Ukraine outrage and analysis. [Archive]

dneal

February 27th, 2022, 05:36 PM

First, this thread can be a place for the folks in Andrew Lensky's modern pen review thread to vent.

I would plead that we not turn this into "the usual", blaming countries other than Russia, leaders other than Putin, etc... That's easy, but partisan and we can be more responsible adults than allowing descent into that silliness.

I suggest this is also a place to provide links to reasonable, non-partisan-pundit based news outlet. Youtube has a France24 channel that is live (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNhh-OLzWlE), and Die Welle (DW) does also (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9KZGs1MtP4).

Lastly, we could share rational opinion on the situation. National Review is right-leaning, and normally not a source of non-partisan views; but THIS ARTICLE (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-the-russians-are-struggling/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second) was shared with me and provides decent analysis. I think this sort of piece is welcome.

As the sun goes down in Kyiv, the city has not yet fallen to the Russians. This is unquestionably a defeat for Vladimir Putin.

It’s important to not get carried away here: The Kremlin is still favored to win this fight. But the last three days of combat should put a serious dent in the reputation of this new Russian army. We should, however, try to understand why the Russians are struggling. First, the Russian army’s recent structural reforms do not appear to have been sufficient to the task at hand. Second, at the tactical and operational level, the Russians are failing to get the most out of their manpower and materiel advantage.

There has been much talk over the last ten years about the Russian army’s modernization and professionalization. After suffering severe neglect in the ’90s, during Russia’s post-Soviet financial crisis, the army began to reorganize and modernize with the strengthening of the Russian economy under Putin. First the army got smaller, at least compared to the Soviet Red Army, which allowed a higher per-soldier funding ratio than in previous eras. The Russians spent vast sums of money to modernize and improve their equipment and kit — everything from new models of main battle tanks to, in 2013, ordering Russian troopers to finally retire the traditional portyanki foot wraps and switch to socks.

But the Russians have also gone the wrong direction in some areas. In 2008, the Russian government cut the conscription term from 24 to twelve months. As Gil Barndollar, a former U.S. Marine infantry officer, wrote in 2020:

Russia currently fields an active-duty military of just under 1 million men. Of this force, approximately 260,000 are conscripts and 410,000 are contract soldiers (kontraktniki). The shortened 12-month conscript term provides at most five months of utilization time for these servicemen. Conscripts remain about a quarter of the force even in elite commando (spetsnaz) units.

As anyone who has served in the military will tell you, twelve months is barely enough time to become proficient at simply being a rifleman. It’s nowhere near enough time for the average soldier to learn the skills required to be an effective small-unit leader.

Yes, the Russians have indeed made efforts to professionalize the officer and the NCO corps. Of course, non-commissioned officers (NCOs) have historically been a weakness of the Russian system. In the West, NCOs are the professional, experienced backbone of an army. They are expected to be experts in their military specialty (armor, mortars, infantry, logistics, etc.) and can thus be effective small-unit commanders at the squad and section level, as well as advisers to the commanders at the platoon and company level. In short, a Western army pairs a young infantry lieutenant with a grizzled staff sergeant; a U.S. Marine Corps company commander, usually a captain, will be paired with a gunnery sergeant and a first sergeant. The officer still holds the moral and legal authority and responsibility for his command — but he would be foolish to not listen to the advice and opinion of the unit’s senior NCOs.

The Russian army, in practice, does not operate like this. A high proportion of the soldiers wearing NCO stripes in the modern Russian army are little more than senior conscripts near the end of their term of service. In recent years, the Russians have established a dedicated NCO academy and cut the number of officers in the army in an effort to put more resources into improving the NCO corps, but the changes have not been enough to solve the army’s leadership deficit.

Now, let’s talk about the Russian failures at the operational and tactical level.

It should be emphasized again that the Russian army, through sheer weight of men and materiel, is still likely to win this war. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that the Russians’ operational and tactical choices have not made that task easy on themselves.

First, to many observers, it’s simply shocking that the Russians have not been able to establish complete air superiority over Ukrainian air space. After three days of hostilities, Ukrainian pilots are still taking to the skies and Ukrainian anti-air batteries are still exacting a toll on Russian aircraft. The fact that the Russians have not been able to mount a dominant Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) campaign and yet are insistent on attempting contested air-assault operations is, simply put, astounding. It’s also been extremely costly for the Russians.

To compound that problem, the Russians have undertaken operations on multiple avenues of advance, which, at least in the early stages of this campaign, are not able to mutually support each other. Until they get much closer to the capital, the Russian units moving north out of Crimea are not able to help the Russian armored columns advancing on Kyiv. The troops pushing towards Kyiv from Belarus aren’t able to affect the Ukrainians defending the Donbas in the east. As the Russians move deeper into Ukraine, this can and will change, but it unquestionably made the opening stages of their operations more difficult.

Third, the Russians — possibly out of hubris — do not appear to have prepared the logistical train necessary to keep some of their units in action for an extended period of time. Multiple videos have emerged of Russian columns out of gas and stuck on Ukrainian roads.

In the Russians’ defense, everything is hard in war. It’s extremely difficult to keep an army supplied in the field while on the move. What Karl von Clausewitz called “friction” envelops the battlefield. Friction, Clausewitz wrote, is “the concept that differentiates actual war from war on paper.” In combat, friction is what makes “even the simplest thing difficult.” So we shouldn’t be surprised that some Russian units are running low on supplies. What’s surprising is the scale of the Russians’ apparent logistical problems.

Finally, and in my opinion, most glaringly, there is the tactical level. There is a strange, counterintuitive law of modern war that says for men to win in a fight against steel and heavy weapons, you must close with the enemy. A corollary to this law is that, if both sides are equipped in a similar manner — in this case, mechanized infantry and tanks — the side that is willing to dismount, get out of its infantry fighting vehicles, and serve as a relatively exposed infantry screen to the armor, is going to have a tremendous tactical advantage. Tanks and armored vehicles are incredibly vulnerable to modern anti-tank missiles. As the Ukrainians have proved, a two- or three-man team armed with a Javelin or NLAW anti-tank-missile system can wreak havoc on a mechanized column if it is allowed to get close enough to make kill shots.

This video shows a Ukrainian soldier carrying a British-made NLAW after an engagement with Russian mechanized assets.

You can see how light and portable the missile system is. These are deadly serious anti-tank weapons.

The key to countering such weapons is to operate as a combined-arms team: Mechanized infantry must be willing to, on a moments notice, receive the order to dismount, leave the perceived safety of an infantry-fighting vehicle, and serve as a screen for the armor. The infantry can neutralize the anti-tank missile teams. The armor can then provide covering fire, supporting the infantry as they move up, while knocking out any heavy weapons a defender might emplace. The point is that the infantry and the armor must work as a team. And this takes trust. And a hell of a lot of training. Because it’s counterintuitive to leave the safety of the vehicle to close with the enemy, you must drill and drill and drill what the U.S. military calls “immediate actions.”

Marine Lieutenant Colonel B. P. McCoy described this dynamic in his book The Passion of Command, which documents his battalion’s march to Baghdad in 2003. When 3rd Battalion 4th Marines was ambushed by elements of the Republican Guard on Iraq’s Highway 6, this is how McCoy describes the Marines’ response: “The enemy has initiated contact from as close as 30 meters, peppering the column with small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades” but “Bravo’s infantry platoon comes roaring up in three Armored Amphibious Vehicles (AAVs), slamming to a halt at the edge of the kill zone.”

The colonel continues:

Their heavy M2 .50 caliber machineguns and Mk-19 40 millimeter automatic grenade launchers open up to cover the Marine infantry rushing down the back ramps of the 26-ton vehicles, as a volley of RPGs is unleashed by the enemy, some sailing high while another ricochets off the hull and spins and hisses on the ground without detonating.

What happens next is pure violence, yet elegant in its harmony. Thirty-five US Marines of Kilo Company’s 3rd Platoon rush out of the gloomy confines of their AAVs and into the teeth of the enemy fire. They know nothing of the enemy’s strength or disposition. All they know is that this is a “contact right” battle drill, and this is what we do in “contact right.” Private First Class Dusty Ladendorf, one of the platoon’s riflemen, is less than a year out of high school. In an after-action review he makes this comment on the firefight: “You come out of the back of the track and just do it like you were trained. Execute your battle drill, take cover and fire, cover your buddy’s move, and move yourself when he covers you. Find the enemy, close in on him, and kill him. Keep moving and keep killing, until it’s over.”

Allow me to quote a little more from McCoy’s description of the fight:

The platoon rushes straight into the teeth of the fire and gains a foothold in the palm grove, taking advantage of the protection provided by every subtle fold in the ground and clod of dirt.

An untrained observer may look at this scene and think it no more organized than a riot. Actually, to us it is ferocious poetry. Every weapon system joins the fight, each supporting the other: machineguns, rifles, grenade launchers, and rocket launchers systematically suppress and then kill the enemy. We are now gaining fire superiority. Soon it is for the enemy to question the prospect of survival.

To survive and win, this is what mechanized infantry must do in a force-on-force fight. But by all accounts, the Russians appear to be “noticeably reluctant” to dismount and close with the Ukrainian defenders. We should be careful to not paint with too broad of a brush here. There are examples of Russian troops performing well in the fierce combat of the last three days. But there is clearly a pattern developing.

This is a morale problem, a training problem, a leadership problem, and a will-to-fight problem. None of these are factors that can be easily or quickly fixed. It takes months of training and trust both across the ranks and up and down the command structure to work effectively. The private must believe that, if he gets out of his vehicle and pushes forward, his mates in the tracks will have his back. Hanging back in perceived safety leads to defeat. Counterintuitively, it makes you more vulnerable to enemy fires.

None of this is easy or simple. There’s a reason that every Marine infantryman learns from day one of boot camp that the mission of the rifle squad is to “locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat.”

Unfortunately for the Russians as they advance into Kyiv, every part of what I described above becomes immeasurably more important when the terrain transitions from woods, fields, and roads to urban combat in a major city.

As I have written before, urban combat is hell. And as the Russians are learning, fire can come from all sides. The fog of war becomes all-enveloping. As nerves are frayed and exhaustion sets in, trigger fingers get touchy. Every window, doorway, and sewer drain is an “aperture” that can house a rifle or a medium machine gun. Streets and buildings constrict the lateral movement of an attacking force. In urban combat, units tend to drift towards the path of least resistance and “easy” avenues of approach such as major roadways — which can play right into the defenders’ hands by funneling the attackers into overlapping fields of fire.

It takes tremendous courage and discipline to initiate a “movement to contact” operation in an urban setting. It takes effective communication both within a unit and with the units on your left and right. There can be no shortcuts. Each time a unit crosses a road or moves to a new building, it must set up its movements in the correct sequence: First, an element must possess local security. Then, once local security is achieved, the next element can provide covering fires, achieve fire superiority, and suppress the enemy. Only then can the assault element cross the street without being gunned down. Get the order of operations wrong — and a unit’s flanks will be exposed or the assaulting element will reenact “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

As the Marines say, “Movement without suppression is suicide.”

The Russians do not appear to be good at the details, and their failures at the operational and tactical levels have made an inherently difficult task much, much harder. This is why they are struggling. It’s why they will now turn to brute force to try to smash their way into the capital.

dneal

February 27th, 2022, 08:52 PM

I understood Putin's taking of Crimea. It was "gifted" to Ukraine with no idea the USSR would ever collapse. A war was fought over it. It's historically significant to Russia, and it's strategically important as their port to the Black Sea.

He was willing to have a serious fight over it, and no one else was. He smiled and nudged his way a little further east and took a bit of Ukraine. His polls reflected the support the Russian people had for the action.

This action has me scratching my head. Some of the punditry is plausible (potential NATO membership, for example), but I can think of others. Ukraine has been Russian since the revolution. It's the Russian breadbasket (wheat). No one really knows. Maybe it's just a form of dementia from decades of leading the country, COVID and his reported isolation, his worrying about his legacy, whatever...

What's clear are two things: He underestimated the capability of his forces (but Russia's modernization has been geared toward artillery and air defense, not maneuver units), and he underestimated the resolve of the Ukrainians. Zelensky's leadership is noteworthy. I got the same feeling when I was deployed to Poland - that they were a people who would never let "that" (occupation or loss of sovereignty) happen again. It doesn't surprise me that Ukraine is exhibiting the same.

An insurgency and urban fighting is exponentially more difficult than force-on-force in open terrain. The Ukrainians have been preparing, and working with USAREUR and NATO for 15 years or so. Russian logistics were immediately what I thought their problem would be. They don't have the logistics backbone nor "magazine depth", and rely on irregular warfare which the Ukrainians seem to have been prepared for.

We'll see what the "peace talks" are about. Best case is it's a way for Putin to withdraw and save some face. He's got to get a win in some way though - and taking Ukranian membership in NATO off the table might be enough. That's a big ask after you just invaded them. We'll have to see.

dneal

February 27th, 2022, 09:11 PM

Oh, if Lady Ethernaut is around... I would be interested to hear how things are in Poland right now.

Lloyd

February 27th, 2022, 09:41 PM

Chip

February 27th, 2022, 10:42 PM

Since quite a few Russian soldiers have relatives and other ties in Ukraine, I'd think that being ordered (by an insane dictator) to slaughter their parents and brothers and sisters and cousins and seize the country has caused quite a lot of dismay and disaffection in the ranks. Simply put, I don't think their heart is in it.

Some Russian soldiers, who knows how many, do retain a sense of human decency and justice. They are certainly ashamed and mortified at being mere tools of oppression.

Lloyd

February 27th, 2022, 10:52 PM

Chuck Naill

February 28th, 2022, 07:57 AM

Had a thought, Ukrainians are defending and the Afghanizations didn't. Is it because the Ukrainians are democratic by choice? Are there other thoughts?

dneal

February 28th, 2022, 08:10 AM

Sadly, I wouldn't underestimate Putin and his army, capability-wise nor tactically. I doubt he thought this would be a brief encounter with minimal Ukrainian and Worldwide opposition. I believe he knew how fiercely Ukrainians would defend their homeland, and that he pre-assessed how the NATO nations would react.

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Russian capability has always been mass. U.S. concerns vs Russia are massed artillery protected by massed and layered air defense. It's commonly referred to as the "A2AD Bubble". You can't close with your maneuver formations because the artillery will kill you as you advance. You can't kill the artillery because it's protected by air defense.

Technologically, Russia is overestimated. The M1 was designed to fight at a 6 to 1 numerical disadvantage. DESERT STORM surprised the U.S. and the Russians at the imbalance between the T72 and M1. Russia has been developing the T14, but most of its capabilities are hype and it's not in production mainly because of technological difficulties.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) used to inspect Russian equipment sites. Russia was free to inspect ours as well. The majority of Russian equipment sat in fenced gravel lots, inoperative. On a relative scale, Russia still has an enormous numerical advantage, but nothing like the Soviet days. Their equipment is archaic by modern standards, which makes it more simple to maintain; but also requires more of that simple maintenance - it breaks down easily.

Tactically, Russia has a DOTMLP-FP problem (Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, Facilities, Policy) that's laid out pretty well in the National Review article. Where they excel is cyber, electro-magnetic, information and other irregular operations. Their ground forces are more of an extension of information ops than actual close combat formations. In Crimea, the presence of large formations were as much as a bluff as anything; a bluff that could be costly to call. It's much safer to fold - which is why he "won that hand". This appears initially to be much of the same. A large threat as a bluff that's too risky to call. Ukrainian forces were handily beaten during the Crimean incursion. Russian EW capabilities identified and targeted command and control nodes, air defenses, and pretty much every conventional unit. It was a relative cakewalk. Ukrainian TTP's have changed. They don't leave their air-defense radar on. They minimize their EW signature for C2. They also have javelins and stingers now.

Did Putin expect this level of resistance or ineffectualness? I don't think so. It's much more likely that he has a problem similar to Hitler at the end of WWII - subordinates afraid to tell him the truth, contradict him, etc...

Chuck Naill

February 28th, 2022, 08:25 AM

Subordinates unwilling to tell the truth sounds familiar right now in the Republican Party. Not trying to infect the thread at all, but it caught my attention, nonetheless.

dneal

February 28th, 2022, 09:01 AM

STOP IT CHUCK! This is NOT the thread for partisan American political crap. A country has been invaded. People are being killed.

Chuck Naill

February 28th, 2022, 09:12 AM

STOP IT CHUCK! This is NOT the thread for partisan American political crap. A country has been invaded. People are being killed.

People could die in the US if TRump is elected and people have died due to disinformation from people like you regarding the virus. Why such a sudden concern from you? Damn hypocrite!! What a complete fucking ass you are @dneal.

dneal

February 28th, 2022, 09:14 AM

Chuck, STOP. There are plenty of threads for that shit. This isn't one of them.

dneal

February 28th, 2022, 09:21 AM

Back on topic...

Since quite a few Russian soldiers have relatives and other ties in Ukraine, I'd think that being ordered (by an insane dictator) to slaughter their parents and brothers and sisters and cousins and seize the country has caused quite a lot of dismay and disaffection in the ranks. Simply put, I don't think their heart is in it.

Some Russian soldiers, who knows how many, do retain a sense of human decency and justice. They are certainly ashamed and mortified at being mere tools of oppression.

I think you have the right idea, but some of the reasons aren't correct.

Ethnic Russians are concentrated on the eastern border, so you're right with that in that portion. But considering the second point (about being "hesitant to slaughter"...) it's not the ethnicity that's the factor. It's the humanity - which gets to your last two sentences, and I agree.

Dave Grossman points out in his book On Killing the number of G.I.s that would shoot over German's heads during WWII. It was hard for a man to shoot another man even in that environment. Add to that the lack of training previously mentioned, the realization of personal risk to follow orders, etc... weighs heavily on initiative and morale.

Chuck Naill

February 28th, 2022, 10:08 AM

Chuck, STOP. There are plenty of threads for that shit. This isn't one of them.

I am sorry, but your sudden concern for human life cannot be ignored or sweep under the rug. Death by any means is important.

Bold2013

February 28th, 2022, 11:37 AM

Some of my fathers family lives in Poland 40 miles west of Ukraine. They are experiencing refuges and empty store shelves.

dneal

February 28th, 2022, 02:34 PM

The Hill’s Kim Iversen has a good piece on erroneous information. It’s going to happen, for all sorts of reasons and motivations, from innocent sharing of what is believed to be accurate to deliberate information operations (although those are designed to be difficult to attribute).

Point being that a healthy amount of skepticism is never a bad thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98cXig0hOVw

Chuck Naill

February 28th, 2022, 03:07 PM

@dneal wokiening!! LOL

dneal

February 28th, 2022, 04:09 PM

Chuck, something is wrong with you. Seriously.

Go over to the ad hominem and grandstanding thread. I'll play there.

Lloyd

February 28th, 2022, 05:24 PM

I found this article interesting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/28/internet-war-cyber-russia-ukraine/

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dneal

February 28th, 2022, 06:41 PM

I found this article interesting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/28/internet-war-cyber-russia-ukraine/

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Pretty good article, but behind a paywall. I found the article through my AppleNews account. Text below, and I bolded what I think is the key portion. Just another example of Ukraine's lessons learned from Crimea and corrected for.

It helps that they aren't as network reliant as more modern militaries. We're focused on ways to defend against cyber, instead of ingraining analog backups like mapboards and overlays. On a different note, I saw that Elon Musk is sending terminals for his Starlink internet service.

For more than a decade, military commanders and outside experts have laid out blueprints for how cyberwar would unfold: military and civilian networks would be knocked offline, cutting-edge software would sabotage power plants, and whole populations would be unable to get money, gas or refrigerated food.
But while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spawned all manner of cyberattacks and defenses, few are playing out the way the experts thought they would.
As of Monday, five days after tanks moved into Ukraine, the Internet and other key Ukrainian infrastructure were still functioning, the outgunned Ukrainian military was still coordinating effectively and Russia’s vaunted disinformation capabilities were failing to persuade Ukrainians that resistance is futile.
“We imagined this orchestrated unleashing of violence in cyberspace, this ballet of attacks striking Ukraine in waves, and instead of that we have a brawl. And not even a very consequential brawl, just yet,” said Jason Healey, a former White House staffer for infrastructure protection and intelligence officer who’s now a research scholar on cyber conflict at Columbia University.
A vastly larger, more powerful military — one especially feared for its cyber-military prowess — has allowed Ukrainians almost unfettered access to the Internet. This has helped them get weapons to citizens and harness social media to rally global political support through direct, emotional appeals backed by stirring visuals.
“It’s certainly not what anyone predicted,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a longtime cybersecurity executive and U.S. government adviser who heads Silverado Policy Accelerator.
Ukraine’s core cyberdefense has done better than expected because it focused on the issue after Russian hackers briefly knocked out power to swaths of the country in 2015 and 2016, said David Cowan, a veteran cybersecurity venture capitalist and corporate director, and because it has had help from American and European experts.
“I would have thought that by now Russia would have been disabled a lot more infrastructure around communications, power and water,” Cowan said. “If Russia were attacking the U.S., there would be more cyber damage.”
The absence of major disruptions predicted by cyberwar doctrine has allowed Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to deliver propaganda coups with little more than a smartphone and a data link. Images of civilian casualties, the brutal shelling of cities and also some Russian losses have undermined that nation’s claims of a limited and humane “special military operation.” A viral audio clip of Ukrainian soldiers on a tiny island telling a Russian warship to “go f--- yourself” has become a defining moment of national resistance.
“It’s become a global participatory thing. Everybody thinks they’re part of it,” said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, which tracks global data flows. “It would be a lot harder to do all that if there was a blackout.”
Ukraine has not escaped unscathed, and some experts warn that cyberattacks or Internet outages could grow as Russia’s invasion intensifies in the face of unexpectedly stout resistance.
Russia or its allies already have deployed software to wipe data off some Ukrainian computers, including border control offices. But such intrusions are not nearly as widespread as in past attacks such as NotPetya, in which fake ransomware attributed to the Russian government caused billions of dollars in damages, much of it in Ukraine.
“I do not think the destructive malware had an impact of any significance,” said Vikram Thakur, head of threat intelligence at Broadcom’s Symantec division.
Russia also may be holding back to some extent, for strategic reasons or because the timeline for the invasion was so closely held that cyber teams did not know what to target or when.
An invading army might be expected to quickly cut backbone cables or switch them off through hacks, said Madory, a former Air Force communications engineering officer.
But neither has happened. And Madory isn’t sure why.
“Is it following the playbook? I don’t know if we have the right playbook,” Madory said. “So far the Internet is still up.”
“You need to develop access and know how those targets are going to fit into the overall plan of the campaign,” said Trey Herr, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
He and other experts point to several possible explanations, starting with the possibility that the Russians thought Ukraine would fall so quickly that it wasn’t necessary to damage systems they would want operational once an occupation began. Disabled telecommunication systems — or ones that are bombed — can require costly, time-consuming repairs.

Lloyd

February 28th, 2022, 09:25 PM

Also, I found this ≈30 minute video pretty good at summarizing many of the reasons for the invasion.

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Empty_of_Clouds

February 28th, 2022, 10:20 PM

dneal

March 1st, 2022, 05:35 AM

manoeuver

March 1st, 2022, 09:06 AM

I'm having trouble seeing how Putin gets what he wants, then I remember the nukes.

Then I wonder what exactly it is that he wants. If it's just a neutral Ukraine (which seems reasonable for him to want) this doesn't seem the way to get that.

It's heartbreaking to look at my own kids and then imagine kids just like them in Ukraine and the hell their lives are becoming.

welch

March 1st, 2022, 09:29 AM

I have been reading the journalism from these places:

- The UK Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/mar/01/ukraine-russia-latest-news-live-updates-war-vladimir-putin-kyiv-kharkiv-russian-invasion-update

- The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/01/world/ukraine-russia-war

- The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/01/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news/

- The Toronto Globe and Mail, as much as I can without subscribing: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-russia-ukraine-live-updates-kyiv-mayor-advises-residents-to-seek-bomb/

- The SF Chronicle: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/40-mile-Russian-convoy-threatens-Kyiv-shelling-16967099.php

- Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/28/us-announces-plan-to-expel-russian-diplomats-from-un-liveblog

Empty_of_Clouds

March 1st, 2022, 10:47 AM

Yazeh

March 1st, 2022, 12:06 PM

Russian leaders and their predecessors have no qualms of doing whatever, they need to do, to achieve their means.
Stalin caused 3.5 million Ukrainians die from hunger. Check Holdomor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor)
And he ordered the death of almost all the Polish officers when he took over Poland. They massacred 22 000 officers et.
I mention Poland, because modern Western Ukraine was part of Poland.
Back to the Russian leader. In the recent years, the Chechen wars. They razed the capital Grozni.
If you think Putin won't do it again, watch and see.
I hope Ukrainians manage to make Russian leaders regret their choice.
But think how 500 000 refugees can wreak havoc in Europe. They tried it with Syrian refugees in Belarus and created chaos.

It feels that we are reacting World War II all over again...

dneal

March 1st, 2022, 12:51 PM

If the news reports are true regarding the use of cluster bombs and vacuum bombs, what is the response from the West? Is this the excuse to get physically involved?

Also, if Ukraine's application to the EU is fast-tracked or rubber stamped, does that mean that NATO will have to step in on the ground?

It's all very confusing from this far away (apart from understanding that Putin is a criminal).

Thermobaric weapons and cluster munitions aren’t outlawed by previous conventions, so there’s no “trigger” that would pull the west in. The problem remains that it’s Russia and escalation could be catastrophic globally.

The EU is an economic union, and unrelated to NATO other than many countries being members of both organizations.

Maybe I am missing something, happy to be corrected, but there is a convention against cluster bombs that has quite a number of signatory states, excepting Russia of course. Don't know anything about the vacuum stuff quite frankly. Aside from that though isn't there a general agreement not to target civilian areas? The Geneva Convention covers that part I believe.

I know the Eu is an economic club, but I was thinking this may have been a first step for Ukraine to signal its intention to apply for NATO membership, whatever that may entail.

And I agree with @manoeuver, if a neutral Ukraine was the goal there had to be other ways to achieve this. I do sometimes think that this is a grudge thing, a bit like Mugabe's genocide among the ethnic Ndebele after he came to power on the alleged card of uniting a nation.

From Reuters:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-isolation-intensifies-ukraine-fighting-rages-2022-03-01/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraines-ambassador-us-says-russia-used-vacuum-bomb-monday-2022-02-28/

So I'm generally familiar with cluster munitions due to DPICM's. They're artillery rounds that explode over an area and spread explosive submunitions (about the size of a tennis ball). There is a convention on cluster munitions, because not all of the submunitions detonate - creating an unexploded ordnance issue post conflict - hence the convention. They're still very, very effective and have future applications like BATs (Brilliant Anti-Tank Munitions). The convention is talking about what to do, but no one is willing to give up an effective tool yet. There's like a dozen signatories. Point being that they're not "illegal" munitions like those that most countries agreed not to use in the several Geneva conventions - the "Dum-Dum" bullet (basically the original hollow-point), for example.

Most of the international Law of Armed Conflict is in the 4th Geneva Convention. Civilians are a weird area. They're people who aren't armed and do not engage in participation of hostilities. Yes, generally you are supposed to limit targeting them or increasing suffering. Point those people out in Ukraine, from Russia's perspective (and I'm not trying to excuse anything about Russian action). Ukraine has issued weapons and created non-uniformed militias. Those people aren't "civilians" anymore (usually the term is "combatant" or "non-combatant"). They're also interspersed among true civilians/non-combatants in cities.

Now think along the lines of a church (also not supposed to be targeted). You may not specifically target a church, but collateral damage is not illegal, and it loses all protection if used by combatants. Whether something ends up being "illegal" is determined by the victors, but also has to be enforced by someone. A different example: Israel is a signatory to Geneva IV. You can occupy territory, but you can't move your population there - which is what they've done in Palestine/West Bank. Technically in violation, but who is going to enforce it? It's messy.

RE: EU / NATO. Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952. The EU still hasn't let them in that club. Only point is that one doesn't guarantee the other. I don't know why Ukraine is asking for some immediate acceptance, since to the best of my knowledge there are no security guarantees. There has been the question of economic alignment with the EU or Russia, and Russia has wanted the latter (although "economic alignment" to Russia probably means "economic control" - and therefore political control).

If Ukraine thinks sudden admittance to the EU will protect them from something, or trigger defense obligations; I think they're mistaken. Suppose the EU agrees and Putin succeeds? It's a worthless agreement since he controls the country.

Putin still needs a land bridge to Crimea (i.e.: Sevastopol), and that's eastern Ukraine. That's where the majority of the 17% ethnic Russians in Ukraine live. I don't know why he invaded the whole country, and no one does but Putin. Maybe it's bargaining, and what he'll settle for is an eastern slice. Maybe that's what he always intended. Maybe it's simply conquest, and he wants to restore (or begin to restore) a greater Russia - which also creates an absolute buffer between NATO and Russian mainland (like Belarus). Maybe it's just an enormous miscalculation on his part.

Empty_of_Clouds

March 1st, 2022, 01:18 PM

Yes, it's an unfortunate end run that as soon as the civilian population offers resistance they become combatants and credible targets.

The thing about the EU is what initially confused me. I too could not grasp why Ukraine is asking for immediate acceptance. The reasoning behind this has not been made clear by them or any of the usual news pundits.

Yazeh

March 1st, 2022, 01:46 PM

Chip

March 1st, 2022, 01:56 PM

Putin has gone off the rails.

This photo is worth more words than I care to spend.

https://i.imgur.com/0yaGAXZ.jpg

Acute megalomania? Terrified of the virus? Afraid of playing Hitler in the failed briefcase plot?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_July_plot

dneal

March 1st, 2022, 02:03 PM

@dneal thanks for the original post. it's clear, concise and comprehensible for the layman.

However, Russia has already 6 Nato members at is doorsteps,
The three Baltic countries, Poland (with Kaliningrad) and Norway and Turkey (Maritime border).
(I forgo, US, obviously)
What difference will another one make?

Apparently a lot to Putin.

Putin has gone off the rails.

This photo is worth more words than I care to spend.

https://i.imgur.com/0yaGAXZ.jpg

That, and many similar pictures are what cause me concern. He's paranoid about something, and that's not a good sign.

Chuck Naill

March 1st, 2022, 02:14 PM

@dneal was for Putin since Trump
Was for Putin. Don’t but this sudden concern for human life. She/he’s not been concerned for 2 years .

dneal

March 1st, 2022, 02:20 PM

@dneal was for Putin since Trump
Was for Putin. Don’t but this sudden concern for human life. She/he’s not been concerned for 2 years .

Chuck, thanks for removing any ambiguity on who this forum's troll really is. Well done.

welch

March 1st, 2022, 02:35 PM

welch

March 1st, 2022, 02:39 PM

The Post says, as of this afternoon:

A 40-mile-long column of Russian tanks and combat vehicles has “stalled” north of Kyiv, a senior U.S. defense official said Tuesday. The Russians appeared to be regrouping six days into their invasion of Ukraine while dealing with fierce resistance and fuel and food shortages.

The column effectively has not moved in a day, putting it about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) north of central Kyiv.

About 80 percent of the combat power that Russia prestaged at the Ukrainian border is now committed to the war, up from just under 75 percent Monday, and the Russians are shelling Kyiv, the senior defense official said.

