On Wednesday, Jeremy Fleming, the head of the U.K. Government Communication HQ, made a series of statements about Russia, and Vladimir Putin that seem all to credible and reflective of where things stand 37 days into the unprovoked invasion.
“It increasingly looks like Putin has massively misjudged the situation,” said Fleming. “It’s clear he’s misjudged the resistance of the Ukrainian people. He underestimated the strength of the coalition his actions would galvanize. He underplayed the consequences of the sanctions regime. And he overestimated the abilities of his military to secure a rapid victory.”
Then Fleming went on to make a series of statements that would seem incredible—in the sense that they’re so outlandish, they could easily be interpreted as a psyop—were it not for the fact that there has been repeated evidence on the ground from multiple sources.
“We’ve seen Russian soldiers, short of weapons and morale, refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment, and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft,” said Fleming. “And even though we believe Putin’s advisers are afraid to tell him the truth, what’s going on, and the extent of these misjudgments, must be crystal-clear to the regime.”
The whole thing, says Fleming, was a vast “strategic miscalculation” by Putin, who has made this his “personal war” with the cost paid by innocent people in Ukraine, and mislead soldiers in the Russian military.
Fleming’s statements put him in a line of officials who are convinced that Putin is misinformed about what’s actually happening in Ukraine. That includes one U.S. official who said Putin “is being misinformed by his advisors about how badly the Russian military is performing and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because his senior advisors are too afraid to tell him the truth.”
This “Putin is ignorant” view seems to be based on the fact that, in spite of massive losses and devastation to the Russian economy, Putin continues to act as if Russia is winning this war. He continues to look for more troops to feed into the meatgrinder, continues to issue demands at the negotiating table that make it impossible for talks to progress, and continues to take actions that seem to have no result but the inexcusable loss of lives. This if-he-really-knew perspective also appears to hold out some possibility of hope—if only some of Putin’s advisers would only stiffen their spines and tell the boss what’s really going on, maybe he’d take reasonable action.
But the Putin is ignorant camp is being far too hopeful. The most likely situation is that Putin knows exactly how things are going in Ukraine. He knows exactly what’s happening to the ruble, the Russian stock market, and to prospects for future investment in his country. Putin knows.
Putin may be closing newspapers and cutting off TV channels, blocking social media and censoring the internet, but all that is to keep regular Russians from grasping the cause and scale of this disaster. Putin is not cut off from seeing every report of planes shot down, or soldiers surrendering, or entire columns of tanks shot down. He’s not sitting in a palace, waiting for an adviser to bring him notes on the war on a silver tray. Putin has the internet. He has access to outside media. There is nothing he could be told that he doesn’t already know.
The truth is that Putin is a monster. Has always been a monster. He’ll keep losing his own troops at a rate of 10-1 to Ukrainian losses. Because he’s a monster. He’ll keep shelling cities and killing civilians in an effort to gain the smoking ruin that was a city. Because he’s a monster. He’ll keep prosecuting this war right up until the last creaky tank is ablaze and the last missile has been driven through a kindergarten. Because he’s a monster.
No one should be waiting for Putin to smarten up. He’s already destroyed the Russian economy. He’s already shattered the illusion of competence that surrounded the Russian military. In every real sense, he lost the war in Ukraine in the first 48 hours. Everything he’s doing now is for a purely domestic audience. He wants something he can wave as a “victory” before an audience which is ignorant of the truth.
Putin likes it that way. You might even say he “loves the poorly educated,” because they can be easily manipulated. Keeping Russians ignorant gives Putin the only numbers he really needs.
Thursday, Mar 31, 2022 · 4:17:14 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
A even closer look at Izyum, that town 60 miles to the southeast of Kharkiv that looks to be the site of some major conflict.
The mayor of the town reports that it’s been over two weeks since humanitarian aid reached the town, and on maps it seems to be at the end of a Russian salient, completely inside Russian-controlled territory. That’s almost true.
Those critical river bridges seem to be the line of demarcation between Ukrainian and Russian control. It’s the area south of the Siverskyt Donets River where 20,000 people have been holding out against Russian forces in an area that’s been described as simply “hell.” Russian forces have been above to move south along both the west and east of the town, bombarding it with artillery in an attempt to dislodge this little sliver of Ukrainian control that has halted the Russian advance, and blocked that long talked-about effort to connect with other Russian forces in the Donbas. It’s also likely that Russia can’t advance too close to the river on either the west or the east, because a quick look at the map shows that both of those areas are essentially marsh, unable to support armor or artillery.
So Russia sits on the north bank, hammering at this little plug of Ukrainian resistance, as it has done since the third day of the invasion. Izyum’s resistance has been critical to the survival of Ukrainian forces in the east. It still is.
On Thursday, images are appearing of both Russian and Ukrainian vehicles lost in the area of Izyum, but their exact location could be critical to deciphering what’s happening. Is Russia having some success in attacking across the river, or are Ukrainian forces managing to move down from the recently opened highway south of Kharkiv?
Stay tuned.
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