Putin's deadly 'hybrid' war ... Russian mothers burying their sons

Whilst, suddenly, Putin has decided,

".... that its state-owned gas giant Gazprom provide discounted gas to the struggling government in Ukraine", (Tomas Hirst : Business Insider UK : Mar. 31, 2015) (my emphasis)

he has also launched the next deadly phase of his 'hybrid' war against Ukraine.

As Maxim Tucker reports,

"Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, says Russia has entered into a new phase of its campaign to destabilise Ukraine, with the 22 February attack in Kharkiv just one of a series of bombings orchestrated by Russian spy services, the FSB and the GRU. “It starts with the FSB’s security centres 16 and 18, operating out of Skolkovo, Russia,” says Vitaliy Naida (left), head of the [Ukrainian] SBU department responsible for intercepting online traffic. “These centres are in charge of information warfare. They send out propaganda, false information via social media. Re-captioned images from Syria, war crimes from Serbia – they’re used to radicalise and then recruit Ukrainians.” (Newsweek : March 31, 2015) (my emphasis)

Putin's FSB and GRU are targeting,

“ ....  Kiev, Kharkiv, Dnipropretovsk, and Odessa, and all along the potential land corridor [between Russia and] Crimea – Mariupol, Kherson and Mykolaiv. The separatists need these cities. They know there is no chance for them to survive without the land corridor.” (ibid Maxim Tucker) (my emphasis)

And just as Putin has recently admitted in a documentary that Russian soldiers did, indeed, invade Ukrainian Crimea, so too is the truth now bubbling to the surface that Russians soldiers and generals are controlling the war in eastern Ukraine.

As Alec Luhn reports,

"For the past year, the Kremlin has strenuously denied that its troops are supporting pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine — but fighters on the ground are apparently no longer bothering to keep up the farce.
........
St. Petersburg native Dmitry Sapozhnikov (right), who went to Ukraine in October to fight alongside the rebels, told the BBC Russian service in a candid interview from Donetsk that Russian military units have played a decisive role in rebel advances, including the operations in February that led to the capture of the transport hub of Debaltseve. Russian officers directly command large military operations in eastern Ukraine, he noted." (Vice News : March 31, 2015)(my emphasis)

Furthermore, as Anna Dolgov (left) informs us,

"A report being prepared by supporters of slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (right) claims that Moscow has started discharging its soldiers from the army before sending them to Ukraine and then denying compensation to the families of men who were killed in order to cover up Russia's involvement in the conflict.

The report, which Nemtsov was working on before he was shot and killed in Moscow on Feb. 27, will be completed and published next month by his allies, the politician's friend and associate Ilya Yashin wrote on his Facebook page Monday.

"We have managed to communicate with people who were Nemtsov's sources," Yashin said. "They were very much afraid to speak while he was alive. The murder of Boris, as you understand, did not give them new courage, so they were reluctant to get in contact." (Moscow Times : Mar. 31 2015) (my emphasis)

But how long can Putin's propaganda machine continue to deceive the Russian people, especially as the the effects of the disastrous downturn in the Russian economy now affects their very daily lives?

Surely there will come a point when this 'drip-feed' of the truth about Putin's war with Ukraine, Russia's collapsing economy being due to his desperately protecting his kleptocratic 'siloviki' and fawning oligarchs, and the growing number of body-bags containing Russian soldiers that have fallen in eastern Ukraine being surreptitiously returned to their loved ones in Russia; surely there will come a 'tipping point' when the Russian people themselves will say, "Enough is enough"?

Putin, and his 'siloviki' in particular, must be aware that in today's electronic age there are limits to concealing the truth. A simple SMS is all that is needed for an event in Vladivostok to immediately be known to someone in Moscow. The younger Russian generation of today can be exposed to just so much nationalistic propaganda before they, themselves, tire of this electronic onslaught on their minds.

Putin cannot control the 'entire' electronic ether. And it is for this reason that many in the West are rapidly gearing up towards confronting Putin's propaganda onslaught against his own people.

Is it any wonder that at his first 'foreign policy' speech for a month, 

"[h]e told a meeting of his internal intelligence service, the FSB, on Thursday (26 March), that “they [the West] are using their entire arsenal of means for the so-called deterrence of Russia: from attempts at political isolation and economic pressure, to large-scale information war and special services operations”. (Andrew Rettman : EU Observer : Brussels, 27. March 2015) (my emphasis)

This, however, is not a 'war on the West' but rather Putin's call for an 'information war' to control the minds of the Russian people themselves.

As stated in yesterday's blog-entry,

Oleg Kalugin (left) best  sums up this current strategy of Putin as follows;

"Nikolai Patrushev was my subordinate for years in Leningrad. One day he brought a report about one dissident in his district and said, We must take care of him, maybe arrest him. I said, Why? Give me the case. I read the file of this man, and it showed that he was honest about the lack of food, long lines you have to stand in for food, the bureaucracy of the Soviet party and government institutions. When Patrushev brought it, I said, Why do we have to put him in jail? What is this case? Patrushevs first desire was to put the guy in jail because he would spread his discontent and unhappiness among his friends and colleagues and that was dangerous."(Foreign Policy : July 25, 2007) my emphasis)

The current falling price of oil, the tumbling rouble, the rising food prices, rising inflation, and the horrendous interest rates on loans; these are the equivalent of the reasons of that honest man that Patrushev wanted to jail during Soviet times.

Today, however, that same honest dissident need not move out of his flat to inform his friends and colleagues of the corruption of the Putin regime that he may personally experience. Nor about the funerals of Russian soldiers who have fallen in eastern Ukraine that a neighbour may tell him about.   
Already Russian soldiers themselves are exposing the facts about their fallen comrades in eastern Ukraine. Thus how much longer can Putin lie to the Russian people, no matter how much he tries to wrap up such lies in the cloak of 'nationalist fervour' or modern techniques of propaganda.

Photo of cemetery near Rostov where, according to users of social networks, the Russian soldiers who were lost on Donbass are buried. Tens anonymous burials are designated by plates "Surgical waste".Photo: informator.su

(to be continued)