I subscribed so I could read inside observations about the "Russian presidential administration", an institution whose exact relation to the official government institutions is somewhat opaque, but which has given us concepts like Surkov's sovereign democracy and Vaino's nooscope.
But now I think what I'm actually seeing, is at least the third example in the last 150 years, of a Ukrainian-led attempt to dismantle Russia per se, by stirring up separatist nationalism within Russia's conquered territories. The first would be everything that led up to secessionist movements in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The second would be the Anti Bolshevik Bloc, a Cold-War anticommunist movement which nonetheless talked about opposing russification. And the third would be Yurii Shulipa's Anti Russian Forum (look it up).
Now one thing to notice is that all these movements had external sponsors. I won't say that they were controlled from outside, but there were always external powers supporting them. In Putin's 2021 essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians", he complains about Austria-Hungary stirring up the Ukrainians. The Anti Bolshevik Bloc grew up in the aftermath of Nazi Germany's retreat, and was backed by the West. And now Mr Shulipa, who advocates an extreme anti-Russian ideology ("Russia... must cease to exist"), is acting as consul for "Ichkeria", a Chechen government-in-exile that is, I believe, based in the UK.
I think this history and these relationships also deserve attention from anyone who reads the whole article.
Thank you for subscribing! I hope you found the article interesting even if it wasn't quite what you expected. If you have further questions for Yurii, I'd be happy to pass them on.
Your comment is perceptive. When you say you think you're seeing a Ukraine-led attempt to dismantle Russia, do you mean that you think you're seeing it in real time--i.e., in Russia--or that this article represents such an attempt?
If the latter, it's not a hidden agenda: He is, indeed, advocating precisely that. Certainly, Ukraine believes it would benefit from this, although it isn't clear to me that they're necessarily correct. I assume that yes, its intelligence services are doing their best to stir up separatist nationalism within Russia. Whether they're succeeding is much harder to assess.
I doubt Shulipa's forum is receiving much by way of sponsorship (it doesn't seem to be lavishly funded). If the suggestion is that the US may be funding him, I suspect we're not sufficiently on-the-ball to do that. I would approve of it if we were, but I doubt we're playing the game that competently. I'm open to being pleasantly surprised. But I think his assessment of our policy disposition is, alas, close to being right. We're just not interested in seeing the breakup of the RF.
I wish we were. I agree with his assessment of the danger Russia poses. I also suspect he's right about the degree to which non-ethnic Russians living in the Russian Federation would prefer to govern themselves, although getting accurate information about what these people would prefer is almost impossible, given the constraints on gathering such information. I also agree that losing its empire would be a condign punishment for Moscow's crimes, and very likely nothing short of this will turn Russia into a normal country.
I firmly draw the line, however, at the idea of launching a preemptive strike of the kind he envisions. That would be reckless and insane. But I do pray we're prepared to do it if necessary--that is, if we see evidence that Russia is preparing a nuclear strike of its own.
I would argue that he's minimized the danger of pursuing the goal of breaking the RF apart. But it's a work of advocacy, not dispassionate analysis, so I didn't feel I needed to insist that he explore those risks. I thought it was interesting enough to hear his, perspective which is one we don't often hear.
I just mean this is a Ukrainian (Yurii Shilupa) organizing a coalition to dismantle Russia, just as the Stetskos ran the Anti Bolshevik Bloc during the cold war, and possibly there was something comparable in the chaotic period between the 1917 revolutions and 1922 USSR treaty of formation.
My attitude to the war is that it is a monstrous destruction of lives and should be halted ASAP, that the declared bargaining positions of Ukraine and Russia (however far apart they may be) define the gap that has to be closed, and that it should be closed by a joint effort of all the countries interested in ending the war.
It is indeed a monstrous destruction of life. But surely you don't mean that Ukrainians should lay down their arms and submit to Russia's occupation? Because in every village and town that's been liberated from Russia, we've discovered what Russian occupation means: Concentration camps. Rapes. Torture chambers. The kidnapping and deportation of children, stolen from parents who will never see them again. Mass murder. There is no doubt in my mind that Russia's objective is genocide. That's not a "bargaining position" with which anyone can "close the gap."
