Nikolai Karpitsky. May 8, 2022. Ukraine. Seventy-fourth day of war

Tomorrow is May 9. The occupiers did everything to succeed on the Donbass arc by this date, but Ukrainian troops held out. Three weeks ago, the invaders threw all their forces into the offensive, in the first days captured Kremennaya, Yampol and got stuck near Liman. All this time there were fierce battles. The enemy has a huge advantage in artillery shells, but the positions of the Ukrainian troops are much more convenient for defense. A wooded ridge stretches along the southern shore of the Seversky Donets. From there you can see the roofs of the Liman houses, which is ten kilometers away. This is an ideal place for artillery, which paralyzed the advance of Russian troops. However, the offensive potential of the invaders is still significant. Yesterday they entered the village of Shandrigolovo in the north of Liman. Today it was reported that the enemy managed to seize the ruins left of the town of Popasna.

The battles near Slavyansk this week were very hot, they fought even at night. It is here that the density of Russian troops is highest, although the terrain is completely unsuitable for an offensive - it is full of ravines, hills and forests. You can advance either along the road, which is shot through, or along the paths. All this time I wondered whether Slavyansk would survive or share the fate of Rubezhnoye and Popasnaya. Sometimes the shooting was very close, there’s a smog and the smell of burning in the city. Finally, yesterday, I noticed that the cannonade was heard much farther than usual. Obviously, there was a counterattack, and the enemy was thrown another ten kilometers away from us and from the railway connecting Donbass with the rest of Ukraine. At the same time, near Kharkov, Ukrainian troops significantly pushed the invaders away from the city. Hotheads called this the beginning of a counteroffensive, but it is still far from it, although successful counter-attacks are encouraging.

I also hoped that by May 9 Putin would have exhausted all his reserves and that the Ukrainian army would launch a counter-offensive, but the war is dragging on. The occupiers can still pose a threat of breakthrough in certain areas or attrit in endless skirmishes, having an unlimited resource of old equipment and the lumpen to mobilize from depressed cities.

However, Ukraine has much more combat-ready reserves that have not yet been put into action. Thanks to Lend-Lease, there is a unique opportunity to transfer the army to western weapons. Moreover, it is possible to create new military units from scratch according to NATO standards. If this succeeds, the counter-offensive losses will be reduced manifold. But this will take several months, which means that the plans for the liberation of Ukraine are being postponed, at least until fall.

However, knowing the Ukrainian temperament, I can say that the Ukrainian army will not sit on the defensive all this time. The rearmament of artillery on the front line is already underway. Now the Ukrainian military will shoot the last Soviet-made shells and send the Soviet howitzers into scrap metal. They are already being replaced by Western-style howitzers, which hit farther and more accurately. While the Russian military will be defeated in artillery duels, small detachments of Ukrainian infantry under the cover of modern drones will be able to crush the enemy’s rear. Under these conditions, Putin will constantly pull up new reserves of obsolete equipment, not to win, but to wear down the Ukrainian troops. From his position, there is a double win here: on the one hand, this will force the Ukrainians to waste ammunition, on the other hand, it will allow getting rid of extra mouths in depressed cities. Guided by this approach, he is already mobilizing in Donetsk and Lugansk, and then throwing unprepared recruits into battle. In the near future, he will spread this practice throughout Russia, first in small depressed cities, and then everywhere.

Today is May 8 - Victory Day over fascism. Historical analogies involuntarily suggest themselves: Putin's Russia as the reincarnation of Hitler's Germany, while Ukraine playing the role of Britain in 1940, which single-handedly withstood against Germany and undermined the power of many times superior German aviation, turning the tide of World War II. Now Ukraine is saving the world from fascism in exactly the same way, by grinding the Russian army in its fields.

It is important to determine what is considered a victory. Churchill refused to take a position of non-intervention in exchange for the security of the country, because for him victory meant the destruction of fascism. Nor will it be a victory for Ukraine simply to liberate all its territories. While this will be a huge success, it will mean only a temporary truce, not a victory. Now, as then, only the destruction of fascism itself can be considered a victory. After Ukraine defeats the invading army, it will be the international coalition that will be achieving victory. However, the voice of Ukraine will be the most significant. And here we should not give in until the colonial system of government, which makes Russia dangerous to the rest of the world no matter who comes to power there, is destroyed.

Victory Day is an occasion to draw another important analogy with Britain, namely, how quickly it was able to restore peaceful life, becoming one of the strongest powers in the world. Ukraine will also get such a chance. The first years after the victory, it will have great authority and credit of trust as a country that saved the world from fascism. The whole world will help it recover. Huge investments in the construction sector will restart the economy. The surge of interest in Ukraine all over the world will open up new opportunities for the development of cultural ties. But here people have a question. After all, so many opportunities have already been missed! How this time, after the victory, not to miss these opportunities?

