Guest
On August 22, Vladimir Putin held a meeting with national and local officials via video link on the situation in the Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk regions. While the meeting mainly focused on the administrative challenges that the Ukrainian counter-invasion into Russian territory means, it also revealed some disturbing facts about the Kremlin’s long-term planning when it comes to the warfare on its territory. It is now clear that the Russian Government is preparing for a long war, into the winter, and is preparing emergency measures to ready the border regions for it. Overall, it was a dry meeting, the “matter of fact” kind of A, B, and C that are going on. That’s maybe why it didn’t attract a lot of attentions. Nevertheless, I find this important for a few reasons. I clipped the most important part of the meeting and we translated it, so feel free to jump forward if you want to hear it in the original. Now, what do we learn from this recorded video-link? First of all, that this administrative meeting was broadcast at all, is certainly part of the Kremlin’s PR approach to calm Russian citizens down and project an air of government authority and control over a threat to the nation. This looks to me very similar to the almost forgotten Corona-emergency broadcasts that nearly every government around the world did in 2020 and 2021. Talking about operational planning, expert meetings, and the allocation of funds for government programs invokes an air of government control and plans for something that is quite clearly a huge—and to a good extend—unpredictable challenge. Secondly, we learn that Ukrainian shelling and the boots on the ground have caused substantive damage to Russian houses, agriculture, and the general economy, especially in Kursk. The federal government and the regions are making budgets available in the billions or Rubels to counteract the damages. One interesting detail I found is the comment that the government has already—in less than a month—gotten the mechanism ready to write-off the mortgages of home owners whose properties have been damaged or destroyed. Compare that to the unending ordeal of many home owners in Maui, Hawaii, after wildfires destroyed their homes and insurance companies did not pay-up, leaving these people in a completely different admin-limbo. Well, if the Russian families who lost their hoses are gonna be helped indeed quickly or not is another matter but we surely see how the Kremlin would like this to be the case. Next we hear in the meeting that especially schooling is being discussed as a challenge, as the new school year is starting again just about now. This topic, together with preparations to guarantee continuous heating in the winter months are the points telling us that the Kremlin is actually preparing for continued hostilities in the border regions. The laying of optical fibre cables that are less susceptible to shelling than 5G antennas, and the decision to allow for distance schooling so that kids would not have to go out when falling projectiles might endanger them, tells me that Putin is not expecting these threats to subside anytime soon. After transitioning to a war-economy, the Russians are now getting ready to become a war-society. And I don’t mean the US kind in which people occasionally catch up on US wars 10’000 kilometres from home, but the one in which property and people at home are under direct threat—hence also the comments about building shelters in schools and shelling training for kids and other civilians. Over all, I’m really not thrilled at this development, not just because it means we are expecting more people to suffer more in the coming months, but because this is yet another escalation in this already ugly war and the military answers that Russia will have to present are going to further make things worse. The collective west is reporting that this incursion is going to make Russia more likely to cut a beneficial peace-deal with the Ukrainians but the opposite might become the case in which this now strengthens the arguments of the hawks in the Kremlin to continue the war much more heavy handed, which will in turn probably strengthen the hawks in Ukraine and the West who want to hit Russia with long-range missiles, etc. etc. And on and no it goes, the escalation spiral keeps turning and societies will be forced into war-time mode until we all go down in flames. But, ok, enough with the doom and gloom. Here are 23 minutes of the dry boring meeting. Feel free to increase the play-back speed of the video, but do have a listen to get a feeling of the preparations under way.
