Is Fake Dissent Just Part of Putin’s War Plan? A British Analyst Thinks So

When a prominent Russian reserve colonel went on one of the most widely watched political talk shows in Russia a few days ago to say that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine wasn’t going quite as the Kremlin planned it, plenty of buzz in Western media ensued — but maybe for the wrong reasons. Could the whole thing be a bit of psy-ops during the age of Twitter?Speaking on the Rossiya 1 program “60 Minutes,” the retired officer and defense columnist, Colonel Mikhail Khodaryonok, called Ukrainian soldiers “professional” and willing to “fight to the last man” while deadpanning that Russia is now “in full geopolitical isolation” — but according to a new report, this is all part of Vladimir Putin’s intricate and often misread propaganda machine. But given that inscrutability and the Kremlin go reliably hand in hand, the West would do well to read between the lines of what might have only seemed like a dissenting view. Writing in the Sunday Times of London, a British analyst, Mark Galeotti, claims most if it not all of what Colonel Khodaryonok said on the air actually suggests that Mr. Putin “is recalibrating his narrative and digging in for the long term,” adding that “according to Mr. Putin’s ideology, Ukrainians are proving difficult to conquer because they are actually Russians … they just don’t realize it yet.”Seems jarring? Maybe not. Mr. Galeotti, author of “The Weaponization of Everything” (Yale University Press) and the forthcoming “Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine,” correctly points out that Russian broadcasts such as its “60 Minutes” are very carefully stage-managed. This makes sense: The show’s host, Olga Skabeyeva — known as the “iron doll” of Russian TV on account of her allegiance to the party line — hardly registered surprise when Colonel Khodaryonok made comments such as, “We need to take it into account that the situation for us will frankly get worse.” For Mr. Galeotti, those words suggested no loosening of control but rather a kind of massaging of Mr. Putin’s message that the invasion of Ukraine is something on the level of the Great Patriotic War that ended with a Russian defeat of Nazi Germany. For Moscow the war on Ukraine is really a battle royal against the West in which the Ukrainian people are merely, as Mr. Galeotti puts it, “brainwashed cannon fodder.” What is powering the Ukrainian fight is Western assistance ranging from American weapons to British intelligence, as the Kremlin regularly puts forward and Colonel Khodaryonok in effect parroted. Casting the Ukrainians as cannon fodder serves the Kremlin’s long-term goals of retaking a country that it perceives as intrinsically Russian, the argument goes. “It provides an excuse for the underwhelming performance of the military,” Mr. Galeotti writes, “and also prepares the ground should Putin decide to admit that this is a war so that he can mobilize at least some reserves.” By paying a few backhanded compliments to the Ukrainian army on account of its unexpectedly robust performance in various battle settings, Colonel Khodaryonok was likely sending signals, approved from on high, that Russians must pivot from the dashed hopes of a quick victory in a “special military operation” to the realization that they are in for a long war the likes of which has not been seen for generations. Mr. Putin may be steering his country toward very hard times, so while it is in his warped strategic interests to gobble up Ukraine, it also serves his personal interests to manage expectations on the homefront. Colonel Khodaryonok had in the meantime made a subsequent appearance on Russian state television, the Daily Mail reported on Friday. “The Russian Federation has not yet committed even a tenth of its military and economic potential … so be careful what you wish for, gentlemen,” he reportedly opined. If the comments seemed to contradict the colonel’s previous statements, actually they did not: He never said Russia was not prepared to take on Ukraine’s army, even if he took ownership of some grudging admiration for its hard-fighting members. Because in Vladimir Putin’s world Ukraine is just “a temporarily mislaid part of the wider Russian world,” as the author of the Times of London piece put it, for the Russian leader “Ukrainians are Russians, and it is as true that Russians are winning as that they are not.” Despite blips of Western hope to the contrary, it seems that Mr. Putin still controls the narrative, at least inside the confines of a Russian Federation lurching into a long-haul war of his making. Creating the appearance of dissent in media outside Russia is likely just a ruse to woo the West into a false sense of complacency vis-à-vis the Kremlin’s intentions with respect to truly crushing Ukraine. If so, the West can at least take some cold comfort in the fact that Mr. Putin is probably not crazy, but simply calculating to an extreme degree.

Is Fake Dissent Just Part of Putin’s War Plan? A British Analyst Thinks So

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