Ukraine — the siege of Mariupol
This is Ukraine’s Blitz. Failing to secure a military victory on the ground, Putin is resorting to indiscriminate bombing — much like Hitler, in 1940, resorted to bombing British cities having failed to defeat the RAF. The deliberate bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol on the 10th of March signified the start of the new phase. Since then, Mariupol has been destroyed and the bombing campaigns against other cities — most notably Kharkov, Chernigov and Sumy — has intensified. On the 16th of March, an aircraft dropped a bomb on Mariupol’s Donetsk Regional Theatre, used as a shelter by hundreds of people. The casualty figures are still unknown: the shelters in the basement did not collapse, likely saving the majority of those inside, however the intent of the bombing to hurt and kill a large number of people was clear to everyone.
Thus far, the Russian approach to the war can be divided into three stages. In the first four days, paratroopers and special forces were sent to quickly take out the key Ukrainian cities and airports. They were wiped out before being able to achieve their missions. In the second stage, of about a week, a conventional war was fought — advancing infantry and vehicles towards various targets. This only yielded one major city — Kherson in the south before it ground to a halt, limited by the fragile Russian supply lines and Ukrainian resistance. We are now into a third stage — of sieges and indiscriminate bombing. The Russians attempt to encircle cities, trap the Ukrainian combatants and the civilians inside and starve/bomb them into submission. When humanitarian corridors are agreed upon, they are invariably shelled, whilst aid agencies are not allowed to bring humanitarian aid inside the sieges.
The official view of the US and UK is that the Russian offensive has stalled. They are not neutral observers, however there are worrying signs for the Russians that lend credence to this analysis. The Russians keep calling up reinforcements, pulling in men from contingents in places such as Akhazia and Armenia, recruiting from as far as Syria and Lybia, placing desperate adverts within Russia. Allies are refusing to help: Belarussian troops are wisely staying out of Ukraine, other CSTO nations, even Kazakhstan, the recent beneficiary of a Russian action to quell serious unrest on its territory, are staying neutral.
The problem for Ukraine is this: Russia does not care about losses. Putin enjoys huge support in his country and has convinced enough of his people that he is ‘fighting evil’ in Ukraine. He will try to use the threat of civilian casualties to strong-arm Zelensky into accepting a deal favourable to Russia. Zelensky will be faced with a choice between a long, protracted struggle that will eventually result in the Russian army running out of steam after a bloody war and an immediate deal that places restrictions on Ukrainian sovereignty and makes territorial concessions. Putin, by bombing theatres, schools and hospitals, by interfering with humanitarian corridors, is saying, yes, I am ruthless, I will stop at nothing, so it is best you obey me. The ill-disciplined behaviour of his own troops helps to terrorise Ukraine’s civilian population: reports of looting and of civilians shot dead by the Russian troops are many.
The latest offer from Russia towards the leadership of Mariupol is a prime example of this blackmail campaign: put down your weapons and be allowed to leave or face being obliterated. Humanitarian corridors will only be open on the condition of the laying down of arms. Once again, Russia threatens huge civilian casualties to persuade people to stop resisting. There is, of course, no reason to trust the Russians to actually allow the Ukrainian troops to retreat— the massacre at Illovaisk, in 2014, by the forces of the Donetsk National Republic of Ukrainian troops retreating under an agreement is still fresh in everyone’s minds. In case of refusal, the Russians also threaten to put the entire civilian leadership of the city under a military tribunal — a clear violation of the Geneva Convention.
There is little to no long-term thinking here. Putin needs an outcome that he can spin as a win, even at the cost of driving a permanent wedge between the Russian and Ukrainian people. The sad irony is that the victims of the bombings are the very people in East Ukraine who used to be the most predisposed towards Russia — whereas the West Ukrainians have largely avoided being under fire. Politicians who used to be very pro-Russia, such as Anatoly Shariy, deplore the invasion. When even leaders of parties banned in Ukraine speak out against Russia, you know Putin has a problem. When the survivors of Mariupol fully describe the horrors they have experienced to the world’s media, he will have an even bigger problem. Russia has lost all of Ukraine, permanently and irrevocably, except possibly for the small parts it managed to grab in 2014.
