and prepared soldiers. Especially in the elite brigades: airborne troops, special forces, and marines. But since Putin, for whom the destruction of the statehood of Ukraine became an obsession, did not know how to think strategically, he threw all his well-trained troops into the war ahead of time. All of them were successfully destroyed by the Ukrainian army.
At the moment, the once large Russian army consists of almost 90% raw, untrained recruits. Although the return of a Stalin-era innovation – blocking detachments – allows Russian generals to successfully drive it into “meat attacks”, during which only 3 percent of Russian infantry sent to storm Ukrainian positions often survive.
After the end of the war started by this Kremlin “generalissimo”, the Russian Federation, if it can survive within its current borders, will need at least a decade to rebuild the army that Putin destroyed. All this was the result of the Kremlin’s incompetence and impudence.
The post-Soviet Russian army was mothballed in the past and never developed. The Ukrainian military was trained in the West and had the opportunity to change, improve and develop their professional skills. However, the main miscalculation and the root cause of all of Moscow’s problems is that Putin decided to start a war with Ukraine.
The Russian military machine and the military-industrial complex, geared towards war, allow the usurper to prolong the invasion of Ukrainian lands a little longer. Although he might now want to put the “genie of war” back in the bottle, the time for this has already been hopelessly lost.
Putin, clinging to his war in Ukraine, is deliberately bringing Russia closer to its collapse. He has shown the whole world the true face of the Russian Federation, its dystopian society, which Russia managed to hide for a long time, hiding it behind the facade of the feigned prosperity of its capital, Moscow.
The consequences of Putin’s war in Ukraine are already a demographic crisis, short life expectancy, alcoholism, drug use, suicides and an imbalance in the ratio of men to women. Russian society is increasingly deteriorating, and if everything continues at the same pace, then it is unlikely that Russians as a people will have any positive future.
At one time, the ideologists of Putinism came up with such a dubious formula that Russia is Putin, and Putin is Russia. It seems that the dictator is surrounded by sycophants and lackeys, and he believes in it himself. Now Russians are faced with a dilemma: to choose the destruction of Russia or the destruction of Putin. The final choice is theirs.
Victor Kaspruk
Главком
