Welcome back to the Two Navy Guys Debrief, the (mostly) weekly forum where we look at a national security issue and how we have explored that topic in our fiction.
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In our novel Order of Battle, we wrestled with the question of what it would take to depose an autocratic leader of the Russian Federation. Our antagonist is Vitaly Luchnik, a thinly veiled Putin clone. Fueled by imperial fantasies, Mr. Luchnik launches an invasion of Ukraine, but has much bigger dreams.
As we considered the likelihood of a coup in Russia, we decided that the only way such a thing could happen was if (1) President Luchnik lost the confidence of his security services and (2) there was someone to take his place.
[As we discussed in our behind-the-scenes look at how we built the Command and Control series, this novel was written before the actual invasion of Ukraine. It was always intended to be fiction. Honest.]
These past few weeks have offered a split screen view into Russia and her “strongman” leader, Mr. Putin. Let’s review some highlights of the last month:
March 7 – US officials publicly and privately warned Russia “about the intelligence pointing to an impending attack.”1
March 17 – Mr. Putin was “reelected” to his fifth 6-year term, which puts him on track to become the longest-serving leader since the 1917 Russian Revolution.
March 19 – Mr. Putin called Western statements about the potential for terrorist attacks “outright blackmail.”2
March 22 – Massacre in a Moscow concert hall leaves 133 dead. (That number may change.) The attack was claimed by ISIS-K. (Islamic State Khorasan refers to an old term for the region that included parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.)3
So we’re asking this question: Does this sequence of head-snapping events mean the strongman is weaker than he looks? Not so fast.
New York Times reporter Valerie Hopkins set out to investigate whether Mr. Putin’s supposed 86% approval rating had any basis in fact. Turns out, it does. In this episode of The Daily podcast, A Journey Through Putin’s Russia, she tells a more nuanced story of what’s going on inside The Russian Federation two years into their invasion of Ukraine.
[Before we dig into Ms. Hopkins’ reporting, let’s just reflect on what kind of grit it takes to be an American reporter in Russia right now. Her colleagues have been jailed for doing their jobs and she’s still there. Our hats are off to Ms. Hopkins.]
Her first reporting stop was a mall in Samara, Russia. Recall how Western brands fled Russia in 2022, partly due to conscience and partly due to sanctions. Coke, Starbucks, McDonalds, all these iconic brands beat feet away from Mr. Putin’s Russia. Predictably, the malls were devastated.
Not so today. Ms. Hopkins found a vibrant mall scene filled with new stores and lots of customers. Some of the new brands are knock-offs. For example, she tried the fake Coke named Dobry-Kola. (The name translates as “good cola.” Who says subtlety is dead?)
More troubling was the availability of Western brands, like Chanel, which are being imported via middlemen in China and Central Asia. She even interviewed a guy selling Apple products who claimed that he had the new iPhone three days after it released in the US.
Ms. Hopkins next visits a rural area, representative of the places from where Mr. Putin has drafted most of his soldiers for his Unnecessary War. Ovsyanka, known as Oatmeal, is a village of about 2500 people on the Yenisei River in south central Russia.
It was a collective farm back in the days of the Soviet Union. In some of the open fields, you can just see the remains of collapsed infrastructure, but the village of Ovsyanka itself provides almost no jobs. Mostly people are working in subsistence agriculture or hunting for scrap metal, doing odd jobs here and there…I mean, the place is really impoverished. Every year, it seems like there’s another suicide, which in a really small place takes its toll. It feels like a place with a lot of despair.
This setting is about as far as you can get from the guy in the mall selling Apple iPhones. What’s more, on the day she visited the Kadyrov family, their son’s body was being returned home. Vitya had been drafted into the “special military action” and was killed after only a few months.
She describes the military convoy delivering a sealed crimson casket to the family, the formal ceremony with military honors and a patriotic speech by the head of the district government. (The audio of this part is devastating.)
The people she interviews all repeat Putin’s messaging about the “special military action” in Ukraine. But she also reveals that there’s more than just patriotism at play here.
But there is another element in this too, which is something the family didn’t really speak about. And that’s the fact that men who often are not able to really provide very much for their families while they’re alive know that if they do die, their family can get somewhere up to $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 in compensation payments after their death. ..This is a place where presumably people are living on maybe the equivalent of a hundred, couple hundred dollars a month. So these salaries are an incredible boon.
You have to hand it to Mr. Putin, he knows all the angles.
If you started listening hoping to see a robust resistance, you’re going to be disappointed. However, there’s one final piece of her reporting which offers a ray of hope to those of us who look forward to Mr. Putin’s eventual comeuppance. She stays with the family into the evening and they start to open up.
I had this really surreal reporting experience. After this military honors ceremony, the crimson military-issued casket was actually brought into the house, where, according to local custom, Vitya was to spend one final night at home before being buried in a nearby cemetery. And as members of his family gathered around his coffin, they got into a debate actually about why he died.
The conversation she captures shows all is not as it seems on the surface. It’s hard to comprehend the bravery it must have taken to speak out against Mr. Putin’s lies to an American reporter.
The entire 30-minute podcast is well worth your time if only to offer a jolt of reality. Mr. Putin has put in place the internal security apparatus to oppress a nation of 140 million people over a land mass twice the size of America. More than 350,000 Russians have been killed or wounded in Ukraine4 since the start of the “special military action” and Putin has not paid a political price for it. Yet.
His propaganda persona is all about how he alone can keep Russia safe. While he’s sending thousands of soldiers to fight fabricated threats in Ukraine, actual threats—that he was warned about in advance—strike in the heart of Moscow.
It seems to us that ignoring the US warning about potential terrorist activity was pure hubris. As Ms. Hopkins points out, Mr. Putin is spinning a lot of plates to keep the wheels on the autocratic bus. How many other danger signs is he ignoring?
Covert Action is well past 250 reviews this week and there’s some real gems in the mix. Longtime reader and reviewer Mike Beason says:
A masterful description of the misleading cues world leaders may create to obtain their goals of global expansion. This book has spellbinding action from the first chapter. Traitors abound! Presidential politics in Russia and the US dictate bad decisions. But the Chinese are up to something...
Good to hear from you, Mike, and we’re glad to hear you enjoyed the ride.
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David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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