In Moscow's Shadows 61: Ukraine: When Autocracy meets Technocracy - Putin's War, Info War, Spook War

Rather than try and follow the day-by-day, I tackle one of the tricky conundra: not just why the Russians have done so badly, but why the Ukraine war hasn't been fought the way the Russian army is meant to fight. My suspicion is that it is what happens when autocracy meets technocracy, and I explain what I mean.

In the second part, I look at the current claims that Colonel General Beseda of the FSB is under arrest and the hints of opening divisions in the security apparatus, as well as the wider question of how we try and make sense of it all in the midst of active information warfare being waged on every side.

You can also follow my blog, In Moscow's Shadows, and become one of the podcast's supporting Patrons and gain question-asking rights and access to exclusive extra materials right here. 

Transcript

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Putin's war? Information wars? Spook wars. Yes, it's more about Ukraine. Hello, I'm Mark Galliotti, and welcome to my view of Russia in Moscow Shadows. This podcast, of varying length, frequency, and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons, who also receive extra perks and bonuses appropriate to their tier. If you'd like to join them, just head on to Patreon.com slash inMoscow Shadows. But now, on with today's program. You know, I'm wondering actually if I need to be thinking again about that opening music. I mean, yes, it's all very jolly and so forth, but it feels just a little bit too martially triumphalistic for the moment. Anyway, something I'll have to think about. Now, going on to the war, I'm not even going to try and talk about the sort of day-by-day minutiae for several reasons. One, because we, and this is something I'll cover right at the end, actually know much less than we might like to think. There is a huge amount of news, but I must admit a lot of it isn't really that much newsing. Information precisely about where the Russian forces are, where the current front lines, does tend to get rather lost in yet another piece of, frankly, heartstring tugging filler about the refugees and people who are suffering under bombardments, all of which is terrible and all of which absolutely needs to be reported. But I just do tend to feel that that obscures a real sense of exactly what's happening in the conflict. So, in that context, I'm not going to talk much about the day by day, and also because the day by day does indeed change. Instead, what I wanted to in the first half of this podcast is dwell a little bit on a very big picture issue about, as I say, this is very much Putin's war in more ways than one. It's not just the fact that I absolutely don't think that the reality of this war is indeed something that most Russians are behind and would support. Remember those opinion polls that seem to say that more than 50% agree. That's because, in a way, as far as they're concerned, they are agreeing with the official position. The official picture, which is of a limited, relatively surgical operation to prevent Ukraine from acquiring nuclear weapons or launching an attack on the Donbass or whatever. I really do feel that we're going to see that kind of support erode very rapidly, in part to a degree because of sanctions, though sanctions will also generally push a bit of a rally round the flag kind of effect. But more to the point as real information about what's going on in Ukraine filters back, as it will as boys start coming home or not coming home. And just one other point that's worth mentioning. We're now beginning to see that happen. We're now beginning to see admissions that conscripts were sent. Putin, as ever, unwilling to actually allow himself to be blamed for anything, is now sort of calling for investigation as to why conscripts were there. But the point is that at the same time conscripts are coming back with all the kind of uh news of the miseries that they saw, and they're coming back just in time for the start of the spring call-up season. One of the interesting little indices that's worth looking at, insofar as the Russians will be honest about what's going on, is once that happens, let's see if the uh rate of draft dodging goes up. I wouldn't be surprised if it does. Anyway, one of the things about calling this Putin's war that I think this is worth highlighting is the degree to which he has to take responsibility for what is still something of a conundrum, which is how can we explain just how badly the Russian military seems to have messed up, at least the first two weeks of the invasion. And again, it's worth stressing, we are in an age where we tend to expect instant gratification on all things, whether it's Amazon Prime deliveries or binging series on Netflix. Wars can often take quite a long time to unfold, and we cannot assume that what we see after two weeks is guaranteed to be the pattern that we'll see in the future. We wait and see. But yes, it just seems to have been done really surprisingly badly, given that this is an army which seems to have had a long time to prepare, had certain massive strengths, and yes, it was fighting a Ukrainian military that clearly had also had time to prepare, and clearly was exceedingly determined to defend its own homeland. And sure, there's an element in which military corruption, failures in preparation, general blunders and so forth, all that