Perhaps, Putin has believed his own propaganda machine. Having so effectively brainwashed Russian people into accepting his narrative of ‘Russia under threat’, he now hopes to similarly brainwash the East Ukrainians. The events in occupied South Ukraine bear this out: the plan is to arrest the most vocal activists, ‘encourage’ opponents to leave, intimidate the protesters, pacify the rest, subject everybody to the state propaganda. It is what happened in Crimea in 2014. It is what Zakhar Prilepin, one of Putin’s most radical propagandists, suggested: he sees the majority of Ukrainians as ‘flexible people, able to agree with anybody’ who will grow to accept being part of the ‘Russian world’. Even if that is true and people within Ukraine can be convinced they were bombed ‘for their own benefit’, it still pre-supposes Russia being able to control the territory in question: however none of the peace proposals being mooted include Russia keeping its territorial gains of the last three and a half weeks. Once the conflict is over, once the dust settles, in all the areas that have suffered during it anger will crystallise into a permanent hatred of not just Putin but all Russians.
Whatever the outcome of this fratricidal war, both countries will experience further erosion of liberty. In Ukraine, Zelensky is busy stifling freedom of speech and banning opposition parties. The claim is that this is an emergency measure, however I very easily see it staying permanently. Opposition figures are being arrested. Because Russia has used saboteurs in this conflict, it has made it so much easier for the Ukrainian government to detain people without trial, citing security concerns. It has become a popular joke that the Russian ‘Z’ symbol stands for ‘Zelensky’ — the invasion has allowed the Ukrainian president to solidify his own position and deal with dissenting voices.
In Russia, things are a whole lot worse. The personality cult of Putin, complete with new insignia, staged rallies, parades and ‘political education’ lessons in schools, is strongly harking back to Soviet times.
People are losing their jobs for opposing the regime’s policy in Ukraine. The last independent media outlets have shut. People are afraid to discuss the war openly. Criticism on social media could result in a 15-year jail sentence. Phones are constantly checked by police. Facebook has been declared a terrorist organisation. People are being asked to display ‘Z’ and ‘V’ everywhere. It is a full-speed slide towards Chinese-style control, and it will get massively worse if Russia is seen to fail to win in Ukraine.
Both regimes will use each other to justify abuses of power. The Ukrainian leadership will be able to use the presence of Russia along its borders to keep people in a state of alarm. Russians already have a siege mentality. They are told that NATO poses an existential threat to their country, that NATO’s pawns, the Ukrainians, have staged a genocide against the Russian people in the Donbass and, by implication, are bound to continue into Russia proper should it and Crimea fall. Any failure will increase that sense of insecurity; it is also bound to be accompanied by a ‘stab in the back’ myth seeking for scapegoats for the army’s failure. Some of this anger is bound to be directed at the people responsible — its corrupt leadership. Heads are bound to fall. However, any opponent of Putin is bound to also be blamed for ‘not supporting their country’.
The Russian information war was barely visible on English-speaking social media for the first ten days. Everything changed around 7–8 of March. Influencers on both the extremes of the political spectrum started repeating the pro-Putin talking points. Candace Owens and Jack Posobiec on the right, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, Benjamin Norton, Aaron Mate, Caitlin Johnstone on the left (and many others besides those) focused exclusively on Ukraine, on the criticism of NATO and on ‘the need to fight the Nazis’.
For instance, they would talk of the (very real) problems in Ukraine — arrests of opposition politicians and journalists, harassment and arrest of activists, neo-Nazism, glorification of Stepan Bandera — without reiterating the basic point that none of those justify the invasion, that none of those mean we should not be helping the Ukrainians, that the prolongation of conflict makes it less likely those people will be released and neo-Nazism will be dealt with. There are many decent people in Ukraine who are having bombs drop on their heads, whom the pro-Putin Russians dismiss as collateral damage (assuming, of course, they do not deny that peaceful citizens are in fact being bombed by Russia). It would be wrong for us to dismiss them as ‘allies of neo-Nazis’ — yet the implication seems to be that the presence of neo-Nazis in the country makes civilian deaths acceptable.
