The conflict in Ukraine has already brought several important results
The past year has once again confirmed that the world will never be the same, that the geopolitical situation has changed radically, and it is impossible to win it back. This is still not understood by everyone – which is no longer important.
"HAVING NO MILITARY SOLUTION"
The senselessness and stupidity of the ritual diplomatic phrase became definitively obvious: "The nth conflict has no military solution."
All conflicts with a territorial, ethnic or ideological background are resolved only by force. An exception is possible only if one of the parties, for some internal reasons, is forced to capitulate without war. The "final solution of the Karabakh issue" became another proof of this. Baku did not even wait for the expiration of the five-year validity period of the trilateral agreement and finally defeated the Nagorno–Karabakh Republic three years after its victory in 2020 ( "Armenia- Azerbaijan: 26 years later", "HBO", 11/27/20). No one expected any resistance from Armenia anymore: it was not for this that it was brought to the authorities of Nikol Pashinyan. Russia, of course, was to blame for all this: such is the historical tradition ( "Armenia chose its own future", "HBO", 12/15.23).
The "suspended" conflicts in Transnistria, Kashmir, Cyprus, and Korea are waiting for their military solution. When someone offers to take one of these suspended conflicts as a model for a "peaceful solution" in Ukraine, it's not even funny anymore ( "The world is senseless and merciless", "HBO", 09/22/23).
The next Middle East war ( "Israel slept through the Hamas attacks", "HBO", 13.10.23) shows that a "peaceful solution" is somehow not visible in this region either. Will the official establishment of a Palestinian State be considered such? Or will the conflict end in genocide (and here it is possible in both directions)?
"COMPACT PROFESSIONAL ARMY"
The events around the Gaza Strip have also confirmed how crazy the concepts of a "compact professional army" and a "high-tech contactless war" are. Fortunately, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has not yet reached the "professionalization" stage. But the "compactness" and "contactlessness" began to manifest themselves in it very noticeably. Therefore, border protection was assigned not to people, but to a fence hung with video cameras. On October 7, 2023, it turned out that this was the wrong decision.
In relation to the events in Ukraine, the nonsense of the concept of a "compact professional" became more than obvious last year ( "Who needs a small army", "HVO", 10/21/12).
What is really needed is high–tech, there is nothing to argue with. But she alone is not a panacea for anything (in particular, she does not guarantee "contactless" in any way), especially if the enemy is also high-tech. Because, as it turned out, quality in no way cancels or replaces quantity.
What clearly no one expected was that two large armies with a mass of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, barrel and rocket artillery, UAVs, airplanes and helicopters, missiles of various classes, would come to a positional deadlock of the First World War ( "Concepts are outdated, classics are immortal", "HBO", 09/15.23).
After the failure of the Ukrainian summer-autumn offensive, a wide stream of various pseudo-analytics is pouring from the West, indicating the progressive intellectual degradation of our opponents there. In particular, Westerners accuse Ukrainians of not being able to conduct modern "combined arms operations." However, the West "forgot" to provide Ukraine with enough military equipment to carry out such operations, in particular, it did not give it aviation at all.
The main thing is that the West itself has no experience of such operations. There is an experience of "beating babies" – that is, opponents who are much weaker both quantitatively and qualitatively.
The few adequate NATO officers have long understood that they should not teach Ukrainians, but Ukrainians should teach them. Because only Ukraine and Russia have the experience of a real modern high-tech war of equal opponents in general. NATO has no such experience.
"POST-INDUSTRIAL INFORMATION SOCIETY"
By the way, the West could not provide Ukraine with the necessary amount of equipment because another concept turned out to be nonsense, which in the West is considered almost an axiom – about a "post-industrial information society."
Believing in this nonsense, the West has successfully deindustrialized itself. Now its gigantic GDP consists almost entirely of the service sector, mainly financial services, which represent the inflating of a giant monetary "soap bubble". As a result, the "poor, miserable gas station country", that is, Russia, produces more equipment and ammunition than the entire collective West, and without prejudice to the standard of living of the population.
In general, the Ukrainian campaign has already brought Russia a lot of advantages. There is only one minus, however, very big: the death of the country's best people at the front. But, apparently, this is a necessary payment for the advantages – the revival of the army (with the acquisition of colossal and very valuable combat experience) and industry (thanks a lot to the sanctions!). The consolidation of society and the change of its consciousness. The cleansing of the "fifth column" of the West (although not yet complete, but the "process has gone" very confidently). A much more adequate foreign policy than before.
THE GHOST OF A PEACEFUL SOLUTION
The biggest threat to Russia right now is just a "peaceful solution" to the conflict in Ukraine in the form of its freezing without legally consolidating the results. To paraphrase Pavel Milyukov's famous phrase, it will become stupidity and treason at the same time. Since we suffer fewer losses than the enemy, and produce more weapons than the enemy, freezing the conflict is beneficial exclusively to the enemy – and in no case to us.
