by Rolo Slavski via The Occidental Observer

I have resisted the urge to write much about the actual war in Ukraine up to this point for several reasons.

First, I am not a military expert, although I have spoken to several retired military men to get their take on the situation since the start of the conflict. This is made easier by the fact that I come from a military family.

Secondly, I saw Russian military dominance and victory a foregone conclusion and still do. This was always a war for the Russian politicians to lose, not for the Ukrainian military to win.

Thirdly, I do not believe that anyone has any real inside information on Russian troop movements and strategic goals. The Ministry of Defense has kept a very tight lid on that sort of thing. Therefore, all we really have to work with is speculation based on Telegram and Twitter videos and reports from embedded journalists. Or, we rely on the reports of Western intelligence agencies, which do not have a good track record.

We should instead consider Putin’s goals going into this war. The most obvious factor to consider is the fact that Putin has no political future should he fail to achieve his objectives in Ukraine. One way or the other, he needs a victory of some sort or another to hang his hat on. This is perhaps the best metric that we have for figuring out what Putin’s intentions are in Ukraine and since this series of essays is focused on internal changes occurring in Russia as a result of the showdown with the West, we should consider what exactly Russian civil society is demanding from Putin.

First and foremost, the so-called “Atlanticist” faction, which seems to a euphemism for Jews and their puppets as far as I can tell, did NOT want Putin to intervene in Ukraine. He did so anyway. And he did the same in Crimea, Syria and Georgia. Now, many of the most prominent Atlanticists have fled the country. In other words, there is no proof whatsoever that Putin is willing to bend to their demands when it comes to Russia’s security and so, we can safely disregard the opinions and demands of these people and their supporters in Moscow and St. Petersburg because it is quite clear that Putin has already done so.

The largest block in society is what we can broadly call the “Patriots.” They come in all ideological shades and stripes — some are red flag-waving Communist nostalgists, others prefer the black, yellow and white aesthetics of the Russian Empire. Most simply fly the red, white and blue of Russia and have no ideology to speak of other than what we can understand as generic patriotism. They all support the military operation in Ukraine, but they have various goals that they want the intervention to achieve. These people make up 80+% of Russian society and we know this because Putin’s approval rating has soared into the 80s because of the military intervention. The hardliners want an incorporation of the entire territory of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, but are willing to settle for everything east of the Dniepr. The majority of patriotic Russians just want a victory in Ukraine, and have no idea of what exactly that will entail. Liberating the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) and reincorporating them into Russia while giving the Ukrainian army, the “Nats-bats” (mercenary “nationalist” militias), and Zelensky a good thrashing is good enough for them. Russia’s official stated goals in this conflict are just that, simply phrased another way: the “de-nazification” and “de-militarization” of Ukraine and the liberation of Donetsk and Lugansk. To achieve this limited victory, all Putin has left to do is to dislodge the Ukrainian army in the East, where they were massing up to attack the DNR and where they are hunkered down in their fortified positions now.

But let’s examine the military operation in greater detail for a moment. If we’re going to speculate on Russia’s military plans and objectives, we have to focus on the facts and not on the narratives that we can spin based off these facts. For example, we know for a fact that the Russian army reached Kiev within the first three days of the conflict. Now, was this a feint or part of a psychological operation to get Kiev to surrender, or an attempt to prevent a planned Ukrainian offensive on Donbass by splitting the Ukrainian army or the first stage in a preparation to storm the capital and cut the head off the snake? Here, we can only speculate.

We can also add to our speculations that there may have been an attempt to activate Russian assets within the city and take it from within. Russian bloggers are speculating that this was the Russian plan for Kharkiv, which failed to materialize for one reason or another. In fact, there are rumors that Kharkiv’s officials feigned surrender only to lure Russian troops in and then open fire on them, leading to a similar repeat of the Grozny ambush during the Chechen wars. I hesitate to hang my hat on this claim, but it strikes me as having a ring of truth to it. After all, what was the Russian plan for taking the cities if they refuse to bomb and then storm them into submission? Clearly, negotiating with the officials and activating sleeper agents within the cities would be a far more cost-effective method of taking these cities. If that is the case, Russian spooks and diplomats failed spectacularly in Kharkiv, Kiev, and Mariuple.

More facts: the Russian military plowed through the Ukrainian in-field defenses and parked themselves outside these cities or simply went around them. No immediate storming occurred. While they surrounded these cities and continued their targeted destruction of the Ukrainian military, a bloodbath began in these cities targeted at Russia-sympathizers and officials who spoke up about entering negotiations or surrendering ending up being assassinated by the SBU and the “Nats-bats.”