The United States has seen signs that Russian soldiers, especially young conscripts, did not know they were being sent into combat, the U.S. defense official said.

The Russian regrouping comes as fierce fighting and shelling continue in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, and as Russia employs multiple-rocket launcher systems in Ukraine that could be used to fire thermobaric weapons, the senior defense official said. Such weapons are designed to ignite fuel using oxygen in the air, creating what has been described as a vacuum effect.

“We do assess that they have launcher systems that could be used for a thermobaric weapon, but we cannot confirm the presence of a thermobaric weapon, and we cannot confirm the use of a thermobaric weapon,” the senior U.S. defense official said.

In the southern part of the country, Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting in the city of Kherson, and Russia has occupied Berdyansk and taken possession of Melitopol, a city of about 150,000.

Russian forces remain outside the major southern city of Mariupol but are now close enough to attack it with artillery and other long-range weapons, the senior defense official said.

Airspace over Ukraine continues to be contested, despite the massive size advantage of the Russian air force, the Pentagon assesses. As of Tuesday morning, Russia had launched about 400 missiles at Ukraine since the invasion began, up from about 380 on Monday, the senior defense official said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/01/russia-ukraine-war-putin-news/#link-YCEKSLJ7Y5GXDCK5PPECL2JJ74

dneal

March 1st, 2022, 02:44 PM

The Post suggests that Putin is terrified of Covid. His meeting with his security council showed them in a tightly-packed semi-circle on the far side of an large council chamber from Putin. The reporter says, no, it was not because Putin wants to appear like an emperor, although he does so want, but from a fear of Covid.

Incidentally, Putin keeps showing himself in front of a magnificent double-eagle flag. That is the Byzantine-Roman imperial double eagle. Russians fancied Moscow as "Third Rome", after Rome and Constantinople. "A fourth there shall not be".

I think it’s fear of Covid based as well, and I suspect the isolation that resulted exacerbated it. Could be age and some other cognitive decline too. He leverages uncertainty, but he’s approaching bizarre.

BTW, the Russian double eagle is just historic and goes back to the Tsars. I wouldn’t read too much into that.

welch

March 1st, 2022, 02:44 PM

From the NY Times:

It has been a menacing presence in the war in Ukraine: Satellite images have shown a military convoy stretching 40 miles long on a roadway north of Kyiv, with a number of homes and buildings seen burning nearby.

Experts fear the convoy, which includes supply and armored attack vehicles, could be used to encircle and cut off the capital or to launch a full-on assault. The front end of the convoy is just 20 miles from the capital.

“What we are seeing is basically Phase 2, which is a shift to much more brutal, tactless, unrestricted warfare, which will lead to many more civilian casualties and bloodier battles,” said Mathieu Boulègue, an expert in Russian warfare at Chatham House, a leading policy institute in London.

While the Ukrainian military has air power and missiles capable of striking the convoy, its abilities are limited. Targeting such a long convoy would present its own challenges, as well as risk inciting Russia to retaliate.

“The Ukrainians attacking it from the air would have to make a decision of taking their very limited air force and going after what is a very difficult target,” said Frederick W. Kagan, the director of the Critical Threats project at the American Enterprise Institute, which has partnered with the Institute of the Study of War to provide updates on the Russian invasion. He noted that the Russian military is likely defending the convoy aggressively.

It was also possible that Ukrainian commanders are waiting to engage the armored vehicles until they enter Kyiv, where they could be more easily destroyed while confined on city streets, and where neighborhoods could provide plenty of hiding places and protection for soldiers firing anti-tank missiles.
Experts cautioned that it was still too early to tell the convoy’s exact purpose, saying that it was also possible that the convoy could be used as part of a pincer movement to cut off the northeast of the country. But they said that Russia appeared to be adapting its initial strategy.

Under that strategy, Kremlin leaders had wrongly assumed Ukrainian forces would suffer a swift defeat against a superior Russian military, and that Russian forces could quickly take major cities without much fighting. Instead, Russian forces were stalled by stiff resistance from both Ukraine’s military and citizens who took up arms.

So what do we know about this convoy? Cloud cover has made it difficult to get a continuous or complete view of the area or a clear sense of the convoy’s movement. It was not clear whether the buildings and homes seen burning had been attacked.

The convoy is dotted along a roadway that stretches from Antonov airport to the north toward the village of Prybirsk for approximately 40 miles, according to Maxar Technologies, which released the images.

It includes food supply trucks for soldiers and fuel for vehicles, but the bulk of it, in Mr. Boulègue’s assessment, is made up of miles upon miles of heavy artillery.

The convoy is not one continuous line. Some vehicles are spaced far apart from one another, while in some sections two or three military vehicles are moving alongside each other across the road.

Mr. Kagan said it was notable that the convoy was not made up entirely of attack vehicles.

A Pentagon official said on Tuesday that Russian forces had been plagued by shortages of fuel, food and spare parts. Mr. Kagan said a number of trucks in the column likely contained such essential supplies to avoid more logistical problems.

Mr. Kagan observed that when Russia initially concentrated its forces, in particular on the Belarusian border ahead of its advance, it didn’t appear to have built up the kind of logistical base usually mobilized before an attack was launched. That, he said, helped to explain why Russia’s incursion had failed to quickly capture the capital.

While it was not unusual for an invading force to have such logistical challenges, he said it was unusual for them to persist several days into an invasion and in a military operation in which President Vladimir V. Putin had spent at least months preparing.

“It reflects the fact that this invasion was in fact poorly planned, poorly, poorly prepared, and is being poorly conducted,” Mr. Kagan said. “That column reflects, in part, Russia scrambled to adjust to problems that they had created by the way that they prepared and conducted this attack.”

Despite Russia’s superior firepower and resources, visible in the miles of weaponry outside Kyiv, Mr. Kagan said the outcome of the battle was not a forgone conclusion, noting how Ukraine’s forces and civilians had shown unexpected resilience.

“I would hedge that bet,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/world/europe/russian-convoy-ukraine.html

dneal

March 1st, 2022, 02:52 PM

RE: the WashPost and NYT articles (and thanks for posting the text, because paywalls...):

The "stall" (and the sudden ask for peace talks) concerns me because it's a tactical pause that lets him regroup and update orders. More than that, it's an opportunity to fix his logistics problem.

Although that was my first thought, I listened to a pundit report that supposedly the request came after a call with Xi. My first response was "cause it's bad for business", but literally that is the case from a Chinese perspective. Getting tangled up in sanctions isn't something they want.

The analysis went on to emphasize that China uses "sovereignty" rhetoric often. Taiwan isn't a sovereign nation, just a part of China held by rebels. Shut up about Uyghurs, because that's in our country and a matter of our sovereignty. It paints them in a corner if they don't recognize Ukraine's sovereignty and support Putin.

They abstained at the security council vote. Read into that what you will. I think the "it's bad for business" notion is key.

Lloyd

March 1st, 2022, 03:17 PM

🤎Andrew Lensky posted on FB 2 hours ago.

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

welch

March 1st, 2022, 05:32 PM

I find that Al Jazeera Live has the best minute-by-minute coverage of the Russian invasion. Just saw a Ukrainian woman in Poland lambaste Boris Johnson: "Why do you come here to Poland and tell us you can do nothing? If you cannot declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine, then give us something else? Declare us a no-missile zone. What do you have? Roman Abromovich still owns Chelsea. He might have flown to Moscow, but what about his mansions? What about his children that are still in London?" Al Jazeera interviewed her after showing her tongue lashing of Johnson, with a looping ten-seconds or more of Kyiv night and the lights flashing of bombs and artillery.

dneal

March 1st, 2022, 05:59 PM

Yes, it seems counter-intuitive but Al-Jazeera does have good coverage. I meant to comment on that when you listed what you were watching.

Lloyd

March 1st, 2022, 07:33 PM

welch

March 1st, 2022, 08:21 PM

Lloyd

March 1st, 2022, 08:59 PM

I just saw this story about the Russian media's internal propaganda
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60571737
Coincidentally, someone on FB replied to a recent post by Andrew (drawing and words of might expect from his talent and his current situation) with a screed of a similar nature.

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

dneal

March 1st, 2022, 09:02 PM

Ukraine has survived another day and most of the night. I think it is now about 3am in Kyiv. The Guardian linked to this summary from The Institute for the Study of War. I don't know exactly who they are, although they mention US retired generals Jack Keane and David Petraeus. Summary is not much different from what we read in the NY Times and the Washington Post.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-1

There are a bunch of think tanks the DOD contracts with for various purposes. Rand is the most well known. This is something like that. Having General Keane lends it credibility, gets it contracts, etc…. Not trying to be completely cynical, that’s just how the system works.

I haven’t been watching this particular organization, but it’s a good report basically written as the “enemy” section of the Situation paragraph of an operations order, or the intel update a CG would get on the floor of the COIC. Like most intel assessments, it could be right or wrong. It’s a good summary with operational graphics. Most of the sources cited are Facebook and Twitter posts. Doesn’t mean it’s bad or wrong because of that.

Bold2013

March 1st, 2022, 09:19 PM

Even though Putin has more resources things keep going the wrong direction for him. I’m worried he might be feeling backed into a corner and will over commit to save face. Seems like a recipe for greater disaster.

welch

March 2nd, 2022, 06:32 AM

Russian people see that the entire world (almost) opposes them.

“To Russia, it means we are going back into the caves,” he said. “I think it’s like the end, for Russia.”

Putin’s war on Ukraine is drawing battle lines within Russia

By Robyn Dixon
Yesterday at 4:21 p.m. EST

A woman walks in front of Russian armored vehicles parked at a railway station in the southern Russian Rostov region on Feb. 25. (AFP/Getty Images)

MOSCOW — When Russians showed shame and grief over President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, his most loyal propagandist was withering: “If you are now ashamed that you are Russian, don’t worry, you’re not Russian,” the editor in chief of state-owned broadcaster RT, Margarita Simonyan, sniped on Twitter.

The invasion that united NATO and Europe on sanctions as never before has also divided Russians. On one side: an outward-looking urban middle class who vacation in Europe and while away spend time scrolling through Western apps on their iPhones and send their children to universities abroad. On the other: Putin loyalists, many less-educated Russians or older people raised on Soviet propaganda.

In Kamenka village in Russia’s southern Rostov region, close to the Ukraine border, Alexei Safonov, 47, was horrified at the news that Russia began its attack last week. Then he got to work as chief engineer at an ice-skating rink and was sickened to find his colleagues celebrating.

“The feeling was it’s high time we showed what we could do to those ‘Nazis,’ so it’s high time we started this operation,” he said, referring to Putin’s claim that he would “denazify” Ukraine and its leadership. “That made me feel really dejected and depressed. People around me are enthusiastic about it. When I look at them, I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

That night, he wrote an anguished social media post, lamenting the “horror and shame” of a war that “will be catastrophic.” It initially received 19 comments, most attacking him. A friend, a local policeman, warned him to delete it, but he refused.

At work the next day, the general director of the complex stormed in, shouting and swearing at Safonov.

“He said, ‘Either you remove that post or we don’t need people like you around here.’ He told me to sign a resignation letter, but I just packed up and left,” Safonov recounted.

Later, three police armed with machine guns came to his home, arrested him and charged him with showing disrespect for society and the Russian Federation. He faces court on Friday and fears that authorities may concoct a more serious charge.

The war’s seismic impact is just beginning to dawn on many Russians, deepening these fissures in society. State television hosts tell viewers that the sanctions prove the West hates Russians.

Europe’s airspace slammed shut, and Russia’s now-toxic brand was shunned in sports, chess, ice hockey, football, motor racing, and by art galleries, Harley Davidson, Disney, the film “The Batman,” the Eurovision song contest, luxury car companies, the Maersk shipping line, the International Olympic Committee, major oil companies, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and many more.

The cascading effect was swift. Google blocked YouTube channels connected with state-run media RT and Sputnik. Even Europe’s far-right leaders and strongmen in Central and Eastern European balked. The ruble crashed and the Central Bank stopped trading for two days as Putin barred Russians from depositing foreign exchange into accounts or sending it abroad.

When Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stood up to speak at the Geneva Disarmament Conference on Tuesday, almost every delegate stood up and left the hall. When senior official Vyacheslav Volodin flew home from an official trip on the weekend, his plane was turned away from airspace in Sweden and Norway.

To be fair, outside of liberal circles, the public criticism is still a relative trickle in a country where dissent is not tolerated. It has, however, included a few powerful oligarchs, although they have little to no sway over Putin.

Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire industrialist, called for peace “as soon as possible” on the Telegram messaging app. Ukrainian-born mogul Mikhail Fridman wrote a letter to staff at LetterOne, first reported by the Financial Times, saying that war could never be the answer.

State television host Ivan Urgant posted a black square on his Instagram feed on invasion day, along with the words “Fear and Pain. No to war.” His show the next day was canceled, and it’s not clear it will ever air again.

Even the daughter of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov posted a black banner on social media with the words “No to war,” though she swiftly deleted it.

Anissa Naouai, chief executive of Maffick, a company with RT links and one of Putin’s staunchest defenders for years, announced Tuesday she was “cutting all ties with RT,” posting a black banner on Twitter with the words “Russia without Putin.”

Apolitical people felt the need to make their opposition clear. Peter Svidler, a Russian chess grandmaster, usually tweets about chess, Wordle and dogs. But last week he wrote that it was impossible to stay silent. “No to war,” he posted.

“Let’s at least get some things stated live on air. I do not agree with the war my country is waging in Ukraine. I do not believe Ukraine, or Ukrainian people, are my enemies, or anybody’s enemies,” he said speaking Tuesday on a Chess 24 stream.

Almost 6,500 protesters in dozens of cities have been arrested since the invasion, according to rights group OVD-Info. Psychiatrists, doctors, architects, journalists, actors, historians, computer programmers, directors, Orthodox priests and others signed open letters protesting the war.

If Putin did not change course, Russia would “take its place as an aggressor and rogue state, a state that will bear responsibility for its crimes for generations,” said Ivan Zhdanov, director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, headed by jailed dissident Alexei Navalny. Zhdanov spoke in a video urging a national campaign against disinformation.

But as Russia’s economy came under intense pressure from sanctions, Russian officials doubled down and hardened their rhetoric.

In a Russian Foreign Ministry tweet Monday, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova questioned if “the process of denazification in Germany after the end of World War II” was really complete, commenting on Germany’s decision to send arms to Ukraine.

Lawmaker Andrei Klimov called for treason charges against those who “cooperated with foreign anti-Russian centers bringing obvious detriment to our national security.”

The older generation of Russians who lap up state television fear the West and admire Putin for the stability he brought after the chaotic post-Soviet 1990s. But the predictability is gone.

The ice-rink engineer Safonov said ordinary low-income Russians would be most hurt, but wealthy elites “will be fine as usual,” adding, “Maybe they will be a little shaken but not much, I’m sure.

“To Russia, it means we are going back into the caves,” he said. “I think it’s like the end, for Russia.”

Natasha Abbakumova contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/01/russia-ukraine-putin/

Chuck Naill

March 2nd, 2022, 06:41 AM

From inside the bunker:

"KYIV, Ukraine — In launching a war on our country, President Vladimir Putin claimed Russia would “de-Nazify” and free Ukraine. But Ukraine — a nation that lost as many as eight million lives in World War II, a country that has a Jewish president — does not need to be freed from the liberated path it has chosen.

Not since the end of World War II has Europe seen violence and naked territorial ambition at such a scale.

I am writing this appeal from a bunker in the capital, with President Volodymyr Zelensky by my side. For a week, Russian bombs have fallen overhead. Despite the constant barrage of Russian fire, we stand firm and united in our resolve to defeat the invaders. We will fight to the last breath to protect our country."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opinion/ukraine-russia-war-zelensky.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAA AACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DO Dm4YiOMNAo6B_EGKeKl5bto10nGBWcRaMbZqW_Voi_1SO0FrUA q55JuYnZBPawMElbWOZEJklZTcQeJ_tjbwcmiyLOo4yebg4xnf aDL1XqLV12kmI1kxvZo1J1i133cPxP_DF7J139cqzu5hUs4hPU oIZCCLuvXtAx5_KY_GOkmasl9qLrkfDTLDntec6KYCchFQCj_F TnB54GU87LBMKY9dffa_f1N7Jp2I0fhGAXdoLYypG5Q3W4HX8r 1rurPPoheLo9Gk8QF0YggNexYdR5TIBeuTyQ&smid=url-share

welch

March 2nd, 2022, 07:29 AM

A question now: how can the west get military supplies into Ukraine? Until the invasion, it was possible to fly them in. A photo inside this article showed Soldiers loading Javelin anti-tank missiles to be flown to Ukraine. Now that's impossible. The Ukrainian borders with Poland and Romania are open...at least until the Russians an put troops there. And that might be tough for Russians given that they have had trouble carrying enough gas to the forces moving toward Kyiv.

The U.S. has been rushing to arm Ukraine, but for years it stalled on providing weapons

Ukrainian service members at Boryspil International Airport outside Kyiv, Ukraine, unpack Javelin antitank missiles from the United States on Feb. 10. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
By Karen DeYoung
February 27, 2022 at 7:49 p.m. EST

The current rush by the West to send weapons to Ukraine is in stark contrast to years of hesitancy that often had as much to do with domestic U.S. and allied politics, and concerns about their own relations with Moscow, than with an assessment of the Russian threat to Ukraine.

Russia’s launch last week of a full-scale invasion, with land, air and sea attacks on Ukrainian cities and military installations, has been met with what U.S. officials have described as a surprisingly robust defense. Officials in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, claim they have destroyed hundreds of Russian vehicles, including an entire column of T-72 tanks in the northeast Ukrainian town of Glukhov, near the Russian border.

Ukraine has pleaded for more help, including additional Javelin antitank weapons, and Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The Kremlin has gone “beyond all bounds and crossed all the red lines,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov beseeched Congress last week on YouTube. “It is not going to stop if we will not stop it.”

Historic sanctions on Russia had roots in Zelensky’s emotional appeal

President Biden has authorized nearly $1 billion in military assistance over the past year for Ukraine, including $350 million in weapons such as antitank and antiaircraft missiles last week, and $200 million in drawdowns from U.S. arms stocks approved in December. The new package includes more Javelins, although Stingers are likely to wait until a further tranche, defense officials said.

Germany, in a major break from its post-World War II aversion to involvement in overseas military entanglements, said Saturday that it would send 1,000 antitank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles to Ukraine and released other countries from export restrictions on German-manufactured weapons. That release allowed the Netherlands to pledge German-made antitank and air defense rockets.

France and the United Kingdom are sending military assistance, as are smaller NATO members, including Belgium, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Neutral Sweden said Sunday that it would suspend its long-held doctrine of not sending weapons to countries engaged in conflict to ship defensive equipment and other supplies to Ukraine, and Finland said it is considering doing the same.

How the United States and other allies will keep up the shipments has already bumped up against the harsh reality that deliveries through Ukraine’s now-contested airspace are virtually impossible without getting directly drawn into the conflict, said a senior U.S. defense official, one of several who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military planning.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House lawmakers late Thursday evening that the administration was looking for ways to deliver arms and is considering training Ukrainian forces in another country, said Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) and two other congressional officials.

Reznikov, in his video, tried to provide an answer. “You may deliver it to Poland,” he told potential donors. “From there, we will transport them across the land.”

Meanwhile, as Ukrainians prepare to face down tanks in the streets of Kyiv with molotov cocktails assembled in their basements, and rifles being distributed to every able-bodied civilian, there has been no shortage of revisionist history and finger-pointing in Washington.

While the Biden administration has moved quickly since Russian troops began massing on the border in December, its response was sluggish to earlier Russian deployments in April. Before the Russians finally moved into Ukraine in force on Thursday, Republican lawmakers and pundits accused Biden of appeasement in trying to secure a diplomatic solution to the crisis. Russia would never have dared to invade, several charged, if Biden hadn’t shown weakness by withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Former president Donald Trump, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “genius,” has said it never would have happened under his watch.

U.S. interest and involvement in Ukraine has long been a subset of its relations with Russia. That reality became even more apparent in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and established control over breakaway regions of southeastern Ukraine in the chaos that followed the resignation and flight to Moscow of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Ukrainian forces fought a series of battles against Russian-backed separatist rebels in an effort to regain seized territory. But while the West had sanctioned Russia and refused to recognize the Crimean annexation, then-President Petro Poroshenko’s request for U.S. military assistance, ranging from F-16 jets and Javelins to helmets and blankets, gave then-President Barack Obama pause.

At the time, there was a high sensitivity in the White House to avoiding a conflict that could lead to direct confrontation with Russia. Some senior Obama aides initially advocated taking a breather before deciding to arm the Ukrainian military, which only weeks before had been fighting pro-democracy protesters in the streets and was believed to be highly corrupt.

Obama became more convinced that providing high-end armaments to a far-off conflict was folly when, barely a month after Poroshenko’s June 7 inauguration, a Malaysian airliner was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over separatist territory in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard. Western intelligence believed the weapon had been provided to the separatists by Russia.

If the same thing had happened with U.S.-provided weapons to Ukraine government forces, Obama said at the time, according to aides, the United States would have gotten the blame.

After a year of internal debate, Obama declined to provide lethal aid, overruling most of his national security team. Still, the United States committed more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016, including body armor, night-vision goggles, vehicles and training.

But Obama’s refusal to provide lethal weaponry had by that point become a Republican talking point, leading then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to charge in 2015 that the “Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we’re sending blankets and meals.”

Four years later, Trump would echo that charge, claiming that while his administration had sent “antitank busters” to Ukraine, Obama had provided only “pillows and sheets.”

But Trump had his own problems with Ukraine, very little of which had to do with protecting it from Russia. Trump first approved the sale of $47 million worth of 210 Javelin missiles and 37 launchers to Ukraine in December 2017. Delivered in April the following year, they were not deployed to the front lines of the still-simmering separatist war. Under the terms of the sale, they were kept boxed in a military storage facility far from the front lines, where they were to serve symbolically as a “strategic deterrent” to Russia.

In the summer of 2019, Trump froze an additional $400 million in congressionally approved security assistance to Ukraine, an action that later became a centerpiece in his first impeachment. Based in large part on a July 25 telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that year, in which Zelensky expressed interest in buying more Javelins, Trump deflected the request and instead asked Zelensky for the “favor” of digging up dirt against then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and the Ukrainian business dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter.

Trump released the frozen aid when his action, along with a transcript of the call with Zelensky, became public.

Recent days have brought increasing unity on all sides of the political spectrum to help Ukraine. But that has not prevented a partisan rehash of the past eight years.

“I don’t think we left Ukraine defenseless,” said Evelyn Farkas, who served as deputy assistance secretary of defense for Russia and Ukraine from 2012 to 2015. “Could we have done more? Yes. Could everybody have done more? Yes.”

“But nobody foresaw what we see today.”

Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/02/27/ukraine-us-arms-supply/?fbclid=IwAR109tNGS4w4Kkxzs-zkuCJco-teY0jiIG-bo1Po8suoMkMpR9raFj38NOI

dneal

March 2nd, 2022, 08:08 AM

Bold2013

March 2nd, 2022, 08:31 AM

Dneal thank you for that interesting analysis.

welch

March 2nd, 2022, 01:18 PM

Maybe only Poland. On Al Jazeera, I saw a map of the invasion that included topography. It appears that the Ukrainian - Romanian border runs along Carpathian mountain range.

Separately, here is a word from George Monbiot, left-wing climate activist, slicing up the "party-line" of the "anti-imperialists" who keep repeating Kremlin propaganda points.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/russian-propaganda-anti-imperialist-left-vladimir-putin

And from RTE Ireland, quoting a military expert in Russia.

A Russian-based military expert has said "bad military planning" has resulted in the nation's tanks being "stuck in mud" in north Ukraine and the country's economy facing "meltdown" due to the to-date faltering invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's defence ministry today said that 498 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine and another 1,597 had been wounded since the beginning of Moscow's military operation there, according to Russia's RIA news agency.

It was the first time that Moscow had put a figure on its casualties since it started the invasion on Ukraine last Thursday.

Moscow-based defence analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said Russian president Vladimir Putin is in a "very dangerous dog house" over the situation, saying he has made a series of miscalculations over the war.

https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2022/0302/1284030-russian-forces-expert/?fbclid=IwAR0DD7ka10FfGxp_WgijAkHrR8Dz_vKtw-EfhRrvLNFWRMQXZ_hL9IlolZI

dneal

March 2nd, 2022, 03:51 PM

MK airbase is next to Constanta, which is a Romanian port on the Black Sea. All of that is on the east side of the mountains and there’s a route north to Ukraine. Poland is easier, but Romania is not difficult.

Chuck Naill

March 2nd, 2022, 04:39 PM

Some information is coming out that China asked Russia to delay the invasion until after the Olympic Games. Happen the day after the closing ceremonies. I’m sure more will develop.

dneal

March 2nd, 2022, 04:56 PM

Also, I found this ≈30 minute video pretty good at summarizing many of the reasons for the invasion.

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk
I forgot the link
https://youtu.be/If61baWF4GE

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This is very informative, and I recommend everyone take the time to watch. I’m pretty well versed and most of the “military” aspect wasn’t new (Ukraine being an avenue of approach, Crimean land bridge, etc…) but I didn’t know about the aqua duct to Crimea or the oil reserves off the western coast. The economic competition argument is sound.

The music and whatnot is a bit cheesy, but it’s solid and thorough analysis.

welch

March 2nd, 2022, 05:17 PM

SWIFT said today that seven Russian banks will be disconnected on March 12:

Diplomatic decisions taken by the European Union, in consultation with the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, bring SWIFT into efforts to end this crisis by requiring us to disconnect select Russian banks from our financial messaging services. As previously stated, we will fully comply with applicable sanctions laws.

To this end, in compliance with the legal instruction in EU Council Regulation (EU) 2022/345 of 1 March 2022, we will disconnect seven designated Russian entities (and their designated Russia based subsidiaries) from the SWIFT network. This Regulation requires us to disconnect the identified entities on 12 March 2022, and we will do so accordingly. The SWIFT community will be kept regularly updated across multiple channels, including in the customer section on swift.com.

(full statement, which includes boilerplate first and last paragraphs, here:https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/message-swift-community)

Why not immediately? Banks pay each other thousands of times a day. On an average day, SWIFT carries 41 million messages; even though not all are payment messages, it is still a lot. If a bank fails to make a payment, it is in violation of all sorts of banking agreements, and the payee bank is missing a payment that it assumed it had when it paid somebody else. Think of banking as a world-wide just-in-time supply-chain of money. It takes time to stop.

Further complication: global payments are one side of a "delivery versus payment" (DVP) pair. For each payment there will be something moving to the payor.

Lloyd

March 2nd, 2022, 05:22 PM

Andrew posted this on FB at 3pm EST today. He has managed to make these types of post daily.🤎
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20220303/e90a1ca5258e53b6bde3a72198b9d37c.jpg

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dneal

March 2nd, 2022, 06:10 PM

Looking at the 2 Mar update at the Institute for War resource welch shared.

They say Kiev is the main effort. I'm not so sure. Forces in the Donbas are just as numerous (6 divisions vs 5 units of unknown size approaching Kiev), they appear to have secured the land bridge to Crimea, and they're destroying the city of Maruipol (which they don't need post-conflict).

I'd say the land bridge to Crimea is the main effort, and what they'll bargain for. Kiev is a capital city. Encircling it gives political leverage, and options. Take the city and install a new government, try to bargain for one (or some other concession related to the EU or NATO), or leave it alone as an exchange for getting to keep the land bridge.

--edit--

Link to publications page (https://www.understandingwar.org/publications). It should automatically include daily updates at the end of each day, as opposed to linking to the specific day's update.

Lloyd

March 2nd, 2022, 06:32 PM

On a slight tangent, I found this article about the weaponization of finance and the pros/cons of bitcoin interesting. I hadn't thought heavily about these topics before.

Yazeh

March 2nd, 2022, 06:42 PM

Idiotic question:
The media shows a line of Russian military vehicles using a road/ highway to Kyiv.
Why don't the Ukrainians attack this convoy? or why did they not pepper it with mines/ IEDs?

welch

March 2nd, 2022, 07:23 PM

On a slight tangent, I found this article about the weaponization of finance and the pros/cons of bitcoin interesting. I hadn't thought heavily about these topics before.

Missing the link, Lloyd.

Bitcoin might be one way around SWIFT, since it was intended to bypass banks, central banks, and regulations. I noticed it about 15 years ago, and it seemed a great way for drug dealers and terrorists to hide their money as they moved it. That never happened, other than as a way for Russian hackers to collect ransom. The actual crypto-currency, the one that gets "mined" day and night, is more like a Dutch tulip in the 18th Century: each unit is valuable because somebody else wants it. While a US dollar is more or less a reflection of the US GDP, and the UK pound reflects British GDP, and all the rest, a crypto-coin represents only a very long number. A unique number, but nothing else.

In its original idea, crypto might have become a way for Russian banks to pay and get paid, but has not become a payment system. There are crypto exchanges, several of them, and everything about crypto is unstable. Further, if any of the crypto exchanges tried to become the way around the banking system, SWIFT, the Fed, the Bank of England, and all the other central banks, then governments would shut them down.

dneal

March 2nd, 2022, 07:24 PM

Idiotic question:
The media shows a line of Russian military vehicles using a road/ highway to Kyiv.
Why don't the Ukrainians attack this convoy? or why did they not pepper it with mines/ IEDs?

Mines in general are a pain for a lot of reasons. Can't bury them in tarmac, and they end up killing a lot of innocent people. Forget thermobaric and cluster munitions; mines are borderline legally and there is a big movement to ban them. You have to emplace IEDs, and they work better if they're command detonated. That's hard because it's easy to get killed trying to do that. If they're trip detonated (wire, pressure, etc...), they kill indiscriminately - like mines.

My social media is lit up with memes of killing these formations lined up on the road. A-10 memes, artillery memes, etc... It's stupid for the Russians to do, and western forces would light them up. For Ukraine, it's a matter of capability and capacity. Artillery needs to be in range, but counter battery radar detects you and you get artillery rounds back for your trouble. See Here (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=counter+battery+fire). You can attack those sorts of convoys with aircraft, but there's air defense to deal with. Like I mentioned earlier, artillery and air defense are Russia's strengths. So while they could do it (capability), they would lose equipment/aircraft they can't afford to lose (capacity). They're also in the defense, and should be setting up kill zones and destroying equipment when it enters the kill zone. Artillery has it pre-planned, they shoot and displace. U.S. Javelins and British MLAWs can easily kill armored vehicles, Stingers can easily kill fixed and rotary wing attack aviation, and RPGs (which are plentiful) can kill soft vehicles.

Lloyd

March 2nd, 2022, 08:09 PM

welch

March 2nd, 2022, 09:03 PM

Maybe Russian casualties will begin to trouble Putin.

Russian Troop Deaths Expose a Potential Weakness of Putin’s Strategy

By Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt
Published March 1, 2022
Updated March 2, 2022, 10:39 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, President Vladimir V. Putin was so worried about Russian casualty figures coming to light that authorities accosted journalists who tried to cover funerals of some of the 400 troops killed during that one-month campaign.

