I haven’t posted much about Russia recently, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on there. You can’t do that by looking at the newspapers as easily as you could, say, a year ago, because the coverage seems to have dropped, and the war hardly ever seems to make the first page any more. And there are some aspects of the war that I haven’t read about for months. What, for example, is going on in the Russian controlled areas of eastern Ukraine? What has happened to the millions of people who emigrated from Ukraine at the start of the war, flooding much of central Europe. Are they still there? Are they integrating into new homes? Are they returning to Ukraine, or traveling back and forth? And what about the rumblings of dissatisfaction with how Zelensky is handling the war, or how the Ukrainian military is holding up? Zelensky replaced a number of the top military leaders some months ago. Did that turn out to be a good move? Has anyone been writing about this?

But there are some things we do know. Russia still controls most of the parts of Ukraine that it has occupied during the war. Where Ukraine has pushed the Russians back, the Russians have then pushed Ukraine back. This looks like it could go on forever. On the other hand, in a major surprise, Ukraine has actually invaded Russia, particularly in the Kursk province and near the city of Belgorod, and in another major surprise, Russia has not been able to dislodge them, and in fact doesn’t seem to be trying very hard.

Similarly, Russia still seems firmly in control of Crimea, but Ukraine has absolutely decimated the Russian Black Sea fleet, using drones, not naval engagements. The bridge to Crimea, Russia’s main supply line, seems intact, although Ukraine keeps threatening its destruction (which for some reasons is apparently more difficult than one might think it would be). The Russians have recently blanketed Ukraine with massive air attacks aimed at utilities and infrastructure and shown some success, although Ukraine seems resilient and able to restore damaged facilities quickly. And winter is coming.

The Biden administration (and the potential future Harris administration) is holding fast to its support of Ukraine and, with Congressional approval where necessary) sends more arms and more sophisticated arms, including F-16s, without which, for example, the invasion of Russia may not have occurred. NATO is still holding strong as well, with some faltering potential in Germany, which is having its own budgetary problems. What Trump would do if reelected is unclear, but (like everything else he might do) frightening.

All this we know. But where this is going we have no idea.

I listen to a fair number of podcasts. This is where I get most of the information I get, and the guesses as to the future. Whether this information is reliable is another question, to be sure, and I admit that I haven’t really dug into the bona fides of the sites I am frequenting. One site is Times Radio. Times Radio is related to The Times of London and the Sunday Times, and that means it is part of the Rupert Murdoch empire. The other site is called Silicon Curtain, also out of the United Kingdom, and I frankly don’t know who controls it, but it is a major site on matters concerning this war, and if you look at its ratings on various internet sites, they range from 4.6 to 4.9. Both of these sites have new podcasts daily, usually multiple times a day, so they can keep you busy. The formats are similar – a host and an expert, who is usually a British or American retired military or government expert, or a disillusioned Russian. Both sites are clearly pro-Ukraine and very anti-Russian and anti-Putin.

This last sentence is important. These are not fair and balanced reports, unless you believe (as I do) that being very pro-Ukraine in this instance is a sign of being fair and balanced. But having listened to these podcasts for months, or maybe even well over a year now, I get the sense that there is a lot of wishful thinking involved. The Ukrainians are always viewed as the victim fighting beyond its capacity to save itself, and with important tricks up their sleeves that we don’t even know about yet. The Russians are always on the verge of internal chaos, and Joe Biden will probably still be the president of the United States on the day that Putin is removed from power. A day that will surprise us, but which is definitely coming soon.

You don’t hear much about the economic strength of Russia. Clear economic analysis is not the forte of these podcasters – you don’t hear much about Russia’s relationships with its allies in this fight. You hear that, outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia is a full fledged basket case, and it is only because people are unable to protest that they are not protesting. You hear that Russia’s troops, often prisoners, are untrained for battle and account for nothing. In fact, you learn again and again that Putin, a typical dictator, is in this for his own power, and does not care a whit about the Russian people. You hear that Russia can make ammunition in unlimited quantity, but the quality of weaponry is abysmal, and its ability to increase its weaponry is limited. You hear that the military has not drafted young men from either of the two main cities of the country, and that if this happens there will be real trouble for Putin.

Of course, I am exaggerating a bit in discussing the limits of the comments on these podcasts. They are filled with undoubted facts and statistics, beyond the prognostications and wishful thinking. And this is what makes them so interesting.

There is a lot of focus on Putin himself. The typical stuff. His Soviet/CIA upbringing. His desire to reconstruct a nation that includes as much of the former Soviet Union as possible. His paranoia about the United States and the West.

But yesterday, I heard three new points from a guest on a Silicon Curtain podcast yesterday.

1. Putin, as you probably know, denies the existence of Ukrainians as a people; he thinks they are all Russians. The guest wondered, if Ukrainians were in fact Russians, how the Russians could treat them so badly, bombing them, destroying their cities and so forth. He concluded that Russia could do this because Putin’s (and therefore Russia’s) attitude towards Ukrainians (soldiers and civilians) is the same as his attitude towards Russians (soldiers and civilians)….that they are simply expendable. And, although the commenter was at first speaking about Putin, he extrapolated from only Putin to virtually all Russians. They inherited their willingness to treat people brutally, he said, from the Mongols. This is the way the Mongols captured Asia he said, cutting off peoples’ heads and bringing the heads to the next village to show the villagers what would happen if they don’t surrender. Whether he was saying that the Mongols had taught this to the Russians, or the Russians were genetic successors to the Mongols, was not clear. Maybe some of both. At any rate, it was a rather shocking description.
2. The speaker than talked about World War II, and how the Russians fought off the Nazis to save the world. This is a bit exaggerated, he said, because it was not the Russians who suffered most from the Nazis, it was the Ukrainians. Only 5% of Russia was occupied by Germany, while 100% of Ukraine was for at least two years. And, he says, it was the Ukrainians rather than the Russians who fought off the Nazis. He says that, for the past 80 years, Russia has been taking the credit that Ukraine deserves.
3. Finally, he spoke about the Ukraine takeover of the Kursk oblast and nearby territory. He found it surprising, he says, that there hasn’t been any rebellion from the Russians whose home are now occupied by Kiev. He ascribes this to two related things: first, that the Russian officials are bad governmental rulers, so Russian peasants aren’t sad to see them go, and second, that the Ukrainians are no worse than the Russians in controlling the landscape, so why should the residents care? He spoke about a number of conversations he has had in parts of Russia which were occupied by the Germans in World War II with elderly survivors of that era. He asked them what life was like under German occupation. Presumably, we are not talking about Jewish survivors, but he said that the people he spoke to said that life under German occupation was not bad at all. He concluded that it made no difference to these people who was governing over them, as long as their day to day freedoms were not curtailed.

These last three points all sound more like propaganda than anything else, right? Maybe so. And maybe much of what I hear on these YouTube channels is propaganda. They certainly don’t have guests who favor Russia on the programs. So, I don’t really know what to make of them. Yet, I find them interesting and hopeful. And I do learn from them, and it gives much things to think about. So I keep listening, day after day after day.