So: were the Russians planning on taking all of these cities but failed because their sleeper cells were poorly prepared/neutralized? Or was the Ministry of Defense and Putin telling the truth when they said that they weren’t interested in taking territory or these cities but simply in knocking out Ukraine’s military potential and liberating the DNR and LNR?

Choose your own narrative as you see fit or wait until the dust settles. Either way, we simply don’t know the answer yet.

Back on the home front, Putin hasn’t even called up Russia’s reserves. Young men are NOT being drafted to go fight in the Ukraine. Again, this is another fact. What does it tell us? That the war is not popular? Hardly. Not only do we have the polls to prove that the war is, in fact, popular, but we have Western media lamenting the fact that this is the case. Why then not call up the reserves? Perhaps because they were deemed unnecessary for the goals of the operation. This indicates that the goals of the operation were limited, does it not?

And now a few words on the Russian Ministry of Defense.

We can start with Anatoly Serdukov, the former minister of defense. Serdukov was one probably one of the least qualified ministers of defense in Russian history. He was widely reviled and hated by the officer corps in the military and his replacement with Sergei Shoigu was seen as a much-awaited step in the right direction. In the 90s, Serdukov was a furniture salesmen (fine, a general director) in St. Petersburg and it was widely believed in military circles that he was as corrupt as they came. For example, his significant other got caught with millions of dollars in her bank account. There was also regular run-of-the-mill corruption associated with his five-year reign which ended in 2012, such as the use of military resources to build roads to oligarchs’ villas and the like. I suppose one could make the argument that there was no proof of direct embezzlement, but he ended up getting sacked for involvement in corruption all the same. The silver lining was that no one in the West could take Russia seriously with him at the helm, and so NATO relaxed. It was around this time that President Obama declared Russia a regional power and declared that a pivot to China was the path forward for ensuring US hegemony in the world. Russian patriots believe that Serdukov was partially to blame for this insulting demotion from superpower status. Most notably, the army during this period was drastically cut as part of a money-saving campaign that was branded as an anti-corruption effort.

With Sergei Shoigu taking over in 2012, Russia slowly began reinvesting in the military. Shoigu, like many other Russian public figures, was considered a legacy of the Yeltsin kakistocracy that once ruled the country. That being said, he demonstrated actual competence during his time in political office and his time at the Ministry of Emergencies — a rare trait in the Russian government over the last 30 years, to be sure. All that being said, he is not, strictly speaking what the military circles would consider to be a true-blue military man. There are rumors circulating now that he is about to be sacked, which are largely the result of him having dropped out of the public eye since March 11 of this year. Shoigu is widely known as a media enthusiast who enjoys putting himself in front of the cameras, which also lends credence to the rumors. I was hesitant to bring them up or give them any credence, but these rumors aren’t being promoted solely by the Ukrainians and Russian Liberals, but by Russian military men, who would like to see him replaced with one of their people, and ideally, a man with actual combat experience from either the Afghanistan or Chechen campaigns.

Firing Shoigu would be bad PR for the Kremlin now, but in terms of improving Russia’s military capabilities and continuing Russia’s move away from the legacy of the 90s, it’s really not the worst thing that could happen — in fact, military circles would rejoice at the news. This is also partially why the military experts and veteran officers have been so critical of the war effort so far. Russian military people believe that this war is being fought with political considerations in mind, and not as a strict military operation. Clausewitz once famously said that war is a continuation of politics by other means and that has certainly been the Kremlin’s approach to this operation. But now, having exhausted the possibility of taking Ukraine without any major bloodshed through other, more political methods involving diplomacy or subterfuge, the only way forward is to fall back on old-fashioned military force. The Russian army has abandoned Kiev and several other cities and is concentrating in Donbass to surround and destroy the hunkered down Ukrainian army. This is not exactly good news for Russia’s foreign policy and her political ambitions. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are going to die now. Civilians will die as well. Relations with Ukraine will never be the same.

But, internally, this is not the worst possible outcome by any means because what the politicians bungled, the military men are being called in to fix now. This will translate into an increased share of power and prestige for the Russian military establishment within the country. A deeply conservative, militaristic and “old-school” faction is about to start flexing its muscles in Russian society now. This is not too dissimilar to the situation that existed in Tsarist Russia and the USSR, where the military was very much involved in politics and formed a hardcore conservative bulwark in society. This is simply a part of Russia’s pre-Yeltsin political tradition. In contrast, in much of the West, the military simply doesn’t have much to do with internal politics as an institution. But, in many other nations in the world, the military either significantly influences politics or simply runs the country outright. Remember: Post-Soviet Russia was run by a coalition of the office of the Presidency, the Federal Security Service, and the Oligarchs. If all goes well, the power vacuum caused by the shutdown of many oligarchs in recent months will be filled by the military.

