Translated material
Is Russia really winning?
The BRICS summit was held in Kazan, which was attended by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Russian troops are advancing in the Donbass, and the economy of the aggressor country, despite sanctions and isolation, is coping and even growing . So, Putin won? Not quite so, Ivan Filippov, a writer and researcher of the Z-community, is sure - the right answers should be looked for not in the headlines, but in the nuances.
Many liberal bloggers, seeing the successes of the Russian Armed Forces in Donbass, believe that everything is lost for Ukraine. But they miss a lot of nuances
The main property of any propaganda is to provide simple answers to complex questions. Thus, television or any other media relieves a person of the need to think for himself and, most importantly, to draw conclusions on his own. Everything has already been done for him, he receives pre-packaged news, in which all the accents are placed. This news is extremely understandable and causes a strong emotional reaction. Please, dear citizen, we have done the whole thought process for you, you can live your life calmly and not ask unnecessary questions.
The war, now in its third year, inevitably leads to people looking for simple answers. It’s not necessarily because they are somehow bad, or stupid, or don’t want to think for themselves - it’s just that the war has been going on for a long time, and there may not be the mental strength to dive into the circumstances and nuances in detail. You tell us who wins. And no more is needed. After all, this is the most important thing in war, right? Again, this is a completely human desire. But almost always, in the search for simple answers, nuances are lost, context is lost, and the simple answer becomes simply wrong.
This time - for a change - I was hooked not on the statement of the Z-channel, but on the words of the completely anti-war-minded Yulia Latynina, written to her in response to Ilya Yashin’s tweet about the large anti-war rally planned for November 17 in Berlin:
“This is a useless and comical idea. Putin is winning. The Ukrainian Armed Forces front is collapsing. <…> The Biden administration’s plans for the total isolation of Putin have failed; the BRICS summit is in Kazan.”
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Here we have, it seems to me, an excellent example of how the reader is offered simple answers to complex questions. But each of them, as the old indecent joke said , “has a nuance.”
For example, the BRICS summit, which truly became a holiday for the Z-community. Much has been written about how the Kazan summit demonstrated the failure of the West's attempts to isolate Russia. Even the entire UN Secretary General came to Kazan - is this isolation? Everything is true, but there is a nuance.
Boris Bondarev, the only Russian diplomat who publicly spoke out against the war, wrote beautifully about why the UN Secretary General considered it possible to fly to Vladimir Putin despite the war he started and the warrant issued for his arrest by the UN (!). In short, and leaving aside the absolute immorality of this visit, the Secretary General’s job is, among other things, to meet with dictators. However, this is not the most important thing.
Putin talks a lot and often about his desire to put an end to US hegemony - the very existence of BRICS is essentially aimed at this. But of all the invited countries, only Iran is emphatically anti-American. All other states, although they may have strained relations with America (or not), trade with it well and largely depend on the American market - just like China. And this is not to mention the fact that many of the countries participating in the summit comply with the sanctions regime, and everyone simply refused to create a single BRICS currency. That is, yes, not “isolation,” but there is a nuance.
The same thing, by the way, is with the economy. Yes, Russia survived, did not cave in under the sanctions, the economy is functioning. But even here there is a nuance called the Central Bank rate of 21%, which makes any mortgage (except subsidized by the state) practically unaffordable and certainly does not help the development of any business except drug trafficking . Agree, this is an important nuance.
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Russia is huge, the Russian military machine has accelerated and is working at full capacity. These statements are undoubtedly true. But at the same time, something else is also true: the Russian army is not yet able to win the war precisely because Vladimir Putin has built his vertical of power, replacing the competent with the loyal, not paying attention to the corruption that has affected all institutions of power, which, together with the military bureaucracy, helps Now Ukraine is in a war no less than the supply of Western weapons.
And finally, to the most important thing. To Latynina’s words that “Putin is winning. The Ukrainian Armed Forces front is collapsing.” Is this true? No, not like that. First, let’s make a reservation: “not like this” does not mean victory for Ukraine and success for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The Russian army is indeed advancing. There is no point in disputing this. But there is a nuance that the Z-channels themselves write about - that is, absolutely pro-war authors who dream of Russia’s victory in the war. For example, the author of the “Voenkor Kotenok” channel, hereditary war correspondent Yuri Kotenok:
“We have an absolutely inadequate assessment of the military situation in the Northern Military District zone by society and in the media. <...> And now, with the advance of the Russian Armed Forces in the Donetsk direction and the stop of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Kursk, the media, other LOMs, chatterboxes on the TV box have already started babbling (as in February 22nd) that:
1) the front of the Ukrainian Armed Forces collapsed;
2) supplies of weapons, equipment and ammunition by the West are nearing an end for a number of reasons;
3) in a month or two the enemy will have no one or nothing to fight with, and capitulation is coming;
4) others are already tormented by doubts whether to give Lviv to the Poles, etc.” (Hereinafter, the authors' spelling and punctuation are preserved) .
Forgive me for the long quote, but this is a really important point. A war correspondent, who nevertheless has competence in the matter, writes about a “benefit performance of mischief” (it seems that the author does not fully understand the meaning of the word “benefit”), which “does not fit well with reality.”
How does the Kitten describe the real state of affairs? Like this: “The enemy’s defense did not crumble, did not disappear, did not bend. <…> To put it mildly, there is no sign of capitulation.” The military correspondent in his post refers to Russian propaganda, but his words could just as well apply to Latynina’s text. Igor Strelkov, who is sitting in the colony, echoes Kitten. There they send him dispatches about the state of affairs at the front, and Strelkov offers his analysis in letters:
“It is characteristic that very insignificant (on a strategic scale) successes in the Donbass (for the Ukrainians - a “secondary front” from the very beginning of the war) in our country tend to be presented by propaganda as a “collapse of the front” of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The defeat of several “secondary” territorial defense brigades (which were stubbornly not reinforced with reserves) is presented as signs of the imminent “collapse” of the entire enemy front line.”
Who does Igor Ivanovich answer to? In fact - Yulia Latynina.
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These are exactly the very nuances that I would like to draw your attention to. Yes, there are victories, yes, arrows on the maps indicate the advance of the Russian army, but at the same time it is wrong to exaggerate the significance of the latest victories of the Russian Armed Forces. As well as, by the way, downplaying.
For example, the author of the Glockmeister channel, who, in his own words, trains new contract soldiers at the training ground, essentially talks about the reason that the Russian Armed Forces cannot develop their success in any way and turn it from tactical to strategic - there are no people. Glockmeister writes about what citizens looking for big money in the Russian army look like now:
“We lost and wasted our motivated infantry. It ended in '22 and '23. <…> These motivated people are replaced by people of specific categories. <…> These are people of the age group 40+, and often 50+ years. Very often with medical problems. Those who have abused alcohol, various substances, or simply been incarcerated for most of their adult lives.”
And here I again want to return to the thought that I tried to formulate at the beginning of the text: propaganda is not necessarily the grin of Margarita Simonyan or the hysterical cry of Vladimir Solovyov. Much more important is its other fundamental quality: giving simple answers to complex questions. And no matter how much we would like to agree with such answers, the reality is always more complicated. And everywhere there is that same nuance.
The author's opinion may not coincide with the opinion of the editors.
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Author: Ivan Filippov Photo: David Mdzinarishvili / Reuters