By ALASTAIR CROOKE*
The invasion of Kursk has cemented the awareness of hostile Western intentions among Russians. “Never again!” is their tacit response now.
War propaganda and tactical deception are as old as the hills. So far, nothing new. What is new is that the so-called infowar (or information warfare) is no longer or complement of broader military objectives, having become an end in itself.
The West has come to believe that “owning” a winning narrative – and presenting the Other’s as vile, dissonant and extremist – is more important than confronting the facts on the ground. From this perspective, conquering the winning narrative means winning. Virtual “victory” would therefore trump objective reality.
Thus, war becomes, rather, the setting for imposing an ideological alignment in terms of a broad global alliance, through a compliant media. This objective then enjoys a higher priority than, say, securing some industrial capacity that is sufficient to achieve military objectives. Constructing an imagined reality takes precedence over constructing reality on the ground.
The point here is that this approach, being a function of the alignment of the whole society (both at home and abroad), creates traps of false realities and false expectations, from which any escape, once necessary, becomes practically impossible, to the extent that the imposed alignment has ended up paralyzing public sentiment.
The possibility that a State will change course as the events unfold becomes either reduced or definitively lost, and any more accurate reading of the facts on the ground is biased by what is recognized as the most politically correct, thus distancing itself from any objectivity. The cumulative effect of a “winning virtual narrative” then carries the risk of gradually slipping towards another “real war”, inadvertent.
Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and -equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Russian Kursk oblast. In terms of the “winning narrative,” its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine has “brought the war into Russia.”
Had Ukrainian forces managed to capture the Kursk nuclear power plant, they would have gained a significant bargaining chip, and could well have diverted Russian forces from the Ukrainian front in Donbass, which was already undergoing a sustained and progressive collapse.
To make matters worse, in terms of information warfare, the Western media were primed and lined up to show President Vladimir Putin “frozen” by the surprise of the incursion, and “rocked” by anxiety that the Russian public would turn against him in their anger at the humiliation.
CIA Director Bill Burns said that “Russia will not offer Ukraine any concessions until Putin’s overconfidence is challenged and Ukraine can show itself stronger.” Other U.S. officials added that the Kursk raid alone would not bring Russia to the negotiating table. Bold follow-up operations would need to be developed to thaw Moscow’s cold feet.
The broader aim, of course, was to present Russia as fragile and vulnerable, in keeping with the narrative that at any moment Russia could fracture and be blown to pieces, and that the West would emerge victorious.
Indeed, the Kursk incursion was a huge gamble by NATO: it required mortgaging Ukraine’s manpower reserves and most of its military armor, like chips on a roulette table, in the form of a bet that a short-lived success at Kursk would turn the strategic balance. The bet was lost; the chips were taken by the bank.
Put bluntly, the Kursk case exemplifies the West’s problem with “winning narratives”: their intrinsic weakness is that they rely on emotion and are devoid of argument; they are hopelessly simplistic. They are designed only to foster alignment within society as a whole, or, in other words, to harangue through all the media, corporations, federal agencies, NGOs and security apparatuses that we must all come together to “oppose the extremisms” that threaten “our democracy.”
This goal alone demands that the narrative be undemanding and even less controversial: “Our Democracy, Our Values, and Our Consensus.” The Democratic National Convention, for example, embraced “joy” (repeated over and over), “moving forward,” and “facing the weird” as key themes. However, memes so trivial only gain energy and impetus not through their content, but through the charm of the deliberate Hollywood setting that gives them spectacle and glamour.
It's not hard to see how this Zeitgeist one-dimensionality contributed to the United States and its allies misinterpreting the impact on Russian pedestrians of the “bold adventure” of Kursk.
“Kursk” holds a lot of history. In 1943, Nazi Germany invaded Russia once again through Kursk to offset its own losses, and was soundly defeated there. The return of German military equipment to the Kursk area must have left many (Russians) astonished. The current battlefield near the town of Sudja is precisely the place where, in 1943, the 38th and 40th Soviet armies engaged in a counteroffensive against the German 4th army.
Over the centuries, Russia has been attacked on its most vulnerable western flank many times. Most recently, by Napoleon and Hitler. It is no wonder that Russians are very sensitive to this bloody history. Did Bill Burns and others think of this? Did they imagine that if NATO invaded Russia itself, Putin would feel “challenged” and, with one more nudge, would withdraw and accept a “frozen” outcome in Ukraine, with the latter’s subsequent entry into NATO? Well, maybe so.
Ultimately, the message sent by the Western services was that the West (NATO) has now come to deal with Russia. That is the meaning of deliberately choosing Kursk. The cowrie shell reading of Bill Burns’ message simply says: prepare now for war with NATO.
Just to be clear, this kind of “winning narrative” applied to Kursk is neither a fallacy nor a dissimulation. The Minsk Agreements were an example of dissimulation, but it was based on a rational strategy (i.e., it was something historically trivial). The Minsk dissimulation was intended to buy time for the West to arm Ukraine before the latter attacked Donbass. It worked, but at the cost of a complete breakdown of trust between Russia and the West. On the other hand, the Minsk dissimulation also hastened the end of the 200-year era of Westernization of Russia.
Kursk, on the other hand, is a different beast. It rests on notions of Western exceptionalism. After all, the West sees itself as walking on the “right side of history.” The “winning narratives” essentially affirm, in secular form, the inevitability of the Western eschatological mission for global redemption and convergence. In this new narrative context, facts on the ground become mere inconveniences rather than realities that must be taken into account. This is its Achilles heel.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago was underlining another version: just as the hegemonic West emerged from the Cold War, shaped and strengthened by the dialectical opposition to communism (in the terms of Western mythology), today we find ourselves facing a (supposed) totalizing “extremism” – whether under the rubric Make America Great Again (MAGA) be it under an external variety: Iran, Russia, etc. –, proposed in Chicago in the form of a Hegelian dialectical opposition analogous to the previous one, of capitalism against communism. However, in the case at hand, it is an “extremism”[I] in conflict with “Our Democracy”.
The Chicago DNC’s narrative-thesis is, in itself, a tautology of identity differentiation, which presents itself as a union under the banner of diversity, in conflict with “hegemonic whiteness” and “extremism.” Thus, this “extremism” presents itself very evidently as the successor to the old Cold War antithesis: communism.
The backdrop to Chicago seems to be the idea that a confrontation with “extremism” – in the broadest sense – could once again produce, as it did in the aftermath of the Cold War, a rejuvenation of the United States. In other words, a conflict with Iran, Russia and China (in one form or another) is likely to be on the agenda. The telltale signs are already there – not to mention the need for the West to readjust its economy, something that war would usually provide.
The Kursk adventure certainly seemed clever and bold to London and Washington. But what was the result? It did not achieve the goal of capturing the Kursk nuclear power plant or removing Russian troops from the Donbass front. The Ukrainian presence in the Kursk region will simply be eliminated.
What this adventure has achieved, however, is to put an end to all prospects of a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Ukraine. Russia’s distrust of the United States is now absolute.
This made Moscow more determined to see the Special Operation through to its final consequences. The German equipment visible at Kursk awakened old ghosts in the Russians and cemented their awareness of the hostile Western intentions towards their country. “Never again!” This is the tacit answer they are now giving.
*Alastair Crooke, former British diplomat, founder and director of the Conflicts Forum.
Translation: Ricardo Cavalcanti-Schiel.
Originally published on the website of Strategic Culture Foundation.
Translator's note
[I] Liberal discourse has already tried to attribute to this “extremism” the designation of “illiberalism”. Apparently, this last term succumbed to its own ideological bias.
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