Kremlin’s Use of Veterans with Criminal Pasts and PTSD as Teachers in Regular Russian Schools Backfiring

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 18 – Having failed to get even the United Russia Party to agree to push veterans of Putin’s war in Ukraine into political office, the Kremlin is now inserting veterans, including many with criminal pasts or suffering from PTSD, as teachers in the early grades of Russian schools, hoping to keep these veterans loyal and to inculcate its version of patriotism.
    The Russian government has even set up a special training center in Moscow to provide such veterans with some training in pedagogy – see vk.com/vershinarus?w=wall-224943658_2%2Fall – but Moscow’s primary interest, Horizontal Russia says is propagandistic (semnasem.org/articles/2024/11/18/cennye-kadry).
    The independent news portal says that the Putin regime believes correctly that the earlier it can inculcate its version of patriotism, the more success it will have in ensuring that the new generation will remain on its side and carry out all the orders that the center gives them. But the system is backfiring, Horizontal Russia continues.
    Many of the veterans inserted in the schools do not behave well and they frighten the children rather than attract them to Putin’s cause. And their parents are outraged that the education of their children is being sacrificed to propaganda and that this propaganda is being carried out by people with few educational credentials and numerous personal problems.
    Educational specialists, the portal says, are recommending that parents who are troubled by this use of veterans of the war in Ukraine as teachers should either shift their children to other schools where such “teachers” have not yet appeared or if necessary homeschool their children so they won’t be put at risk by such teachers.  

After 1,000 Days of Putin’s Expanded Invasion, Ukraine Now Very Much a Real State, Rodnyansky Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 18 – Having resisted the Russian invasion, Ukraine has “won with blood its fight to exist with a free life and its own future,” Aleksandr Rodnyansky says, adding that as a result and exactly opposite to what Putin intended Ukraine over the last 1,000 days “has become a real state, one far from perfect and with thousands of problems but real.”
    As a result, it can be said that Putin has failed and Ukrainians have succeeded, the Ukrainian film maker says, For Putin, Ukrainian statehood has “always been fake,” something he and his band have never really believed in (t.me/alexander_rodnyansky/1900 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/1000-dnej-polnomasshtabnoj-fazy-vojny).
    The Kremlin leader called Ukraine “an anti-Russia project” and expected that the Russian army would be welcomed as “liberators from the oppression of Bandera” and that Russian victory would come quickly with the flight of the Ukrainian government and “the transformation of Ukraine into a version of Belarus.”
    But things didn’t work out as Putin and his ilk expected, Rodnyansky continues. The Ukrainians have resisted, and they will continue to do so, hopefully with the continued assistance of the civilized world. But even if that assistance declines, the Ukrainians will continue to fight to defend their nation and their state.  

After 1000 Days of War, Russia Managed to Expand Its Occupation of Ukraine from Seven to 18 Percent

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 18 – Statistics never tell the whole story about any human activity. That is particularly true about wars given the human suffering they involve. But the numbers in themselves are important, and they provide a framework for discussing the conflict and its total impact.
    That makes the collection of data that the Important Stories portal has assembled from various authoritative sources about Putin’s war in Ukraine worthy of note (istories.media/stories/2024/11/18/1000-dnei-voini-v-tsifrakh/). Among the most important of these are the following:
•    Before Putin launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia occupied seven percent of Ukrainian territory. In 1,000 days of fighting since then, it has expanded its occupation and that now totals 18 percent of Ukraine, a vast swath of that country but far less than Putin promised at the outset.
•    Since February 2022, approximately one million people have been killed or wounded in Ukraine and Russia combined. Most are military personnel, but at least 12,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 26,000 wounded since February 2022 – 12 dead and 26 wounded every day of the war.
•    These losses are putting the demographic future of Ukraine in peril. Because of these losses and flight, Ukraine has lost seven million in areas Kyiv controls in addition to the nearly five million who live in areas under Russian control.
•    Approximately a third of all Ukrainians who remain – 10 million people – now suffer from mental disorders because of the war.
•    Russian forces are intentionally destroying Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, having destroyed or damaged the homes of 3.4 million people and reduce the production of electric power by 70 percent.
•    The war is costing Russia and Russians as well. Almost half of all Russian government revenues now goes to military needs, almost 150,000 Russians have died, and the additional number of wounded means that the irrecoverable losses of the Russian army could be more than 300,000.
•    Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine is now the most frequent cause of death among young Russian men, with every second death among that category having died in the war itself.
•    Increased military spending has sparked inflation and wage increases have not kept up.
•    Russians in Kursk Oblast are suffering following the advance of the Ukrainian army into that portion of the Russian Federation. Nearly 400 have died and more than 130,000 have fled.
•    But one of the most serious costs to Russia of the war lies ahead: Returning veterans are committing more crimes and as the number of former soldiers increases, these crimes will increased as well.
•    And many of those Russians who fled the war to avoid mobilization or because of opposition to the war as such won’t return, inflicting yet another cost on Russia and its people. Those who oppose the war but have remained in Russia have suffered as well from repression of various kinds.

