Desperate bluffing by Putin

This post will come replete with major caveats in due course, but let's start with the headline.  Vladimir Putin is bluffing like crazy over the inevitability of his victory, and will continue doing so for the next three months (until after the upcoming "elections") against the seemingly slender hope that Trump will somehow ride to his rescue and force Ukraine to accept something that can be portrayed as "victory" for Russia.  Given that use of nukes is off the table, bluffing plus outright airborne slaughter in Kyiv are practically all he has left.

To sum up:

• the Russian 2026 "spring-summer offensive" has yielded miniscule net[1] territorial gains at the cost of phenomenal Russian casualties.  All objectives remain unmet.
• counting from the front line to St Petersburg and beyond, the Ukrainian medium- and deep-strike campaign, notably on oil and logistics assets, has: seriously incommoded Russian forces at the front (supplies must be brought up by drone and on foot); paralysed transport on major roads in the occupied territories, with critical shortages of fuel - & water - in Donetsk, and Crimea almost under siege; made significant dents in manufacturing facilities of the Russian industrial-military complex across a very wide swathe of the country; seriously hampered telecomms and air movements across western Russia; wreaked colossal damage on the oil industry, with severe shortages resulting (and forcing large-scale imports from Belarus, India and other nations) that must soon have significant inflationary, industrial and food-production consequences; via vast palls of black smoke over Moscow and St Petersburg, demonstrated vividly and demeaningly to the populace that nowhere is safe from highly accurate drone and missile bombardment.
• having thus far failed miserably in the planned effort to censor the internet in Chinese style, Putin faces a populace that can see all this quite clearly.  Not withstanding the existence of some loyalist diehards that will cling to Putin's infallibility as they did to Stalin's, the greater part of the people, realistic cynics as most Russians are, have clocked it all as being at the very least, not at all what they were sold back in 2022, but in fact starting to impinge on them directly.  To call this "unrest" would be to misunderstand how Russia has always been: but it's a near equivalent.
• the economy is in a bad way, and short term relief from Iran-war oil prices has been overtaken by those prices falling back again PLUS the abovementioned actual shortage of oil products.

There are very big decisions pending for after those elections, in two categories:

1. the economy: if nothing changes, really deep measures will be needed;
2. manpower: if Putin decides to soldier on, even just to the extent of trying to capture the rest of the Donbass (and his stated territorial goals extend a lot further than that), he'll need a very large intake of new conscripts - perhaps a million.

So: given that's all 3 months away, during which time Putin doubtless feels he can (just about) maintain a facade of BAU, he sees little downside to giving the Trump card one last play.  Look, we're advancing on all fronts - let me lend you this magnifying glass - and can carry on like this forever!  Get that clown to surrender, now - and cash in your Nobel Prize voucher!!  Yeah, right.  Even Witless-Dumkopf, even Trump himself, have probably spotted the flaws in that line of reasoning.

One other thing, before the caveats.  L'il Volodya also shows signs of losing it a bit.  It's always necessary to enter notes of caution here because he's been written off as a dying man for years.  But in a very high-profile set-piece "interview" he gave recently, he dropped a real Biden of a clanger and declared Ukrainian troops in a town deep inside Russia were only 2 km away from being totally surrounded.  He was obviously mistaking it for some tiny Ukrainian settlement he'd been briefed about but forgotten the name of - commentators have made various guesses because it's not entirely obvious which.  But this in the full glare of prime time Russian TV.  Not a helpful incident.

And the caveats?  It's basically the usual one, with a specific twist.  It's always wise to assume that there is no limit to the suffering that can be imposed on the Russian people, however cynical they may be.  That's one manifestation of "the mysterious Russian soul"[2] that they are so proud of.  And I doubt there are any moral limits to the extent Putin is willing to exploit that, even if there might be some political constraints in an internet age.  So my opening list of how bad things are in Russia needs to be considered in that light.  BUT it cuts both ways: Ukrainians are equally able to take it, as they've proved heroically for over four years in defiance of almost all expectations.  Are they crumbling in the next 3 months?  No, they ain't.  And of course they have the tremendous backstop of EU / UK funding, without which it would have all been up for them some while ago.

The special twist is this: all the evidence points to Putin not knowing in detail what's actually happening.  He uses neither mobile phone nor laptop.  The military accounts he receives are just the icing on the mighty traditional Russian layer-cake of filing "beautiful reports" at every stage along the chain; and we can probably assume the economic and industrial reports he gets are similarly sugared.  It's only occasionally that hard facts seem to get through to him.  This all makes it even more likely that he'll play the game of attrition by infinite suffering.  Scary stuff.

There is one last fallback for Putin - China: because we all assume Xi won't let him "actually lose the war".  But Xi also serves as a restraining influence: he's ruled out nukes in no uncertain terms; and note how the 2024 experiment using 10,000 North Korean troops in front-line roles quietly came to an end without being scaled up, or even just continued. 

And "actually losing the war" may not be a relevant criterion: look how badly things have become for Putin with China notionally having his back!  I don't think he'll be getting any change from the Donald either just now: a(nother) failed "peace process" is the last thing Trump needs before the mid-terms.  

ND

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[1] 'Net', because Ukraine has been successfully counter-attacking on a couple of fronts and re-seized territory of its own.

[2] Here's some more of my attempts to illuminate these big cultural differences. 