applies. But the point is this is a military we've seen also can operate very effectively. One can look at, well, the uh Syrian operation would seem to be a case in point. What's more, the Russians know about many of their flaws. You can see them discussed in the military press, you know, particularly about the issues to do with preparation, but also a little bit more circumspectly, things like corruption and so forth. And they have sought to create mechanisms and processes which will minimize that. And this is actually visible in just generally how Russia prepares for war. And here I want to just dig into some of the points I was making earlier this week at a talk at the Oxford Changing Character of War program. And incidentally, thanks for them for inviting me. The thing is, there's in some ways two ways of war that dominate within Russia. One is the military perspective, and the other one is the perspective that is largely held within the security apparatus, the security agencies, and obviously their sort of main hub in the Security Council Secretariat. The military, for all the talk about hybrid measures and so forth, which they absolutely do think of as ways of preparing the battlefield, what uh would be described as shaping operations in the West. But when it comes down to it, ultimately, war is war. It is about the grand movement of troops and forces and beating the enemy, depriving them of the will and the capacity to resist. And then, of course, the spooks, they think of war in their terms as essentially political war, the use of all means short of outright military operations. So it's its subversion, it's destabilization, it's disinformation, it's misdirection, and sometimes, yes, it's uh assassinations or explosions and whatever else. A whole variety of ways. The interesting thing is that both the military and the security apparatus they they they think a lot about what they do. There's a very intellectual tradition that goes back to Soviet and to a degree pre-Soviet times, of how the Russians think about conflict, how they manage it, how they structure it, how they organize it, and it's quite, again, as fits Russia, quite bureaucratized. And if one looks at the Ukrainian conflict, I mean until three weeks ago, let's say, it was essentially a political war. There was this huge build-up of troops, but they were not actually doing a fighting. They were really what one would think of as a pretty extensive and exquisitely detailed exercise in heavy metal diplomacy, in coercive diplomacy, using the military as a means of intimidating not just Ukraine, but also the West. And at the same time, you had the full panoply of non-military means of war fighting, as discussed in my book, The Weaponization of Everything, I would add, being deployed against Ukraine. Cyber attacks, economic pressure, disinformation, subversion, you know, virtual terrorism. And the point is, as a political war, this was really very, very successful. It meant that Russia was not really having to deploy much in the way of resources. And yes, it cost a certain amount of money to have all those troops there, but well within the realms of the bearable. Meanwhile, though, the Ukrainian economy was tanking. And because of the pressure, because of the extent to which actually international investors were much less keen to get involved, I mean, Ukraine was suffering inflation rate of over 10%. It effectively lost access to international financial markets. You know, this was bringing heavy pressure to bear there. And at the same time, we had certain Western politicians who really wanted to avoid any risk of actual conflict beginning to put serious pressure on President Zelensky to make some kind of a deal with the Russians. And obviously, if we're talking about a deal, we're talking about concessions. So there was the prospect that without firing a shot, they could get political concessions from a Ukrainian government that they've been looking to get moving on, you know, whether it's the Minsk II package or some other form. But anyway, actual political movement of what had been a stalemated situation, and also severely hitting the Ukrainian economy with all the impact that has on generally the credibility of the democratic experiment and everything else. Why change? Why not continue? Especially because as one after another of the claimed dates in which an invasion was going to start pass, it allowed them to give the chance of saying, look, you see the Americans, they're just hysterical. They're or even worse, they're lying. Come on, Europe, why are the Americans lying to you about this? What else are they lying to you about? Everything worked out for them. And yet Putin chose to pull the trigger on an actual invasion. I don't know why. I mean, this may have been his plan all along. This is the implication of the intelligence materials we we've been getting. But on the other hand, there does seem to have been, even at the very last week, a certain degree of wobbling about exactly what was going to be done and whether or not the aim was simply the Donbass or all of Ukraine. But whatever was driving him, I don't know, was it impatience? I mean, we do know that Putin's not good at feeling that he doesn't have initiative. And initiative is of course an active macho thing. Is it his his anger, his disdain at Ukraine? I mean the the venom with which he talks about Ukraine in his most recent speeches is really quite quite striking and