Is the Soviet Union alive and well?

The fallout from Russia’s invasion in Ukraine stirs anxiety.

KYLE ANDREW BROWN

Washington, January 10 – The cascade of events in the Donbas has transported Angela Merkel across Europe, Moscow and Monday an impromptu walk-thru into the Oval Office in Washington.

The NATO countries without equivocation told Vladimir Putin last week that the Allies’ unified security organization is resolved to ensure Russia’s violent military moves to destabilize and fragment Ukraine’s sovereign territory will not stand.

Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General, laid out in his address at the Munich Security Conference this past weekend the specific acts of territorial aggression that Russia is commiting in Ukraine.

Angela Merkel put it pointedly to Vladimir Putin in his Kremlin office on Friday night: Take the Diplomatic Solution we’re offering you today and end the violence.

“NATO will not walk away from Ukraine.”

Call it what you will, NATO’s Jen Stoltenberg understands that the Kremlin calculates that given it’s investments in both military operations and fictional narratives to it’s own population it cannot accept the Diplomatic Solution – Namely – Retreat.

For the  Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus controls all media through both interlocking ownership of media and regulatory oversight by state media regular Roskomnadzor.

The fictional narrative the Kremlin has woven into the country’s mindset risks, if abandoned, threatening the ruling elite party members’ legitimacy to both own state enterprises distributed among  the oligarchs; and to unquestionably govern.

Deconstructing Russia’s Ukraine narrative

The Russian narrative is tightly woven. Official statements about Ukraine are limited to Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. No one else in the Kremlin is permitted to question Ukraine policy.

The Russian narrative is simplistic. The Kremlin frames its interests in Ukraine as:  Mother Russia’s securing her fraternal bonds with the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas and Crimea. This narrative’s constructive simplicity  omits having to transparently state the Kremlin’s true economic, political, territorial and ideological objectives to destabilize and fragment Ukraine.

The Russian narrative is one of factual omission:

• The Russian narrative permeating throughout the state controlled media is without action verbs – Russia is doing nothing. Invasion is not a word in the Russian vocabulary.

• The Russian narrative omits mention of Russia’s clients: the Donetsk oligarch Rinat Akhmetov – the benefactor of deposed president Viktor Yanukovych –  and his industrialist clan.

• To cover all bases, the guiding diplomatic formulation is: Russia is restoring territory that rightly belongs to Mother Russia. “

Russia has lost the political initiative – a fundamental of the Soviet Playbook

Last winter when the Kremlin’s elite party members launched their attacks in the Donbas and annexed Crimea, the Soviet Playbook said the West would put up a fit and then latch onto  the drip drip drip of propaganda justifications presented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to Secretary of State John Kerry:

Why sure, Crimea has been part of Russia all along.

Why sure, the everyday citizens of Donetsk – they yearn to be part of the Russian Federation.

This simplistic diplomatic message was formulated by the Kremlin to be latched onto  by the West as the rationale for accepting as fait accompli the various People’s Republics sprinkled along the Russian border. A rationale that abandons Ukraine.

Moscow’s We are united as fraternal brothers! justification that the Kremlin manufactured at the onset of it’s  Novorossiya : New Russia project collapsed under the sheer weight of the piles of dead Russian soldiers’ bodies decaying – unclaimed – in dump trucks on Donetsk streets.

So this week the Kremlin’s propaganda has been reformulated to be:

“Russia will never succumb to Washington’s uni-polar world which demands obedience!” 

This new Kremlin diplomatic formulation NATO’s Jen Stoltenberg has already anticipated. In his Munich address he basically told Vladimir Putin:

“BTW – It is unacceptable to the NATO countries that you – Russia – go to the Soviet Playbook and set up a frozen territory in the Donbas, à la the 1950s-1990s style Cold War.”

NATO is  meant to spin wheels on Putin’s fiction that the United States wishes only to humiliate and defeat Russia

Back in the winter of 2014 Soviet Playbook fundamentals encouraged Moscow to take the initiative to destabilize and fragment Ukraine. The Kremlin game plan arcs between HOT and MELLOW:

MELLOW: Russia only wants for the people of Donetsk  to decide their future.

HOT:  Russia will not let the fascist’s in Kyev murder our fraternal brothers in Donetsk!

The Kremlin’s rhetoric has been cognitively constructed to disguise the Soviets’ true objectives in Ukraine.

There are four Soviet objectives in the Kremlin’s Novorossiya Project: Economic – Political – Territorial – Ideological.

Russia’s Economic Objective: To facilitate Russia’s ability to acquire and control natural resources in the Donbas down to the Crimea. To sever the economic utility of those resources from the Kyiv Ukraine nation.

