Press
Russian propaganda dismisses US military aid to Kiev as meaningless. Weapons deliveries are apparently imminent.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov needed 47 seconds on Monday to downplay the new US aid package for Ukraine: “Fundamentally, the situation on the battlefield does not change anything. The Russian armed forces are improving their position.” This dynamic is absolutely understandable to everyone, the US money would only increase the casualties on the Ukrainian side.
Moscow is as confident of victory as ever, even though the US House of Representatives approved $61 billion for Ukraine after a five-month dispute. The confirmation by the Senate is considered a formality; the first containers with rockets and projectiles should already be ready for transport in Germany. But the Kremlin and its media are cheering as if they were going to Russia.
Russia reports that it has captured a “Leopard 2”.
Russia wins and wins, reports the Russian media. A “Leopard 2” was captured and the village of Bogdanowka was finally conquered. And people are celebrating the shooting down of a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter bomber, according to the state TV station Pyatij Kanal, the 591st enemy aircraft destroyed since the beginning of the “special war operation” – even though Ukraine already had fewer than 130 fighter planes back then.
The ATACMS missiles that the USA is now delivering to Ukraine “are like shotgun pellets for an elephant,” assures Moscow military expert Viktor Litovkin. ATACMS missiles with a range of up to 300 kilometers were certainly suitable for a strike against the Crimean bridge, which cost three billion euros.
But according to the portal “aif.ru”, the USA will spend at least 80 percent of the aid to Ukraine to restore its own weapons reserves. “Even the money that reaches Kiev has to be paid back,” says Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin. The USA is forcing Ukraine to wage war down to the last Ukrainian and to finally bury its own economy.
US film fits into the narrative
Nobody in Russia is discussing what consequences the delivery of new precision projectiles to the Ukrainian front-line troops in conjunction with the combat drones they are already using on a massive scale could have for their own spring offensive in Donbass. “Western experts agree that neither long-range missiles, aircraft, nor anything else can help the Ukrainian army,” the portal “life.ru” reports. It doesn’t provide any citations.
Russia’s political public functions like a propaganda brigade, striving at all costs to maintain its own narrative of the invincible Russian war machine slowly crushing all resistance. “It seems as if they are ready to turn all logic on its head,” says a liberal Moscow political scientist anonymously. Former President Dmitry Medvedev is already calling for a devastating civil war in the USA. Apparently Medvedev saw the US film “Civil War,” which is now showing in almost all Moscow cinemas, as “End of the Empire.”
The Russian media repeatedly quoted the “Global Times”. She wrote that Russia had the necessary resources to deliver the “final blow”. However, it is not mentioned that the “Global Times” is an English-language newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and that the author of this sentence is actually an Italian expert.
In contrast, the loyal press does not hear anything about the essay that the Chinese Russia political scientist Feng Yujun published in the “Economist”. And that Yujun believes Moscow’s defeat is inevitable. He cites the “information cocoon” into which Vladimir Putin fell due to his long dictatorship as one of the reasons. The Kremlin lacks reliable intelligence information and the state leadership works in a system that has no effective correction mechanism.
Due to the lack of open and controversial debates, the entire political public in Russia is probably suffering from the problem.