Some thoughts three weeks into the "special operation"
Over three weeks into what Russian government still insists ins't a war, things didn't go quite the way I expected.
As I wrote in the post at the start of the war, I expected the Russian army to sweep across Ukraine in the matter of weeks, only to face ongoing guerrilla warfare. If you look at the maps of the fighting posted on BBC News, the Russian army continues to make gains, but I thought they'd be fighting over Kiev by now. It looks like the part about Ukrainians making the invaders bleed for every centimeter proved to be ore true than I realized,The part about Putin sending conscripts into a meat grinder proved to be even worse than I realized.
I don't begrudge Ukrainians for doing everything they can to defend their Motherland, but it still hurts, because, again, none of this was necessary. None of this had to happen.
Ukraine certainly benefited from NATO aid, but as everybody and their maiden aunt have commented at this point, it looks like the much-touted Russian military reforms really didn't get very far. When the word first got out of the military convoy getting stuck on the approach to Kiev, I snarked on Twitter that this was the kind of competence one would expect from the Russian Federation, because that definitely sounds like something that would happen to the Russian army I knew growing up in the 1990s.
For the past 15 years or so, United Russia has been trying to build up the image of how strong Russian army is, how it would put any humiliations of the past behind. The past 3 weeks put that notion to rest - and Putin has no one to blame but himself.
Not that all of the shortcomings that have been laid bare mitigate everything it inflicted on Ukraine. The Russian declarations that they would try to avoid civilian casualties obviously held as much weight as Soviet Five Year Plan reports, because Chechnya, Syria and, to the lesser extend, Donbas in 2014-2015 attested to that. But that doesn't make all of the wanton destruction any easier to stomach. Unlike some other Russians, including members of my family, I can't say I've really been ashamed - as the Russian saying goes, мне не привыкать (roughly "it isn't as if I have to get used to it"). I have been angry. But this - the bombing of the civilian targets that was at best, at best careless...
Ukraine survived Holodomor, and World War II. It will survive this. But we cannot bring back the dead, we can only do so much to heal the wounded, and the trauma that has been inflicted will be there forever. And that, ladies and gentlefolks, does shame me.
I have been carefully avoiding Nazi comparisons. The term is too loaded, and it has been thrown around too carelessly. But when the sheer scale of the destruction and suffering comes can't help but bring to mind the bombings of Kiev and Moscow, the Siege of Leningrad - that is, to put it mildly, not a good place to be in.
A flyer found in St. Petersburg. "The city that survived the Siege [of Leningrad] is against the war!"
There are two things I keep thinking about. One one is a clip posted on Twitter two weeks ago, from an anti-war protest in St. Petersburg. A guy in his 20s, shouting "No one will ever forgive us!" And the other is Grandpa Gena P. telling me about how, when he, his sister and their mom returned from the war, they found their town virtually leveled. And just as they were trying to rebuild their lives, their mom - who, by an uncanny coincidence, shares a name and a patronymic with my sister - stepped on the landmine and got blown up.
Even when the war ends, tragedies won't.
The response in Russia has always been interesting. Of course I wish more people would've come out and protested. But I was struck by how many labor unions, professional organizations and celebrities spoke out against the war, before support started to coming in. It certainly wasn't like that in 2014. The protests lasted more than two weeks. Even after thousands of people got detained, people kept coming back.I was not surprised at the media crackdown, but I'm impressed at the media outlets that continue to keep going, even when some, like Novaya Gazeta, have been forced to walk an increasingly fine line that the government can move, any time.
There have been a lot Discourse about how many Russians actually support the war, even among Russians back in Motherland. Independent polling has already become a dodgy proposition over the last few years, and the war smothered whatever was left. But I think this interview for the Bumaga online newspaper is onto something when it speculates that there are three groups - those that earnestly support the war, those that earnestly oppose it and those who don't want war, but they don't want to believe that Russian army is, say, willfully hurting civilians. The difference between the first group and the third group, I think, is in how they are going to respond as the war drag on.
Speaking of things dragging on, another thing I didn't expect was how far the Western powers would be willing to go with sanctions. I've seen some discussion in Russian LJ about how the fact that the powers put the sanctions in place that quickly shows that it's all some kind of a great Western conspiracy, which misses the obvious point that Western powers had eight years to think about what could be done if Putin escalated. Only question is whether they'd pull the trigger.
The idea is to squeeze the Russian economy to hinder its ability to wage war and, while they can't admit it out loud, it seems obvious they hope that the economic pressures would lead to growing discontent among your average Russians. Now, the sources I trust say that, in their opinion, after the initial shock, people are trying to go on with their lives. Which makes sense - it's human nature to try to find some stability. There is also the fact that, as St. Petersburg governor Alexandr Beglov said in the recent speech, Russia survived the post-collapse 1990s. Thing is, 1990s were traumatic for those who lived through it, and nobody wants to actually go back to that. Plus, there is a whole generation of adults that doesn't really remember the 1990s, and their kids weren't old enough to experience it. I am reluctant to make predictions, because Russia never experienced anything like this, not really, but I maintain that one can't count on Russians to grin and bear it, at least not on the long run.The longer this goes on, the more pressing the question of the exit strategy becomes, and "we don't need the West - we can build up our own industry" just isn't a realistic solution in this day and age (if there ever was. People tend to forget that even the supposedly self-sufficient Soviet Union exported fossil fuels and imported grain).
