You have already read on NEWS 24/7 about how Vladimir Putin made a living, the art of deception. He also made it a career, as can be seen with what he is pursuing, through what he is doing in Ukraine. Professor of history at Yale University (the university he attended) and permanent fellow at the Institute for the Humanities in Vienna, Timothy Snyder explains that his behavior has roots in the traditional Soviet art called maskirovka. Or else the Russian military doctrine of disguise, of military deception.
He also informs that there is a possibility that Putin is "lost" in his habits and cannot correctly interpret what is really happening in the world that exists outside of Russia.
The author of eight books on the history of Ukraine, Russia and the Soviet Union (he has won numerous awards for his works that have been translated into forty languages) writes in the article published by the Atlantic that “Vladimir Putin likes to connect the current Russian Federation, with the old Russian empire. And in a sense, he's right. The Russian Empire was the most constitutional state of its time, with the most sophisticated police force:the Okhrana ".
Fact: the Okhrana was the secret service of the Russian tsars and was created after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. For more than 30 years, its members infiltrated, monitored, censored and arrested groups considered terrorists or left-wing rebels and destabilize the nation or threaten the authoritarian rule of the Russian Empire.
As Britannica reports, the main modus operandi was through the infiltration of labor unions, political parties and - in at least two cases - newspapers:policemen were editors of the Marxist magazines Nachalo and Pravda. The organization was abolished after the February Revolution of 1917 (caused the end of the Russian Empire and the Romanov dynasty).
'No one is ever innocent' and the first deception
Snyder continues, stating that “Russian revolutionaries, men and women, who founded the Soviet state were trained in Okhrana methods that did not simply persecute them, but often unwittingly put them into a complex dance of partner-blame. their. He specialized in challenges and knew how to make enemies do all the work for them. Intelligence's job is to find things. Counterintelligence's job is to make intelligence work difficult.
On the far fringes of counterintelligence are businesses designed not just to confuse the world but to change it. In Russian, the word for Russian military fraud is maskirovka, while of course there is also the well-known provokatsiia.
TheBolshevik state security apparatus, the Cheka took action and expanded the Okhrana's methods. Communist ideology gave them new life. No one was ever innocent. All were connected to the class struggle in one way or another. The exploitation of people (so that they turn against each other) was justified.
Tradition and ideology aside, Soviet institutions were superior to their counterparts in the West. In the early 1920s, when the Soviet state was vulnerable to external pressures, the Cheka 'ran' an operation called 'Trust'. Her agents went abroad and presented themselves as members of a conspiratorial organization operating within the USSR. They convinced the European intelligence services that they could 'bring down' the Soviet empire and that all they needed was money.
This discouraged European states from entering the Soviet Union, at a time when intervention could have made a difference, and secured money to supplement the Cheka's budget" .
What made the NKVD more effective than the Gestapo
"During World War II, the NKVD (Naródnyy Kómissariát Vnútrennikh Del - the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, as the state police of the Soviet Union was then known) was even more famous than the Gestapo.
After the joint German-Soviet invasion of 1939, Poland was divided between the two powers and its territory became a kind of natural experiment.
When the Gestapo led and made an arrest, then tortured and killed. Thus the Polish resistance continued. When the NKVD made an arrest, it would make the arrestee its own (change his mind) and send him back as an agent. Thus, there was no Polish resistance, since quite a few groups were formed that operated underground and basically did whatever the Soviet power wanted. Only then were they all arrested or taken to the Gulag or executed.
The story was more or less the same during the Cold War. If there was an intelligence competition then, the Americans would be out of luck. Like Europeans before them, Americans lacked the instinctual paranoia, compulsive creativity, and years of practice needed to figure out the challenges.
That said, the habit of maskirovka (or deception) had tragic consequences. If all one does is provoke, then all one sees - that someone - is the challenge. When Stalin's policy of collectivization led to mass starvation in Soviet Ukraine, he blamed Polish intelligence. Which was ridiculous, yet people believed him.
Writer Arthur Koestler believed in propaganda, to the extent that he believed hungry peasants with bloated bellies were provocateurs.
One reason why Soviet trial shows in the 1930s were possible was that the stories told about the accused - which were completely improbable - could fit into a world of mirrors, where everyone used to be suspicious of anything that looked likereality .
During the purges, the aim was to 'unmask' people against whom there was no evidence, in the traditional sense of the term. It was a way of thinking that makes sense when maskirovka becomes a way of life" .
