The Proud Barbarians

When murdering civilians lifts your spirits, what are you ?

Much of the Western media described the latest Russian wave of cruise missile attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine as retaliation for the explosion which heavily damaged the Kerch bridge linking Russia to the Crimean peninsula, which Russian forces currently occupy. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the explosion occurred on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s birthday.) Putin himself described the latest Russian missile barrages as payback for an act of “terrorism.” His claim is of course risible nonsense; the Kerch bridge (especially the railway portion) is a key supply route for Russian troops in occupied Ukraine and is a legitimate military target.

Putin is probably also lying about the reason for the missile attacks. It’s unlikely that the Russian military could have planned and executed so many missile launches on such short notice. The more logical explanation is that the strikes were the brainchild of Gen. Sergey Surovikin, the newly named overall commander of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Surovikin distinguished himself as a brutal psychopath while in command of the Russian forces aiding the regime of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Asad. His troops bombed and shelled opposition-held towns and cities into rubble, in particular concentrating on schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. A favorite Russian tactic was to bomb Syrian civilians as they stood in line at their local bakeries in the morning. The goal was to make it impossible for areas held by the opposition to sustain human life, and that goal was largely achieved.

Russian state media commentators, so down in the dumps after the Kerch bridge explosion, were jubilant at the attacks on Ukrainian civilians. With footage of a missile strike on a playground in Kyiv playing behind him, Russia’s former commissioner for human rights (!) declared that Ukrainian sewage systems are serving the war effort and should be struck as well. He asked rhetorically of the Ukrainians: “Are they whining yet ? Are they howling ?”. On Rossiya-1, Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean for international politics at Moscow State University, stated that “Ukraine should not exist,” adding that Russia should “cut off Europe so they all starve.” To drive home the point, the same network played an interview with Pavel Gubarev, the self-proclaimed “people’s governor” of the unrecognized “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Gubarev explained that Ukrainians are in fact Russians who are possessed by Satan and then followed up with a statement of genocidal intent: "We aren't coming to kill you, but to convince you. But if you don't want to be convinced, we'll kill you. We'll kill as many as we have to: 1 million, 5 million, or exterminate all of you." It’s worth noting that this grotesque TV programming is not really aimed at Ukrainians- who aren’t paying attention- but at lifting Russian morale.

The exultation currently on display on Rossiya-1 and elsewhere is likely to be short-lived, however. The Russian military has one core competency: murdering civilians. Gen. Surovikin is clearly determined to make fullest use of that competency. But it’s a losing strategy. Russia is expending hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of irreplaceable ordnance on targets which have almost no bearing on Ukraine’s ability to resist. Even the terror effect is lessened by the fact that Ukrainian civilians are now battle-hardened just like their soldiers and airmen. They know the drill (literally). Predictably, NATO countries like the Netherlands and Germany have already responded to the missile onslaught by expediting deliveries of air-defense systems to Ukraine. In Syria, Russian aircraft could fly in formation over uncontested airspace and drop bombs on women and children at their leisure. Ukraine is a drastically different tactical environment; about half of Russia’s cruise missiles and kamikaze drones are being downed en route to their targets. And Russian pilots no longer even attempt to operate near Ukrainian cities. (Four Russian helicopters were shot down just today.)

The Surovikin strategy of pursuing victory through missile terror is also risky due to the fact that Russian “high-precision” weapons are not actually all that precise, a fact of which Surovikin is probably unaware. What if a Russian cruise missile launched in the general direction of a school in Kyiv comes down on the U.S. embassy instead ? Embassies are considered sovereign territory, so in that scenario Russia would have just attacked American soil.

So as much as this latest spasm of savagery gladdens Russians’ hearts, it won’t win the war for them. More Ukrainian victories will come in time, more Russian conscripts will die, and before long the butcher of Syria will take his turn in the ring as the reason why Putin’s invasion is still failing.