Any genuine Russian restoration will have to involve the restoration of the prestige of the military — its reintegration into political life and it’s re-elevation within civil society. Much depends on the success of the Russian offensive in the Donbass.

by Rolo Slavski via The Occidental Observer

Below I present the abridged version of an interview that I conducted with Andrei Tsiganov in St. Petersburg on March 30th.

Mr. Tsiganov is a political activist in Russia. You may not have heard of him personally, but it far more likely that you have heard of some of the activity that he and his organization have been engaged in. In his own words, Mr. Tsiganov is engaged in a lawfare campaign against Liberal forces in Russia and while there are other conservatives operating in Russia, his organization appears to be the largest and most effective, with some actual victories to their name. The much-derided (in the West) anti-LGBT propaganda law passed in Russia was largely the work of him and his organization and the work of Duma Deputy Vitaly Milonov, who became the face of the law.

Recently, Tsiganov was active in the fight against the COVID clampdown in Russia, filing lawsuits and providing an alternative perspective to the WEF with the help of his media resource “Katyusha”, which is quite popular in Russia. As an aside, the Covid hysteria has largely been dropped in Russia as a result of the military operation in Ukraine and Mr. Tsiganov has much to say on this topic, so I hope that we can revisit it with him in depth in the future. This time though, we spoke mostly about the state of the Russian government and the media situation in Russia and the sweeping changes that are occurring in civil society. Tsiganov and his people are a fairly good representative of the views and positions of the large patriotic bloc in Russia, which generally wants the government to adopt a more conservative, sovereign position in its national policies, foreign policy and cultural program.

I hope you enjoy it.

Me: Mr. Tsiganov, what is happening within Russia? The shakeups that we have seen in the last weeks are historic, no? Is Russia finally fed up with Liberalism?

Tsiganov: First and foremost, it is important to understand that there is a stark difference between the “deep nation” and the traitor class — the usurpers of Russia’s financial system, its media, and its culture-creators. Many of these traitors have left the country in recent weeks. True patriots don’t abandon their country. We can also refer to these people as “foam” — the foam on the top of the water. In other words, the foam is leaving the country. Alternatively, these people can be thought of as the sores on the Russian body. Many of them are non-Russians, but all of them are people who do not identify with Russia at all. They just used Russia to earn some money, temporarily. This is a positive cleansing process that is occurring now. We should be very thankful for it. Things would have been better had the West imposed sanctions on Russia earlier.

Take Anatoly Chubais as an example. He was one of the most prominent Liberal western agents. It’s a very good sign that he left. He was part of the pro-Western cultural elite in Russia. However, I hesitate to even use such words to describe him because neither he nor the people like him can be considered “elite” or particularly cultured for that matter. Unfortunately, we have to consider the possibility that some of them have may come back. For example, Vladimir Pozner [Channel 1 TV presenter] returned and thinks that he will be able to adjust to the new reality. His show is back on the air. Ivan Urgent [late night show entertainer who fled to Israel] also said that he might come back.

In the meantime, Konstantin Ernst [Channel 1 CEO] has had charges brought up on him. You have to understand, Channel 1 was pushing anti-Russian news on a state channel.

Me: How so?

Tsiganov: Well, they invited many liberal people, people from the pro-West camp, onto their shows and PR’d them. Take Morgenshtern, as an example. This is an entertainer that popularizes drug use to the youth. The government recently kicked him out of the country.

Me: So the poster stunt on Channel 1. Are you saying it was staged?

Tsiganov: It was a deliberate provocation by Ernst. He refused to apologize. It was done to send a message to Putin. The audience for this was the West — the message was written in English, after all. Western media jumped on it. The woman with the sign had a lawyer sitting by ready. It was also a shot fired off Putin’s bow to demonstrate that Ernst and his operation did not approve of his actions in Ukraine.

Me: I see. What changes would you like to see occur within Russia?

Tsiganov: Well, in the constitution it says that ideology as such is banned. Modern Russia was created as a post-ideological country by the West. But the Russian people need an idea and there is now an attempt to create something new. The closest that we have to this is the National Safety Plan put together by the military where a first attempt was made. Several theses were voiced such as the necessity of defending the traditional view of family and fighting back against the anti-Russian historical narrative that is being promulgated in our schools. A second such document came out recently as well: the Project for the Defense of Traditional Values. This document provides guidelines for what projects are allowed to be funded with government money and what people can be allowed to sit in the government by proposing a loyalty test for ministers and bureaucrats. Much is still in the air and depends on the concepts, programs, and ideas that are eventually adopted. But the key point here is that nothing has been adopted yet because of the chinovniks (bureaucrats) refusal to implement it. Take, for example, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. This is a Western creature through and through. His whole mindset is Western. He uses neoliberal models in his policies and programs. The entire government is in panic because of this; they don’t know how to do things outside the liberal operating protocol, which is being jettisoned now.

