Analytical and Opinion articles about Putin and Ukraine

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Hey folks, as usual (at this point), no major happenings around the frontlines. Russians are terror-bombing civilians, Ukrainians are blasting Russians, i.e. the new normal.

Otherwise things aren't going well for the Russian army; the low morale has resulted in some truly ghoulish scenes. I'm not going to link it here for fear of having my channel yeeted, but the Twitter account @SputnikATO posted a video of a Russian solder's corpse in the snow with a rocket launcher next to it. The corpse's left leg is chained to a road sign's pole, apparently to prevent desertion. The guy was either shot or froze to death.

Otherwise Kadyrov's men (Chechens) are deployed behind Russian lines, to execute deserters. We're 17 days into the conflict, and we're already back to Stalin-era methods. How nice is that.
Otherwise here are a few points from Francis Fukuyama which I'll paste here, entitled "Preparing for Defeat":

I’ll stick my neck out and make several prognostications:


1.
Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.

2.

The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north; the Russians are doing better in the south, but those positions would be hard to maintain if the north collapses.

3.

There is no diplomatic solution to the war possible prior to this happening. There is no conceivable compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine given the losses they have taken at this point.

4.


The United Nations Security Council has proven once again to be useless. The only helpful thing was the General Assembly vote, which helps to identify the world’s bad or prevaricating actors.

5.

The Biden administration’s decisions not to declare a no-fly zone or help transfer Polish MiGs were both good ones; they've kept their heads during a very emotional time. It is much better to have the Ukrainians defeat the Russians on their own, depriving Moscow of the excuse that NATO attacked them, as well as avoiding all the obvious escalatory possibilities. The Polish MiGs in particular would not add much to Ukrainian capabilities. Much more important is a continuing supply of Javelins, Stingers, TB2s, medical supplies, comms equipment, and intel sharing. I assume that Ukrainian forces are already being vectored by NATO intelligence operating from outside Ukraine.


6.
The cost that Ukraine is paying is enormous, of course. But the greatest damage is being done by rockets and artillery, which neither MiGs nor a no-fly zone can do much about. The only thing that will stop the slaughter is defeat of the Russian army on the ground.

7.

Putin will not survive the defeat of his army. He gets support because he is perceived to be a strongman; what does he have to offer once he demonstrates incompetence and is stripped of his coercive power?

8.

The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings.

9.

The war to this point has been a good lesson for China. Like Russia, China has built up seemingly high-tech military forces in the past decade, but they have no combat experience. The miserable performance of the Russian air force would likely be replicated by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, which similarly has no experience managing complex air operations. We may hope that the Chinese leadership will not delude itself as to its own capabilities the way the Russians did when contemplating a future move against Taiwan.

10.

Hopefully Taiwan itself will wake up as to the need to prepare to fight as the Ukrainians have done, and restore conscription. Let’s not be prematurely defeatist.

11.

Turkish drones will become bestsellers.

12.

A Russian defeat will make possible a “new birth of freedom,” and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.

4. The United Nations Security Council has proven once again to be useless. The only helpful thing was the General Assembly vote, which helps to identify the world’s bad or prevaricating actors.

5. The Biden administration’s decisions not to declare a no-fly zone or help transfer Polish MiGs were both good ones; they've kept their heads during a very emotional time. It is much better to have the Ukrainians defeat the Russians on their own, depriving Moscow of the excuse that NATO attacked them, as well as avoiding all the obvious escalatory possibilities. The Polish MiGs in particular would not add much to Ukrainian capabilities. Much more important is a continuing supply of Javelins, Stingers, TB2s, medical supplies, comms equipment, and intel sharing. I assume that Ukrainian forces are already being vectored by NATO intelligence operating from outside Ukraine.

6. The cost that Ukraine is paying is enormous, of course. But the greatest damage is being done by rockets and artillery, which neither MiGs nor a no-fly zone can do much about. The only thing that will stop the slaughter is defeat of the Russian army on the ground.

8. The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings.

This is some useful knowledge, too, isn't it?

Yes. The MiGs should have been supplied quietly but once the officials failed to do it, they're not worth the risks.
Also, indeed - if Russia got defeated by NATO, it wouldn't be as humilitating for Putin as if they were defeated by Ukraine.
Long-term goal of collapse of the Putinist system is more achieveable if NATO officially stays unengaged (only keeps sending Javelins and providing intelligence info...)

Funny that, despite having sympathized with the bunch above and being conservative populists themselves, Polish PiS is now doing a lot of political work to push for sanctions on Russia and organize help for Ukraine.
Okay. We know the risk Putin poses to us.
Even our populists realize gay parades don't create humanitarian catastrophes.

The news said the Russians dropped a bomb near the Polish border.

Nationalism is a complex thing.
Polish-Ukrainian relations weren't particularily good in history. However, on some national identity level, Ukrainians are very relatable: struggling to get out of post-Soviet mess, corruption and poverty like we did 30 years ago - now attacked in a way so similar to 1939 in Poland - ready to fight and die for their right to their own identity and state, like in all out 19th century national stories...
There's so much relatability.

And there is awareness of the threat. In Poland, there were clear voices warning about it at least since 2008. Well, even we didn't expect it to look that bad, though.

Aren't relations (and competing nationalisms) in the region really complicated by how the different current nation-states are all named after and consider themselves successors to older multi-ethnic states with larger territories or at least different (and often shifting) boundaries, so everyone's kinda standing on everyone else's toes?