I'll try to answer briefly. After any revolution, power passes to the most organized part of society. In Ukraine, this part was the oligarchs and the bureaucracy. An alternative to them can only be civil society, which exists in Ukraine, but it is not organized enough to become the main political force. After victory, therefore, resources must be invested not only in the economy and culture, but also in the development of civil society.  Every city needs a platform for communication that will allow members of the public and all active people to communicate personally. It takes very little money to do this, but in the conditions of such communication it will no longer be possible to hide anything from the public. If this can be done, all the actions of the authorities will be transparent to the public, which simply will not allow theft or inefficient use of funds for the restoration of the country.

Nikolai Karpitsky. May 3, 2022. Ukraine. Sixty-ninth day of war

Five days ago I wrote about the dangerous advance of the invaders who approached Liman. My students and colleagues live there. The city is shelled, residential buildings are burning. Volunteer friends are taking people out under shelling. If Liman had been taken, the artillery could have hit Slavyansk from there. But the front line has not moved in the last few days. It may seem like nothing is happening, but it is not. Putin decided to succeed by May 9 at all costs, and all the while a desperate offensive has been going on. I know about this from the constant artillery cannonade. Fights are going on both on the ground and in the air. Today is sunny, the weather is convenient for flights, so the intense work of our air defense is constantly heard.

The occupiers are laid out in full. This is the maximum they can do, but the Ukrainian military successfully repels all attacks. By the intensity of the shooting from our positions, it is felt that the forces of the defenders have grown. In addition, somewhere in the rear, new reserves are being prepared, equipped with western heavy weapons. When they enter the battle, the defeat of the Russian army will be a foregone conclusion. Until recently, so-called oppositionists from Russia explained that although Crimea was seized illegally, it is technically impossible to take it back. It looks like the problem will resolve itself soon.

Today I was extremely surprised. It turns out, as I was told, Russian TV consumers are still sincerely convinced that Russia is successfully advancing and winning! The most critical of them admit that the Russian troops are temporarily bogged down, but they still do not doubt in victory. And we wondered what Putin would present to his electorate as a success by May 9th. It turns out that there is no need to present anything, people already believe that everyone is defeated.

For me, as for everyone in Ukraine, the inevitability of victory is obvious. A month ago, there were fears that the matter would end with a truce and the withdrawal of Russian troops to the status of February 23, 2022, but now the complete liberation of all the occupied territories is only the beginning. Now we are talking about, in principle, making Russia undangerous for the rest of the world. And here we can compare how our faith in the victory of Ukraine differs from the faith in the victory of Russia zombied by propaganda.

In the early days of the invasion, an acquaintance from Russia sympathetically suggested fleeing Ukraine, which would soon be completely captured, another, condolingly, wrote that he did not expect the Ukrainian resistance to collapse so quickly, thinking they would hold out a little longer. These people live in a picture of the world completely divorced from reality, and with them millions more who even now continue to believe in Russia's victory. The essence of this faith is that the believer is in a passive position in relation to the subject of faith. This begs the comparison to football fans watching the match on TV. They believe in the victory of their team, but they cannot influence the situation and therefore only passively watch what is happening.

By the way, military hysteria in Russia is of the same nature as the hysteria of fans who are not able to play themselves. For a complete analogy it should be added that they observe the match on the tape from which the censor cut out all the goals missed by their team.

The belief in Ukraine's victory is also irrational to some extent, as it initially manifested itself in a seemingly hopeless situation, when Kyiv was supposed to fall within four days, and organized resistance to collapse. This is how the ratio of military potentials worked out according to rational calculations by specialists. However, these calculations meant nothing to the Ukrainians, neither military nor civilians, who together stopped the enemy because they believed in victory. And this faith was fundamentally different from that one of those brainwashed by propaganda. The faith of Ukrainians is not based on ideological convictions or on a disconnected picture of the world, but on their own will to victory. It was that will that formed not a passive, but an active attitude towards the subject of faith. 

The will to win is such an inner intention that does not depend on external circumstances and is able to change the surrounding reality. It arises in internal free self-determination and is revealed in actions in such a way that at every moment a person feels the power to do the right thing and realizes that this act really changes something. It is namely this realization that becomes the belief in victory. This is a special kind of faith as a form of awareness of one's inner intention, which determines an active attitude to the subject of faith.

The passive faith of those zombified by propaganda is of a fundamentally different kind. It will sooner or later make you feel like a victim of circumstances. If they show you a picture on TV that Russia is winning, then everything is fine, you can be proud of yourself. If they don't show it, too bad, but nothing depends on you anyway. All you have is to bear it and wait for the soothing lies of propaganda, in relation to which an addiction is formed.