Why Care About Me, or Russia?

The military conflict in Ukraine has become the biggest “hot” story of the week and sparked a wave of hysteria across the internet. These developments are significant, but everyone is losing their heads for basically no reason. In this post I’ll provide some answers, based on my own personal knowledge and experience (and trying not to stray outside topics I’m qualified to opine on). I will also address some questions fielded by my readers in the comment threads of my previous posts. I will also, finally, get around to properly filling out a brief autobiography of myself, my relationship with Russia, and why any of you should care.

I’m a former US Marine fire support specialist, and also worked for about 10 years as a public affairs specialist in the US Army National Guard and Reserves. For that reason I will mostly opine about the “information operations” aspect of current events in Ukraine.

About three years ago I expanded into writing fiction, starting with a sci-fi anthology titled Ultra Violence, which is the first part of what I originally intended as an ongoing seven-book series. COVID lockdowns, personal drama, and a lengthy hospitalization unfortunately interrupted my project, though I plan to come back to it soon when life allows me to. I then wrote a fictional short story about the Russian “Night Witches” in World War II, which was published on the Fabius Maximus website. Fabius Maximus is now defunct, but you can read a copy of my story on the very first post of Reading Junkie, Ballad of the Unknown Pilot. The topic of Night Witches interested me enough that I decided to write more about them, which required more study and research on my part. The more I read, the more I realized just how little I knew about the Soviet Union, Russia, and the people in it. This rabbit hole eventually led to me to taking multiple trips to Russia, and that’s where I still am today. In Moscow region, attending a course for beginners in the Russian language, and writing my book.

Russia’s official entry into the simmering Ukrainian civil war, and the wave of hysterical sanctions and russophobia made things particularly complex for me. I had just recently returned back to the USA from Moscow when the “invasion” started Feb. 24. Many friends and acquaintances stopped talking to me, or even, as crazy as this might sound, suspect that I was personally involved in Putin’s plans for world domination. It was all very ridiculous and horrible.

For days I was extremely depressed about the state of the world. Then I finally pulled myself together enough to write a new post, Fake News Killed the Ukrainians and it is Our Fault. From there, I wrote frequently about the continuing fight in Ukraine, including my most widely-viewed pieces, I Finally Understand Why We Hate Russia, and We Seriously Underestimated Russia; Our Own Propaganda is Killing Us. My humble blog here at Reading Junkie became “viral,” getting more viewers in a single week than in the entire previous year. I went on to write other pieces that I consider important to anyone wanting to understand Ukraine and Russia, including Russia is not the Savior You Want Her to Be, The Fatal Scale Error in the Ukraine War, and The Blood Pump of Donbass.

I have tried my best to write from the “Russian perspective” regarding their military, political, economic, and cultural goals in the world today. By this I mean trying to explain my own interpretations of the Russians’ mentality, values, and why their wants and needs should be taken seriously and respected. I also try to emphasize the brotherly relationship between Russians and Ukrainians and the importance of understanding this truth.

The second truth I want everyone to understand is that the world is best off when people coexist, trade, and build bridges with each other. Even enemies forced to settle down and barter will eventually forget their past quarrels, or at least banish those troubles to the back of their minds. When a larger state breaks into smaller states, that brings poverty, misery, and weakness to those peoples. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union, and that’s what happened in Yugoslavia. Even more importantly, that weakness invites foreign meddling. A large, powerful state dictates policy. A small, weak state is dictated by someone else’s policy.

Understand that even after the bloody fighting in 2014-15, Ukraine still had the chance to be a strong, independent country. They didn’t need Crimea or Donbass. They could have listened to the demands of those people and respected the Minsk agreements. They could have kept the borders open for trade, jobs, taxation, and mutual prosperity. Instead, they were goaded by NATO into turning the whole country into a war zone. Regions that could have had a complete recovery years ago are still a hell on earth covered in trenches, barbed wire, and mines that kill and cripple children every year. It should be more obvious now than ever before that this whole time, Russian policy was to push Ukraine and the Donbass separatists back together into one state of people who could coexist. Now that’s impossible.

NATO promises “freedom and democracy,” but what they actually do is peddle nazism and extremism to divide the entire world into small, weak ethno-states. It should be telling that NATO wants other nations like the Soviet Union and China to be broken into smaller ethno-states, but promotes the opposite policy for themselves. UK’s Brexit from the European Union is portrayed in the western media as a disaster, and no one seriously suggests that Alabama should be free from the USA. Don’t Native Americans have the right to be angry? Shouldn’t they pick up weapons and kill the white people who stole their land? No? Why then, do our leaders demand that Siberia split from Russia, and Hong Kong split from China? To make this all even more hypocritical, when Ukraine’s government fell to a nazi coup in 2013/14, many people in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine rightfully said they wanted to have no part in the new regime. And yet the advocates of “self-determination” in the West declared that anyone who refuses to submit to the nazi regime in Kiev must be forcibly crushed. Ukraine’s president openly boasted about slaughtering children with artillery, and received congratulations and encouragement from the West for his idea.