What they are discovering, every time, are horrors even worse than this hideous, hideous war.
Russia's demands of Ukraine, last I saw, are neutrality, acceptance of its territorial losses, and rights for ethnic Russians. Ukraine wants something like restoration of its territories, war reparations, security guarantees, and trials for war criminals and Putin's circle. This is all part of a larger geopolitical context in which America is at war with authoritarians inside and outside the country, and in which Russia is the military standard-bearer for all those opposed to American worldwide hegemony. I take the larger Russian strategic goal in Europe to be the creation of a buffer zone between themselves and western militancy, since that's what they wanted in late 2021, before the war.
As for saying that "Russia's objective is genocide"... Just now, I decided to check on conditions of life in the occupied Ukrainian provinces. The most recent story I got via Google, starts with two refugees from Donetsk in their early 20s, whose complaints are that they had "no credit card, no electricity, no freedom of speech" under Russian occupation, and that their parents are pro-Russian.
From what I can see, what Russia is doing doesn't even count as ethnic cleansing. They want the opposite of that - they want Ukrainians to stay inside the "Russian world", rather than become part of the "European world". *That* is the objective that unleashed all the actual horrors.
I could not more strongly disagree with you. The evidence that Russia's intent is genocidal--as are its actions--is overwhelming. So is the evidence that Russia's goals go *far* beyond "creating a buffer zone" between themselves and "Western militancy" (the evidence for which is inexistent). Russia's goals--repeatedly and overtly stated--not only include conquering all of Ukraine and ridding it of anyone with a Ukrainian identity, but conquering all of the former Soviet Union and dismembering the rest of the West (in the sense of breaking up the EU and NATO, and to the extent possible fomenting internal division and crisis in the domestic politics of the member countries ). I'll write about this today. Meanwhile, I just sent a cross-post about the conditions at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant: Look not just at the article, but the report to which it links. This is what it means to be under Russian occupation.
To me, and I believe to the average person, a genocide is when an ethnic group is wiped out by being killed off. However, it is increasingly being used to refer to anything that threatens the future of a people as a sovereign cohesive whole, all the way up to cultural and demographic change. Perhaps this change in usage is inevitable, but it means that genocide becomes a matter of degree, a matter of legal or academic opinion, a rhetorical accusation employed in political and geopolitical struggles. Russia accuses Ukraine of genocide for denying the Donbass its autonomy, Ukraine accuses Russia of genocide for threatening the existence of the Ukrainian state.
Both Russia and the West have a complicated ethno-politics which provides a point of vulnerability. When Peskov says something outlandish like he did today, about Ukrainian fascism threatening all of Europe, I think he's saying, if anti-Russian nationalists win in Ukraine, they will inspire other nationalists throughout eastern Europe, and anti-immigration nationalists throughout western Europe, and the whole European political order will burn down too.
“Key positions in state and municipal organs, as well as in state corporations and private commercial organizations, are filled by seconded employees from the FSB special services.”
Reminds me of the scores of former FBI and CIA employees hired by social media companies. See,
Before drawing false equivalencies, states have interests and they pursue them. Main difference, imho, is scale. The US has other, softer options. E.g. cultural power. Don‘t underestimate the strength of that pull, it is one of many reasons why regions of the former Soviet space want to align themselves with the West rather than Ruzzia. Case in point: Closer alignment with the EU was the carrot which Yanukovic held on under the nose of the electorate in order to narrowly defeat Timoshenko. When he shelved that at behest of Putin, he triggered Euromaidan, fled to Moscow and set the stage for the current war.
Andre, I agree with most of what you said with one exception. I disagree that I’ve drawn a false equivalency. It was an imprecise equivalency but it was not false.
