Russians With Attitude

Throughout the entire “long nineteenth century” (1789-1914), the image of Russia was an important component of France’s internal discourse: first as an example of “enlightened absolutism”, then of backwardness, and then of order. At times these concepts blended together, succeeded one another with extraordinary speed, or existed in parallel within different currents of French social and political thought. New article up on Substack

A fresh episode of RWA News! There was much to discuss. Some light digressions on AI-supported book burning and Japanese-themed bars in Moscow. Zelensky's "40 days" prophecy of destroying Russia leading to a borderline landlocked Ukraine. The Ukrainian war on Russian fuel and Wildberries, along with a short discussion on what "dual-use" even means. Will Russian megacorps now field private Cyberpunk armies? Will the Wildberries machine guns be pink?.. Zelensky keeps making enemies, by sacking the popular Instagram grifter from his post as Minister of Defense, and by murdering Iranian sailors. Will Russia be forced to condemn Iran for killing the entire Ukrainian government? And, of course, a short survey of the frontlines, as usual, accompanied by a look at the military career of the new Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Drapatyi. There was also a very particular Russian missile strike that “unalived”, among others, a Knight of Malta... Episode's free, as always. Go tune in now! On Gumroad

War in Africa is still more 20th century than in the SMO zone. POV Footage of an old-fashioned firefight between the Russian Africa Corps and Al Qaeda in Mali. Looks like 6-8 dead terrorists.

All of which is to say I am happy about his appointment and I am looking forward to the Ukrainians crying bloody tears and begging Syrski to come back by spring next year

Mikhail Drapatyi, the new Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, does have some military achievements under his belt, most notably slowing down Lapin's Volchansk operation in 2024. Lapin fucked that one up so badly that he was sacked and is now a veteran's affairs bureaucrat in Tatarstan. The other one people frequently cite is the offensive operations in right-bank Kherson oblast in 2022, but they did not produce a military result at all -- Surovikin pulled out of Kherson because the Ukrainians were going to blow the Kakhovka dam, and the Russian presence on the right bank served no purpose at all since like March 2022 when the "gesture of goodwill" resulted in the retreat from Nikolayev. But anyway. In the last couple of years, Drapatyi's brilliant military career looked something like this. Basically his shtick is that he pays Ukrainian journalists and milbloggers to depict him as a new incarnation of General Walter Model, "Hitler's Fireman", a tactical genius who was sent to the most dangerous sectors in need of saving and stabilized them. After Volchansk, in the summer of 2024, Drapatyi was sent to the Avdeevka area after the fall of the city to prevent the collapse of the sector, which resulted in the Russian Army Group Center breaking through the Ukrainian frontlines at Ocheretino and marching 50km from Avdeevka to Pokrovsk. In the following winter, while Center under Mordvichev was taking an operational pause and doing rotations etc., Drapatyi decided that now's the time to play offense and started throwing troops at Pokrovsk and Toretsk. The half-year zerg rush resulted in such horrendous casualties and depletion of Ukrainian units involved that in May Center counterattacked and managed to collapse the Ocheretino bulge and flank Konstantinovka from the west in a week. In the summer of last year, Drapatyi fucked up near Dobropolye, leading to a 20km Russian breakthrough that could only be momentarily stabilized by Syrski's personal intervention. Still, Mirnograd was de facto encircled and the fate of the entire agglomeration was sealed. Syrski was mad at the imbecile and sent him to Kharkov oblast, where the unrecognized General Model pulled away forces from Sumy oblast and Krasny Liman for a cope counteroffensive in Kupyansk. As a result, Russian forces cleared 20km of the Serebryansk forest which had been an impossible, blood-sucking obstacle for over three years under other commanders, and are now standing ca. 14km away from the city of Sumy. To stabilize the Liman area, Drapatyi withdrew forces from the area around Seversk, and the city of Seversk, a well-defended strongpoint that had likewise withstood three years of occasional Russian assaults, fell in a few weeks. Krasny Liman is currently being cleared by Russian forces. That's what Drapatyi does. He goes somewhere to "save" a sector, kills all his men in pointless cope assaults, buys PR from Ukrainian milbloggers and journos, and when he runs out of men he fucks off to another part of the front and leaves some poor fool from Syrski's team to deal with the fallout.

Impossible not to laugh. Large sections of Ukrainian society are viciously attacking Syrski right now, demanding that he be sacked, and it looks as though they are winning. The attached screenshot is from an article General Syrski published today to defend himself, and it really goes to the heart of the matter. The criticism leveled at Syrski by the “progressive” Ukrainian milieu can be summed up in a few points: He has the audacity to insist that war is war and not a Silicon Valley startup. He has the audacity to insist that drones are only one part of contemporary warfare and that, besides drones, you also need everything else a modern military requires. He dares to claim that the word “drone” is not a magic formula that solves all your problems. He is forcing people to dig trenches and fight in a real war instead of the high-tech, asymmetrical, digital Palantir war they were promised — in which they emphatically do not have to dig trenches, but can instead enjoy a matcha latte at a café in Kiev while their MacBook wins the war. That’s really it. They blame everything — the immense casualties, the forced conscription, the loss of territory — on Syrski’s personal qualities, as though he were the only thing preventing them from having ChatGPT code a Win the War app. The fact that this level of discourse is treated seriously by so many people is the result of two factors. The first is that it is in the Ukrainian national character to believe in one-off miracles and fantasies that will solve all their problems. This time, it is Fedorov and his vibe-coded slide decks. You just need to do this one thing and then never do anything again — just as ousting Yanukovich supposedly turned Ukraine into Switzerland overnight. You just need to make the bad man go away, and then bussification will disappear because AI drones from America (the place where virtuous people go after they die) will save the day. It is magical thinking in its dumbest form. The second factor is that the Americans themselves believe this too, and they set the agenda in Kiev. The Americans went into Iran believing that all they needed were their Shahed clones, Palantir, and Claude picking targets, and that everything would then magically resolve itself with the complete annihilation of Iran. Modern war is extremely complicated, intellectually taxing, and requires immense effort at every level of industry and knowledge work. There is no magic bullet, and there is no Win the War button. This is an unpleasant fact. One can understand the Americans’ naïveté, since they have not fought in a real modern war, but the Ukrainians who ought to know better———well, during the Russian Civil War, the Ukrainian nationalists under Petliura, right on the cusp of defeat, began spreading the rumor that they had received a secret directed-energy weapon from the French: the deadly “purple ray”, which would allow them to vaporize entire enemy battalions in a heartbeat. I bet many of them believed that too!

Looks like Syrski's going out for real soon, if Ukrainian media is to be trusted. Could all be psyops, of course. One likely replacement as Commander-in-Chief of the AFU is General Drapatyi, who pays Ukrainian media to write posts in which they compare him to General Walter Model. He got out of the Izvarino encirclement in 2014 by the skin of his teeth back in the day. His modus operandi is to be sent to a sector of the front, kill all the fresh reinforcements in pointless attacks, buy PR from Ukrainian war reporters to celebrate his "victories", then fuck off to a different sector. That has more or less been his job throughout the SMO: create pseudo-successes at any cost before diplomatic negotiations to create the illusion of having more "leverage". So. That would be a great choice. Other candidates that are being floated by Ukrainian media are Oleg Apostol, the decently competent Commander of the Ukrainian Air Assault Forces who is a huge public supporter of violent conscription, Azov Commander Andrei Biletsky, Commander of the Khartia Corps Igor Obolensky (though I have my doubts since he's a National Guard guy) and Syrski's deputy Gorbatyuk, about whom I don't know much and who would be a compromise figure since he's part of Syrski's core team.

RWA is back with a very special episode! Sasha Rybkin, Nazbol enfant terrible, has visited our studio again. He's playing Fairy Godparent to Westerners who've moved to Russia and brought one of them along — Oliver, a Briton who fought in the SMO for a year. As it turned out, Oliver decided to move to Russia after listening to one of our episodes. He knew Jay, call sign "Kelt", who... moved back to Britain recently. We discussed many things, starting with the death of Lindsay Graham, Oliver's background, some family updates from Sasha and, of course, Oliver's experiences — moving, the war, life in Russia, the problems foreigners face over here, Ы sound, dating, etc. There's a 20 minute interlude where we debate Nazbol ideology, too. I think it turned out great, and you should go listen. Also available on Gumroad

Spain and Argentina seem intent on reinforcing the American belief that "soccer is dumb because every game ends 0-0" Anyway, what are your thoughts about the game