As for what I think about the Ukrainians’ Kharkov offensive, let me remind you of something I said a while back in my post The Fatal Scale Error of the Ukraine War:

[H]ere is my attempt to summarize how to win a battle, or a war.

Expose as much of the enemy force to attrition as possible, and for as long as possible, while minimizing your own force’s exposure to attrition, while still utilizing them 100% at key moments of the operation for the purposes they’re suitable for.

Here’s an analogy. An army is an object that’s fluid and can be molded into any shape, like water. However, the more you do this, the more your army suffers attrition. You dump a bucket of water on the floor and try to mop it up again, you’ll still lose some. And understand that attrition isn’t just combat losses. Ships and planes crash just from cruising around in peacetime. Soldiers roll their ankles, trucks break drown, and equipment wears out whether or not there’s a war on. Any military unit, whether it is a tank battalion or a crew on a warship, will degrade over time unless they are given sufficient time to rest and refit. Think of a battle like a sports game. A team with many fresh players on the bench will probably win against a team that doesn’t.

Ideally, the enemy should be exposed all the way to their rear echelons to disruption by indirect fire and air attacks. Their soldiers should all be on high alert, suffering high rates of attrition from injuries, fatigue, and desertion, but not able to use their weapons to hurt you. Meanwhile, your own army should be exposed to as little combat as possible, and maintaining large reserves. Those reserves can be used for anything, from replacing or reinforcing units actively engaged in combat operations, or opening new fronts at key times and places.

Ukrainian forces are gaining a lot of terrain, and a lot of good “victories” for propaganda purposes. But like everything else in love and war, it comes at a cost. They’re suffering losses of soldiers, vehicles, equipment, as well as expending fuel and supplies (beans, bandaids, bullets). I’m not going to sit here and say these losses are pointless and futile, because they’re absolutely not. They serve a very real purpose, aside from whatever damage and setbacks they inflict on the Russians, of proving to NATO that Ukrainians are able and willing to fight and suffer casualties. Even if this offensive burns out, I think we all have to admit at this point that it will likely achieve its political purpose: to coax western sponsors into continuing to support Ukraine this winter. However many vehicles they lose in the offensive will be worth it if NATO countries replace those vehicles, and of equal importance, provides money and supplies to keep the war going through the harsh winter months.

I think some of the people reading this very post might owe Scott Ritter an apology. Back in April he called Biden’s signing of the Lend-Lease act a “game changer” and got tons of angry comments accusing him of being a concern-troll and spreading lies. Ritter stressed the significance of the supply of vehicles like the obsolete M113, which are not only of limited usefulness on a modern battlefield but impossible for a Soviet-style maintenance outfit like the Ukrainians to repair. Vehicles like the M113 or the Cougar MRAPs from the Afghan war are not meant to be kept in the fight. They’re meant to be used once until they break down or are damaged then immediately thrown away. I will freely admit now that I was extremely skeptical of Ritter and thought he was overblowing the whole situation, but recent events have proved him right in this aspect, because that’s exactly how the Ukrainians are fighting right now. They just took hundreds of various armored vehicles, including those old modified Polish T-72s, and threw them 30 miles into Russian-held territory. When one of those vehicles has engine trouble, it’s abandoned on the side of the road. If it gets damaged in combat, it’s also abandoned. They’re disposable assets and, unfortunately, the men driving those vehicles are just as disposable.

Now if you think I’m like Ritter and exaggerating Ukrainian accomplishments, well, hold your horses. Let’s take a look at this map from today:

From an “information war” aspect, I find western coverage of these advances interesting, because legacy outlets like CNN are using what I call the “global warming tactic.” From CNN:

Ukraine’s top military commander claimed that more than 3,000 square kilometers of territory has been retaken by the country’s military since the beginning of the month.

