A Lesson from Estonia about Russian Interference

https://www.politico.eu/article/estonia-thwarts-russian-hybrid-operation-arrests-10/

A small but valuable lesson from Estonia about Russian influence operations that disrupt Western society. Whether Estonia, Germany, Britain, US or elsewhere, Russian interference does not reflect true social conflict but Russia’s attempt to create or magnify social tension to disrupt Western society and undermine legitimate government.

All Western democracies are susceptible to disruption because they support individual freedoms and tolerate differences of opinion.  However, small disruptive acts such as those described by Russia in the article can escalate into social conflict.  Western democracies must guard against malignant acts that are not true differences of opinion but are outside interference aimed at weakening the West.

https://www.politico.eu/article/estonia-thwarts-russian-hybrid-operation-arrests-10/

The Military Significance of Avdiivka

Photo credit

Originally posted in Telegram channel Made in Ukraine.

Material from the joint project OBOZ.UA and the Information Resistance group.

Departure from Avdiivka - how will this affect events in the combat zone and what will happen next

 

The Ukrainian defense forces abandoned Avdiivka, which was quite predictable in the current conditions and for which society should have been prepared without fantasies. This town near Donetsk served as a meat grinder for Russian resources for more than four months, and thanks to this, records for the destruction of DOM were set. But what will happen after the capture of the city and how will events develop in the combat zone?

Record losses

Even Russian military officers and those unit commanders who have the right to vote admit that their losses in the battles for Avdievka are many times greater than during the battles for Bakhmut. While Russian armchair urapatriots are squealing with pleasure at the fact of capturing a small town with an incomplete area of ​​29 km², the middle-level command staff on the ground is horrified by the amount of ROV resource that was allocated for this.

Only according to verified data from various sources, losses in the equipment of the invaders from October 10, 2023 until the end of January 2024 ranged from 400 to 600 units. Taking into account the specifics of verification and coefficients, real losses in equipment in the battle for Avdievka near the ROV could easily reach and even exceed a thousand units! A thousand tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery and other equipment in battles for a small town, which is not even a regional or district center and was actually an agglomeration with Donetsk, occupied since 2014!

The loss of human resources among the Russians is completely unimaginable - only the figures of 15, 20 thousand and more are killed.

But the important thing is that since the second half of 2022, the Russian occupiers have not carried out a single important, large-scale seizure of a large city, but are content with small towns and villages. A year has passed since the capture of Bakhmut and now Russian occupation forces are capturing little Avdiivka. But how important was it to them and to us?

 

The importance of Avdeevka

From the very first days of the attack on this town, Russian propaganda persistently imposed the narrative on consumers of informational fast food that Avdeevka would protect Donetsk from attacks by the Ukrainian Defense Forces, and would also open the road to the Dnieper.

As for the first statement, Avdeevka has never been a platform for firing at Donetsk and its environs. For high-precision strikes against targets of the Russian occupiers, weapons were used that did not need to be in or near the city.

As for the road to the Dnieper, this is partly true, because we are talking about the northern and southern route to Pokrovsk along T0511 and M04, and from Pokrovsk to Pavlograd and Dnieper. But, for a moment, this is 200 km in a straight line. It took the occupiers four months to cover a distance of 1-2 km, break through to Avdiivka and start urban battles, while refusing to advance into the field, and also losing almost a thousand pieces of equipment and tens of thousands of personnel. The question arises: when moving to the Dnieper, what will run out of the ROV first - equipment or people?

In fact, Avdievka was seen by the Russian command as a window of opportunity to show a quick victory on the eve of Putin’s direct line in December, then to the New Year’s address. Now Putin’s address to the federal assembly was heated, and this catalyzed the actions of the ROV into a regime of suicidal assaults.

Avdeevka did not actually represent any tactical, let alone strategic, importance for the Russians. It’s just that the Russian generals decided that they could surround and capture it very quickly. When the failure of the offensive went too far, it was too late to stop...

 

Read the continuation here 👉 https://war.obozrevatel.com/kovalenko-vyihod-iz-avdeevki-kak-eto-skazhetsya-na-sobyitiyah-v-zone-boevyih-dejstvij-i-chto-budet-dalshe.htm

The Putin Interview: Distortions, Lies and Misinformation

An excellent, brief counterpoint to the now infamous Tucker Carlson-Putin interview is provided in an article by Stefan Hedlund, professor of Russian Studies at Uppsala University.  

The counterpoint is necessary because, as many have pointed out, the interview is riddled with lies and imagined history.  

Hedlund's article, What President Putin Could Have Learned from History, sets the record straight on Russian and Ukrainian history and their connection.  What it covers is important to keep in mind, while navigating the distortions and outright fabrications on social media.  The basic facts in Hedlund's article are important to keep in mind to avoid being misled.

Among Hedlund's conclusions,

"The final lesson to be drawn from history is that when Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, Muscovy was so exhausted by its drawn-out campaigns to destroy Novgorod and by the Livonian War against Sweden and Poland-Lithuania that it collapsed shortly after...Putin's latter-day Muscovy may be looking at a similar fate...It will find itself increasingly exhausted by its attempt to destroy Ukraine..."

For a longer analysis, read Timothy Snyder's article, Putin's Genocidal Myth on the subtleties of Putin's "naive and cynical" use of history to justify not only Russia's land claims but its genocidal actions in its current war in Ukraine.

For a more detailed history of Ukraine read Paul R. Magocsi's A History of Ukraine: the Land and Its Peoples or Serhii Plokhy's The Gates of Europe.  For an insight into what the Ukrainian people are defending themselves against in Putin's war, read Anne Applebaum's Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, when up to 4 million Ukrainians may have died in Stalin's 1932-33 manmade famine.