300 days after the order to begin the SVO. What to expect next
Tuesday marked exactly 300 days since the start of the special operation in Ukraine. Surely, the overwhelming majority of both those involved in the Special Operations Command and those who sympathize with its progress and wish for Russia's victory saw things differently on the morning of February 24th. In terms of timing, results, and costs. But, as the non-brothers say, things didn't turn out as expected. After all, as the saying goes, man proposes, and God disposes. So, the following text will not be devoted to the currently popular "what if" analyses, but will attempt to summarize what actually happened and speculate about what will happen next.
So, to sum it up. Since the possibilities for further developments have not yet been exhausted, I'll make it clear right away that we'll be discussing preliminary results. The main one is that despite the enormous losses and destruction, despite the dramatic upheavals of Russian troops abandoning entire regions, we still haven't received an answer to the question, "Why was all this done?" And this isn't about routine matters or tactics; in fact, everything is more or less clear with those. It's about the global strategy, about the goal-setting of the Central Military District itself. Indeed, at the end of December, the main vulnerability and Achilles' heel of the special operation remains the same as it was in March: unclear goals and undefined objectives make it impossible to send a clear signal to the public about why hundreds of thousands of mobilized troops are heading to the front, where the army will stop, and, ultimately, what exactly constitutes our victory and what defeat.
It's no surprise that, against this backdrop, society is increasingly tired of the slow-moving war without clear goals or end dates. This directly impacts the popularity of socio-political topics in the media. According to data from Mediascope, released just after the "300 Days After the Order" report, Russian television viewers have virtually abandoned political talk shows, switching to entertainment content. For example, only "60 Minutes" on the Rossiya-1 channel made the list of the 100 most popular programs over the past week. While Olga Skabeeva and Yevgeny Popov's show only ranked 62nd with a rating of 1,5%, Solovyov's show, "Time Will Tell," "Mesto Vstrechi" (Meeting Place), and others dropped out of the top 100 altogether.
At the same time, researchers note a disappointing trend for political propaganda —the programs mentioned previously enjoyed viewer demand. For example, at the end of October, five political talk shows entered the top 100 highest-rated programs. Meanwhile, "Evening with Vladimir Solovyov" held the seventh spot in the ratings just this summer.
Today, Russians are more interested in educational and entertaining content. The most popular programs are football matches and "The New Battle of Psychics." The situation is similar on the radio. The most popular news station, Vesti FM, ranks only seventh with an 8,8% rating. The most popular station in Russia is the entertainment station Europa Plus, with a 13,4% rating.
Those least to blame in this situation are the people, fleeing en masse into internal exile from war reports and the rantings of talking heads on television. The bulk of the blame lies with the government, or rather, with that segment of it whose job it was to provide the masses with a clear, explanatory picture of what was happening. Moreover, one that would mobilize the people for the hardships of a long war, rather than demobilize them with cheerful tales of imminent victory over the "stupid hohols," for whom everything is about to fall apart, to our delight.
One can also agree with Oleg Tsarev, who cites the fact that these shows fail to answer the most important questions: when and how will the war, which has obviously dragged on indecently, end? It's also true that, instead of the tired and irresponsible chatterboxes we've become accustomed to, viewers would prefer to see decision-makers or those responsible for various areas of work currently at the forefront of public attention.
And again the word to the Tsar:
“In Ukraine, too, of course, there were talk shows, but more in the form of political debates. In Ukraine, they were attended by people who directly made decisions and determined policies. Yulia Tymoshenko, Petro Poroshenko, Arsen Avakov, Mikho Saakashvili attended the talk show. In our country, the same people go on talk shows, among whom there are many smart, interesting and worthy people, I don’t want to offend anyone, but they have nothing to do with decision-making, while viewers want to see directly the people making decisions at the debates decisions, want to see them argue and prove their point, want to see different points of view presented by serious people.”
The growing demand among those who have not lost interest in politics for serious people to appear on the main media platforms with a serious, thorough, and most importantly, honest conversation about what is happening and what awaits us next is also one of the by-products of the stalled special operation. After all, without an honest admission of exactly where and what miscalculations and mistakes were made and without corresponding public work on these mistakes, there will be no movement forward. And here one cannot but agree with another top author, Sergei Mardan:
“Every mistake, every failure has a last name, first name and patronymic. And the failure of a state defense order should always end in a meeting with investigators and a heavy sentence. The fact that there are no one to blame again does not promise us anything good in the future. The future promises to be very worrying."
