Putin's Regime Faces the Fate of His Kerch Bridge - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“Battles are the principal milestones of secular history,” Winston Churchill wrote in his biography of the Duke of Marlboroug
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The strike on the Kerch Strait Bridge was not a battle, but it was an important contributor to one of the great inflection points of this war—the moment when Russian elites began to understand that they are losing
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The Kerch Strait Bridge attack, by contrast, inflicted at most a couple of casualties but packed multiple punches
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Russia’s military predicament is going from bad to worse. Occupying a thousand-kilometer front and reliant on massed firepower, the Russian military depends on creaking supply lines that run parallel to the front and that are increasingly vulnerable to Ukrainian precision attacks.
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Meanwhile, Russia’s military mobilization is a deeply unpopular botch, as more Russian men flee the country than can be inducted into an army that cannot equip them, cannot train them, and cannot lead them.
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More disasters await. Ten thousand to 20,000 of Russia’s best remaining troops are bottled up in the city of Kherson, their backs against the Dnipro River and the bridges behind them unusable for heavy traffic.
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Surovikin—his face set in the menacing scowl of most Russian generals—will not be able to create a unified command organization overnight. Nor is he likely to escape the micromanagement from the Kremlin that seems to have plagued Russia’s war effort. What he will do, however, is repeat the brutalities over which he presided in Syria, where the Russian military gained experience not in fighting but in butchering civilians
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Putin may now face the unappetizing choice between picking a more effective, colorful, and (on the nationalist right) popular set of subordinates who could turn on him, or sticking with the loyal but failed mediocrities who have absorbed the obloquy associated with Putin’s system and the president himself.
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Dictatorships built solely on fear and self-interest are brittle things, and in Russia the cracks are showing.
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Running throughout the open conduits of opinion, primarily on Telegram, is boiling discontent with the military, the conduct of this war, the absurd insistence that it is not a war but a “special technical operation,” the incompetent mobilization, and, by implication, Putin himself.
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At the same time, Russian paranoia about the West, a combination of grievance and thwarted desires to restore an imperial state, has created an atmosphere in which measured policy is impossible.
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All of this suggests that predictions of stalemate are wrong, at least so far as the higher conduct of this war is concerned. The impulse of General Surovikin will be to destroy civilians, power plants, and hospitals, because he cannot beat the Ukrainian army.
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“Great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.”
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A much larger psychological disaster for Russia will ensue if and when Kherson falls and the largest city that Russia has taken is lost to Ukraine, together with thousands of Russian prisoners. That would be the real inflection point, a great battle, and as Churchill also put it: