On Times Radio there is an endless stream of interviews with various experts, typically ex-British or US senior military figures, or ‘senior journalists’. They endlessly predict the collapse of Russia, a coup (leading to what?), or Ukraine making some huge battlefield breakthrough. None of this happens, and, indeed all the evidence is pointing in the opposite direction. But this doesn’t phase them. The same stories appear again and again, month after month. It really is an amazing exercise in narrative over reality.
This is a great quote from Richard Sakwa on this point:
The journalist Ron Suskind quotes an anonymous White House official shortly after the [2003 Iraq] war: The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore’, he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’. [1]
Much of material on Times Radio is in the realm of pure phantasy; a line which they never tire of, for example, is that “discontented oligarchs” are going to rise up and overthrow Putin. [2] These are dreams, which correspond to the Russia of the early 1990s, (when corrupt oligarchs did indeed rescue pro free-market Yeltsin from losing an election to the Communist Party), not the Russia of today. It seems that with Ukraine they might have found one case, where they cannot just bend reality to their narrative.
This is a Times journalist Marc Urban. I should say, this is at least some kind of attempt to be serious. It is not the usual phantasising about Putin’s demise and Russia’s collapse.
Comments:
1. He says the MOD estimates 600,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded. Maybe. (I don’t know). But what about Ukrainian losses? From a population base three or four times smaller.
2. He claims that in the Moscow Metro there are adverts offering £47,000.00 p.a pounds for new recruits and that “even with those sums of money being offered they are still having great difficulty filling the ranks”. I cannot specifically disagree with his claim about £47,000.00. I am not in Moscow. I was in Kazan recently and the sum there was about 200,000 rbl per month with a sign-up bonus of up to 600,000.00 rbl. (I may be wrong, but I think the monthly salary is fixed at a federal level and the sign-up bonus is offered by the regions; I have seen the 200,000.00 monthly salary consistently in various regions in Russia). This is about £1,650.00 pcm or about £20,000.00 p.a. Still a very large salary for a “Russian working man”, but not £47,000.00. However; even if he is right, this would be an exception for Moscow, where salaries are much higher in general than in the regions in Russia. As for “not filling the ranks”, this part is not true. The MOD has said that Russia is recruiting about 30,000.00 soldiers per month. [3] Russia would have to be losing 1000 soldiers a day for Mark Urban’s claims about “not filling the ranks” to be true. (I find all this talk about losses and ‘not refilling’ almost impossible. This is blood, not ink). Meanwhile, if you want to find it, there is plenty of evidence of Ukraine’s recruitment problems; men are literally being dragged off the street. Commanders at the front are complaining that a large number of the recruits sent to them are simply unusable. [4]
3. Urban then goes on to talk about the crazy idea to allow Ukraine to fire the Storm Shadows into the Russian homeland. He talks about the intra-Western politics but there is no sense at all that he has an awareness of the seriousness of this step.
4. Urban then argues that the losses, he claims, plus the “increasingly effective Ukrainian strikes” will put pressure on Russia to negotiate in the next few months. Assuming he is aware that Russia regularly offers to negotiate, albeit with their key points respected, most recently Putin offering to pick up the thread where it was left off in Istanbul, he must mean that Russia is ready to make concessions. I think this is extremely optimistic. Ukrainian strikes on Russia do not begin to match the level of destruction that Russia can inflict on Ukraine. The whole of Ukraine is regularly under attack from dozens of Russian missiles. Ukraine can strike within the European part of Russia on occasion, with its drones, but cannot come close to Russia’s waves of attacks. Ukraine is at the point of collapse and Russia, while suffering some disagreeable events, is not. At least Urban concedes that Ukraine is under considerable pressure.
5. The discourse about how if Kamala Harris wins the US election then Russia will have a problem, because they won’t benefit from Trump shutting down the war, misses, amazingly enough, a rather key point. The last tranche of money for Ukraine barely made it through Congress. It took months to scrape it over the line. Can the war party rely on Congress to come up with another tranche once this one has been spent? If not, then the war is over at that point.
Overall, Urban paints a picture of two war-weary sides being ready to compromise. This is wrong, for two reasons. Firstly; Russia is in no way under the same kind of pressure, economic or on the battlefield, as Kiev – a country which is totally dependent on unreliable foreign aid to keep its army and economy afloat. Secondly, for Russia, all the key questions; Ukraine joining NATO and Crimea, at least, are existential and non-negotiable.
Personally, I wouldn’t call this a “brilliant analysis” as the anchor does. (Still, the bar is pretty low in Western journalism these days). I do wonder though, if we aren’t seeing the beginning of the preparations for Ukraine’s surrender and acceptance of Russia’s key terms. Hopefully we are, since the alternative may be escalation.
Notes
1. Sakwa, Richard. The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War (p. 138). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
2. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j5w6X0_bAM “Putin faces oligarch ‘discontent’ as Ukraine’s Kursk offensive gains hold”.
3. https://www.ft.com/content/ade7862b-050f-43c2-857c-b76fb05c9ff6
4. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-new-recruits-pokrovsk-ed2d06ad529e3b7e47ecd32f79911b83