"Supreme Excellence In Warfare Is To Break Your Opponent's Will To Resist Without Fighting" - Sun Tzu
And Vladimir Putin has been very successful in this, in his use of influential media figures in the US and abroad, to convince opponents that they cannot possibly win against his forces ...
when those forces have been steadily losing ground for the past two years, and have been limited to minor gains and losses on either side of a defensive line, far away from the totality of the territories that he has claimed for his hegemony; whose naval forces have been driven from their bases in Crimea to a base on the other side of the Black Sea, and which cannot risk exposure on the high seas without significant risk of loss; whose air forces have suffered significant and costly losses, including the loss of nearly half of his AWACS capability, and a significant portion of offensive aircraft, fighter jets and helicopters, such that he has been forced to suspend their operations over Ukraine and adjoining territories. And Ukraine has lately been targeting Russia’s refineries, its fuel storage facilities, and other vital logistics, without which Russia cannot project force, much less win or even hold its territorial gains, effectively enough so that President Joe Biden has told Ukraine to stop, because it is interfering with his Presidential campaign.
This is not the picture of military victory, it’s a series of resounding defeats, but Putin’s information warfare, his propaganda, has painted quite the different picture. Ukraine has been able to keep going with the donations of surplus military hardware from its allies - which gave Ukraine an assurance that its 1991 borders would be defended, an assurance sufficient to induce Ukraine to surrender its nuclear weapons, the presence of which would have deterred Putin’s aggression - and Ukraine has been able to fight off Putin’s aggression but not win, because of limitations placed on the range and usage of this military hardware, much of it destined for (or rescued from) the junkyard.
And Putin realizes that the only way he can possibly win is to break the will of Ukraine’s allies to continue to supply Ukraine with these weapons, and with the support of useful fools (like Tucker Carlson, Scott Ritter, Colonel MacGregor, and others) he’s been able to do this in large part. He’s convinced many Republicans in the Congress that Ukraine “cannot possibly win” because of “Russia’s military might” - which simply flies in the face of facts which can easily be found on the internet with a cursory search.
“Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West - and will likely lose - if the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin. The West’s existing and latent capability dwarfs that of Russia. The combined gross domestic product (GDP) of NATO countries, non-NATO European Union states, and our Asian allies is over $63 trillion.[1] The Russian GDP is on the close order of $1.9 trillion. Iran and North Korea add little in terms of materiel support. China is enabling Russia, but it is not mobilized on behalf of Russia and is unlikely to do so. If we lean in and surge, Russia loses.
The notion that the war is unwinnable because of Russia’s dominance is a Russian information operation, which gives us a glimpse of the Kremlin’s real strategy and only real hope of success. The Kremlin must get the United States to the sidelines, allowing Russia to fight Ukraine in isolation and then proceed to Moscow’s next targets, which Russia will also seek to isolate. The Kremlin needs the United States to choose inaction and embrace the false inevitability that Russia will prevail in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s center of gravity is his ability to shape the will and decisions of the West, Ukraine, and Russia itself. The Russian strategy that matters most, therefore, is not Moscow’s warfighting strategy, but rather the Kremlin’s strategy to cause us to see the world as it wishes us to see it and make decisions in that Kremlin-generated alternative reality that will allow Russia to win in the real world.” https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/denying-russia%E2%80%99s-only-strategy-success
Here - look at this map - from today - which hasn’t changed more than ten miles either side of a line in the past 20 months:
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-29-2024
The above map doesn’t show a “blitzkrieg”, it shows an incompetent and weak military whose best efforts have allowed it to hold ground, at the expense of billions of dollars worth of hardware and hundreds of thousands of lives. Putin is destroying his own country, more and more of his people are recognizing that, and are doing what they can, in a police state with total surveillance. The only war Putin can win by his direct efforts now is his war against his own people, the only way he can win against Ukraine is to con the West into shirking its duties towards Ukraine - those security assurances - and stop the flow of weapons and ammunition.
At its roots, this is a war of perceptions - after all, as Sun Tzu said, millennia ago: “supreme excellence in warfare is to break the opponent’s will to resist without fighting.” It’s much cheaper and a lot less risk of harm to use words to manipulate one’s opponents’ perceptions so that they will stop fighting or supporting their allies, people with whom they have created an interdependent relationship, and people with reasonable expectations of continued support. Right now, it’s like the old joke: “A conservative sees a drowning man 12 feet away, throws him six feet of rope and expects him to swim for it, while a liberal throws 15 feet of rope and walks away to do another good deed.”
“Perception manipulation is a key element of Putin’s offset strategy – a way to achieve goals beyond the limits of Russia’s power. In 2020 ISW assessed that Putin’s center of gravity is increasingly his ability to shape perceptions of others and project the image of a powerful Russia based on limited real power. We wrote: “The Kremlin often generates gains based on perception without changing Russia’s capabilities. These gains emerge at the nexus of the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate perceptions and the West’s inherent blind spots about Russia’s intent and capabilities. Minimizing the West’s perception of its own leverage over Russia is a core component of this effort.”
The Kremlin depends on this strategy in Ukraine. Russia does not have sufficient military capability to achieve its maximalist objectives if Ukraine’s will to fight persists alongside Western support. Degrading US decision making is one of the few, possibly the only way, to narrow the gap between Russia’s goals and means in Ukraine.
Russia uses perception manipulation to advance its interests globally. Information operations have been a key part of the Kremlin’s toolkit for decades. Russia’s national security paradigm shifted heavily toward the information space after 2014, however, as a recognition of the increasingly vital requirement to shape global perceptions to advance Russia’s goals. The Kremlin has been working to create an environment that would simply accept Russian premises. If the world accepts that Russia can do whatever it wants within its self-declared sphere of influence, Russia will need fewer sticks and carrots to impose its will on its neighbors. Or, for example, if the Kremlin succeeds in creating conditions in which NATO is forced to abandon its principles, such as Article 5 or the Open Door Policy, Putin would have succeeded at his goal of breaking NATO.” https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/denying-russia%E2%80%99s-only-strategy-success
What I hear and see in putatively conservative media in the US for the past 18 months has not ceased to amaze me. The information to destroy Russia’s case - and that of people like Carlson and MacGregor - is out in plain sight. This isn’t some kind of deep mystery, the product of arcane knowledge, it should be plain and simple to anyone who can read text and read a map. Original sources, close to the action, are extremely important, they allow people to determine whether they’re being conned or lied to. Most media designed to appeal to a general audience that I’ve seen - on both sides, liberal and conservative - tend to hide or obscure information sources, making it nearly impossible to evaluate the truth of the statements made. And if you do a search on the net with a key phrase from an article or video, you’ll see that content repeated verbatim all over the place, a cheap way to generate clickbait content - and a very useful weapon which can be used by governments who wish us ill and to con us into giving them something valuable for free. It’s hard work to chase a story down to its sources, but it’s useful, because it allows you to figure out how much you can trust a source - if you should trust that source at all. And with the firehose of information we get every day, that’s a very useful filter.