I call this the global warming tactic because legacy media outlets love citing big, scary numbers of questionable authenticity and no context. It’s like saying a billion tons of arctic ice melted. That’s a scary, big number, but it’s useless without context. So Kiev has allegedly taken 3,000 square kilometers of territory this month. That’s great for them, but Ukraine (to include Crimea and the separatist republics) is more than 600,000 square kilometers. Russia and allies hold (this is a guestimate on my part) about 20% of that, or 120,000 kilometers. It’s 11 Sept, so at this pace, for Kiev to make “everything Ukrainian” would take… 429 more days. Also, conservative estimates of Ukrainian killed in action in the combined Kherson and Kharkov offensives so far is over 5,000. So the same rate of casualties would be 200,000 killed, and three times that wounded.

So, long story short, the Ukrainians have had successes, but let’s not get carried away. 99% of what we’re seeing on western social media and legacy outlets is pure hype.

That said, I want everyone reading this to understand that most “pro-Russia” commentators on the western web are really no better than the natonazis. The “collective West” is in economic and social chaos right now and a lot of people are understandably unhappy about it. So these angry people make blogs and social media accounts to rant about how bad and evil the West is. Which is fine, but complaining about a problem isn’t the same as fixing the problem, now is it?

Complaining isn’t useful, but it is harmless. That said, what isn’t harmless is projecting your own anger and agitation on someone else and using him as a proxy to solve problems you’re too weak and cowardly to tackle yourself. That’s what these commentators are doing with Russia. They think Russia is going to save them from big bad NATO and the Globohomo globalist conspiracy. This is gross for two reasons.

1. The Russian government is only obligated to solve their own problems, not yours.
2. Cheerleading for Russia to slaughter Ukrainians isn’t helpful. It’s obvious they don’t want to do that, and repeatedly advocating for “taking the gloves off” to “crush the stupid Ukrainians” is not helpful, it’s the opposite of helpful.
   

Apparently, advocating for the Russian perspective makes me a fringe extremist for both sides. This was particularly apparent this week, with the wave of hysteria about the Ukrainian counter-offensives in Kharkov (which I wrote about in my previous post here). See, here’s the problem with the vast majority of commentators on the internet as well as the legacy media. Most journalists and bloggers, however well-read, educated and sharp-witted they are, lack the expertise to see the “big picture” of a war. They also feel obligated to talk every day, even if there’s nothing new to say, and this can also lead to people giving outrageous, emotional opinions without properly thinking them over first.

Here’s a good example. I particularly enjoy Dima on his military summary channel on YouTube. He does a good job of reading through updates from major channels from Ukrainian, Russian, and Western sources, and summarizing them in his videos. This is very useful because many of us simply don’t have the time or inclination to browse dozens or hundreds of channels on Telegram, Twitter, and other mediums every day. It’s great to simply dedicate 15-20 minutes listening to someone else accurately summarizing what happened. Unfortunately, I don’t think he has the adequate background and education to adequately explain the military weapons, maneuvers, and capabilities he’s trying to relay to his audience.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Military Summary Channel taking it upon himself to aggregate a large amount of information into easily accessible videos, but crucial facts frequently get “lost in translation.” Sometimes, things are literally lost in translation because he isn’t a native English speaker. As an American wandering around in Russia babbling and mispronouncing things to the locals, I’m not one to make fun of a person for speaking English with an accent. But it is absolutely essential to fully understand the words you use. For example, he has frequently claimed the Ukrainian lines across the front are “collapsing.” I understand what he is trying to say, that the Russians inch forward and push the Ukrainians back incrementally, but that’s not what “collapse” means in military terminology, and him saying it paints an incorrect picture of Ukrainian resistance falling apart. This misuse of words also makes me question if he’s adequately knowledgeable about military science.

The second much bigger problem with the Military Summary Channel is that it just regurgitates minute tactical developments without the context of what’s happened over the past week, month, etc. Actually, he’s repeating the flaw of the digital online map tools he relies on. None of the ones I’ve tried (like liveuamap) are easy to use. I would like a map that has easily toggleable overlays for for positional changes of Russian/Ukrainian forces as they change over time. A “live” map showing today’s events is cool, but not particularly helpful to me.

I have mixed feelings about Andrei’s The Saker website. He’s a big enthusiast for Russia and I appreciate how he encourages his audience to maintain a cool head and not get swept up by the constant barrage of propaganda and white noise flowing out of our computers, phones, and televisions. But I also find his attitude frequently unhelpful. My biggest complaint is that he feels that the Russians need to do more to counteract western propaganda about the war. I disagree, and his statement is objectively not true. The Russian government’s job is to communicate to the Russian people, and that’s it. They are not obligated to spend valuable time and resources trying to appeal to western audiences. And frankly, winning an information war in western Europe, Canada, or the USA would be an asymmetric effort at Russia’s disadvantage. They would have to compete with and overpower the military propaganda, disinformation, and mainstream media from those countries’ own governments and I’m skeptical that even if Russia wanted to, it would be possible. See my post Russia is not losing the information war.

