Yesterday, the Kremlin made another series of absurd, inhumane and downright insane comments when Dmitry Peskov, main spokesperson of the Russian government, made an appearance on CNN.
This follows a trend I wrote about last week of Putin’s lies growing desperate to the point of comedy where the claims and narrative building that the Russian government is now trying to make are not only easily disproved, but also increasingly incoherent. But as we’ll see, this pivoting of the narrative is both a sign of weakness and failure, as well as an indication of where the Russians are likely to move next.
Some of his statements from the half an hour long interview includes:
"It is going on strictly in accordance with the plans and the purposes that were established beforehand” He goes on to state that the main goal with the military attacks in Mariupol is to "cleanse the city" of what he describes as nationalist military units. Before again stating that the “operation” is going as Russia had planned in advance, and that "occupation of Ukraine is not the goal". "No one thought the special military operation would take only a few days".
Let’s take a short minute to just absorb how insane these comments are. In just less than 4 weeks, 10 million people in Ukraine have been displaced, more than 3 million have fled the country – which has resulted in one Ukrainian child becoming a refugee once per second on average for _four weeks consecutively, - As well as tens of thousands Ukrainian and Russians being killed and whole cities ruined. How much of a psycho does one have to be to look at that and think it’s going according to plan? And what would we call the purposeful “cleansing” of a people that involves the total ruination of a whole city as means to achieve the objective if not genocide?
Of course, these are mostly another round of lies and the “operation” is not going according to plan. First of all, we already know that the Russians believed they would accomplish their objective within three days and had prepared announcements and communications, as well as laid a strategy for how they informed their soldiers accordingly. Second, we see repeated pivots in communications strategies and claims made, which are growing increasingly inconsistent and desperate. Not something you would see if anything was going according to plan.
What can it tell us about the development in Russia's plans?
While it’s tempting to react mainly with ridicule and contempt, for which it is deserving, there may be more to these statements than just the literal insanity. Initially, the Kremlin was very clear in its intent to change the Ukrainian regime away from its pro-Nato and pro-EU stance and towards “neutrality”. The claims that Russia is only concerned about “Nazis in Ukraine” and “their oppression of Russian minorities in the east, is quickly dismissed by the fact that Russian forces are also attacking the western parts of the country. Although it may seem small, this new statement is quite a step back by claiming that there is no desire to occupy Ukraine and that the goal of the “military operation” is instead to wipe out nationalists.
A sinister reading of it could be that if they're not interested in occupying Ukraine, and if they won't stop until they've "clansed" and wiped out all possible threats to Russia, then in fact they won't stop until Ukraine is completely ruined and obliterated. Judging by the Russian obliteration of much of Mariupol, as well as their new tactic of attacking and destrying agricultural sites and infrastructure necessary to support civilians, that's still a likely objective.
However, Russia has seen that it will take much longer to beat the Ukrainian armed forces, as well as the many Ukrainian citizens and foreign volunteers joining the resistance, than they had anticipated. With a struggle also to keep support within Russia, as witnessed by its increased crackdown on journalists, social media and peaceful protestors, the Kremlin is also fighting an information war against its own citizens to maintain support. Understanding that it doesn't have the military means to fully occupy and control Ukraine, nor the financial incentives to do so, the Kremlin is most likely looking for a plan B that will allow them to end the conflict sooner, whilst still obtaining some kind of objective in order to declare some kind of success and thus maintain support. Their weakness is that in order to do so, they'll need to lay the groundwork for it by building up a narrative of what the objectives and their associated rationales are. Thus, they give clues of what outcome they are planning to achieve through their communication to their citizens and the world at large.
As it seems increasingly likely that Russia will only suffer more losses in the coming days, it thus makes sense that they will prepare their public to accept and even celebrate a "win" where all Russia accomplishes is the obliteration of cities where they have claimed there to be "nazi militia", while also taking control of the eastern regions in Donetsk. Although I doubt this conflict will end any time soon, as Ukraine also seems determined on regaining territory which Russia does not have the resources to continuously occupy, it seems plausible that Russia will try to claim that it has completed its "operation" relateively soon.