Russia touts ‘war with NATO’ amid losses in Ukraine
As Russia faces challenges on the frontlines and at home, President Putin’s backers engage in war of words with Kyiv’s Western allies. Kyiv, Ukraine
As Russia faces challenges on the frontlines and at home, President Putin’s backers engage in war of words with Kyiv’s Western allies. Kyiv, Ukraine – Clad in military fatigues, Russian President Vladimir Putin listened to his top general talk about Ukraine’s “Western sponsors”. “Lacking success on the ground, the Kyiv regime is trying to convince its Western sponsors that it overtook the initiative and had significant battlefield gains,” Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s General Staff of the Armed Forces, told Putin in televised remarks. In response, Putin urged him to “continue analysing” the involvement of each Western nation in the war that has not gone according to Moscow’s battlefield plans and its wish to “demilitarise” Ukraine back in 2022. “We’ll need this analysis for the possible making of responsible decisions in the future,” the Russian president said in the video broadcast, released at the beginning of a news cycle in the United States ahead of the Independence Day weekend. To anyone familiar with the recent turn of hostilities, their conversation seemed staged and based on false information. Putin claimed that his troops “completely liberated” the long-contested eastern city of Kostiantynivka, even though Ukrainians still control parts of it, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy challenged Putin to meet him there to “find a diplomatic solution” to end the war. Putin also purported that this year, Moscow seized more than 3,000 square kilometres (1,158 square miles) of “our land” in Ukraine. But because of the shifting front lines and Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Moscow’s actual gains between January and July amounted to a mere 97 sq km (37.4 sq miles), according to the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank that provides verified, geolocated data.
Instead of facing facts, Putin is creating a “constructed reality premised on a rejection of the tactical and operational developments,” it said. “Putin’s control over the information space and his ability to shape and propagate narratives of Russian military success are critical to maintaining this false reality,” it said. And Russia’s claims of seizing a town or a village are often based on missions by servicemen who are ordered to reach a central square or another landmark and send a photo of themselves planting a Russian flag. “And then we kill them, and they never make it back,” Andriy, a Ukrainian serviceman who spent three years on the eastern frontline, told Al Jazeera, withholding his last name in accordance with wartime protocol. ‘It has to be justified, explained to their audience’ To a four-star Ukrainian general, Putin’s goals are crystal clear – to convince the Russian public that it was NATO’s backing that turned Moscow’s blitzkrieg, dubbed a “special military operation”, into a full-scale “war with NATO” with no end in sight. “The goal is to justify why the ‘special military operation’ has been lasting for the fifth year instead of months,” Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera. The Kremlin uses “such a propaganda approach as it needs to show why the war has to be scaled up, why this is happening, that this is a war already, and they’re at war not with Ukraine, but with all of NATO,” he said. Amid daily Ukrainian strikes on occupied areas and mainland Russia from the Baltic to western Siberia, a growing fuel shortage and mounting economic problems, the Kremlin is warming Russians up to the idea of a wider mobilisation ostensibly planned for after the September 18-20 parliamentary vote.
The BriefWire