In any widespread scandal, they are always the scapegoats. Russia is no different.
More people are returning to Ukraine than leaving right now.
Kamil Galeev, who’s commentary seems to have gotten pretty big these days and is all over this thread. Often hammers on the tendency for official commentary and popular discussion in Russia to dismiss regular military as “idiots”. And seemingly: poor people, hicks, and the wrong kind of Russian or non-Russians.
As compared to near worship of internal state security and intelligence forces.
But he’s repeatedly mentioned that failures would be dismissed on grounds of Generals and troops being incompetent or untrustworthy. The idiots and farmers have betrayed Russia, it never would have happened if we sent in our catalog ready Paratroopers and the true believers.
I’d say that exact thing creeping up is probably a sign that the failure here is sinking in.
If some generals and colonels have to be executed or sent to the gulag to end this pointless conflict I’m fine with it. It’s obvious that a majority of Russians are either happy about or resigned to letting Putin remain in power despite his and his media mouthpieces’ ridiculous claims and hand-waving and backpedaling. The best outcome is for him to use scapegoats in the military command to save face, withdraw his now-wrecked military from Ukraine with no territorial gains (and a revitalised NATO) while declaring victory, and continue on his course of looting and destroying the Russian economy and degrading Russian civil society from within.
The rest of the world would then go back to regarding Russia as the third-rate power it is (albeit one that can cause a lot of trouble with what little leverage it has); the sanctions will remain in place and the domestic economy will be increasingly disconnected from the global one; Putin will eventually die without a designated successor; there will be a period of internal chaos as the other thugs and cronies jockey for power; and Russians will once again – with the help of their literary tradition and the Orthodox church – lament helplessly how life is nothing but suffering imposed from without by a disappointed God and by Satan and his minions (Jews, Muslims, the West, Ukrainians, etc.).
I doubt the same will be true about the young educated people who fled Russia after the invasion. Nothing left for them to go back to there, no future.
They did send the paratroopers. They failed. Many were shot out of the sky before they got to Kyiv. So yeah, that narrative doesn’t hold up… Russian propaganda is going to be pushing water up hill for a while.
But they didn’t seem to have sent the catalog model ones.
It’s them tight shirts that make them unstoppable.
This is how “lost cause” narratives get built, right? “We could have won this whole thing, except it was stacked against us. Bad generals, bad command-level officers all around, corruption, and then all the western powers helping Ukraine.” Then you throw in, as you point out, the Muslims and especially the Jews, and you’ve got a way to blame all your ills on “them.” Then you form a political party that exploits the grievances and take control. Then you get revenge.
I’ve seen this movie before. It sucks.
That’s one reason this conflict needs to end with a UN patrolled DMZ for 20km either side of the border, nothing heavier than a UAZ-69 jeep and side arms.
Call me a dreamer…
They’ll just be using their dolchstosslegende to preserve the existing regime instead of to establish it. The fascist playbook is all hacky re-treads.
Time will tell, and plenty of other war-torn countries have managed to eventually bounce back, especially when the wars were primarily from external invasions rather than internal strife. In the meantime, Ukraine grows a substantial fraction of the world’s wheat so it’s definitely to everyone’s benefit if conditions are safe enough for people to return and manage the harvest. A wheat shortage is the last thing the world needs right now.
I was thinking of the Confederates, Lost Cause Southern Whites, and neo-Confederates, but yeah Fascists also.
There was a Twitter thread where the Engineer reviewed the river, knew where they would most likely cross. They dialed in the Ukrainian Artillery and used drones ton watch the area. They did cross there, waited for a good chuck of them to cross, before blowing up the pontoon bridge, and prevent their retreat.
A+ on Strategy!
Cue Hannibal.
It will be up to the West to help make sure Ukraine is rebuilt and maintains democracy. We have seen examples in the past where a war torn country can’t recover on its own, and a strong man Nationalist vows to pick the country up by its bootstraps and then we end up back to square one. 
You hate to see it: two poets who participated in a pro-invasion “patriotic marathon” event say they were paid far less than organizers promised them. The Kremlin spent 95.3M rubles ($1.4M) on this nationwide initiative. Oh well!
Looks like TFG’s best bud Pooty has the same habit of stiffing contractors…
