By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Vladimir Putin’s airborne forces have suffered heavy casualties after being thrown into battles better suited to heavier armoured infantry units, British defence chiefs said on Thursday.They stressed that the elite VDV, Russia’s airborne forces, had been involved in a number of “tactical failures” in Putin’s war in Ukraine.

As we suggested earlier Russia’s defense industry is going to feel a lot of pain from the invasion of Ukraine, officials believe. This includes Ben Wallace Britain’s defence secretary who two days ago said that Russia’s army is already “exhausted and broken.”

 

Propaganda and the re-invention of history

If a Ukrainian grandmother with pro-Russian views did not exist, it would be necessary to invent her, or at least that is what the Russian government decided in April. 

Anna Ivanova and her husband were located in a hospital in the city of Kharkiv. One day, mistaking a group of arriving Ukrainian soldiers for Russians, she took out an old Soviet flag and waved it vigorously to remind them of their shared past and try to deter them from destroying the village. Instead, the Ukrainian forces, outraged at the sight of the hammer-and-sickle, took the flag from her and trampled it.

Caught on video, the episode was “immediately” seized on by the Kremlin. She’s “Granny Anya,” as she was called, though she’s only 69, the same age as Putin, and was adopted as a potent symbol of support for Russia’s “special operation.” Here was living proof that the people “of Ukrain” were desperately waiting to be “liberated.” 

None of that matters, of course. In Moscow, Sergei Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s PR mastermind, a monument to Granny Anya was swiftly constructed and unveiled in Mariupol’s devastated port city. Her image has become ubiquitous in Russian war propaganda.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Anya Ivanova’s efforts, her own home was later damaged in a Russian mortar attack, and for some time, she and her husband were both in a hospital in Kharkiv. “It was miserable of Russia to attack us,” she said she recorded from her hospital bed in a statement. She and her husband have returned to their home village, Velikaya Danilovka.

 

The statue of babushka Anya in Mariupol:

 

Paradoxes of the Russian war

This war is full of paradoxes. Russian President Vladimir Putin insists he is fighting against a country overrun by Nazis, yet among the millions of Ukrainians who have fled the Russian advance were 78 Holocaust survivors who were evacuated, to Germany. Ninety-one-year-old Vanda Obyedkova survived the German occupation of Mariupol in World War II, only to die during the Russian siege of the city in 2022. In Kharkiv, 96-year-old Boris Romanchenko, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, was killed when a Russian shell hit his apartment building. During World War II, the Ukrainian soldier Ivan Lisun was one of the Soviet soldiers who helped liberate Belarus and Poland from the Nazis. His own Kharkiv region has been destroyed by the Russian army.

Granny Anya is a character from the Kremlin’s world of paradoxes, a world in which history itself has been turned inside out. As her story makes plain, after nearly three “months of deadly” violence, the Russian regime has struggled to find coherent, positive symbols for its “special operation” Ukraine’s. It has not captured any Nazis (although the Duma would like to present captured fighters of Ukraine's Azov Battalion as such) and has also failed to clarify for what it is doing. Instead, it has plunged an entire country Russia’s fantasy realm, where words and deeds have opposite meanings:  Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, for example, invented the concept of Orwell’sl fascism”; Maria Zakharova, the legendary Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, now reports that George Orwell’s 1984 was written about Western civilization. And now, the Putin regime faces a more daunting challenge still: how to imagine a victory out of a war that has brought the country to the brink of disaster.

 

National identity

Our world likely will be more fractious, more tumultuous, and more violent, so it is all the more important not to give up on the idea of the nation. They should recognize that, in truth, nothing makes the universalism of liberalism incompatible with a world of nation-states. 

For proof of the abiding importance of national identity, look no further than the trouble Russia has run into in attacking Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine did not have an identity separate from Russia and that the country would collapse immediately once his invasion began. Instead, Ukraine has resisted Russia tenaciously precisely because its citizens are loyal to the idea of an independent, liberal democratic Ukraine and do not want to live in a corrupt dictatorship imposed from without. With their bravery, they have made clear that citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only when those ideas are embedded in a country they can call their own.

 

Liberalisms Vacuum

Liberal societies struggle to present a positive vision of national identity to their citizens. The theory behind liberalism has great difficulties drawing clear boundaries around communities and explaining what is owed to people inside and outside those boundaries. This is because the theory is built on top of a claim of universalism. 

States with a delimited territorial jurisdiction remain critical political actors, because they are the only ones able to exercise a legitimate use of force. In today’s globalized world, power is employed by a wide variety of bodies, from multinational corporations to nonprofit groups to terrorist organizations to supranational bodies such as the European Union and the United Nations.

 

Putinism

The world has perhaps arrived at a similar point in human history: it has been free from large-scale interstate war for three-quarters of a century and has, in the meantime, seen a massive increase in global prosperity that has produced equally massive social change. The European Union was created as an antidote to the nationalism that had led to the world wars and in that respect has been successful beyond all hopes. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine augurs more disarray and violence ahead.

At this juncture, two very different futures present themselves. If Putin is successful in undermining Ukrainian independence and democracy, the world will return to an era of aggressive and intolerant nationalism reminiscent of the early twentieth century. The United States will not be immune from this trend, as populists such as Trump aspire to replicate Putin’s authoritarian ways. On the other hand, if  leads Russia into a debacle of military and economic failure, the chance remains to relearn the liberal lesson that power unconstrained by law leads to national disaster and to revive the ideals of a free and democratic world.

 

 

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