Claire’s guest highlights the fact that the presence of Russian spooks is ubiquitous in many “private commercial organizations.” It is simply a fact that American social media companies have hired a multitude of former law enforcement and intelligence officials. Many of these officials have played some role in content moderation and it strains credulity to suggest that they haven’t acted as a conduit to agents still employed by their previous employers.
It’s not just social media organizations that have made a habit of hiring these individuals. The employment rolls of defense contractors are also chock full of former Pentagon brass. Given the shocking incompetence of the American military this is no cause for comfort.
There’s a lot of chatter in right-wing circles about how compliant and even complicit the American mainstream press has become with the Biden Administration. They chalk this up to the fact that reporters, editors and publishers are mostly on the left end of the political spectrum and that most of the denizens of the press are Democrats.
This completely misses the point. The press is aligned with Biden not for political reasons but for economic reasons; both the press and the Government fear the disintermediation that social media represents.
Ma Bell hated it when MCI and Sprint came along. Macy’s hated it when Amazon started cleaning it’s clock. Merrill Lynch watched as their business model collapsed after Charles Schwab revolutionized the online brokerage business. I could go on and on, but you get the point.
For decades, the American Government basically had three major television networks and five to ten consequential newspapers to deal with. Even in this environment curating it’s message was difficult.
It’s no wonder that now that everyone with a Twitter, Facebook, You Tube or Substack account is able to mimic what the press used to do, Governments around the world are literally horrified. It’s an information free-for-all and Governments in the western world are panicking because they don’t know how to deal with it. That’s why they are insisting that these sites moderate or even censor what messages can appear. And, it is clear that these censorship requests extend not only to pornography and hate speech but also to speech that is true like the Hunter Biden lap top story and the discussion of the possibility that COVID emerged as a result of a lab-leak.
As threatened as the Government may be by the social media phenomenon, traditional press outlets are even more threatened. While some outlets (the New York Times comes to mind) have found a way to survive in this environment, many others, (the Washington Post is an example) are being rocked to their core financially.
The mainstream press and the Biden Administration have become so aligned because they face a common enemy. The power of disintermediation wrought by social media platforms is far more virile than the power that Government and the mainstream media are losing by the day. That’s why these two former adversaries have become strange bedfellows.
Social media platforms probably have many reasons for recruiting so many law enforcement and intelligence agents to work for them in senior capacities but one of those reasons must surely be to appease American and European Governments.
This isn’t precisely equivalent to what’s happening in Russia, of course. But it’s not altogether different either.
Just because Fox News says something does not make it [a] fact. Counter-intuitively, the more frequently an item is repeated on Fox News, the more likely it is cut from whole cloth. Conflating any item - really, every item - stated repeatedly on Fox News as fact is a bridge too far.
Thanks, David. I don’t watch FOX News. I don’t think my television set has been sullied by that network for more than ten minutes in the past ten years. By the way, it’s not just FOX news, I don’t watch CNN or MSNBC regularly either, although I might tune into CNN if there’s an emergency like a hurricane or an earthquake.
Some years ago I bought a new TV. When Best Buy's Geek Squad came by to calibrate the new display, he told me he uses CNN as his lodestar.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because," he replied, "CNN spends the most money, has the greatest IT budget, to have the latest technology to deliver the best signal. That signal strength helps me tune your display."
So how interesting/funny is it that my DirecTV dish is obscured by my neighbor's hedge - and the only station untunable is CNN? I get Fox and MSNBC just fine. Does the universe send me a coded message? :-)
If you’re open to a friendly suggestion; thank your neighbor for maintaining his shrubbery in a way that obscures CNN. Then ask him to hone his horticultural skills so that he can grow out his shrubs to also block out MSNBC and FOX.
Block out all three networks and you will have hit the trifecta!
I subscribed so I could read inside observations about the "Russian presidential administration", an institution whose exact relation to the official government institutions is somewhat opaque, but which has given us concepts like Surkov's sovereign democracy and Vaino's nooscope.
