Pepe Escobar
Remember Putin: “We haven’t even started anything yet.”
“Whispers of an ‘evil power’ were heard in the ranks of dairies, trams, shops, apartments, kitchens, suburban and long-distance trains, at large and small stations, at dachas and on beaches. Needless to say, truly mature and cultured people did not tell these stories about the visit of an evil power to the capital. In fact, they even made fun of them and tried to talk reason to those who told them.”
Mikhail Bulgakov, The teacher and Margarita
To quote Dylan, who might have been a Bulgakov epigone: “So let’s stop talking fake now/The hour is getting late.” By now, it’s pretty clear that the illusion of a “peace” deal in Ukraine is the latest wet dream of the usual “can’t-deal” suspects, forever hooked on lies and looting while cleverly manipulating liberals selected from among the Russian elite.
The aim would be to appease Moscow with some concessions, while maintaining Odessa, Nikolaev and Dnipro, and safeguarding what would be NATO’s access to the Black Sea.
All this while investing in an angry and resentful Poland to become a heavily armed EU military militia.
So any “negotiation” towards “peace” in fact masks an impulse to postpone, just for a while, the original master plan: to dismember and destroy Russia.
There are very serious discussions in Moscow, even at the highest levels, about how the elite really stands. Approximately three groups can be identified: the Victory party; the “Peace” party -which Victoria would describe as surrenders-; and the Neutral/Undecided.
The victory certainly includes crucial players like Dmitry Medvedev; Rosneft’s Igor Sechin; the Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov; Nikolai Patrushev; the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Aleksandr Bastrykin; and, even under fire, certainly Defense Minister Shoigu.
“Peace” would include, among others, the head of Telegram, Pavel Durov; billionaire businessman Andrey Melnichenko; metal/mining czar Alisher Usmanov (born in Uzbekistan); and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Neutral/Undecided would include Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin; the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin; the Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office, Anton Vaino; First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential administration and media czar, Alexey Gromov; Sberbank CEO Herman Gref; Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller; and, a particular bone of contention, perhaps the FSB supremo, Alexander Bortnikov.
It is fair to argue that the third group represents the majority elite. This means that they heavily influence the entire course of the Special Military Operation (SMO), which has now metastasized into an Anti-Terrorism Operation (ATO).
The “counteroffensive” fog of war
These differing Russian views at the top predictably provoke frenzied speculation among US and NATO think tanks. Hostage to their own emotion, they even forget what anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows: Kiev, crammed with $30 billion worth of NATO weaponry, can generate less than zero effects from its much-lauded “counter-offensive.” . Russian forces are more than ready and Ukraine lacks the element of surprise.
The West’s hacker collective, after feverish head scratching, has finally figured out that kyiv needs a “combined arms operation” to get something out of its new avalanche of NATO toys.
John Cleese has noted how the coronation of Charles The Tampax King looked like a sketch from Monty Python. Now try this as a sequel: The Hegemon can’t even pay off his trillions in debt, while Kiev’s PR thugs complain that the $30 billion they got is peanuts.
On the Russian front, the indispensable Andrei Martyanov, a whirlwind of wit, has observed how most alarmed Russian military correspondents simply have no idea “what type and volume of combat information is reaching command posts in Moscow, Rostov-on-Don or front line formation personnel.”
He emphasizes that “no serious operational level officer” will even talk to these guys, cheerfully described as “voenkurva” (more or less, “military bitches”), and simply won’t “release any kind of operational data that is highly classified.”
So, as it stands, all the noise and fury about the “counteroffensive” is shrouded in a thick fog of war.
And that only serves to add fuel to the fire of the illusions of the American Think Tankland. The new dominant narrative in the Beltway is that the leadership in Moscow is “fragmented and unpredictable”. And that may be leading to “a conventional defeat of a major nuclear power” whose “command and control system has collapsed.”
Yes: they actually believe their own silly propaganda (copyright John Cleese). They are the American equivalent of the Ministry of Silly Rides. Unable to analyze why and how the Russian elite have different views on the method and scope of the SMO/ATO, the best they can come up with is “protecting Ukraine is a strategic necessity, as the Russian threat increases if Moscow wins in Ukraine”. .”
What’s behind the sound and fury of Prighozin
The characteristic American arrogance/ignorance does not erase the fact that there appears to be a serious power struggle among the siloviki. Yevgeny Prigozhin, a siloviki, denounced Shoigu and Gerasimov as incompetent, implying that they only retain their posts out of loyalty to President Putin.
This is as serious as it gets. Because it’s tied to a key question posed in several Moscow-educated silos: If Russia is widely known for being the strongest military power in the world with the most advanced defensive and offensive missiles, how come they haven’t sealed the whole deal in the Ukrainian battlefield?
One plausible answer is that only 200,000 members of the Russian military are currently fighting, and between 400,000 and 600,000 are waiting in reserve for the Ukrainian attack. While they wait they are in constant training; so waiting works to Russia’s advantage.
Once the famous “counteroffensive” is over, Ukraine will be hit with massive force. There will be no negotiated agreement. Only unconditional surrender.
What is happening right now, Prigozhin’s drama, is subservient to this logic, running in parallel to a rather sophisticated media operation.
Yes, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) made several serious mistakes, just like other Russian institutions, since the inception of the SMO. Criticizing them in public, constructively, is a healthy exercise.
Prighozin’s tactics are a gem; he manipulates a degree of public outrage/outrage to put pressure on the MoD bureaucracy by essentially telling the truth. He might even go so far as to name names: officers who are leaving different sectors of the front. In contrast, his Wagner “musicians” are portrayed as true heroes.
Whether Prigozhin’s sound and fury will be enough to fine tune the Defense Ministry’s entrenched bureaucracy is an open question. Still, media coverage of the entire drama is essential; now that these problems are in the public domain, people will expect the Ministry of Defense to act.
And by the way, this is the essential fact: the Higher Power (the St. Petersburg connection) has permitted to Prighozin (my italics) to go as far as he wants. Otherwise, he would now be in a revamped gulag.
So the next few weeks are absolutely crucial. Putin and the Security Council certainly know what no one else knows, including Prighozin. The key takeaway is that it will begin to lay the groundwork for the US and NATO to eventually turn the Ukrainian rump, Baltic lapdogs, rabid Poland and a few other extras into some sort of Eastern European Fortress. engaged in a war of attrition against Russia. with the potential to last for decades.
That may be the last argument for Russia to finally go for the jugular, ASAP. Otherwise, the future will be bleak. Well, not so gloomy. Remember Putin: “We haven’t even started anything yet.”
Strategic Culture Foundation
