On Feb. 26, when Russian tanks were supposed to be rolling into Kyiv, state news outlet RIA Novosti briefly published an article prematurely proclaiming the capture of Ukraine’s capital.
Read the Rai/Novosti post in full. It’s chilling.
Despite the perfuctory condemnation of the USSR for creating Ukraine as a Soviet republic, the entire vocabulary, syntax, and tenor of this rant is in the exact Soviet style.
Alternatively, it can be compared to Nazi pronouncements on Poland, e.g., about how it wasn’t even really a state.
ADDENDUM: given how relatively sophisticated Russian disinformation was in 2016, and how well it played into the fucked up psychology of certain groups in a foreign society, it’s remarkable how crude Russian propaganda has become.
ADDENDUM 2: Amazing, really, when a major political figure ever says he was wrong. German president Steinmeier seems to have broken precedent:
https://www.aol.com/got-putin-wrong-says-chastened-165051465-092038340.html
I think we’ll be waiting a long time for Trump to make the same admission.
I can’t imagine how anyone might think Putin is “strengthening his hand” in allowing atrocities like these to happen. In fact, I think it’s a pretty sure bet at this point that Ukrainians will never stop fighting until every last Russian is out of their country and that places like Crimea that were already occupied years ago are taken back.
Russia will be paying for this for decades and, if Putin doesn’t end up dead or deposed soon, Russia will likely end up like a giant version of North Korea. My guess is, those close to Putin already see him as nothing but a liability and are busy trying to find a “solution” but we’ll see.
And yet, the US and NATO still haven’t sent the Ukrainians the weapons and jets they have asked for. Biden and Stoltenberg give great speeches but words do not stop missles. [https://kyivindependent.com/opinion/editorial-give-ukraine-everything-it-asks-for-and-now/]
“Denazification” is 100% projection.
I think you have to dehumanize your enemy to gin up a killing rage in your soldiers, particularly in soldiers who tended to view Ukrainians as similar to them and who include a lot of draftees. Further, the soldiers were told they were liberators and would be greeted as heroes. In the first week or so of the war, they got a lot of push back from Ukrainians speaking Russian to them and expressing anger at their presence. (Now, the Ukrainians and Russians just shoot each other). Soldiers expressed confusion that their “brother nation” wasn’t feeling much brotherly love.
“You will be greeted as liberators by your brother Slavs, who are really just Russians with funny accents. Also, you must exterminate them from the face of the planet as the Final Solution to the Ukrainian Question.”
Here’s a link to the Post from Rai/Novosti. It is indeed chilling.
https://medium.com/@kravchenko_mm/what-should-russia-do-with-ukraine-translation-of-a-propaganda-article-by-a-russian-journalist-a3e92e3cb64
It’s happening, slower than we might like, but also quite quietly. Germany just approved a few dozen infantry fighting vehicles, Czech Republic was quietly sending off some tanks before people caught it on camera.
I expect something is happening on the jet front, quite possibly just switching to F-15s/16s tapped in from the boneyards as other possibilities of sourcing MiGs haven’t played out. Would take a few weeks to a couple of months to throw that together, complete with pilot training (cross-training for current pilots wouldn’t be a massive lift, but would be multi-week). Really wasn’t an option until the latest clearance of the forces around Kyiv and the re-concentration in the southeast, have to also have protected and safe areas to fly out of and conduct maintenance and all that, whole string of things behind that.
The sorts of things you do quietly and then they just show up one day and are there.
ETA: I’ll also note that there have been regular updates of close contacts between the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and their Ukrainian counterparts, all of which have been fully devoid of details but with the Ukrainians projecting a very positive view of what they’re getting.
Definite hints out there that we are not at all seeing in public the full spectrum of what’s being provided in support, and I expect that our level of involvement will eventually prove to be the most laughable of smoke-screen pretend that we weren’t actually in the war.
Excellent reporting, Josh Kovensky. Thank you for it.