But now I think what I'm actually seeing, is at least the third example in the last 150 years, of a Ukrainian-led attempt to dismantle Russia per se, by stirring up separatist nationalism within Russia's conquered territories. The first would be everything that led up to secessionist movements in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The second would be the Anti Bolshevik Bloc, a Cold-War anticommunist movement which nonetheless talked about opposing russification. And the third would be Yurii Shulipa's Anti Russian Forum (look it up).
Now one thing to notice is that all these movements had external sponsors. I won't say that they were controlled from outside, but there were always external powers supporting them. In Putin's 2021 essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians", he complains about Austria-Hungary stirring up the Ukrainians. The Anti Bolshevik Bloc grew up in the aftermath of Nazi Germany's retreat, and was backed by the West. And now Mr Shulipa, who advocates an extreme anti-Russian ideology ("Russia... must cease to exist"), is acting as consul for "Ichkeria", a Chechen government-in-exile that is, I believe, based in the UK.
I think this history and these relationships also deserve attention from anyone who reads the whole article.
And who’s backing all the (albeit pitiful) secessionist movements in the United States? Oh, that’s right, Putin’s Russia!
Thank you for subscribing! I hope you found the article interesting even if it wasn't quite what you expected. If you have further questions for Yurii, I'd be happy to pass them on.
Your comment is perceptive. When you say you think you're seeing a Ukraine-led attempt to dismantle Russia, do you mean that you think you're seeing it in real time--i.e., in Russia--or that this article represents such an attempt?
If the latter, it's not a hidden agenda: He is, indeed, advocating precisely that. Certainly, Ukraine believes it would benefit from this, although it isn't clear to me that they're necessarily correct. I assume that yes, its intelligence services are doing their best to stir up separatist nationalism within Russia. Whether they're succeeding is much harder to assess.
I doubt Shulipa's forum is receiving much by way of sponsorship (it doesn't seem to be lavishly funded). If the suggestion is that the US may be funding him, I suspect we're not sufficiently on-the-ball to do that. I would approve of it if we were, but I doubt we're playing the game that competently. I'm open to being pleasantly surprised. But I think his assessment of our policy disposition is, alas, close to being right. We're just not interested in seeing the breakup of the RF.
I wish we were. I agree with his assessment of the danger Russia poses. I also suspect he's right about the degree to which non-ethnic Russians living in the Russian Federation would prefer to govern themselves, although getting accurate information about what these people would prefer is almost impossible, given the constraints on gathering such information. I also agree that losing its empire would be a condign punishment for Moscow's crimes, and very likely nothing short of this will turn Russia into a normal country.
I firmly draw the line, however, at the idea of launching a preemptive strike of the kind he envisions. That would be reckless and insane. But I do pray we're prepared to do it if necessary--that is, if we see evidence that Russia is preparing a nuclear strike of its own.
I would argue that he's minimized the danger of pursuing the goal of breaking the RF apart. But it's a work of advocacy, not dispassionate analysis, so I didn't feel I needed to insist that he explore those risks. I thought it was interesting enough to hear his, perspective which is one we don't often hear.
What do you think?
"When you say... do you mean..."
I just mean this is a Ukrainian (Yurii Shilupa) organizing a coalition to dismantle Russia, just as the Stetskos ran the Anti Bolshevik Bloc during the cold war, and possibly there was something comparable in the chaotic period between the 1917 revolutions and 1922 USSR treaty of formation.
My attitude to the war is that it is a monstrous destruction of lives and should be halted ASAP, that the declared bargaining positions of Ukraine and Russia (however far apart they may be) define the gap that has to be closed, and that it should be closed by a joint effort of all the countries interested in ending the war.
It is indeed a monstrous destruction of life. But surely you don't mean that Ukrainians should lay down their arms and submit to Russia's occupation? Because in every village and town that's been liberated from Russia, we've discovered what Russian occupation means: Concentration camps. Rapes. Torture chambers. The kidnapping and deportation of children, stolen from parents who will never see them again. Mass murder. There is no doubt in my mind that Russia's objective is genocide. That's not a "bargaining position" with which anyone can "close the gap."
