Day 1590
Under the Heat Dome
On the twenty-fifth of June, Z approved something called an influence operation. Forty days, he said, though he did not say what would fill them. This is a very Ukrainian kind of precision: an exact number attached to unspecified content, like a wedding invitation announcing the date but not the couple.
I have counted, because someone has to. Today is the seventh day. Thirty-three remain, assuming the operation survives its own naming, which is not guaranteed. Wars produce many things, including bird nests, faster than they produce forty consecutive days of anything.
What has happened in these seven days is this: nothing has happened that was not already happening. The State Security Service of Ukraine struck the Dubna communications center for the second time, which is impressive and also, if we are honest, a continuation of a sentence that began before Z sat down with General Khmara and decided the sentence needed a title. The refinery outside Moscow that supplies forty percent of the region’s fuel remains, according to reports, out of commission through the end of the year. This too predates the operation.
Meanwhile, Phillips O’Brien, writing for a magazine that specializes in the discovery of patterns, discovered a pattern. I do not begrudge him this. Discovering patterns is a livelihood like any other. The pattern he found — pressure on money, pressure on command, pressure on the fiction that Moscow is safe — is a real pattern. I only note that its load-bearing evidence was gathered before the pattern was given a name and a countdown.
Meanwhile in Russia, a different pattern is being managed, and managed well. The Times sent a correspondent to ask why nobody in Lyubertsy would say where the bomb shelters were, and the answer, delivered with the calm of a man explaining that the sky is up, was that the country is not officially at war, shelters are for wartime, and therefore there are no shelters, only PDFs. Bashkortostan has decided sirens cause more depression than drones.
This is not a society approaching the limits of self-deception. It is a society that has found an economical relationship with the truth: enough to keep the trucks running, not enough to cause anyone to ask why the trucks keep not arriving. Arkhipova, who studies such things professionally, calls it a performance of obedience. I think she is exactly right.
I want to be fair to Z. A president cannot announce, “We will continue doing what we have been doing, at approximately the same pace, for an indeterminate period.” This is true, but it is also not a speech. Somebody in the room will have argued that a number creates momentum, that a countdown is a promise the enemy can be made to fear even if the promiser has not yet decided what precisely is being promised.
It is a fairly ordinary piece of statecraft, and there is a reasonable chance the audience is not the Kremlin, which has not dignified the operation with comment, but Washington. If the Kyiv Independent’s super-secret source is to be believed, the White House wanted boldness. If that is the audience, the operation is already succeeding. A man who tells his boss he has forty days to fix something has purchased forty days in which the boss stops asking whether it can be fixed at all.
I have been reading, in the meantime, a young Irishman named Caolan, who returned from Venice and Ireland this week and announced, with the sincerity of a man who has just gotten off the train, that the air in Ukraine felt different.
He does not mention that the air, in the most literal sense available to a thermometer, was in fact different across much of Europe. He landed in the middle of a heat dome that spent a week moving east, breaking records in Germany, Poland, and Slovenia before settling over Kyiv, where people were cooling off in the Dnipro because it was, for entirely mundane meteorological reasons, extremely hot.
I believe Caolan felt something. I believe he felt something roughly forty degrees Celsius.
I am less certain the feeling is evidence of anything beyond the fact that a person who has spent two weeks abroad will, upon returning to a country at war during a historic heatwave, feel that something has shifted. Something always has shifted. War and weather are both reliably shifting conditions, and a man fresh off a train is poorly positioned to say which one he is describing.
Being present where it is hard to be present is Trey Yingst’s kind of journalism: proximity offered up as its own species of evidence, with no standards desk, no editor whose job is to ask whether “the shortest vampire” is really the phrase he wants in a dispatch about potato planting.
The Institute for the Study of War, working through the same seven days with a map and a percentage sign, found that Russian and Ukrainian forces made no confirmed advances on the twenty-ninth of June. No shift in the air registers on their instruments. This does not mean Caolan’s air was imaginary. It means he and ISW are measuring different things, and only one of them intends to be measuring anything at all.
So: Day Seven. The war continues at the pace it was continuing before it received a title. Moscow manages its citizens’ understanding of their own fuel lines with a discipline that would be admirable in any other context. Z’s boldness appears to have received a press release. And a young man from Kilkenny has told his subscribers that something is different now, which is either the truest sentence anyone has written this week or simply the sentence a returning traveller always writes, regardless of what he finds when climbs up to the roof.
Thirty-three days to go. I will count the rest.