This has never happened before, and here it is again — the military machine of Putin’s Russia has mysteriously lost elite personnel, not as a result of combat actions, not from enemy missiles and shells, but as a result of another «unfortunate accident».
Fourteen people, including 7 captains of the 1st rank and 2 heroes of Russia, who were on board the nuclear submarine AS-12 «Losharik» sailing in the Barents Sea, died in a fire. The incident was a real tragedy, because if the fire had not been extinguished by the remaining members of the crew, the explosion of the nuclear submarine could have had dramatic ecological consequences for the north of Russia and other countries in the northern region.
Well, in this regard, let’s recall how on December 25, 2016, as a result of the crash of a Tu-154 plane flying from Sochi to Aleppo, the main members of Russia’s main military orchestra — the Alexandrov Ensemble, the head of the military police of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Lieutenant General Vladimir Ivanovsky, and the head of the Department of Culture of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Anton Gubankov, the author of the famous anthem «Polite People» died. They were all flying to celebrate the capture of Aleppo, which the Russian Air Force had bombed to the ground in a few months, with no regard for the civilian victims.
The recently burned «Losharik», despite its funny name, was far from harmless. The composition of the crew, which included the best personnel of the Northern Fleet, if not the entire Russian Navy, indicates the exceptional complexity and responsibility of the task assigned to it, as numerous military experts now say. The actual task, which is classified, is not disclosed, but one of the versions mentioned suggests that the possibility of disabling the world’s Internet and communications of NATO countries in the event of a military conflict was studied.
Once again, Putin’s army elite is sacrificed to his adventures — in the case of the flight from Sochi to Aleppo, participants of the propaganda war serving the real Syrian war died, and in the case of «Losharik», participants of the new Cold War preparing for a global war. But once again, they were not destroyed by a military adversary. As believers, we know in whose hands the life and death of everything created lies, but the immediate secular cause available to everyone was either equipment failure or the unpreparedness of the personnel commanding it.
And these are only the cases where the result of such recklessness led to the loss of elite military personnel, since no one counts the ordinary Su and Mi fighter jets that fall apart in the air with ordinary pilots. As for the employees of various PMCs who are dying in Syria, Putin himself said about them: «They are present there, but they are not part of the Russian state. And they do not take part in combat actions,» they perish and risk their lives solving «economic, as they used to say, tasks and problems.
All this is a visible «success» of the construction of a single army by Putin’s regime, whose budget, as in the years of the Cold War, is again dragging down the entire economy of the country. Against this background, yesterday’s statement by Putin’s Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova went unnoticed, in which she stated: «We are losing the country’s population catastrophically. In four months, the natural population decline has reached about 149,000 people».
And all this is happening at the same time as the Astrakhan region and Siberia are drying up and flooding due to inefficient hydraulic engineering, garbage protests, daily reports of falsified criminal cases, including against journalists and public figures, and torture in pre-trial detention centers and prisons.
Well, the social contract, if you can call it that, that the regime offered to society after 2014 assumed that Russians would have more «guns» and less «butter». But as it turns out, the authorities, whose planes regularly fall apart in the air and whose submarines catch fire in the water, are incapable of providing either.