In genuinely alarming news, the head of South Africa’s army has travelled to Moscow, exposing himself to the very real risk of being chloroformed and waking up on the front lines in Bakhmut armed with nothing but an antique rifle and the thanks of a grateful despot.
South Africa has played down the trip, saying it is a “goodwill” visit that had been “planned well in advance”. (For Russian readers, “planned well” is something that is done by people who don’t work for the Russian army, while “advance” is also something that is done by people who don’t work for the Russian army.)
Russia’s defence ministry, however, has a different version, telling TASS news agency that the two countries discussed “issues relating to military co-operation and interaction aimed at the implementation of projects aimed at improving the combat readiness of the armed forces of both countries”.
Which brings me back to be concerned about Lt-Gen Lawrence Mbatha.
I understand why he went: it’s nice to feel needed.
Indeed, it’s now become clear that what the Russian army knows about “combat readiness” can fit onto the smouldering fragment that is all that remains of a tank whose commander had just phoned his wife on an unencrypted cellphone to complain about the utter shitshow unfolding around him.
Russia’s army, protected for months by phalanxes of Wagner mercenaries (and Wagner-conscripted convicts), has increasingly been revealed as a fighting force more at home in 1914 than 2023. Vladimir Putin still has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and his air force has been largely unused (thanks to Russia’s traditional inability to integrate air- and land forces, and Ukraine bristling with advanced anti-aircraft systems) but down on the ground the war is taking place in muddy trenches where soldiers shoot each other with rifles or blow each other up with hand-grenades while artillery whooshes overhead.
Russia’s army, protected for months by phalanxes of Wagner mercenaries (and Wagner-conscripted convicts), has increasingly been revealed as a fighting force more at home in 1914 than 2023.
Certainly, Russia’s ability to engage in offensive operations seems to have been ended, either by Ukraine’s defence since last year, or very quietly over the last many years as corruption on an industrial scale hollowed out the former Soviet war machine. If Vladimir Putin doesn’t go mad and deploy nuclear weapons, or risk his bomber fleet in a massive aerial bombing campaign, all Russia can do now is hunker down in the territories it has occupied and try to hold back increasingly well-armed and motivated Ukrainian counterattacks.
All of which is why I imagine Lt-Gen Mbatha has found himself being tugged this way and that by Russian generals desperate to pick his brain about what it’s like having a military that’s only partially corrupt, whether South Africa gives its soldiers actual helmets or just the plastic bedpans they’ve been doling out on the eastern front, or whether “combat readiness” necessarily requires soldiers to survive said combat. After all, if a soldier never sees the drone that kills him, does it mean he wasn’t combat ready?
Amid all that attention, however, I hope Lt-Gen Mbatha remains alert, has someone taste his vodka for him, and steers clear of anyone clutching brown glass bottles with stained handkerchiefs pressed over the top. Russia is desperate, and I’d hate for him to wake up to the discovery that he’s the commander of two terrified teenagers and a retired bookkeeper huddled in a hole with ten rounds of ammunition between them.
Come home where it’s safe, general. The Russians have made their bed. And now they’re dying in it.
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