But Moscow may be losing that many soldiers daily in Mr. Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine, American and European officials said. The mounting toll for Russian troops exposes a potential weakness for the Russian president at a time when he is still claiming, publicly, that he is engaged only in a limited military operation in Ukraine’s separatist east.

No one can say with certainty just how many Russian troops have died since last Thursday, when they began what is turning into a long march to Kyiv, the capital. Some Russian units have put down their arms and refused to fight, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Major Ukrainian cities have withstood the onslaught thus far.

American officials had expected the northeastern city of Kharkiv to fall in a day, for example, but Ukrainian troops there have fought back and regained control despite furious rocket fire. The bodies of Russian soldiers have been left in areas surrounding Kharkiv. Videos and photos on social media show charred remains of tanks and armored vehicles, their crews dead or wounded.

The Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, acknowledged on Sunday for the first time that “there are dead and wounded” Russian troops but offered no numbers. He insisted Ukrainian losses were “many times” higher. Ukraine has said its forces have killed more than 5,300 Russian troops.

Neither side’s claims have been independently verified, and Biden administration officials have refused to discuss casualty figures publicly. But one American official put the Russian losses as of Monday at 2,000, an estimate with which two European officials concurred.

Senior Pentagon officials told lawmakers in closed briefings on Monday that Russian and Ukrainian military deaths appeared to be the same, at around 1,500 on each side in the first five days, congressional officials said. But they cautioned that the figures — based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and on-the-ground media reports — were estimates.

For a comparison, nearly 2,500 American troops were killed in Afghanistan over 20 years of war.

For Mr. Putin, the rising death toll could damage any remaining domestic support for his Ukrainian endeavors. Russian memories are long — and mothers of soldiers, in particular, American officials say, could easily hark back to the 15,000 troops killed when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan, or the thousands killed in Chechnya.

Russia has deployed field hospitals near the front lines, say military analysts, who have also monitored ambulances driving back and forth from Russian units to hospitals in neighboring Belarus, Moscow’s ally.

“Given the many reports of over 4,000 Russians killed in action, it is clear that something dramatic is happening,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, who was NATO’s supreme allied commander before his retirement. “If Russian losses are this significant, Vladimir Putin is going to have some difficult explaining to do on his home front.”

Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, added, “There are going to be a lot of Russians going home in body bags and a lot of Russian families grieving the longer this goes on.”

In particular, Pentagon officials and military analysts said it was surprising that Russian soldiers had left behind the bodies of their comrades.

“It’s been shocking to see that they’re leaving their fallen brethren behind on the battlefield,” said Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration. “Eventually the moms will be like, ‘Where’s Yuri? Where’s Maksim?’”

Already, the Ukrainian government has begun answering that question. On Sunday, authorities launched a website that they said was meant to help Russian families track down information about soldiers who may have been killed or captured. The site, which states it was created by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, says it is providing videos of captured Russian soldiers, some of them injured. The pictures and videos change throughout the day.

“If your relatives or friends are in Ukraine and participate in the war against our people — here you can get information about their fate,” the site says.

The name of the site, 200rf.com, is a grim reference to Cargo 200, a military code word that was used by the Soviet Union to refer to the bodies of soldiers put in zinc-lined coffins for transport away from the battlefield; it is a euphemism for troops killed in war.

Military aid. Several countries are funneling arms into Ukraine, while NATO is moving military equipment and troops into member states bordering Russia and Belarus, amid rising fears that Russia might try to reclaim its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

The website is part of a campaign launched by Ukraine and the West to counter what American officials characterize as Russian disinformation, which includes Russia’s insistence before the invasion that the troops surrounding Ukraine were simply there for military exercises. Information and the battle for public opinion around the world have come to play an outsize part in a war that has come to seem like a David vs. Goliath contest.

On Monday, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, read out before the General Assembly what he said were the final text messages from a Russian soldier to his mother. They were obtained, he said, by Ukrainian forces after the soldier was killed. “We were told that they would welcome us and they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass,” he wrote, according to Mr. Kyslytsya. “They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard.”

The decision to read those texts, Russia experts and Pentagon officials said, was a not-so-veiled reminder to Mr. Putin of the role Russian mothers have had in bringing attention to military losses that the government tried to keep secret. In fact, a group now called the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia played a pivotal part in opening up the military to public scrutiny and in influencing perceptions of military service, Julie Elkner, a Russia historian, wrote in The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies.

On Tuesday, a senior Pentagon official said entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense. In some cases, Russian troops have punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.

The Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operational developments, declined to say how the military had made these assessments — presumably from a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks might be across the sprawling battlefield.

Images of body bags or coffins, or soldiers killed and left on the battlefield, a Biden administration official said, would prove the most damaging to Mr. Putin at home.

Ukrainian officials are using the reports and images on social media of Russian casualties to try to undercut the morale of the invading Russian forces.

On Monday, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, offered Russian soldiers cash and amnesty if they surrendered.

“Russian soldier! You were brought to our land to kill and die,” he said. “Do not follow criminal orders. We guarantee you a full amnesty and 5 million rubles if you lay down your arms. For those who continue to behave like an occupier, there will be no mercy.”

Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/us/politics/russia-ukraine-war-deaths.html

Chip

March 2nd, 2022, 11:25 PM

Seems like that 40-mile traffic jam would be a hell of a target. If only a small number of vehicles were immobilized, it would keep them all stuck in place. Good shot for partisans with anti-tank weapons or armed drones. Hit the lead tanks and fuel trucks: kaboom!

I'm recalling the Market Garden attack in WWII where the English military geniuses sent armored columns along narrow roads through wetlands, among other incredible blunders. It was intended to end the war in short order. No such luck.

"The road toward Arnhem was narrow, only wide enough for two vehicles, and German infantry men wielding Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons picked off the nine lead British tanks right at the start of their advance. Allied ground troops managed to advance only seven miles by the end of the first day."

https://www.history.com/news/operation-market-garden-failure-allies

dneal

March 3rd, 2022, 05:38 AM

Those German infantrymen were in the defense and set up a kill zone at a choke point.

welch

March 3rd, 2022, 06:42 AM

An article in the NY Times pointed me to this article by Ivan Tomofeev, saying

The Russian International Affairs Council, a government-funded think tank, published an article by a prominent expert describing the war as a strategic debacle. The expert, Ivan Timofeev, said Ukrainian society would now “see Russia as an enemy for several decades to come.” He added a veiled warning directed at government officials who were now cracking down on people speaking out against the war.

The article is really an argument that their analysis, from several months before the war, had been proven right: the gains of an invasion would be tiny and the costs would be enormous.

It is in Russian, so I used Google translate. However, there seems to be a button for English. I read the short version, which is long enough. A bit of terminology: the Russian government calls this a "special military operation" and has silenced anyone or or media calling it war.

https://russiancouncil.ru/analytics-and-comments/analytics/pochemu-eksperty-ne-verili-v-veroyatnost-vooruzhennogo-konflikta-s-ukrainoy/

Yazeh

March 3rd, 2022, 07:58 AM

@dneal... much appreciated the detailed response.
@Lloyd, crypto can be blocked. That's what the Canadian government did with the Trucker's convoy...

welch

March 3rd, 2022, 08:15 AM

Geez, sorry.
https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/03/02/bitcoiners-were-right-weaponized-finance-just-created-a-post-dollar-planet/?outputType=amp

The article points out that bitcoin maintains its history. So, who will accept bitcoin that went through Russia? Without bitcoin, they can't get money in; with bitcoin, they can't get money out.

I read the article. One eye-popping claim: that before SWIFT, banks shipped gold to each other to settle trades. No. Gold doesn't move, and neither does money. Paper moves, and banks change their ledgers to "move" money from one account to another. Banks have accounts with each other: in an international payment, a bank in the US moves dollars from its own account of the payor to that of a German bank. A German bank takes Euros (or deutsche marks in the old days) from the US banks account and puts them into the account of the payee.

Legend has it that in the ancient world a guy in Phoenicia, who wanted to buy wheat from Sicily, would go to the port of Sidon. There he would give money to another guy sitting on a bench under a tree just above the harbor. This ancient banker would write out a letter to his cousin in Syracuse saying "please give my Phoenician trader this much money and deduct it from my account". Today, that Sidonian's letter is still called a Letter of Credit. The Phoenician trader would buy his wheat and ship it home. The paper moved, but gold or silver stayed in each cousin's vault.

Immediately before SWIFT, banks communicated by telex, letter, or phone call. SWIFT just gives banks a uniform, secure, and reliable way to send "high value" messages. Think of a message as an envelope. SWIFT member banks agree on the addressing on the envelope, as, for example, a Bank Identifier Code (BIC). For their convenience, they also agree on the format of the message inside the envelope, as in, this spot has an account and that field has an amount. By having a formatted message, banks can read a message directly into a computer system. Everything is automated. Banks could also send free-text messages, but that requires someone to type the text at the sender and someone else to read it at the receiver. No way to handle 40 million messages a day.

The all-automatic all computer mechanism allows a certain amount of policing of international payments. In the US, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCen) of the Treasury Department demands that every bank send a copy of every payment from a foreign bank or to a foreign bank. Other countries each have an equivalent of FINCen. In addition, every bank has a list of companies it cannot touch.

Chip

March 3rd, 2022, 12:25 PM

A screenshot from the NY Times.

https://i.imgur.com/9tMmIXV.jpg

The apparent strategy was to zoom that surface-level force to Kyiv before resistance could be mobilized. But it's not working out that way.

A forty-mile long traffic jam has eighty miles of flank.

Another bit: info that exposed a plot to assassinate Zelensky, the Ukranian leader, and led to its failure was leaked from a Russian FSB intelligence source. Wowser!

dneal

March 3rd, 2022, 12:53 PM

A forty-mile long traffic jam has eighty miles of flank.

How many soldiers, small arms, crew served and other weapon systems do you suppose are in that 40 miles of convoy?

Lloyd

March 3rd, 2022, 03:37 PM

Around 11:30am EST on March 3rd
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20220303/ee7b2824339b3c084c47b3834b452d2b.jpg

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Lloyd

March 3rd, 2022, 06:08 PM

dneal

March 3rd, 2022, 07:47 PM

From today's ISW brief. (https://www.understandingwar.org/publications)

The Russian military has continued its unsuccessful attempts to encircle Kyiv and capture Kharkiv. The Russians continued to attack piecemeal, committing a few battalion tactical groups at a time rather than concentrating overwhelming force to achieve decisive effects. Russian commanders appear to prefer opening up new lines of advance for regiment-sized operations but have been unable to achieve meaningful synergies between efforts along different axes toward the same objectives. They have also continued conducting operations in southern Ukraine along three diverging axes rather than concentrating on one or attempting mutually supporting efforts. These failures of basic operational art—long a strong suit of the Soviet military and heavily studied at Russian military academies—remain inexplicable as does the Russian military’s failure to gain air superiority or at least to ground the Ukrainian Air Force.

It only remains inexplicable if your explanation is that the "failing" attack is the main effort.

Meanwhile in Mariupol...

Russian forces likely seek to force Mariupol to capitulate by destroying critical civilian infrastructure and killing civilians to create a humanitarian catastrophe—an approach Russian forces have repeatedly taken in Syria

and

Russian troops have surrounded Mariupol and are attacking it brutally to compel its capitulation or destroy it.

Seems their operational art is working in another area. If the land bridge is the main effort, they're doing pretty good. Then what's going on from the north? It's just as probable that it's leverage and an opportunity, which is also classic Putin. It creates options.

Still to early to do anything than develop a hypothesis, and there're plenty of those. It could be that Ukraine is indeed putting up more stiff resistance. It could be that Russian presence is intended to draw the majority of Ukrainian defense to Kiev, to make the land bridge easier to take - while "peace talks" continue. A friend in Europe said the conscripts contract service runs out in May. So those 1 year conscripts being 3/4 through their obligation are about as trained as they're going to be. That's not much (see original article in the OP), but that's what they have. Optimal timing for a suboptimal force. Also "fodder" who are going to leave service in 2-3 months anyway. Don't need them to perform. Only need them to distract. If some die... well, that's war.

Chip

March 3rd, 2022, 10:28 PM

A forty-mile long traffic jam has eighty miles of flank.

How many soldiers, small arms, crew served and other weapon systems do you suppose are in that 40 miles of convoy?

They're spread pretty thin, two columns wide. When they're moving, they aren't able to engage with accuracy. Any blockage owing to Ukrainian attacks creates gaps. So they aren't able to concentrate their obviously superior weapons and forces in order to advance. Plus sufficient fuel. Maybe they'll get to Kyiv.

Or maybe not.

manoeuver

March 4th, 2022, 09:31 AM

TSherbs

March 4th, 2022, 11:06 AM

dneal

March 4th, 2022, 01:07 PM

Here's a guy with some interesting takes. This is the first I've read of him so I don't have a thorough read on his biases (some are clearly on display.)

https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/02/opening-salvos-tossed-putin-next-moves-ukraine/ (https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/02/opening-salvos-tossed-putin-next-moves-ukraine/)

There's a lot to it, this guy posits the Ukraine invasion is the first overt step in Putin's plans to destabilize the West's entire financial system.

I don't know if I buy that. So far it's among very few cogent explanations that don't include Putin as some kind of pure evildoer or suffering some psychiatric malady.

I do get the feeling Putin knows what he's doing, and keeping us guessing is an enjoyable part of the plan.

The guy gets an A for creativity. Some of it is Alex Jones levels of "out there". He starts with: "This isn’t a war for Ukraine, it’s a war for the future of the entire world. Ukraine represents the hill both Davos and Russia have chosen to live or die on."

Yeah, I don't think so.

Some of it is just wrong, like "No one is willing to actually send arms to Ukraine." There are plenty of people willing to sell arms to Ukraine. There's a lot of money to be made.

This map (if Putin really wants everything up to the Dnieper), isn't bad. Too early to tell, and I don't think it's likely; but who knows.

68112

Chip

March 4th, 2022, 01:31 PM

[QUOTE=Lloyd;357223]One eye-popping claim: that before SWIFT, banks shipped gold to each other to settle trades. No. Gold doesn't move, and neither does money.

Actually, quite a lot of US dollars were shipped (bundled on pallets, yet) to Iraq and Afghanistan.

How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish

The US flew nearly $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.

Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. "The numbers are so large that it doesn't seem possible that they're true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"

The memorandum details the casual manner in which the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbursed the money, which came from Iraqi oil sales, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food programme and seized Iraqi assets.

"One CPA official described an environment awash in $100 bills," the memorandum says. "One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/10/9/11-millionaires-and-corruption-how-us-money-helped-break-afghanistan.html

Lloyd

March 4th, 2022, 05:03 PM

From the NYTimes - "Last Vestiges of Russia’s Free Press Fall Under Kremlin Pressure". Unfortunate but not surprising.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/world/europe/russia-ukraine-propaganda-censorship.html

(I actually remembered to include the link)

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Another surprising add on to this-
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russia-blocks-facebook-accusing-it-restricting-access-russian-media-2022-03-04/

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Lloyd

March 4th, 2022, 05:05 PM

@Chip That wasn't my quote. That was a response by @welch.

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dneal

March 4th, 2022, 05:05 PM

Not sure what that has to do with Ukraine, but I'll just comment on how that Iraq and Afghanistan cash thing went.

When you invade a country, it turns out that they don't take your unit's government credit card you use a home station. If you want to buy something, or pay someone for labor (local nationals); they want cash. Their currency is in limbo. What are my Saddam-faced Dinar worth now? Dollars spend worldwide, so you have to move the physical thing (pallets of cash) there.

In 2003, I carried $10k cash in my cargo pocket to buy whatever we needed. Civil affairs goes through amazing amounts for cash. Iraqi playgrounds were paid for in cash.

Watching that on a national level is why I'm so cynical. The invaded government is funded in U.S. cash, because there is no banking system (Afghanistan, for example). When you see your government blow through literal cash, and the scale of it; you can imagine very quickly how they're pissing it away at a D.C. level. That's not a partisan comment, btw. Each party has their own money-making racket. I, my son, his children, and everybody else's is looking at a hell of a bureaucratic bar tab.

--break--

Back on topic, today's ISW still talks about Kiev being the main effort and follows with a bunch of buzzword bingo terms not really saying anything. Mariupol's update is:

"Russian forces still encircle Mariupol and are continuing an artillery, rocket, and missile barrage on the city while concentrating ground forces likely in preparation to seize and secure it within the next 24-48 hours. The Ukrainian General Staff, various social media reports, and claims by DNR and LNR forces suggest that Russian forces drawn from the 8th Combined Arms Army (likely of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division, among others) supported by elements of the Donetsk and Luhansk proxy militias are engaged in this operation.[11] Russian and proxy forces will likely secure and/or destroy Mariupol within the coming days.'

I think the land bridge is the main effort.

welch

March 4th, 2022, 05:08 PM

This opinion piece argues that sanctions will hurt ordinary Russians but that the Russian economy will survive: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/3/how-much-damage-will-sanctions-do-to-russia
Author was a deputy minister of finance and a minister of the central bank of Russia.

Russia is the largest economy and the largest country globally, by population, against which such strong sanctions have ever been implemented. Western leaders know that they will not immediately stop the war, but hope that they would inflict enough damage on the Russian economy to help de-escalate the conflict.

What follows is my insight into how the current package of sanctions will and will not hurt the Russian economy and why.

He goes into details, and they are interesting.

He seems to be replying to a previous opinion suggesting that sanctions will drive the Russian economy back to the chaos of the early 1990s; even back to the wipeout of 1918, when the Bolsheviks repudiated the Tsarist debts. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/4/russias-looming-economic-crisis-will-be-worse-than-1991

Today, Russia appears to be on the verge of an economic collapse without parallel in its post-World War II history. The United States and European Union’s decision to sanction Russia’s central bank on February 28 has essentially severed the spinal cord of the country’s economy. Russia is set to default on its debts, see its oil export relationships rejuggled to its detriment, its currency collapse even further, and it is now possible that most of its residents’ quality of life may fall to Iranian or potentially even Venezuelan standards in the near future.

President Vladimir Putin has long justified his strongman rule through warnings that without his guiding hand, Russia would be destined to fall back into the chaos of the 1990s when Russians experienced a drastic decline in living standards and a major contraction in the economy on the back of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Yet the reality is that his invasion of Ukraine has made possible a collapse worse than anything that Russia experienced in the 1990s.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet economy and the birth of the new Russian economy saw huge amounts of wealth smuggled abroad, the collapse of the political-economic structure on which the Soviet Union depended and its replacement with a class of mostly violent criminals, well-connected former apparatchiks and the occasional idealistic capitalists who would come to be known as “oligarchs”. Russian life expectancies collapsed.

welch

March 4th, 2022, 05:58 PM

This is a Twitter thread by Mark Sleboda, who claims to have been a US Army officer and who is now an "intelligence analyst" in Moscow. Sleboda is a disciple of Alexander Dugin, one of the "thinkers" behind Putin. Dugin is what I would call a "Eurasian fascist mystic", something like the 19th Century Russian slavophiles. He calls for Russia to develop away from the degenerate ideas of "the west", to return to the spiritual ways of the Russian Orthodox Church. Just before the invasion, I read a long essay by Putin, from last July, calling for the unification of Russia and Ukraine on the basis of a "historical and spiritual" bond that goes back to the 10th Century CE. Putin points to a St. Vladimir and a warning by Oleg the Prophet. Putin's essay was at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181?fbclid=IwAR2qE6Peehnuplu8tX1VkkgcFfmfr-yOyGO8gjhvOW5Eyd2AYpdieLFrB6Q. It can't be reached now, perhaps because the Russian government took it down. Putin repeated the essay in his speech a week ago, televised on C-SPAN. Putin seems to echo Dugin.

This is #theGreatDecoupling between the West and Russia. Economic linkages will be cut down to only energy and a few other commodities & chemicals that Europe is dependent on Russia for. The West controls and has weaponized their entire economy in their war to break Russia. 1/-

^ 2/- Political, social and cultural linkages will also be severed to a high degree. Weaning Russia off this dependence will be hard and immiserating. But with Chinese and some other Eurasian support, Russia may just weather it. The entire global economy will suffer as well.

^ 3/- But once the dust has settled and new domestic and import substitution formed - Russia will at least be economically & financially independent from the West. They will never again be able to weaponize their economic hegemony to coerce, blackmail, or wage war on Russia.

^ 4/- The same weaponized economic war too will also soon be turned on China and the Rest of the world's holdouts from US-led Western Hegemony. The Unipolar world will truly be over, but the Multipolar world will be stillborn by US attempts to hang on to their hegemony.

5/- Instead US/Western pressure will directly result in the formation of an anti-Western bloc led by China and Russia for survival and independence. Neutrality will be difficult to maintain. A new Bipolar world is coming into being, just decades after the last ended.

6/- The Golden Age of the Global Internet is also now over resulting not from Russia closing itself off, but by censorship and exclusion by Western and the social media platforms and the internet fixtures they control - because they don't trust their own people to hear alternate

7/- perspectives and narratives and judge on their own.
The world's internet will now break down into regional spheres with limited connectivity. It will be a new, much smaller, less connected, more localized and divisive world.

8/- We are of course already seeing the physical connections around the world break down - with closures of entire swathes of the globe's surface to each others' airlines and global shipping connections being severed one by one as we speak.

9/- Global distribution networks will be disrupted & chaos result for months. Because Russia & Ukraine are primary sources of so many of the world's commodities - energy & food costs around the world will skyrocket. In the First world prices will go up, in the Third - starvation.

10/- Ultimately the cause was the US-led West trying to maintain and extend their Hegemony, while they can and Russia resisting it. NATO expansion east in waves. US meddling and hybrid warfare to bring into power pro-Western/anti-Russian govts in formerly neutral, unaligned,

11/- national identity-divided post Soviet states was the endgame of this NATO expansion to geopolitically consolidate all of Europe under US-led Western Hegemony up to Russia's borders. Russia resisted this geopolitical flipping by color revolution in Georgia, Belarus & Ukraine

12/- And now the ultimate target of this economic war on Russia is forcing regime change in Russia itself for having the temerity to resist the Hegemon's geopolitical expansion right on her very borders.

13/-The great Realist IR scholar Mearsheimer foresaw all of this. As did Kissinger, George Kennan US Ambassador John Matlock and many others. They tried to warn what the consequences of the US trying to geopolitically flip Ukraine would be, but to no avail

youtube.com
Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer
UnCommon Core: The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine CrisisJohn J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4&t=14s

15/-
newyorker.com
Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine
For years, the political scientist has claimed that Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine is caused by Western intervention. Have recent events

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine

16/- For Russia the only path forward, the goal to survive is, must be - separation, autarky (self-sufficiency), and independence from US-led Western Hegemony.

https://twitter.com/MarkSleboda1/status/1498955961930854401

So that's Putin and Russia, or, at least, some of what whirls around Putin's brain.

dneal

March 4th, 2022, 06:24 PM

Empty_of_Clouds

March 4th, 2022, 07:30 PM

welch

March 4th, 2022, 07:35 PM

The "great decoupling" thing looked a little out there to me, so I looked up who Mark Sleboda was. HERE is his Twitter Page (https://twitter.com/MarkSleboda1) and HERE is his Facebook "about" page (https://www.facebook.com/gramsci).

Best I can tell is that he was a navy enlisted nuclear propulsion tech. There are a few international academic listings on there, but I don't see any degrees.

I'd take his stuff with a grain of salt...

I do. On the "decoupling", he is nutsy. Someone challenged me to "refute" Sleboda, and I refuse on grounds that you don't "refute" insanity or mysticism.

dneal

March 4th, 2022, 07:48 PM

dneal

March 4th, 2022, 07:55 PM

Taking a course in one semester and calling it 'studied at X university year 2010' is kind of disingenuous. And isn't RT one of the Russian state media outlets? I'm a bit rusty on all this. But yeah, grain of salt.

Yes. It’s good to check out though. You can’t know what the narrative is if you don’t. Most of their global news is pretty vanilla, most of their spin is subtle. Check out India’s WION. It’s kind of, uh, “emphatic”?

Lloyd

March 4th, 2022, 08:52 PM

For those interested in Andrew, he's still posting regularly to his site. His daily posts are both informative and still include his amazing art.
http://lenskiy.org/

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

Chip

March 4th, 2022, 11:24 PM

welch

March 5th, 2022, 06:16 AM

Today, the Washington Post describes a just-declassified document about the weapons the US rushed to Ukraine:

As war loomed, U.S. armed Ukraine to hit Russian aircraft, tanks and prep for urban combat, declassified shipment list shows

By Karoun Demirjian and Alex Horton

The United States drastically enhanced its shipments of lethal military aid and protective equipment to Ukraine as the prospect of a Russian invasion became more apparent and then a reality, according to a declassified accounting of transfers and sales reviewed by The Washington Post.

The list indicates that as early as December, the Pentagon was equipping Ukrainian fighters with arms and equipment useful for fighting in urban areas, including shotguns and specialized suits to safeguard soldiers handling unexploded ordnance. Over the last week, the Biden administration has increased such shipments, sending Stinger antiaircraft missile systems for the first time and further augmenting Kyiv’s supply of antitank Javelin missiles and other ammunition.

Taken together, the variety, volume and potency of firepower being rushed into the war zone illustrate the extent to which the United States sought to prepare the Ukrainian military to wage a hybrid war against Russia, even as President Biden has expressly ruled out inserting American troops into the conflict.

“This is a continuous process. We are always, always looking at what Ukraine needs, and we’ve been doing this for years now,” a senior defense official told reporters Friday on the condition of anonymity under ground rules established by the Pentagon. “We have just accelerated our process of identifying requirements and accelerated our consultations as well with the Ukrainians, talking to them daily, as opposed to periodic meetings that we did before this crisis.”

John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, declined to comment. The list of materiel reviewed by The Post generally tracks with the administration’s broad public statements about the transfers. It does not contain any information designated classified.

Ukrainian military personnel load a truck with the U.S. weapons at Kyiv's Boryspil Airport on Feb. 11. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images)
Though Ukrainian fighters have managed to slow the invasion, Russian forces continue to make gains as they bear down on urban areas. The capital, Kyiv, and Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, have come under heavy bombardment. Russian troops also are closing in on the strategic port city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, and pressing from Crimea toward Ukraine’s other large port city, Odessa.

Many experts say that despite the Ukrainian military’s efforts to exhaust Russian forces, the war is destined to turn into a street fight, particularly if Moscow is able to assert control over key cities. The shipment list suggests that the Biden administration anticipated Ukraine would need to arm itself for a multipronged invasion.

It affirms that the Biden administration has sent Stinger man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS, to Ukraine in the last several days, weapons that would aid soldiers targeting Russian aircraft. Those were provided alongside shipments of Javelin missiles and launchers, a mainstay of military assistance to Ukraine since 2018, as well as ammunition.

About $240 million of the $350 million in military assistance that was approved in late February has already been transferred to Ukraine, according to a senior defense official.

Those shipments are in addition to about $200 million in military assistance approved for Ukraine in late December that included M141 single-shot shoulder-launched rocket launchers, M500 shotguns, Mk-19 grenade launchers, M134 mini guns typically used for firing from helicopters, and protective suits for explosive ordnance disposal.

U.S. defense aid shipment arrives in Ukraine

A $200 million security support package from the United States arrived in Kyiv, the U.S. embassy said on Jan. 22. (Reuters)
The Pentagon has declined to specify the amount or confirm the full roster of military equipment being supplied to Ukraine since Russian threats against the country sharply escalated over the winter. U.S. officials have cited concerns about identifying what capabilities the Ukrainians have at their disposal.

The United States is one of 14 countries that have delivered security assistance to Ukraine, some of which includes materiel that was originally provided to other U.S. allies but was approved for transfer to Ukraine. Such third-party transfers include anti-armor and antiaircraft systems, according to the list reviewed by The Post.

In the last year, the United States has committed more than $1 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, the senior defense official said. That includes counter-mortar radars, secure radios, electronic equipment, medical equipment, vehicles and a steady supply of Javelin missile systems, according to the list The Post reviewed. At least nine Island-class patrol boats and five Mi-17 transport helicopters have also been provided to Ukraine from the U.S. reserve of excess defense articles.

Ukraine had previously received 210 Javelins through the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program in 2018 and purchased an additional 150 Javelins that arrived in 2020.

The United States has committed about $3 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/04/us-weapons-ukraine/

welch

March 5th, 2022, 06:25 AM

Another article in this morning's Post:

Western allies tightlipped about how they move military aid into Ukraine
“We don’t necessarily tell you exactly what, where, when and how," one British official said.

9 min
By Karen DeYoung, Michael Birnbaum and Karoun Demirjian
Yesterday at 1:50 p.m. EST|Updated yesterday at 9:05 p.m. EST

A man tries to cross a destroyed bridge in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 3. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

As Russia’s military buildup pressed against Ukraine’s border in late January and early February, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov celebrated the arrival of weapons from the West, illustrating his near-daily tweets with photographs of smiling men in uniform unloading heavy pallets from cargo aircraft.

“The 8th [American] bird has arrived in Kyiv!” Reznikov exulted on Feb. 5. “Our partners from #USA have sent more than 650 tons of defense ammunition to Ukraine! To be continued.”

The last such message came on Feb. 23, the day before Russia invaded.

There have been no known air deliveries since then. Ukraine’s airspace is now part of a war zone that no Western nation wants to enter, even as the United States and its allies and partners pledge to deliver more weaponry for the fight.

NATO territory to the west — where Ukraine borders Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania — provides the only still-uncontested ground access. But east-west roads that can handle truck transport into Ukraine are few, and most are clogged with refugees fleeing the country.

“There are stockpiles in Poland,” where much of the weaponry coming from outside is being gathered, said Ed Arnold, a research fellow of European security at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute. From there, “there are only two main supply routes to Kyiv,” one near the Belarus border, and a second farther south.

Live updates: Read the latest from Russia's invasion of Ukraine

Internal Ukrainian logistics “have been okay thus far but need to improve rapidly,” Arnold said. “They might have three days of ammunition left in some areas.”

No one wants to say exactly how the military assistance is moving. “It kind of needs to be something that we say that we are doing,” British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey said in a Monday interview with British Forces radio. “We don’t necessarily tell you exactly what, where, when and how.”

Before the invasion began, Britain air-delivered 2,000 NLAW antitank missiles, which combat photographs indicate are now in use by Ukrainian forces. “We’ve actually been flowing more stuff forward, uniforms, protective equipment, some munitions and weaponry,” Heappey said. “We reach a stage now, though, where because combat operations are ongoing, routes for the Ukrainians to get the stuff into the country are much more challenging.”

U.S. defense aid shipment arrives in Ukraine
A $200 million security support package from the United States arrived in Kyiv, the U.S. embassy said on Jan. 22. (Reuters)
At least 22 NATO nations and a handful of others have said they will send military assistance to Ukraine, including antitank missiles, artillery ammunition and Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Last week, the United States announced $350 million in new shipments that it says are already arriving. In the last 10 days, the Biden administration sent Stinger anti-aircraft missile systems for the first time, alongside more anti-tank Javelin missiles and ammunition, according to a detailed list of transfers obtained by The Washington Post.

The shipments came on top of other U.S. military aid that since late December has included M141 single-shot, shoulder-launched rocket launchers, M500 shotguns, Mk-19 grenade launchers, M134 machine guns, and protective suits for explosive ordnance disposal, according to the list.

