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Wednesday marked both the six-month anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine as well as 31 years of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. It seemed deeply fitting that both events fell on one summer day. Contributing to the unreality of it all has been the abruptness with which Ukraine, despite its seven-year proxy conflict in the Donbas, was thrust into a state of total war. Indeed, as I reported earlier this week, Putin’s final decision to invade was dictated with so little warning that even top Russian ministers were caught unaware. Three sources, both in Washington and in Moscow, described to me how Putin’s foreign policy advisor, Yuri Ushakov, had been set to meet Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, in Helsinki on February 23, just one day before the invasion. (A spokesperson for Sullivan, who only responded after the piece was published, denied that a planned meeting was on the calendar.) According to these sources, the meeting was canceled—but only because Ushakov had come down with Covid.
As promised, today I bring you the second, bonus installment of this week’s TWBW, focused on the startling Saturday night assassination of Darya Dugina, the daughter of the imperialist ideologue Alexander Dugin. The internet is already teeming with theories about what exactly happened (or didn’t happen) and what it may (or may not) mean for the war in Ukraine. Here, dear reader, is my analysis of the events, with the very important caveat that it hasn’t even been a week, there’s a lot we still don’t know, and Russia is where Occam’s razor goes to die.
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| Wars, once they start, have a way of taking on their own momentum. After the abject failure of Vladimir Putin’s initial plan for a Ukrainian blitzkrieg, Russia’s armies have gotten bogged down in the country’s east and south. As the autumn approaches and Ukraine continues pounding their positions with American-provided HIMARS rockets, the Russian military has lost whatever momentum it had managed to gain this summer.
But despite the war’s now truncated aims, Putin now has to contend with the so-called party of war, the hardliners who think that he is being too moderate in his prosecution of the holy war in Ukraine. It’s hard for people in the West to imagine Putin as a moderating force, but he appears nearly docile compared to the hawks that his invasion unleashed. There is a sense among these hardliners that Russia’s war in Ukraine is some kind of handcuffed effort, restrained and polite. There is Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, who has long been publicly pleading with the Russian president to let him “finish the job” and whose fighters have appeared in Ukraine sporting “to Kyiv” patches. There are people like RT chief Margarita Simonyan, who bragged at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum earlier this summer that Russia could easily subdue the world through famine (this was before the U.N. helped broker a deal for the safe passage of Ukrainian grain)—or nukes... |
