jducoeur

If you haven't seen it yet, I recommend reading through this memo, which purports to be leaked from an FSB analyst. It paints a fairly bleak picture of the Ukraine invasion as, essentially, a bureaucratic fuckup.

Is it real? It's hard to be sure (and there are certainly plenty of cynics saying it can't possibly be), but my current thinking is that it probably is. Some reasons why:

• In general, it sounds right. It's exactly the sort of blame-shifting memo I expect to see from a pissed-off middle manager (or an exceptionally brave IC) when things are going completely to hell, saying basically "this was incredibly stupid, and don't you dare blame us for it -- we were kept in the dark and were just following orders".

• The central gripe here is that the FSB was told that there would never actually be an invasion, but that they needed to produce an analysis showing that Russia could mount a successful blitzkrieg on Ukraine, as a negotiating tactic. So they did a perfunctory analysis, intended for propaganda rather than real planning, and were shocked when it actually got used. Which explains a lot about how half-assed the invasion has actually been.

• It somewhat obliquely alludes to a plan to claim that Ukraine was building a bomb, as an excuse that the invasion was necessary and simply self-defense. Which goes a long ways to explaining the somewhat mysterious focus on attacking nuclear power plants.

• It wanders off into odd but appropriate side-tracks. For example, it spends a while talking about the fact that this mess puts the Assad regime in danger. That has little propaganda value for a forgery -- but would be totally appropriate for an analyst who has spent much of the past several years thinking about how to support that regime.

So -- yeah, I suspect it's a real internal memo that got leaked. If so, it shows the whole war as basically what happens when the political yes-men have too much power: that they arranged things to tell Putin what he wanted to hear, with nobody actually thinking the whole thing through. Which isn't exactly comforting, except if you had been under the impression that the Russian government was being led by evil geniuses who were several steps ahead of everybody else...