Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Thursday, April 25, 2024 19:19
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Friday, March 31, 2023 3:33 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Truth Or Lies (2015), Chapter 5 from The Road to Unfreedom (2018) by Timothy Snyder

"He who is deceived is turned into a thing."—Mikhail Bakhtin, 1943

“Information war is now the main type of war.” Dmitry Kiselev was in a position to know. He was the coordinator of the Russian state agency for international news, and the host of a popular Sunday evening program, Vesti Nedeli, that led the information offensive against Ukraine.

The first men the Kremlin sent to Ukraine, the spearpoint of the Russian invasion, were the political technologists. A war where Surkov commands is fought in unreality. He was in Crimea and Kyiv in February 2014, and served as Putin’s advisor on Ukraine thereafter. The Russian political technologist Alexander Borodai was the press officer for Crimea during its annexation. In summer 2014, the “prime ministers” of two newly invented “people’s republics” in Ukraine’s southeast were Russian media managers.

A modest affair in military terms, the Russian invasion of southern and then southeastern Ukraine involved the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the history of warfare. The propaganda worked at two levels: first, as a direct assault on factuality, denying the obvious, even the war itself; second, as an unconditional proclamation of innocence, denying that Russia could be responsible for any wrong. No war was taking place, and it was thoroughly justified.

When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2014, President Putin lied with purpose. On February 28 he claimed, “We have no intention of rattling the sabre and sending troops to Crimea.” He had already sent troops to Crimea. At the moment he uttered these words, Russian troops had been marching through Ukrainian sovereign territory for four days. For that matter, the Night Wolves were in Crimea, following Russian soldiers around in a loud display of revving engines, a media stunt to make the Russian presence unmistakable. Even so, Putin chose to mock reporters who noted the basic facts. On March 4, he asserted that Russian soldiers were local Ukrainian citizens who had purchased their uniforms at local stores. “Why don’t you have a look at the post-Soviet states,” Putin proposed. “There are many uniforms there that are similar. You can go to a store and buy any kind of uniform.”

Putin was not trying to convince anyone in that post-Soviet world that Russia had not invaded Ukraine. Indeed, he took for granted that Ukrainian leaders would not believe his lie. The provisional Ukrainian government understood that Ukraine was under Russian attack, which is why it plead for an international response rather than reacting with military force. Had leaders in Kyiv believed Putin, they certainly would have ordered resistance. Putin’s aim was not to fool Ukrainians but to create a bond of willing ignorance with Russians, who were meant to understand that Putin was lying but to believe him anyway. As the reporter Charles Clover put it in his study of Lev Gumilev: “Putin has correctly surmised that lies unite rather than divide Russia’s political class. The greater and the more obvious the lie, the more his subjects demonstrate their loyalty by accepting it, and the more they participate in the great sacral mystery of Kremlin power.”

Putin’s direct assault on factuality might be called implausible deniability. By denying what everyone knew, Putin was creating unifying fictions at home and dilemmas in European and American newsrooms. Western journalists are taught to report the facts, and by March 4 the factual evidence that Russia had invaded Ukraine was overwhelming. Russian and Ukrainian journalists had filmed Russian soldiers marching through Crimea. Ukrainians were already calling Russian special forces “little green men,” a joking suggestion that the soldiers in their unmarked uniforms must have come from outer space. The soldiers could not speak Ukrainian; local Ukrainians were also quick to notice Russian slang particular to Russian cities and not used in Ukraine. As the reporter Ekaterina Sergatskova pointed out, “the ‘little green men’ do not conceal that they are from Russia.”

Western journalists are also taught to report various interpretations of the facts. The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis. He positioned himself as a side of the story while mocking factuality. “I am lying to you openly and we both know it” is not a side of the story. It is a trap.

Western editors, although they had the reports of the Russian invasion on their desks in the late days of February and the early days of March 2014, chose to feature Putin’s exuberant denials. And so the narrative of the Russian invasion of Ukraine shifted in a subtle but profound way: it was not about what was happening to Ukrainians, but about what the Russian president chose to say about Ukraine. A real war became reality television, with Putin as the hero. Much of the press accepted its supporting role in the drama. Even as Western editors became more critical over time, their criticism was framed as their own doubts about Kremlin claims. When Putin later admitted that Russia had indeed invaded Ukraine, this only proved that the Western press had been a player in his show.

After implausible deniability, Russia’s second propaganda strategy was the proclamation of innocence. The invasion was to be understood not as a stronger country attacking a weaker neighbor at a moment of extreme vulnerability, but as the righteous rebellion of an oppressed people against an overpowering global conspiracy. As Putin said on March 4: “I sometimes get the feeling that across the huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing.” The war was not taking place; but were it taking place, America was to be blamed; and since America was a superpower, all was permitted in response to its omnipotent malice. If Russia had invaded, which it was somehow both doing and not doing, Russians would be justified in whatever they were doing and not doing.

The choice of tactics in the invasion served this strategy of innocence. The absence of insignia on Russian uniforms and the absence of markings on Russian weapons, armor, equipment, and vehicles did not convince anyone in Ukraine. The point was to create the ambience of a television drama of heroic locals taking unusual measures against titanic American power. Russians would be expected to believe the preposterous: that the soldiers whom they saw on their television screens were not their own army but a ragtag band of can-do Ukrainian rebels defending the honor of their people against a Nazi regime supported by infinite American power. The absence of insignia was not meant as evidence, but as a cue about how Russian viewers were supposed to follow the plot. It was not meant to convince in a factual sense, but to guide in a narrative sense.

Real soldiers pretending for dramatic reasons to be local partisans can use partisan tactics, thus endangering real civilians. As a tactic of war, this might be called reverse asymmetry. Normally, “asymmetrical warfare” means the use of unconventional tactics by a partisan force or terrorist group against a stronger regular army. In the Russian invasion, the strong used the weapons of the weak—partisan and terrorist tactics—in order to pretend to be the weak. During what was already an illegal invasion, the Russian army broke the basic laws of war, by design and from the outset. Putin endorsed this manner of warfare even as he denied that a Russian invasion was under way. On March 4, he predicted that Russian soldiers would hide among civilians. “And let’s see those [Ukrainian] troops try to shoot their own people, with us behind them—not in front, but behind. Let them just try to shoot at women and children!”

Download all Timothy Snyder’s books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.boo/search.php?req=Timothy+Snyder

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 31, 2023 6:27 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Truth Or Lies (2015), Chapter 5 from The Road to Unfreedom (2018) by Timothy Snyder

"He who is deceived is turned into a thing."—Mikhail Bakhtin, 1943

I read this and Jack immediately came to mind.

T

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Saturday, April 1, 2023 6:06 AM