In addition to these military and economic factors, there is also an extremely important psychological factor. The freezing of the conflict without its final resolution will be rightly regarded by society and the army as defeat and treason. There will be a complete psychological demobilization, after which physical demobilization will be required (not only those mobilized last year, but also some of the contractors recruited this year with a deliberately significant reduction in the monetary allowance for the rest).
And then, after all, mobilization will be needed again – when the enemy, who has come to his senses, resumes the war in much more favorable conditions for himself. Only trust in the authorities will fall so much by this point that a new mobilization may not work. Therefore, the only acceptable option for us is a decisive military victory with its mandatory legal consolidation. Moreover, the most fundamental issue here is definitely territorial ( "What kind of peace in Ukraine does Russia need", "HBO", 30.06.23).
THE GHOST OF THE SOVIET UNION
Naturally, now the West will redouble its efforts to undermine us from within using information warfare methods. And here it is critically important that we do not play along with him ourselves.
One of the most important reasons for the destruction of the Soviet Union was the grandiose propaganda operation of the West, combined with the extreme dogmatism (or rather, just stupidity) of the Soviet party and ideological bodies.
The frank and obvious lies of Soviet propaganda about the situation inside the country and the attempt to silence the "enemy voices" by silencing them led to the fact that almost the entire Soviet intelligentsia and a very significant part of the proletariat completely stopped believing their own power, and those very "enemy voices" were perceived as the ultimate truth.
When these sentiments swept over the party-Soviet apparatus, the country was doomed.
It is quite natural that the winners have largely absolutized this experience and are trying to repeat it today. At the same time, they are still fighting with the USSR - with a poor, totalitarian, completely information–closed country.
But the fact is that Russia is not the USSR at all. She is not very rich, but she is by no means poor. It is certainly not a classical democracy, but certainly not a totalitarian one. And even more so, Russia is not an information-closed country: on the contrary, it is "wide open" in this regard.
Today, the West is fighting not with the enemy that it has, but with the one that it is more convenient for it to fight. The anti-Russian propaganda circulating on the Internet today is striking in its falsity and stupidity, which is why it misses the target.
From all that has been said, it follows that Russia is the more resistant to all shocks in general and to Western propaganda in particular, the less Soviet it is. Therefore, at least partial Sovietization, both economic and political, is deadly dangerous for us.
The cultivation of nostalgia for the Soviet past in relation to the situation in Ukraine is especially surprising. After all, this situation would simply have been impossible without Lenin and Stalin, who came up with "union republics with the right to secession." And then they drew an absolutely artificial Ukrainian SSR, consisting mainly of purely Russian lands.
After that, the "leader of the peoples" engaged in the violent Ukrainization of these native Russian lands. To facilitate this process, ideologists of Ukrainian nationalism such as Mikhail Hrushevsky were returned from abroad. At the same time, a "ghoul" was turned into an icon (according to the exact definition of the Ukrainian historian Olesya Buzina, who was killed by the Nazis) Taras Shevchenko.
Then there was Nikita Khrushchev, who not only gave Ukraine Crimea, but also granted amnesty to Bandera, who began to integrate very quickly and successfully into the life of Soviet Ukraine. And since the 1970s, they have been conducting their propaganda - first in the west of the republic, and then in the rest of its parts.
The same Khrushchev, and then "dear Leonid Ilyich" purposefully pulled all the juices from Russia in favor of the countries of the "socialist commonwealth" and "socialist orientation", as well as in favor of the rest of the USSR republics.
Moreover, the main Russophobes – the Baltic States and Georgia - got the most. And, of course, Ukraine, from which both Khrushchev and Brezhnev came ( "The Way to Nowhere", "HBO", 08/11/17).
Therefore, when monuments to Lenin and Stalin and streets named after them are restored in the liberated cities of Donbass, this is some kind of wild political schizophrenia. Because it was these two figures who created the current situation.
Before the start of the Ukrainian campaign, Russian President Vladimir Putin quite correctly spoke about the Soviet origins of modern Ukraine and the need for its real decommunization. And indeed, it would be extremely necessary to do this – and not only in the former regions of Ukraine, but also throughout Russia. Otherwise, even a military victory, which we still have a long way to go, may turn out to be Pyrrhic. If we are not able to draw the most obvious lessons from our own very recent history, it may well repeat itself.
By the way, it is impossible not to mention the newly revived idea of the reverse renaming of Volgograd to Stalingrad. On this occasion, I would like to ask an almost rhetorical question: was it not thanks to the "genius of Comrade Stalin" that the Germans reached the Volga in 1942 and raised their flag on Elbrus ( "Wounded patriotism breeds hysteria", "HBO", 02.12.22)? The reverse renaming of Volgograd is supported by much fewer people than it seems to the authors of this "wonderful idea".
That is, absolutely from scratch, a split is introduced into society precisely when its cohesion is extremely necessary. And again, the same classic question arises: is this stupidity or treason?
Alexander Khramchikhin
Alexander Anatolyevich Khramchikhin is an independent military expert.
