Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visits positions of Ukrainian service members, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues, in Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine July 8, 2022. Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via REUTERS

July 24 (Reuters) – After five months of Russian attacks, Ukraine will continue to do all it can to inflict as much damage on its enemy as possible, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on Sunday.

“Even the occupiers admit we will win,” he said as he hailed the upcoming day of Ukrainian statehood, July 28, a new annual holiday that Zelenskiy announced in August last year. “We hear it in their conversations all the time. In what they are telling their relatives when they call them.”

Like every day in the last months, Zelenskiy said that Ukraine was not letting up. “We do everything to inflict the highest possible damage on the enemy and to gather for Ukraine as much support as possible.”

He said Ukraine had an important week ahead, with the holiday approaching in the midst of what he called a “cruel war.”

“But we will celebrate against all odds. Because Ukrainians won’t be cowed.”

Reporting by Elaine Monaghan; Editing by Leslie Adler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

About the author: Mikhail Shishkin is a Russian-Swiss writer and the author of more than a dozen books, of which the novels Maidenhair and The Light and the Dark and the short-story collection Calligraphy Lesson appear in English.

Culture, too, is a casualty of war. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some Ukrainian writers called for a boycott of Russian music, films, and books. Others have all but accused Russian literature of complicity in the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers. The entire culture, they say, is imperialist, and this military aggression reveals the moral bankruptcy of Russia’s so-called civilization. The road to Bucha, they argue, runs through Russian literature.

Terrible crimes, I agree, are being committed in the name of my people, in the name of my country, in my name. I can see how this war has turned the language of Pushkin and Tolstoy into the language of war criminals and murderers. What does the world see of “Russian culture” today but bombs falling on maternity hospitals and mutilated corpses on the streets of Kyiv’s suburbs?

It hurts to be Russian right now. What can I say when I hear that a Pushkin monument is being dismantled in Ukraine? I just keep quiet and feel penitent. And hope that perhaps a Ukrainian poet will speak up for Pushkin.

The Putin regime has dealt Russian culture a crushing blow, just as the Russian state has done to its artists, musicians, and writers so many times before. People in the arts are forced to sing patriotic songs or emigrate. The regime has in effect “canceled” culture in my country. Recently a young protester faced arrest for holding a placard that bore a quote from Tolstoy.

Read: European politicians are suddenly quoting Dostoyevsky

Russian culture has always had reason to fear the Russian state. In the saying commonly attributed to the great 19th-century thinker and writer Alexander Herzen, who was sent into internal exile for his anti-czarist sentiments—and reading “forbidden books,” as he put it—“The state in Russia has set itself up like an occupying army.” The Russian system of political power has remained unchanged and unchanging down the centuries—a pyramid of slaves worshipping the supreme khan. That’s how it was during the Golden Horde, that’s how it was in Stalin’s time, that’s how it is today under Vladimir Putin.

The world is surprised at the quiescence of the Russian people, the lack of opposition to the war. But this has been their survival strategy for generations—as the last line of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov puts it, “The people are silent.” Silence is safer. Whoever is in power is always right, and you have to obey whatever order comes. And whoever disagrees ends up in jail or worse. And as Russians know only too well from bitter historical experience, never say, This is the worst. As the popular adage has it: “One should not wish death on a bad czar.” For who knows what the next one will be like?

Only words can undo this silence. This is why poetry was always more than poetry in Russia. Former Soviet prisoners are said to have attested that Russian classics saved their lives in the labor camps when they retold the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky to other inmates. Russian literature could not prevent the Gulags, but it did help prisoners survive them.

The Russian state has no use for Russian culture unless it can be made to serve the state. Soviet power wanted to give itself an air of humanity and righteousness, so it built monuments to Russian writers. “Pushkin, our be-all and end-all!” rang out from stages in 1937, during the Great Purge, when even the executioners trembled with fear. The regime needs culture as a human mask—or as combat camouflage. That’s why Stalin needed Dmitri Shostakovich and Putin needs Valery Gergiev.

