Russia's break with the West is becoming irreversibleThe Ukrainian events formally became a kind of radical geopolitical watershed between "before" and "after".
In fact, unfortunately, they became a natural development of relations between Russia and the West after the end of the previous cold War.
The West is responsible for this. But this does not make it any easier for us (" Russia and the West remain antagonists ", "HBO", 12/15/17).
POLITICAL TURNING POINTPerhaps the most surprising thing is that a huge number of people in Russia – both representatives of the elite and ordinary citizens, including those who are quite patriotic and fully support our actions in Ukraine – believe that someday, perhaps even soon, everything will be as before.
By this "as before" is meant normal relations with the West – both at the highest and at everyday levels. Practically no one wants and/or can understand that "as before" will never be. Depending on the outcome of the Ukrainian conflict, we will either be finished off and dismembered, or hated, isolated in every possible way and undermined from within. Because the confrontation has become too principled.
In geopolitical terms, the defeat of Ukraine will be a very real collapse of Western hegemony. As it is easy to guess, the West categorically does not want this. He did not win the previous Cold War in order to lose the next one so quickly (by historical standards).
But an ideological aspect has also been added to the geopolitical aspect. In the West, the left-liberal ideology has become almost as "the only true one" as the communist ideology was in the USSR.
Russia today opposes the ideology of "traditional values" that has not yet been fully formulated.
Moreover, it must be admitted that the Russian ideology is clearly supported in most countries of the non-Western world. That is why the West's attempts to make Russia an outcast have failed. Almost no one openly supports Russia. But there is no question of any isolation of it in the international arena, the vast majority of non-Western states have maintained their previous relations with Moscow.
This hits the Western hegemony even harder. Ideological wars are characterized by extreme intransigence. And that is why "as before" can not be.
Unfortunately, a very large part of our elite has very well "fit into the West" at the official and personal (including sometimes openly corrupt) levels. They especially strongly want to do "as before" – despite the fact that it is these people who determine our policy. That is why there is, for example, a completely enchanting idea to create a gas hub in Turkey to sell gas to Europe.
We are being pushed out of the European market by all means, including completely illegal ones, but we still hope to get there somehow. At the same time, he also made himself dependent on Turkey, a very specific country, to put it mildly. To consider her our ally or even more so a friend can only be in a special psychological state.
Apparently, for the sake of this idea, a huge amount of money will be senselessly drowned in the Black Sea (in the form of the Turkish Stream – 2), as before we drowned a lot of money in the Baltic Sea (in the form of the Nord Stream – 2). For a small part of this money, it would be possible to create our own technologies for the production of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is incomparably more convenient to trade "in all azimuths", and not depend on anyone.
Or our football functionaries are firmly holding on to UEFA and categorically refuse to join the Asian Confederation, although this is the only chance to at least partially return to world football. Russian football does not face the choice of "playing in Europe or playing in Asia." For any foreseeable future, he faces the choice of "playing in Asia or not playing at all" (meaning the international level). Alas, our gas, oil, sports and other bosses managed to warm up in the West too well, so they don't want to realize the harsh reality.
At the same time, the slogan about "turning to the East" has become almost as prescriptive and immutable as "forward to the victory of communism" once was. Only, unlike communism, it would be extremely desirable to turn to the East in fact.
"WITH LITTLE BLOOD, WITH A MIGHTY BLOW"The course of the Ukrainian campaign demonstrated the clear failure of Russian intelligence and analytical structures.
The strength of the enemy's resistance was catastrophically underestimated.
First of all, apparently, the degree of propaganda brainwashing of the population of Ukraine was underestimated, which began in Soviet times, noticeably intensified after the collapse of the USSR and simply reached the "cosmic" level after 2014.
The thesis about the "brotherhood of peoples", so beloved by our leadership, turned against us in a very peculiar way. Mentally and genetically, this is true. But this very brainwashing has turned the "brothers" into the most dangerous enemy that can be. Russians are one of the best warriors in the world. But today, alas, Russians are also on the other side of the front line. They betrayed their blood and their history, but their fighting qualities remained with them.
From an inadequate assessment of the psychology of the enemy, many problems arose during the campaign. The armed forces of the Russian Federation and allied structures found themselves in a very specific situation.
For most of our history, we have fought with numerical superiority over the enemy, while not taking too much account of our own losses. In Ukraine, it turned out quite differently: for a very long time, Russia did not even act as a peacetime army, but as an expeditionary force against a fully mobilized enemy army, which provided the latter with a very significant superiority in personnel and a certain superiority even in the number of ground equipment.