That said, I mostly like the Saker and find the site useful, hence why I comment there sometimes and it’s on my blog roll. No one is perfect and I do think he’s coming from a good place, even when I find what he says misguided.

Now there is a third group of sites that I want to bring up, and that’s the psyops. Like Tokyo Rose in WWII, these sites and channels follow the 60/40 rule – providing information that is 60% useful to their enemy, and 40% of information that is propaganda disguised as information that is useful. For example, “Soviet Visuals” on Facebook and Twitter is a large brand that shares nostalgic Soviet and Soviet themed photos, posters, and art. They’ve been active for years and much of their content, maybe 60%, could be described as innocuous, even openly favorable to the Soviet Union. But they also share NATO propaganda and actual disinformation, like urban myths that the USSR abandoned their own cosmonaut in orbit during the dissolution.

The Moon of Alabama is a huge blog that I do have a special personal connection with. I commented there frequently for months, and he even shared a link to my site there. So I owe a large portion of my readership to MoA. Then over time, he got frequently erratic and unhinged, and that’s especially true this week when the Ukrainian Kharkov offensive happened. His last two posts were, from any objective standpoint, utterly insane. In this post, he invokes Stalin, “quality by quantity” and openly demands that Russia end the special military operation and openly declare war. I wrote a comment stating that this type of emotional reaction isn’t helpful and we need to look at this from the Russian perspective. We also simply don’t have enough concrete information about the events leading up to and during the Kharkov offensive to make any sweeping statements about it.

At this point, I do actually have to suggest that, however remote the possibility, that MoA is a NATO psyop, and I’m not just saying that because I don’t like his last several posts. Here’s why.

A while back, my site was scrutinized by “NewsGuard,” a private firm employed by the Biden government to root out “Russian disinformation” (see my post here). The Saker was also scrutinized by them, and listed as disinformation. So was Moon of Alabama. All three sites are Russian disinformation, according to NewsGuard. But here’s the crucial difference. The NewsGuard analysts personally scrutinized me and Andrei at the Saker, digging into our personal backgrounds. They did not do this with “b” at Moon of Alabama. Why? NewsGuard has the acumen to dig up my military records, and research the status of a nonprofit I opened up years ago. They could also dig up Andrei’s immigration status in the USA. But they could not figure out who Moon of Alabama is registered to? Why? He’s allegedly a German citizen, he could be theoretically shut down or even prosecuted by the German government, and MoA is a huge blog, a big fish, so to speak. Wouldn’t there be a significant incentive for NewsGuard to cooperate with German authorities to shut MoA down? After all, they weren’t shy about contacting the US DOD about me, and I get maybe 1% of the viewership MoA does. Maybe there’s a reason they’re deliberately allowing MoA to operate and run his mouth.

It’s possible that NewsGuard pressured MoA into changing his editorial policies, under threat of notifying the German authorities about his politically incorrect blog, but the NewsGuard entry claimed that MoA did not respond to their queries. If you wish, don’t take my word for it. You can download the free NewsGuard extension for Microsoft Edge, and see the “fact checks” of Reading Junkie, The Saker, and Moon of Alabama, and any other site for yourself. (You’re reading this, Valerie? I’m giving you guys at NewsGuard free exposure, you should pay me). Anyway, I can’t prove what happened one way or another, but I am removing MoA from my blog roll, and not referencing his nonsense again.

That’s my full rant, as usual if you have thoughts, feedback, or additional information you would like me to be aware of, please let me know in the comments.

And…

Today, I made a decision about the future of this blog, as well as my Night Witches book and other future projects. After I had to abruptly retire from the Army, I wanted to be an author. However, books cost money and any content behind a paywall is less accessible. It is more important to me for any interested person to read what I have to say here without having to pay. This is particularly important now with the digital “iron curtain” severing visa bank cards within Russia. So if I contain my writings in a book, there would be people who might want to buy it but simply unable to. I’m also, for now, financially secure. For those reasons, I will be posting everything I write, both fiction and nonfiction, here and without any kind of paywalls. For people who are interested in supporting my site, I have set up a Buy Me a Coffee, which can be accessed here. I will also be adding a widget visible throughout the site.

I am also collecting the emails for people interested in a newsletter. I am currently shopping around for an adequate service that is both affordable and easy to use. When I do finally get the newsletter launched I will announce it. In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions for a service that is good (besides Constant Contact or Mailchimp) I’m open to suggestions.

Ian Kummer

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