As war loomed, U.S. armed Ukraine to hit Russian aircraft, tanks and prep for urban combat, declassified shipment list shows

Germany, reversing its longtime hesitation to send arms into conflicts, said Saturday that it would send 1,000 antitank weapons and 500 Stingers. They went over the border Wednesday. The European Union agreed this week to reimburse its member states up to $555 million for military and humanitarian aid, a decision that leaders said they hoped would speed the flow of assistance.

The United States is handling much of its own distribution through the U.S. European Command, which is coordinating with NATO, a State Department official said. The European Union has set up a coordination center to try to match what Ukraine says it needs to what member nations can offer. Poland has established a logistics center to collect much of the assistance and spirit it over the border, two E.U. policymakers said.

Russia's business ties to the West took 30 years to build and one week to shatter

The State Department official, one of several U.S. and foreign officials who spoke about the sensitive internal allied discussions on the condition of anonymity, said there was helpful “muscle memory” for assistance from the United States, developed in the eight years since the end of Ukraine’s pro-Russian government.

In addition to drawing on its own weapons stocks, the United States has to approve the transfer of any U.S.-origin equipment from third countries.

“When we get that list of current needs, we’re going through and figuring out: what partners do we know that have U.S. origin equipment to meet the requirement, then reaching out to individual countries and saying ‘Ukrainians are in need of, say, antitank missiles. We know you’ve got 300 of them, do you have any excess. … would you consider transferring them?’ ” the State Department official said.

“It’s a fluid situation, but we’re getting it into a good groove right now,” the official said. But “it would be misleading if I left you with the impression this is a perfectly well-organized operation. … We’ve been at this for a week, with things coming constantly. We’re just working as fast as we can.”

U.S. soldiers near a military camp in Arlamow, Poland, near the border with Ukraine, on March 3. (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images)
Since the attack started last week, 14 countries have sent supplies, a senior U.S. defense official said. On the U.S. side, a handover process that typically takes weeks or months has been compressed to hours and days.

“I think all of us have been tremendously impressed with how effectively the Ukrainian armed forces have been using the equipment that we’ve provided them,” the official said.

Poland declined to elaborate on its role as a principal conduit of weapons aid. “For security reasons, which are obvious at the moment, we cannot inform you about the details,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

“Poland, NATO and EU allies are increasing their political and practical support for Ukraine, which is defending itself against a full-scale invasion by Russia,” the statement said. “We are providing massive humanitarian aid, hosting refugees and supplying equipment. In this situation, we must also remember responsibility and information restraint in all defense matters. Poland’s security is paramount.”

U.S. labels attack on nuclear plant a 'war crime'; Zelensky calls for direct talks with Putin

Britain hosted a 25-nation conference this week to discuss and coordinate meeting Ukraine’s needs, Arnold said, but so far, “it’s not a question of overlap. It is a question of volume.” At the moment, he said, the need is for “food, water, ammunition, and then what we refer to as small arms — rifles, ammunition, grenades, especially shoulder antitank and anti-helicopter aircraft missiles. They’re the things that are most effective … they’re quite light, and anyone can use them.”

Some of Ukraine’s asks are more difficult to provide. Despite reports that the United States, or NATO, is considering sending Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries, a U.S. official said that was not likely. “They don’t come flat-packed with an Allen wrench. You need years of training and a whole infrastructure for sustainment,” the State Department official said. “Right now, that’s not an option.”

While the need to aid Ukraine has found rare bipartisan support in Congress, some lawmakers have said the help is too little, too late. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — a fierce opponent of impeaching President Donald Trump in 2020 for using withheld military aid as leverage to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden during the presidential campaign — blamed Ukraine’s current needs on the Biden administration.

“The challenge that we have is, it’s the actions that we could have done before from this administration to make sure today wasn’t happening,” McCarthy said Tuesday on Fox News. “We could have supplied the weapons to Ukraine. They’re not asking for American troops; they’re just asking for the ability to fight.”

The aid and how to get it to where it is needed have become sensitive subjects for a NATO alliance that is fearful of getting drawn into a direct confrontation with Russia. Those worries helped persuade Hungary not to allow its border to be used to ship military support to Ukraine.

“Such deliveries might become targets of hostile military action,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said Monday, adding that Hungary is “not sending weapons to Ukraine.”

Catching up on Russia and Ukraine? Here's what you need to know.

NATO’s leadership has repeatedly emphasized that, despite the shipment of weapons, it is not a party to the conflict. “NATO is not going to send the troops into Ukraine or move planes into Ukrainian airspace,” alliance Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Poland.

A senior NATO diplomat said that Stoltenberg was emphasizing NATO’s lack of belligerence under “hot, clear instructions from the U.S. to do so.”

While thousands of U.S. troops have been sent to bolster front-line NATO states, President Biden said in his Tuesday State of the Union address that “our forces are not engaged and will not engage in conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine.”

Inside Ukraine, “right now, they’re getting infiltration routes set up” to transmit weapons, said Arnold of RUSI. He said there are “probably some organized crime elements to support it … this is weapons smuggling, essentially. It happens the world over” by people who “either support the cause or think they can make a lot of money out of it. Conflicts like this suck in all types of people.”

Some policymakers in NATO countries fear that if Russia becomes desperate — whether because of a stalled advance inside Ukraine or from painful Western sanctions — it could lash out at Ukraine’s backers by attacking military aid convoys before they reach the Ukrainian border.

“This is something that one should take into account,” a senior European diplomat said.

Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks said in an interview that if Russian President Vladimir Putin wants a pretext to attack NATO, he will find one regardless of what the alliance does.

“I don’t think Russia can accuse us simply about deliveries — simply because it cannot be interpreted as a war between NATO and Russia,” Pabriks said. “But, of course, if they would like to interpret something in a negative way, Putin can always imagine something.”

Max Bearak in Brzegi Dolne, Poland, contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/04/weapons-access-ukraine/

dneal

March 5th, 2022, 06:55 AM

Not sure what that has to do with Ukraine, but I'll just comment on how that Iraq and Afghanistan cash thing went.

I'd guess that quite a lot of that cash went into military and contractor pockets and came back to the US. Call it tax-free supplementary pension funds.

Not really. You have at least two people, one orders and the other pays. The finance bubbas that issue the money are draconian in accounting for it, and you’re personally liable. Sack of cash got burned up in an RPG attack? Too bad. You owe the government.

Individual purchases can’t exceed $2500, you provide receipts, etc…. Any kind of scam wouldn’t net that much. The real money is in letting contracts, and most of those folks got caught.

The system is already rigged for defense contractors to make insane profits. “Kickbacks” go to politicians through corporate lobbyists and campaign donations. G.I.s with cash to pay for unit needs in a combat zone is chump change.

welch

March 5th, 2022, 09:30 AM

adhoc

March 5th, 2022, 09:54 AM

Well I've been to the border to help at least a little bit, seeing as I'm just a few hundred kilometers away from the border of the conflict. I did the same during previous crisis as the huge groups of people passed Slovenia to reach northern Europe.

It's terrible, sad, heart breaking, soul crushing, words can not describe it. Nobody wanted this war, not the Ukrainians, not Russians, just a handful of people. Granted, my circle of connections to Russia are all scientists, but they're so much against it, they refuse to continue their work, as it enables and propagates war in some way or another. They're all planning to move to Europe and help with their scientific output here instead, literally. I don't know of a single person that is for this war in Russia.

I'm looking at Serbia now, also just around the corner from my home, nationalistic tendencies there are through the roof due to Russia's aggression. I'm just waiting to one day wake up and find out there's yet another war started in my neighbourhood. What a terrifying and terrible time to be alive. I'm honestly expecting war to reach us sooner or later, as it is going on or is brewing almost all around us. If not flat out war, at least minor conflicts between ethnic minorities in my country, of which there are a lot, and each side is extremely vocal about theirs and hateful against the other.

What is unbelievable to me is how quick people are to jump into this bipartisan split. Everybody around me is cheering for "their" side, but nobody seems to stop to think how many young widows, and fatherless children this war is creating. Dead bodies of men to whom even I could be a father, had my now wife gotten pregnant when we started having sexual intercourse, and that's mind boggling to me, as I'm not even 34 yet. Dead bodies frozen in some god forsaken frozen swamp in the middle of nowhere.

Chuck Naill

March 5th, 2022, 10:09 AM

dneal

March 5th, 2022, 10:13 AM

Where is the Russian airforce? Shouldn't the airforce of a global super-power have been able to wipe out the Ukrainian air force? Maybe the Russians a just not good enough. This military affairs site suggests:

- a limited number of precision-guided munitions;

- poor coordination with ground-based air defenses;

- low number of flying hours; and perhaps a hesitancy not to disabuse notions of foreign observers that the Russian air force has modernized and professionalized in recent years.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/how-big-is-the-russian-air-force/?utm_source=Task%20%26%20Purpose%20Today&utm_campaign=f1e954bd6d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_03_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_67edd998fe-f1e954bd6d-76770755&fbclid=IwAR0sWGkPWBlphxEFhOAYf9kQVp8-tJEkK8JrtAMS2BiLPxFGUZZ8BkFxUnc

This is the sort of thing that gets under my skin about "expert" analysis.

The simple answer? No SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense), which is hard when you're facing SA7 Grails and Stingers. The places the Russian Air Force would be going to attack (like Ukrainian airbases) have people with very effective shoulder-fired missile systems. A missile with a fire and forget seeker head that weighs a fraction of your fighter and travels 3 times as fast is not something you want to deal with (or even can deal with, in the case of Russian technology).

Chuck Naill

March 5th, 2022, 10:41 AM

In your mind, you are the expert. :focus:

Lloyd

March 5th, 2022, 11:51 AM

I'll be posting this elsewhere in this forum, too. It's a brief exchange I had with Andrew on FB. It is me asking him how he can be reached and his reply.

Hi Andrew,
I'm Lloyd in the forums. There are
many at FPG that are very concerned about you, support Ukraine, and would get in touch with you if they knew how. What is your email address?
With deepest respect and support,
Adam

Hi Adam,
I remember you. Thank you
for your support of Ukraine. The
regular email of my site is not stable
as well as the work of the site, I'm not sure how long it will work. My public email (pm Lloyd), but you must understand, when rockets fly over your house and explosions are heard, I can not always answer. We don't know the future, but we believe in our
VIctory!

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

Empty_of_Clouds

March 5th, 2022, 01:27 PM

Chuck Naill

March 5th, 2022, 02:58 PM

In your mind, you are the expert. :focus:

And in your mind how do you define an expert?

Pretty much everything dneal has put into this thread speaks to his experience in theatres both active and otherwise that is relevant to the current situation.

EOC, you are free to believe what your want regarding everything.

He doesn’t vote and has consistently posted false information regarding Trump, Covid, Fauci, and vaccines. I’m not here to change your opinions and perceptions.

Empty_of_Clouds

March 5th, 2022, 03:08 PM

By being selective about which veterans you wish to thank for their service you start to sound like Trump himself. Remember when Trump went after McCain? McRaven? La David Johnson? Humayun S. M. Khan? The list goes on. Now, because you have a personal beef with dneal you disparage his service, his experiences, and his expertise, none of which you are in a position to assess or judge. Shame on you. And saying to me that I am 'free to believe what you want regarding everything' is such a massive dodge to answering questions that make you uncomfortable or taking part in any kind of rational debate.

I’m not here to change your opinions and perceptions. And are clearly completely averse to examining and perhaps changing your own.

How about you providing a relevant response to my question about who you think are the expert assessors of the current conflict. I'll wait, though I suspect given the profile you have been determined to build here that this wait will be very long if not eternal.

Chuck Naill

March 5th, 2022, 04:16 PM

TSherbs

March 5th, 2022, 04:25 PM

Although I agree with your sentiment, EoC, I would also like to point out that the very person you are defending (at least in principle) has participated in the disparagement of me in my profession when my profession, which I have dedicated my adult life to, was not the topic of discussion (certainly far less relevant than dneal's in this thread). This practice of sucker punching is, unfortunately, not unknown on these threads.

And, for the record, I have never returned the disparagement of a person's livelihood in kind to another member. To me, like referring to a family member, this is verboten territory.

You are right to correct Chuck, but he is not the only one who should receive this correction.

TSherbs

March 5th, 2022, 04:29 PM

I have found this thread informative, and at the same time I reserve conclusions for me to make on my own.

welch

March 5th, 2022, 05:12 PM

Cut it out, Chuck.

dneal

March 5th, 2022, 05:49 PM

Today's update from ISW:

Key Takeaways

Russian forces conducted no major offensive operations against the cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Mykolayiv in the past 24 hours;
Russian troops continued to encircle, bomb, and shell Mariupol;
Russian forces east of Kharkiv and in northern Luhansk Oblast appear to be trying to link up;
Russian troops around Kherson city are likely preparing to resume offensive operations against Mykolayiv and ultimately Odesa; and
Russian naval infantry in Crimea continue to prepare for amphibious operations, which would most likely occur near Odesa.

The first two are the important ones. The rest are speculation. Should have been written in a Facts and Assumptions format.

Chip

March 5th, 2022, 10:53 PM

Chuck Naill

March 6th, 2022, 05:26 AM

For me, in my life time, this conflict is the first true righteous war where people are paying the price in a myriad of ways to gain freedom making military and citizens working together to accomplish a common purpose essential.

I do not agree that the military are trained to be killers, but if you are going to protect your nation you had better be trained.

dneal

March 6th, 2022, 05:37 AM

The system is already rigged for defense contractors to make insane profits. “Kickbacks” go to politicians through corporate lobbyists and campaign donations.

So you admit it's a corrupt system. The waste, fraud, and abuse in the Dept. of Defense could fund quite a few worthwhile projects, but they seem to have a license to steal, with congressional approval. You don't think people handling huge bundles of cash tend to grab as much as they think they can get away with?

The military trains people to be killers, not saints.

Admit? No. Assert? Yes. It's not just the DoD. It's anything that starts with "Department of..." It's not corruption only, it's incompetence too.

My point is that in the big picture, "pallets of cash" is insignificant.

But this isn't the thread for that discussion. Feel free to start a new one on that topic, what the military trains, etc...

welch

March 6th, 2022, 06:53 AM

[QUOTE]Russian Prisoners and Ukrainian Soldiers Describe Two Sides of the Conflict

Russian Prisoners and Ukrainian Soldiers Describe Two Sides of the Conflict

The accounts painted a picture of a conflict consisting largely of ambushes, at least in northern Ukraine where the Russian forces are striving to encircle and capture the capital, Kyiv.

By Andrew E. Kramer
Published March 5, 2022
Updated March 6, 2022, 8:21 a.m. ET
Sign up for the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing. Every evening, we'll send you a summary of the day's biggest news. Get it sent to your inbox.

KYIV, Ukraine — With hands still dirty from the battlefield, a dozen Russian prisoners of war sat, stony-faced, in a conference room of a Ukrainian news agency on Saturday and described being captured after their armored columns were ambushed.

Lt. Dmitry Kovalensky, who had fought in a Russian tank unit and spoke at the behest of his Ukrainian captors, said he recently came under fire from an armed drone and shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles on a road near Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine. “The whole column burned,” he said.

Around the same time and a few miles away, at a makeshift Ukrainian military base in an abandoned building on the western edge of Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers prepared for the same sort of ambushes that took out Lieutenant Kovalensky’s unit.

Lt. Yevgeny Yarantsev, a Ukrainian officer, said his country’s soldiers fight differently than the Russians. The troops under his command organize in small, nimble units that can sneak up on and ambush the lumbering columns of Russian tanks.

“They have a lot of tanks, we have a lot of anti-tank weapons,” said Lieutenant Yarantsev, who previously fought with a volunteer group against Russia in eastern Ukraine. “In the open field, it will be even. It’s easier to fight in the city.”

The two young officers — the same rank, but each representing a different country — gave some of the few firsthand accounts of the fighting that have emerged in the 10-day war. The Russian was a prisoner of war speaking under the watchful eye of heavily armed Ukrainian security officials. The Ukrainian spoke as he displayed newly obtained, sophisticated weapons from the United States.

The accounts of soldiers from both sides give a small glimpse of how the war is being fought around Kyiv in the north. There, relying largely on ambush tactics, Ukrainian forces have slowed the Russian campaign to encircle and capture the capital, even as Russian troops barrel across the south.

Lieutenant Kovalensky and the other Russian prisoners were presented at a news conference intended to support Ukraine’s claim that it had captured a significant number of Russian soldiers. In their statements, the prisoners
blended woodenly phrased condemnations of their own country’s leadership with genuine-sounding details of the conflict’s early firefights.

According to the rules governing treatment of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, governments are supposed to protect a prisoner of war from being made into a “public curiosity,” a concept that is sometimes interpreted as not presenting them in any public setting. The Russian soldiers looked exhausted, but showed no outward signs of having been mistreated.

The prisoners’ comments and the fact of their capture supported descriptions by Western military analysts and governments of a Russian offensive that has suffered grave setbacks. The Russian army’s superior numbers and equipment, however, could well reverse that trend.

“Near the end of the day’s movement on Feb. 27, our column was attacked,” Pvt. Dmitry Gagarin of the Russian army told the reporters. “My commander burned and died. I ran into the forest and later surrendered to local people.”

Lieutenant Kovalensky said he learned Russia would invade Ukraine only the evening before the tank columns began moving, and that soldiers at the rank of sergeant and lower were not told where they were driving until after crossing the border.

All the prisoners described being captured after their armored columns were ambushed on roads, accounts that supported Ukraine’s assertions that its military had made good use of Western-supplied anti-tank weaponry, such as the American-made Javelin missile. But independent analysts have also described more mundane problems for the Russian army, including logistical snarls and a lack of fuel.

Lieutenant Yarantsev, the Ukrainian officer, commands what he described as a mobile group of about 500 soldiers who are skirmishing with the Russians on the western approach to Kyiv. He said that their prospects were bolstered three days ago when they received Barrett 50-caliber sniper rifles in a shipment from the United States.

Sleek and black, with barrels so long they look almost like spears, the rifles were being unpacked and inspected. One sniper, who declined to offer his name, said he had fired one in combat on the outskirts of Kyiv.

Lieutenant Yarantsev said the troops were more comfortable being able to garrison in buildings than in fields or forests. “I’ve noticed something about war,” he said. “Soldiers want to be somewhere where cellphones work and where there is internet.”

The building the soldiers have taken up in, in a leafy residential area of the city, was cluttered with ammunition boxes. Two hand grenades sat on the floor beside a sofa. The soldiers had an electric kettle and offered coffee. In a hallway, a soldier oiled his Kalashnikov.

The fighting has been inching closer to the capital. Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said in a statement on Saturday that the Russian forces’ primary objective is to encircle Kyiv, following the tactic they have pursued with smaller cities such as Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, which is now surrounded, with its heat and electricity cut off.

The fighting around Kyiv is mostly in Irpin and Bucha, two outlying towns to the northwest, where conditions are grim. A central street in Bucha is now clogged with the burned husks of Russian armored personnel carriers, destroyed in an ambush.

Stanislav Bobrytsky, a computer programmer reached by phone in Irpin, said he had not left his apartment since Tuesday. “All the windows are shaking” from blasts, he said. “It’s very scary.”

In the center of Kyiv, at the news conference with captured Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian security officials present refused to speak. A moderator passed around a microphone, offering reporters an opportunity to question the prisoners.

Lieutenant Kovalensky said he was appealing to the Russian people to rise up and overthrow President Vladimir V. Putin because the Russian leadership had deceived the army’s officers about the aims of the war and had used the guise of a military exercise to prepare for an invasion.

The prisoners said they did not know what would happen to them after the news conference. While they said they were treated well, days after their capture it was unclear if they had showered or been offered clean clothes.

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Lviv, Ukraine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/05/world/europe/ukraine-russia-soldiers-war.html

Chuck Naill

March 6th, 2022, 08:26 AM

Cut it out, Welch.

TSherbs

March 6th, 2022, 08:36 AM

Thanks for posting that, welch.

EricTheRed

March 6th, 2022, 09:01 AM

Chuck Naill

March 6th, 2022, 09:24 AM

guerilla war is the most effective. During the CW in the US, this was the most feared type. You just never know who might kill you butt.

TSherbs

March 6th, 2022, 09:27 AM

Whereas this is temporarily militarily embarrassing for Putin, he knows Russia will eventually succeed in violently removing the Ukrainian government. The Russian plan at this point is to encircle the major Ukrainian cities, thereby trapping the people inside, then using massed artillery to destroy these cities block by block. This is a crude but highly effective method the Russians used successfully against the Germans at both Stalingrad and Berlin. The Ukrainian’s, who are fighting bravely can make the Russians pay a heavy price for this, but they cannot stop them.

While Putin will eventually win this war, this will only create new problems for him as the Ukrainians will then wage a costly guerilla war against him which the Ukrainians will eventually win once the Russian people lose the will to continue supporting this war. This guerilla war could go on for decades at an enormous cost to both the Russians and the Ukrainians.

What needs to happen in my opinion is a face saving measure to get Putin to agree to an immediate cease fire and full military withdrawal from Ukraine. This is likely possible if Ukraine agrees to not join NATO in return for a withdrawal, promise by Russia to respect the Ukrainian government and reparations from the Russians to pay to rebuild Ukraine. The international community could match the Russian contribution dollar for dollar so both sides can declare victory to their people and we can return this issue to the diplomats, where it rightfully belongs.

I tend to agree with you, except that I don't feel that Putin would ever agree to the terms that you suggest in your last paragraph. Sadly, I share none of the confidence that your tone suggests that he would ever accept withdrawl from Ukraine. I just don't think that is possible as long as he is alive and in control.

Chuck Naill

March 6th, 2022, 09:33 AM

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/fox-news-ukraine-cold-open/685253587

So for @welch, @eoc, and @detrump, you may not get it.

dneal

March 6th, 2022, 09:39 AM

Whereas this is temporarily militarily embarrassing for Putin, he knows Russia will eventually succeed in violently removing the Ukrainian government. The Russian plan at this point is to encircle the major Ukrainian cities, thereby trapping the people inside, then using massed artillery to destroy these cities block by block. This is a crude but highly effective method the Russians used successfully against the Germans at both Stalingrad and Berlin. The Ukrainian’s, who are fighting bravely can make the Russians pay a heavy price for this, but they cannot stop them.

While Putin will eventually win this war, this will only create new problems for him as the Ukrainians will then wage a costly guerilla war against him which the Ukrainians will eventually win once the Russian people lose the will to continue supporting this war. This guerilla war could go on for decades at an enormous cost to both the Russians and the Ukrainians.

What needs to happen in my opinion is a face saving measure to get Putin to agree to an immediate cease fire and full military withdrawal from Ukraine. This is likely possible if Ukraine agrees to not join NATO in return for a withdrawal, promise by Russia to respect the Ukrainian government and reparations from the Russians to pay to rebuild Ukraine. The international community could match the Russian contribution dollar for dollar so both sides can declare victory to their people and we can return this issue to the diplomats, where it rightfully belongs.

The Germans destroyed Stalingrad, first with air power and then with artillery. Urban guerrilla warfare kept them tied up in the city, and the Russian counter-attack cut them off. At that point it was a classic siege, the German defense was cut off from resupply and reinforcement, constantly under attack, and forced to surrender.

Putin may indeed encircle the cities and reduce them. He may also end up like the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad. There are way too many variables and possibilities to account for at this point.

Your second paragraph is contradictory. If it turns into an insurgency, then Putin hasn't won and it could turn into a much bigger loss. He can't beat an insurgency if there's sanctuary (Mao's Theory). He has two NATO countries (Romania and Poland) on the border of Ukraine that fill that role, so it's much more difficult to isolate Ukraine (i.e.: deny sanctuary). This is where the danger of escalation / "WWIII" enters the calculus.

Chuck Naill

March 6th, 2022, 09:59 AM

@dneal know enough to be dangerous.

dneal

March 6th, 2022, 10:04 AM

Chuck - ssshhhh. The adults are having a conversation.

Chuck Naill

March 6th, 2022, 10:06 AM

What a conplete idiot. :(

Chuck Naill

March 6th, 2022, 10:08 AM

Happy Trump Day everyone
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-muses-on-war-with-russia-and-praises-kim-jong-un/ar-AAUGzt7?ocid=msedgntp

dneal

March 6th, 2022, 10:17 AM

*sigh*

From the OP:

I would plead that we not turn this into "the usual", blaming countries other than Russia, leaders other than Putin, etc... That's easy, but partisan and we can be more responsible adults than allowing descent into that silliness.

Chuck, there is no shortage of threads for you to be a clown in. Please stop disrupting this one.

EricTheRed

March 6th, 2022, 11:36 AM

dneal

March 6th, 2022, 11:57 AM

dneal - Thanks for your response. You make some good points.

By Putin “winning” the war I meant in a conventional sense, he will eventually be successful in capturing or eliminating the current Ukrainian President by encircling and destroying his city. I agree that he is incapable of winning the war in a real sense, by destroying the Ukrainian peoples will to resist. I think he has placed Russia in the same situation they were in after invading Afghanistan, only worse in that he has turned many former potentially supportive and Russian friendly Ukrainians into bitter enemies. Putin believed most Ukrainians would welcome the Russian army as liberators. He clearly by now sees he miscalculated and I believe this presents an opportunity for the international community to give him a face saving way out of this predicament while stopping the carnage and destruction, along with further escalation.

Do you think, given this reality, there is a possibility he might accept the terms I suggested in my earlier post?

I have no idea at this point, and there's a wide range of plausible to possible - which is why I don't accept the pundits', politicians' and professors' opinions as conclusive either. The "experts" let it get to this point, after all... I'm cynical and sarcastic about that because I've seen bureaucratic group-think firsthand.

That 30 minute video Lloyd linked does an excellent job of laying out the "problem" from the Russian perspective. Avenues of approach, pipeline tariffs, economic competition, etc... It's very insightful, clear and comprehensive. I think it's reasonable to assume that:

- Ideally, Putin would like to see the whole of Ukraine as a vassal (or pick the term) similar to Belarus.
- At a minimum, Putin wants Crimea (for historic and strategic reasons, and he was already willing to fight over it).
- He needs a land route to it (everybody in DOD calls it a "land bridge"). The actual bridge they built on the eastern corner can be destroyed.
- He doesn't want Ukraine as part of NATO (forget the "threat", the real problem is that it's forever off the table then).
- He doesn't want Ukraine as part of the EU (as a matter of economic influence, and/or as a stepping stone to NATO membership).
- He knew there would be "outrage" (like when he took Crimea). But I think he didn't anticipate the current global response (a rare miscalculation).

If those are fair assumptions, now what? There are a whole range of possibilities. Watching the military action, I see clear decisive operations to establish the land route / "land bridge" to Crimea. That's why I think ISW is wrong, and why the land bridge (i.e.: Mariupol) is the main effort right now. Everything else is nebulous. Is he just slowly encircling Kiev? Maybe. Is he threatening it as a ruse? Maybe. Is he having logistics problems? Maybe. I can come up with all sorts of hypotheticals why or why not.

So really I just think it's too early to tell what he's going to do and what he's willing to settle for. He retains the initiative, which means we have to wait for him to exercise it.

--edit--

Future Operations (FUOPS) bubbas think in terms of "branches and sequels". They're really just a bunch of "if/then" sentences. If Putin attacks Kiev in force, then... If Putin withdraws from Kiev, then...

Each branch produces new branches and sequels, and they're numerous and diverse - particularly when you consider where the campaign is at currently. Our only way to seize the initiative is to attack, which we're not going to do.

dneal

March 6th, 2022, 12:58 PM

I just add another endorsement for the video Lloyd shared, and I'll embed it here too.

My wife asked me about "the Ukraine thing...". I showed her the video. She said "oh, I get it now".

My brother and I were talking about it over the phone (he's a retired SF officer, I'm a logistician). I emailed it to him too. He said "Some pretty good sh!t there. Thanks."

I don't care who you are, and the format is a little "excited History channel dude as narrator", but the information is clearly and simply articulated, insightful, and very comprehensive. His possible resolutions of the situation are as good as anybody else's, and you get an idea of the variation of possible ends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If61baWF4GE

welch

March 6th, 2022, 01:42 PM

What needs to happen in my opinion is a face saving measure to get Putin to agree to an immediate cease fire and full military withdrawal from Ukraine. This is likely possible if Ukraine agrees to not join NATO in return for a withdrawal, promise by Russia to respect the Ukrainian government and reparations from the Russians to pay to rebuild Ukraine. The international community could match the Russian contribution dollar for dollar so both sides can declare victory to their people and we can return this issue to the diplomats, where it rightfully belongs.

My hunch is that Putin intends to absorb Ukraine; at a minimum, he wants to kill Zelenskiy and remove the Ukrainian government for one led by a puppet.

Chip

March 6th, 2022, 04:40 PM

Russian Prisoners and Ukrainian Soldiers Describe Two Sides of the Conflict

Andrew E. Kramer
March 6, 2022

https://i.imgur.com/rXTNRXi.jpg

KYIV, Ukraine — With hands still dirty from the battlefield, a dozen Russian prisoners of war sat, stony-faced, in a conference room of a Ukrainian news agency on Saturday and described being captured after their armored columns were ambushed.

Lt. Dmitry Kovalensky, who had fought in a Russian tank unit and spoke at the behest of his Ukrainian captors, said he recently came under fire from an armed drone and shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles on a road near Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine. “The whole column burned,” he said.

Around the same time and a few miles away, at a makeshift Ukrainian military base in an abandoned building on the western edge of Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers prepared for the same sort of ambushes that took out Lieutenant Kovalensky’s unit. Lt. Yevgeny Yarantsev, a Ukrainian officer, said his country’s soldiers fight differently than the Russians. The troops under his command organize in small, nimble units that can sneak up on and ambush the lumbering columns of Russian tanks. “They have a lot of tanks, we have a lot of anti-tank weapons,” said Lieutenant Yarantsev, who previously fought with a volunteer group against Russia in eastern Ukraine. “In the open field, it will be even. It’s easier to fight in the city.”

The two young officers — the same rank, but each representing a different country — gave some of the few firsthand accounts of the fighting that have emerged in the 10-day war. The Russian was a prisoner of war speaking under the watchful eye of heavily armed Ukrainian security officials. The Ukrainian spoke as he displayed newly obtained, sophisticated weapons from the United States. The accounts of soldiers from both sides give a small glimpse of how the war is being fought around Kyiv in the north. There, relying largely on ambush tactics, Ukrainian forces have slowed the Russian campaign to encircle and capture the capital, even as Russian troops barrel across the south.

Lieutenant Kovalensky and the other Russian prisoners were presented at a news conference intended to support Ukraine’s claim that it had captured a significant number of Russian soldiers. In their statements, the prisoners blended woodenly phrased condemnations of their own country’s leadership with genuine-sounding details of the conflict’s early firefights. According to the rules governing treatment of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, governments are supposed to protect a prisoner of war from being made into a “public curiosity,” a concept that is sometimes interpreted as not presenting them in any public setting. The Russian soldiers looked exhausted, but showed no outward signs of having been mistreated.

The prisoners’ comments and the fact of their capture supported descriptions by Western military analysts and governments of a Russian offensive that has suffered grave setbacks. The Russian army’s superior numbers and equipment, however, could well reverse that trend.