It has been interesting to see how the Russian state media's coverage and justifications for the war have been shifting. It went from being about protecting Russians in Dombass to about cleanizing Ukraine of Nazis to about defending Russia from evil Westerns schemes to protecting Russia from western-funded bio labs to who knows what else. It went from saying that conscripts aren't involved in the fighting to admitting that, yes, they were involved in the fighting but saying that it was an accident (somehow) to describing conscripts as heroes. And there is this whole "using letter Z as a symbol of the war effort" thing. If you are going to try to rally the country around the righteous Russia fighting against the Nazis and the West, why use a letter of the Latin alphabet? Why not a Cyrillic letter З, or literally any clearly Russian symbol? Even a lot of people in the government don't seem to know, and the justification we've seen seem post-hoc. The whole thing is absurd, and all of the patriotic displays featuring the big Z feel even more absurd.
There have been a lot of discussions about giving Putin an off-ramp, enough justification to declare victory and go home. With all the hoops state media has been jumping through and all the propaganda weirdness, it wouldn't even be that much of a stretch. The obvious counter-argument to this is that Putin would be getting away with everything, his position would be stronger and good luck convincing any Russians in Group 3 (let alone Group 1) that our forces did anything wrong. Problem is, the alternatives aren't too terribly appealing, either. Without an off-ramp, fighting will continue, and people will keep dying.
I may well have to eat those words in a year or two (or maybe sooner), but I do have faith that there will be some kind of justice, even if takes decades. If there's one thing growing up in the post-Soviet Russia taught me, it's that nostalgia is ultimately self-defeating. You can't bring back the past, because the world, and the society, inevitably keeps on changing. People change. Each new generation grows up a changing world.
I know how this story ends, because we've seen it happening, over and over again. Whether it's Alexandr III undoing his father's reforms, Nicholas II trying to put the genie back in the bottle after forming the Duma, Brezhnev and his successors trying to turn back the clock on the Soviet Union, or, in the most extreme case, the State Committee on the State of Emergency trying to stop the collapse of the Soviet Union. They could halt change, pause change, some for longer than others, but they could never stop it.
I was there during the coup. I know how this story ends. It's just the question of how long it would take to reach this inevitable conclusion and, again, how much blood would need to be spilled, and how much suffering Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainains will have to endure before we get there.
As I wrote in the post at the start of the war, I expected the Russian army to sweep across Ukraine in the matter of weeks, only to face ongoing guerrilla warfare. If you look at the maps of the fighting posted on BBC News, the Russian army continues to make gains, but I thought they'd be fighting over Kiev by now. It looks like the part about Ukrainians making the invaders bleed for every centimeter proved to be ore true than I realized,The part about Putin sending conscripts into a meat grinder proved to be even worse than I realized.
I don't begrudge Ukrainians for doing everything they can to defend their Motherland, but it still hurts, because, again, none of this was necessary. None of this had to happen.
Ukraine certainly benefited from NATO aid, but as everybody and their maiden aunt have commented at this point, it looks like the much-touted Russian military reforms really didn't get very far. When the word first got out of the military convoy getting stuck on the approach to Kiev, I snarked on Twitter that this was the kind of competence one would expect from the Russian Federation, because that definitely sounds like something that would happen to the Russian army I knew growing up in the 1990s.
For the past 15 years or so, United Russia has been trying to build up the image of how strong Russian army is, how it would put any humiliations of the past behind. The past 3 weeks put that notion to rest - and Putin has no one to blame but himself.
Not that all of the shortcomings that have been laid bare mitigate everything it inflicted on Ukraine. The Russian declarations that they would try to avoid civilian casualties obviously held as much weight as Soviet Five Year Plan reports, because Chechnya, Syria and, to the lesser extend, Donbas in 2014-2015 attested to that. But that doesn't make all of the wanton destruction any easier to stomach. Unlike some other Russians, including members of my family, I can't say I've really been ashamed - as the Russian saying goes, мне не привыкать (roughly "it isn't as if I have to get used to it"). I have been angry. But this - the bombing of the civilian targets that was at best, at best careless...
Ukraine survived Holodomor, and World War II. It will survive this. But we cannot bring back the dead, we can only do so much to heal the wounded, and the trauma that has been inflicted will be there forever. And that, ladies and gentlefolks, does shame me.
I have been carefully avoiding Nazi comparisons. The term is too loaded, and it has been thrown around too carelessly. But when the sheer scale of the destruction and suffering comes can't help but bring to mind the bombings of Kiev and Moscow, the Siege of Leningrad - that is, to put it mildly, not a good place to be in.
A flyer found in St. Petersburg. "The city that survived the Siege [of Leningrad] is against the war!"