quite telling. Is it because he's ill, all the other speculations? I don't know. I doubt anyone outside a very small circle in Moscow knows. But anyway, one way or the other, he abandoned a successful political strategy in favor of a very, very risky military one. And then once that started, what's really striking is that this was not the kind of military operation that the Russian army plans, prepares, trains, and equips for. I mean, we saw, on the one hand, clearly relatively little preparation that had actually been done. Secondly, we saw, whereas usually the Russians would have launched a massive, truly epic bombardment by air, by missile, by long-range artillery and so forth, both to shock and awe the Ukrainians, but also very, very specifically to crater all of their runways so that their planes could not loft, to destroy all the infrastructure of air defence, not just missile batteries, but also things like radar and communications hubs, and also clearly to, as far as they could, shatter the cohesion and the effectiveness of the Ukrainian ground forces. Now, they launched some attacks to be sure, but nothing like the ones that they could have, and that one would have thought, given the way the Russians do prepare, they would have. And then we saw these really rather sort of bizarre, quixotic little glory runs of small, fast-moving units of lightly armed paratroopers trying to move into not just Kyiv, but also some other major cities, seemingly thinking that they could actually motor into the centre of town, grab the government, and before you know it, Ukraine was in Russian hands, or at least in the hands of a Russian-appointed puppet government. I mean this this is pretty senseless. And needless to say, none of it worked out. And this initial notion that Kyiv would have fallen within two days and the whole operation would be over in two weeks, which is very broadly, I think, accepted now, within certainly with it within Russian circles, that had little real connection with what was likely to happen in the real world. So what was going on? Well, my view is that what this demonstrates is actually massive political interference in the process. It wasn't just that Putin decided to pull the trigger on an invasion, but also that he did so in such a way as to severely inconvenience and undermine Russian attempts to actually do the invasion properly. First of all, the actual decision-making process. I mean, again, it does seem clear that maybe as early as in January, but quite possibly not until later, were people really told that they were definitely going to be moving ahead with a war. And that was even, you know, at relatively senior levels. I mean, it's it's striking how little psychological preparedness there was amongst the ordinary Russian soldiers. And we get that, you know, we we have to be slightly cautious when we're hearing accounts from prisoners of war, because one presumes the Ukrainians will be shrewd enough to only put in front of a camera or only sort of play recordings of ones who were saying the convenient things. But you know, even from people on the Russian side of things, it is clear that these were soldiers who thought they were just on exercises and suddenly found themselves in a war. And even then they were told that they were going to be welcomed by the Ukrainians, and they find themselves anything but. So there is clearly a sort of lack of preparation there, and in part that represents, it seems to me, a bypassing of the way that the Russian military machine as a bureaucracy prepares for military operations, small or large. And here you're gonna have to excuse me just briefly, but it will make sense in the end. I'm gonna delve into some quite arcane issues. Since 2014, its real debut was uh around the Crimean operation, the Russians have had this National Defense Management Center, which is a fancy situation room of the sort that you see in the films with all the great big screens and banks of operators behind computers and such like. But it's more than that. It's it's a collection of different sort of suites of officers and such like, it's one of the fastest and biggest uh military supercomputers in the world. But above all, it represents a philosophy, shall we say, of war management. It's the idea that in a modern world in which actually war fighting is not just simply about soldiers on the ground, but about the national economy and intelligence and everything else, you can fuse all these different sources of information to create a proper war fighting approach through a center like this. And so what happens is when there's the prospect, and I'll stress out, the prospect of some kind of military action. What happens is that within this center, a combat management group, a GBU, Gebu, is set up, which will be essentially the sort of um the hub which will not actually try and run the war. That's going to be the operational commander, whether it's a military district or a group of forces abroad, such as in Syria. But in a sense, it's this is the group that is there to make sure that the task force is set up, that it has the forces it needs, that it has all the resources it needs, and that also it has a clear, identifiable military objective. So, in other words, that the the operational commanders will decide how to win the war. The GBU will communicate to them what the objectives of the war are. And a GBU doesn't necessarily only include soldiers. It will include