Apparently, there is no trend so bad that has not carried even worse, but partly unforeseeable, options.
Let me start with the worst: the risks of a terrorist threat are increasing rapidly. First, a clarification: Even when one of the intelligence agencies is involved in real provocations, that does not categorically mean that everyone in the performing intelligence agency is aware of everything. From uninvolved colleagues information is shut out in every way, just like from all other people. And regardless of who does the provocation and why, a number of specialized subdivisions are not engaged in the search for the guilty - this is done by other specialized units, which also can and should not be put on notice if the provocation was ours. For some units and specialists it is important to give information (not to find the perpetrator), the reaction of external and internal environment, the elimination of risks and the search for maximum pragmatism in the emerging situation. Here I am being very careful to point out that it is naive to think that if (for example) our people are involved in the provocation, then all employees are aware of it.

The Tochka-U missile strike on Donetsk was supposed to be "evidence of genocide on the part of Ukraine." By a number of indications and by a number of facts independent of each other in this tragedy, one can state with almost complete certainty that it was not Kiev that was behind the launch. But for a number of reasons I am simply not morally ready to take this story apart - I am sure that other experts can do that without difficulty. Understanding this missile strike will also help to understand further prospects with the risk of terrorist attacks.

On the purely military topic I will try to be as concise as possible: the existing forces and means are insufficient even for the theoretical seizure of not just Ukraine but at least the key cities. There are not enough forces even for a complete encirclement, let alone an assault. At the same time, the information picture is already becoming, technically speaking, extremely unacceptable.
Russia has weapons that have not yet been activated, but there are problems with their use.

A local nuclear strike will not solve the military problem, but it will add problems. Trying to scare before using such a strike is possible, but after using it, there are enormous risks. And although the situation is now somewhere outside the bounds of logic and common sense, I still hope that no outright stupidity will be done.

A massive nuclear strike. Even assuming that it is technically possible, that all links in the chain follow all orders (I don't believe that anymore), it still doesn't make sense. Such a strike would cover everyone. And we'll get a pretty good one, too.
Non-nuclear superpowered charges. Again, the main problem is that this war is not an early to mid-century war with a solid line of fortifications. Who is to be hit? Kiev? The shockwave of such explosions, along with the houses, will also destroy the neutrality of all the other countries (India, China, the Arab world, Latin America) towards us. And we will have to shoot "for sure", taking into account the fact that the air defense system of Ukraine may well shoot down some (who knows what) of the released charges, and "to shoot and not to fly" is to erase our military reputation to zero. And if you give many times more power at launch and all of them will reach, then it is time to start looking for justification of the term "genocide" at least for the domestic user. But here I rather believe in an attempted "intimidation strike" than in an attack on Kiev with an attempt to wipe it out.

There are, of course, the same "Solntepecs," but there are nuances with them. (note: he is referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOS-1). The TOS is a vulnerable machine, and it will have to be guarded by large forces. In Syria, an unpleasant incident with the defeat of the TOS took place - the detonation is enough to destroy its own rear and all those who cover it. Checked, that's enough. And the Solntepecs still need to get to Kiev, at the risk of turning the entire convoy into dust after just one successful hit. A massive UAV attack, a single artillery volley, an ambush - one hit on one particular vehicle - and the result will be tremendously negative.

All this forces us to look for other solutions. In this regard, Mariupol is turned into a field of "show of force and intimidation" - in the hope that in the other cities this example will be perceived as the need to flee or surrender. The side effects can be seen with the naked eye: the wiping into the dust of a large city raises questions even among domestic audiences. Here, what is called a "Nazi terrorist attack" could have very much pulled attention away.
In addition, "terrorist acts of the Nazis" (I am using the working vocabulary now, rather than giving my assessment) provides an opportunity to justify a much longer stay of Russian troops on Ukrainian territory, and the possible withdrawal (voluntary, forced) could be covered by the threat of "terrorist acts of the Nazis" in response to the withdrawal of Russian control. And there is also a reason to take control of critical infrastructure - this is already a bargaining chip in future negotiations.
The most cynical question is the possible "Nazi terrorist attack" in Russia. This is where the FSB is the most disinterested party in this. First, the destabilization of the situation could easily override the "mobilization psychosis. Secondly, in any case, the FSB's task is to prevent something like this from happening, so such a terrorist attack in the late stages of the war puts the Service in the crosshairs of internal criticism, with an obligatory search for those responsible. If the Reichstag had been partly a central powder warehouse, it would hardly have caught fire in the 1930s. In that sense, our whole country is a big gunpowder warehouse, and imitations don't work much now (the limit was successfully exhausted before the operation began).
This does not cancel the fact that in addition to the FSB (it is very fashionable to hang all the dogs on us) there are other services and departments. We also have enough burnt-out heads among the conditionally civilian part of us, who for the sake of the good purpose of the war of the whole country could well try to "push" the plot of events - we would follow them, it's already good. But in some services can think in terms of the military (to which these services belong), and this has its own logic. And just such a development of the plot would seem to them to be very advantageous.

At the same time, we see a propensity for violence in society. Violence begets violence and the spiral unwinds. And by a combination of factors, the risks of terrorist strikes reach a new level, both for Ukraine and Russia. At the same time, terrorist attacks on the territory of Ukraine may be an attempt to "pressure the West," or hidden behind man-made disasters. The logic is simple: there will be an argument to pressure the West that "the longer Kiev's resistance, the higher the risks for everyone. But here we can get a categorically harsh reaction, the real reasons for which I will explain below.

