The Praetorian Guard is Lying to the Emperor!

Someone needs to break into the Kremlin and teach Putin how to use the internet!

Honestly, this new story could be complete bullshit and I acknowledge that. Liberals have an incentive to portray Putin as removed from reality, I suppose. But, even if it is a lie, it’s still a very good lie because it seems to fit in neatly into the empty white spaces in the jigsaw puzzle that we are solving together.

The missing piece:

Kapital:

According to a former Russian intelligence officer and several former officials, Putin wakes up around 7 a.m. to read the military briefing. The information in it is carefully verified - the emphasis is on successes, and failures are downplayed.

Up-to-date information does not reach Putin - the delay in submitting data reaches several days. By the time Putin gets acquainted with the situation on the battlefield, the information is already completely out of date.

At the same time, frontline commanders are required to report to the FSB, which prepares operational reports for Security Council experts. Then they get to the head of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, and only after him - to Putin. In fact, the president was deprived of the right to get acquainted with important information from the primary source.

At meetings with the participation of the military, objective information is also not given to Putin. Fifteen days after the start of the military operation, Putin held a meeting via video link with the leadership of the Ministry of Defense. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, everything is going according to plan. We inform you about this every day,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported. According to what plan everything goes, he did not specify.

A group of Russian officials, journalists and analysts tried to convey to Putin the real situation at the front, but they were not allowed to do so. A sociologist close to the Kremlin brought the results of a poll that showed that the majority of Russians do not support the military operation. “Now there is no need to upset Vladimir Vladimirovich,” they told him and did not show Putin what was happening in reality.

After HIMARS appeared on the front, which became a real problem, Putin summoned 30 heads of defense companies to his Novo-Ogaryovo residence. All invitees spent three days in quarantine, passed PCR tests and were placed at the end of a long table from the president. Putin told them that the military operations were going well, and that Russia was "clicking" on all American weapons. After this meeting, the heads of enterprises realized that Putin did not have an objective idea about the course of the military operation.

So, let’s focus on the fact that the report alleges that Putin is surrounded by what amounts to a Praetorian guard who keeps him isolated from the military and from the people.

This does not strike me as an outrageous thesis.

After all, Russia is a society divided between the Spooks and the Crooks and Putin’s whole ruling strategy was to straddle the line between them and settle disputes, redistribute stolen loot, squeeze out disloyalty and gradually strengthen his own core of support among both the Crooks and the Spooks. His Presidential career was approved in the first place as a sort of compromise between the Crooks and the Spooks.

Furthermore, we have very good reason to believe that it was the FSB who was in charge of planning the “Special Military Operation.”

So, is it too much of a stretch to assume that they’re probably still meddling in how things are being run now? No, I don’t think it is. I think there’s a very good chance that military operations are being approved by FSB commissars.

Again, we already KNOW that the Security Council is running things.

And we KNOW that the FSB is the go-between between them and the frontline.

So, it makes sense that the FSB would be controlling the flow of information.

Putin, famously, does not use the internet or even cell phones. He gets his information delivered to him in printouts by the FSB over breakfast. Control what is in the report and you can control the President. Simple as.

They did it with Trump too!

Furthermore, Putin is not a military man by any stretch of the imagination so he is even more reliant on the assessments of others and doesn’t have any well-honed heuristics to fall back on from years of experience in the field that would help him sniff out bullshit in the reports and start investigating more thoroughly.

So, again, not really much of a stretch to see how the court is keeping the king in the dark, no?

But I don’t buy the idea that Putin is being led by the nose as the article alleges. If I were a total Putin apologist, it would be in my interest to do so though, mind you. My argument would be the classic “the Tsar is good, it’s his advisors who are misleading him” narrative. Instead, I’m just going to point out that this is just how Putin has always liked to run his ship of state. He relied on the upstanding gentlemen of the FSB for his entire time in office. He also put them in charge of key offices (those that weren’t promised to Liberals). And now, they probably are trying to cover their asses by lying to him and telling him that things are better than they are and that the military is just belly-aching.

The missing piece in our understanding of the internal situation in Russia is the FSB.

We have to figure out who they are, what they want and why they’re running things the way that they are and how powerful they are, really. Until we do, the puzzle will remain unfinished.

Also, the FSB has a powerful incentive to keep the military at arm’s length.

If Putin starts spending time with the military, then the military people see their star rising as the course of this war continues. I imagine that the situation is not unlike the court of Louis the Sun King.

Not the scene from the movie that I’m looking for^, but my point is that it is not a stretch to think that those who are closer to Putin get the most loot and their interests defended more aggressively.

Furthermore, the problem that most Russia analysts have is that they don’t differentiate between the military and the secret ideological police.

That’s what sets me apart from them in my analyses.

They lump the military in with the FSB or Putin’s Judo friends or the legacy gangsters of the Yeltsin years. This is because Liberals have ideological blinders on and hate on everything that has a whiff of old world tradition to it. They condemn Russia for militarism while I say that the lack of militarism is exactly the problem that has plagued Russia since the collapse of the USSR.

Remember: the military has always been the populist, traditional alternative to rule by Spooks or Crooks. The fact that people pearl-clutch when I say this is because they have been psychologically primed to hate men in uniform because, well, like everything else that they think they know about politics, it relates somehow, vaguely to the ghost of Hitler.

And we can’t have a Hitler Hate Authoritarian Fascism society!

Only Love Freedom Liberal Happiness Democracy society!

The true tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union is that the military was knocked out of being a key caste involved in the decision-making process of Russia and so the country took a nose dive into insanity almost immediately. If, in Tsarist Russia, the military and the nobility and the Tsar were the ruling coalition of society, then in the USSR, the party, the secret police and the military in distant third place were the ruling coalition. Post-Soviet Russia saw the rise of the oligarchs and the spooks cutting a deal with them to create the current power balance.

That’s just how it be. It be what it do. It do, it really do.

The West is a similar coalition of Spooks and Crooks, only they have gone global and are even more unaccountable and repressive than their more traditional eastern counterparts.

Also, extremely popular men-of-the-people soldier-populists like General Lebed were warning that Russia’s military was being actively sabotaged by the people in power back in the 90s and 00s. Back in the 00s, General Lebed stated that thanks to the sabotage and cuts, Russia could barely field 500k men. Have things really changed that much since his time? (They have improved a little to be fair).

Anyways, I think I’ve set the premise for my next series of posts pretty well. We need to start talking about the Russian Spook state next. Soon, soon.