Russian-Ukrainian war: media and reality Serhey Bohdan's scenario

The Ukrainian government and its allies are emphasising the recent successes in repulsing the Russian invasion. But the reality looks very ambiguous - in spring the Ukrainian army was achieving much more significant results than now.

Over the past two weeks, Ukrainian forces have liberated more than 6,000 square kilometres of their own territory, Kyiv announces, mainly in the northeast of the country, towards Kharkiv. Nearly a fifth of the Kharkiv region has been liberated - almost all that the Russians have managed to occupy in that region. Some advances have also taken place in the south. Nevertheless, Russian troops continue to control about 1/5th of Ukraine's territory.

In the glory of Western arms: real and media victories

The successes of the last counteroffensive of the Ukrainian army near Kharkiv should be evaluated, moving away from the support of Kyiv or Moscow, in terms of what it means for the war. First of all, what happened? Ukraine has dislodged Russian troops from several districts far "beyond Kharkiv", but what is the strategic importance of these territories? Indeed, it is always good to liberate one's own land, but as for waging war, not all lands are "equally useful".

Has the enemy been driven away from Kharkiv, the largest city after Kyiv, an industrial and scientific centre? No way, a completely different part of the region has been liberated and the threat to Kharkiv has not diminished one iota. Ukrainian troops have reached the borders of the Russian Federation? Well, they were on those borders before that, and, say, the Ukrainian army had an opportunity to shell Russian territory and send in SSGs before that. Or maybe Kyiv, having gained more space to deploy near the Russian borders, would send its troops into Russian territory - a perfectly legitimate move? But it is doubtful that Ukraine would dare to do such a move under the current leadership. After all, Kyiv does not dare to touch the gas pipeline on its own territory between Russia and the EU, and the day before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would back the idea of reopening Russian ammonia exports through Ukraine if Moscow handed back prisoners of war (POWs), an idea the Kremlin quickly rejected.

This is, in fact, all you need to know about the readiness of the Ukrainian government to fight for its land — its courage ends where the interests of big business and Western countries begin.

So what was it like at Kharkiv? The operation was an important but tactical success. However, in the postmodern era, material, even military realities are not so important. This was noted by the famous French philosopher Jean Baudrillard during the American military operation against Iraq in 1991, the so-called Gulf War. He then published a series of provocative essays entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, pointing out that thanks to the discursive hegemony of the West and the practices of the Western media, the public was presented with a picture that concealed the real war.

The current war is being waged in a similar manner. As if to illustrate Baudrillard's theory, already at the beginning of Western arms sales to Ukraine on the central German TV an expert from the government-associated "think-tank" explained that the threat of nuclear war is mainly in people's heads and not in the material reality, they just need to get rid of fear. In general, the sides are waging this war primarily in the media and political space, and therefore the value of the Kharkiv counter-offensive was not in material achievements, but rather in being proof of the power of Western weapons and the importance of continuing to supply them in the eyes of the Western public. In ancient Rome, they would have said more bluntly - the plebs because Western politicians (increasingly reminiscent of their Russian counterparts in this regard) increasingly do not hide their peculiar attitude toward citizens and their opinions on what is happening. Indeed, as German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock recently stated at a conference in Prague, the opinion of German voters regarding supplies to Kyiv does not bother her (alas, her words were unequivocal and not invented or at least distorted by Russia Today).

In order to understand the real scale of the Kharkiv operation, one should simply recall the real strategic success of the Ukrainian army - the successful defence of Kyiv and the subsequent expulsion of Russian troops from all of northern Ukraine this spring! It was this victory that then forced the Kremlin to abandon its attempts to bring the Ukrainian state to collapse, and forced the West to start supplying more and more arms and other aid. That victory was won by the Ukrainian forces, who still had no Western weaponry in their arsenal.

Therefore, the spring victory was of no use to the West, but the Kharkiv operation allows speculation that it is the West and its miraculous weapons that save poor Eastern Europeans from "empire". The miraculous efficacy of Western weapons, in general, is based more on media coverage by the Western-controlled media than on objective facts. The forces armed with the latest Western technology could not cope with the Taliban in Afghanistan or with the Hussites in Yemen. Nor has the arrival of Western weapons in Ukraine so far improved the effectiveness of the Ukrainian army in recent months - a bitter truth for the West.