In Rural Russia, ‘Closing Schools is Easy but Re-Opening Them is Hard,’ Residents Say

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 17 – Closing village schools which often have only a few or even only one pukepil is relatively easy: Under Putin era regulations, any school with fewer than 30 pupils can be closed by fiat; and more than half of the rural schools in existence in 2000 have now been closed.
    Moscow argues that such closures and the consolidation that follows are not only economically justified but are the only way to provide young Russians with more educational opportunities, including Internet connectivity and the opportunity for those in consolidated schools to study a far greater variety of subjects.
    But both the employees of these schools, who often outnumber the students, and the residents of the villages more generally actively oppose such closures because they know that “closing schools is easy but re-opening them is hard” and that if the school shuts down, so too will the village.
    Consequently, they resist. Takiye Dela journalist Ksenisya Shorokhova reports on a school in the Siberian village of Ponomarevka where there is only one pupil left but where seven people are employed to give her an education and where residents hope keeping the school open will mean that their village can recover (takiedela.ru/2024/11/nikuda-my-bez-tebya/).
    They fear that if the school is closed, their village and its way of life will be under a death sentence; and so they are resisting. Local officials are supporting them where they can and apparently taking what steps are open to them to keep the school open so that their village and all its residents will have a future.
    For them, that possibility is far more important than any talk of economic rationality.  

Putin’s Order to Promote Patriotism Repeats Stalin’s ‘Almost Word for Word,’ Kerzhentsev Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 16 – Vladimir Putin’s May 2024 directive to use history lessons in the schools to boost patriotism and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life for Russia repeats Stalin’s May 1934 order to do the same thing in the Soviet Union “almost word for word,” according to Boris Kerzhentsev.
    The historian and commentator traces the evolution of Kremlin policy toward history and its use as a propaganda tool in the first decades of Soviet power and then says that the changes Putin has introduced are virtually the same (moscowtimes.ru/2024/11/16/istoriya-v-zakone-kak-gosudarstvo-ispolzuet-proshloe-dlya-podgotovki-pushechnogo-myasa-a147872).
“Like Stalin, Putin’s ‘ideological front’ is rapidly turning into a real military front, on which people fooled by propaganda are dying senselessly. To be sure, foreign agents are not yet mentioned in the text of Putin’s ‘Foundations,’ but this is most likely a matter of time,” Kerzhentsev says.
Indeed, he continues, “some propagandists are already close to, as before, demanding from a high rostrum that ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ be shot ‘like mad dogs,’” as Stalin’s notorious prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky did. And thus one must conclude that despite everything, “for almost a century, nothing has changed in Russia.”
“Using its unlimited resources of violence, control and coercion, the government constantly steals the country's truth about the past, composes its own alternative version of history, and declares it the only true one. And it does so not for the love of writing, but purely for the sake of ensuring the self-preservation of the regime,” Kerzhentsev concludes.

Russian Army which has Looted in Ukraine Now Looting in Russia’s Kursk Oblast as Well, Officials There Compelled to Acknowledge

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 15 – In the early stages of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, there were widespread reports that the Russian invasion force was engaged in the looting of Ukrainian households. Now, the same thing is taking place in portions of Kursk Oblast where Ukrainian troops have never been.
    After ignoring the problem for most of the last three months or even denying it for three months, Russian officials have been compelled to acknowledge it because it is so widespread (zona.media/article/2024/11/15/kursk, zona.media/news/2024/11/14/_sluchai_maroderstva and t.me/kurpepel/834).
    Not only does this highlight the decline in military discipline in a force that is increasingly made up of former convicts who have been pardoned by agreeing to go to fight in Ukraine, but it raises the specter that when such troops do return home, they are far more likely to engage in criminal activities, unconstrained by the fact that they are again among Russians.

Since Start of Expanded War in Ukraine, Russians More Inclined to See Themselves as ‘Masters of Their Own Fate,’ Moscow Institute of Sociology Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 17 – Since Vladimir Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine in 2022, Russians are more inclined than before to view themselves as “masters of their own fate,” either because they feel that they personally are more in control of what happens to them or because they feel their country is in control of the situation.
    That is one of the findings of new research reported by the Moscow Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences which found that the share of those who felt that way jumped from 48 percent to 62 percent while those holding the opposite opinion fell from 52 percent to 38 percent (ng.ru/economics/2024-11-14/4_9135_sociologists.html).
    The sociologists rooted this shift in the rising standard of living among Russians and declines in the number of poor as people worked more and earned more, but the impact of the war on such attitudes is beyond question, although the balance between the two has tended to shift back as the war proceeds.
    At present, the share of Russians who feel themselves to be masters of their own fate fell to 57 percent in 2024 while the fraction which felt otherwise has risen to 43 percent, an indication that for many economic gains are becoming harder to come by and that the self-confidence they gained from the war is ebbing.