"Manchesterism" - seems like we've been here before

 ... and it didn't end well.

"Manchesterism" - not to be confused with Manchester Liberalism - is intended to mean something easily grasped for political purposes: greater interventionism at the civic level.  This is supposed, a priori, to have obvious benefits yielding excellent results.  Well, maybe, sometimes.  The ideal degree of devolution is as long as a piece of string: how many Scots feel their once vaunted education system, or the Welsh their vaunted health service, have benefitted from greater devolved control?  Objectively, the results suggest otherwise.  And the ludicrous Rebecca Long-Bailey's equally ludicrous 2019 Labour manifesto plans for ultra-devolution of the energy industry (down to the level of units of "around 200 households" owning their own local energy infrastructure) provide the reductio ad absurdum of 

And there are reasons to think that Burnham's model isn't what it's thought to be: that he's basically encouraged commercial property development on a significant scale, which can't easily be replicated across the nations.  A glance at the pages of every issue of Private Eye and its years-long revelations of naked, industrial-scale corruption on Teesside for the personal benefit of a very small number of individuals, shows that local devolved powers can end up being shockingly abused. 

But there's another factor.  Remember how Neville Chamberlain came to Westminster as the dynastic hereditary king of Birmingham, with municipalism in that other great city as his calling card.  He didn't do so well in the corridors of Whitehall - or of Bad Godersberg and Munich (notwithstanding some recent revisionist versions of events there).  Maybe in other nations there is a wothwhile tradition of fine presidents and prime ministers coming up the local government / Big City Mayoral route.  But not around these parts. 

Do we see any signs that Andy is up to the bigger job?  Municipalism is not enough, Mr Burnham.  

ND

Starmer goes "with good grace"? We'll be the judges ...

And so it came to pass.  Suddenly, all the fight went out of him.

"I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party ... and I accept that answer with good grace."

Oh, really?  Let us be the judges of that.  If I were a gullible Labour leftie who'd had higher hopes back in 2020, I'd be fairly bitter.  Andy "novelty factor" Burnham will be having all those hopes projected on him now.  Good luck with that.  I guess he's at least got the advantage that hopes will be set rather lower now.  "Hope he doesn't accept too many freebies ...";  "Maybe he believes in something ...".

Spare a thought for Sadiq Khan, who "paid tribute to Sir Keir Starmer as 'a man of great integrity' ".  Well, it takes one to know one: pardon me while I mop up this pool of spilled tea.  Oh, tragedy: this moment should surely have been Sadiq's - how he's been trying to figure out how he could do a Burnham before Burnham himself pulled it off.  So now he'll have to wait for another mainstream Labour meltdown.  If the Tories are the model for modern British politics, that'll be along as soon as the latest lettuce wilts.  Early GE, anyone?

That said, I'm not sure Khan looks terribly well just now.  Let's charitably blame the new haircut.  Now, about that critical upcoming NATO summit next month ... what's your foreign policy, Andy?  And defence spending?  They are all looking at you.

ND

Hattersley: a disarmingly honest old hypocrite

Well the tub of lard** lasted a lot longer than the lettuce, but now Roy Hattersley's gone.

Over the years he's come to our attention before, and BTL on the previous post one of our Anon's gave us two of Roy's fine pieces of cheery hypocrisy, both from the Grauniad.  Another gem worth recalling is something he wrote in his long-running Diary in the same newspaper:

I do not believe that there are young women who get themselves pregnant to qualify for a council house.  And even if I am wrong about this, it it to my credit that I don't believe it.

He knew he was in the wrong, but unlike most of these left-ish rogues, he didn't mind admitting it.   Refreshing, in its own way, I suppose.

ND

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** Oddly, that episode of HIGNFY seems to have been expunged from the www

Hockney - a true master

With the passing of David Hockney we have lost something precious: a master of his work.  I tend to think there are three pre-requisites for genuine artistry: that the artist should first be a complete master of the technicalities - craft before art; that they should have a fine eye (or ear) for abstraction; and boundless productivity.  Some might say that Vermeer provides a counter-example to the third of these, but I'd say that's a rarity.

Hockney had it all.   His output was legendary, of course: and his technical skills were that of an outright genius.  I recall a small, simple drawing he made of a muddy lane, and you could tell that what one was looking at was the indentations in the soft ground of where a pile of logs had been resting until recently at the roadside.  As if one was there. This is extraordinary stuff.

Crayon sketch: I did this - in homage - 50 years ago

The quick Guardian obit refers to "his fascination with perspective" but I don't think that's quite right.  Mere perspective is old hat: it was a fascination with depth, and how it can be conveyed in two-dimensional media - and in this, he was truly a revolutionary, going way beyond other depth-masters (Monet comes first to mind) in finding new ways to convey what all sighted people with two eyes experience all the time.  In particular, he worked on depth in its 4 dimensions, finding tech-facilitated ways to capture and portray the temporal aspect that always arises, because we can often only perceive depth by changing our point of view over an interval of time.   

His extremely well thought-out views on abstraction are important, too: and the accuracy of his eye in this regard was never in doubt.  In terms of mastery, abstraction and output he was the equal of Picasso (possibly also as innovator), though to different effect as he never really sought to go beyond the figurative.  He knew, though, as every good photographer does, that abstraction is at the heart of figurative representation.

ND