Putin's three priorities

The real strategic success of the Ukrainian army could and should have been the operation in a completely different direction, Kherson. Strategic, because it would have changed the nature of the war - not only by breaking the logic of the Russian army's operations to seize the Black Sea coast of Ukraine but also by cutting off or at least endangering the land corridor from Crimea to Russia, while also disrupting the water supply in Crimea again. An operation in Kherson Oblast was indeed being prepared, and the Western media even reported it as having been launched, later, however, changing their story to say that it was a military ploy to divert Russian troops from the Kharkiv direction. The media remained silent about their role in this - military disinformation in the interests of one of the sides, ignoring the interests of their main audience (this is the same "Baerbok model" described above).

Putin is said to have fallen for this ploy and withdrawn troops to Kherson. However, it is not clear what kind of troops he took there. Quite a few Russian forces had been concentrated there for a long time, and the generals in Moscow were much more serious about this area than about Kharkiv. The main priorities of the Kremlin have not changed much since the war began. Only the plans to achieve them have changed. In the first place (by a huge margin) has always been the southern direction - primarily in connection with Crimea, which since its annexation in 2014 has been a "white elephant" for Putin. To get Crimea out of this state, the Kremlin needed to create a land corridor between Crimea and Russia, provide the peninsula with water from the mainland, covering the bases of the Black Sea Fleet, etc.

Eastern Ukraine was second on Moscow's list of military priorities. Its unenviable place is already evident from the fact that six months after the start of the invasion, the Ukrainian army is still shelling the same Donbas cities that it was shelling before, and even doing so more successfully. No matter how much Moscow talks about its concern for the population of Donbas, there is no other function for the inhabitants of this region than to be used as an excuse for Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This can also be seen by the way the Russian side has been eliminating any amateur initiative of the residents of this rebellious Ukrainian region since 2014.

The northeast and north of Ukraine were only in third, or even better, last place for the Kremlin. Putin is in no hurry to seize areas with a large Ukrainian population. Though Moscow propagandists have been saying for years that "Ukrainians" do not exist and were invented by the Bolsheviks and other enemies, in reality, the Kremlin is well aware that Ukrainians do exist in reality and is therefore not inclined to mess with the millions of Ukrainian population. A different plan is in effect for them - to push them out into the EU, thereby putting additional pressure on the West.

This hierarchy of priorities also explains the behaviour of Moscow's rulers. For example, Putin said that the Russian army's plans of operations in Ukraine will not be adjusted due to the recent counterattack by the AFU near Kharkiv. "Despite these attempts by the Ukrainian army to counterattack, our offensive operations in Donbas itself have not stopped," he said and stressed that he was not particularly concerned about the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The path to nowhere

However, some plans are being adjusted. Symptomatic was the speech of businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, known for his closeness to the Kremlin, this week before the prisoners in a certain Russian detention centre with an appeal to sign up to the so-called PMC Wagner, which he created. This means that the Russian authorities have taken the practice of using PMCs to a new level. First, by moving to the use of prisons as recruiting points for the actual armed forces. You may find a lot of thugs there, but soldiers who can perform complex tasks in modern warfare - definitely not.

Secondly, Putin is putting PMCs and so-called volunteer units even on the front line in military operations. Even in Iraq or Afghanistan, the US did not put the PMCs in combat operations - they were given the "dirty" jobs, such as guarding facilities in the occupied countries after the invasion. The results of the "work" of the volunteer and PMC units have always been the same everywhere - they can harass the population, but can not perform serious strategic objectives in the war, especially against the regular army. And the Russian side seems to be about to step on the same rake that the Americans recently stepped on when they privatized the war.

The US built a puppet state in Afghanistan on neoliberal approaches, the "invisible hand of the market", privatization, outsourcing, etc. Privatised health systems also worked beautifully until the coronavirus hit. Similarly, in Afghanistan, until the resistance to the occupation regrouped, the system that Washington had built looked remarkably successful. Its peak should be considered the negotiations of the owner of one scandalous PMC with many names, Eric Prince, on the establishment of a private air force in Afghanistan. Prigozhin, incidentally, in the same speech in front of prisoners, said that he already had the planes and other equipment.