“Near the end of the day’s movement on Feb. 27, our column was attacked,” Pvt. Dmitry Gagarin of the Russian army told the reporters. “My commander burned and died. I ran into the forest and later surrendered to local people.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/05/world/europe/ukraine-russia-soldiers-war.html?referringSource=articleShare

Lloyd

March 6th, 2022, 08:28 PM

Chrissy

March 7th, 2022, 01:50 AM

My hunch is that Putin intends to absorb Ukraine; at a minimum, he wants to kill Zelenskiy and remove the Ukrainian government for one led by a puppet.
My hunch is also that this is what Putin wants. He knows he can't have everything he wants unless the Ukraine government is controlled by puppets/Russian sympathisers. Only then will they become like Crimea and Belarus. He can't let them become members of the EU/NATO. Not that this may any longer be a current possibility.

Over the weekend there was a report in a daily tabloid newspaper here (not necessarily one that I would trust) that Putin is terminally ill with bowel cancer and wants this as his legacy to Russia. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter as much as who would be the next Russian president and whether they will be anything like Putin though some may argue that no-one could be as bad.

TSherbs

March 7th, 2022, 05:17 AM

This came up on my FB feed today:

"Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

- "Chronicle of Young Satan"
Mark Twain

TSherbs

March 7th, 2022, 05:35 AM

And before we think that all of Fox is a conservative shill, here is an article about a gutsy Fox reporter correcting other Fox talking heads:

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-arts-and-entertainment-army-tucker-carlson-europe-7d0f7212e07ecb8657f3e94b851710db

dneal

March 7th, 2022, 06:30 AM

TSherbs

March 7th, 2022, 06:46 AM

Putin's gambit continues :

https://news.yahoo.com/russia-says-military-action-will-stop-immediately-if-ukraine-agrees-to-four-conditions-121826715.html

dneal

March 7th, 2022, 07:08 AM

From TSherbs link:

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov gave Moscow's most explicit statement so far of the terms it wants to impose on Ukraine to halt what it calls its "special military operation", which is now in its 12th day.

Pesko said Ukraine must:

cease military action
change its constitution to enshrine neutrality
acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory and,
recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent territories.

So he is willing to settle for Crimea and the land bridge. The constitutional change to a neutral state is clever. It can be changed again, but that would have to happen before a NATO agreement and would be an obvious signal for Russia to respond to.

It lets him score the whole thing as a “win”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the west (Europe in particular) pressures Ukraine to agree.

TSherbs

March 7th, 2022, 10:44 AM

Chuck Naill

March 7th, 2022, 10:49 AM

I'm torn about this. On the one hand, I want compromise and stability and a brokered peace for the common folk of that region. On the other hand, Russia has invaded a sovereign nation and devasted cities and towns and villages, the clean up and repair of which will take decades...so some motherfucking Russians deserve to die and the Ukrainians deserve the pleasure of making it happen.

I'm kinda 50-50 this way.

I am with you on this. It reminds me of Sherman's march to the ocean tearing up infrastructure along the way. Russia should pay for all repairs and the money should come from the SWIFT accounts.

As an aside, China is between a rock and a hard place.

adhoc

March 7th, 2022, 12:39 PM

dneal

March 7th, 2022, 01:56 PM

welch

March 7th, 2022, 05:13 PM

ISW this afternoon:

March 7, 3:00 PM EST

Russian forces are concentrating in the eastern, northwestern, and western outskirts of Kyiv for an assault on the capital in the coming 24-96 hours. The Russians are bringing up supplies and reinforcements as well as conducting artillery, air, and missile attacks to weaken defenses and intimidate defenders in advance of such an assault. It is too soon to gauge the likely effectiveness of any Russian attempt to complete the encirclement of Kyiv or to seize the city at this time. If Russian troops have been able to resupply, reorganize, and plan deliberate and coordinated simultaneous operations along the several axes of advance around and into the capital, they may be more successful in this operation than they have in previous undertakings. Operations near Kyiv in the past 72 hours have not offered enough evidence to evaluate that likelihood.

Russian troops in southern Ukraine continue to divide their efforts between attacks westward toward Mykolayiv and Odesa, attacks northward toward Zaporizhya, and attacks eastward toward Mariupol and Donbas. Failure to focus on any single line of advance has likely hindered Russian operations and will probably continue to do so. Russian troops in Kherson Oblast appear to be feeling their way around Mykolayiv, likely seeking to find a route across the Southern Bug River that would allow them to bypass Mykolayiv itself and resume their advance on Odesa. Those heading toward Zaporizhya currently lack the combat power likely necessary to encircle or take that large city. They could, however, set conditions for successful operations against Zaporizhya once reinforcements arrive following the fall of Mariupol and the opening of a wide land route westward from Donbas.

Key Takeaways

Russian forces are consolidating and preparing for further operations along the western and eastern outskirts of Kyiv, especially in the Irpin area on the west and the Brovary area on the east;
Ukrainian forces are challenging the extended Russian lines reaching from Sumy, which Russian forces have not yet taken, to the eastern outskirts of Kyiv;
Russian troops are likely attempting to bypass Mykolayiv and cross the Southern Bug upriver of that city to permit an advance on Odesa that will combine with an impending amphibious operation against that city; and Russian forces are driving north from Crimea toward the city of Zaporizhya.

Al Jazeera has a crew inside Kharkiv. They just finished a segment showing what Russia has destroyed. Beyond grim.

https://www.aljazeera.com/live

Lloyd

March 7th, 2022, 05:17 PM

I'm not sure if anyone here is interested, but the U of Michigan is offering a short free course about the Ukrainian issues. Here's a link (I didn't forget it 👍)
https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/russian-invasion-of-ukraine-teach-out-a-free-course-from-the-university-of-michigan.html

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

TSherbs

March 7th, 2022, 05:17 PM

TSherbs

March 7th, 2022, 05:25 PM

I just browsed a bunch of the photographs from Ukraine on the Aljazeera website. Grim is right.

welch

March 7th, 2022, 06:05 PM

I find that Al Jazeera live is better than CNN or any US-based 24 hour news. Right this minute, someone is interviewing a Belgian security official and an Arab about NATO membership, defense of Ukraine if it had joined NATO ("far to the east"), and Turkey ("the Turks don't want Russia to capture the entire seacoast of the Black Sea, from Georgia / Ossetia around to Odessa. But the Turks have important economic relations with Russia, and they want to keep that")

Al Jazeera has fascinating coverage of many other topics...a couple days ago, I watched a report of an international group testing this amount of plastic fragments in the Indian Ocean, and gathering plastic bottles on some islands off Kenya to show the islanders what accumulates. And then to demonstrate what can be made out of "single use plastic". I watched Al Jazeera during "the Arab Spring" but had forgotten about it. It's good.

TSherbs

March 7th, 2022, 06:13 PM

word, I just watched a 30-minute segment. High quality stuff.

welch

March 7th, 2022, 06:16 PM

Incidentally, another "SWIFT alumnus" posted a story about Swiss police having been posted around a SWIFT operating center for fear that some Russia-fans would try to attack. By the way, it used to be policy not to reveal the location, or even the towns, of SWIFT centers. Everything was scrubbed after September 11. Perhaps of interest: SWIFT, the Fed, the European Central Bank, the NYSE, the Bank of England, and a couple other primary financial institutions concluded, back then, that the most secure way to protect themselves and the world was to build a mesh system. A system in which several data centers can operate if any one is attacked.

adhoc

March 8th, 2022, 01:05 AM

Here's an excellent video explaining the history and reasons for war. I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in understanding what's going on. I thought I understood it, but still learned several new things from this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If61baWF4GE

Same one Lloyd posted.

Yes, it’s very good.

Ah sorry, I just saw mindless shit flinging again from the 2 usual culprits and didn't feel like participating, so I didn't read rest of the thread.

dneal

March 8th, 2022, 07:00 AM

Ah sorry, I just saw mindless shit flinging again from the 2 usual culprits and didn't feel like participating, so I didn't read rest of the thread.

“Let he whose fingers are free of stench fling the first turd” (https://fpgeeks.com/forum/showthread.php/22388-War-Stories/page2)

adhoc

March 8th, 2022, 07:48 AM

I'm still against war. I don't care who's the one doing the bombing, whether it's the americans or the russians. That's not shit flinging, it's being a decent human being.

welch

March 8th, 2022, 09:49 AM

US to ban imports of Russian oil. I'm not an expert in economics, but it might be useful to read into the economic impact of sanctions and trade cutoffs within Russia. And bouncing back against the West. My uneducated hunch is that Russian life will be crunched.

Around 2002, senior management told us to prepare for the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China. They would be the next "advanced industrial" nations. That happened with China, but Russia flopped. It looks weak, still stuck exporting raw materials. Is Russia strong enough to withstand heavy economic pressure?

The Biden administration will impose a ban on U.S. imports of Russian energy on Tuesday without the participation of its European allies, according to people familiar with the matter.

The ban will include Russian oil, liquefied natural gas and coal, according to two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The decision was made in consultation with European allies, who rely more heavily than the U.S. on Russian energy, another person said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/8/biden-to-announce-a-ban-on-us-imports-of-russian-energy

welch

March 8th, 2022, 09:55 AM

Here is Bloomberg. I don't subscribe, but it looks like Bloomberg gives readers a couple free articles per month. This article just talks about day-to-day trading in Russian financial instruments...not the larger Russian social economy.

Russian Stock Market Halt Extended, Ruble Trading to Reopen

BySagarika Jaisinghani and Sydney Maki
March 8, 2022, 11:31 AM EST

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MOEX
MOSCOW EXCHANGE
95.91RUB+0.00+0.00%
Russia is keeping its stock market shut in an effort to protect domestic investors from the impact of harsh sanctions, while currency trading is set to resume.

The Moscow Exchange equity market will stay closed on Wednesday, the Bank of Russia said in a statement. The trading halt, which began on Feb. 28, is the longest in the country’s modern history. Foreign-exchange trading, meantime, is set to reopen on Wednesday after a shorter closure.

Before the shutdown, the IMOEX benchmark index saw its worst weekly slump on record. While the trading halt helped to limit the damage for local stocks, Russian equities listed in London lost more than 90% of their value before getting suspended as international sanctions hit everything from the country’s ability to access foreign reserves to the SWIFT bank-messaging system.

European companies with business exposure to the country have lost more than $100 billion in market value, while global index providers announced plans to remove Russian shares from their benchmarks. Although some investors have now deemed the nation “uninvestable,” Russia has promised to prop up its equity market with up to $10 billion when it reopens.

The plunge in foreign-listed shares of Russian companies is also an indicator of how local equity investors might react when Moscow trading resumes, with some strategists saying the index is likely to fall another 40% to 50% before any bounce from state intervention.

Ruble trading is also a global affair. The currency is both traded round-the-clock in the interbank market and on the Moscow Exchange.

Normally interbank prices around the world reflect prices in Moscow trading, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the markets to diverge. The ruble lost a third of its value in offshore trading at one point on Feb. 28, its biggest-ever slump, and the drop for the offshore price by early evening that day was six percentage points more than the Moscow price.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-08/russian-stock-market-halt-extended-ruble-trading-to-reopen?srnd=premium

dneal

March 8th, 2022, 10:00 AM

Is Russia strong enough to withstand heavy economic pressure?

One would suspect that's why Putin hasn't assaulted Kiev, and is offering the 4 requirements for ending hostilities (Constitutional change to not join NATO, recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, etc...)

Empty_of_Clouds

March 8th, 2022, 10:25 AM

Tend to agree with that, although I'm only an armchair strategist.

While it's only politics, rhetoric or whatever, I find it incredibly frustrating and annoying to hear Putin whine about sanctions when they are the obvious consequence of his actions to (apparently) arbitrarily invade another country. I very much doubt if, in general, anyone thinks Russia has been hard done by, both before the attack or right now. And when he, or his 'government', put out a list of 'non-friendly to Russia' nations, it is just laughable in its schoolboy petulance. But that's just my feelings on it, not based on any educated analysis only gut response.

Chip

March 8th, 2022, 05:37 PM

The Guardian report the deaths of two Russian generals in the assault.

A Russian general has been killed in fighting around Kharkiv, Ukrainian intelligence has claimed, which would make him the second general the Russian army has lost in Ukraine in a week.

The intelligence arm of the Ukrainian defence ministry said Maj Gen Vitaly Gerasimov, chief of staff of the 41st Army, had been killed outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, along with other senior officers. He was the second Russian general from the 41st Army to die within a week in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. At the beginning of March, its deputy commander, Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky, was confirmed by Russian media to have been killed.

The ministry also broadcast what it claimed was a conversation between two Russian FSB officers discussing the death and complaining that their secure communications were no longer functioning inside Ukraine.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/08/vitaly-gerasimov-second-russian-general-killed-ukraine-defence-ministry-claims

Another key point is that the Russian military is so conditioned to rigid, top-down control that the troops wait for orders to act, and are afraid to seize the initiative. When resistance disrupts their physical contact or their communications, they are paralysed by their fear of their own commanders.

welch

March 8th, 2022, 07:02 PM

Young girls sings "Let It Go" inside Ukrainian bomb shelter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_zHOBaWfrg&t=32s

Lloyd

March 8th, 2022, 08:08 PM

Young girls sings "Let It Go" inside Ukrainian bomb shelter:

Prior to watching, I was going to make a sarcastic quip. However, I wound up too touched by it to joke (quite a rarity for me).

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

Lloyd

March 9th, 2022, 01:00 AM

While dneal probably expected this, I hadn't thought about it.

Private military firms see demand in Ukraine war
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60669763

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

Chuck Naill

March 9th, 2022, 05:14 AM

"There is simply no pathway that I see for Putin to win in Ukraine in any sustainable way because it simply is not the country he thought it was — a country just waiting for a quick decapitation of its “Nazi” leadership so that it could gently fall back into the bosom of Mother Russia.

So either he cuts his losses now and eats crow — and hopefully for him escapes enough sanctions to revive the Russian economy and hold onto power — or faces a forever war against Ukraine and much of the world, which will slowly sap Russia’s strength and collapse its infrastructure.

As he seems hellbent on the latter, I am terrified. Because there is only one thing worse than a strong Russia under Putin — and that’s a weak, humiliated, disorderly Russia that could fracture or be in a prolonged internal leadership turmoil, with different factions wrestling for power and with all of those nuclear warheads, cybercriminals and oil and gas wells lying around.

Putin’s Russia is not too big to fail. It is, however, too big to fail in a way that won’t shake the whole rest of the world."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/opinion/putin-ukraine-russia-war.html

TSherbs

March 9th, 2022, 05:54 AM

Young girls sings "Let It Go" inside Ukrainian bomb shelter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_zHOBaWfrg&t=32s

That's poignant!

welch

March 9th, 2022, 06:14 AM

Russia bars purchases of dollars by citizens in sign of hard-currency pinch

By Jeanne Whalen
Yesterday at 8:02 p.m. EST

Foreign currency exchange rates to the Russian ruble in Moscow last week. (Audrey Rudakov/Bloomberg News)

As it scrambles to keep the ruble’s value from plummeting further, Russia’s central bank on Wednesday announced that it is prohibiting citizens from using rubles to buy dollars and other hard currencies for the next six months.

“Banks will not sell hard currency to citizens during the period of the temporary order,” the central bank said in a statement posted to its website after midnight Moscow time. The order is to expire Sept. 9.

The central bank said it also will limit to $10,000 the amount of U.S. dollars that clients can withdraw from hard-currency accounts at Russian banks. Anyone wanting to withdraw more than that from a hard-currency account will have to take the balance in rubles, said the central bank, which is known as the Bank of Russia.

The measures are designed to prevent Russians from making a run for dollars as the ruble plummets to fresh lows in the wake of Western economic sanctions, which have limited the central bank’s access to its hard currency reserves.

“For regular people, the main impact of these measures is that they are no longer able to buy dollars, which, for everyone save millionaires, is the best financial asset to protect against inflation,” said Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago.

In just over a week, Western allies have imposed one of the most rapidly moving sanction campaigns in modern history against Russia. (Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)
Sergey Aleksashenko, a former top official at Russia’s finance ministry and central bank who now lives in the United States, called the move “incredible foolishness.”

“Apparently, the outflow of foreign currency deposits from Russian banks has exceeded the Bank of Russia’s forecasts and put under question the banks’ ability to meet their obligations,” he said in his Substack newsletter after the news broke.

“The biggest mistake monetary authority may make in Russia is to touch private savings — if there was no bank run until now, it’s going to happen,” he wrote.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/08/ruble-dollar-exchange-barred/

welch

March 9th, 2022, 06:42 AM

Analysis from the Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/09/world/europe/russia-ukraine-economy.html

Russia’s Other Contest With the West: Economic Endurance

Which side can maintain domestic support as the war costs regular citizens could also determine the outcome in Ukraine.

By Max Fisher
March 9, 2022, 6:57 a.m. ET
Sign up for the Russia-Ukraine War Briefing. Every evening, we'll send you a summary of the day's biggest news. Get it sent to your inbox.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on, Moscow is finding itself mired in a parallel conflict: a contest of economic and political endurance against the West.

Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, had prepared Russia for sanctions like those imposed after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, as if daring Western countries to cut off their citizens from Russian trade and see who blinked first.

But the severity of Western measures has far exceeded expectations, not only devastating Russia’s economy but also isolating its citizens from travel and even from Western brands like Apple and McDonald’s.

Now, both sides face a test of their ability to maintain domestic support for a standoff whose costs will be borne by regular citizens. More than a battle of wills, it is a test of two opposing systems.

Mr. Putin’s Russia, which rallied around nationalist fervor in 2014, now relies on propaganda and repression. Western leaders increasingly appeal to liberal ideals of international norms and collective welfare that had been in global decline — until now, they hope.

The economic balance favors the West in the extreme. One study estimated that a full trade war would curb the combined gross domestic product of Western countries by 0.17 percent, but Russia’s by a devastating 9.7 percent.

Public opinion may also advantage the West, where surveys find wide support for harsh measures against Russia, whereas Mr. Putin dare not even acknowledge the war’s extent for fear of triggering more protests.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which rallied around nationalist fervor in 2014, now relies on propaganda and repression.Credit...Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Still, Western leaders must maintain unity across 20-plus fractious democracies, persuading citizens from Canada to Bulgaria that spiking energy prices — which may be just the start of the economic shocks — are worth the sacrifice.

Political fissures will inevitably open within the West, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director for the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“The polls really tell us nothing about how people will actually react to economic pain and masses of refugees,” Mr. Shapiro said. The question is when.

Mr. Putin, meanwhile, must maintain his grip on both Russia’s public and the network of political power brokers who back him. If their tolerance of the war’s rapidly rising toll slips before Western resolve does, it could imperil not just his war, but his very hold on power.

The question of who breaks first may shape Ukraine’s fate as much as any weapons transfer or tank assault. And though the outcome is impossible to predict, a range of economic indicators and political signals offer some clues.

The West’s Challenge

Western countries’ secret weapon, nearly as important as their economic edge, may be their citizens’ sudden desire for concerted and unified action.

In polls, Europeans across the continent express a moral imperative to punish Russia’s invasion, as well as a belief that Russia now poses a direct threat to their countries.

In a seven-country survey taken just before the invasion, a plurality said they were willing to personally bear the economic toll of isolating Russia, which provides much of Europe’s energy. Country-specific polls suggest that share has likely increased.

In Germany — the European Union’s largest economy and often its decider on Russia matters — only 38 percent supported increasing military spending as of September, now it is up to 69 percent.

Image
A PCK Raffinerie oil refinery in Germany. The company receives crude oil from Russia via the “Friendship” pipeline.
A PCK Raffinerie oil refinery in Germany. The company receives crude oil from Russia via the “Friendship” pipeline.Credit...Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters

In past standoffs, European leaders often went against the will of their voters to confront Moscow, seeing it as a grim necessity.

Now, leaders like Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France are seeing their approval ratings surge as they rally against Russia. Far from playing down the costs to everyday citizens, some emphasize it as a point of pride.

Political risks are further eased by the election calendar: Mr. Macron is nearly alone among Western leaders in facing re-election this year and is a strong favorite to win.

Still, a slowdown in Russian energy exports — already underway as Russian firms are buffeted by the turmoil — is expected to hit Europe hard. Germany imports more than half of its gas from Russia, as does Austria. Some Eastern European countries run on nearly 100 percent Russian gas.

Europe’s West gets most of its gas elsewhere, such as from Norway and Algeria. Still, as Russia is cut off from buyers, fossil fuels will become scarcer and therefore costlier worldwide. Some Germans’ energy bills are already projected to increase by two-thirds this year.

To ease the burden, European governments are putting in place sweeping energy subsidies, worth 15.5 billion euros, or about $17 billion, in France, €5.5 billion in Italy, €2 billion in Poland, €1.7 billion in Austria, and so on. Many target low-income households.

But there may be a timer on Western resilience. Unless European countries radically re-engineer their infrastructure for importing gas or take on perhaps the fastest shift to renewable energy in history — both considered technically feasible but costly — they could potentially run out of fuel next winter.

Economic shocks could extend well beyond heating costs. A number of European industries are already slowing production because of rising energy prices. Russia also exports much of the world’s copper and other industrial materials.

At the same time, while Europeans express wide support for welcoming Ukrainian refugees, it is unclear whether this will last.

Image
Ukrainians waiting in the cold on Tuesday to cross into Poland.
Ukrainians waiting in the cold on Tuesday to cross into Poland.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Europe is already expecting a major surge in refugee arrivals this summer, many from Afghanistan. Western leaders have proved extremely sensitive to anti-immigration backlash.

“There remain significant divides that are being buried in the emotion of the moment,” Mr. Shapiro said.

The West’s greatest ally in maintaining unity may be Mr. Putin himself. By massing forces on NATO’s borders and producing shocking images of destruction in Ukraine, he has given Europeans something to rally against, distracting from their disagreements, for now.

Russian oil imports. President Biden banned Russian oil, natural gas and coal imports into the United States. The move, which effectively shuts off the relatively small flow of Russian fuel into the country, could further rattle global energy markets and raise gas prices.

A halt to Russian sales. After days of seeming reluctance to take a stance over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, three high-profile American food and beverage companies — McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Starbucks — said they were pausing operations in Russia.

The key cities. Ukrainian military and civilian soldiers continued to bog down Russian forces, protecting the borders of key cities and inflicting heavy losses against the larger and better equipped Russian army.

A humanitarian crisis. Indiscriminate Russian shelling has trapped Ukrainian civilians and left tens of thousands without food, water, power or heat in besieged cities. The United Nations said that the number of refugees who have fled Ukraine has reached two million.

Moscow’s Challenge

In a telling contrast to 2014, when many Russians cheered their country’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Putin has turned almost immediately to repression and censorship, threatening severe prison terms for so much as calling the invasion a “war.”

This has accelerated a kind of authoritarian feedback loop in Russia, with tightening repression feeding popular discontent, beyond even the extremes of recent years.

But Mr. Putin belongs to a particular club of authoritarians — individual strongmen, rather than military or party dictatorships — for whom popular support is a secondary concern.

Rather, such leaders draw their power from the backing of political elites, like the heads of security agencies or state industries, said Erica Frantz, a Michigan State University scholar of authoritarianism.

“This is not to say that ordinary citizens don’t matter, but rather that if we’re looking for regime vulnerabilities at the moment, the focal point really needs to be on these indicators of elite discontent,” Dr. Frantz said.

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Authoritarian elites, garrisoned behind vast personal wealth, can more easily endure the economic hardship that will be borne by regular Russians. They also tend to give leaders wide latitude in wartime, which may be why strongmen rarely lose power because of battlefield losses, research has shown.

Still, such elites are not fooled by state propaganda. And they are not indifferent to their country’s fate.

Surveys of Russian political elites conducted in 2020 found that most backed Mr. Putin for exactly the accomplishments now under threat: stabilizing the country and winning it respect abroad. Many also expressed concern over his handling of the economy — and opposition to military adventurism in Ukraine.

“The crisis will be most severe for a minimum of three years. Take the 1998 crisis and multiply it by three,” Oleg Deripaska, a prominent Russian billionaire, said in an unusual break with the Kremlin, referring to Russia’s economically catastrophic 1990s.

Sanctions could hurt Mr. Putin with the elite by limiting his ability to distribute the spoils they expect in return for their support. So could popular unrest, if it grows severe enough to make those elites question whether Mr. Putin is imperiling Russia’s stability.

“Russian public opinion is becoming such a problem that Putin is effectively fighting two wars: one in Ukraine, and one at home,” Sam Greene, a Russia scholar at King’s College London, wrote this week.

The danger is not only antiwar protests, which have been mostly associated with segments of society already skeptical of Mr. Putin. Bank runs or other forms of mass economic panic, Mr. Greene argued, could trigger a sense of national crisis, overriding even the sanguine lies of state media.

Mr. Putin, by hiding the scale and nature of the invasion, is in effect tying his own hands, making it impossible for his government to adequately inform citizens about the struggles ahead. You can’t ask citizens to rally around a war you insist does not exist.

Much as European disunity is all but inevitable as the tolls mount, apprehension among the Russian elite may simply be a matter of time.

“The indicators of elite discontent that we have seen thus far are unusual in Putin’s Russia and should therefore be taken seriously,” Dr. Frantz said, referring to comments by Mr. Deripaska and a few others.

Though she stressed that Mr. Putin could well ride out the self-made crisis, “in the long term, this external pressure — coupled with the domestic unrest — could lead to Putin’s downfall.”

Max Fisher is a New York-based international reporter and columnist. He has reported from five continents on conflict, diplomacy, social change and other topics. He writes The Interpreter, a column exploring the ideas and context behind major world events.

welch

March 9th, 2022, 07:16 AM

Full text of essay by Russian think tank, Kremlin-funded, arguing against the "special military operation" in Ukraine. The costs far out-weigh any possible benefits, they argue. Author is Ivan Timofeev, head of Russian Council for International affairs. In late November, Tomofeev had counted out the benefits of invasion and compared them with the likely costs, concluding that an invasion would be disastrous for Russia. This article, from March 2, checks off each point from November against what had happened.

Most experts, both Russian and foreign, considered it unlikely or even impossible to launch a full-fledged military operation in Ukraine. Claims that Moscow was preparing for something like this were perceived as another Russophobic campaign promoted by propagandists and radicals. However, on February 24, it turned out that the forecast of Russophobes was correct. But the calculations of many scientists and analysts on both sides of the current barricades are not. Why did such a fundamental mistake occur? Because the experts clearly understood the consequences of such a conflict. They were wrong in the forecast, but they were not wrong in assessing the consequences. Even before the start of the special operation, it was clear that it would cause enormous damage to both Ukraine and Russia. Analysts proceeded from the fact that the understanding of such damage is a weighty argument not to start the demilitarization of Ukraine. Scientists were right in assessing the consequences, but they misjudged the attitude of those who made the decisions. We made a mistake because we didn't make a mistake.

As an example, we can take the forecast made on November 25, 2021, three months before the start of the Russian special operation. There were clear prerequisites for such a decision. Among them are the experience of using force since 2008, the relatively painless consequences of the campaigns, the growing dissatisfaction with the status quo under the Minsk agreements, and fears that the appearance of Western military infrastructure on the territory of Ukraine is only a matter of time.

Ivan Timofeev:

War between Russia and Ukraine: a basic scenario?

And yet, the use of force scenario seemed unlikely even after the recognition of the LNR and the DNR. The November 25 article outlined seven likely consequences of such a decision. All of them are currently being implemented in one form or another.

Corollary 1 . Prolongation of the conflict. The Russian army inflicted colossal damage on the armed forces of Ukraine. However, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are concentrated in large cities. Their assault threatens significant military and civilian losses. In urban development, the superiority of Russia in the air and technology is leveled. It is obvious that the Ukrainian leadership has recovered from the shock of the first days of the operation. Any negotiations will give a respite to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. That is, Russia faces a difficult choice: either to negotiate, realizing that they can be used by the enemy for a breather, or to continue hostilities, including taking into account the urban factor and growing losses.

Consequence 2 . Consolidation of the West in the issue of assistance to Ukraine and a multiple increase in the volume of this assistance. The West is not yet ready for an armed confrontation with Russia, but will provide significant financial and military support to Ukraine. The supply of military equipment and equipment is physically possible, since the western border is not controlled by Russian troops. Among the weapons sent to Ukraine will be both Soviet models from the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, more or less compatible with Ukrainian equipment, and Western weapons, the development of which does not require long training (including portable air defense systems and anti-tank systems). Foreign volunteers may also appear in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. A respite will lead to the remilitarization of Ukraine, the continuation of the special operation will give the same result, delaying its implementation, but increasing losses.

Consequence 3 . Diplomatic isolation of Russia. Moscow's actions are perceived, either explicitly or by default, as aggression against a sovereign state. The political position of the West on this issue is unequivocal and consolidated. Non-Western countries either join this point of view or withdraw from assessments. There are few people willing to support Russia, and their position does not change the global narrative about aggression. These countries themselves are either isolated or critically dependent on Russia. World public opinion and the media are on the side of Kyiv. And this applies not only to Western countries.

Consequence 4. Unprecedented sanctions are being imposed against Russia. Bravado and statements that sanctions are indifferent to us do not correspond to reality. Unlike Iran, against which restrictions were introduced gradually, the economic blow to Russia is massive and sharp. Its goal is to destabilize the economy in a short time. The economic bloc of the government in recent years has managed to create a sovereign financial infrastructure that is resistant to external shocks. At least the electronic payment system is not broken in the country, the Central Bank controls the situation with liquidity. However, both the short-term and long-term consequences of the sanctions will be severe. Among them: inflation, rising import prices, possible interruptions in the supply of imported goods, rising unemployment. In the medium and long term, we can talk about ousting Russia from the world markets for raw materials, weapons, and food. This process will stretch in time, and the initiators themselves will have to pay a high price for it. But at present, politics is engulfing economic rationality. Opponents will go to the exclusion of Russia from the supply chains, regardless of the losses. A separate problem is that foreign businesses introduce boycotts or suspend transactions, overtaking the actions of their governments. In addition, many Western and non-Western companies are subject to US sanctions even if they do not operate in US jurisdictions. All this means a partial or complete stop of a significant number of commercial projects with the participation of Russia. The main consequence of all these factors will be a reduction in the resource base of the Russian economy, a drop in incomes and the quality of life of citizens. But at present, politics is engulfing economic rationality. Opponents will go to the exclusion of Russia from the supply chains, regardless of the losses. A separate problem is that foreign businesses introduce boycotts or suspend transactions, overtaking the actions of their governments. In addition, many Western and non-Western companies are subject to US sanctions even if they do not operate in US jurisdictions. All this means a partial or complete stop of a significant number of commercial projects with the participation of Russia. The main consequence of all these factors will be a reduction in the resource base of the Russian economy, a drop in incomes and the quality of life of citizens. But at present, politics is engulfing economic rationality. Opponents will go to the exclusion of Russia from the supply chains, regardless of the losses. A separate problem is that foreign businesses introduce boycotts or suspend transactions, overtaking the actions of their governments. In addition, many Western and non-Western companies are subject to US sanctions even if they do not operate in US jurisdictions. All this means a partial or complete stop of a significant number of commercial projects with the participation of Russia. The main consequence of all these factors will be a reduction in the resource base of the Russian economy, a drop in incomes and the quality of life of citizens. A separate problem is that foreign businesses introduce boycotts or suspend transactions, overtaking the actions of their governments. In addition, many Western and non-Western companies are subject to US sanctions even if they do not operate in US jurisdictions. All this means a partial or complete stop of a significant number of commercial projects with the participation of Russia. The main consequence of all these factors will be a reduction in the resource base of the Russian economy, a drop in incomes and the quality of life of citizens. A separate problem is that foreign businesses introduce boycotts or suspend transactions, overtaking the actions of their governments. In addition, many Western and non-Western companies are subject to US sanctions even if they do not operate in US jurisdictions. All this means a partial or complete stop of a significant number of commercial projects with the participation of Russia. The main consequence of all these factors will be a reduction in the resource base of the Russian economy, a drop in incomes and the quality of life of citizens.