Russia has now lost the planned nature of its actions. The hierarchy of decisions has been undermined, the behavioral model of "Let's do this..." lacks the necessary level of critical analysis and counteraction. Adventurism has been added where it should not exist even in theory.

Now for more important aspects of the war planning phase. Our problem (not only at the level of the FSB, but also at the level of Russia) was that Ukraine was perceived as "the same Russia, just under the weight of the American narrative. And approaches were formed "as to Russia. Now we can state that we are dealing with a mentally absolutely different country, so all the initial plans only for this reason can be thrown into the furnace. There is more than one reason, by the way.

In Russia, the role of the security wing is enormous. In terms of security, the FSB (for all our disadvantages) remains a powerful foundation, controlling everything. And the belief that things were similar in Ukraine with the SBU came at too high a price.
According to the original plan, with the overthrow of the pro-Western regime and the rise of pro-Russian forces to power, a key marker also emerged: the reaction to the preparatory actions of the SBU's Department for the Protection of National Statehood. Given that the SBU is now working under the close control and guidance of the Americans (of which I have no doubt myself), we also understood that they may have some trump cards. On information wars they have now risen to an unpleasantly high level - this direction (as well as the power wing, which has had a constant practice for many years) we considered a strike force. But, on the other hand, it was hard to imagine a huge gap in the level of the different departments.
Their Department of Protection of National State is an analogue of our Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System and the Fight against Terrorism (Dvoyka), so the main counteraction to our plans we expected from them. By all indications (it was 100% confirmed by the later events) the SBU department was acting so primitively and ineffectively that there could be no significant threat to our plans. Here, I believe, we made a major miscalculation, extrapolating the level of this department to the security system of Ukraine as a whole. And the second miscalculation was superimposed on this one: we assumed that the level of influence on domestic processes in the country was the same as the role of the FSB in Russia. And if you also remember the miscalculation of the political leadership with their bet on individual figures (who even then had no authority, and now have gone into hiding), the result begins to read immediately. Add to the pile the situation with the "mass reliable agents in Ukraine" - that is, in general, the whole picture.
But the SBU fully engaged the security wing and the information workers. In general, here we partly knew where the trouble would come from, so the Ukrainian information operations units (both from the defense and the SBU) received their own blows, including physical ones. But the effect here was not achieved: they were incommensurably better at this kind of information attack by Ukraine on us than we were on them. On the one hand, they instantly created a background of coverage of the operation in their favor, forming the attitude of Ukrainians to what was happening as a domestic war. In our country there were no countermeasures at all in this respect in the first days, largely because of the secrecy of the beginning, largely because at first they thought to concentrate on explaining the need to stop resisting.
On the other hand, an information war is strictly a war of attack, where there is no place for defense. Ukrainian information workers simply burst into our territory: the demonstration of prisoners, their calls to their parents - amid attempts to remove our official information from the Russian audience, we received a total domination of information "alien". In terms of information, we suffer a defeat that in the first days was a complete defeat.
Fakes, beautiful motivational legends, throws in, disinformation, pieces of quite real information from the battlefield (we did not let this kind of information on the air at all) - this is where the American training seems to have given the biggest results. And here we must also add unexpected behavior of Zelenski, which no one was ready for. His image of a drug addict and comedian (we focused on this) against the background of his media pitch played a cruel joke on Russia because of the dissonance of his image and behavior. The situation was finished with the fact that we did not have a symmetric answer: V. Putin, keeping his distance from the closest circle, looked much more lost to any outside observer than Zelensky, and we did not have our own charismatic figures to counterbalance the constant broadcasting of Ukrainian figures.
In recent days Russia has been building its own model of media behavior, but, first of all, it was too late, and, secondly, in the media field it is by definition harder for us against professional showmen. Incomparably so.
And the key surprise - Ukraine was away from centralized management, all military decisions were completely given to the military (without political objectives). It was the same with the regional authorities, which made operational control extremely flexible. Given that the information battle was lost, for Ukrainians this war became a domestic war, destroying the plans for a special operation format for good.
The Western world has so taken over the image of such a Ukraine that no serious politician can speak out with an attempt to put pressure on Ukraine anymore (this was not the case until recently). And even in attempts of unspoken negotiations with Zelensky they will be afraid to press: Zelensky's public statement about such a call to surrender will undercut any Western politician's rating. As a result, many years of quite successful work with the Russia-loyal political stratum of Western countries is ruined by an asymmetrical blow. Add to this the banning of broadcasting from a purely Russian point of view - that's it, there is nothing to answer for now.

Would an act of terrorism be able to fundamentally change the situation? No. But I consider their risk to be as high as possible. Even in Russia. Or even more so in Russia. Am I sure that the FSB won't commit a large-scale terrorist act against their own population? I am not only sure of this, but also of the fact that they will prevent all such acts of terrorism professionally and to the maximum possible extent. Can our other special agency take on such a task with a purely military approach? Yes. Are there any forces in Russia, other than the General Staff, that could consider such a scenario? Yes, but to list them would be like reading tea leaves in a cup of tea, and enumerating them would sound like an unwarranted accusation on my part.

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Pub: 18 Mar 2022 07:36 UTC
Views: 57316