Conjuring Putin's "Victory" out of thin air: a masterclass

Further to last week’s post, Trump and Putin: making up war aims on the fly, I had intended to offer my own suggestions for an “Absolute Victory26″ framing within which Putin can declare successful completion of his inane war, and call everyone back home for tea, medals, and of course a proper Victory Parade with real tanks, as opposed to the demeaning Dad’s Army spectacle they are reduced to this year. 

In the meantime, something much better than my own poor efforts has emerged: a professional Kremlin strategy document [1] entitled “After Victory” on how to allow L’il Volodya his glorious day on the parade rostrum any time he cares to call it quits.  What, in bullet-points, are the declarations Russia will make that, they’ll claim, add up to absolute victory?  It’s referred to in the doc as “The Image of Victory” which pretty much captures what these PR men are up to.  And it meets my test of “essentially in the bag already”, i.e. could be delivered tomorrow, if desired. 

I’ll summarise here the proposed approach, which is quite evidently the work of some genuinely strategic thinkers:  

• ‘De-Nazification’ has been achieved by the deaths of so many Ukrainian soldiers [2]
• Putin has thwarted the West’s plans to expand and prolong the conflict
• Victory has been achieved over a much stronger opponent than Ukraine – the “collective West”
• No longer will the West provocatively test Russia’s strength
• The EU has been dealt a major economic blow
• There are territorial conquests; seizure of natural resources; a land route to the Crimea and the coast of the Sea of Azov (new holiday resorts!); and the acquisition of millions of new Russian-speaking fellow citizens
• A ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ was prevented in the Donbas: Russia has protected its own
• The Russian army is now ‘the most combat-ready in the whole world’ and has withstood confrontation with ’50 countries’
• Thanks to sanctions, Russian industry has developed new capabilities and markets
• All this without general mobilisation!

Plus some conditional stuff relating to what a deal with the west might look like in terms of a final territorial settlement and sanctions lifted. [3] 

It wouldn’t be hard to dispute and/or mock some of these if taken at face value – not quite the capture of Kyiv, or the expulsion of Zelensky, or, errrr, unconditional surrender, eh?  And this from the heirs of the conquerors of the Wehrmacht at Berlin ’45 …  

But that’s not the point.  In its own right this is serious stuff: I can only applaud the competence of these strategising Kremlin PR-merchants.  They should be offering their services to Trump.  For a fat fee.  A ‘Deal’, wouldn’t you think?

ND

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[1] One always needs to ask “are we be played here?” – of course – but this one doesn’t have that feel to it at all.  There might be one subtlety: the doc is a signal to the West: “see, we have an off-ramp – so let’s get round that table and we’ll find a way to call it quits“.  Maybe.

[2] Recall that de-Nazification of the whole body politic was one of only two stated war aims at the outset: so, silent here on regime change, of course.  The other was, ahem, de-militarisation of Ukraine …  

[3] They assume Russia gets Donbas + existing gains in the south (parts of Kherson & Zaporizhia), but relinquishes gains in the north (around Kharkiv and Sumy): and that US sanctions are lifted but not EU