Will Tolerance Help Russia's Army Hold in Kherson?

I feel bad for not writing about all the rumors circulating around the supposed imminent abandonment of Kherson by Russian forces. If I hadn’t seen what went down in Kharkov, Lyman and then the subsequent mass evacuation of civilians and monuments in Kherson, I wouldn’t put any stock in these rumors.

But then, all those things did happen and only about 80K mobilized Russians have been deployed so far, which is not enough to counter the huge Ukrainian manpower advantage. Besides, moving behind the river makes sense from a strategic point of view even though it looks really bad politically. It would be another blow to the Kremlin’s prestige to lose one of the few cities that they took in Ukraine, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Russians retreat beyond the river and wouldn’t even fault them for it. The politicians got the army and the West Russians into this predicament and now “hard decisions have to be made,” as General Surovikin himself said a couple weeks ago. Let the Kremlin take another thrashing from civil society until performance improves, I say.

But, again, who knows? So far, the Russians have done a good job beating back the probing attacks of the Ukrainian forces. There are rumors that the Ukrainians have been pulled back (probably to lower the Russians’ guard) and the pundits on the home front are thundering from their pulpits that not one more territory can be abandoned.

I interrupt the rising crescendo of nail-biting drama building up around Kherson to divert your attention to a sideshow that is being discussed on the sidelines. A memo apparently went out to the Russian troops reminding them of the values of the Russian army: namely, tolerance.

The memo talks about the need to give non-Russians in the military special privileges such as providing them with better food, more time off and better conditions.

Luckily, the memo is probably a fake. Too many phrases are written in the most up-to-date SJW language that only a Moscow hipster would know. There aren’t any tolerance enforcement officers in the Russian military and Communist political commissars are a relic of the past as well, so it comes off as fishy. Many people will believe it though because they don’t trust their government, and, frankly, rightly so. The Russian government is almost as opaque and Byzantine as the one in Washington. But at least we know that people like Putin and Shoigu and other visible top officials do actually rule and have some power, which we cannot be so sure of when we speak about the Joe Brandon administration, which is probably unironically run by space lizards behind the scenes.

The next question to ask is: who wrote and released this piece of propaganda and why?

The “why” is easier to answer. It appears that, despite everything we have been told for near a century now, diversity is NOT a strength. In fact, diversity can be exploited to sew division and discontent. This appears to be an attempt to try and put the idea of demanding superior treatment into non-Russian recruits’ minds and also to stoke resentment from Russians.

As for “who” well, it would be funny if it were the Brits as many on Telegram are alleging. Why would it be funny? Well, it would show that the apparatchiks running that glorified island pirate base don’t believe their own bullshit about tolerance and mult-kulti and so on. If it’s the Ukrainians though, it marks what could be the start of a new strategy: appealing to the non-Russians in Russia. I might have more to say on this and the topic of how Ukraine frames their war at home in the near future.

I’ll leave you with my musings on war that I tapped out while at the health spa where I was treating my sinuses last week. As I tapped away on my keyboard, I wiggled the toes on my warm, wool, sock-clad feet that I had thrown up on the desk while I reclined in my armchair, sinking deeper into my poofy white bathrobe as my junk unceremoniously spilled out of bottom and I clicked my tongue with dissatisfaction that room service was being slow to bring me my cleaned, pressed and folded underwear.

“Let me tell them how much I know about about the hard life,” I thought to myself without any shame or self-awareness as I penned the mini-treatise below.

War ought to be treated as a learning experience for those who are either lucky or unfortunate enough not to be directly experiencing it. For the people in the thick of it, it’s an education of a different, experiential kind. A few, special people might even be able to achieve accelerated spiritual growth because of the closeness of death and depending on the frequency of near death experiences. Sure, a lot of bullshit occurs in war on the command, logistics and interpersonal level, but even more bullshit has to be swept aside to make room for stuff thats real, the stuff that works, the stuff that makes a difference in the struggle for strength. Instead of being outraged about the scandal du jour, I scour the news for lessons instead. I ask myself: “what can I learn about how war is conducted, the mentality of the enemy, the mistakes of my team?” and so on. This searching for truth is part of a larger and greater quest for strength. Strength through life-shaking encounters with raw, explosive truth is the all-encompassing, over-goal that both the cold, dirty grunt in the trenches on the front line and the sniffling big-brain intellectual sipping warm mineral water to calm their delicate duodenum both seem agree on. Between these two brother disciples lies a chasm, a morass of mid-wittery and morons as vast as the distance between my health spa and the front line.

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NOTE: If I come off as irreverent (to offended Westerners???), I apologize, but you have to remember that I was kicked out of Russia and Belarus and threatened with deportation to Ukraine, where, I’d be either arrested or sent to fight and kill Russians. Me sitting this thing out abroad was not my decision so allow me a little levity as I make the occasional funny about my involuntary exile, OK?