Russian War Efforts and Other Tales
The Russian Ministry of Defense has been lying to the Russian people from the beginning. We are seeing more of this as more Western equipment arrives. We know Sergei Shoigu has promised the destruction of every F-16 within a month of arrival. Given Ukraine has lost every HIMARS launcher and then some, here is MO's take on these lies or creative truths.
The Russian Ministry of Defense completely lied. Shoigu and his subordinates report the “destruction” of Western equipment that was never supplied, and the “liquidation” of more than the Ukrainian Armed Forces received.
👻 The Ministry of Defense twice (in September and October ) reported in its reports about the destruction in Ukraine of the American M198 howitzer, which was never transferred to the Ukrainian Armed Forces . The Conflict Intelligence Team project drew attention to this.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces use the American M777 howitzer. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the last such howitzer was destroyed back in March 2023 — based on the total number of guns delivered, writes the Ukrainian publication Focus. However, the Russian military continues to regularly report on the destruction of the M777 — only last week such messages appeared in reports every day, from Monday to Thursday , the Defense Ministry noted.
🤷♂️ Even pro-Russian resources admit the lies of the Ministry of Defense about the amount of destroyed equipment. “Military Review” wrote at the end of 2022 that the Ministry of Defense “destroyed” 44 HIMARS MLRS installations, despite the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces received only 40 such vehicles. “It’s not working out well — minus four Haymars installations are creating a nightmare for the entire line of defense and objects in the rear, ” the author of the publication sneers.
🧑✈️ Shoigu himself calls unrealistic numbers . In October , he spoke about the destruction of 24 Ukrainian aircraft in 5 days , later bringing this statistics to 37 aircraft for the entire October . At the same time, according to the Oryx project, during the entire Russian invasion, confirmed losses of Ukrainian military aviation amounted to 77 aircraft .
👉 The destruction of 24 (and 37) aircraft is another invention of Shoigu and the Ministry of Defense, says military analyst Yan Matveev . “In the realities of this war, even one or two downed planes quickly appear in photos and videos — both in Russian and Ukrainian channels,” the analyst pointed out in a commentary to MO. “And here several dozen were allegedly shot down, and there is not a single confirmation, not a single photo of the wreckage .”
🦀 Putin is also confused about the quantity of Ukrainian equipment: in September he spoke about the loss of 18,000 armored vehicles by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and in October he suddenly reduced this figure by almost 10 times, to 1,900 armored vehicles.
Here is the problem. And yes, truth is the first casualty in war. If you are making up numbers for civilians, that’s one thing. Sooner or later, they will realize these are lies and lose all trust. But Vladimir Putin is not aware?
This raises a question relevant to authoritarian spaces. Do you tell Putin creative lies because he can’t handle the truth? Or they are so used to lying that this is just a force of habit.
The answer to this is primarily academic. However, the former speaks to a weak leader who will react negatively when told the truth. The latter is just another day in Russia, which brings me to Bell XXI. I have shared their posts some time ago. They are a somewhat liberal channel, but their description of Russian society as more akin to a society of slaves is what Ukrainians describe Russians as:
Homeland?
We think that you need to understand one important thing. When you see an adequate, sane Russian in front of you, then you must realize that this Russian essentially has nothing in common with Russia.
That is, if in front of you is a Russian who is not sick with great-power chauvinism and is not infected with imperial fever, a Russian for whom human life is the highest value, and the rights and freedoms of the individual are the primary necessity for its dignified existence, if he is not a racist, not a xenophobe, not anti-Semite, hates Stalin and Putin, the USSR considers the entire history of imperial Russia to be an evil empire — a history of unpunished crimes and merciless, cruel enslavement, wants defeat in the war for the Russian occupiers and the most severe punishment for his country — then this person has nothing in common with Russia, except for the language he speaks and a piece of paper with a two-headed eagle in his pocket, which was given to him by right of birth.
It is a big misconception when some Russian liberals (only a few liberals in the good sense) claim that Russia is them. NO. They are its opposite. Russia today, like yesterday, is an unchanging, hopeless Gulag. And the decent, conscientious, worthy people in it always acted as prisoners, as persecuted, ostracized, tortured and passionately, blindly, brutally hated by the deep people.