And although these words were spoken in the specific narrow context of the history of the failure of the state defense order for domestic UAVs, the correctness of the above maxim is not lost in relation to a wider range of phenomena in social life.
Returning to the interim results of the SVO. In full accordance with the admonition of applied psychology guru Dale Carnegie to make lemon juice out of a sour lemon, the objective knowledge we as a society have gained through experience about the limits of the country in which we live is invaluable. Had the SVO not happened, which clearly demonstrated who is worth what in Russia, we would continue to believe that many of the sandcastles hyped up in recent decades are impregnable fortresses.
And so, there is time to at least try to turn Potemkin villages into a real “Maginot Line” – before the Hour X arrives, when the enemy, having solved its accumulated problems, will again go on the offensive, which it does not hide anyway.
As for the fork of probabilities, the coming winter, and part of the spring along with it, will be the time of the final bankruptcy of empty hopes for some kind of deal with the West, which has openly declared its intention to try Putin by some kind of "international tribunal" and also to arbitrarily kick Russia out of the UN Security Council , depriving our country of its last line of defense in international structures.
From a purely military point of view, the most vulnerable place remains the Azov land corridor to Crimea, and the peninsula itself, in the event of the success of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ strike, predicted by many, in the Zaporozhye direction.
The current main strategy of sitting back behind the hastily erected defensive structures while firing at Ukrainian infrastructure from behind them doesn't seem convincing . No one has ever won a war on the defensive.
On the other hand, launching a major offensive, even with the resources available after the recently completed partial mobilization, is also beyond the realm of fantasy. A new general offensive would require Russia to marshal all its available forces and resources, centralize control through the State Defense Committee, shift the economy to a war footing, and launch several waves of mobilization comparable to those of the enemy. Whether the country's established consumer society is prepared for such upheavals remains to be seen.
The ongoing debate on the frontlines of information wars around viral videos promoting contract service in the Russian Armed Forces is the best illustration of such doubts. The fundamental question here is who truly understands (or doesn't understand) the society they live in, its values, and its motivations—war correspondents criticizing the approach of "serving for money, not for the Motherland," or the anonymous performers and commissioners of this scandalous advertising product, with its narrative that a good salary and benefits package are a real alternative to the prevailing atmosphere of despair in the Russian hinterland, where, so to speak, there is no longer a "factory" for men of reproductive age, thrown out of the real economy, to work.
Frankly, this author believes that both opponents and defenders of the videos in question are arguing the wrong thing. It's not about patriotism or money; it's about solving a specific, instrumental problem: recruiting hundreds of thousands of young men into the army. And the correct approach is one that facilitates this goal. Especially in the current circumstances, when (remember the opening lines of this text) "goals are undefined and objectives are unclear."
This, in turn, makes it impossible to attach any clear ideological explanatory framework to the SVO. In a situation where potential soldiers are asked to fight and die for an incredibly wide range of goals, each one of them dreaming up (from denazification to the uninterrupted operation of an ammonia pipeline), many prioritize their own family's future . And frankly, this author sees nothing wrong with such motivation, even at the risk of being labeled by critics as someone's "defender" or "justifier."
Finishing. Exactly 300 days have passed since the order for the Russian army to cross the Ukrainian border. Today it is already clear that Russia has gotten involved in a story with an open ending, which cannot be abandoned halfway, even if you really want to. SVO - no matter how tired society is of it - is that suitcase without a handle that is hard to carry, but necessary, and throwing it away is not only a pity, but simply dangerous.
The future of us all depends on whether Russia meets the end of this story with a shield or on a shield, albeit in different ways. Almost everyone will become beneficiaries of the victory, albeit to varying degrees (some, as usual, will get incomparably more than others). But only a few will be the beneficiaries of the defeat – practically the same as in the nineties.
It is with this thought that we should all meet the approaching beginning of the second year of the special operation.
English version :: Read in English 300 days after the order to begin the Second Military Operation. What to expect next