a large contingent of people from the General Staff's main operations directorate, which is its kind of planning and management arm, but it will also bring in whoever else is needed. So, for example, when it comes to Syria, there are people who are well, there's a representative from the foreign ministry, there's people from the intelligence community, you know, whoever is needed. So the idea is again this very kind of holistic, bring it together, bring all the people you need to make absolutely sure that you've got the forces in the field that need to be there and that they are backed up. Now, I do not know if this is true. I mean, this is one of the problems again, which come I'll come back to about information these days. It's only from a single source, a single, entirely plausible source, but in this day and age, with so much disinformation doing the rounds, you can't really rely on anything that doesn't have a triple sourcing or the like. But still, it would make sense. What I have heard is that actually the GBU for the Ukrainian war was only set up the day after the fateful televised Security Council meeting in which Putin browbeat his security officials into backing his policy for what to do on Ukraine. If so, this is a phenomenal indictment of the process. This GBU should have been up and running for months, if not right at the beginning of the troop build-up in spring of last year. If it is true, and I said, if if if must must stress that, but if it is true, it would explain one hell of a lot. It would explain why actually for all the forces there, there has been this clear lack of preparation, that they are suffering from, for example, of you know, a very uh serious problem in terms of coordinating their air forces and their ground forces. It would explain why there just aren't the um resources there in terms of fuel and food and everything else, and why it was just simply two weeks worth, you know, because after all that was going to all the campaign was going to take. All these kinds of things. And again, that speaks to the fact that right up at the end, Putin was either unwilling to make a decision, had not made a decision, or just simply was refusing to either tell his senior officials or to let them act on that basis. Because the point is, once you start setting up a GBU, then the word gets out. You know, sure you can maintain the degree of operational security. But the point is, a big operation like this, the GBU would be a large agency which would bring in people from all around, it would have people from the National Guard because the National Guard's also there, etc. etc. It would have people from the civilian government because they need to make sure the resources are moved and all that kind of thing. There's no way you could keep that quiet. So whether it's because of his own vacillation, whether it's because of his own paranoia over operational security, but one way or another, it it it does look as if, and as I said, I mean, I might be proven completely wrong when eventually the information comes out. But it would seem to make sense that in fact the a kind of core means of managing combat operations was actually hamstrung by Putin. And the second way that I think this is really Putin's war, and that thus, you know, it really demonstrates his own flaws as a national leader, is the the idea of just sending in light forces just to sort of seize the main cities as if you think you can just do it easily makes sense only if you accept a certain basic premise. And that is that the Ukrainian state is so illegitimate, so rotten, that it will indeed collapse at the very first and most gentle push. And that seems to be what happened. And as a result, you have a situation in which paratroopers were frankly squandered. Remember, these are some of Russia's best and most aggressive forces. But anyway, they were squandered in these little penny packet attacks that did nothing other than embarrass the Russians, delay their operations, and give the Ukrainians some easy early victories. Now again, I I'm really not convinced that the military high command, and look, I'm not trying to act as a sort of high command fanboy here, just that in my experience soldiers tend to be much more realistic about what they're facing because they precisely know what the can what the costs are of getting that wrong. Anyway, I very much don't believe that the High Command would have made that quite that same assumption. That to me seemed to have been something that is overlaid, imposed upon them as a result of political assumptions, well, I say assumptions, prejudices, that will come from Putin and that sort of handful of ideologues around him. So this is why it's very much Putin's war. Now, the interesting thing is, I mean, at the moment this has been a case of, and again, this is a sort of strap line that I came up with on the train heading into Oxford, um, that this war has been a case of autocracy meets technocracy. In other words, it's all Very well having all the various specialists who know their stuff. But ultimately, autocracy will win and will impose its own views on them. But we've got to see what happens next. And look, it's a very, very problematic parallel to be drawing. But on the other hand, it seems appropriate, not least because it's a parallel that implicitly, through his own rhetoric, Putin himself draws. But let's think about World War II. Both Hitler and Stalin were absolutely of