Consequence 5 . The control of the territory of Ukraine, even in the event of the defeat of large groups of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, remains in question. The current situation shows the complexity of solving such a problem. The encirclement of cities is fraught with humanitarian crises. Their assault will lead to even more civilian casualties. Control will be difficult even assuming the surrender of Kyiv, which in itself is becoming less and less likely. It will be extremely difficult to keep a large country with one way or another hostile population.

Consequence 6 . Ukrainian society seems to be consolidating on the basis of confrontation with Russia, regardless of regional differences. If earlier radical nationalism and Russophobia were the lot of a minority, now they are becoming a national identity. Civilian losses reinforce this process. Ukrainians are involved in the resistance, getting their hands on weapons and ammunition. As the experience of Aleppo and other urban battles shows, the armed population can play a significant role in them. Regardless of how the Russian special operation ends, Ukrainian society will consider Russia an enemy for several decades to come.

Andrei Kortunov: Has the
time for diplomacy passed? Seven Features of the Coming Age

Corollary 7. Actions against Ukraine have launched controversial processes in Russia itself. The population split into opponents and supporters of the decision. The first somehow protest, feel frustration and try to deny what is happening. So far, there are no reliable sociological data showing the real level of anxiety in society and the real ratio of opponents and supporters of the special operation. Here we need not just the results of questionnaires, but also an understanding of what exactly is behind the answers. Such information can be provided by in-depth interviews and focus groups. At the same time, the very existence of anxiety and protest is beyond doubt. Calls are heard from another camp to search for "traitors". This is a dangerous situation, fraught with an uncontrolled "witch hunt", and in extreme cases - show trials arranged according to the "laws of war". The hunt for "traitors" is unlikely to contribute to the cohesion of society. Moreover, history teaches that those who identify "traitors" sooner or later themselves become victims of "enthusiasts" and "well-wishers." The split may deepen as the economic consequences of the restrictive measures introduced against Russia manifest themselves. The experience of applying sanctions shows that it is the unprotected layers and the middle class who suffer from them, and not the “oligarchs” and “authorities”.

To the consequences of the conflict, which were predicted three months ago, two more should now be added.

First- movement towards a significant increase in NATO's military presence in Eastern Europe. The blockade of airspace by a number of Western states creates the preconditions for the isolation of the Kaliningrad region. So far, the alliance has shied away from active intervention. However, tensions in relations with the bloc will inevitably grow, incl. in the field of strategic deterrence. The danger of incidents and escalation to a military conflict with NATO is growing even in a situation where neither side wants this escalation. Current events will lead to a radical militarization of Eastern Europe. Russia will have to get involved in an arms race, which in itself is very costly. On the Western side, one should expect a significant increase in defense spending, the modernization of the armed forces and the adoption of other decisions that were previously postponed until later. One of the consequences is the remilitarization of Germany, the likely overcoming of the post-war complex with its evasion of an active military policy, the emergence of a powerful military power near the borders with Russia, uncompromisingly sharpened to contain Moscow. The European Union will acquire military-political subjectivity also on an anti-Russian basis.

The second is bullying and persecution of compatriots abroad, especially in Western countries. The ongoing events have given rise to a high level of aggression that will be vented on ordinary people just because they are Russian.

What can be considered an achievement of the campaign in Ukraine for Russia? Perhaps it will push back the formal membership of Ukraine in NATO. But at the same time, it definitely guarantees the total militarization of Ukraine on an anti-Russian basis or the costly control of a country with an anti-Russian population. The scale of NATO build-up on our western borders is likely to devalue Ukrainian control, even if it can be achieved. Processes have been launched, the consequences of which will have to be analyzed for decades.

Ivan Timofeev:

The price of the issue: what will be the result of the sanctions imposed against Russia
One of the results of the special operation can be considered the removal of a direct military threat to Donetsk and Lugansk, which have been on the front line for the past eight years, with all the ensuing losses of the civilian population. However, this was achieved at the cost of the death of many citizens of Ukraine, huge damage to its infrastructure. In addition, Moscow is unlikely to be able to refute the thesis that the conflict in Donbass began with its explicit or covert support. This means that it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to lay the blame for the fact that there were hostilities there for eight years only on the nationalists and Kyiv, proving the legitimacy of the operation.

Bottom line, the costs seem to greatly outweigh the benefits. It was this premise that underlay the assessment of the current scenario as extremely low. That is why we made a mistake in the forecast. Because they were not mistaken in understanding its consequences.

https://russiancouncil.ru/analytics-and-comments/analytics/pochemu-eksperty-ne-verili-v-veroyatnost-vooruzhennogo-konflikta-s-ukrainoy/

(Posted a link last week. I'm posting the full text in case connections are broken to all ".ru" addresses. )

TSherbs

March 9th, 2022, 07:18 AM

Thanks for that copy, Welch.

Chip

March 9th, 2022, 03:14 PM

Putin is trying to recruit Syrians or former Syrian mercenaries, for his Ukraine effort.

welch

March 10th, 2022, 05:54 AM

This fits with Putin's long essay last July about the spiritual unity of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, going back to Oleg the Prophet in the early 10th Century. It also fits with Putin's devotion to the thinking of Alexander Dugin, a "philosopher" who is a leader of Putin's party in the Duma. Dugin is a sort of fascist mystic who has developed a "Eurasian" view that Russia should turn away from the "depraved" West and back to some sort of Eastern Orthodoxy leaning toward mysticism.

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY

How Vladimir Putin Lost Interest in the Present

March 10, 2022

By Mikhail Zygar

Mr. Zygar is a Russian journalist and the author of “All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin.”

Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, Russia is now more isolated than it has ever been. The economy is under sanctions and international businesses are withdrawing. The news media has been even further restricted; what remains spouts paranoia, nationalism and falsehoods. The people will have increasingly less communication with others beyond their borders. And in all of this, I fear, Russia increasingly resembles its president.

I have been talking to high-level businessmen and Kremlin insiders for years. In 2016 I published a book, “All the Kremlin’s Men,” about Mr. Putin’s inner circle. Since then I’ve been gathering reporting for a potential sequel. While the goings on around the president are opaque — Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, has always been secretive and conspiratorial — my sources, who speak to me on condition of anonymity, have regularly been correct. What I have heard about the president’s behavior over the past two years is alarming. His seclusion and inaccessibility, his deep belief that Russian domination over Ukraine must be restored and his decision to surround himself with ideologues and sycophants have all helped to bring Europe to its most dangerous moment since World War II.

Mr. Putin spent the spring and summer of 2020 quarantining at his residence in Valdai, approximately halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg. According to sources in the administration, he was accompanied there by Yuri Kovalchuk. Mr. Kovalchuk, who is the largest shareholder in Rossiya Bank and controls several state-approved media outlets, has been Mr. Putin’s close friend and trusted adviser since the 1990s. But by 2020, according to my sources, he had established himself as the de facto second man in Russia, the most influential among the president’s entourage.

Mr. Kovalchuk has a doctorate in physics and was once employed by an institute headed by the Nobel laureate Zhores Alferov. But he isn’t just a man of science. He is also an ideologue, subscribing to a worldview that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism. This appears to be Mr. Putin’s worldview, too. Since the summer of 2020, Mr. Putin and Mr. Kovalchuk have been almost inseparable, and the two of them have been making plans together to restore Russia’s greatness.

According to people with knowledge of Mr. Putin’s conversations with his aides over the past two years, the president has completely lost interest in the present: The economy, social issues, the coronavirus pandemic, these all annoy him. Instead, he and Mr. Kovalchuk obsess over the past. A French diplomat told me that President Emmanuel Macron of France was astonished when Mr. Putin gave him a lengthy history lecture during one of their talks last month. He shouldn’t have been surprised.

In his mind, Mr. Putin finds himself in a unique historical situation in which he can finally recover for the previous years of humiliation. In the 1990s, when Mr. Putin and Mr. Kovalchuk first met, they were both struggling to find their footing after the fall of the Soviet Union, and so was the country. The West, they believe, took advantage of Russia’s weakness to push NATO as close as possible to the country’s borders. In Mr. Putin’s view, the situation today is the opposite: It is the West that’s weak. The only Western leader that Mr. Putin took seriously was Germany’s previous chancellor, Angela Merkel. Now she is gone and it’s time for Russia to avenge the humiliations of the 1990s.

It seems that there is no one around to tell him otherwise. Mr. Putin no longer meets with his buddies for drinks and barbecues, according to people who know him. In recent years — and especially since the start of the pandemic — he has cut off most contacts with advisers and friends. While he used to look like an emperor who enjoyed playing on the controversies of his subjects, listening to them denounce one another and pitting them against one another, he is now isolated and distant, even from most of his old entourage.

His guards have imposed a strict protocol: No one can see the president without a week’s quarantine — not even Igor Sechin, once his personal secretary, now head of the state-owned oil company Rosneft. Mr. Sechin is said to quarantine for two or three weeks a month, all for the sake of occasional meetings with the president.

In “All the Kremlin’s Men” I described the phenomenon of the “collective Putin” — the way his entourage always tried to eagerly anticipate what the president would want. These cronies would tell Mr. Putin exactly what he wanted to hear. The “collective Putin” still exists: The whole world saw it on the eve of the invasion when he summoned top officials, one by one, and asked them their views on the coming war. All of them understood their task and submissively tried to describe the president’s thoughts in their own words.

This ritual session, which was broadcast by all Russian TV channels, was supposed to smear all of the country’s top officials with blood. But it also showed that Mr. Putin is completely fed up with his old guard: His contempt for them was clear. He seemed to relish their sniveling, as when he publicly humiliated Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, who started mumbling and tried to quickly correct himself, agreeing with whatever Mr. Putin was saying. These are nothing but yes men, the president seemed to say.

As I have reported for years, some members of Mr. Putin’s entourage have long worked to convince him that he is the only person who can save Russia, that every other potential leader would only fail the country. This was the message that the president heard going back to 2003, when he contemplated stepping down, only to be told by his advisers — many of whom also had backgrounds in the K.G.B. — that he should stay on. A few years later, Mr. Putin and his entourage were discussing “Operation Successor” and Dmitri Medvedev was made president. But after four years, Mr. Putin returned to replace him. Now he has really and truly come to believe that only he can save Russia. In fact, he believes it so much that he thinks the people around him are likely to foil his plans. He can’t trust them, either.

And now here we are. Isolated and under sanctions, alone against the world, Russia looks as though it is being remade in its president’s image. Mr. Putin’s already very tight inner circle will only draw in closer. As the casualties mount in Ukraine, the president appears to be digging in his heels; he says that the sanctions on his country are a “declaration of war.”

Yet at the same time he seems to believe that complete isolation will make a large part of the most unreliable elements leave Russia: During the past two weeks, the protesting intelligentsia — executives, actors, artists, journalists — have hurriedly fled the country; some abandoned their possessions just to get out. I fear that from the point of view of Mr. Putin and Mr. Kovalchuk, this will only make Russia stronger.

Mikhail Zygar (@zygaro) is the former editor in chief of the independent TV news channel Dozhd and the author of “All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html

Chuck Naill

March 10th, 2022, 06:28 AM

Perhaps he is bi-polar and suffering from depression, which could also cause him to focus on the past. Better to live in the past than embrace the present and the future. Most likely some with a background in psychology could comment.

welch

March 11th, 2022, 01:26 PM

This is Alexander Dugin, nicknamed "Putin's brain". I won't spread any of his "Eurasian fascistic mysticism" but Dugin is the leading "thinker" in Putin's party in the Duma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin

welch

March 11th, 2022, 03:43 PM

Putin is trying to recruit Syrians or former Syrian mercenaries, for his Ukraine effort.

Putin confirms it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has backed allowing volunteers, including from abroad, to help pro-Moscow separatists fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region, more than two weeks after he sent thousands of Russian troops into the neighbouring country.

“As you see, there are people who want to come on a voluntary basis, especially not for money, and help the people who live in the Donbas – well, you have to meet them halfway and help them move into the combat zone,” Putin told a meeting of the National Security Council on Friday.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/11/putin-green-lights-plan-to-let-volunteers-fight-in-ukraine

Same article says

Shoigu said the Russian military planned to strengthen its Western border after what he said was an increase in Western military units on Russia’s border.

Putin also ordered that Shoigu prepare a separate report on strengthening Russia’s western borders “in connection to the actions that NATO countries are taking in this direction”.

welch

March 11th, 2022, 08:03 PM

Intelligence points to heightened risk of Russian chemical attack in Ukraine, officials say

By David L. Stern, Joby Warrick, Michael Birnbaum, Ellen Nakashima and Missy Ryan
Today at 7:26 p.m. EST

MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — The United States and its allies have intelligence that Russia may be preparing to use chemical weapons against Ukraine, U.S. and European officials said Friday, as Moscow sought to invigorate its faltering military offensive through increasingly brutal assaults across multiple Ukrainian cities.

Security officials and diplomats said the intelligence, which they declined to detail, pointed to possible preparations by Russia for deploying chemical munitions, and warned the Kremlin may seek to carry out a “false-flag” attack that attempts to pin the blame on Ukrainians, or perhaps Western governments. The officials, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter.

The accusations surfaced as Russia repeated claims that the United States and Ukraine were operating secret biological weapons labs in Eastern Europe — an allegation that the Biden administration dismissed as “total nonsense” and “outright lies.”

After more than two weeks of war, the Russian military grinds forward at a heavy cost

Any use of poison gases in Ukraine would violate a decades-old international treaty banning such weapons, and represent a dangerous turn in Russia’s two-week-old military offensive against its neighbor. Russia, which possessed vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons during the Cold War, has used outlawed nerve agents in at least two assassination attempts against political foes of President Vladimir Putin in the past three years, including at least once outside its borders, Western intelligence agencies concluded.

Because the U.S. and European officials declined to describe the nature of the intelligence pointing to a possible Russian chemical attack in Ukraine, it was impossible to determine how significant it might be. U.S. officials have been warning publicly for days that Russia might carry out a false flag operation, after the Kremlin alleged the United States had supported a bioweapons program in Ukraine.

“It’s more than an urgent concern,” one European official said of the prospects for a Russian chemical attack. “Clearly there’s been an increase in the threat.”

A senior NATO official added that Russia “is preparing the ground for a chemical or bioweapons attack.”

According to the latest figures from the United Nations, 564 civilians have been confirmed killed and 982 injured, though the true toll is probably far higher.

Russian forces continued to suffer substantial losses, as Ukrainian troops armed with antitank weapons and armed drones beat back invading forces along several fronts. But the methodical demolishing of Ukrainian urban centers by Russian missiles and artillery has contributed to a mounting humanitarian catastrophe, according to Ukrainian officials and international relief agencies. The mayor of Mariupol described his besieged southern port city as going through “Armageddon.”

The United Nations’ human rights office said it has received “credible reports” of Russia using cluster bombs, including in the key eastern city Kharkiv, which could constitute war crimes. Almost 2.5 million refugees have fled Ukraine during Moscow’s attack, according to the U.N.

In the latest economic salvo against Russia, President Biden called on Congress Friday to end normal trade relations with Russia and announced a new slate of bans on Russian imports and exports. Meanwhile, YouTube joined a growing number of Western companies to restrict business in Russia, announcing that it was blocking Russian state media channels worldwide. The move followed an announcement by Russia that it intended to block the social media platform Instagram and to declare Facebook an extremist organization — actions that show how the Kremlin is increasingly willing to censor free expression and retaliate against tech companies.

Fears that Moscow might introduce nonconventional weapons into the Ukrainian conflict have intensified in the wake of Russian failures to quickly to capture major Ukrainian cities. As the war’s momentum has slowed, Russian diplomatic and military officials have stepped up accusations about supposed secret biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.

On Friday, Russian representative to the U.N., Vasily Nebenzya, told the body’s Security Council that Russia had discovered “truly shocking facts” related to what he said were at least 30 Ukrainian laboratories working on diseases including anthrax, cholera, and “the plague” with funding and oversight by the U.S. military. He said the “reckless” activity included research related to diseases born by birds, lice and fleas.

The claim recycled unproven accusations voiced by Russian officials since the start of the Putin era, and amplified by state-run Russian news media. No verifiable evidence has ever been put forward to substantiate the allegations, which a Pentagon official dismissed on Friday as “absurd and laughable.”

Still, Russia’s sudden vehemence in repeating the accusations has stoked fears that Moscow may be creating a pretext for its own use of chemical or biological agents in Ukraine.

“Russia is attempting to use the Security Council to legitimize disinformation and deceive people to justify President Putin’s war of choice against the Ukrainian people,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said at Friday’s Security Council meeting. She also accused China of echoing the false allegations, effectively “spreading disinformation in support of Russia’s outrageous claims.”

Britain’s representative to the United Nations, Lady Barbara Woodward, called the bioweapons claim “utter nonsense.”

“Russia is sinking to new depths today, but this council must not get dragged down with it,” she said.

During Syria’s civil war, Russia repeatedly provided diplomatic cover and logistical aid to President Bashar al-Assad when Syrian forces used chemical weapons against opposition-held neighborhoods. The Syrian chemical attacks, intended to undermine rebel morale and drive insurgents out of urban barricades, included sophisticated and highly lethal nerve agents, as well ordinary industrial compounds such as chlorine. In the worst attack, in August 2013, deadly sarin gas seeped into basements used by Syrian families as bomb shelters, killing an estimated 1,400 people.

The Syrian attacks often were accompanied by false-flag claims — repeated frequently by Russian officials — suggesting that rebels themselves were behind the attacks.

According to the NATO official who described the growing angst about potential chemical attacks in Ukraine, the concern is being driven by new “intel, and also Russia’s previous record of the tactics.”

The official described the tactics as consisting of “heavy bombardment, flattening of cities, then chemical weapons use to clean basements of fighters, then denying and planting false flags.”

A second European official also cited new intelligence suggesting possible preparations for a chemical attack, but decline to elaborate. U.S. officials declined to comment on intelligence assessments. A senior Defense official said that Ukraine’s government has not requested protective equipment for defending against a chemical attack.

Elderly residents hide in a basement for shelter, with no electricity, water or food in the center of Irpin, Ukraine on Friday. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)
Ukrainian forces, facing slow but steady advances from Russian troops, have urgently appealed for other assistance, including advanced weaponry. NATO countries want to help, officials say, but can only provide what Ukraine’s troops can actually use based on their existing training.

The most useful weapons systems are Soviet- and Russian-made ones that are in the arsenals of former communist countries in Eastern Europe. Among other things, Ukrainian officials are seeking stepped-up deliveries of antitank weapons because they see it as the only way to break the progressive encirclement of their cities, according to a senior European diplomat. The weaponry would be used to create humanitarian corridors in and out of the cities, the diplomat said.

Putin, meanwhile, on Friday approved recruiting foreign “volunteers” to reinforce the Russian military’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

“If you see that there are people who want to come voluntarily, especially free of charge, and help people living in the Donbas, you need to meet them halfway and help them move to the war zone,” Putin told his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, during a televised Russian Security Council meeting Friday.

Donbas is a region of eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed separatists have declared independent “republics” and where Putin has baselessly accused Ukraine of committing a genocide against Russian speakers.

Shoigu said that Moscow has received “a colossal number of applications” from across the world to join what it is calling a “Ukrainian liberation movement.” The defense minister said the Kremlin got more than 16,000 applications, of which most came from the Middle East.

Adela Suliman in London, and Timothy Bella, Maite Fernández Simon and Dan Lamothe in Washington contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/11/intelligence-russian-chemical-attack/

welch

March 12th, 2022, 11:46 AM

Targeting supply convoys in Ukraine? Or in Romania and Poland?

Russia has said its troops could target supplies of Western weapons in Ukraine, where the Russian army has been advancing since late February.

“We warned the United States that the orchestrated pumping of weapons from a number of countries is not just a dangerous move, it is a move that turns these convoys into legitimate targets,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told state television on Saturday.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/12/russia-says-it-could-target-western-arms-supplies-to-ukraine

kazoolaw

March 12th, 2022, 01:26 PM

Noted not endorsed:
https://maphub.net/Cen4infoRes/russian-ukraine-monitor

dneal

March 12th, 2022, 03:05 PM

Noted not endorsed:
https://maphub.net/Cen4infoRes/russian-ukraine-monitor

So I have no doubt that there are discrepancies present, but that's always the case (see: Clausewitz's "fog of war").

Caveats aside, that's a really good tool. Protip: Turn off everything (click the "eye" icon), and then turn on what you want to see. Russian casualties, for example, will leave a bunch of red pins. Each pin is referenced with a pic/vid/tweet/whatever to substantiate it. It wouldn't be their only source, but professional intel bubbas would find this "good enough" to include for assessments and estimates.

dneal

March 12th, 2022, 03:44 PM

Looking at Russian rail movements - look to the east and keep an eye on that periodically. The movements shown were from Jan mainly (a couple of trains on the 1st of Feb). Ok, that lines up with the deployment and staging. Clearly an indicator, so it's safe to assume the intel community was briefing that as a possibility of intent - but in fairness to decision makers that's one of many possibilities, and is among many choices that have real consequences.

If you see new ones, that's reinforcement and level of intent and/or commitment.

Downside of cutting off Russia from social media is that it filters future twitter posts from Russia that would be added to the map.

Chuck Naill

March 13th, 2022, 07:15 AM

Biden is going a great job. :)

welch

March 13th, 2022, 12:29 PM

What the Russians do when they capture a town is what, I guess, they will do when they capture a city.

Reports of Russia abducting two mayors signals ominous new phase of Ukraine invasion

By Isabelle Khurshudyan, Annabelle Timsit and Timothy Bella

ODESSA, Ukraine — Local officials disappearing, public warnings that protests will be considered “extremism” and signs of Ukrainian resistance anyway: This is what life looks like inside some Ukrainian cities now under the control of Russian troops, according to new photos and videos from those areas posted to social media.

Ukrainian officials’ claims that Russian forces have abducted at least two mayors to install pro-Russian replacements marks a new phase in Moscow’s invasion, now in its third week.

Russia’s advance through some parts of Ukraine may have stalled. But in the cities already captured, there has been popular pushback against what appear to be attempts at installing friendly lawmakers and quashing protests.

How Moscow’s forces handle the Ukrainian towns and cities already under its control could provide clues to President Vladimir Putin’s potential endgame for this invasion and the troubles he may encounter. U.S. officials have said that it’s unclear what the ultimate goal of Putin’s military offensive may be. If the plan is to occupy Ukraine, then Ukrainians are showing that there will be significant resistance.

In one video posted to social media and verified by The Washington Post to be in the southern port city of Melitopol, Russian military vehicles earlier this month drove through the street blaring an announcement that demonstrations are prohibited and a curfew runs from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. People responded by booing.

In another video from Melitopol that was widely circulated Sunday, pro-Russian lawmaker Galina Danilchenko addressed citizens on local television and said that there are people in the city who are “calling on you to take part in extremist actions” and to not listen to their “provocations.”

That’s a line out of the Kremlin’s playbook: Officials in Russia have designated opposition groups and their protests as “extremist,” equating them with terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.

Danilchenko said a “committee of the people’s chosen” leaders would be making all administrative decisions in the city. In a separate video message published later Sunday, Danilchenko said that Russian state television channels would now be broadcast in Melitopol, so people could “get accurate information.”

British intelligence had warned publicly before the invasion that the Kremlin was planning a similar strategy to replace Ukraine’s president with pro-Moscow politicians. So far, President Volodymyr Zelensky has remained free.

Melitopol, with about 150,000 residents, was among the first cities to fall under Russian military control two weeks ago. Zelensky said Russian forces had captured the mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, which sparked protests over the weekend. In videos verified by The Post, crowds in the city chanted, “Bring back the mayor” and “Where’s our mayor?”

Thousands protest in Melitopol after Russian forces reportedly abduct mayor with a hood over his head

Videos circulated by Ukrainian officials appeared to show Fedorov being led away by Russian soldiers on Friday with what resembled a hood over his head. Zelensky called the alleged abduction “simple terrorism.”

He said it was the latest in a number of actions against mayors across the country who do not cooperate with Russian forces trying to occupy their cities and towns.

Despite the Russian occupation of the city, Fedorov, who is ethnically Russian, had encouraged recent demonstrations in Melitopol against the invasion.

Russia has accused Fedorov of “terrorist activities,” according to the Associated Press. The prosecutor’s office of the Luhansk People’s Republic, a Moscow-backed rebel region in eastern Ukraine, has claimed without presenting evidence that Fedorov was financing the nationalist militia Right Sector to “commit terrorist crimes against Donbas civilians.”

Then on Sunday, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, accused Russian forces of abducting Yevhen Matveyev, the mayor of Dniprorudne, a city of about 18,000 people in southeast Ukraine.

“Getting zero local support, invaders turn to terror. I call on all states & international organizations to stop Russian terror against Ukraine and democracy," Kuleba tweeted.

While at least two other Ukrainian officials cited Matveyev’s kidnapping by Russian forces, the reports could not immediately be independently verified by The Washington Post.

With a second mayor now apparently abducted, Olexandr Starukh, the regional governor of Zaporizhzhia, said Sunday on Facebook that “war crimes are becoming systemic.” He said Matveyev “has been kidnapped.” Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, called the alleged kidnapping a “terrorist” tactic.

Zelensky said in an address Saturday that Russian forces have “switched to a new stage of terror, when they are trying to physically eliminate representatives of the legitimate local Ukrainian authorities.” He called the capture of Fedorov “a crime against democracy.”

The Ukrainian president said democratic countries would equate Russia’s actions with those “of ISIS terrorists,” and asked for “guarantees of full security to all heads of communities across the country.”

Videos posted to social media Sunday and verified by The Post showed large crowds carrying blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags in the southern port city of Kherson, which is now under Russian military control. The crowds were chanting in Ukrainian.

“Freedom to Ukraine!” the protesters said in unison.

Crowds gathered in Melitopol, Ukraine, on March 12 to protest the alleged abduction of the city's mayor, Ivan Fedorov. (Kyrylo Tymoshenko via Storyful)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/13/ukraine-mayor-abduction-kidnapping-dniprorudne-yevhen-matveev/

Chuck Naill

March 13th, 2022, 01:26 PM

Same as Trump would do, I suspect .

dneal

March 13th, 2022, 02:38 PM

Bear in mind Melitipol is along the route of advance from the Russian border to Crimea. It's 1/3 the size of Mariupol (150k v 450k). Good to know what R is doing immediately post conflict (locally, anyway), but not really surprising. Good article.

Kiev is like 3.4M. That's somewhere between Chicago and Los Angeles. It's a megacity. A capital. Urban warfare is hard and no one with any sense wants to do it. There is a whole think-tank subject on warfare in future megacities.

welch

March 13th, 2022, 04:02 PM

Reports that Russia has asked China for a re-supply of weapons.

Russia seeks military equipment and aid from China, U.S. officials say

Listen to article
4 min
By Ellen Nakashima, Karen DeYoung and Cate Cadell

Today at 5:04 p.m. EDT|Updated today at 5:48 p.m. EDT

Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, did not describe what kind of weaponry had been requested, or whether they know how China responded.

The development comes as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan plans to travel to Rome on Monday to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi.

“We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions, evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them,” Sullivan told CNN.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said he was not aware of any such request for assistance. “I’ve never heard of that,” he said in an email to The Washington Post.

“China is deeply concerned and grieved on [the] Ukraine situation,” he said. “We support and encourage all efforts that are conducive to a peaceful settlement of the crisis. The high priority now is to prevent the tense situation from escalating or even getting out of control.”

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, speaking Sunday in a television interview, noted that part of Moscow’s gold and foreign exchange reserves were in Chinese currency, Reuters reported. “And we see what pressure is being exerted by Western countries on China in order to limit mutual trade.”

“But I think that our partnership with China will still allow us to maintain the cooperation that we have achieved, and not only maintain, but also increase it in an environment where Western markets are closing.”

While Sullivan, who spoke on several Sunday talk shows, focused his remarks on economic aid and sanctions evasion, the officials said that Russia is running low on certain types of weapons. They declined to specify which kinds.

“If Beijing is offering any type of military assistance to aid Moscow’s war in Ukraine, the spillover effects on U.S.-China policy could be vast,” said Eric Sayers, a former adviser to the U.S. Indo Pacific Command and now senior vice president at Beacon Global Strategies.

“It would abruptly end debate about pathways to working with Beijing. More importantly, it would push Washington to accelerate retaliatory and decoupling actions toward China, and create new pressure on companies now doing business in China,” Sayers said.

China buys certain weapons from Russia, especially advanced fighter aircraft and surface-to-air missile systems, said Taylor Fravel, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in Chinese defense.

“As far as I know, China does not sell any weapons systems to Russia,” Fravel said. “In other words, Russia has enabled China’s military modernization but China so far has not contributed much to the development of Russia’s armed forces, apart from the profits of Russian weapons sales, which can be reinvested to improve Russian capabilities.”

China has sought to balance political support for Russia, including blaming the United States and NATO expansion for the war, with upholding principles such as sovereignty and territorial integrity, Fravel noted. So if China provides “direct material support” to Russia’s war effort, he said, “it would be a watershed moment.”

Michael Kofman, director of the Russia studies program at the Virginia-based nonprofit analysis group CNA, said Russia’s request, of which he had no independent knowledge, appears to reflect the fact that “this war is costly and over time will prove exhausting for the Russian military.”

On the day Russian troops entered Ukraine, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said Beijing would not send arms to Russia, taking a jab at U.S. efforts to muster military support for Ukraine. “There’s a difference in methods between China and the U.S. on this issue. … I think Russia, as a powerful country, does not need China or other countries to provide it with weapons,” Hua Chunying said at a news briefing.

Moscow’s apparent turn to Beijing comes as senior U.S. intelligence officials last week described to Congress how Russia and China were more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s.

“It continues to be the case that they are getting closer together,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Tuesday, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee. “I think there’s a limit to which it will go, but nevertheless, that remains a concern. In terms of the impact of the current crisis, I’d say that it’s not yet clear to me exactly how it will affect the trajectory of their relationship.”

During the same panel, CIA Director William J. Burns noted that the China-Russia partnership has strengthened in recent years. He added, however, that he thought Chinese President Xi Jinping “and the Chinese leadership are a little bit unsettled by what they’re seeing in Ukraine.”

China has also been cautiously watching how close the European Union and U.S. have been in lockstep on the Ukraine crisis. Chinese officials have “valued their relationship with Europe and valued what they believe to be their capacity to drive wedges between us and the Europeans,” Burns said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/13/russia-ukraine-war-news-live-updates/#link-UD2Q4MAMAJEAZO5TUEYSMNX4JA

welch

March 14th, 2022, 09:59 AM

How Does It End? A Way Out of the Ukraine War Proves Elusive.