It would seem that adopting a national mindset based on no, we're a nation defined by being the people living within this territory is probably the best way to reduce ethno-nationalism and reducing that as a concern seems like it would make it easier for relations to be based on from here, going further and hopefully be less likely to get caught up on historic grievances committed by regimes that no longer exist and perpetrated by people who've been dead for many decades.

The Next 10 Days Will Decide This War


Russia’s effort to conquer Ukraine may culminate within the next 10 days.

The Russians are in trouble, and they know it. That's why they have reached out to China for help and why they are now recruiting Syrians.

Russian generals are running out of time, ammunition, and manpower. That’s not based on any inside intelligence — it’s clear from open source information and my own experience. I could be way off, but I am confident of this assessment.

An essential caveat to my assessment is that we, the West, led by the US, must accelerate and expand the support we are providing to Ukraine on the scale and with the sense of urgency of the Berlin Airlift (June 1948-May 1949). They need the weapons and ammunition to destroy the rockets, cruise missiles, and long-range artillery that are causing most of the damage to Ukrainian cities, as well as the intelligence to locate those systems, and the ability to hit Russian Navy vessels that are launching cruise missiles into cities from the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

The time challenge for Russia is not just military. The effects of sanctions are growing — Russia may soon default on $150bn of foreign currency debt —and Russian domestic resentment is also growing (we should remember that it’s unusual as well as extreme brave for ordinary people to protest in Putin’s Russia and for television editors to suddenly interrupt their own programs waving anti-war placards.) We should do all we can to fuel that discontent and to let courageous Russians know they have our support.

Ammunition shortages

The Russians are experiencing ammunition shortages. Their transition to attrition warfare is driving up consumption rates beyond what they had planned and what they can sustain. They will still have a lot of the conventional artillery and so-called dumb bombs. But as we know from past US military operations, the most sophisticated munitions are very expensive and so more limited in availability. The Russians are likely to be having the same experience; in addition, they thought the campaign would end within a few days so large stocks were probably not prepared. Wartime consumption always exceeds planning numbers, and urban combat exacerbates that. Sanctions will also have assisted —Finland and Slovenia used to provide some munitions to Russia, and those have now stopped.

Manpower shortages

The Pentagon has said that 50% of Russian combat power was committed in Ukraine. At the height of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were about 29% committed. And it was difficult to sustain that.

This plays directly into the discussion of the encirclement of Kyiv. Russia does not have the manpower or firepower to encircle the Ukrainian capital, let alone capture it.  I have been to Kyiv several times.  I was there in Kyiv five weeks ago, met President Zelenskyy.  It is a very large, dense major urban center on the banks of one of Europe’s largest rivers. It is a difficult, complex urban terrain.

The Ukrainians are going to be able to keep it open and prevent encirclement, especially if we can get the flow of weapons and ammunition up to the levels needed. There will be, unfortunately, be increasing attacks on the city by air and ground systems, and many more innocent Ukrainian citizens will be murdered, injured, or displaced.  But I don’t believe it will fall.

Russia’s dilemma is only worsened by its combat casualties. Although I am always skeptical about enemy body counts, I do believe the numbers of dead are in the thousands (possibly in the 5,000-6,000 range suggested by US sources) and the numbers of wounded much higher. The modern battlefield is extremely lethal, especially for poorly trained or disciplined soldiers. These are very high numbers for just the first two weeks of war and many come from Russia’s elite units — they are hard to replace (and the Kremlin won’t be able to conceal these losses from the Russian public and all those for long.)

Reports of low morale, dissension between commanders, mutiny on at least one vessel, desertion, and so on, all within the first two weeks are indicators of major manpower problems. And in pure numbers, the Ukrainian armed forces still outnumber or closely match Russian forces actually on the ground in Ukraine.

There is no suggestion that the Russians have big units lurking in the woods somewhere (and the Pentagon has said it sees no signs of significant reinforcements.) So it’s apparent that the notional 900,000 strength of the Russian military is a hollow number.  Their public call for 16,000 troops from Syria and elsewhere indicates this. Employment of “stop loss” by Russia on conscripts whose time is about up is another indicator. The Ukrainian diaspora is flocking home to help the fight; Russians are not coming back home — and indeed, many are leaving to avoid Putin’s fight.

There is now an opportunity to exacerbate their manpower problem.  The next intake of conscripts into the Russian Army is on April 1, when around 130,000 Russian families are required to send their sons (18-25) to Conscription Centers where they will be inducted into the Russian Army as privates.

We should do all we can to influence that next intake by using a combination of human outreach as well as cyber/technical means to bypass the Russian blackout on journalism and social media. Millions of Ukrainians, Georgians, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, and Finns have friends, family, business contacts, employees, and customers in Russia.  They should be reaching out to them directly — Lithuanians have already launched a campaign along these lines. If we can get some percentage of those families to resist, joining those thousands of Russians who are already showing the courage to protest, that would send shockwaves across Russia.

The next 10 days are decisive. It is a race and I’m not seeing enough urgency. We need to push the gas pedal to the floor now, immediately.

Lieut. General (Ret.) Ben Hodges is Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, DC.

So far, it looks like China is distancing themselves from the affairs.
They may secretly support Russia but not on large scale, similarily to how North Korea haven't collapsed yet mainly thanks to low-profile Chinese support.

I don't trust a word from Chinese diplomats but I see very consistent pragmatics-over-ethics pattern of their politics. That makes me bet on the Chinese not wanting to be dragged into the war at all. They have nothing to gain from supporting Russia on large scale. They may hope for weakened Russia to become dependent on wealthy China - but to achieve this, they need to avoid being sanctioned themselves.