The Real Russia. Today.

Monday, September 26, 2022

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Feature stories

🔥 New wave of arsons at military enlistment offices and local administrations unfolds across Russia (2-min read)

🚨 Local resident opens fire in military enlistment office in Irkutsk region (2-min read)

✊ Women in Dagestan and other regions protest mobilization: ‘Our children are not fertilizer!’ (3-min read)

🥔 ‘Let them run’: Lukashenko speaks about Russians leaving the country to escape the draft (2-min read)

📺 ‘Blame the West and scapegoat the commissars’: The Kremlin’s latest propaganda guide (mobilization edition) (5-min read)

💰 ‘Immortal love’ and heirloom real estate: Team Navalny exposes the secret wealth of Gen. Alexey Sedov, head of the FSB’s Second Service (2-min read)

Opinion and analysis

☢️ Those power-hungry Yanks must be taught to fear a Russian nuke attack if they press on in Ukraine

Dmitri Trenin, political analyst (Russia in Global Affairs): In an interview with Fyodor Lukyanov, Trenin warns that the U.S. has stopped acknowledging Russia’s “red lines,” believing that it stands to lose little by challenging Moscow even in areas that the Kremlin feels under existential threat. The “American strategy of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia” in Ukraine is based on the conviction that Russia will not use nuclear weapons, even though Putin has indicated in past statements that he would sooner destroy the planet than see “a world without Russia.”

U.S. decisionmakers are likely “tempted” to use the “current situation in Ukraine” as an opportunity to solve the West’s “Russia problem,” not unlike WWII solved Europe’s “Germany problem.” Trenin also suggests that Putin could rationally conclude that the existence of the Russian state is threatened in Ukraine, given that NATO is effectively waging war against Russia by supplying Kyiv with a flood of modern weapons. (Trenin does not address the reason for these weapons transfers.)

Bring back the fear! At the center of Trenin’s comments is the notion that American officials don’t fear Russian nuclear weapons enough. In fact, he says Washington even believes that nuclear attacks in “the Ukrainian or European theaters” would not be “catastrophic” to U.S. interests — essentially accusing the Pentagon of embracing the idea of a “winnable nuclear war.” Moscow must convince the Americans that its nuclear deterrence in Ukraine would also feature strikes against the U.S. itself, he explains.

Washington doesn’t get it: The West misinterprets Putin’s nuclear rhetoric as a threat to use nuclear weapons when really he is only trying to “deter the enemy,” says Trenin (not explaining the difference). He adds that Washington compounds this supposed misperception by expecting Moscow to use nuclear weapons only in Ukraine to compensate for failures in conventional combat. In fact, the Kremlin’s nuclear strike could happen outside the “theater of operations,” warns Trenin, again implying that effective Russian nuclear deterrence requires targeting something closer to America’s critical interests.

The stakes for Russia are higher: In the Ukraine war, Russia is fighting for its “fate” as a nation, says Trenin (again without explaining what he means), while America’s motivations are merely to protect its global hegemony. In fact, even “U.S. defeat in Ukraine” could subsequently rally American “satellites” to Washington, which amplifies the White House’s sense that it has nothing to lose by challenging Russia on this “existential issue.”

💀 Mobilization for the Ukraine invasion could reduce Russia’s 20-somethings to a lost generation

Maxim Mironov and Oleg Itskhoki, economists (Novaya Gazeta Europe): Citing reports of Russia’s invasion force at the start of the war, as well as estimates of casualties and new recruits since February 24 and the number of healthy soldiers now in need of R&R, Mironov and Itskhoki conclude that the Russian military currently needs to replace roughly 350,000 men killed, injured, or still fighting. To do this with draftees (who are under-trained and less motivated and therefore less effective on the battlefield), will require mobilizing 2­–3 more times people, which puts Russia’s “partial mobilization” target between 700,000 and 1 million (far higher than the Defense Ministry’s official figure of 300,000).

Most of these draftees will be men in their 20s with past military service — a population of roughly 2 million (or 3 million, if the age bracket is extended to 35), making a draft summons extremely likely for anyone meeting these criteria. Further complicating matters is the fact that the military will draft more heavily in poor and remote areas, avoiding affluent urban centers where the danger of protests is higher.

Casualties could be very high: If Russia’s new draftees are thrown into battle with insufficient training, as is expected, their casualty rate could compare to the 55-percent loss rate estimated for “Donetsk People’s Republic” troops, leading to losses among Russia’s new troops as high as 60–70 percent (15–20 percent killed and 45–50 percent injured), leaving perhaps half a million men dead or wounded. As a result, Russia could lose more than 10 percent of its men in their 20s — a demographic that’s crucial for labor and population replacement.

An antiwar movement will need class solidarity to succeed: Mironov and Itskhoki conclude by warning that draft dodging will not derail Russia’s mobilization because the military will recapture those soldiers by drafting less informed, less affluent men. In other words, draft evasion merely shifts the burden to poorer men, and mass public protest against the mobilization is the only conceivable way to prevent the mass casualties and demographic disruption they predict.

🪖 Putin’s mobilization was a choice and it’s backfiring internationally

Yuri Fyodorov, political analyst (iStories): Mobilization wasn’t Putin’s only option in response to the Ukrainian counteroffensive. For example, he could have even acknowledged the war’s failure and blamed it on Russia’s own military and used it as grounds to purge the entire political field of “potential and real adversaries in elite circles.” With colder weather coming and events on the ground in Ukraine, Russia had little reason to panic about its capacity to hold most of the occupied territories. So why is the Kremlin doubling down with mobilization and annexations?

Maybe the generals convinced Putin that the situation is even worse. Perhaps the president worried that Russia’s political elite is losing patience with the war, so he escalated, hoping to turn the tide.

The West is simultaneously unimpressed and alarmed: Instead, the administration has succeeded mainly in demonstrating the Russian military bureaucracy’s “organizational impotence” and worrying the West with talk of nuclear weapons, bolstering the perception that “the Russian nuclear threat” must be “eliminated at its source” (an apparent allusion to regime change). (Compare this to Dmitri Trenin’s comments about how the U.S. sees a “Russia problem.”)

Other recent news

• 👮 Poet Artem Kamardin beaten and raped by Russian police
• 🛂 Putin grants Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden
• ✊ In Dagestan, locals fight police on day two of mass protests against mobilization
• 🛂 FSB sends armored personnel carrier to border checkpoint 'just in case'
• 🛂 Russian border guards reportedly checking men against conscription lists and denying exit to some
• 🚨 Unwilling would-be conscript self-immolates in Ryazan
• 🚨 15 killed in school shooting in Izhevsk
• 🪖 Evgeny Prigozhin admits to creating PMC Wagner in 2014
• 🛂 Russian security services count more than 260,000 men fleeing Russia
• 💥 In Kherson, former MP Oleksiy Zhuravko dies following missile strike
• ✊ In Dagestan, residents protesting the mobilization blocked a federal highway, police fired shots into the air
• 🕊 ‘Now is the time to decide whether your life will end.’ Zelensky addresses Russians about the mobilization.
• 🪖 Kremlin thinks about mobilizing residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia
• 🪖 Russia may formally annex occupied territories on September 30
• 🪖 Head of Yakutia says residents called up ‘by mistake’ should be returned

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