80 000 ppl attended Z-rally in Moscow. Midwits compared its size with smaller anti-war protests and concluded it's a proof of mass Z-enthusiasm. Midwits are unable to comprehend two factors that rule this world: leverage and incentives 🧵
Journalist is asking Z-attendees "Friends, wanna give a small comment - what does this day mean for you?" They turn away in silence. He insists - they shake their heads and refuse to answer. Finally he asks - why did you come? Response "They pushed us into a bus and brought here"
When looking at Z-rallies in Russia you need to understand they're all 100% staged. Putin suppresses any independent political action and won't allow any protest either pro- or against war. Russian nationalists who are trying to do Z-rallies are arrested and threatened with jail
Kremlin allows only one single type of rallies - the ones which it orchestrated. Putin doesn't want any enthusiasts. That makes sense. If you have convictions, you may support Putin out of conviction. But it also means you may fight Putin out of convictions. You are dangerous
Putin wants only controllable people who do whatever they are told. He promotes such people o all positions of power, which explains poor Russian performance in economy, war, technology, etc. This also explains why he forces unenthusiastic people to political rallies
The main tool for filling pro-government rallies in Russia is сгон бюджетников - pressing the government employees. Government forces university, vocational school ПТУ and other students, school teachers, doctors, civil servants and whoever is on payroll to come to rallies
This for example is a public protest of an independent teachers' union Учитель. In 2014 teachers were forced to participate in demonstrations in support of the Donbass War and annexation of Crimea, and the union protested against it. You can find dozens of such publications
And this is a WhatsApp chat message. Administration forces teachers to collect school kids letters, paintings and posters in support of Z-invasion of Ukraine
This may be the most creative illustration of how they use administrative resource to demonstrate support of Z-campaign. They forced terminally ill children from hospice and their parents to form a Z-letter, supporting the invasion
How does сгон бюджетников work in practice? You command people on government's payroll to come to pick up point. You put them on a bus and drive them to Moscow. When the rally is over, you put them on a bus and drive home. This time they brought people from as far as Smolensk
If you think about it, it makes total sense. These people don't want to come, they are bored, want to go home. They don't do anything stupid, don't network. If you brought real enthusiasts they would network which is super dangerous. You just need to feed them and put onto a bus
Huge size of pro-war rallies is explained by government fully using its leverage and incentives to make people come. They literally order this school to bring 50 people, that civil service office to bring 100 and will fire the boss if he doesn't fill the quota of fake protesters
Yekaterinburg. This woman says she supports the Z-operation (though standing with the poster "for peace"). However, when asked why did she come she responded - they asked us and we came
The only articulate statement in support of the war I've seen so far. She is very happy Putin restored the authority of the country and thinks that display of Russian flags is very patriotic
This is a more typical case:
- Why did you come here?
- They called us
- Did they tell where you are going
- No, they said it will be some event, that's all
Some Z-supporters express even less enthusiasm and run away from cameras. They lool very uncomfortable and probably ashamed of attending the pro war rally
On the other hand, government uses its leverage to discourage people from protesting against the war. Here police breaks the door of Timur Tuhvatullin to arrest. He's accused of "inciting the mass riots"
Police are searching the homes of those who signed an open letter, condemning the Z-war - designer Anna Kantser, activist Gulnaz Ravilova and politician Russian Zinatullin. They had to open the door after police started cutting it
They started a criminal investigation against Liberman, a philosophy teacher of Kazan university who wrote an open letter condemning the war and started collecting students, professors and alumni signatures under it
Tons of people arrested for protesting against the war. All of prisons and detention centres in Moscow and nearby, like Saharovo, are full with people. Now they are treated much harsher than before. Last year they didn't typically beat arrested people, now they do
At this point things didn't get that bad yet. For example this guy who spit on Z letter will be just fined between 30 000 - 50 000 rubles. However, now, after Putin declared that society should "self-clean" such acts might entail far harsher consequences
This sort of explains why we see so much public support of Z-war and so little condemnation of it. Government uses leverage and incentives to promote the former and suppress the latter. This quite cringe propaganda video explains it much better than I could. Watch it. End of 🧵
What does this mean for russian logistics?
A thread 🧵:
Since 2014-15 russia built dozens of ammo dumps hidden in civilian buildings near railway stations in the parts of Ukraine it occupies.
1/n
russian logistics depots are always close to railways as russia's military has a serious lack of logistic units, especially transport units.
This is compounded by russia's military being corrupt and technologically backwards, even eschewing things like forklifts or cranes.
2/n
So russian supplies and ammo are loaded by hand onto trains, transported towards the front, unloaded there by hand, loaded onto trucks by hand, and then driven to the frontline units, where it is unloaded again by hand.
It's time consuming. No other army is so backwards.
More than four months have passed since the beginning of the Russian invasion of #Ukraine. During the war, Russian and Ukrainian strategy has evolved. Today, an update on Russia’s #strategy in Ukraine. 1/22
2/ The aim of this is to provide insights into how Putin has evolved his ‘theory of victory’ in #Ukraine, and therefore provide a foundation for developing Ukraine’s (and the West’s) defeat mechanisms against Russia.