Russian state media leaked audio recordings of the Ukrainian intelligence agent who is charged with murdering the woman who blew up that Ukrainian oligarch in Monaco (Vitaly Zhikovich; the woman was, of course, also an SBU agent, though probably not an "official" intelligence officer). On these recordings, among other things, he calmly refers to his own work as "terrorism", talks about Israeli software that Mossad shared with the SBU, explains how much he loves his work (including assassinations), mentions that they have specific orders from Zelensky to cause civilian casualties during attacks, and talks about a plot to murder a Dagestani official by enlisting local Islamists (the assassination plot was thwarted by the FSB, and the Dagestani official is on the Ukrainian hit list because he's an SMO war hero). The recordings were clearly obtained by Russian intelligence originally, and I have suspected some recent Russian intelligence coup against the SBU for a while now, partly due to how badly Operation Spider Web 2.0 failed (I don't think I've mentioned that on here? They caught several trucks with drones in Siberia, arrested a bunch of people involved with it, etc. Basically the plan was the same as the original Operation Spider Web — smuggle drone parts into Russia and attack air bases through perfidy — only this time they were discovered and neutralized). Looks like there's been some SIGINT penetration, somebody flipped, or the SBU just got sloppy.

Russian state media leaked audio recordings of the Ukrainian intelligence agent who is charged with murdering the woman who blew up that Ukrainian oligarch in Monaco (Vitaly Zhikovich; the woman was, of course, also an SBU agent, though probably not an "official" intelligence officer). On these recordings, among other things, he calmly refers to his own work as "terrorism", talks about Israeli software that Mossad shared with the SBU, explains how much he loves his work (including assassinations), mentions that they have specific orders from Zelensky to cause civilian casualties during attacks, and talks about a plot to murder a Dagestani official by enlisting local Islamists (the assassination plot was thwarted by the FSB, and the Dagestani official is on the Ukrainian hit list because he's an SMO war hero). The recordings were clearly obtained by Russian intelligence originally, and I have suspected some recent Russian intelligence coup against the SBU for a while now, partly due to how badly Operation Spider Web 2.0 failed (I don't think I've mentioned that on here? They caught several trucks with drones in Siberia, arrested a bunch of people involved with it, etc. Basically the plan was the same as the original Operation Spider Web — smuggle drone parts into Russia and attack air bases through perfidy — only this time they were discovered and neutralized). Looks like there's been some SIGINT penetration, somebody flipped, or the SBU just got sloppy.

Your favorite news show is back again! We talked about the war with Iran making a comeback, the various myths war keeps killing off, the Russian gasoline crisis and ways the gov is trying to fix it (including the special situation in Crimea), the current political climate in Russia ahead of the Duma elections in a couple months, the undignified death of the "Spirit of Anchorage" and Space stuff. Lots of stuff to cover, much of it stressful. At least the weather is nice sometimes. Episode's free. Go listen now on our Substack

It's easy to attack the late Mr. Graham for being single-mindedly devoted to causing as much death and misery in the world as possible and having no interests other than homosexual escapades, fanatical worship of Israel and killing me and my friends — but de mortuis nil nisi bonum, so I'll say that he was remarkably honest and open for a US politician in expressing these desires (sans the sodomy, but being in the closet kind of worked for him as a running gag), and didn't hide all that much behind moralistic pretexts and procedural language, like all his colleagues do. He gave us the phrase “to the last Ukrainian”, after all. I'm sure they'll take that under consideration in the big place with no AC

"Both the Muscovite and the Khokhol are cunning people, and the cunning of both finds expression in pretense. But each pretends in his own way: the former likes to play the fool, while the latter likes to play the wise man" Vasily Klyuchevsky, 19th century Russian Imperial historian So true.

It's tiresome

from the ancient 2022 meme folder

A minor rebellion against Zelensky's forced conscription is happening in Lvov. Locals have surrounded and attacked a press-gang vehicle. They are shouting "Shame!" and "Faggots!". >when ТЦК has the audacity to violently kidnap men in western Ukraine and not just in the East

real

If you remember, I pointed out that if the Ukrainians launched drones from Kazakhstan, their priority targets would be Omsk and Novosibirsk, and that the intense targeting of Samara and Volgograd pointed to drones being launched from the Caspian Sea and merely flying over Kazakh territory (that much is undisputed, Ukrainian drones literally crashed in Kazakhstan near the Russian border, many times). Recently, the cities on the plausible Baku-Caspian-Kazakhstan route were attacked significantly less, and this coincided with chatter about Russia threatening the Azeris into putting a stop to Ukrainian drone operations from their territory. Today, Omsk and Novosibirsk came under drone attack, which is as good as proof that the Ukrainians smuggled drones into Kazakhstan and launched them into Russia from across the border.

The local militia in question, hehe.