the fog of war, as he called Clausewitz to the confusion and uncertainty that every armed conflict entails in which wills confront each other subject to so many imponderables, is today so dense that, on many occasions, makes a reliable analysis of what is happening on the battlefield impossible, what leads to decisions based on incomplete information that can be fatal. But beyond the objective difficulty in handling so many variables at stake – from those that affect human behavior to climatic, technical or physical ones – the term can also be applied to the deliberate intention of the combatant actors to hide or deny acts that, only a posteriori, allow a proper interpretation of victory or defeat.
This comes to mind the growing succession of fires and explosions that are being registered on Russian territory in recent days. What began last April 1, with the explosion of a fuel depot and a powder keg in Belgorod, has multiplied until today with the disabling of railways and more warehouses and magazines surprisingly razed. All this without forgetting that similar events are also being repeated in Belarus, which put out of service the railways that serve Russia to fuel the invasion of Ukraine and suggest saboteurs interested in contravening the guidelines subordinated to the Kremlin advocated by Lukashenko.
In the absence of verified information on the causes of the incidents recorded in Belgorod, Briansk, Staraya Nelidovka, Kursk and Voronezh, it is not possible to determine whether they were accidents, sabotage or Ukrainian attacks. But be that as it may, Russia’s image is negatively affected. In the first case, it would be one more sign of the inefficiency in the management of such vital services as the railway or the maintenance and surveillance of fuel and defense material that are so necessary for the ongoing military campaign. In the second, it would mean that, despite the enormous effort to silence criticism and internal dissidence, Moscow is not capable of rooting out the opposition to its warmongering and anti-democratic policy. And, of course, if what happened were Ukrainian attacks -whether by special operations units or artillery or aerial bombardment- it would be clear that the Russian forces are not capable of preventing the infiltration of enemy means and of nullifying the intelligence that would provide kyiv precise details of the targets to beat.
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Exactly the same as what seems to have happened, although in this case it is on Ukrainian territory, with the precision attack against a Russian command and control post in the vicinity of Izium, in which there were at least forty officers in charge of directing the operations of the troops in charge of forcing the northern front of the offensive that seeks to control the Donbas. The fact that more than twenty of them have died and that among the wounded was General Valeriy Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff and visible head of the military modernization process carried out in the last decade, is a notable fiasco for the side Russian and an equally outstanding success of Ukrainian artillery and intelligence (or some kyiv ally).
In addition, if Gerasimov is in the front line, he can only assume that Moscow is willing to go the extra mile to achieve its goal. But it is also a confirmation of the failure harvested so far.