Thread by @MarkGaleotti

"The Ukrainian army is an amazing and very strong combination of a Russian soldier, a fascist officer and an American general"
The convolutions hardline Russian commentators must go through to explain their failures in #UkraineRussianWar. A short thread 1/
kp.ru/daily/27391/45…

It is, of course, quite a challenge how to pivot from "we will be welcomed" to "we are being hammered" but Russia's propagandists are doing their best. Markov's article, linked in the first tweet, is a better example than most 2/

1st, the need to share the blame: "The Ukrainian army turned out to be much stronger than it was supposed, looking from Russia, and much stronger than it was seen by Western analysts" - ie, we were no more wrong than anyone else 3/

2nd, an attempt, in effect, to claim the credit (this is quite ingenious): "The rank and file are Russian people; the language of the UKR army is RU. The RU soldier has been considered one of the strongest in the world for centuries." 4/

In other words, the only reason Russians are not winning is that they are being resisted by, if they but knew it, Russians! But why are they fighting? 5/

It's because they are controlled by a "nazified" "officer corps ...[that] is very ideological, motivated, ready to die and kill others. This combination of Russian soldier and fascist officer is successfully managed by American generals" 6/

3rd. US generals? Of course - this is just a proxy war with NATO, run "not only by advisers from the Pentagon, but also UKR generals trained over the years by the Americans. They are loyal to the US and Britain, and most have both American and British passports" (News to me) 7/

They also "receives strong support from the electronic intelligence of the strongest military powers - the United States and Britain" (It's always nice for the UK to get co-star billing in these lurid nationalist dramas). The point is that RU failures are because of NATO 8/

So it's an excuse and also a pretext for any further escalation to wartime footing and mobilisation: because RU is not just losing against a country with less than 1/3rd its pop, but the whole Western alliance 9/

So the UKR army "is, in fact, the external centre's occupying army, using civilians as hostages. But ...at the moment the population of Ukraine is not able to express its political will, being under the pressure of terror and propaganda." Hence this can still be spun as... 10/

...A war of 'liberation' - but also liberating Ukrainians from the false consciousness of not realising that they are being repressed. All nonsense, of course, but for me the best encapsulation of the emerging Kremlin line and the bizarre contortions it is having to make. 11/end