5 days ago
The New Total War by Bob Seely: Putin's most dangerous weapon? Mind control
The New Total War by Bob Seely (Biteback £25, 432pp)
I hadn't thought I would be able to kill people… Obviously, I can.' The words are those of a Ukrainian woman, a former drone pilot who is one of the interviewees in Bob Seely's The New Total War. Seely, who has been a soldier, a foreign correspondent and an MP,
has written a book that is a remarkable blend of first-hand accounts from the frontline in the war in Ukraine and a guide to the various methods by which Putin is pursuing larger conflict with the West.
He talks to Ukrainians whose lives have been irrevocably changed by the war. Panoushka is a Latin teacher turned sniper. She risks her life, driven by the need to be a 'warrior' after the death of her fiancé. Rozmaryn worked as a chef in Poland but returned to Ukraine to fight after the Russian invasion.
One of the characteristics of the war is 'the explosive rise in the use of cheap, mass-produced drones to reconnoitre, target and kill'. Seely visits the Dragon Sky Drone School, where one of the teachers is the former lead guitarist in a well-known Ukrainian indie band.
He speaks with several teenagers who have been on the receiving end of Russia 's inhumane policy of kidnapping and indoctrinating children. 'They wrapped me up like a candy bar and sent me to Russia,' says Ksenia, who escaped and rescued her younger brother. On three occasions, 16-year-old Rostyslav was put into solitary confinement after he refused to sing the Russian national anthem. Seely also interviews Zayats, a Russian POW who has revelatory tales of the brutality of life in Putin's army.
Seely wants to open the eyes of his readers to 'Russia's new form of total warfare' in which the meanings of 'war' and 'peace' are blurred. Throughout Russian history there has been conflict between Westernisers, those who wish to imitate the West, and Slavophiles, those who despise Western culture and values. Today, the latter are in the ascendancy.
They see old-style military violence as only one element in an ongoing conflict with the West. Information warfare, what one Ukrainian described as 'messing with people's minds so they don't know what's true or not', is just as important. Seely argues that what happens in Ukraine is important for all of us. If we fail to grasp the new nature of conflict, 'the next few decades will witness the twilight of democracies'. His book is a call for an understanding of new realities. 'We overestimated Russia in 2022,' he writes. 'We underestimate it now.'
