As Russia's military commissariats begin rounding up reservists for the front, we're seeing fairly clear -- if inevitably anecdotal -- evidence that the call-up is falling hardest on the communities already hardest hit by the war, particularly ethnic minorities.
/1
As has been the case since the beginning, that means Buryats...
/2
Racism and classism are absolutely part of this process. Wars are almost always fought by the disenfranchised, marginalized and the poor on behalf of the powerful -- and Russia is no exception in that regard.
/8
But there is also a more mundane -- and, for Putin, a more problematic -- reason behind this: Bureaucratic inertia.
Tasked with mobilizing as many men as possible as quickly as possible, the military is going for the easiest targets.
/9
Inefficient bureaucracies -- whether the police, the tax authorities or the military -- will often try to hit their targets by fishing over and over again from the same ponds. It's easier than seeking new fishing holes, even if it brings diminishing returns.
/10
The diminishing returns from such behavior, meanwhile, accrue to others: to the communities being decimated by this war, and to the front-line commanders, who will have to fight with poorly trained and weakly motivated troops.
/11
I've been noting for months that the burden is falling inequitably on particular communities, creating pockets of deprivation and injustice -- and warning that the Kremlin lacks the administrative capacity to smooth things out.
/12
What we're seeing now bears that analysis out: Rather than correcting the mistakes of the earlier phases of this war, the Russian administrative machinery is deepening them. The scenes we're seeing from Dagestan are evidence of the potential consequences of that.
/13
The Kremlin's coercive apparatus will now have to pick up the tab for this administrative dysfunction, seeing off protests and rounding up reluctant recruits. If they're mostly facing down big-city liberals, they'll probably make it through.
/14
But if the Kremlin needs to suppress the communities from which the military is trying to recruit troops, it may struggle. It's not just that blue-collar workers might fight harder on the streets, though it's that, too.
/15
If the Kremlin tries to repress ethnic minorities, they will sharpen identities, imbue those identities with a sense of injustice, and swing horizontal social institutions into the fight -- institutions that can be much more legitimate in these communities than Putin is.
/END
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Russianists chronicled the rise of nationalism and imperialist revanchism. Russianists warned of metastasizing corruption and the dangers of energy dependence. Russianists screamed for the world to take 2008 & 2014 seriously.
All Russianists? Of course not. It’s a diverse field, as it should be. No — it should be even more diverse.
And yes, we desperately need more investment in studying Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan and the Caucasus.
Ukraine's counter-offensive in the northeast – liberating in a day territory that took Russia a month or more to conquer – is breathtaking. Inspiring, even.
But it should also be sobering. Apart from anything else, it reveals just how much we struggle to analyze this war.
/1
As recently as yesterday, the consensus in Western policy circles – among US, UK & EU experts & officials – was that while Russia was not winning this war, neither was Ukraine. It was hard to find anyone who believed that Ukraine could make significant territorial advances.
/2
For two months or more, everyone has assumed this to be a war of attrition, rather than of position – and for good reason. The counter-offensive in the south was a slog, and reports were coming in of heavy casualties. Meanwhile, signs of fatigue in the West were mounting.
/3
I’ll start with a caveat: I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t an over-interpretation of Peskov’s statement. Gazprom hasn’t confirmed. This feels like the kind of ambiguity feint the Kremlin often deploys.
/2
But the FT’s reporting is backed up by Kommersant, which comes to the same broad conclusion from a wider base of sources: Зима объявлена kommersant.ru/doc/5546868
/3
This is an interesting an important partial rebuttal to my earlier thread, and to many of us who have been arguing that the US should not negotiate “about Ukraine without Ukraine”. But I think there’s an important distinction here having to do with sovereignty.
The points raised by @JohnAllenGay require more depth of thought then I can deal with here, so this is only a partial response. A fuller one will follow later in the week on TL;DRussia. But my basic point is this: we should not be sacrificing people.
/2
John is correct, I think, that states’ first responsibility is their own security. Without that, they cannot begin to support security more broadly. That + resource limitations = hard choices. Point taken.
/3
On one level, Anatol's message is an old one: We need to talk to Russia to prevent more Ukrainians from dying, mitigate the global food crisis and head off nuclear war.
The twist is the justification: Ukraine, in Anatol's view, has already won, and Russia has already lost.
/2
Awarding this victory to Ukraine -- holding off the Russian military, cementing its independence and achieving a path to EU membership -- is, in Anatol's view, a game changer.
Those gains, he says, should be pocketed and consolidated -- just not militarily.
/3