the view that they could impose their own political views upon the war fighting experience. Whether it's in terms of Stalin, absolutely convinced that he had basically won through until spring of next year, before there was going to be the inevitable war with Nazi Germany, and so that even when his spies and his generals and his analysts, and indeed deserters coming across the lines, were telling him about the imminence of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion, he refused to believe it, and as a result, Russian forces received such a drubbing at the beginning of that that it was almost questionable as to whether or not the Soviet Union would be able to recover, though it did. The thing is, though, that Stalin did to a degree learn his lesson. Although clearly he retained overall command and strategy and the objectives were his. After then he listened much, much more to his generals and marshals, and to a large extent allowed them to fight the war the way they felt it needed to be fought. So in that respect, there was a case of an initial political intervention, but that he learned the lesson. We could contrast that with Hitler, who throughout the war and right up to the end, insisted on intervening, micromanaging, often to the colossal detriment of the German war effort. Now, okay, I'm clearly delighted that he did. But the point is again, what we don't know is, if we can put it in these emotive terms, whether Putin's going to be a Hitler or a Stalin in this respect. Is he now going to sit back and let the generals try and make the best of the current situation? And yes, although they've had a bad two weeks, they have also made advances, and we can't rule out their possibilities, especially if they start making some gains, momentum is important after all, that they can actually kind of recover, uh not to the extent, in my opinion, of taking all of Ukraine, but at least of perhaps taking the eastern side of Ukraine and giving the Russians a strong basis on which to try and impose some kind of a political settlement and and and and a political deal in due course. Or is Putin going to continue to insist on the war being fought the way he feels it should be fought, and insist on seeing the Ukrainians as he sees the Ukrainians? If so, it's going to become even harder for the Russians to actually salvage something from this ghastly and stupid adventure. Which we'll have to see. But anyway, I think that's a suitable time for a break, and then I'll come back and talk about some other issues again relating to Ukraine. Just the usual reminder, you're listening to the In Moscow Shadows podcast. You can support it by going to patreon.com slash in Moscow Shadows. And remember that patrons get a variety of additional perks as well as knowing that they're supporting this peerless source on all things Russian. And you can also follow me on Twitter at MarkGaleotti or on Facebook, MarkGaleotti on Russia. Now back to the show. So it's a sign of the times that we don't actually have any kind of official confirmation, but also so far at least, not that I've seen any kind of official and formal repudiation of the news. But the suggestion has been made and has been picked up in a lot of different places that Colonel General Sergey Beseda, who is head of the Federal Security Services Fifth Service, has been put under house arrest by, well, variously, some people say by other FSB officers, others say by the investigatory committee, others say by the FSO, that is the Federal Protection Service. But anyway, at the same time, maybe his deputy has also been put under arrest, and it could well be other officials within the Fifth Service. Now, why does this matter? Why now? Well, the Fifth Service, which is formerly the Operational Information and International Cooperation Service, snappily titled, includes within it the DOI, which is the Department of Operative Information. And what that is, is in effect the FSB's primary foreign intelligence arm, which engages in espionage, but above all in subversion, the kind of political active measures that are still very, very much the FSB stock in trade. And Beseda is in charge of all of them, but obviously it's been particularly associated with the DOI. Now he has been very active in Ukraine with Ukraine, and this is in fact why he's under US, UK, and European sanctions. And certainly back in 2014. Now, in 2014, he actually very much was talking up the prospects for the then President Yanukovych and his chances of actually defeating the Yoromaidan revolution of dignity. And this is at a time when a whole variety of other agencies were actually much, much more skeptical. The Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, for example, and indeed also the Interior Ministry, the NVEDE. I mean, these are for different reasons, were all very negative. I mean, in terms of the MVD, it was precisely because they felt that, you know, speaking as specialists in managing protests and public order, they felt that he was doing everything wrong, and of course, they were absolutely right. But still, Beseda was very bullish about Yanukovych and seemed to have helped convince Putin that things were going to be alright, until, of course, they all of a sudden weren't. Now that time he dodged the bullet, demonstrating the kind of necessary skills to be a senior figure within the distinctly carnivorous and cannibalistic world of Russian security politics, he managed to end