March 13, 2022, 6:09 p.m. ETMarch 13, 2022
March 13, 2022
David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt

Demonstrators gathered near the White House last month to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Demonstrators gathered near the White House last month to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Credit...Kenny Holston for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The United States accurately predicted the start of the war in Ukraine, sounding the alarm that an invasion was imminent despite Moscow’s denials and Europe’s skepticism. Predicting how it might end is proving far more difficult.

There are three separate back-channel efforts underway to start negotiations — by the leaders of France; Israel and Turkey; and, in a recent entree, the new chancellor of Germany. But so far, all have hit the stone wall of President Vladimir V. Putin’s refusal to engage in any serious negotiation. At the Pentagon, there are models of a slogging conflict that brings more needless death and destruction to a nascent European democracy, and others in which Mr. Putin settles for what some believe was his original objective: seizing a broad swath of the south and east, connecting Russia by land to Crimea, which he annexed in 2014.

And there is a more terrifying endgame, in which NATO nations get sucked more directly into the conflict, by accident or design. That possibility became more vivid on Sunday, when Russian missiles landed in Ukraine’s western reaches, an area unscathed until now by the 18-day-old conflict, about a dozen miles from the Polish border. Russia declared over the weekend that continued efforts to funnel weapons through that region to the Ukrainian forces would make the convoys “legitimate targets,” a warning that just because the weapons are being massed on NATO territory does not mean they are immune from attack.

In interviews with senior American and European officials in recent days, there is a consensus on one point: Just as the last two weeks revealed that Russia’s vaunted military faltered in its invasion plan, the next two or three may reveal whether Ukraine can survive as a state, and negotiate an end to the war. So far even the most basic progress, such as establishing safe humanitarian corridors, has proved elusive.

And now, what troubles officials is that Mr. Putin may double down and expand the fight beyond Ukraine.

In private, officials express concern that Mr. Putin might seek to take Moldova, another former Soviet republic that has never joined NATO and is considered particularly vulnerable. There is renewed apprehension about Georgia, which fought a war with Russia in 2008 that today seems like a test run for the far larger conflict playing out.

And there is the possibility that Mr. Putin, angered by the slowness of his offensive in Ukraine, may reach for other weapons: chemical, biological, nuclear and cyber.

Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, mentioned that scenario on Sunday, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Part of the reason why Putin is resorting to the possibility of extreme tactics like the use of chemical weapons is because he’s frustrated because his forces aren’t advancing,” he said.

Mr. Sullivan said that Russia would suffer “severe consequences” if it used chemical weapons, without specifying what those would be. He sidestepped the question of how Mr. Biden would react. So far he has said the only thing that would bring the United States and its allies directly into the war would be an attack on NATO nations. Quietly, the White House and the senior American military leadership have been modeling how they would respond to a series of escalations, including major cyberattacks on American financial institutions and the use of a tactical or “battlefield” nuclear weapon by Mr. Putin to signal to the rest of the world that he would brook no interference as he moves to crush Ukraine.

Even with Ukrainians begging for more offensive weapons and American intervention, Mr. Biden has stuck to his determination that he will not directly engage the forces of a nuclear-armed superpower.

Image
President Biden is determined to not directly engage the forces of Russia, a nuclear-armed superpower.
President Biden is determined to not directly engage the forces of Russia, a nuclear-armed superpower.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
“The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment,” Mr. Biden said in Philadelphia to the House Democratic Caucus on Friday, “and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand — and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say — that’s called ‘World War III.’ OK? Let’s get it straight here.”

Diplomacy: Deciphering Putin’s Bottom Line
Early last week there was a glimmer of hope that a real negotiation would begin that could establish humanitarian corridors for Ukrainians to escape the horror of intense shelling and missile attacks, and perhaps lead to peace talks. Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman and a confidant of Mr. Putin, said that if Ukraine changed its constitution to accept some form of “neutrality” rather than an aspiration to join NATO; recognized that the separatist areas of Donetsk and Lugansk were independent states, and that Crimea was part of Russia; the military strikes would stop “in a moment.”

In an interview with ABC News the next day, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine seemed surprisingly open to the idea. He said he had “cooled down” on joining NATO, saying it was clear the Western alliance “is not prepared to accept Ukraine.” And while he did not say he could accept a carve-out of part of the country, he said that “we can discuss and find a compromise on how these territories will live on.”

But it is unclear whether Mr. Putin himself would take that deal. Separate conversations between the Russian leader and President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey all circled the same issues, but left his interlocutors wondering if they were being played for time as the war ground on.

A French government account of a call to Mr. Putin on Saturday by Mr. Macron and Mr. Scholz termed it “disappointing with Putin’s insincerity: He is determined to continue the war.” Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, said there was no evidence from the conversations so far that Mr. Putin has changed course; he remains “intent on destroying Ukraine.”

Each of those leaders checked in with senior U.S. administration officials before and after their talks with Mr. Putin, and they have been speaking with Mr. Zelensky as well. The United States has kept some distance — in part because no senior Russian officials will communicate with their American counterparts, including with the kind of talks that were routine in the run-up to the war.

The best hope, American and European officials say, is that Mr. Putin concludes that he must scale back his goals in the face of the economic sanctions — especially the crippling of Russia’s central bank and the prospect that the country will default quickly on its obligations. Yet should Mr. Zelensky actually strike a deal with Mr. Putin, that could lead to a hard decision for the United States: whether to lift any of the sanctions that it has coordinated with nations around the world.

A Worse Alternative: Long, Slow Slog
Despite his military’s logistical problems, Mr. Putin appears intent on intensifying his campaign and laying siege to Kyiv, the capital; Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city; and other Ukrainian urban centers.

But even as Mr. Putin presses on with his strategy to pound Kyiv into submission, Russian air and ground forces are confronting Ukrainians motivated to fight, senior Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials said.

William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, told lawmakers last week that he was anticipating an “ugly next few weeks.”

“I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now,” Mr. Burns said. He is likely to “try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties,” he added.

Indeed, even as Russia widened its artillery, missile and bombing strikes on Sunday, Russian and Ukrainian forces were girding for what is shaping up to be a climactic battle in Kyiv.

Mr. Putin has demonstrated in past conflicts in Syria and Chechnya a willingness not only to bomb heavily populated areas but also to use civilian casualties as leverage against his enemies. Senior U.S. officials said the coming weeks could see a long, drawn-out fight with thousands of casualties on both sides, as well as among the roughly 1.5 million citizens remaining in the city.

Russian and Ukrainian forces are now pitted in fierce street fighting in the suburban towns around the capital. Russian forces greatly outnumber the Ukrainian Army, but the Ukrainians have been ambushing them with Javelin anti-tank missiles supplied by NATO and the United States.

China aid. Russia asked China for military support for the war in Ukraine and additional economic aid to help offset sanctions, according to U.S. officials. The news comes as Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, plans to meet with a top Chinese official in Rome.

American journalist killed. Brent Renaud, an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist who drew attention to human suffering, was fatally shot while reporting in a suburb of Kyiv. Mr. Renaud, 50, had contributed to The New York Times in previous years, most recently in 2015.

Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers last week there was a limit to how long Kyiv could hold on as Russian forces edged closer from the east, north and south, tightening the vise. “With supplies being cut off, it will become somewhat desperate in, I would say, 10 days to two weeks,” General Berrier said.

Another senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments, said it could take up to two weeks for Russian forces to encircle Kyiv and then at least another month to seize it. That would require a combination of relentless bombardment and what could be weeks or months of door-to-door street fighting.

“It will come at a very high price in Russian blood,” said retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander for Europe. That high cost, he added, could cause Mr. Putin to destroy the city with an onslaught of missiles, artillery and bombs — “continuing a swath of war crimes unlike any we have seen in the 21st century.”

Abandoning Plan A, and Dividing the Nation
The Russian assault has so far failed to achieve any of Mr. Putin’s initial objectives. But on the battlefield, he is closer to some goals than others.

Beyond Kyiv, the northern cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy remain encircled, or nearly so, and continue to suffer heavy Russian shelling. Progress in the east and south, while slow, has been grindingly steady. But it also hints what a divided Ukraine might look like.

Russian forces are still subjecting Mariupol to siege and bombardment, but are close to securing that strategic southern port city and, with it, a land bridge from Crimea in the south to the Donbas region in the east that has been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.

And if Russia can seize Odessa, a pivotal Black Sea port city, and perhaps the remaining Ukrainian coast to the southeast, it would deprive Ukraine of important access to the sea.

Senior Pentagon officials said the key issue now is maintaining extreme pressure on Russia in hopes that Mr. Putin will cut his losses and settle for the Russian-speaking south and east.

Yet the Russian attacks in western Ukraine over the past two days underscore Mr. Putin’s continued determination to control the entire country, starting with Kyiv. It remains unclear how he would find the forces to occupy it, which could require a bloody, yearslong guerrilla war.

“The most probable endgame, sadly, is a partition of Ukraine,” said Mr. Stavridis, pointing to the outcome of the Balkan wars in the 1990s as a model. “Putin would take the southeast of the country, and the ethnic Russians would gravitate there. The rest of the nation, overwhelmingly Ukrainian, would continue as a sovereign state.”

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Worst-Case Scenario: Escalation
The fear now is that the war could expand.

The more the fighting moves west, the more likely it is that an errant missile lands in NATO territory, or the Russians take down a NATO aircraft.

Mr. Putin has used chemical weapons before against political opponents and defectors, and he might be inclined to do so again. Using battlefield nuclear weapons would cross a threshold, which most American officials believe even Mr. Putin would not do unless he believed he was facing the need to withdraw his troops. But the possibility of a nuclear detonation has been discussed more in the past two weeks than in years, officials say.

And finally, there are cyberattacks, which have been strangely missing from the conflict so far. They may be Mr. Putin’s most effective way of retaliating against the United States for grievous harm to the Russian economy.

So far there are none of the procedures in place that American and Russian pilots use over Syria, for example, to prevent accidental conflict. And Mr. Putin has twice issued thinly veiled reminders of his nuclear capabilities, reminding the world that if the conflict does not go his way he has far larger, and far more fearsome, weapons to call into play.

The War in Ukraine

Russian Airstrike at NATO’s Doorstep Raises Fears of Expanded War
March 13, 2022

Booms, Smoke and Fire Signal Horror of Russian Attack on Base
March 13, 2022
David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent. In a 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook

Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/us/politics/russia-ukraine-us-endgame.html

Chip

March 14th, 2022, 12:45 PM

Just issued by Ukraine: a new postal stamp.

https://i.imgur.com/3ukLxaR.jpg?1

manoeuver

March 15th, 2022, 12:03 PM

Chuck Naill

March 15th, 2022, 12:33 PM

It has been a mature and reasonable response. It is good the US has an adult in the room.

dneal

March 15th, 2022, 04:06 PM

I am so disappointed in the US response. We've done nothing to try and de-escalate the situation.

These morons making policy think they can push us toward nuclear annihilation and pull up short, like they can actually maintain control of a complex multinational conflict.

The hubris and hypocrisy are horrifying.

It has been a mature and reasonable response. It is good the US has an adult in the room.

Gents, could we avoid that discussion in this thread? It's a topic of its own.

EricTheRed

March 15th, 2022, 06:28 PM

Looks like propaganda that Russia is seeking weapons from China. Russia has more that adequate weaponry. What they do not have is a viable strategy for winning this war. The Ukrainians have surprised the Russians by fighting fiercely and clearly will not submit to Russian rule now or in the future. Afghanistan was a picnic for the Russians compared to the immediate effective resistance offered by the Ukrainian military and citizenry. Let’s hope the Kremlin leadership has the humility to recognize this colossal blunder and intelligence failure sooner rather than later and depart from Ukraine while swearing off any future aggressive military adventures.

Chip

March 15th, 2022, 08:01 PM

At this point, even if Russian troops do occupy major cities and most of the land area of Ukraine, Russia will have to reckon with a humanitarian disaster and a determined resistance, while suffering diplomatic and financial isolation, and an economic crash.

I think Putin has gone over the edge, on a mythic crusade, charging full-tilt towards Armageddon. Let's hope he doesn't start with the nukes.

Given his generally demented conduct and frenzied reaction to the slightest dissent, amid widespread ruin, I'd not be surprised if there are a number of active plots among the powerful to unseat him.

EricTheRed

March 15th, 2022, 08:17 PM

I do not think Putin is demented. After all he threatened to invade Ukraine for many years, then he finally did once it appeared they might join NATO. I do believe he exercised terrible judgment but that does not mean he is crazy. I agree there are probably powerful people in Russia who want to replace him. After all, he has wrecked Russia’s economy, isolated Russia from the rest of the world, and is responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. Now he appears to be doubling down on this disastrous decision without a reasonable road map for a positive outcome for his country.

Lloyd

March 16th, 2022, 05:34 PM

FYI: As of the 14th, Andrew is back posting on his website his drawings and words-
http://lenskiy.org/
🤎👍👍👍👍👍🤎

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

TSherbs

March 16th, 2022, 08:36 PM

FYI: As of the 14th, Andrew is back posting on his website his drawings and words-
http://lenskiy.org/
🤎👍👍👍👍👍🤎

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

Beautiful art.

Lloyd

March 16th, 2022, 10:27 PM

FYI: As of the 14th, Andrew is back posting on his website his drawings and words-
http://lenskiy.org/
🤎👍👍👍👍👍🤎

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

Beautiful art.
And words

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

welch

March 17th, 2022, 03:42 PM

The Guardian discusses Russia media, after Putin outlaws reporting off facts. Anyone who calls the war against Ukraine a "war" is liable to 15 years in jail. Even so,

Guardian readers this week were riveted by the story of Marina Ovsyannikova, a producer on Russian state television who staged an extraordinary protest when she disrupted a TV broadcast to protest her country’s war on Ukraine.

Ovsyannikova jumped in front of the camera, shouting “Stop the war” and held a sign reading, “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” She was quickly arrested and released a day later, and ordered to pay a fine.

On the day of her release, I spoke with Pjotr Sauer, a reporter who covers Russia for the Guardian and who has been following Ovsyannikova’s story. I mentioned to him that millions of readers globally had been drawn to her story. “I think it rightly got the attention that it did abroad, because it's a fascinating story,” he said. “It’s an image that will go into the history books.” We just published an interview he conducted with her today, the day after her release.

The image also got attention inside Russia, where a strict new censorship law effectively criminalises news coverage that does not align with government propaganda. Russia’s independent media was decimated practically overnight, as virtually all independent outlets closed in response to the law. “Channel One has been the main voice of pro-war propaganda. For her as a senior producer, to go out and stage this live, completely unscripted – that's a huge deal,” he said, adding that “everyone was talking about it, it was sort of the talk of the town yesterday.”

Merely calling the war a “war” is now punishable in Russia by 15 years in prison. Ovsyannikova’s quick release suggests the government might have decided not to make her a martyr, Pjotr said, though he cautioned that her story might not be over – she was fined over a pre-recorded video denouncing the war and the “anti-human regime” of Vladimir Putin, and could still face consequences for the live protest. She expressed fears for her safety in today's interview.

With journalism squeezed out of Russia by an unprecedented state clampdown, any crack in the system is notable. Pjotr says he’s aware of three journalists with state-sanctioned outlets who have quit their jobs since Ovsyannikova’s protest. “I think it’s really unprecedented. We've seen dissent against this war among the circle that usually protests – young, educated Muscovites” who typically attend anti-corruption protests or who demonstrate in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Human rights groups say some 14,000 people around Russia have been arrested for protesting against the war and could face long prison sentences.

“But to see journalists from state television leave their jobs – I think that's something that would worry the Kremlin. It's a real sign that a lot of people within the system are not happy about this war.” Russian journalist Denis Kataev describes the simmering dissent permeating in media circles in an op-ed we published today.

Accurate information is increasingly out of reach for Russians, given the growing list of sources the government has blocked – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, the BBC, to name a few – and the shutdown of independent media. Pjotr described a sort of information bifurcation between those already predisposed to seeking out the truth – who are using VPNs to access blocked sites and reading non-Russian media like the Guardian – and the majority of the population, whose primary source is TV. That’s what made Ovsyannikova’s act a “revolutionary development for TV in Russia”, wrote Kataev.

Pjotr is working on a story on the many independent journalists who have fled Russia and are working to find new footing. Some outlets, like Meduza, have evacuated their entire Russia-based news operations. Other journalists are becoming independent bloggers.

“Some of them told me they feel their work is more important than ever, because they think there'll be more dissent in Russia in the coming months,” said Pjotr. “They’re saying, you know, that's where we come in – to tell the truth, because someone has to.”

Guadian's account:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/14/russian-tv-employee-interrupts-news-broadcast-marina-ovsyannikova

Chip

March 17th, 2022, 11:23 PM

"Merely calling the war a “war” is now punishable in Russia by 15 years in prison. Ovsyannikova’s quick release suggests the government might have decided not to make her a martyr, Pjotr said, though he cautioned that her story might not be over – she was fined over a pre-recorded video denouncing the war and the “anti-human regime” of Vladimir Putin, and could still face consequences for the live protest. She expressed fears for her safety in today's interview."

Given the killing of Anna Politovskaya, in 2006, and various vengeful murders, some by poison, over the years, she's right to worry. Just heard a curious fact: Politovskaya was killed on 7 October, which is Putin's birthday. Several similar events have taken place on that date, which might lead to the idea that they are birthday presents for the dictator. Touching. . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Anna_Politkovskaya

Just heard an interview on public radio with a Finnish editor, who has banded together with colleagues from Scandinavia and the Baltic states to have their war coverage translated to Russian and posted on the web. Within a week, they saw hits reach 100,000.

TSherbs

March 18th, 2022, 06:19 AM

Interesting developments re China (via Heather Cox Richardson):

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-17-2022?s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct

PS: Trump's cadre are scum on this issue.

Chuck Naill

March 18th, 2022, 07:03 AM

I can only guess they think they are scoring points with the American Autocrat.

While I was treading the book by Snyder there was a chapter on who holds the power of violence. It is the government. He said when the para military begin to lure the police and ex-military, the end it near. He cited the SS in Nazi Germany and police in Russia.

It did occur to me the January 6, 2020 insurrection was comprised of ex military and police. This should cause alarm and great fear for anyone who has studied the European history of the 1920-1940's.

The book also said the most unpopular party is running things in the US via gerrymandering.

dneal

March 18th, 2022, 08:02 AM

There are plenty of threads to vent one's perspective on U.S. politics.

This isn't one of them.

Chuck Naill

March 18th, 2022, 10:05 AM

I like that, "Trump's Scum. Thanks, Ted.

TSherbs

March 18th, 2022, 10:25 AM

Chuck Naill

March 18th, 2022, 10:33 AM

dneal

March 18th, 2022, 11:22 AM

The discussion of Trump is appropriate given his use of armed guards at his rally's and vilification of the press. People who fail to pay attention will pay dearly. Don't be confused thinking otherwise. Putin took Don to school. The similarities are apparent to those who are awake.

It’s no more appropriate than introducing Hunter, his laptop, Burisma, etc.

There’s a place for it, but it ain’t here. This is about what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Take the TDS to one of the many other threads.

Chuck Naill

March 18th, 2022, 11:43 AM

It's applicable.

Bold2013

March 18th, 2022, 11:59 AM

The discussion of Trump is appropriate given his use of armed guards at his rally's and vilification of the press. People who fail to pay attention will pay dearly. Don't be confused thinking otherwise. Putin took Don to school. The similarities are apparent to those who are awake.

Don’t use the blood of Ukrainians to continue with your trumpian delusions. Please use the dozen other tainted threads.

welch

March 18th, 2022, 12:03 PM

Enough, Chuck. Let's talk about Ukraine and Russia here.

Zelenskyy: 130 rescued, ‘hundreds’ under Mariupol theatre rubble
Up to 1,000 may have been taking refuge underground at the time of the blast, which Ukraine blames on Russia.

A satellite image shows a closer view of Mariupol Drama Theatre before bombing, as a word "children" in Russian is written in large white letters on the pavement in front of and behind the building, in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 14, 2022.
The Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed the number of possible casualties [Maxar Technologies/Handout via Reuters]
Published On 18 Mar 2022
18 Mar 2022

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 130 people had been saved after the bombing of a theatre in the port city of Mariupol under Russian siege, but “hundreds” were still trapped in the rubble.

Ukraine accused Russia of hitting the theatre on Wednesday. It had been feared that up to 1,000 people may have been taking refuge underground at the time of the blast. Russia has denied responsibility for the attack.

“More than 130 people have been saved. But hundreds of Mariupol residents are still beneath the rubble,” Zelenskyy said in a video address on Facebook on Friday.

He promised to continue rescue operations in Mariupol “despite shelling” in the southern city that has suffered vast destruction.

“Despite the shelling, despite all the difficulties, we will continue the rescue work,” Zelenskyy added.

Earlier, Ukraine’s ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said a bomb shelter underneath the Drama Theatre survived the impact and some “adults and children” had emerged alive but added there was still no information on more than 1,000 other people official figures suggest were sheltering there when the bomb fell.

The Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed the number of possible casualties.

Days before the apparent attack, satellite images shared by private company Maxar showed the word “DETI” – “children” in Russian – written on the ground on either side of the building.

<snip>

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/18/zelenskyy-130-rescued-hundreds-under-mariupol-theatre-rubble

Chuck Naill

March 18th, 2022, 01:04 PM

I want to prevent the blood from any authoritative figure including US citizens. . This is a wake up call for some of you apparently. If you don’t like it, ignore it.

It’s not like anyone here is saving anyone.

Chuck Naill

March 18th, 2022, 01:13 PM

Plus, I’m responding to a post by Ted and no one else. Carry on.

dneal

March 18th, 2022, 03:20 PM

It's applicable.

You confuse applicable with appropriate.

Not appropriate for this thread, to include "Ted".

Lloyd

March 18th, 2022, 04:00 PM

Chuck, I may agree with your with your politics, but this isn't the thread for it.

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

welch

March 18th, 2022, 04:23 PM

Ukraine Is Wrecking Russian Tanks With a Gift From Britain

John Ismay
March 18, 2022, 4:52 p.m. ET1 hour ago
1 hour ago

John Ismay

In video after video taken in Ukraine, a puff of smoke and a brief flash of light signal that another clutch of Russian troops are about to die.

Sometimes it is only a split second before that light streaks to a tank or armored vehicle that suddenly erupts in smoke and flame, often bursting from within as ammunition inside explodes.

Rewinding these videos a bit often shows Ukrainian soldiers before the attack, patrolling to an ambush point with large green tubes carried on their backs — each one a gift from Britain. In perhaps 15 seconds, and sometimes even faster than that, the soldiers can unsling the weapon, unfold its aiming sight, release a safety catch and wait for their prey to appear.

The green tubes are called NLAWs, for Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapons. They are the result of decades of weapons research dedicated to building small lightweight guided missiles that may have evened the balance of power in combat between the fearsome tank and the soldier.

Compared to the American-made Javelin antitank weapon, which has been hailed by officials at the Pentagon and the White House and sent to Ukraine by the thousands, the NLAW weighs about half as much, costs far less, can be easily discarded, and is optimized for use in the relatively short-range fights Ukrainian soldiers are getting into with the invading Russian forces.

The NLAW is a product of the Swedish company Saab and has been sold to a number of NATO countries — including Britain, which assembles the missiles at a factory in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for the British Army. And although the British Army also has the Javelin, it began purchasing NLAWs about 10 years ago and has been sending them to Ukraine in ever greater numbers.

A British diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss defensive aid, said Britain had sent more than 4,200 NLAWs to Ukraine.

“We still assess it to be one of the best short-range defensive anti-tank weapons around,” the diplomat said.

The Javelin and the NLAW, both of which an individual soldier can carry and fire, include features previously only seen in much larger and more cumbersome weapons, the kinds that usually have to be mounted on vehicles.

Both weapons can be fired directly at targets like enemy soldiers or a building, but when attacking vehicles they can also be programmed to hit from above — where a tank or armored personnel carrier has the least armor. The American weapon can pop up and then dive down to impact and explode, while the British missile flies a shorter path — crossing over its target and firing its charge downward.

The result, however, as shown in Ukraine is the same: an uncounted number of destroyed Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks.

The missiles have succeeded despite efforts to defeat them. The Russian military had said, and Pentagon leadership believed, that a defensive system on the newest T-90 tanks was capable of sensing and destroying anti-tank missiles like Javelins and NLAWs in flight. In an apparently new countermeasure, Russian troops are welding improvised cages of parallel steel bars atop tank turrets. Video evidence shows that both defenses, however, have failed.

Russian losses. British intelligence reports say that Russian forces have “made minimal progress on land, sea or air in recent days.” The Pentagon estimated that 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, more than the total of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Javelin, which was designed toward the end of the Cold War, consists of two parts: a 15-pound reusable launcher that soldiers often use for reconnaissance and surveillance, given its suite of thermal cameras that can zoom in and out for finding targets, and a 33-pound disposable tube that contains the missile itself. The newer NLAW, by comparison, weighs just under 28 pounds and has no camera — just a simple sight to aim.

And while the Javelin can kill tanks from as far away as two and a half miles, its missile flies slower than the NLAW, which is most accurate for targets up to only about a half mile away. For moving targets, the Javelin can guide itself while in flight, thanks to a heat-seeker in the missile’s nose, whereas a soldier firing an NLAW simply points the weapon at a moving vehicle, engages the guidance system and tracks the target for a few seconds before firing. The missile then flies to a point where it predicts the target will be.

The capabilities of the two weapons make the Javelin more like a sniper rifle for taking out armored vehicles at extreme distances, the British diplomat said, while the NLAW is better for close-quarter battles and ambush scenarios.

Given that the Ukrainians are unable to fight Russian armor with tanks of their own, they must use different tactics, the diplomat said, adding that the Ukrainians have shown the will and the extraordinary nerve to get close to tanks and destroy them in these missile attacks.

“You need to know how to fight, and you need the means, but it’s the will — what’s in the heart of the Ukrainians to fight?” the diplomat said. “They’re fighting an existential threat and they’re not giving up. So we’ve given them, at their request as a sovereign nation, the tools to go and do this.”

John Ismay is a Pentagon correspondent in the Washington bureau and a former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer. @johnismay

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/us/ukraine-antitank-missiles-russia.html

welch

March 18th, 2022, 04:30 PM

And another by the Times about some weapons going to Ukraine:

U.S. Adds ‘Kamikaze Drones’ as More Weapons Flow to Ukraine

March 16, 2022, 9:40 p.m. ETMarch 16, 2022
March 16, 2022

Julian E. Barnes and John Ismay

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration will provide Ukraine with additional high-tech defensive weapons that are easily portable and require little training to use against Russian tanks, armored vehicles and aircraft, according to U.S. and European officials.

In remarks on Wednesday, President Biden announced $800 million in new military aid for Ukraine, including 800 additional Stinger antiaircraft missiles, 9,000 antitank weapons, 100 tactical drones and a range of small arms including machine guns and grenade launchers.

The Ukrainians have already proved their prowess at using British-provided and American-made antitank weaponry against Russia’s much larger military. But in an impassioned speech to Congress on Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine asked for additional help as Russian troops pushed to encircle major cities.

U.S. and European officials want to send more equipment that is easy to use by small teams, and that has technology that can overcome Russian defenses or exploit weaknesses — rather than offensive weapons like tanks and warplanes that require significant logistical support. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe the details of the weapons transfer publicly.

In addition to sending its own equipment, the United States is helping coordinate donations from European countries. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is visiting Slovakia and Bulgaria this week in part to help with that effort.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, a senior defense official said that the United States was focusing on sending supplies quickly, and that the Pentagon would figure out how to replenish its stockpiles later. The official said the focus now was to make sure that the Ukrainians get the items quickly. The Ukrainian military needs easy-to-carry and easy-to-use defensive weapons to continue to stall the Russian advance. The Ukrainians will succeed, U.S. and European military experts said, if they can operate in small teams, strike assembled Russian forces, then melt away to set a new ambush later.

As part of the package, the Biden administration will provide Switchblade drones, according to people briefed on the plans. Military officials call the weapon, which is carried in a backpack, the “kamikaze drone” because it can be flown directly at a tank or a group of troops, and is destroyed when it hits the target and explodes.

“These were designed for U.S. Special Operations Command and are exactly the type of weapons systems that can have an immediate impact on the battlefield,” said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Bigger, armed drones, like U.S.-made Predators or Reapers, would be difficult for Ukrainians to fly and would be easily destroyed by Russian fighter planes. But former officials said small, portable kamikaze drones could prove to be a cost-effective way to destroy Russian armored convoys.

The United States and its allies are trying to step up the flow of defensive weaponry to the Ukrainians and help them communicate more effectively by providing more gear.

The United States has said it has provided some communications gear — and Ukraine has said it wants more, including more tactical radios and jamming gear to help prevent Russian forces from talking to one another.

Ukraine had asked for additional MIG fighter planes but has backed off that request. American and European officials have said Ukraine’s military is not flying all the planes it has.

Ukrainian officials, including Mr. Zelensky in his speech to Congress, emphasized their need for other equipment, an implicit acknowledgment that the war has moved to a new stage.

Image
President Biden said on Wednesday that the United States would send an additional $800 million in military assistance to help Ukraine fight Russia.
President Biden said on Wednesday that the United States would send an additional $800 million in military assistance to help Ukraine fight Russia.Credit...Kenny Holston for The New York Times
In addition to antiaircraft systems like the Stinger, Ukraine is requesting mobile air defense systems that can hit planes flying at higher altitudes, like the bombers that struck a training ground near the Polish border on Sunday.

Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to Know
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The Biden-Xi talk. In a two-hour call with China’s President Xi Jinping, President Biden discussed the Russian invasion of Ukraine, detailing the implications and consequences if Beijing were to provide material support to Russia in its attacks.

In the city of Mariupol. At least 130 people were rescued from a theater that was destroyed in the Ukrainian city. Up to 1,000 people were believed to be taking shelter in the building, and hundreds remain unaccounted for.

An attack in the west. A missile strike rattled the outskirts of Lviv, a western city that has been a haven for people fleeing areas under siege. The mayor of the city said several missiles had struck an aircraft repair plant at the airport in Lviv, destroying the buildings.

A looming energy crisis. The International Energy Agency said that the repercussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are likely to intensify over the next several months, and nations around the world should respond by reducing their use of oil and gas.

Russian losses. British intelligence reports say that Russian forces have “made minimal progress on land, sea or air in recent days.” The Pentagon estimated that 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, more than the total of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Zelensky asked for the S-300, a Russian-made air defense system, which the United States could ask other nations to provide.

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Mr. Austin will be talking with allies in Europe about ways they can give Ukraine additional air defense equipment, the senior defense official said.

The United States and its allies have already been providing ammunition for NATO-standard weapons and for those that were used by the former Soviet Union. While Ukraine has been modernizing its military, its state-owned defense industry continues to make weaponry modeled on Soviet-era designs, such as Kalashnikov assault rifles. The new U.S. package will include small arms like rifles, pistols, machine guns and grenade launchers in both Eastern and Western standard calibers.