What they are discovering, every time, are horrors even worse than this hideous, hideous war.
Russia's demands of Ukraine, last I saw, are neutrality, acceptance of its territorial losses, and rights for ethnic Russians. Ukraine wants something like restoration of its territories, war reparations, security guarantees, and trials for war criminals and Putin's circle. This is all part of a larger geopolitical context in which America is at war with authoritarians inside and outside the country, and in which Russia is the military standard-bearer for all those opposed to American worldwide hegemony. I take the larger Russian strategic goal in Europe to be the creation of a buffer zone between themselves and western militancy, since that's what they wanted in late 2021, before the war.
As for saying that "Russia's objective is genocide"... Just now, I decided to check on conditions of life in the occupied Ukrainian provinces. The most recent story I got via Google, starts with two refugees from Donetsk in their early 20s, whose complaints are that they had "no credit card, no electricity, no freedom of speech" under Russian occupation, and that their parents are pro-Russian.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/life-russian-occupation-life-low-key-mission-bringing/story?id=103101372
From what I can see, what Russia is doing doesn't even count as ethnic cleansing. They want the opposite of that - they want Ukrainians to stay inside the "Russian world", rather than become part of the "European world". *That* is the objective that unleashed all the actual horrors.
I could not more strongly disagree with you. The evidence that Russia's intent is genocidal--as are its actions--is overwhelming. So is the evidence that Russia's goals go *far* beyond "creating a buffer zone" between themselves and "Western militancy" (the evidence for which is inexistent). Russia's goals--repeatedly and overtly stated--not only include conquering all of Ukraine and ridding it of anyone with a Ukrainian identity, but conquering all of the former Soviet Union and dismembering the rest of the West (in the sense of breaking up the EU and NATO, and to the extent possible fomenting internal division and crisis in the domestic politics of the member countries ). I'll write about this today. Meanwhile, I just sent a cross-post about the conditions at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant: Look not just at the article, but the report to which it links. This is what it means to be under Russian occupation.
To me, and I believe to the average person, a genocide is when an ethnic group is wiped out by being killed off. However, it is increasingly being used to refer to anything that threatens the future of a people as a sovereign cohesive whole, all the way up to cultural and demographic change. Perhaps this change in usage is inevitable, but it means that genocide becomes a matter of degree, a matter of legal or academic opinion, a rhetorical accusation employed in political and geopolitical struggles. Russia accuses Ukraine of genocide for denying the Donbass its autonomy, Ukraine accuses Russia of genocide for threatening the existence of the Ukrainian state.
Both Russia and the West have a complicated ethno-politics which provides a point of vulnerability. When Peskov says something outlandish like he did today, about Ukrainian fascism threatening all of Europe, I think he's saying, if anti-Russian nationalists win in Ukraine, they will inspire other nationalists throughout eastern Europe, and anti-immigration nationalists throughout western Europe, and the whole European political order will burn down too.
“Key positions in state and municipal organs, as well as in state corporations and private commercial organizations, are filled by seconded employees from the FSB special services.”
Reminds me of the scores of former FBI and CIA employees hired by social media companies. See,
https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-ex-fbi-cia-officials/amp/
and
https://scrippsnews.com/amp/stories/tiktok-has-been-hiring-former-cia-fbi-and-nsa-officers/
Before drawing false equivalencies, states have interests and they pursue them. Main difference, imho, is scale. The US has other, softer options. E.g. cultural power. Don‘t underestimate the strength of that pull, it is one of many reasons why regions of the former Soviet space want to align themselves with the West rather than Ruzzia. Case in point: Closer alignment with the EU was the carrot which Yanukovic held on under the nose of the electorate in order to narrowly defeat Timoshenko. When he shelved that at behest of Putin, he triggered Euromaidan, fled to Moscow and set the stage for the current war.