Alternatively, they offer a rigidly geopolitical view of the world. This view recognises only a few major actors — the US/NATO, Russia, China, perhaps India — pulling the strings. Every event is written off as the result of covert activity by one of the major actors. From that perspective, Ukraine is just a territory on which a conflict between the West and Russia is being waged, with the Ukrainians being used as proxies. Any agency that the Ukrainians might have is ignored and dismissed as ‘western brainwashing’, part of ‘the information war’. The Maidan revolution was a ‘west-backed coup’, part of a more general aggression called ‘the NATO expansion’, essentially an act of war by the West against Russia, to which, supposedly, Russia had a right to retaliate with force. It reframes the (David vs Goliath) struggle Ukraine is engaged with Russia into a contest between Russia and the West, in which it is the West that is the stronger partner.
A favourite Putin argument often repeated on the Right is that ‘Ukraine is a made-up state’. This is historically untrue. However, even if it were true, it is not relevant. International law does not divide states into ‘historically valid’ and ‘historically invalid’. A country needn’t have a history stretching back hundreds, thousands of years to have a right to exist. It exists here and now, and this should be more than sufficient to stop its territorial integrity being compromised.
Another favourite argument concerns the ‘genocide in the Donbass’, more precisely the idea that Russia had to invade to stop a genocide of Russian people. Whilst it is true that around 14000 people died in the fighting in the Donbass since 2014, they were not all on the separatist side — these are the total casualty figures for the conflict. Furthermore, Ukraine did not siege cities, denying them food, water and medicine and did not shell humanitarian corridors and — although they probably did shell residential buildings. They merely fought to restore their territorial integrity, just like Russia did in Chechnya during the Chechen wars in the 90s. If Russia’s proxies had not invaded in 2014, none of this would have happened. Moreover, the Russian invasion represents a clear military escalation of the conflict.
There are many other narratives— the conspiracy theory about the biological weapons labs, the constant allegations of false flag operations that allege that Ukrainians are bombing their own civilians, the whataboutery of pointing to anywhere else in the world and asking why the focus is on Ukraine and not there, the allegation that Ukraine is in reality losing but we are being told about it and so on.
Why did we not see all this from the very beginning of the war? One possible explanation is that Russia was waiting to see how the situation on the ground in Ukraine would develop. Another is that it was focusing on trying to brainwash the rest of the world. In the BRICS countries Russian propaganda was non-stop, from the beginning, focusing on exploiting anti-West feelings and presenting Russia as a friend.
It remains to be seen if Russia’s propaganda has worked outside the West. It is clear however that outside the political fringes it is failing in the West, as polling shows increasing numbers supporting greater Western involvement in the conflict. I have discussed before that Ukraine’s own propaganda campaign has been spot-on, presenting a fairy-tale image of an underdog country fighting for its existence against a former colonial power. Russia’s propaganda, on the other hand, ultimately relies on the absence of common sense. It is common sense that when a city is under siege, the vast majority of the destruction will be carried out by the attacking side — they are the ones attempting to take the city. It is a fact the Russian army did destroy Grozny, Aleppo and Eastern Ghoutta. Therefore, claims that the bombings of Kharkov and Mariupol were a Ukrainian false flag operation might appeal to conspiracy theorists, but not to the mainstream. Conspiracy theorists will demand precise proofs, precise evidence that showed the Russians were responsible: this is in vain as everyone understands that in a war zone people are unlikely to stand around filming missile trajectories. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and if Russia wants people to believe its extraordinary claims about false flags, it needs to produce the evidence, and, of course, that evidence does not exist.
Perhaps the most self-defeating decision of the whole campaign was to call this war a ‘special operation’ and insist Ukraine was not being invaded. People generally do not like their intelligence insulted in this way and the Russians were clearly trolling everybody. At least the US, when invading Iraq on the false pretences of Saddam having WMDs in 2003 had the decency to admit they were involved in a war.