Stalin's tradition that Putin "inherited"
"Stalin was so used to overthinking reality that he could miss its essential points. By the spring of 1941, it was clear that Germany was preparing to betray its Soviet ally and invade. The German troops were massing on the common border, in the middle of occupied Poland, while Stalin had received more than 100 intelligence warnings.
He ignored them all and preferred to interpret their content as evidence of the British provocation - designed to create discord between the Soviets and the Germans. It was a mistake that cost millions of lives.
Former KGB officer Vladimir Putin is an heir to this tradition. He was a complete unknown when he was chosen to succeed Boris Yeltsin in August 1999. His approval rating was at 2%. A month later, a series of bombs exploded in Russian cities and Putin was quick to blame the attacks on Chechen terrorists. Not by chance:this is how he laid the groundwork for the war aimed at subduing the breakaway region of Chechnya. The next day his acceptance rate was at 45%.
By the way, he had not presented the slightest evidence to prove his claims.
At the same time, there was evidence that it was the work of the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti - State Security Committee). In one city, agents of the commission known today as the FSB (Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti -Federal Security Service) were arrested, suspected by their colleagues. As history unfolds, Putin won the presidential election in March 2000. He's been with us ever since. ".
What did Putin check in 2014
"Technological developments of the 21st century have helped Putin's cause immensely. Thanks to social media, his invasion of Ukraine in 2014 became the triumph of the postmodern challenge. If you're on the left, you'd hear that Ukraine is Nazi. . If you're on the right, you'd be told they were gay. If you're on the extreme right, you'd find out they're Jewish.
Such stories did not allow the people of the West to see the simple truth:one country had invaded another and occupied its territory, killing people and driving others into exile.
Buoyed by the success of what happened in Ukraine, Russia applied the same techniques to Brexit and the US presidential election. The results were also the same. Facebook users in Great Britain or the USA were trading with others of those they believed to be 'opposite' them and taking actions that - unbeknownst to them - served a hidden purpose:digital maskirovka.
The invasion of 2014 was also rich in traditional type challenges. After seizing Crimea in February of that year, Russia sent special forces to eight more Ukrainian regions to wage an irregular war.
A month later, Putin let slip what he had planned when he said “let's see these Ukrainian troops, trying to shoot their own people, with us behind them - not in front of them. Let them try to shoot women and children ".
On July 5, 2014, Russian special forces withdrew to Donetsk. Six days later, the Russian army began shelling the Ukrainian army, from the Russian side of the border. The Ukrainians could not respond, because of the international public opinion that Putin had "teased" and would accuse them of escalating the tension. They could, however, attack the Russian troops that were in Donetsk. And that was the point of it all. "I am responsible for the shelling of Donetsk," Russian general Igor Girkin was heard to say. Having provoked the Ukrainian army to bomb a Ukrainian city, Russia recruited more among those who suffered and blamed all Ukrainians.
It is expected that he will do something similar now.
Provocation can become a prerequisite for action. Putin has massed Russian forces on the Ukrainian border, but so far he has not shared a story with the Russians to explain why he would invade.
The Russians appear not to believe that an invasion is in the offing, and there is little sign that they would support such a move - as long as their own side is the aggressor. This creates a given weakness:if Putin really wants to invade, he will have to give the world an effective illusion before initiating the proceedings. One that will allow the Russians to think that something else is going on - beyond the war of hostility" .
Perhaps mobilization (rather than invasion) serves to disorient us
"No one knows what Putin will really do. Or why he will do it. He may be lost in his personal myth of reuniting Russia with Ukraine and imagining that he will actually gain immortality if he invades his neighbors with the logic that they are brothers of the Russians - and therefore need a strong reminder of this brotherhood.
Anyone can imagine how this overwhelming naivety perfectly fits a career full of challenges. Whatever happens, the habit of provocation may make it more difficult for Putin to 'read' the outside world. Just because you live in a house full of mirrors doesn't mean you can find the way out.
Regardless of whether or not there is a war, Americans must remember that challenge is part of what is happening and that challenges have different levels. The Biden Administration resisted the most obvious, which was to make concessions under the weight of psychological pressure. He has also had unprecedented success in pointing out the Russian provocation scenarios in Donbas and thus making it more difficult for them to be effective.
This deprived the Russians of the tactical advantage and avenues they would have used for propaganda. The creativity and historical awareness of the Biden Administration has made the war more costly for Russia. Of course, there may be another level to consider:how the mobilization (rather than the invasion) is meant to distract us from something else ".