up dumping the blame on the SVR. As I understand it, his basic theme was well, our analysis was based on their information. And clearly, if they give us dud information, then our an our analysis cannot be held responsible. Anyway, that worked then, and the SVR got the flak, and apparently a bunch of SVR people from their Ukraine desk ended up sacked or otherwise rusticated. Since then, though, well thing things are rather different. The ostensible charge on which he has been arrested is apparently that he was responsible for embezzling a share of the again, this is the word I don't know how accurate it is, five billion or so dollars worth of money that in the last eight years Moscow has spent on subversion operations within Ukraine. Everything from trying to pay off people to be more pro-Moscow to actually supporting convenient media outlets and websites and anything else. But then again, I think this is as probably as much an excuse. I mean, I'm I'm sure that he would have dipped his beak in this funding flow. How many Russian officials live by their salaries alone, let's be honest. But the point is again, this is the classic Putinism thing. In some ways, I mean I'm not saying that this is a system that actually encourages directly people to be corrupt, but in some ways it also does benefit from that. When everyone has skeleton in the closet, you just simply get to decide whose closet you rummage in. And what it seems to be was that a few days ago Putin instructed a series of other officials, what we might think of as a little commission, to look into precisely what had happened to the money. Now the key thing is this, is first of all, when you establish such a little working group, you are pretty much already indicating who you want to be found guilty. So let's be honest about that. But secondly, a key issue is who you pick to actually manage this process. And that's also quite significant. I mean who did Putin turn to? He turned to the head of the investigatory committee, Bastrikin. Now, Bastrikin has distinct bones to pick with the FSB, which is one of the sort of primary institutional rivals of Slyetcom, the Investigatory Committee. So he has very good reason to see the blame pinned on the FSB. Who else? Prosecutor General Krasnov, likewise someone who has already tangled with the FSB in the past. Then there was Dmitry Shalkov, who is the head of the Presidential Administration's Control and Audit Department. Now, I mean he, I don't I have not seen any suggestion that he has a particular issue, one way or the other, with the FSB. But remember, I mean, he is basically one of the chief bean counters and corruption finders within the presidential administration. So he works for Putin, so again, he will take direction. And the final key figure, interestingly and ironically, it's actually an FSB insider. It's the FSB's first deputy director, Karalyov. The point is, Karalyov is himself rather tarnished, but more to the point, he is currently the heir apparent to succeed the current director, Alexander Bortnikov, when the 70-year-old and according to some suggestions already quite ill, Bortnikov steps down. From his point of view, he knows that he faces a fair amount of opposition both within and without the FSB. Too many people think he's frankly a nasty piece of work and unfortunately a dangerous piece of work too. One of the potential rivals he could face if he's not able to clinch the deal of his succession within the next couple of years, would include one, Sergey Beseda. So he has a personal and political interest in seeing Beseda taken down. So, you know, a bunch of people who either actually have active reasons to go after Beseda and the FSB, or at the very least have no reasons to stand up for him, were charged with looking at him. Lo and behold, he seems to have been found, at least on a preliminary level, guilty. But as I say, I don't actually believe that this was about embezzlement. It's probably much more precisely a sense of using him as a scapegoat, as well as actually because of his genuine role in pushing the kind of narratives on which the current deeply flawed Ukraine strategy was based. Just as in 2014, it seems to have been that he continued to press this notion that really Ukraine was an illegitimate and unformed state that would indeed easily collapse. And what's more, there doesn't seem to have been much return on investment for this $5 billion in terms of subversion, Trojan horses and such like. So look, I mean I think this is long-delayed karma more than anything else. But what makes it interesting, apart from the fact that it clearly demonstrates that there is some kind of an awareness that there were some serious fundamental flaws in Russian thinking on Ukraine. And of course, because the boss can't possibly be to blame, one needs to therefore find other scapegoats, is that the search for scapegoats also can tend to become something of a circular firing squad. As everyone seeks to ensure that they aren't to blame, they will of course be looking for others to point out. And as spooks, soldiers, and police fall out, well, that can actually be a really quite disruptive and dangerous process for what is really by these days a security state, if not a full-blown police state. And it's interesting we could also see at the same time the military intelligence, the GU is clearly trying to hide behind Shoigu. We have National Guard increasingly openly complaining about