It was the history of privatisation of the war in Afghanistan that predetermined the military defeat of the pro-American government in Kabul, and this became particularly evident at the very end. On the eve of the American decision to withdraw, there were 2,200 US soldiers in Afghanistan, but there were also 16,000-18,000 employees of various subcontracted PMCs and other paramilitary companies. The latter, for example, were responsible for supply and evacuation of distant airfields and garrisons of the Afghan army, ground handling of the Afghan Air Force, and armored vehicles - in terms of the market it is easier to hire all kinds of, better cheaper Eastern European, migrant workers, rather than train the Afghans. So, these military and paramilitary companies, which were supplying foreign "cannon fodder", felt that the going get tough in recent months, have immediately abandoned making something for the troops of the Kabul collaborationist regime. The latter were left without food, ammunition, and even fire support from the air - and there was no other. It's a market optimisation, why duplicate, etc.? As a result, the Kabul regime collapsed last year, even though it had at its disposal forces that were formally seriously superior to the Taliban.

In short, Moscow is successfully adopting the worst of the West's experience in terms of effectiveness. The West was lucky that in Afghanistan it was confronted with small gangs of ideologically minded, but poorly trained and equipped fighters. In Ukraine, the Russian troops will have to deal with a very different force. Not only a huge army and modern equipment but also serious special services. This has been demonstrated in recent days: on Friday alone, the "LPR" prosecutor general and his deputy were killed in Luhansk, and in Berdyansk, the deputy head of the pro-Russian administration of that city and his wife, who headed the electoral commission for the referendum on joining Russia, suffered the same fate.

Do the Russians want war?

Actually, these strange experiments with PMCs, volunteer units, and the idea of "self-mobilisation" of the regions proposed by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov (it is also supported by other heads of Russian regions, Nizhny Novgorod region formed a volunteer tank battalion named after Kozma Minin!) highlight the reality that many in the West, some with obviously racist motives, do not seem to want to recognise. But which for the Kremlin is painfully revealing - namely that support for this war in Russia is far from solid.

The conventional wisdom is that the Russian people want war, and support it in every possible way. Everything is reinforced by references to some polls, although the meaning of public opinion, if it is only formed as a result of non-alternative propaganda, is insignificant, it would crumble like a sand castle. The Kremlin understands the pettiness of this "public support" for Putin's policies, just as it understands the bogus nature of the polls and elections - after all, the last more or less adequate elections in Russia took place in 1991. At that time Russians elected Yeltsin - who did not come up with a militant program. Yeltsin, who had not yet shot his own parliament with Western backing, looted the country in the 1990s through so-called privatisation with the help of the West and who started the tradition of stealing elections in 1996 with the help of the West.

Further developments in Russia were only a continuation of the same trends with the help of the West, including under Putin. Where could a Russian person even speak out in support of the war if no one asked him?

To sum up, Kyiv continues to fight primarily in Western capitals and the media. And it is in this light that the epithets awarded to the successful but, as we noted above, not the breakthrough operation of the Ukrainian armed forces in the Kharkiv region are understandable. In the Western liberal media, which defines the global discourse, any success of the Ukrainian army is now declared "strategic" and linked to deliveries of (certainly "insufficient") Western weapons. This is not surprising in a situation where bills are rising and the willingness of citizens in Western countries to support Kyiv and justify the success of their chosen policies is falling. The struggle within the Western establishment is superimposed here, because to some it is the war, and to some, it is a great opportunity to rise in power, earn money, etc. The same head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, squeezed even the leaders of key European countries on the political stage during the Ukrainian war and became the main partner for Biden in the key global policy crisis in Eastern Europe. To make it clear — this is exactly the kind of activist who is associated with the deplorable state of the German army, but who is now at the forefront of the supporters of confrontation.

Some may say: what about Strelkov and other Russian imperial activists? They admit the defeat near Kharkiv and talk about a threat to Russia. Yes, they do, but there is also a political struggle going on in Russia in which the "Ukrainian question" becomes an important tool, and therefore there is such talk in public. It is vital to Strelkov (who is certainly not some Don Quixote of the Empire, but is linked to some not-so-little people in the Russian establishment) and other chauvinistic forces that the Kremlin should not stop, because in a de-escalation they have no chance of getting anywhere. And signs that the occupants of the Kremlin are inclined to make a deal have been present since March, not only in the form of aborted negotiations but also in the "grain deal" and pressure on the EU through gas supplies. The Russian government has fulfilled its minimum programme and probably wouldn't mind getting out of the war already, taking the spoils with it. Naturally, neither Kiyv nor its allies would agree to such an option; resources for warfare abound on all sides and therefore things are just getting started.