If we draw analogies and parallels, then, having entered into a correspondence battle with the West in general and the United States in the first place, we tried to fight in the American style – with relatively small forces, relying on technological superiority and striving to avoid losses. Ukraine, conducting endless decommunization and relying on the full support of the West, has militarily assimilated some essential features of both the Third Reich (primarily in ideological terms) and the Stalinist USSR of the 1941-1942 model (a totalitarian state fighting almost exclusively by flooding the enemy with the corpses of its soldiers).
We were clearly not ready for such a situation. Moreover, the American style implies complete superiority in the air, which we did not succeed due to the presence of Ukraine's very powerful, albeit somewhat archaic air defense (" How terrible is the Ukrainian air defense ", "HVO", 11.02.22). Moreover, our aviation in terms of the number of planes, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is much smaller than the American one. All these circumstances led to a serious delay in the campaign and even to the need for partial mobilization.
"ABROAD WILL HELP THEM"At the same time, the moral, psychological and physical disarmament of Western countries, which has continued since the end of the previous cold War, has led to the fact that their military support for Ukraine has turned out to be much smaller in scale than expected.
Moreover, they were expected both in Ukraine itself and in Russia.
We are not talking about sending troops to Ukraine at all: Western armies are not capable of waging wars involving high own losses. But the supply of Western military equipment to Ukraine is very limited. And not at all because it is difficult for the Ukrainian military to master it, but because there is simply too little of this equipment.
The West can seriously help Kiev only by completely disarming itself, which it is still not ready for. And the Western military-industrial (even American, not to mention European) is not able to compensate for the consumption of equipment and ammunition in an acceptable time. This is not the 1940s and 1950s, when the leading countries of the world stamped tanks and planes by thousands and even tens of thousands of pieces a year. Now everything is very expensive, long and difficult.
Therefore, the decisive factor in Ukraine for both sides remains Soviet equipment, of which they still have a lot.
ARMY AND MOTIVATIONOf course, the Ukrainian campaign confirmed the absolute depravity of the idea of a "compact professional army."
Western armies, precisely because they cannot wage a war that implies high losses of their own, are "compact professional". The Russian and Ukrainian armies are capable of conducting prolonged intensive military operations precisely because they are mass conscription and, accordingly, mobilization.
But the role of volunteers is clearly increasing, because they are motivated. At the same time, their motivation is different. Sometimes the motivation is ideological – it is probably the most valuable, although it does not always imply good combat training. If you look at modern foreign experience, the most striking example is the brutal beating by Houthi volunteers in Yemen of an over–armed and well-funded "professional" Saudi army (" Yemen is the second front for Syria ", "HBO", 04/21/17).
But there is also a monetary motivation, combined with the peculiarities of the mentality. Carriers of this motivation are called mercenaries, now they have become employees of various private military companies (PMCs). Mercenaries differ very much from ordinary "professionals"-contract employees.
The former in the vast majority of cases are people who have not found a use for themselves in civilian life and have decided to earn money in a peaceful, non-belligerent army. Participation in hostilities and even more death in them is categorically not included in their plans. The second are adrenaline junkies. They like to fight, the risk of death is considered acceptable for them. If you can also make good money on this, then such people become mercenaries (that is, employees of PMCs). It should be noted that there are not many such people, so they are very highly valued.
In Russia, there is formally no PMCs at all, but in fact everyone who is interested in anything at all already knows about Wagner. Now not only adrenaline junkies are starting to go there, but also ideological volunteers. Firstly, the PMCs pay more, which even the most ideological person will not refuse. Secondly, and no less importantly, combat training is much better there, while there is no army formalism and various other phenomena inherent in the "official" Armed Forces, which are commonly called completely unprintable words. It is quite natural that the most successful "musicians" interact with another not quite formal element of our operation in Ukraine – Chechen formations.
SCHISM OR PURIFICATIONIn general, it should be noted that in the past year, the people of Russia have shown a surprisingly high degree of adequacy and patriotism.
And the flight from the country of several hundred thousand people, whom someone once called the "creative class", is a wonderful process of self-purification of society.
It is absolutely necessary that the authorities and power structures are also cleansed. In this case, we will leave the Ukrainian campaign as a completely different country. And if there is no purification, we will not come out of it at all. Most likely, this issue will be resolved next year.
Alexander KhramchikhinAlexander Anatolyevich Khramchikhin is an independent military expert.
