After the enemy was thrown back from Slavyansk, the city is coming back to life. There is water, they promise to fix the gas supply, but so far the houses are cold. There are more cars and more people on the streets.
Cannonades are not heard for a long time, however, there are occasional single explosions. The night before last, there was a series of five explosions, the previous one - of two. It's like that everywhere in Ukraine now. But today it seemed to be quiet.
A lot of classes, I have no time to write anything else. I teach classes on the Internet from home. I've got a message that my colleague, professor Mikhail Logvinenko, died as a warrior. One of the best professors. I remember him passing my candidacy exam brilliantly. Now, in my close circle of acquaintances, there are those who died at the front. This war in Ukraine has affected everyone, very soon it will affect everyone in Russia, and there will not be a single person whose relative or friend wouldn't die in this war.
The situation is difficult. The counterattack on Izyum and Liman was successful despite Russia's superior military potential. Now that the occupiers have saturated the front with mobilized men, it is harder to fight, and all those analysts who name the dates and directions of the next successes are irresponsible. A real military analyst can assess the current situation, but will not predict the course of the war. And there is a request for forecasts. As a result, we get such a picture. He sits at home, somewhere in Germany, a humanitarian, reads reports, and then, on the basis of simple induction, begins to write forecasts on Facebook. If someone's troops, for example, have advanced in some direction, then they will continue to advance, surrounding everyone and capturing everything.
And it turns out that he is not assessing the actual military situation, but the hypothetical one that has developed only in his head. It looks as if an amateur undertook to comment on a chess game of masters: “You see, he won back the pawn, which means he plays very well, and if it goes like this, then he will win back the bishop, and then, you see, it will come to the rook!”
The essence of analysis is not to predict what will happen, but to assess the current situation. Critical analysis means that we reassess the correlation of factors in each new situation, without adjusting them to already established ideas or expectations. This distinguishes an analyst from a propagandist who rejects even such a simple induction and takes as truth only what corresponds to his picture of the world. A simple induction is when, for example, we see a successful offensive of the Ukrainian army, and on this basis we conclude that it should also continue to advance, liberating city after city. But as soon as expectations diverge from reality, accusations of “treason” and “agreements” immediately begin. The principle of conformity to one's own picture of the world is when, for example, someone believes that the Russian army is invincible, and therefore interprets all its defeats as cunning maneuvers, without doubting that it continues to win even now. And there are such people, too!
It is irresponsible to predict the course of a war, as it depends on free will and innumerable factors that cannot be taken into account, but one can analyze the already existing situation to see what prospects it opens up. Accordingly, we can see that Russia has no strategic prospect of victory, while Ukraine does. The course of the war may be unpredictable, but this will not change the overall perspective. Paradoxical, but true: Putin's only chance after the February 24 invasion was to quickly lose the war. This would allow him to retreat, retain power and prepare for a new attack. Instead, he began a long war of attrition. This means that, after defeat, Russia will never regain its power enough to threaten its neighbors, and its very existence is highly questionable. As it is now, it will definitely no longer exist.
The military situation is now as follows. The most combat-ready occupant units are locked in the Kherson bridgehead. Putin is bringing in fresh forces, hoping to turn the situation around and go on the offensive, but it is very difficult to do so when the entire bridgehead is under fire. On the other hand, the bridgehead was turned into one solid fortress, and it cannot be taken head-on, and the gap in the defense is no longer found. Thanks to this, the invaders managed to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive near Kherson. And here again, the paradox. The tactical failure of the Ukrainian offensive on Kherson is already turning out to be a success at the strategic level. The rapid liberation of Kherson would free the occupiers from the need to keep there the best forces that they could redeploy to other fronts, gaining a foothold on the left bank of the Dnieper. If not for Putin's stubbornness, they would have done so long ago, and we would have been in a lot of trouble then. The more Putin drives his troops to the Kherson bridgehead, the more his frontline sags. For the Ukrainian army, this is the most advantageous situation when all the main forces of the enemy are concentrated on a small patch from which they cannot deploy, exposed to continuous shelling. In fact, this is the decisive factor that determined the turning point in the entire war. Mobilization helped to deter the advance of the AFU, but only temporarily, because while the Russian army is being replenished by untrained mobilized men, the Ukrainian army is receiving modern weapons.
Of course, Putin can mobilize endlessly and will eventually begin to conscript women, but each new wave of mobilization will face an increasingly equipped Ukrainian army. You can't win this way, but you can postpone defeat. In fact, mobilization is a conveyor of death. So far it is in the process of being fine-tuned, but it'll soon be turned to full power. Many are frightened by this escalation and call for negotiations and peace, but I think that even peace will not stop the mobilization. However, negotiations with Putin are impossible anyway, so this is all empty talk.
The situation in the world is changing so that Russia has almost no chance for the future. Supporting Putin has become collective suicide. I just don’t see how, after all the crimes that Russia has already committed, it's possible to maintain a pan-Russian national identity. However, it is not for me to decide, but for the next generation, which will be ashamed of the parents who betrayed their children. Besides, the other day China finally established a monarchical dictatorship. This means that very soon China will require full control over Siberia and the Far East. Unlike necro-imperial Russia, China has enormous resources, and no one will stand up for Russia.
Let me fantasize a bit. Let’s say Yeltsin did not appoint a successor. There would have been no explosions of houses, and then Primakov would have come to power, in his worldview very close to Comrade Xi. With huge petrodollars, he would have built an empire as powerful as modern China. But, apparently, the world could not withstand two such empires, and providence willed that Putin destroy Russia.
However, Russia did find an ally from its weight class, Iran, which joined its side in the war against Ukraine. Archaic empires based on tradition were replaced in the 20th century by totalitarian empires based on ideology, such as the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Today's Iran belongs to this second type of empires, which in the 21st century have also become archaic.
Russia, on the other hand, is a necro-empire, the third type that arose in the 21st century. Iran's alliance with Russia completely discredits Iran's ideology, since, from the standpoint of Islam, Putin's worldview is demonism. This leads me to believe that in reality the government in Iran has replaced traditional Islam with pseudo-Islamic ideology.
The Iranians are already killing civilians in Ukraine with their kamikaze drones. This means that Iran is taking part not only in the war against Ukraine, but also in Putin’s special military-terrorist operation against peaceful Ukrainians. It follows that the Iranian authorities are just as war criminals as the Russian and Belarusian ones, and therefore must share their fate.