A pitch for TPM folks and others to read Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom (2018). Snyder is one of the world’s experts on European totalitarianism, Nazi and Soviet, and specifically on Ukraine. He speaks and reads Ukrainian and Russian and reads a handful of other relevant languages. The large arc of Road is how the Putin regime has been successfully promoting and in fact exporting anti-democratic authoritarian politics to Europe, and with Trump, to the US. But his long analysis of Putinism’s intellectual foundations in a really hard-core version of Russian fascist nationalism is at the heart of the book. 1) It’s quite terrifying, and 2) it amounts to an astonishingly prescient prediction of the moment we’re in now, 2022. The news is bad, I’m afraid, but it’s always better to know than to be ignorant.
“The installation of the Russian information space”?
1984 already?
His column partly attempts to define what “denazification” really means — a term that Putin left ambiguous in his speech.
I think the definition is clear to everyone, including the soldiers committing war crimes in Ukraine. Putin and the rest of the Russian leadership along for this ride are defining “Nazi” as anyone who opposes Russian hegemony.
The rhetoric has changed a lot in the last month. They were brothers with bad leadership in February. Now, they are a nation of Nazis who need to be exterminated like vermin.
I’ve known a few narcissists and one thing I noted was that if they were hurt/insulted and wanted sympathy for something that did not garner much sympathy, they exaggerated the offense until the listener had to be a monster not to sympathize.
I think Putin has done the same in the face of protests. Protesting an invasion of another country is one thing. Failing to support your country when it is battling genocidal Nazis who want to exterminate your nation is another thing.
1984 again, perhaps. Putin is an expert in Soviet and particularly Stalinist subjection of truth, or perhaps “truth,” to power. Not so much power comes from the barrel of a gun, although that too, but truth comes from mouth of the leader, and the p.r. organs of the leader’s state apparatus.
Frighteningly, the GOP is coming up to speed fast on this, and the rest of then U.S. establishment, not so much. This morning Glenn Kessler fact-checked claims that Ginni Thomas supported a coup. “Two Pinnochios” for the claim. I find it alarming and disturbing that Kessler and the Post are still playing chess while the GOP is, in effect and in fact, breaking windows and beating people up. Kessler and the Post seem totally unaware that they are confronting a full-blown authoritarian nationalist movement, for whom the “truth” is wholly and totally an artifact of their power.
The emphasis seems to have changed, but Putin and his media were always talking out of both sides of their mouths.
It is, isn’t it? I’ve been thinking for a while that Russia is more backward than I ever imagined. Or maybe it’s a lesson and a warning. Far too many people don’t have the critical skills to recognize obvious fiction. We are in danger here too. Biden isn’t wrong when he says Rupert Murdoch is the most dangerous man in the world – and g-d bless Biden for saying it. Murdoch’s power to indoctrinate goes far beyond even Putin’s.
Where’s Eric Prince these days? Running Mariupol for Vlad?
That bastard has to be in there somewhere.
That comes through loud and clear in the Rai/Novosti article. What’s also striking there is the resemblance to GOP rhetoric, whose claims of tyranny, voter fraud, corruption are so clearly naked projection. It really makes you think about the hysteria over pedophilia in Judge Jackson’s hearings. Keep your kids away from Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn, folks.
The US and NATO are giving Ukraine every weapon system they are trained and cable of using, which is Soviet-era hardware and easy-to-use man portable weapons like Stingers, Starstreaks, Javelins, and NLAWs. They’re about to be sent some T-72 tanks, and at least one S-300 missile system, both Soviet/Russian hardware.
There is no point in sending them things they can’t use like Polish jets configured differently from the Ukrainian air force, or Patriot anti-missile systems that would take half a year of training to use.
There are also, frankly, cost considerations. Each Stinger man-portable anti-air missile costs $38,000 US dollars. We’re sending them as many of these as they can use. Each Patriot anti-air missile costs $3 Million dollars and the launcher carries four of them. The unit cost of the system to fire those missiles – the launcher, the search and engagement radars, the command truck – is $1 Billion dollars.
That’s for just one Patriot battery, plus the cost of the missiles. Right now, Patriot batteries are being sent, or sold, to NATO countries like Poland. Risking their loss on an active battlefield where we aren’t actively engaging with US/NATO military is not going to happen.