Andre, I agree with most of what you said with one exception. I disagree that I’ve drawn a false equivalency. It was an imprecise equivalency but it was not false.
Claire’s guest highlights the fact that the presence of Russian spooks is ubiquitous in many “private commercial organizations.” It is simply a fact that American social media companies have hired a multitude of former law enforcement and intelligence officials. Many of these officials have played some role in content moderation and it strains credulity to suggest that they haven’t acted as a conduit to agents still employed by their previous employers.
It’s not just social media organizations that have made a habit of hiring these individuals. The employment rolls of defense contractors are also chock full of former Pentagon brass. Given the shocking incompetence of the American military this is no cause for comfort.
There’s a lot of chatter in right-wing circles about how compliant and even complicit the American mainstream press has become with the Biden Administration. They chalk this up to the fact that reporters, editors and publishers are mostly on the left end of the political spectrum and that most of the denizens of the press are Democrats.
This completely misses the point. The press is aligned with Biden not for political reasons but for economic reasons; both the press and the Government fear the disintermediation that social media represents.
Ma Bell hated it when MCI and Sprint came along. Macy’s hated it when Amazon started cleaning it’s clock. Merrill Lynch watched as their business model collapsed after Charles Schwab revolutionized the online brokerage business. I could go on and on, but you get the point.
For decades, the American Government basically had three major television networks and five to ten consequential newspapers to deal with. Even in this environment curating it’s message was difficult.
It’s no wonder that now that everyone with a Twitter, Facebook, You Tube or Substack account is able to mimic what the press used to do, Governments around the world are literally horrified. It’s an information free-for-all and Governments in the western world are panicking because they don’t know how to deal with it. That’s why they are insisting that these sites moderate or even censor what messages can appear. And, it is clear that these censorship requests extend not only to pornography and hate speech but also to speech that is true like the Hunter Biden lap top story and the discussion of the possibility that COVID emerged as a result of a lab-leak.
As threatened as the Government may be by the social media phenomenon, traditional press outlets are even more threatened. While some outlets (the New York Times comes to mind) have found a way to survive in this environment, many others, (the Washington Post is an example) are being rocked to their core financially.
The mainstream press and the Biden Administration have become so aligned because they face a common enemy. The power of disintermediation wrought by social media platforms is far more virile than the power that Government and the mainstream media are losing by the day. That’s why these two former adversaries have become strange bedfellows.
Social media platforms probably have many reasons for recruiting so many law enforcement and intelligence agents to work for them in senior capacities but one of those reasons must surely be to appease American and European Governments.
This isn’t precisely equivalent to what’s happening in Russia, of course. But it’s not altogether different either.
Hi, WigWag,
Just because Fox News says something does not make it [a] fact. Counter-intuitively, the more frequently an item is repeated on Fox News, the more likely it is cut from whole cloth. Conflating any item - really, every item - stated repeatedly on Fox News as fact is a bridge too far.
EDIT. Typo alert!
Thanks, David. I don’t watch FOX News. I don’t think my television set has been sullied by that network for more than ten minutes in the past ten years. By the way, it’s not just FOX news, I don’t watch CNN or MSNBC regularly either, although I might tune into CNN if there’s an emergency like a hurricane or an earthquake.
A [perhaps] funny aside...
Some years ago I bought a new TV. When Best Buy's Geek Squad came by to calibrate the new display, he told me he uses CNN as his lodestar.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because," he replied, "CNN spends the most money, has the greatest IT budget, to have the latest technology to deliver the best signal. That signal strength helps me tune your display."
So how interesting/funny is it that my DirecTV dish is obscured by my neighbor's hedge - and the only station untunable is CNN? I get Fox and MSNBC just fine. Does the universe send me a coded message? :-)
Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.
If you’re open to a friendly suggestion; thank your neighbor for maintaining his shrubbery in a way that obscures CNN. Then ask him to hone his horticultural skills so that he can grow out his shrubs to also block out MSNBC and FOX.
Block out all three networks and you will have hit the trifecta!