3/ Throughout the conflict, many have explored Russia’s strategy for its subjugation of Ukraine. Because that is what Putin seeks – the absolute subjugation of the Ukrainian people, and the extinguishment of their sovereignty.
Putin's next (and final) battle.
(This thread went viral in Russian so I decided to publish an English version as well)
A long thread about what, in my opinion, is Putin's strategy right now, and the last gamble he is making to break Ukraine's resistance.
1/26
As we remember, XXI century warfare consists of more than just field battles. On the battlefield, Putin's army has shown everything it can do. And it didn’t impress. The only tactic Russia now has left at its disposal is the scorched earth tactic, based on artillery superiority
An AFU fortified area gets subjected to destructive shelling. Then Russian MoD sends in "Wagnerians" or "DPR militia", whom they do not consider people and do not include in casualty count; if there is return fire, they retreat and the shelling continues until AFU has to leave.
We now regularly hear now from people aside from Putin (for example former prime minister and president Dmitri Medvedev) about the meaning of the war, the catastrophic consequences that await Ukraine and the West, and so forth. This is a sign that Putin is losing control. 1/
Usually the news coverage of such pronouncements focuses on their content. It is tempting to get caught up in the Russian fear propaganda. But the real story is that people aside from Putin now feel authorized to make such proclamations. Before the war there was less of this 2/
- What is long, green and smells with sausage?
- Moscow-Tver train
Why? Well, under the USSR provincials had to go shopping to Moscow. Their shops had no food, often very literally. Today we'll learn an expression "supply category"🧵
Under the centrally planned economy it was the state which supplied food to the localities. It would assign each city one of four "supply categories" determining how much food there will be on shelves. Moscow was supplied far better than anyone while cities like Tver - horribly
Provincial Soviet cities of the lower supply categories might have no food on the shelves at all. Sometimes very literally. Sometimes they would have only the scraps from the table of the higher status city: like some algae, or the disgusting paste "Ocean"
I find this line of argumentation illustrative of the general state of Russian discourse, whether "patriotic" or "liberal". Everything Turkic occupies the same place in the Russian debates as everything Irish in the Imperial British. The Inner Other and the source of all the evil
Reading the Russian-Ukrainian debates with both sides accusing each other of racial impurity and having too many Steppe admixtures or influences, I noticed that their argumentation is mirroring each other. See this Russian nationalist material for example sputnikipogrom.com/history/15934/…
This mutuality and almost exact symmetry of Russian-Ukrainian accusations reminds me of a brilliant
thread on the British rule over the Ionian Isles. Bach then the discourse was similar. Brits and Greeks were constantly accusing each other of Irishness
Russian bureaucracy is *massive*. It's also diverse. Judging from my observations, it's less integrated than let's say the apparatus of the U.S. federal bureaucracy. Different agencies have different cultures and operate by different rules. Avoid sweeping generalisations (not🧵)
I see a very common attitude among the Russian pro-war community. It can be summarised this way:
"We expected dumb and incompetent bureaucrats to destroy our economy. But our glorious army would prevail against all odds. It turned out we were wrong. It's the other way around"
Now much of the Z-community argues that they greatly overestimated the Russian army (and the military apparatus). It's very, very much worse than anyone thought before. But they underestimated the economic bureaucracy. Which is very much better than they could have thought
No. Describing Russian regime as "kleptocracy" is misrepresentation. It's not technically false, just absurdly reductionist. Let's be honest, if Putinism was *entirely* about stealing it would not be able to wage wars or produce armaments. And it produces hella lots of them
Keep in mind that public rhetorics work according to the rhetorical logic. Public position doesn't have to be factually accurate, it has to be rhetorically advantageous for it to work. They talk about "corruption" so much because it's rhetorically advantageous. That's it
When you don't have a positive agenda/vision of future or it's too hideous, you talk about "corruption". Examples - Lukashenko or Yeltsin. "Anti-corruption fight" is an ideal topic for a power hungry politician. Because talking about corruption = avoiding the actual conversation
Kremlin may not have a grey cardinal. But it has a bald engineer. The Kinder Egg is a major architect of Putinism. In 1998 he made Putin the FSB Chief. In 2000s he dismantled the regional autonomy imposing the centralised rule. Now he manages Putin's domestic policy and Ukraine🧵
Sergey Kirienko was born as Sergey Israitel in a mixed Russian-Jewish family. After the divorce his mother changed his surname from father's "Israitel" to her own "Kirienko". That could be a pragmatic decision. A boy with a Slavic name would have better career chances in the USSR
In childhood Kirienko lived with his mom in subtropical Sochi. Here he started the bureaucrat career as a Komsomol manager (комсорг) of his high school class. NB: the role of Komsomol in Soviet to post-Soviet transition is underrated. Komsomol management were its main benefactors