And it carries a special warning to populations of some of Russia’s “ethnic” regions. Dagestan, for example, is one of several regions where there has been popular resentment at the disproportionate cannon-fodderisation of local young men. But there will also be memories of the brutal treatment by Putin’s administration of those it indiscriminately labelled “terrorists” in Chechnya.
There is an external message here, too, to the many countries outside the Euro-Atlantic sphere that have declined to condemn Russia’s war of aggression. Putin’s hope is that those with no time to read beyond the “terrorist” label will lazily reassure themselves that there are, after all, bad lots on both sides, and that it’s OK to continue to sit on the fence.
I’m very willing to believe that he lied about speaking to Putin and is backtracking because of the blowback. Of course- he’s just as likely to be lying now.
I realize that the “We couldn’t possibly be getting curb-stomped by Ukrainians; so it must be NATO little green men!” narrative is a thing; but the one thing that I find deeply baffling is how it seems to have both been widely accepted as the party line by guys like Solovyev; but not attracted even a surface-level examination of obvious implications from those very same people. Says that NATO military units are actually in Ukraine, actually killing actual Russian soldiers; doesn’t even propose sending a diplomatic nastygram; much less ponder nuking Berlin, London, Paris; and Washington.
Over on Team NATO, they’ve been very careful about trying to avoid certain classes of excessive provocation(longer range HIMARS munitions, combat aircraft, requests to Ukrainian forces that they please not use provided artillery against targets across the internationally recognize Russian border, etc.); and yet we have people on Russian state TV outright claiming that NATO ground forces are present, in some quantity, not just hardware and the occasional ‘trainer’; but authentic NATO military actually actively killing Russian soldiers; but who don’t seem to be asking any WWIII-related questions about the active shooting war they are claiming exists between NATO and Russia.
Is that just a reflection of the sheer cynicism and for-the-low-information-viewers status of the claim; that(while it’d be career-limiting to deny it, they themselves don’t believe it enough to bother drawing any conclusions, aside from ‘don’t worry, the Ukrainians are still our inferiors’, from it)? Is there something else at play?
If the claim were actually being taken seriously, I’d have expected all the talking heads to be howling for blood; and Russian state apparatus itself doing something between “employing every diplomatic convention used to signal that we are really not happy” and “warming up the ICBMs and telling NATO that they have 72 hours to leave the theatre”. But no. Somehow we are at war with NATO, because the altnerative would be humiliating; but we aren’t doing anything someone at war with NATO might reasonably consider doing.
Talking heads do demand that Russia nuke NATO “decision-making centres”, along with calls to bomb arms deliveries or Ukrainian government buildings, but IIRC that started before the “we’re losing because we’re fighting NATO soldiers” line was established, because back then they weren’t allowed to suggest that Russia was losing.
I’m pretty certain Russia doesn’t have the capacity to actually modernize those T-62s to any meaningful extent. Where are they supposed to get the high-tech parts needed for that?
