There is no shortage of military strategists and retired generals pontificating on TV about the war raging in Ukraine.
There’s also no shortage of real-time information, so much so it’s seemingly impossible to move a soldier there without a cable news host mapping it out like a weather forecast.
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There are live vloggers inside the zones. There are real-time reports from checkpoints. I watched Anderson Cooper the other night broadcasting live on a roof of a building in a town inside Ukraine. He practically rolled his eyes when the air-raid sirens blasted during the broadcast, assuring everyone it was probably nothing.
It seems the era of “the element of surprise” has ended.
But of all the things I’ve seen and read over the past two weeks, the most valuable piece of information as to the status of the war came in a story in the Washington Postt about how the Russian government is considering taking over U.S. and other foreign businesses who abandon their stores amid the conflict.
Two things struck me about the story that I think are key to Russia losing this war in the long run (I don’t know if this will make it better or worse, as far as Putin’s response):
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Russia still has no earthly idea how a market-based economy works and can’t escape it’s Communist sensibilities. Stealing and bad-faith dealing seems to be built into the pie, no matter how hard they’ve tried to integrate with the world economy.
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Russian officials aren’t foreseeing how strong the backlash will be when citizens start losing the goods and services to which they’ve become accustomed.
Russia, according to officials quoted in the story, think they can just kick the foreign owners out and the stores will keep producing the same products they always have. IKEA is leaving and won’t send any new merchandise? We’ll make our own IKEA, seems to be their thought (which makes me wonder if IKEA has a piece of furniture that turns into a factory after 48 hours of maddening self-construction). What about Volvo and other automakers, who would stop sending the components to make the cars? We’ll make our own components.
Here’s a quote from that story from the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament about companies leaving and how Russia will deal with it:
“They announced they are closing. Well, OK, close. But tomorrow in those locations we should have not McDonald’s, but Uncle Vanya’s,” he said. “Jobs must be preserved and prices reduced.”
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First, using a quick web search, Uncle Vanya’s is not a restaurant in Russia (there’s one in Latvia, though). Rather, it’s the name of a Chekov play about two men in love with the same woman. Oh, the irony of that.
But Putin is gauging that people won’t notice the difference, that anybody can make a Big Mac or a Volvo.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I have a feeling Russians, not just the oligarchs, don’t want to go back to a time when they had to stand in line for inferior products. I’m guessing they like how Perestroika has brought them special sauce and will notice when it’s gone. Before that infusion of capitalism, they never knew what they were missing.
People will take a lot of hardship for the right cause, and maybe, if the poll of Russian citizens supporting the war is accurate, they believe in all this homeland propaganda. But what I’m foreseeing is a “Saturday Night Live” bit featuring Putin, Gorbachev and Lenin slinging fries at a fast-food counter where every order turns into borscht served in Golden Arched wrappers. “Enjoy your fries, comrade,” Putin smiles as the customer stares morosely at the soup made of beets.
If I were Vlad, the evil tactical genius who has underestimated every response to his incursion and looks more like bumbling Dr. Evil every day, I’m not sure I’d bet on people choosing Ukraine over modern living in the long run.
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Once you’ve ordered a Happy Meal from your foreign-made car and take it home to eat on an IKEA table that you assembled yourself, it’s hard to go back.
The only question is whether American consumers, now devoting whole paychecks to gas and groceries, will crack first.
This article originally appeared on Star Courier: Russians not likely to choose modern living over Ukraine: Opinion
