Ukraine: The Nexus of Cognitive Warfare - Narrative Consistency 2/2
A month into the conflict. Which narratives have changed?
Western Narrative
Ukrainian “sovereignty”, US political intervention, NATO/EU membership
Decreasing. NATO membership is currently off the cards via NATO and Zelenskyy. Today, Kiev has offered further conditional concessions on neutrality and demilitarisation. Ukraine is a full on proxy war born out of a western coup whose immediate fate rests in the hands of Russia and the west, so its sovereignty is not real. If it was, Zelenskyy wouldn’t be grovelling to both sides. Compare today with his speech on March 11th:
Time is still needed. Patience is still needed. Our wisdom, energy. The ability to do our job to the maximum so that we can win together.
It is impossible to say how many more days we must liberate our Ukrainian land. But it is possible to say - we will do it! Because we strived for that. Because we have already reached a strategic turning point. We are already moving towards our goal, towards our victory.
Source: Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Putin’s desire to rebuild the Soviet Empire
Consistent in that it remains an unevidenced assertion. Only time, and actions and responses will tell.
Putin the “war criminal”
Consistent. A label that has been asserted but remains untried and unproven. Set in context with the US hegemon, Russia could be said to have much greater overall legitimacy for its actions and may yet be shown to have genuinely prosecuted something akin to a “just” war. Subject to “proof” and strength of narrative/propaganda.
Western weapon sales into Ukraine
Increasing. Formalisation of weapons sales/supply, indications of western intent to escalate and extend via possibly covert or indirect means. Subject to an obvious double-pronged bottleneck. If Russian intel can locate and track inbound weapons, supplies and reinforcements, it can destroy them at whim when concentrated. It takes few strikes to destroy an ammo dump of tons of weapons. Russia will not abandon intel operations in theatre and can strike targets even after its withdrawal from theatre. If neutrality is agreed upon, weapons imports are likely to break such an agreement, possibly paving the way for further legitimate Russian intervention.
US Congress formalises continuous intervention in any form
Increasing in that this in itself is an escalation from the US/NATO stance at the start of the invasion. The Congressional bill looks open-ended and broad spectrum so Russia will have to counter and contain it through effective, likely multiple means.
Russian underperformance, “stalled operations”, massive casualties
Decreasing. Reflected by:
Zelenskyy’s simultaneously increasingly desperate (and stage managed) appeals to the west for apocalyptic support and his public capitulations in negotiations;
Russian progress confirmed via multiple sources e.g. Mayor of Mariupol declared that the city (the Azov stronghold) is under Russian control. Azov forces may be contained and diminished against the coast. Even if it took a year for Russia to get most of what it wants, that’s a third of the time it took for the US to “fail” in Iraq and a twentieth of the time it took for the US to “fail” in Afghanistan (although it won in terms of the business of war);
Some western commentary cited the supposedly stalled 25km long Russian convoy outside Kiev as proof of a stalled operation for reasons of supply and strategy issues, yet a static, massive convoy presents a sitting duck target that hasn’t been wiped out by Ukrainian forces. Russia likely wants capitulation without fully entering Kiev;
Huge difference between declared Russian casualty counts and all western guesses. Declared civilian casualty estimates are 7x lower than US Iraq opening month casualties. Truth on either side is impossible to know, but the western reports cannot be more true or accurate than the Russian information, which happens to follows an exact 3:1 injury to kill ratio. On a simple level, Russia has done something quite effective in the information space. It waited until the western narrative had showed its hand in terms of casualty guesses and the attachment of its pundits’ “assessments” to those guessed numbers. Then Russia released a much lower figure, combined with provable progress in theatre, both of which is discredits the western narrative. None of the information has to actually be true; the establishment of conflict and doubt in your mind is the simple point.
UK Defence Secretary reveals UK’s ongoing intention to extend conflict
Decreasing. Epic fail from a UK op sec POV. Russian intel just spoofed UK defence intelligence at the highest level with a prank call that exposed multiple intel compromises and floated the information in the public sphere that even western big tech cannot totally suppress. Cheap win for Russia, especially if Vovan and Lexus had inclusive international calls and/or used WhatsApp or Signal (oh, the irony!).
US Biolab denials, admissions, semantics and telegraphing of possible chemical/biological (false flag) attack
Decreasing. US hegemon is under information assault and its initial denial is undermined by admissions that came days later that had to be spun into a telegraphed possible intent to execute a false flag biological or chemical weapons release/attack. If Russia is winning militarily, it has no reason to resort to such an attack (Ritter). Russia has released at least two announcements that Ukrainian forces were weaponizing ammonia releases. Personally I have been expecting a false flag attack for nearly two weeks and it could come at any time. Syria/Aleppo is proof of this.