the fact that they're being used as cannon fodder, and they seem to have taken a lot of casualties in Ukraine, probably because they were being thrown into a front line that they're not really trained or equipped for. As these various disputes within the security apparatus become more open, first of all, they have a tendency to obviously weaken the security state as a whole. Secondly, they begin to corrode the overall morale of the regime. You know, they really start if people start to think that in fact what was once seemingly this formidable and unbreakable order could actually become all too frangible, then they might start to revise their thoughts about their future loyalties and such like. And also it just simply creates much more grit in the machine of Putin's structure. So I think that's really interesting, and that's something that definitely I'm I'm going to be following. But of course, the fact that we don't really know for sure if Beseda has been arrested, why, and so forth, also highlights not just the degree to which it's very hard to know what's going on, but also something that we have to be aware of, that there is a very, very active and dynamic information war going on. You know, in the past we got used to this idea that it was the Russians who were the information warriors with all their troll farms and their disinformation narratives and such like. Well, look, they were, and I'm not denying that. But it's but two things are really worth saying. One is that it's interesting to discover really the limits of the Russian information war campaign. Their various methods are quite good at undermining other narratives, at introducing elements of doubt, particularly into areas where there isn't a kind of a clear provable fact. They can't question whether or not MH-17 actually f fell out of the sky. But what they could do, sorry, just as a reminder for those who don't, it was the airliner, the Malaysian airliner that was shot down over the Donbass in 2014 with ghastly loss of life, clearly shot down by a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile fired by Russian-backed rebel forces. But on the other hand, what they were able to do is to insert doubt as to, well, you know, could it could it have actually also all been a false flag operation? Could it have been that in fact the Ukrainians shot it down by accident, blah, blah, blah. All of this just simply to try and obscure the realities. But on the other hand, what the Russian campaign isn't at all good at is actually creating a new alternative narrative, especially in the face of real facts. And this is one of the reasons why they're actually doing very badly at the moment, because there are very real and very demonstrable facts on the ground. But also because I think what we're seeing is both the West and Ukraine are fighting back and actually trying to create their own disruptive narrative attacks on Russia with quite considerable success. It's quite fascinating the rumors and the exaggerations and the downright fabrications that are already doing the rounds. That, for example, chief of the general staff Gerasimov has been sacked. Well, I've seen no evidence of that, and frankly, I'd be surprised if that did happen in the middle of a conflict like this. That the chair of the Russian Central Bank, Nabilina, has gone. Now, it seems that there is, again, probably fairly creditable news that she actually did submit her resignation, but that it was refused. But the point is, given that she's very, very highly respected still within international financial circles, the thought that she'd actually gone clearly has a significant impact on Russia's credibility in those things. That Defense Minister Choigu is under investigation or under scrutiny because he's suspected of wanting to launch a coup. Now, he might be, but I think that's very unlikely. But the point is if you start to sew even the thought that he might be a would-be king who's plotting for the opportunity to crown himself at Putin's expense, well, presumably the hope is that this introduces a note of suspicion and discordance within Putin's senior political elite. Then recently there's been a series of long letters, ostensibly from an analyst from the FSB writing in very apocalyptic terms about how terrible things are going to be for Russia, how terrible they are, how badly it's been arranged. Now look, I have absolutely no idea if these are genuine or not. I do have a certain suspicions about them. But the point is they work because they speak to very, very genuine concerns that exactly are expressed in Moscow, but perhaps just with that little extra, you know, little extra 10% just to sort of jazz it up. But precisely by making these public letters, it also encourages a mood of suspicion and paranoia within Moscow. And I'm sure there is a mole hunt or already going on. So this is one of the challenges. You know, we're in a situation in which the fog of war meets, let's say, the pea super of propaganda and rumour, and does create a very difficult sense of quite what's going on. And look, this is not, I mean, I'm not criticizing in any way the West and Ukraine for launching these tactics. To be perfectly honest, I think it's ludicrously overdue. It's about time we became more aware of the non-kinetic instruments at our disposal, and certainly broadened our array beyond just simply economic warfare, in other words, sanctions. But it creates problems. Problems in trying to understand what on earth is going on. And this is really the last thing I'd want to discuss, that the new challenges in trying to understand Russia, trying to find out what's going on within Russia. We are faced with so many often impossible challenges of knowing what is exactly accurate. Take, for example, the level of Russian casualties in Ukraine. I mean, if one takes the Ukrainian figure, it's something like already as of today, more than 11,000 dead. Now, given that the Russians suffered 15,000 in 10 years of the Afghan war, that is an astonishingly high figure. