Vladimir Putin Loves Anniversaries
By Today, several Russian news outlets published a story of Russia’s victory in Ukraine.
There have been a number of signs that Russia is working on a timetable, perhaps since as long ago as last November, when CIA Director William Burns told Vladimir Putin that the United States knew he was planning war against Ukraine.
The United States and Britain then went ahead with an information offensive, predicting that Russia would fake provocations for a war with Ukraine. The information offensive ramped up as Russia massed troops around Ukraine. It’s not possible to tell how much of an effect the offensive had on Putin’s timetable, but a number of attempts at provocation, both verbal and physical, failed to convince anyone outside Russia that a war was justified.
Putin then called a meeting of his security council on February 21 and followed it with an emotional speech declaring Russia’s recognition of the occupied Luhansk and Donetsk regions. He declared war on February 24. Observation of watches on the wrists of people in those meetings and the fact that Putin’s clothes were the same in the February 21 and 24 videos suggested that all of them were recorded earlier on February 21.
The war began the next day with attacks primarily aimed at airfields. Control of airspace is generally a first step in an invasion. The ground invasion began the day after, before Russia controlled the airfields. Rumors began to appear on social media that Putin wanted a victory by the weekend.
That, of course, was an absurd expectation, especially since the war was not going well for Russia. Units were outrunning their supply lines, and vehicles were running out of gas.
A possible reason for a weekend deadline was given by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
On that anniversary, Putin would have loved to have congratulated his puppet President of Ukraine on the unification of Crimea with what Putin would call a Ukraine freed from Western and Nazi domination. It’s possible that the US/UK information offensive slowed things down enough to make that deadline impossible.
Over the weekend, the deadline was moved to Monday (today), when those victory articles were erroneously published. Were they put on auto-publish? It looks like the Russians have done this before.
Expecting a quick end to the war is consistent with a number of things Putin has said. I’ll present them in a future post. Others have noted that Putin’s actions and the way the war is being conducted are consistent with a timetable.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner