Boris Ustyugov. Virtual war

Virtual war
Boris Ustyugov

Publication date: March 4, 2004

In Ladimir, during the four years of his presidency, Putin did not fulfill his main election promise in 2000 - he did not end the war in Chechnya. It was then, in the fall of 1999, that the presidential election campaign of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin strangely coincided with the beginning of the second stage of the Chechen conflict . It was then, after strange explosions of residential buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk and the invasion of Dagestan, that President Yeltsin signed a decree on the start of hostilities. Further events developed according to a very clear scenario. On February 7, federal tanks entered Grozny, and on March 20, the acting The president flew to the Chechen capital on a fighter plane from Sochi and uttered his catchphrase to the whole world, which is now inconvenient to remember. After which, without a hitch, he became the legitimate president of the country and supreme commander in chief.

What has changed in and around the rebellious republic over these four years? Is that war over? Have the terrorists been destroyed? Does Chechnya, as a subject of the Federation, bring revenue to the budget?

The most surprising thing is that you can’t even ask the president himself about this - in all these years, Putin has never once mentioned a word about any specific time frame for ending hostilities and solving the Chechen problem (for comparison, you can cite a simple and clear economic problem to double GDP by 2010 ). If we approach this strictly rationally, then such actions by the head of state indicate a complete lack of planning in domestic politics and, accordingly, the unprofessionalism and spontaneity of all special operations and political decisions in Chechnya.

However, can such a formidable and powerful agency as the FSB, which is in full charge of the Chechen operation, be so dense? The Duma elections that passed like clockwork and the strongest PR propaganda of the activities of the domestic special services (all the shelves are littered with books about intelligence, and series about special forces are shown at the highest rating time on TV) indicate that no. The reasons for the failure of the Chechen campaign are simple. Unlike political games and intrigues, in which the domestic secret agency in company with the Kremlin administration has become so skilled in recent years, the Chechen war is a real phenomenon. The virtual figures of our politicians, the war of incriminating evidence, even the beating of oligarchs cannot be compared in any way with what the state leadership, without knowing it, did in the Caucasus.

It's similar to the movie Ghost , where Patrick Sweezy's main character tries to reach his lover's brain while being a disembodied spirit. His attempts to influence real life are sometimes accompanied by success - he can, by force of will, move beer caps and snatch newspapers from the hands of frightened subway passengers. And then the ghost, trained by his colleagues, commits a very real murder in order to restore justice.

Almost like ours. Recently, all reports about Chechen events can be clearly divided into three categories. The first is the success of local operations to free hostages and other “field” work of special rapid reaction forces. Moreover, you can talk for as long as you like about the advantages of this or that tactic of mopping up and conducting other military operations, but thanks to the efforts of official information services and press secretaries, any, even a well-planned and executed operation of the federal forces looks like an accidental result of a successful combination of circumstances.

The second category of messages from Chechnya are very clumsy purely political attempts to present the situation in the region as a “transition to peaceful life.” What, for example, is worth the expulsion of refugees from Ingush camps to their homeland, the “constitutional” referendum and the election of the President of Chechnya ? Such moves could only have occurred to the most mossy staff generals, but not to the witty, cunning and brilliant (according to the generally accepted opinion) people from the Russian special services. It remains to attribute these attempts to the peculiarities of the mental activity of officials, who certainly want to bring real life to a virtual, that is, completely ethereal, denominator that they understand.

The third category of news related to Chechnya is the most dangerous for the image of the Russian president, since it shows the complete helplessness of the FSB in the fight against terrorism and the separatist movement in a single state. This news looks almost like the tricks of a ghost in a movie - they are not built into a clear system and do not always make sense.

These, of course, are reports of new terrorist attacks, the responsibility for which lies entirely with the country's operational services. It was they who missed the perfectly planned capture of the theater center on Dubrovka. It was they who, a few hours before the explosion at Avtozavodskaya, ordered the Moscow police to check all Caucasians in the metro, because although they knew that something was being prepared, they did not know what and where. FSB operatives, it seems, were not at all aware of the planned explosions in Tushino and the preparation of a terrorist attack near the State Duma, which ended with a suicide bombing near the National.

Also strange are the attempts of the special services to introduce an information blockade of the actions of militants by passing laws on the responsibility of the media for covering terrorist attacks and closing information resources, which, according to the FSB, cover the Chechen problem one-sidedly. Moreover, for some reason these measures do not at all concern the Internet sites of the separatists themselves , which exist in the public domain and seem to be thriving.

The latest example of oddities of this kind is a shootout in the Chechen mountains, which ended with the death of Ruslan Gelayev . Almost a village detective - two fighters accidentally discovered a man in the forest and entered into battle with him. Everyone died. It is the randomness of all these “operations”, “increased vigilance” after each tragedy, the awkward and inadequate “symmetrical responses” that speak of complete disorganization and confusion in the top leadership of the FSB, despite the good preparedness of purely security units.

Obviously, Vladimir Putin is well aware of the structural problems of the department, which he himself recently headed and whose employees have now occupied leading positions in the Russian government system. The problem is that Vladimir Putin is an ordinary official with bureaucratic thoughts and character. An official who is used to existing in the system. An official for whom a real war is just a way to solve political problems and control the consciousness of the electorate. And holding such an official accountable for the failure of the Chechen operation and the death of thousands of civilians and military personnel is probably possible, but it is pointless.

The war has been won, constitutional order has been restored, and the terrorists are dying one after another. What else can official Putin think about on the eve of new elections? Of course, about the fact that the electorate needs to be united around something new - for example, around a new war . Moreover, judging by past experience, this war should be as virtual as possible - after all, officials do not know how to bring real wars to completion.