The great leap backward

Vladimir Putin is pushing Russia into the past

Maybe a generation, maybe a century

The Pantsir S-1 is an impressive beast, almost 17 tonnes of top-notch hardware capable of shooting down planes tens of kilometres away. The specimen photographed not far from Kherson, though, was a sorry spectacle; its missile-tubes bristled like porcupine quills, but it was axle-deep in mud—one of nearly 1,000 pieces of Russian equipment destroyed, damaged, abandoned or captured by Ukraine over two weeks of war.

Seeing the Pantsir on social media, Trent Telenko, a former auditor in America’s defence bureaucracy, noticed a telltale detail which spoke of very poor maintenance: its tyres were in terrible nick. Worse still, they were cheap Chinese knock-offs of the tyres you might have expected on such a vehicle, observed Jon Hawkes of Janes, a defence-intelligence firm; they would have been unable to support the vehicle fully loaded.

There were however limits to the visibility of these synecdoche-inviting defects. No such pictures were to be seen in Russian media, any more than the word "war” was to be read there. Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, has not used the word; nor has he declared a state of emergency. In a plainly-weird-but-purportedly-normal event televised on March 5th he told a group of Aeroflot flight attendants that the special operation to demilitarise Russia’s brother country was going to plan and would soon be complete. Russian forces were using precision weapons and only hitting military targets. The damage to civilian buildings was the work of evil Ukrainian Nazis shelling their own cities. To make sure this important message is not distorted, a law passed on March 4th makes dissemination of any information at odds with the official version of the conflict punishable by a prison sentence of up to 15 years. As George Orwell knew, when War is to be Peace, Ignorance is Strength.

Almost all independent media have shut down, and the government is blocking access to some social media. Nevertheless, accurate news seeps in via Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, foreign sites accessed through virtual private networks and, the simplest expedient, phone calls with relatives in Ukraine. When their loved ones in Kyiv say the city is being bombarded by Mr Putin, some Russians stop their ears and believe the television instead. But many do not.