Hunter Biden, laptop and emails confirmed true, connections to previously denied biolabs
Decreasing. Russia is amplifying this line of attack on the information warfare front to the point that the US President is under direct threat. The lid on the can of worms is nearly off. A risk is that it might trigger an insane reaction from the west, depending upon what’s really at stake and there’s a lot of scope for apocalyptic fuck ups when dementia and provable idiocy occupy the big house. At most, these biolabs may truly have been involved in genetically targeted biological warfare against Russia, tested within Ukraine and Georgia, at least. This means that the US has the capability to do this against anyone, until such capability is contained. Covid is proof positive that this could be real, and the world should be seriously afraid of this possibility given the full on corporate and government collusion on this front.
Qualitative comparative speculation
To me, it looks like Russia is long, medium and short term much more consistent than the west. It is escalating the intensity of its conventional warfare and its guerrilla information warfare, in some senses on its terms and in line with original stated objectives and demands.
Russia has been wrecking Ukraine for a month in a style that is consistent with her stated strategic objectives and different to the way the west wages war. Whether and how that wreckage gets mopped up remains to be seen. Who foots the reconstruction bills depends in part on Russia’s ability to resolve and extract from theatre. How the Ukrainians actually feel about things now and come to feel about it in the future is very hard to truly know. All events there have been directly affected by US/NATO interventions and sponsorship. Socioeconomic fallout will render change that cannot be fully anticipated before western actions are factored in, but there’s some opportunity for Russia to win political capital via reconstruction.
If stable neutrality cannot be achieved or enforced, Ukraine will remain a long term bipolar liability where nuclear, chemical and biological threats persist. An insurgency could target the nuclear reactors, any operational biolabs, gas lines or wheat supplies. Biolabs could be directly dealt with in a conventional manner by Russia once their information/political capital has been expended. Nuclear reactor damage will threaten Ukraine, Russia and the EU, which could be enough to keep those targets off limits or jointly and heavily defended. Gas supply disruption is containable within Ukraine so insurgents run the risk of losing any popular support. Disbursal or loss of control of armaments or uncontrolled armed forces dissolution would be a repeat of the mistake the US made in both Iraq and Afghanistan, so I expect Russia will do what it can to shore up and destroy inventories under the banner of demilitarisation, at the very least. Captured hardware is being used to bolster DPR and LPR forces, so it makes sense to persist with building up those forces by depleting wider Ukraine. That would bolster that front/border from Ukraine but possibly result in an active militarised border or territorial buffer zone.
Western sanctions cut deep both ways. Russia hasn’t even turned off the oil and gas and it’s number one in other essential and highly desirable exports in a time of supply chain meltdown and literal food and fuel shortages. It has a whole second market to supply and practically infinite demand for its major exports as the market prices for most if not all of them climb radically due to both baked-in and resultant inflation. Major customers can and will pay above breakeven rates for them without dollars, and the US attempt to block financial transactions can be multiply bypassed. In doing so, the abandonment of the petrodollar is being accelerated globally and China and Russia are being pushed together instead of separated.
Ukrainian sovereignty/freedom and NATO/EU membership are directly undermined by US intervention over the medium and long term, to the point of paradox and hypocrisy. The degree of lockstep theatrics employed by the western narrative (Zelenskyy’s Oscar, crass speeches etc) is a tell.
Weapon sales are a barefaced admission about aspects of what Ukraine is to the west - a flat out proxy to be milked and placed in harm’s way until it is depleted or becomes a quagmire at the expense of the last Ukrainian. The overt and covert western goal is full-on regime change in Russia, now admitted to in theocratic terms by Biden himself:
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power. God bless you all, and may God protect our freedom, and may God protect our troops.” - President Biden
These edited remarks carry little weight in the context of Hunter Biden, Burisma, Rosemont Seneca and Metabiota, to the point that they look openly deceitful and hypocritical. My two guesses are that no matter what the fall out, investigations will be strung out, Biden Snr will Presidentially pardon his own son, and the incoming administration will immunise Biden Snr, in the same way that Obama immunised the Bush administration.
It’s possible that while Covid represented the slipping of many global masks, this point in the Ukraine timeline represents us being shoved into Room 101 where we will receive our final lesson in Newspeak. Our failure to pass the written and verbal tests will result in a rat-based punishment, and our success will result in a jackboot on our faces. If not forever, at least for many years to come.