Glossary of Pro-Russian Excuses: Scrap, Feint and the Plan

Scrap, feint and plan: the glossary of pro-Russian excuses

Every time a Russian column abandons a tank in the mud, loses a ship or retreats from a city, the same explanation appears: it is not a failure, but part of the plan. The invasion of Ukraine has yielded a continuous harvest of destroyed, captured or abandoned material without a single shot fired, along with its own vocabulary to justify it. The repertoire organizes into four pillars—scrap, feint, plan and propaganda—and a fifth term that fuses them: fintarra.

"That's scrap": old material meant to be lost

The first argument is accounting-based. Everything Russia loses would be obsolete equipment scheduled for retirement, so Ukrainians capturing it are doing Moscow a favor. This reasoning stretches to the Moskva, built in the 1980s, whose loss was attributed to a storm. The category does not distinguish between a museum piece and a ship with defensive technology: if it sinks, it goes into the lot.

The more elaborate variant claims all this material includes devices to identify whoever captures it. In other words, traps. The most literary promise states that when the scrap runs out, modern weaponry will finally arrive. So far, there have been no signs of this handover.

The "feint": the retreat that is actually a masterstroke

When Russian troops are expelled from key territory—Kyiv, Chernihiv, the north—the explanation is that they left voluntarily. And it is strictly true: they go. The doubt is whether they leave because they want to or because they have no choice. In this reading, the retreat becomes a psychological maneuver leaving behind units with years of training, vehicles and weapons, all serving to confuse the adversary.

The airborne assault on the capital and attack helicopters over government buildings would have been, according to this current, a hyper-realistic feint. The shame of admitting a retreat against an army considered inferior explains the rest of the picture.

"The plan": the argument that admits no refutation

Any setback—loss of territory, material, high-ranking officers—fits into an inscrutable plan whose overall vision only the Russian leadership possesses. The observer, like a mere lamb, stops at the tree and fails to perceive the forest. The problem with such an argument is that it cannot be disproven: defeat confirms the plan just as victory does. Without falsifiability criteria, absolutely everything fits.

"Fintarra": the €1,000 tank vs. the €200,000 missile

The fusion of the first two concepts produces the most striking term. Russia sends scrap so Ukraine spends its anti-tank missiles on it: according to a calculation circulating in the thread, a Russian armored vehicle would be worth between €500 and €1,000, compared to €200,000 for a guided projectile. The circulating conclusion is that each destroyed tank is a profitable operation for Moscow. The arithmetic forgets that the vehicle, although old, carries a crew, and that the missile is fired once against a target that, if hit, ceases to be operational.

Propaganda and hoax: the most frequent response

The most common answer to any bad news is that it is propaganda or a fabrication. An estimate collected in the thread places this response around 70% of replies. The logic is not to verify the data, but to systematically discard anything that does not fit the idea that the operation is going according to plan.

Casualties and recourse to history

To justify human losses, the argument turns to the past: today's Russia would be comparable to the Red Army or even the Russian Empire, and suffocating the adversary with one's own casualties would be part of the strategy. Some add that fallen soldiers are low-quality troops and that good units await their moment. In parallel, another comparison circulates: the world's largest country, with virtually infinite natural resources and presence on two continents, has a GDP comparable to Spain's.

From "it doesn't affect us" to "we've been watching since 2014"

The argumentative framework also has its identity component. The same current that justifies invasions and forced displacements maintains that the conflict neither affects nor concerns outside observers. At the same time, critics are reproached for not knowing where Ukraine was on the map until recently, while claiming to have trinc the issue since 2014. Both statements coexist without the slightest discomfort.

Minor episodes join to bulk up the repertoire: the arrival of a ship in Poland was celebrated as proof that the Russian president had not taken the bait, and a commemoration of the Soviet victory was presented as something devoid of ideological labels. Each piece reinforces the previous one. And thus, any uncomfortable data eventually finds accommodation.

The glossary, however, does not yet include an entry for the day when modern material truly arrives. Nor for the moment, if it comes, when someone admits without adornment that a retreat is a retreat.