‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 7 November: Are Russians Losing Patience over the War?

I am grateful to Judge Andrew Napolitano for posting my recently arrived at contrarian views on how the war in Ukraine is going and what Russians are thinking about the way it is being prosecuted.

In today’s chat I was given ample opportunity to take issue with the ‘Putin is the only adult in the room,’ ‘all Russians support Putin,’ ‘the war will end soon after the capture of Pokrovsk’ narrative that is being disseminated by today’s heroes of the U.S. podcasts Scott Ritter, Larry Johnson and several others.  None of these chaps speaks Russian and the ‘insider perspective’ that they present is nothing more than what they are told by the Russia Today officials, Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials and retired Russian generals who are their hosts in Russia and use these naïve colleagues to broadcast Russian propaganda.

I note that two hours after the release of this video, the typically vicious comments by the usual cohort of trolls numbers ten times less than the number of thumbs up.

As I say at the outset, the 150 million citizens of the Russian Federation are well-educated and it is nonsensical to think that any of us can capture their thinking on the issues at the center of today’s Judging Freedom interview with full confidence.  For my part, I do my best. In part I rely on anonymous sources like taxi drivers or barber shop employees, folks who deal with the broad public and may never see the same customer twice, which makes it all the more likely that the customers speak openly to them. In part, I rely on close friends whom I have known for many years: and I take note when I see clear signs of change in views on the war and on Putin’s leadership as I did over table talk at a party celebrating the new Russian state holiday of National Unity on 4 November.

None of my interlocutors is going to demonstrate against the war or even speak openly about it. But that there is discontent, lost patience of this never-ending war at the popular level that I see is clear.  I can well imagine that some of the Moscow elites are also impatient and they do have means to pressure Putin to change course.

My Russian friends are impatient for the war to end because of the large numbers of casualties among the Russian forces. Perhaps there are 150,000 killed in action, but the numbers of those seriously maimed is surely several times higher.  Russian state television has even started presenting advertisements from the manufacturers of prostheses for those who have lost arms and legs to drone strikes and mines.

Considering these losses which are at least double the scale of those suffered by the USA in the Vietnam war, one viewer submitted a comment several weeks ago asking why there are no demonstrations in Russia by mothers and others bereaved as there were over Vietnam.  The simple answer is that all Russian armed forces in Ukraine are volunteers. While Russia does have a draft, none of the conscripts can be sent outside the borders of the Russian Federation.  In a word, the Russians learned the lesson of Nixon and Vietnam very well. After that war the USA turned to a professional army. Its merits were explained in terms of fighting efficiency, but surely the key reason was to depoliticize war making.  The Russians have done the same.

One of the questions which Judge Napolitano pitched to me was whether Vladimir Putin is drawing out this war of attrition in order to kill of a generation of young Ukrainians and thereby prevent any recurrence of armed conflict in the foreseeable future.  I object to this hypothesis on the grounds that those fighting in the Ukrainian army seem to be at least as numerous in the 50s and 60s age category as in the 20s. You see that even today in the television interviews with Ukrainian POWs who surrendered in Pokrovsk. The same was true in earlier Russian reporting going back more than a year ago.  Secondly, I do not believe that Putin is such a cynic. On the contrary he exhibits deep commitment to the values of Orthodoxy and this creates a separate threat for us:  his turn the other cheek Christianity, very Orthodox in nature, is completely misunderstood by our secular Western leaders and political establishments. It is taken for weakness and encourages them to take ever more provocative and risky actions against Russia which one day will result in Russian counter attacks sparking WWIII. What we have here is the making of a Clash of Civilizations as described by Sam Huntington, though Sam never expected the separate Orthodox civilization to be in armed conflict with the West.