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying it is an exceedingly high figure. The Americans, they tend to be more cautious, they're saying I think five to six thousand is the last figure I saw. The Russians themselves are admitting only a few little bit more than 500. Where is the reality? I mean the temptation is you more or less, you know, go for the middle and they'll assume, well, let's go with the American figure because it's somewhere between the Ukrainian and the Russian figures. That's not the best kind of analytic uh trade craft to be using, but often it's it's about the best we've got. So what's going on? Well, I mean, we're finding much less of the old uh social media channels, which used to be such useful insights into what was going on, even though much of what was said in social media was exactly rumour and speculation, but they shall say accurately gave us a sense of what were the rumours and speculations that were circulating within Russia. And I think this is one of the reasons why I'm actually, for all kinds of reasons, of the view that we really shouldn't be trying to cut all these channels for Russia. Then there's the fact that actually, as Russia itself faces a kind of activist campaign of low-level cyber attacks, again it becomes quite quite difficult often to log on to things like the Kremlin.ru website or newspapers like Rasiska Gazetta, more often than not, when I try, I I can't get on. Now, on one hand you might think, well, who really wants to read one more turgid bit of propaganda from Rasiska Gazetta? Well the answer is yes, however turgid and propagandistic it undoubtedly is, it does give us a sense of what is the perspective or at least the official line that is coming from the government. And that matters. What else? Well look, frankly, everyone is scared. I mean a lot of people clearly have got the hell out of Dodge and are no longer in Russia. And again, there is a perverse way in which that actually acts to the Kremlin's advantage, in that precisely the people who were the most uh fearless at uncovering various official misdeeds, the people who were organizing protests and so forth, are also the people who, for totally understandable reasons, I should add, are the ones who have been most sort of assiduous in trying trying to get out. So there isn't that particular dangerous quote unquote fifth column in town. But it also means that the people who are still there are that much more cautious, that much more, well, frankly, scared. You know, in an environment in which in theory you can be sent to prison for 15 years for quote unquote spreading falsehoods about the Russian military, and indeed where even simply calling the special military operation an invasion or a war brings you foul of the law. Well, you know, it it's perhaps not surprising that people are going to be that much more cautious. And in that environment, in information scarce environments, then what happens to fill that vacuum? The answer is rumour. And the danger with rumour is that we have a tendency to pick the ones that we like. We pick the ones that speak to our own prejudices or our assumptions, or just a more extreme and dramatic and exciting. And that's, again, not good tradecraft. To a degree, I suspect that we're going back to the old days of Kremlinology. I mean, just as Putin seems determined to try and turn the clock back to the 1970s, well, in a way, so too will study of Russia. Go back to those elements of the 1970s. We might not be looking at who stands in in order next to whom on top of the Kremlin the Lenin Mausoleum during a parade. But on the other hand, we we already are at the point where we assume that, for example, demonstrable personal access of some officials over others suggests something about their status within the system. I would stress it's only to a degree. We do have more access than we had in the past. We do have more ways of trying to understand, trying to penetrate what's going on in Russia. But nonetheless, for all that and I I know I just use nonetheless twice, never mind. But for all that, the fact remains that this is an increasingly impenetrable system, if not society. But I can almost use nonetheless a third time, but I won't. But we will still try. Thanks very much. Well, that's the end of another episode of the In Moscow Shadow Podcast. Just as a reminder, beyond this, you can follow my blog, also called In Moscow Shadows. Follow me on Twitter at MarkGaleotti or Facebook, MarkGaleotti on Russia. This podcast is made possible by generous and enlightened patrons, and you too can be one. Just go along to my Patreon page, that's patreon.com slash in Moscow Shadows, and decide which tier you want to join, getting access to exclusive materials and other perks. However, whether or not you contribute, thank you very much indeed for listening. Until next time, keep well.