blind leading blind graphic cliff
© Aleutie/iStockThe Herd
Propaganda and outright disinformation continue to masquerade as 'Russia analysis' across the West and Ukraine. This is proving fatal for Western policy and the survival of the Ukrainian state. For example, in summer 2023 Michael McFaul tweeted "Ukraine is winning". Now: "Russia is not 'winning' in Ukraine. In the last year, Putin has sent to be slaughtered tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and tons of equipment all to take 2 villages. Ukraine is enduring losses too, but Russia is not achieving major victories". McFaul's claim that over the last year Russia has taken only "2 villages" is a bald-faced lie or the product of unbounded ignorance.

McFaul here is calling Bakhmut and Avdeevka 'villages'. These have been the loci of Russia's two most important offensive victories over that last year; its most important defensive victory was the defeat of Ukraine's summer 2023 counteroffensive — an endeavour doomed from the start precisely because of the inaccuracies and falsehoods being purveyed as military, political, and economic strategic analysis in the West. Bakhmut, for example, had a pre-war population of 76,000, and the latter — 32,000. These population sizes are not those of villages but of small towns, as any third-grader would know. Moreover, Bakhmut was an important transport hub, in particular for moving troops between north and south Donbass and eastern Ukraine, and Avdeevka was the most powerful Ukrainian stronghold in Donbass and eastern Ukraine, reinforced for over eight years since the Donbass civil war began. It was a key centre for ultranationalist and neofascist Ukrainian units, which routinely fired on civilian centres in pro-Russian Donetsk. Its fall opens the way for a Russian march to the Dnepr River over the next year or so. Villages never have such strategic significance.

Moreover still, since the end of Ukraine's defeated summer 2023 counteroffensive, Russia has taken more than ten villages in the Donetsk sector alone. In the week before McFaul's tweet alone, Russia took three villages in whole (Lastochkino, Severnoe, and Petrovskoe) and several more partially, including what is really a small town, Orlovka. Since then more villages have fallen west of Bakhmut and Avdeevka.

McFaul
© Reuters / Maxim ShemetovFormer US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul
With political scientists and national security advisors like this, who needs idiots? This scale of distortion is what McFaul would call 'misinformation', disinformation' and 'lies' if Putin or any Russian and American who disagreed with him engaged in it. Indeed, McFaul has been deeply involved in US government/academia efforts to expose pro-Russian misinformation, much of which is not misinformation but facts of the kind I have presented herein — facts that are inconvenient for the US government's effort to counter Putin's 'unprovoked, brutal' war 'against Ukraine.' McFaul's tweet sought to buttress Americans' declining support for the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, even as Ukrainians' support for its continuation falls, and is now supported by a minority of Ukrainians,.

Similarly to McFaul's faulty effort, two somewhat more objective observers recently commented on the supposed lack of Russian progress in the war: "The absence of decisive battlefield outcomes over the past two years has made the alternative to a negotiated end (one side's absolute victory) seem like a fantasy".

Even in economics the gap between Western 'knowledge' and Russian reality is cavernous. For example, in April 2022, the World Bank forecast that the Russian economy would shrink by 11.2% in 2022. Reality was 2.5 percent contraction. The Russian economy will "die by winter" 2022 because of the "catastrophic consequences" of the military mobilization, pro-Western Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev warned in autumn 2022. In the interim between then and now Russia bypassed Germany as the world's fifth most powerful economy by purchasing power parity. Beware of prognostications from those dubbed as 'top Russian economists' by Western magazines.

All these smaller distortions are a product of observers feeling the need to one extent or another to serve a particular master, upon whom their careers and pay checks depend: the US government, NATO, CIA, MI6, and so on. Hence the ubiquitous use of propaganda terms such as 'Putin's unprovoked, brutal war against Ukraine' and the vigilant omission of all the Western actions over three decades that provoked this war. No one in Western mainstream media will reveal in an overall sense that this war — what Putin calls a 'special military operation — is actually a war for and against NATO expansion. This is a NATO-Russia Ukrainian war — a war fought between Russia and NATO, each in part using proxies in the form of the Ukraine's breakaway regions, the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples' Republics, in the case of the former and Ukraine in the case of NATO.

Failure and deception is ubiquitous across the Russia-observing community in the U.S. and the West whether one is talking about media, academia, or think tank communities. Issues such as those mentioned above are not difficult to assess in a far more accurate way. Such 'analyses' and forecasts do not require undertaking the greater challenges of discerning what is in a politician's head at any particular time or the outcome of distant events. They require simply gathering facts (research) and then conducting objective analysis of them. Often the failures and falsehoods are a function of incomplete research, but more often than not these days they are a function of enormous biases and wishful thinking, which misdirect research and undermine objective analysis, or outright state-directed misinformation. Beware.

In this case we see people holding important positions of responsibility in forming public opinion intentionally misleading the American people. They do this in order to ensure that the American people continue support NATO's war effort in Ukraine and rejection of negotiations with Moscow regarding Ukraine and the future of European, Russian, and Eurasian security. This means continuation of a failing and inevitably failed war effort against Russia at the least and a potential still unmade decision to have NATO enter the war in full force. This, in turn, means supporting the continuation of the slaughter of the Ukrainians and Russians and possibly many others, should NATO enter the war. These are fools' errands, adding to previous ones — chief among them being NATO Expansion — that turned Russia against democracy and the West, gave rebirth to Russia's security, provoked Russia's invasion of Ukraine. US foreign policy and Western global policies, now running into a series of catastrophes, have too long been driven by an excessive number of ambitious, cynical fools in American government, academia, and media. This persists to our great peril.
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost': Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the "New Cold War" (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia's Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia's Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.