Russia’s Political Objective: To individually destabilize Ukraine and the Donbas. To make Ukraine unattractive to NATO and the European Union by the presence of Russian hostility.  To install Soviet puppet regimes in the Donbas and Crimea.

Russia’s Territorial Objective: To remove the natural resources, oil transport resources, and industrial capacity of East Ukraine from Kyiv. Thereby collapsing Ukraine’s industrial capacity as a nation.

Russia’s Ideological Objectives:  To preserve control of the Russian Federation’s governing apparatus by the Kremlin’s elite party members – the grandchildren of the Communist Party.

The ideological objectives of the Kremlin has application to both Russia’s citizens and to nationalities which constitute the Russian Federation. 

The Kremlin is by definition the elite party members who control the governing apparatus. It’s authoritative oversight of all state media ensures that within the Russian Federation’s borders no citizens’ group or regional nationality can become a successful threat to the Kremlin’s command and control structure. And it’s ownership by the cadre of the party elite. 

The Kremlin’s domination over the Russian Federation’s regions is made transparent in that Vladimir Putin personally appoints each regional governor to carry forward the Kremlin’s command and control structure.

Popular national fronts that rebel against Moscow – such as in Chechnya – are crushed without regard for the welfare of the region.

Kremlin’s objectives in Ukraine

The Kremlin’s unstated opaque objectives in East Ukraine are economic control of industrial and natural resources. And protection of  the financial assets of the Donetsk Oligarch Akhmetov – in cohabitation to a Soviet installed government.

Most importantly, the Kremlin’s paramount objective is to shield  the Kremlin party elite from domestic threats to their legitimacy to control  the apparatus of government institutions. And to control the distribution of wealth among the symbiotic oligarchs.  

Russia’s closed loop diplomacy

NATO’s Jen Stoltenberg recognizes that  the Soviets do not admit  that they see that the West has unraveled the cloudy formations of the Kremlin’s fictional narratives. Fictional narratives which Sergey Lavrov and Vladimir Putin put  forward as the framework for diplomatic negotiations.

Russia’s diplomatic framework obliterates the Kremlin’s responsibility for the destruction of the Donbas and direct threats to Ukraine’s sovereignty.

The Foreign Ministry’s diplomatic formulation  is a closed loop enabler of Russia’s end game – the placement of a redrawn International Border between Russia and Ukraine. A border described as the western territory acquired by Russian forces on the western borders of Donetsk and Lugansk oblates. And the already formally annexed Crimea.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will use this fictional formulation to make the Kremlin’s proposal to end the bloodshed: Just stop armed engagement along this Truce Line. That’s all  we need to agree on.

But as written in the Soviet Playbook it is:

SOVIET PLAYBOOK: Let’s tell NATO the negotiated line is just a temporary truce line. We know it’s really a new International Border which severs Kyiv from her Industrial East.

Kremlin’s end game in sight

Russia’s closed loop diplomatic framework has several fill ins to be completed after a new International Border for Ukraine is put in place.  The most important fill in – final political status  for the Kremlin’s freshly  named League of Unrecognized States.

Over the weekend the Kremlin published on the homepage of Gazeta.ru this new diplomatic naming for Donetsk and Lugansk oblates. The Foreign Ministry – Sergey Lavrov – would find it real handy to toss around in settlement talks.

Once this League of Unrecognized States is recognized as valid terminology in settlement talks, Russia then pivots to proposing: “Aha, here’s where we scribble in our so-called truce line.”

At a time favorable to Moscow, the Donetsk and Lugansk oblates are subsumed in some official – or not so official –  manner into the Russian Federation.

Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko recognizes this Russian diplomatic slight of hand when he categorically rejects any status which redefines Ukraine’s national border.

The Soviet’s have milked the West’s appetite for soon to be realized halts to their Novorossiya project which are never realized. As meanwhile the Russian army continues its planned destruction of the Donbas civilian infrastructure.

As the Soviet Playbook details, Russia has terrorized the population in Donetsk into submission. Their only hope is in so-called diplomatic cessation of hostilities which inevitably places them under Kremlin rule.

The Kremlin must regard it’s execution of the Novorossya project a success to date. It has isolated its violence, killing and destruction to foreign territory. Russia continues to extend the Ukraine Invasion westward. All the while the Foreign Minister poses for handshakes with the American Secretary of State at whatever useless forum they find themselves.

It is of no import to Vladimir Putin, Sergey Lavrov and the Kremlin’s elite party members what length of time it  takes for their end game to cement the Novorossya project. For Moscow the only variable is the weight of sanctions on the Russian economy.

For the NATO countries the calculus may well be:

At what decision point does NATO settle for a frozen territory standstill – Or take measures beyond diplomacy.

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