There are two things I keep thinking about. One one is a clip posted on Twitter two weeks ago, from an anti-war protest in St. Petersburg. A guy in his 20s, shouting "No one will ever forgive us!" And the other is Grandpa Gena P. telling me about how, when he, his sister and their mom returned from the war, they found their town virtually leveled. And just as they were trying to rebuild their lives, their mom - who, by an uncanny coincidence, shares a name and a patronymic with my sister - stepped on the landmine and got blown up.
Even when the war ends, tragedies won't.
The response in Russia has always been interesting. Of course I wish more people would've come out and protested. But I was struck by how many labor unions, professional organizations and celebrities spoke out against the war, before support started to coming in. It certainly wasn't like that in 2014. The protests lasted more than two weeks. Even after thousands of people got detained, people kept coming back.I was not surprised at the media crackdown, but I'm impressed at the media outlets that continue to keep going, even when some, like Novaya Gazeta, have been forced to walk an increasingly fine line that the government can move, any time.
There have been a lot Discourse about how many Russians actually support the war, even among Russians back in Motherland. Independent polling has already become a dodgy proposition over the last few years, and the war smothered whatever was left. But I think this interview for the Bumaga online newspaper is onto something when it speculates that there are three groups - those that earnestly support the war, those that earnestly oppose it and those who don't want war, but they don't want to believe that Russian army is, say, willfully hurting civilians. The difference between the first group and the third group, I think, is in how they are going to respond as the war drag on.
Speaking of things dragging on, another thing I didn't expect was how far the Western powers would be willing to go with sanctions. I've seen some discussion in Russian LJ about how the fact that the powers put the sanctions in place that quickly shows that it's all some kind of a great Western conspiracy, which misses the obvious point that Western powers had eight years to think about what could be done if Putin escalated. Only question is whether they'd pull the trigger.
The idea is to squeeze the Russian economy to hinder its ability to wage war and, while they can't admit it out loud, it seems obvious they hope that the economic pressures would lead to growing discontent among your average Russians. Now, the sources I trust say that, in their opinion, after the initial shock, people are trying to go on with their lives. Which makes sense - it's human nature to try to find some stability. There is also the fact that, as St. Petersburg governor Alexandr Beglov said in the recent speech, Russia survived the post-collapse 1990s. Thing is, 1990s were traumatic for those who lived through it, and nobody wants to actually go back to that. Plus, there is a whole generation of adults that doesn't really remember the 1990s, and their kids weren't old enough to experience it. I am reluctant to make predictions, because Russia never experienced anything like this, not really, but I maintain that one can't count on Russians to grin and bear it, at least not on the long run.The longer this goes on, the more pressing the question of the exit strategy becomes, and "we don't need the West - we can build up our own industry" just isn't a realistic solution in this day and age (if there ever was. People tend to forget that even the supposedly self-sufficient Soviet Union exported fossil fuels and imported grain).
It has been interesting to see how the Russian state media's coverage and justifications for the war have been shifting. It went from being about protecting Russians in Dombass to about cleanizing Ukraine of Nazis to about defending Russia from evil Westerns schemes to protecting Russia from western-funded bio labs to who knows what else. It went from saying that conscripts aren't involved in the fighting to admitting that, yes, they were involved in the fighting but saying that it was an accident (somehow) to describing conscripts as heroes. And there is this whole "using letter Z as a symbol of the war effort" thing. If you are going to try to rally the country around the righteous Russia fighting against the Nazis and the West, why use a letter of the Latin alphabet? Why not a Cyrillic letter З, or literally any clearly Russian symbol? Even a lot of people in the government don't seem to know, and the justification we've seen seem post-hoc. The whole thing is absurd, and all of the patriotic displays featuring the big Z feel even more absurd.
There have been a lot of discussions about giving Putin an off-ramp, enough justification to declare victory and go home. With all the hoops state media has been jumping through and all the propaganda weirdness, it wouldn't even be that much of a stretch. The obvious counter-argument to this is that Putin would be getting away with everything, his position would be stronger and good luck convincing any Russians in Group 3 (let alone Group 1) that our forces did anything wrong. Problem is, the alternatives aren't too terribly appealing, either. Without an off-ramp, fighting will continue, and people will keep dying.
I may well have to eat those words in a year or two (or maybe sooner), but I do have faith that there will be some kind of justice, even if takes decades. If there's one thing growing up in the post-Soviet Russia taught me, it's that nostalgia is ultimately self-defeating. You can't bring back the past, because the world, and the society, inevitably keeps on changing. People change. Each new generation grows up a changing world.
I know how this story ends, because we've seen it happening, over and over again. Whether it's Alexandr III undoing his father's reforms, Nicholas II trying to put the genie back in the bottle after forming the Duma, Brezhnev and his successors trying to turn back the clock on the Soviet Union, or, in the most extreme case, the State Committee on the State of Emergency trying to stop the collapse of the Soviet Union. They could halt change, pause change, some for longer than others, but they could never stop it.
I was there during the coup. I know how this story ends. It's just the question of how long it would take to reach this inevitable conclusion and, again, how much blood would need to be spilled, and how much suffering Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainains will have to endure before we get there.