Read: Cold, ashamed, relieved: on leaving Russia

When the critics say Russian culture is imperialist, they are thinking of Russia’s colonial wars, and they mean that its artists justified the state’s expansionist aims. But what they do not account for is Russia’s internal imperialism: Before anything else, it was a slave empire where the Russian people were forced to endure and suffer the most. The Russian empire exists not for Russia’s people but for itself. The Russian state’s only purpose is to stay in power, and the state has been hammering the Russkiy mir (“Russian world”) view into people’s brains for centuries: the holy fatherland as an island surrounded by an ocean of enemies, which only the czar in the Kremlin can save by ruling its people and preserving order with an iron hand.

For Russia’s small educated class, the eternal questions—the “cursed questions,” as the 19th-century intelligentsiya knew them—were those framed by two great novels of the period: Herzen’s Who Is to Blame? and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? But for millions of illiterate peasants, the only question that mattered was, “Is the czar a real one or an impostor?” If the czar was true, then all was well with the world. But if the czar proved false, then Russia must have another, true one. In the minds of the people, only victories over Russia’s enemies could resolve whether the czar was real and true.

Nicholas II was defeated by Japan in 1905 and in the First World War. A false czar, he lost all popularity. Stalin led his people to victory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II), so he was a real czar—and is revered by many Russians to this day. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, lost the war in Afghanistan and the Cold War against the West, and he is still despised.

Through his triumph in 2014, easily annexing Crimea, Putin achieved the popular legitimacy of a true czar. But he may lose all that if he cannot win this war against Ukraine. Then another will come forward—first to exorcise the false Putin and then to prove his legitimacy through victory over Russia’s enemies.

Slaves give birth to a dictatorship and a dictatorship gives birth to slaves. There is only one way out of this vicious circle, and that is through culture. Literature is an antidote to the poison of the Russian imperialist way of thinking. The civilizational gap that still exists in Russia between the humanist tradition of the intelligentsiya and a Russian population stuck in a mentality from the Middle Ages can be bridged only by culture—and the regime today will do everything it can to prevent that.

Dina Khapaeva: Putin is just following the manual

The road to the Bucha massacre leads not through Russian literature, but through its suppression—the denunciations or book bans against Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova and Andrei Platonov; the executions of Nikolai Gumilev, Isaac Babel, and Perez Markish; the driving of Marina Tsvetaeva to suicide; the persecution of Osip Mandelstam and Daniil Kharms; the hounding of Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The history of Russian culture is one of desperate resistance, despite crushing defeats, against a criminal state power.

Russian literature owes the world another great novel. I sometimes imagine a young man who is now in a trench and has no idea that he is a writer, but who asks himself: “What am I doing here? Why has my government lied to me and betrayed me? Why should we kill and die here? Why are we, Russians, fascists and murderers?”

That is the task of Russian literature, to keep asking those eternal, cursed questions: “Who is to blame?” and “What is to be done?”

President Vladimir Putin’s stated goal for the February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine was the “demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine”, a prevarication that many took to mean a wholesale Russian takeover, including possible regime change. But Ukraine put up fierce resistance, prompting Russia in late March to say it was focusing its aims on the eastern Donbas region, parts of which pro-Moscow separatists had already seized in 2014. 

But, once again, it seems the Donbas is not enough for Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told state media on July 20 that Russia is no longer “only” trying to take control of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, or administrative departments, in Donbas.  

“The geography is different now. It is not only about the DNR and LNR but also the Kherson region, the Zaporizhzhia region and a number of other territories,” Lavrov said, using the acronyms for Donetsk and Luhansk adopted by pro-Russian separatists in those areas.  

Slow Russian progress 

Russia has made progress in parts of the Donbas. At the beginning of July, Moscow claimed to control all of Luhansk oblast bordering Russia in southeastern Ukraine, a claim confirmed by the Institute for the Study of War, a think-tank in Washington, DC. But it is a different story in Donetsk, where Russia has failed to capture strategically important cities like Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. 

“Russia is making slow progress and we can see that it’s suffering significant losses, especially when it comes to military equipment,” said Sim Tack, an analyst at Force Analysis, a US military consultancy. 

