Again the MSM has caught up in the slipstream of our analysis.
The current geopolitical cue revolves around Ukraine’s putative pivot from strikes on Russia’s refineries to an all-out war against “Russia’s Amazon”:
After months of escalating attacks on oil depots and refineries, it has abruptly shifted targets, turning its sights to something more unexpected: warehouses and depots belonging to Wildberries, a Russian retail giant often described as the country’s equivalent of Amazon.
But the biggest bombshell is what they now openly admit to.
The above Telegraph piece veritably gloats over the fact that these strikes are having a major effect on Russia’s civilian population and its perception of the conflict.
But the strikes have another effect.
Robert Brovdi, Ukraine’s drone chief, said the strikes were aimed at destroying the “illusion of a comfortable, well-fed peacetime life enjoyed by the obedient biomass of an aggressor country”.
The damage is impossible to hide.
They show that Russia is vulnerable.
After only briefly and passingly mentioning that some “radios and military gear” are available on the Wildberries site, the authors quickly abandon that line of justification in favor of obsessively cataloguing the civilian toll the strikes are exacting:
The destruction of its warehouses has sent a shock wave through the small businesses selling goods through the site. Hundreds of people have posted videos online complaining that they had lost large inventories of goods and would not receive compensation from the company.
So, it’s not the “military radios” they really care about, it’s the “shock waves” sent through small businesses the article authors are salivating over in the hopes that it will result in mass unrest against Putin.
They end the piece by verbalizing these hopes outright, and proving that Zelensky’s pivot to hitting Russian retailers has nothing whatever to do with paralyzing the army’s ability to buy some kind of radios or armor—as if the Russian Army purchases its gear from Wildberries—but rather everything to do with pressuring Russian citizens, as is the standard M.O. of all failed imperial “kinetic” foreign policy:
One of the more interesting current discussions about Russia’s response to these Ukrainian provocations revolves around the theory that Putin has slowly been forced to change his approach to the war due to the increasing pressure from his own General Staff and security apparatus.
In truth, we can’t know for certain the ‘chicken-or-the-egg’ causal chain of the shift, but we do know this shift in tone and rhetoric is real. Just yesterday Putin told a conference that Ukraine will certainly lose its western territories:
He then went on to liken the attackers of Russian cargo ships to pirates, and told his naval command to begin treating them as one would treat pirates:
It still had the hallmarks of Putinism: the strict legalistic adherence; “framework of international maritime law”, etc. But the tone shift is obvious: “Decisive action” must be taken against these pirates, says Putin.
Even more notably, at his latest speech Putin told the audience a “secret”, that one of the Russian SMO medal winners whispered to Putin that Russia should “go harder” in the war, to which Putin responds: “I really want to.”
This is intriguingly revealing. On one hand, Putin openly gives the reasons for why the Russian Army cannot go “all out” as most people would like: because it would incur much greater losses, and Putin believes Russia’s current persistent slow-march across Ukraine is the ideal pace which maximizes victorious conditions while minimizing losses.
But the fact that he even brings it up and stages it in a kind of dialectic with the Russian people is intriguing in and of itself, because it represents Putin’s response to what is clearly becoming a growing call from society. Putin uses the soldier’s request as a chance to finally address this elephant in the room while acquitting himself of guilt by framing it as something Putin himself wishes he could do, but is not capable of doing for the given justifications.
Now Zelensky has continued agitating about Russia facing a crisis related to the above, with growing rumors—fanned by Ukraine—that a large-scale mobilization is imminent after Russian Duma elections in the fall. Zelensky himself has claimed upwards of 50,000 North Korean troops are getting readied to be “mobilized” into the Russian Armed Forces, while Putin will call up an additional 500k Russian troops.
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