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ANNEXATION OF KHARKOV – UKRAINE TO SHRINK WESTWARD  AS RUSSIA RESPONDS TO CROSS-BORDER ATTACKS

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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with [2]

Existentially speaking — which means whether to live and let live, to do or die — how far from a mortal enemy is far enough? In between the one and the other outcome, is there anything but a no man’s land?  

Carthago delenda est – “Carthage must be destroyed” – was a Roman strategic aim 2,200 years ago. It was regularly repeated in his public speeches by Marcus Porcius Cato in his advocacy of putting an end to the Punic Wars by destroying the Carthaginian adversary entirely, not just militarily, so that it could never rise again to challenge Roman power. The opposition slogan was Carthago servanda est – “Carthage must be saved”. Its author, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum, meant don’t rule by force if it can be avoided;  instead conserve lives, resources, power.  

Cato was a politician; Corculum was a soldier. The political strategy of doing what you can because you can, and as a warning to everyone else, won out; Cato is remembered even now; Corculum is forgotten [3].  This is not because imperial history repeats itself, but because the history is always written by people aiming to stay on the winning side: they don’t know any better until the empire has been lost and their retainers with it.

In the evolution of the Russian war aims, former president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of the Security Council, stood up for the Cato line last week. “Ukraine will disappear”, he declared [4]. “Now it’s time to say how Ukraine will disappear, and also what will then be the risk of a resumption of the war in Europe and in the rest of the world.” Medvedev also left open the Corculum option after the Cato option in his last line. “We may be temporarily satisfied with the second option, but we need a third one.”

Because Russia is the only functioning democracy on the two sides of this war, where military tactics and war aims are openly argued in parliament and the media, the debate between the Cato delenda war aim, and the Corculum servanda war aim is an active one. Sworn to destroy President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and economy, the US, European and western allies misinterpret this debate to be vacillation and vulnerability. Dialectically speaking, this encourages the Cato line faction in Moscow at the expense of the Corculum line faction.  In this way the US and NATO axis provokes its own defeat.  

This process has taken the war well beyond the 300-kilometre range of some of the US, French or British weapons which have been deployed and fired to date. The debate over the 300-km westward defence line was winding up in Russia, not beginning, when winter started  last year [5].   

Medvedev made this official last week, following the intensification of artillery, rocket, and drone attacks on Russian cities, including Moscow. This week the governor of Belgorod, Vyacheslav Gladkov, went further. Then yesterday President Putin (lead image, left) tried to pull Gladkov and Medvedev back in line —  that’s the Corculum line, not the Cato line.

“We live in a state of de facto war. Whether we like it or not, it’s happening,” Gladkov said [6] on the Rossiya 24 television channel. Asked what can be done to increase public security in the Russian border regions, he said one option is “to attach Kharkov to Belgorod Region. This is the best way to solve the issue of the shelling of Belgorod Region.”   

That was a public, political challenge to the Kremlin. It was polite compared to those who use other names when they mean to criticize [7] Putin’s conduct of the war.  

Governor Gladkov [8] is a southerner by birth, education, and career. Born in the Penza region, he has worked in high administrative posts in Penza, Crimea, Stavropol, and for almost three years now in Belgorod.

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 On January 24, 2023, the President was briefed by Governor Gladkov at Novo-Ogaryovo.  Putin tried to be reassuring.  “Anything is possible, but practical combat operations show that Russia's air defense is one of the best in the world. As I have said, the missiles that the US produces for the Patriot system, our country makes three times as many, even more than three times as many. And as for air defense missiles in general, for various purposes, Russian production is comparable to total world production. And apart from everything else, of course, our systems themselves are modern and reliable. Of course, anything can happen, but on the whole, the system is working properly.” Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/ [10]

The first Kremlin reply to Gladkov was Dmitry Peskov’s, the spokesman. He was opposed, he intimated, to annexation of more regions along the front line by repeating the restrictive limits of the war. “This already belongs to the category of issues related to the conduct of Special Military Operation. Therefore, I cannot comment on this in any way.” Peskov said his piece on Monday morning.

On Tuesday afternoon, after Ukrainian drones had landed in Moscow, Putin said more [11]; he also said the same thing. “We all had to respond by launching the special military operation. We are striking at the territory of Ukraine, but with long-range precision weapons, at military infrastructure facilities only, either at ammunition or fuel and lubricants warehouses used for combat operations. We have talked about the possibility of striking at decision-making centres. Of course, the headquarters of Ukrainian military intelligence is one of them, and a strike at this target was carried out two or three days ago.”   

This is the Russian version of the Corculum line. Pinpricks as the drone attacks are in military terms, in Belgorod or Moscow or other regions, they are triggering a great many public expressions of the Cato line – and as Medvedev, Captain Obvious [12] when he was president,  makes obvious, this is now a significant political force.

Was the Belgorod governor challenging the Kremlin to lift the restrictions Putin insists are “military infrastructure facilities only [and] decision-making centres”? Is Gladkov appealing to the Security Council and the General Staff  to shrink the “no man’s land” as Medvedev called it last week? Will demilitarisation, as this was first defined in February 2022, to be extended westward by annexation of all territories from which cross-border terrorism, artillery shelling, drones, and missiles can be launched in the foreseeable future?

Here is a sample of the public answers from academic and military experts in Moscow as reported by mainstream publishers, editors and journalists:

MAP OF BRYANSK, KURSK AND BELGOROD REGIONS ON UKRAINE BORDER

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Left to right:  Yury Shvytkin, former airborne Guards officer, currently deputy chairman of the Duma Defense Committee; Artem Kosorukov, senior lecturer in political analysis, Lomonosov Moscow State University; Mikhail Onufrienko, originally from Kharkov and now in Russia, he produces regular podcast and printed analyses of the war