Over the last 2 years, Mishustin has been instrumental in pushing for and implementing the “cyber gulag” and for increasing the cooperation of the Russian government with the World Economic Forum. Mishustin went so far as to open the Center For the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Mishistin’s entire operation is staffed by graduates of the Higher Economic School and employees of Sberbank. [NOTE: The Higher Economic Schools is one of the pre-eminent forces within Russia pushing for neoliberal reforms since the 90s.] These people are Western-educated and, more importantly, they believe in the Western consensus on everything from governmental policy, economic policy, and social issues. Mishustin and his cronies have formed what they themselves refer to as the “cyber spetznaz” and have passed all these laws without the consent of the Russian people. Our Minister of Digital Transformation says that robots make the best administrators — this is the mentality of the man who wants to totally reform our system of governance. Strange as it may sound, Europe and America have better cyber protection laws on their books. No such protections exist in Russia. Luckily, Mishustin and his people have failed to realize their plans because of the war.

Mikhail Mishustin

Me: Pardon me for the direct question: is the current situation good for you and people who support your position?

Tsiganov: This is a war against the West and Western values. Furthermore, Russians are unlike many other peoples because they are pro-big state. The Russian people hope that the government will go to war for them against the Liberal class. People with our values are to be found in the military and the ranks of the FSB [Federal Security Service]. There are lots of patriots in the administration of the president as well. The war has shown us who is who. People in the government thought that it was possible to come to a compromise with the U.S. And now this has changed. This has created more room for internal maneuver for Putin and his allies.

Me: Why did it take Russia so long to do something about Western propaganda on the internet? Pro-Russian content is routinely banned off all social media sites, and it is impossible to put a pro-Russian narrative out on the internet. What was the plan? At least they’re talking about “cyber sovereignty” on the state channels now.

Tsiganov: First and foremost it is necessary to understand that Russia has no plans — only the Soviet Union had plans. [NOTE: Here he means the Soviet 5-year national plans and such.] That being said, Putin tried to create a “Runet” [a program aimed at furthering Russian sovereignty over the internet in Russia]. But the money was diverted and squandered on the digitization plan promoted by Mishustin and his so-called cyber spetznaz. 150 billion dollars were allocated from the budget and only 11 billion went to internet sovereignty projects. The rest went to various digitization schemes based on Western models.

Another silver lining to the current situation: Kaspersky has come out and said that Russia has lost 200,000 programmers. [NOTE: I am not sure that this number is accurate, but scores of big city dwellers have indeed fled Russia. Programmers who have stayed have been discussing the phenomenon on their channels. I personally know several that moved to Poland and Latvia for what it’s worth.] This means that Mishustin’s cyber gulag plan will fall through — he no longer has the political cachet or the cadres to pull it off. That being said, Russia could still create a sovereign internet if the political will was there. We have the talent and resources to do so.

Now, the US considers the internet its sovereign territory and treats it as such. It is part of the US cyber-strategy plan. There is no such thing as a free and universal internet. Do you know who actually does have a sovereign internet?

Me: China?

Tsiganov: Yes, China. Only China has developed a sovereign internet. The project was completed in the fall of last year thanks to a law on servers which effectively banned the transfer of data across borders. This is the way to do it. The Russian government needs to undertake big projects, like China does, not rely on the so-called invisible hand. Sergei Glazyev talks about this — the Minister of Eurasian Integration. But the people who ran Russia relied on the Liberal way of doing things — allowing private, foreign capital decide what gets invested into and how for the last 30 years. As you know, many of these people have fled the country now. Consider the absurdity of the situation: the Alphabet company controls a large part of Sber [an important bank]. And Alphabet runs Google. We can’t have this. We can’t have our enemies controlling our internet.

Me: What will happen next? What measures do you expect in the coming weeks and months?

Tsiganov: The government will now be forced to lean on the patriotic base in the country because the Yeltsin-era people and the various Western-educated technocrats can’t be trusted. They can’t even mobilize the country should Russia need to transition to a war economy. I expect Youtube to be closed down soon. We have the necessary resources and professionals to implement a sovereign “Runet.” All that we lacked was the political will. I hope that we now have a chance to do what should have been done years ago. People with our values and positions finally have a chance of rising up into government positions that will be vacated as the cleanings continue in the government, media.

(Republished from The Occidental Observer