Tack suggested Lavrov’s statement this week might have been playing on the ambiguities of place names. Russia controls the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine and most of the region bearing its name, but has met fierce Ukrainian resistance in its attempts to take the rest of Kherson oblast. Russia controls part of Zaporizhzhia oblast, including the port city of Mariupol – but not the city of Zaporizhzhia.  

Lavrov’s statement could be part of “preparing the ground for a future attempt to annex parts of those regions currently controlled by Russia”, said Jeff Hawn, an expert on Russian military issues and a non-resident fellow at the New Lines Institute, a US geopolitical research centre. 

But Hawn said another “entirely plausible” explanation for Lavrov’s statement is that Russia really is considering “pushing the offensive even further west”.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby on Wednesday warned that Russia might be planning to use diverse methods to justify the seizure of more Ukrainian territory. Putin might use “rigged” referendums in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts to “roll out a version of what you could call an ‘annexation playbook’ very similar to the one we saw in 2014”, when the Kremlin sponsored a controversial referendum in Crimea on rejoining Russia to justify its annexation.   

Indeed, Moscow has already launched a campaign to get civil servants and teachers in occupied parts of Ukraine to start establishing a Russian administration there – including offering jobs with generous salaries to people relocating to occupied parts of Kherson oblast. 

‘Russia doesn’t know what its war aims are’    

The strategic port city of Odesa has also remained an elusive prize. Long a favoured destination for Russian tourists, it lies 220 kilometres west of the front line. Russians “talk a lot about the idea of capturing Odesa”, Hawn said, but the port hub seems like it would be “very hard for them to capture at this stage in the conflict”.

Ukraine is becoming increasingly effective at striking Russian supply lines thanks to Western-supplied weapons, notably the US HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) delivered over recent weeks. “The Russians are struggling to replace lost equipment quickly at the front and they have to push forward very carefully,” said Tack. 

If the Russian army extended its campaign to western Ukraine, Tack said, Russia’s supply lines would become even more vulnerable. Consequently, any such offensive “necessarily leads to substantial losses in terms of people and logistics alike, especially if the Ukrainians succeed in cutting supply lines”.  

Moscow would therefore have to make major sacrifices to get closer to Odesa. And the most difficult task would still lie ahead. “Every time Russia tries to take a major city – like Kyiv or Kharkiv (both of which it failed to capture) – it is either repelled by Ukrainian forces or has a huge amount of trouble seizing it,” Tack said. 

So it is best to look at Lavrov’s statement through a political rather than military lens, Tack said. The Russian foreign minister was not so much describing a battle plan as making a speech aimed at a domestic audience, to “show the Russian public that Russia is winning”, Tack said, “to perpetuate the myth of a victorious army”. 

The timing of Lavrov’s comments is also telling. “What Lavrov said can be seen as a Russian response to all the commentary of the impact the HIMARS are having in Ukraine’s favour,” Tack said. 

Indeed, Lavrov’s interview marks the first time that a Russian official has referred to these US weapons. Lavrov’s comments may be a way of claiming the rocket launchers are not slowing the Russian advance in Ukraine – because how could they be, if Russia is widening its military objectives? 

“It’s also interesting to note that Lavrov uses the arrival of the HIMARs to justifiy the extension of the war’s targets,” Hawn added. The foreign minister said the army would have to push westwards to get these rocket launchers out of territory bordering Russia because their presence on Ukrainian soil poses a threat to Russia’s national security. 

But Hawn said this justification shows that “Russia doesn’t know what its war aims are anymore, and is using this as a kind of pretext to carry on fighting”.  

And this is arguably the most worrying scenario – because if Russia lacks clear objectives, there is no reason for it to stop fighting.

Lavrov’s statements indicate that Moscow does not know to climb down from this conflict, Hawn said, so it may be concluding that the simplest solution is just to carry on fighting. 

Read more analysis on the war in Ukraine © Studio graphique France Médias Monde

This article was translated from the original in French.