Ukraine Expands Their Hybrid War In Russia
Ukraine Expands Their Hybrid War In Russia
New! Improved! With Polish volunteers!
”The Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion said they had captured Russian soldiers in Belgorod Oblast and wanted a meeting with the local governor,” Ukrainska Pravda reports.
In a video released by the mysterious new combatants, they instruct the Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov how to approach them safely at a local church to recover their prisoners, at least one of whom appears to be wounded under a thermal sheet.
“As a gesture of goodwill, which is so often mentioned in the government of the Russian Federation, we are ready to give you these captured, ordinary Russian soldiers for the opportunity to talk with you personally — to discuss the current situation in the region and, most importantly, to talk about its future and the future of Russia in general.”
The Freedom of Russia Legion (FRL) has reported indiscriminate Russian shelling of civilian areas inside Russia during their recent operations. This is believable. Now the FRL is saying the people of Belgorod Oblast can evacuate to safety in Ukraine.
“Seeking to strike a blow against our forces, the enemy is engulfing populated areas in flames, disregarding civilian casualties,” the Legion says.
Due to the threat to the civilian population, we have agreed with the Ukrainian command to establish humanitarian corridors for the afflicted residents of Belgorod who are suffering from the shelling by the regime’s army. Therefore, anyone in need of assistance, by voluntary agreement, can be evacuated deep into Ukraine to provide shelter and all essential necessities.
FRL is flaunting their safe zone inside of Ukraine’s borders, here. Kyiv officially has no comment, which is to be expected, but this all speaks to good battlefield PSYOPS. Political arguments are ineffective at weakening the morale of an enemy. Much better is instruction on how to behave in defeat: come alone in an ambulance. Come over the border to Ukraine where we can recruit and train you for the war in Russia.
A map is circulating on Twitter. I am not assessing its accuracy. Rather, I note that the operation underway has apparently taken place on a different axis than the one which surprised the world two weeks ago, and in larger numbers. Polish volunteers are now reportedly involved as well. This is in fact an ideal theater in which to use foreign volunteer legions.
Now, I am no expert in insurgency/COIN doctrine. To my eye, however, this has all the hallmarks of an effort to jump-start an armed conflict inside Russia, requiring strategic response from Moscow. To repeat what I said before, this is a diversionary effort, but it may develop into, and does seem to be developing into, a more serious threat to Russian sovereignty. It remains to be seen whether the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) and FRL establish permanent bases, but that is the next logical step in escalating the threat.
These incursions have already forced the redeployment of Russian Armed Forces (RuAF) inside Russia. Forces massed to repel this threat are unavailable to reinforce Russian defenses inside Ukraine. Panicked social media messages call for help. “We need the general help of the Ministry of Defense. Not only artillery, but also armor and aircraft,” Russian Border Guards near Novaya Tavolzhanka reportedly posted on Telegram. “The situation is very difficult. The enemy is present in the settlement.” If true, then Russian communications are as abysmal as ever.
So is Russian discipline. Another Telegrammer has posted video of a thoroughly looted store in Shebekino, for example, suggesting that either the Russian troops, or local civilians, or both, took advantage of the chaos when insurgents arrived.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is angry. In yet another Telegram post, the “victor” of Bakhmut wonders “Why did we take Bakhmut and rename it Artemovsk?”
Why are tens of thousands of people, our Russian guys, dying, moving towards the West? In order for us to start giving away, step by step, pieces of the Belgorod region, our primordially Russian land? Why is everyone silent about the death of these civilians? Where is General Lapin? Where is Shoigu? Where is Gerasimov? Where are their explanations to the Russian people that we give away civilians and our territories to be torn to pieces? When will this silence and the attempt to blur the fate of the Russian people end? Tell us their names and surnames, tell us the place and date where the burial will be, so that we can take off our hats and honor their memory, and then decide how and when we will take revenge.
Appealing to discontent with the regime’s performance in wartime, Prigozhin has also threatened to take unilateral action and defend Belgorod Oblast in place of the Ministry of Defense. This bellicose talk curries favor with the war party in the Kremlin.
It also suggests “he may aim for Wagner forces to assume primary or sole responsibility for an axis in the Ukrainian theater now that Wagner forces have withdrawn from that role in the Bakhmut area,” according to the Institute for the Study of War. Boldface original:
Prigozhin’s apparent threat to undertake military operations, even defensive ones, on Russian territory without the permission of the Russian MoD is astonishing if it is anything other than flamboyant rhetoric. It implies that Prigozhin regards himself as able to use large military forces loyal to him at his own discretion and beyond the control of the actual Russian military. Russian President Vladimir Putin would have to have tremendous confidence in Prigozhin’s personal loyalty to himself to be at all comfortable with such a situation.
He has also indicated that a “Pandora’s box” of regime infighting is underway. "Dangerous games have become commonplace in the Kremlin towers...they are simply destroying the Russian state,” Prigozhin said on Saturday. As ISW notes, none of this would be happening without a weak, or at best permissive, Vladimir Putin.
In a recent interview, Russian dissident Konstantin Samoilov referred to Prigozhin as “Putin's political project.” He was trying to get past the distraction of the words Prigozhin says to point out how fake it is, a Potemkin propaganda project. This is a fair point. Anyone else would be drinking poisoned tea by now. What does Putin get from Prigozhin, exactly?
My best guess — and I am admittedly no Kremlinologist — is that Putin has no heir. Violent successions and coups are the bane of peace in Russia. The last thing he wants as a legacy is Russia at war with itself. I suspect that Prigozhin is Putin’s hedge against violent regime change.
As evidence, I submit the Wagner CEO’s land art projects.
Forgotten now in the drumfire of war news, Prigozhin put actual wartime resources into a combat engineering fraud, the so-called Wagner Line, last October. “Prigozhin is never going to stop a Ukrainian offensive here,” I predicted, “and no such attack is likely in the near future” along the border zone where it was built.
Instead, the Wagner Line was a visual showcase of Prigozhin himself — a form of nonverbal communication with Russians, a totem of his resolve to carry on with Putin’s Russianizing project in Ukraine, come what may, and to carry on with Putin’s form of mafia government by oligarchy. As I said at the time, these so-called defenses were bullshit, unlikely to stop a real mechanized attack. But they made perfect sense as propaganda aimed at Russians in the metropole, who conceive of their postmodern empire as the center of the world.
Prigozhin, I suspect, is expanding on that theme now by threatening to defend Russia without permission. He can get away with saying that because he has permission. He has permission because he is a political project of Putin, whose ultimate purposes are inscrutable.
The more dangerous the incursions become, the bolder Prigozhin will get. Already responding to developments in Belgorod Oblast in near real-time with black wit, proposing to go in place of Governor Gladkov, Putin’s caterer is growing by the hour.
Putin does not call out Shoigu or Gerasimov or his MoD. He does not analyze the failures of the RuAF or reexamine his maximalist demands. Not out loud, anyway. Prigozhin is allowed to say thse things aloud, to take a personal hand in the fight. Putin’s acknowledgement of Yevgeny Prigozhin as the ‘Victor of Artemovsk’ was unusual, and all the more meaningful in a war with few real successes.
Wagner units are still disengaging from the front lines in Bakhmut. It is a wonder that this force has survived, tattered but intact, to fight another day. A wonder. Or perhaps no wonder at all. At this point, it would not surprise me to learn that Prigozhin is a political project in Kyiv as well as Moscow. He is perhaps the only man in Russia with permission to do that sort of thing.