Russia is millions and millions of people who carry all of the above mentioned ulcers and vices. Let it be for now. Maybe in a hundred (two hundred? three hundred?) years it will be possible to say that Russia is us and people like us, but now Russia is them. Informers, occupiers, overseers, a hut on the edge, life for the Tsar, let’s tighten our belts, don’t care about anything until the roast rooster bites, a bomb on America, we didn’t live well and there’s nothing to start with, you don’t have Stalin, your grandfathers fought, we’ll get to Berlin , Ukraine was invented by Lenin, world conspiracy, Channel One, torture, barracks, good tsar — bad boyars, beat the traitor…
Russia is them. We must look at this directly and without unnecessary sentimentality. Who said that slavery is necessarily shackles, ingrained into the skin and grimy faces in the mud, on which the slave owner lashes with a whip, knocking out the last teeth? Modern slavery requires a modern aesthetic.
Everyone is dressed up and even goes to the “elections”.
Slavery is when you close your apartment windows with irritation so as not to hear the screams of people being dragged into a paddy wagon. When you yawn while reading about Bucha. When you stand in front of everyone at full height and without unnecessary embarrassment or a shadow of doubt you say: “My son died for his homeland in Ukraine and I am grateful to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin…”. Slavery is when for 22 years in a row you endure and accept with silent submission (sometimes you approve, even rejoice) the monstrous violence inflicted by your state. Your country. Your homeland. Because the homeland is people. Not birches, not Pushkin, not kokoshnik, but the people with all their aspirations, despairs and predispositions.
But slavery itself is not as terrible as the slave’s love for his unfreedom. A bird in a cage perceives flight as a disease. And he prefers to live his whole life in a cage and die in this cage. And God forbid for the flags. Not ordered. Alien. Scary. Self-stop.
This self-stopping, nurtured over centuries of negative selection, in the national consciousness is the quintessence of slavery.
And that same sane loner with a Russian passport in his pocket embodies everything that centuries-old Russia hates and rejects, has always hated and rejected.
We who remain, scattered around the world, persecuted, hiding, trying to reach out, break through, tormented by pain for Ukraine, wanting fair punishment for all this abomination marching in formation under the damned tricolor, we are its mental, ideological, semantic antipode. From head to toe. At the cellular level. Physiologically. Not literally, but like that.
Any person who today stands on the side of good is an enemy of Russia. The enemy of everything that she personifies and that she carries within herself.
And it’s better not to have a homeland at all than to try to force yourself to love something that is no longer possible to love.
BELL XXI
This is an incredibly prescient description of a society that is in crisis. One that can’t think on its own. One where everything is not accurate, as people pretend to survive. It’s also something else. The poster on Bell XXI is giving up on modern-day Russia. He or she cannot love a country of slaves.
This is why it got my attention. This is the first time I have seen these in the recent past. People tend to be more careful about what they post these days.
However, Ukrainians are reporting increased Russian activity on the line of Contact:
The front has revived, because the leadership of Russia needs at least some kind of victory before the elections, — Land Forces
On the entire front line, there is an increase in activity on the part of the Russian army, said lieutenant colonel, head of the public relations service of the Ground Forces Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Volodymyr Fityo.
“They need any victories, no matter how small, minimal, but presented as a victory. And to explain why already more than 300,000 soldiers from Russia will never return home, and many of them will never even be buried properly,” he said.
The military officer also notes that the most important thing for the Ukrainian army now is to prevent the “freezing” of the front.
Of note, Volymedia states that Ukrainian forces are containing attacks on Aadvika and continue to advance towards Tokmak at a crawl. We also suspect that the landing across Kherson is becoming more significant, but I am still watching that one.
An indicator of this is a new POW camp:
Ukraine will open a new camp for Russian prisoners of war
The increase in the number of prisoners of war is related both to the situation at the front, which worsens the motivation of Russian soldiers, and to the blocking of exchanges of prisoners of war by the Russian side.
“As in the case of the Zahid-1 camp, the conditions in the new camp will meet all the requirements of the norms of international humanitarian law. The Russian military will be provided with medical assistance, three meals a day, contact with relatives, as well as constant access to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross .
The camp itself is located deep in the rear, as this is stipulated by the Geneva Conventions,” the “I want to live” project reported.
This means that, as I suspected, they are getting more prisoners. Also, Russia is refusing to take them back. But more prisoners means Russian morale is likely lower at this point.
So Ukraine has to take them, House them, feed them, and take care of their medical needs. A country following the laws of land conflict will continue to do this.