The American Javelin and Britain’s NLAW antitank missiles take just hours to learn how to use and have proved effective in the hands of Ukraine’s military, officials said.

The Ukrainians have been able to destroy so many Russian tanks and armored vehicles in large measure because they have good conceptual plans of how to use the antitank missiles and the bravery to employ them up close in battle, a British diplomat said in an interview on Wednesday.

The Ukrainians, the official said, “are fighting against an existential threat and they aren’t giving up. They have the will.”

Russia’s War in Ukraine

Invoking America’s Darkest Days, Zelensky Pleads for More U.S. Aid
March 16, 2022

As Russian Troop Deaths Climb, Morale Becomes an Issue, Officials Say
March 16, 2022

Ukrainian Forces Strike Back at Russia as Biden Sends More Firepower
March 16, 2022

Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook

John Ismay is a Pentagon correspondent in the Washington bureau and a former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer. @johnismay

welch

March 18th, 2022, 04:45 PM

Another from the Times. If the Russian army has lost 7,000 killed in Ukraine, that is more than double the losses by the Union Army at Gettysburg, where another 14,500 were wounded.

As Russian Troop Deaths Climb, Morale Becomes an Issue, Officials Say

More than 7,000 Russian troops have been killed in less than three weeks of fighting, according to conservative U.S. estimates.

By Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt
March 16, 2022

WASHINGTON — In 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima during World War II, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed. Now, 20 days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, his military has already lost more soldiers, according to American intelligence estimates.

The conservative side of the estimate, at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths, is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

It is a staggering number amassed in just three weeks of fighting, American officials say, with implications for the combat effectiveness of Russian units, including soldiers in tank formations. Pentagon officials say a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.

With more than 150,000 Russian troops now involved in the war in Ukraine, Russian casualties, when including the estimated 14,000 to 21,000 injured, are near that level. And the Russian military has also lost at least three generals in the fight, according to Ukrainian, NATO and Russian officials.

Pentagon officials say that a high, and rising, number of war dead can destroy the will to continue fighting. The result, they say, has shown up in intelligence reports that senior officials in the Biden administration read every day: One recent report focused on low morale among Russian troops and described soldiers just parking their vehicles and walking off into the woods.

The American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, caution that their numbers of Russian troop deaths are inexact, compiled through analysis of the news media, Ukrainian figures (which tend to be high, with the latest at 13,500), Russian figures (which tend to be low, with the latest at 498), satellite imagery and careful perusal of video images of Russian tanks and troops that come under fire.

American military and intelligence officials know, for instance, how many troops are usually in a tank, and can extrapolate from that the number of casualties when an armored vehicle is hit by, say, a Javelin anti-tank missile.

The high rate of casualties goes far to explain why Russia’s much-vaunted force has remained largely stalled outside of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

“Losses like this affect morale and unit cohesion, especially since these soldiers don’t understand why they’re fighting,” said Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration. “Your overall situational awareness decreases. Someone’s got to drive, someone’s got to shoot.”
tory

But, she added, “that’s just the land forces.” With Russian ground forces in disarray, Mr. Putin has increasingly looked to the skies to attack Ukrainian cities, residential buildings, hospitals and even schools. That aerial bombardment, officials say, has helped camouflage the Russian military’s poor performance on the ground. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said this week that an estimated 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the war.

Signs of Russia’s challenges abound. Late last week, Russian news sources reported that Mr. Putin had put two of his top intelligence officials under house arrest. The officials, who run the Fifth Service of Russia’s main intelligence service, the FSB, were interrogated for providing poor intelligence ahead of the invasion, according to Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security services expert.

“They were in charge of providing political intelligence and cultivating networks of support in Ukraine,” Mr. Soldatov said in an interview. “They told Putin what he wanted to hear” about how the invasion would progress.

Russians themselves may be hearing only what Mr. Putin wants them to hear about his “operation” in Ukraine, which he refuses to call a war or an invasion. Since it began, he has exerted iron control over the news outlets in Russia; state media is not publicizing most casualties, and has minimized the destruction.

But some Russians have access to virtual private networks (VPNs) and are able to get news from the West.

“I don’t believe he can wall off, indefinitely, Russians from the truth,” William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, told the Senate last Thursday. “Especially as realities began to puncture that bubble, the realities of killed and wounded coming home, and the increasing number, the realities of the economic consequences for ordinary Russians, the realities of the horrific scenes of hospitals and schools being bombed next door in Ukraine, and of civilian casualties there as well.”

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The news of the generals’ deaths is trickling out, first from Ukrainians, then confirmed by NATO officials, with one death acknowledged by Mr. Putin in a speech. They have been identified as Maj. Gen. Andrei Kolesnikov, a commander from Russia’s eastern military district; Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov, first deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army; and Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky, deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army.

Russian losses. British intelligence reports say that Russian forces have “made minimal progress on land, sea or air in recent days.” The Pentagon estimated that 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, more than the total of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Western officials say that around 20 Russian generals were in Ukraine as part of the war effort, and that they may have pushed closer to the front to boost morale.

“Three generals already — that’s a shocking number,” Michael McFaul, the former United States ambassador to Russia, said in an interview.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian officials reported that a fourth general, Maj. Gen. Oleg Mityaev, the commander of the 150th motorized rifle division, had been killed in fighting.

Two American military officials said that many Russian generals are talking on unsecured phones and radios. In at least one instance, they said, the Ukrainians intercepted a general’s call, geolocated it, and attacked his location, killing him and his staff.

If Russian military deaths continue to rise, the kinds of civic organizations that called attention to troop deaths and injuries during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could once more come to prominence.

But the Russian toll, some military specialists and lawmakers say, is unlikely to change Mr. Putin’s strategy.

“It is stunning, and the Russians haven’t even gotten to the worst of it, when they hit urban combat in the cities,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said in an interview.

“I don’t think it’ll have an impact on Putin’s calculus,” Mr. Crow said. “He is not willing to lose. He’s been backed into a corner and will continue to throw troops at the problem.”

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent, and was part of the team awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, for its coverage of the Ebola epidemic. @helenecooper

Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook

Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/russia-troop-deaths.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

TSherbs

March 18th, 2022, 06:16 PM

Thanks Welch.

welch

March 18th, 2022, 08:30 PM

TSherbs

March 18th, 2022, 08:47 PM

Actually, I am not letting myself become too encouraged by these estimates. I just don't want to get my hopes up this early. I have trouble seeing this as anything but a long, dirty, deadly grind. Are you hopeful, welch?

welch

March 19th, 2022, 07:57 AM

TSherbs, it makes me hopeful that Ukraine can hold out, but I fear what will be left of the people.

Meanwhile, Putin is holding cheesy-cheery rallies to support himself. Pop singer in black hoody with a big 'Z' singing a song called "Kombat" that goes: "“For Putin. For a world without Nazism,”

(Later, I will copy the article from the Post) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/18/putin-russia-speech-ukraine/

dneal

March 19th, 2022, 08:38 AM

Russia is fielding 1970's based technology, with no combined arms doctrine implemented, against 21st century "fire and forget" technology that was specifically developed to easily (and comparatively cheaply) defeat modern armored systems.

Ukraine has also implemented techniques to leverage commercial technology (and protect against those vulnerabilities). Geolocating a cell phone signal to destroy a headquarters command and staff, for example. That's a very current topic, and you'll find U.S. DoD discussion about our Soldiers having cellphones (not to mention social media) being a big vulnerability. Lots of people are taking notes about what's going on in Ukraine.

Here's an article from 2020 (https://cove.army.gov.au/article/electronic-warfare-threat-command-post-perspective), for example. Note the "lesson learned" by Ukraine, and extrapolate that to the comment above about both exploiting it and protecting against it.

'We often exercised and deployed our joint manoeuvre forces to operate in a contested warfighting environment. So we thought we were postured, prepared and ready for any major Russian incursions.

Critically however, we had failed to properly exercise, and therefore truly understand, the impact of losing control of Defence Information and communications technology (ICT) networks, systems and data links critical to the command, coordination and conduct of manoeuvre warfare.

As a result, the subsequent speed and synchronicity in which the Russians orchestrated and delivered the cyber-attacks within kinetic and non-kinetic joint fires was overwhelming and catastrophic. It left us on the canvas: deaf, dumb and blind – we were essentially rendered combat ineffective in 118 minutes!'

It stands to reason that Putin assumed this incursion would yield similar results. It stands to reason that a bureaucracy (and a Russian one at that) reinforced that assumption. That same bureaucratic mindset prevents initiative. Losses of Russian generals are significant, because no one does anything without the boss ok'ing it.

Ukraine adapted, but Russia assumed they would fight the same force (and we see the problems with that key mistake). If Ukraine continues to receive Javelins, MLAWs, and Stingers - and maintains the will to fight - they can win. Russia still holds the initiative though. They can press the attack (but time is not on their side with current operations), escalate across a spectrum to "scorched earth" (which has severe international consequences), or withdraw. We're not a month into this, so a lot of what's in the news now is just journalistic speculation and political theater.

--edit--

More simplistic version:

Ukraine fought Russia in 2014 using Russian equipment and tactics. Russia understands all that, and won handily because they had better equipment and tactics to implement it. Ukraine changed their tactics, now have western technology, and Russia is confounded.

welch

March 19th, 2022, 10:04 AM

A video from ABC News about Russian army truck tires. Discussion by a former US Army logistics guy who became a Defense Department specialist in damaged trucks. He sees indications that

(1) the Russian army did not exercise and, thereby, maintain trucks tires

(2) the Russian army depends on railroads to move equipment. It skimps on trucks, using them on "last mile" delivery. That last-mile is too short to read Kyiv.

(3) Russian army procurement opens spots for its people to pocket the difference between what was appropriated and what they bought. They bought cheap, and their cheap "enhances" battle damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaz8RrsRKyc

TSherbs

March 19th, 2022, 10:49 AM

A video from ABV News about Russian army truck tires. Discussion by a former US Army logistics guy who became a Defense Department specialist in damaged trucks. He sees indications that

(1) the Russian army did not exercise and, thereby, maintain trucks tires

(2) the Russian army depends on railroads to move equipment. It skimps on trucks, using them on "last mile" delivery. That last-mile is too short to read Kyiv.

(3) Russian army procurement opens spots for its people to pocket the difference between what was appropriated and what they bought. They bought cheap, and their cheap "enhances" battle damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaz8RrsRKyc

interesting stuff, thanks

welch

March 20th, 2022, 08:11 AM

Institute for the Study of War concludes, as of yesterday:

Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated. Russian forces continue to make limited advances in some parts of the theater but are very unlikely to be able to seize their objectives in this way. The doctrinally sound Russian response to this situation would be to end this campaign, accept a possibly lengthy operational pause, develop the plan for a new campaign, build up resources for that new campaign, and launch it when the resources and other conditions are ready. The Russian military has not yet adopted this approach. It is instead continuing to feed small collections of reinforcements into an ongoing effort to keep the current campaign alive. We assess that that effort will fail.

https://www.understandingwar.org/

welch

March 20th, 2022, 08:26 AM

March 15th, 2022. Idus Martiae! The race to the culminating point of Ukraine’s tragedy is on! Possible Chinese support notwithstanding the next ten days or so will prove critical. The Russian war of conquest in Ukraine is now entering a critical phase; a race to reach the culminating point of Russia’s offensive capacity and Ukraine’s defensive capacity. That is why it is vital the West reinforces Ukraine’s capacity to resist and why Russia has started attacking supply bases through which Western lethal aid is passing. The next week or so could prove critical.

The culminating point is reached when a force can no longer conduct operations. For a force engaged on offensive expeditionary operations that point is reached when a force simply can no longer advance. In the wake of the second Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, several constraints on the capacity to conduct a Blitzkrieg became immediately apparent. The moment Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border a large gap appeared between the scale and quality of the Russian forces needed to maintain offensive Russian military momentum and the force available given the capacity of Ukraine’s capacity to resist and the space in which to conduct defensive operations on their own terrain.

It also became rapidly clear that the basic operational and tactical planning of the Russian General Staff was inadequate. Much of the intelligence underpinning the campaign was either faulty, out-of-date, or just plain wrong; mission goals and areas of responsibility between Battalion Tactical Groups had not been clearly established or delineated; secure communications between headquarters and forward deployed forces failed often; force protection was virtually non-existent; joint operations between air and ground elements were rendered extremely difficult by a lack of co-ordination and communications, and the Russian practice of ‘seeding’ regular army formations with conscripts led to rapid deterioration in the morale of the force in the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance. Above all, the lack of sufficient Special Operating Forces and Specialised Forces, allied to a lack of precision-guided munitions in sufficient quantity, rendered the original strategy of decapitating Ukraine politically and militarily impossible to realise.

The rest is at:

https://thealphengroup.home.blog/

TSherbs

March 20th, 2022, 08:28 AM

Wow. Very interesting. Never heard of this group. Some pretty good minds on the board.

welch

March 20th, 2022, 02:55 PM

Here is the latest assessment by the Washington defense think-tank, Institute for the Study of War.

Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed
to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major
Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated.
Russian forces continue to make limited advances in some parts of the theater but are very
unlikely to be able to seize their objectives in this way. The doctrinally sound Russian response to this
situation would be to end this campaign, accept a possibly lengthy operational pause, develop the plan for a new
campaign, build up resources for that new campaign, and launch it when the resources and other conditions are
ready. The Russian military has not yet adopted this approach. It is instead continuing to feed small collections
of reinforcements into an ongoing effort to keep the current campaign alive. We assess that that effort will fail.

The ultimate fall of Mariupol is increasingly unlikely to free up enough Russian combat power to
change the outcome of the initial campaign dramatically. Russian forces concentrated considerable
combat power around Mariupol drawn from the 8th Combined Arms Army to the east and from the group of
Russian forces in Crimea to the west. Had the Russians taken Mariupol quickly or with relatively few losses they
would likely have been able to move enough combat power west toward Zaporizhiya and Dnipro to threaten those
cities. The protracted siege of Mariupol is seriously weakening Russian forces on that axis, however. The
confirmed death of the commander of the Russian 150th Motorized Rifle Division likely indicates the scale of the
damage Ukrainian defenders are inflicting on those formations. The block-by-block fighting in Mariupol itself is
costing the Russian military time, initiative, and combat power. If and when Mariupol ultimately falls the Russian
forces now besieging it may not be strong enough to change the course of the campaign dramatically by attacking
to the west.

Russian forces in the south appear to be focusing on a drive toward Kryvyi Rih, presumably to
isolate and then take Zaporizhiya and Dnipro from the west but are unlikely to secure any of
those cities in the coming weeks if at all. Kryvyi Rih is a city of more than 600,000 and heavily fortified
according to the head of its military administration. Zaporizhiya and Dnipro are also large. The Russian military
has been struggling to take Mariupol, smaller than any of them, since the start of the war with more combat
power than it is currently pushing toward Kryvyi Rih. The Russian advance on that axis is thus likely to bog down
as all other Russian advances on major cities have done.

The Russian military continues to commit small groups of reinforcements to localized fighting
rather than concentrating them to launch new large-scale operations. Russia continues to commit
units drawn from its naval infantry from all fleets, likely because those units are relatively more combat-ready
than rank-and-file Russian regiments and brigades. The naval infantry belonging to the Black Sea Fleet is likely
the largest single pool of ready reserve forces the Russian military has not yet committed. Much of that naval
infantry has likely been embarked on amphibious landing ships off the Odesa coast since early in the war,
presumably ready to land near Odesa as soon as Russian forces from Crimea secured a reliable ground line of
communication (GLOC) from Crimea to Odesa. The likelihood that Russian forces from Crimea will establish
2 Institute for the Study of War & The Critical Threats Project 2022
such a GLOC in the near future is becoming remote, however, and the Russian military has apparently begun
using elements of the Black Sea Fleet naval infantry to reinforce efforts to take Mariupol.
The culmination of the initial Russian campaign is creating conditions of stalemate throughout
most of Ukraine. Russian forces are digging in around the periphery of Kyiv and elsewhere, attempting to
consolidate political control over areas they currently occupy, resupplying and attempting to reinforce units in
static positions, and generally beginning to set conditions to hold in approximately their current forward
positions for an indefinite time. Maxar imagery of Russian forces digging trenches and revetments in Kyiv Oblast
over the past several days supports this assessment.1 Comments by Duma members about forcing Ukraine to
surrender by exhaustion in May could reflect a revised Russian approach to ending this conflict on terms
favorable to Moscow.

Stalemate will likely be very violent and bloody, especially if it protracts. Stalemate is not armistice
or ceasefire. It is a condition in war in which each side conducts offensive operations that do not fundamentally
alter the situation. Those operations can be very damaging and cause enormous casualties. The World War I
battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele were all fought in conditions of stalemate and did not break
the stalemate. If the war in Ukraine settles into a stalemate condition Russian forces will continue
to bomb and bombard Ukrainian cities, devastating them and killing civilians, even as Ukrainian
forces impose losses on Russian attackers and conduct counter-attacks of their own. The
Russians could hope to break Ukrainians’ will to continue fighting under such circumstances by
demonstrating Kyiv’s inability to expel Russian forces or stop their attacks even if the Russians
are demonstrably unable to take Ukraine’s cities. Ukraine’s defeat of the initial Russian
campaign may therefore set conditions for a devastating protraction of the conflict and a
dangerous new period testing the resolve of Ukraine and the West. Continued and expanded
Western support to Ukraine will be vital to seeing Ukraine through that new period.
Key Takeaways:
• We now assess that the initial Russian campaign to seize Ukraine’s capital and major cities
and force regime change has failed;
• Russian forces continue efforts to restore momentum to this culminated campaign, but
those efforts will likely also fail;
• Russian troops will continue trying to advance to within effective artillery range of the
center of Kyiv, but prospects for their success are unclear;
• The war will likely descend into a phase of bloody stalemate that could last for weeks or
months;
• Russia will expand efforts to bombard Ukrainian civilians in order to break Ukrainians’
will to continue fighting (at which the Russians will likely fail);
• The most dangerous current Russian advance is from Kherson north toward Kryvyi Rih in
an effort to isolate Zaporizhiya and Dnipro from the west. Russian forces are unlikely to
be able to surround or take Kryvyi Rih in the coming days, and may not be able to do so at
all without massing much larger forces for the effort than they now have available on that
axis;
• The Russians appear to have abandoned plans to attack Odesa at least in the near term.

https://understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/20220319%20Russian%20Operations%20Assessments.pdf

Full PDF includes maps, plus additional discussion: what Russia might do next, why the Russians are pulling Russian "naval infantry" from amphibious ships to reinforce the attack on Mariupol...

Empty_of_Clouds

March 20th, 2022, 03:18 PM

TSherbs

March 20th, 2022, 03:45 PM

I have to wonder why such analysis is offered in a public space. If it is accurate then surely it is merely giving free info to the Russians - assuming they also believe it to be a true assessment. Although I have no way of determining if this analysis is what it claims to be, I decided to try out my skeptics hat for today. :)

This assessment doesn't include info about anything from the defense tactics. How would it help Russians? It's very generalized. But I too certainly cannot vouch for its accuracy of insight.

Empty_of_Clouds

March 20th, 2022, 05:23 PM

If it was accurate then it suggests better ways of prosecuting the attack.

The Russian military continues to commit small groups of reinforcements to localized fighting rather than concentrating them to launch new large-scale operations.

Just one example. Yes, it is generalised, but it is still an pointing arrow.

dneal

March 20th, 2022, 05:46 PM

I have to wonder why such analysis is offered in a public space. If it is accurate then surely it is merely giving free info to the Russians - assuming they also believe it to be a true assessment. Although I have no way of determining if this analysis is what it claims to be, I decided to try out my skeptics hat for today. :)

It’s just generic “textbook” level analysis. The real analysis is happening in a SCIF, includes all sorts of classified sourcing, etc…

welch

March 20th, 2022, 06:42 PM

Meanwhile, Mark Lebido, disciple of Alexander Dugin ("Putin's Rasputin) insists that the Russian Army never intended to take Kyiv or any other city, never intended a blitz-krieg war. Everything is going to plan. There will be a giant turn real soon now. (Yes, I'm skeptical of Lebido)

TSherbs

March 20th, 2022, 06:46 PM

Chip

March 20th, 2022, 11:16 PM

At the moment, an objective assessment of Russian strategy and tactics in the hearing of Putin or his henchmen would likely get you dragged out and shot.

In the grand tradition of Stalin, those in power seem most given to self-generated myths, historical distortions, and calculated lies.

welch

March 21st, 2022, 04:35 PM

On-line, I stumble across devoted, and demented, followers of Russia. They take gulps from a sewer of Russian propaganda, spitting it at anyone handy. To each, I ask for references. For evidence. Trained journalists and their editors give that to readers. Here is an account of Mariupol from Valerie Hopkins, in the Times. She is normally based in Moscow.

As Mariupol Is Bombed and Besieged, Those Trapped Fight to Survive

Valerie Hopkins
March 21, 2022, 5:11 p.m. ET1 hour ago
1 hour ago
Valerie Hopkins

LVIV, Ukraine — Eduard Zarubin, a doctor, has lost everything. But he does still have his life.

His street is destroyed, and his city, the southern port of Mariupol, is so far the greatest horror of Russia’s scorched-earth war against Ukraine. Russian missiles decimated a theater that sheltered more than 1,000 people. Another attack hit an art school where children were hiding in the basement.

Water is so scarce that people are melting snow. Heating, electricity and gas have disappeared. People are chopping trees for firewood to fuel outdoor cooking stoves shared by neighbors. To walk from one street to another often means passing corpses, or fresh graves dug in parks or grassy medians.

On Sunday, Russia gave an ultimatum that Ukrainian fighters in the city must give up, or face annihilation. Ukrainian officials refused. Evacuation buses, including some carrying children, were shelled on Monday, according to Ukrainian officials. Thousands of people have escaped the city, including Dr. Zarubin, but more than 300,000 others remain, even as fighting has moved onto the streets of some neighborhoods.

“If the war ends and we win, and get rid of them, then I think that there will be excursions in Mariupol, just like there are to Chernobyl,” he said of the abandoned site of a Soviet-era nuclear calamity. “So that people understand what kind of apocalyptic things can occur.”

The destruction of Mariupol, one of Ukraine’s largest cities, has been a siege and a relentless bombardment that for the last three weeks has left its population cut off from the outside world. What news does arrive comes from grainy cellphone videos taken by people still inside the city, from bulletins from Ukrainian officials, or from the accounts of people like Dr. Zarubin, who have witnessed the destruction of everything they had.

Dr. Zarubin, a urologist, lived in a beautiful house on the Left Bank, one of Mariupol’s elite neighborhoods. He had a comfortable life and the expectation that he had worked hard enough to have a secure future. But after the shelling began, he had to walk nearly eight miles a day with his son, Viktor, just to find water for their family. Later, as desperation set in, Dr. Zarubin said that people began looting shops and walking away with appliances, or drugs from pharmacies.

“Every day there was something new,” Mr. Zarubin said of the destruction. “The changes came so fast, and were so dynamic, as if we were in a film. You go out, and you don’t recognize the city. You go out again the next morning and again you don’t recognize it.”

Albertas Tamashauskas, 29, worked in Mariupol’s city planning office. On Feb. 23, the day before Russia invaded, he had a final planning meeting about installing bike lanes across the city. But when the siege began, time began to blur and he lost track of what day or week it was. Instead, he spent his days obsessing about finding water or collecting and cutting wood for cooking.

“On the street there was a park,” said Mr. Tamashauskas, 29. “We cut down the trees and chopped firewood. And in the evening, we had to take it to the basement, because, of course, there was so much looting. People took fuel from the cars.”

“Of course,” he added, “war is scary. But the worst thing is that you do not have a sense of tomorrow. That is, you go to bed, and you do not know what will happen next.”

He and his pregnant wife finally packed one backpack each and walked out of the city, headed west. They are now safe in the region of Zaporizhzhia, northwest of Mariupol.

Even as much of Ukraine still has internet access, and cellphone service, Mariupol is without either.

“You are sitting in an information vacuum,” said Irina Peredey, a 29-year-old municipal worker. “You don’t understand what is happening, or whether there is any help coming into the city or not,” she said. Moscow has refused to allow any humanitarian assistance to reach the city.

“I sometimes saw people carry water that was yellow and brown, but there were no options,” Ms. Peredey recalled. She herself began collecting snow and rain water to cook. “It is really very difficult when you don’t understand how long it will last or what will happen next, so you use every opportunity to somehow collect something.”

The rules and institutions that had governed their community had broken down so fast. The police had stopped working, as had emergency services, even the ambulances, which had too much work and could not navigate the giant holes in the road created by missiles and bombs. A post office was repurposed as a morgue.

Sergey Sinelnikov, a 58-year-old pharmaceutical entrepreneur, moved to the city center after the shelling began, believing like many others that it would be spared intensive bombing. Instead, the district came under heavy attack, too. He watched as a burning curtain fell from the top floor of a nine-story building across the street, where his parents had once lived.

Firefighters arrived at the scene but did nothing. Mr. Sinelnikov wondered if they were lacking water. The fire raged for three days, destroying all 144 apartments.

A routine would set in, Mr. Sinelnikov said. From his window, he watched as people cooked on improvised brick stoves in the courtyards of their apartment blocks — and then, in an instant, they would scatter to seek shelter when they heard the roar of Russian jets.

Mariupol refuses to yield. Ukraine rejected a demand to surrender the embattled southern port city, where Russian forces have broadened their bombardment and forcibly deported thousands of residents, according to local officials.

“Then the plane flew over, dropped its rockets and bombs, and then people went back to their stoves, to what they were cooking,” he said. “It looked like some kind of children’s game.”

Mr. Sinelnikov and Mr. Zarubin both left on March 16, the same day that Russian forces bombed the theater, one of the city’s biggest public shelters. The world “children” was written in large Cyrillic letters outside the site to make it visible for pilots flying over.

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Even as residents have been desperate to escape to the west, Russian soldiers have taken “between 4,000 and 4,500 Mariupol residents forcibly across the border to Taganrog,” a city in southwestern Russia, according to Pyotr Andryuschenko, an assistant to Mariupol’s mayor.

Other former Mariupol residents also told The New York Times similar stories of friends who had been taken into Russia. Mr. Sinelnikov, whose father was from Russia, said that when the war started his Russian relatives invited him to stay in Bryansk, about 250 miles southwest of Moscow. He refused.

“If I go to Russia, I will feel pain and humiliation,” he said. He has fled instead to western Ukraine. “Here, there is only pain that will pass. There will be no humiliation.”

Ms. Peredey, the municipal worker, said her escape took more than 11 hours as she passed through 15 Russian army checkpoints. For two or three days afterward, she did not want to eat, even though food had been rationed when she was in Mariupol. Then, she said, she began to feel hungry every hour.

Mr. Zarubin, the doctor, said nothing would ever be the same. One day when he was still in Mariupol, he said he walked 20 miles to check on their house on the Left Bank. He passed corpses left on the side of the road. When he reached his house, it was one of the few buildings still standing. Everything else was rubble.

“I was born on this street,” he said. “I knew all these neighbors when they were young, how they looked after their houses, how they pruned their trees.

“It was all destroyed in two weeks.”

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Valerie Hopkins is a correspondent based in Moscow. She previously covered Central and Southeastern Europe for a decade, most recently for the Financial Times. @VALERIEinNYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/world/europe/ukraine-mariupol-russia-war.html

TSherbs

March 21st, 2022, 04:45 PM

Tonight's PBS opening segment on Mariupol was devasting to me. And very angering.

welch

March 21st, 2022, 08:52 PM

The Post considers what the sanctions have done and will do. Unfortunately, the article has charts and such that do not come through a text copy.

How Russia will feel the sting of sanctions

By Andrew Van Dam, Youjin Shin and Alyssa Fowers
March 18, 2022 at 9:37 a.m. EDT

The United States, Europe and their allies rely on Russia for some oil and gas, and a few specialized materials. But they also supply Russia with much of its machinery, vehicles, technology and equipment that help Russia’s economy run.

That’s why sanctions can be so effective.

Without global trade, Russian factories would sit idle, businesses would shutter and shelves would sit bare. Even blocking some of those goods from countries that have already imposed sanctions or restrictions could dismember whole sectors in Russia. Some Russian companies that rely on imported components are already reeling — production lines at the automaker Lada reportedly went idle earlier this month.

Russia relies on countries that have imposed sanctions for its cars, machinery and other manufactured goods

Meanwhile, countries that usually sell goods to Russia have a lot less to lose when trade is cut off. Russia spends $11.5 billion annually on its largest import, cars, according to Trade Data Monitor. Germany, South Korea and Japan lead the market, supplying 63 percent of Russia’s motor vehicles. But they would lose only about 3 percent of their international business if they stop selling to Russia.

Russian airlines typically depend on Boeing and Airbus jets. And without aerospace imports, Russia risks running out of the specialized parts needed to maintain them — parts that can’t always be obtained from third-party suppliers.

All in all, more than half of the goods and services flowing into Russia come from 46 or more countries that have levied sanctions or trade restrictions, with the United States and European Union leading the way, according to Castellum.ai.

Though China leads with imports to Russia, the majority of goods come from countries that have imposed sanctions

In a televised speech Thursday, a defiant Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed to acknowledge the country’s challenges. He said the widespread sanctions would force difficult “deep structural changes in our economy” but vowed that Russia would overcome “the attempts to organize an economic blitzkrieg.”

“It is difficult for us at the moment,” Putin said. “Russian financial companies, major enterprises, small- and medium-sized businesses are facing unprecedented pressure.”

Indeed, Russian consumers are already feeling economic pressure. For example, there have been widespread reports of panic buying in Russian supermarkets, according to the Financial Times, as “Russian social media channels are flooded with pictures of empty shelves in supermarkets and videos of people scrambling to buy bags of sugar and grains.”

“All of this already is having an impact on the Russian economy,” said Jeff Schott, who tracks sanctions and trade for the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The ruble has fallen through the floor. Interest rates are high. Inflation is soaring. Imported goods are basically hard to find and are not being restocked because nobody is selling to Russia for fear that they will not get paid — or only paid in rubles.”

Russia is the world’s 11th-largest economy. If it were a U.S. state, Russia’s total economic output would have ranked fourth in 2020, behind California, Texas and New York, and just ahead of Florida. Imports make up one-fifth of its gross domestic product. Many of those imports are now at risk as Russia has, in short order, come to face a higher number of sanctions than any other country, according to Castellum.ai.

The West has imposed a barrage of sanctions on top Russian figures. See how they’re connected to Putin.

Russia’s contributions to the global economy skew toward raw materials which, with a few notable exceptions such as petroleum, nickel and palladium (used in car parts), can be replaced by commodities from elsewhere in the world, a Post analysis of Trade Data Monitor figures shows.

In addition the explicit sanctions, restrictions built into the core of the global financial and trade systems are also making it harder for most countries to trade with Russia. Major global banks are reluctant to finance Russia-related deals — Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank have all said they are winding down business there — and those firms not spooked by sanctions or the reputational cost of doing business with an international pariah are likely to be scared away by the prospect of getting paid in increasingly worthless rubles.

Nations that aren’t scared off will still struggle to get their goods to Russia, as firms representing 30 to 50 percent of global shipping capacity have already boycotted the country, according to economist Judah Levine of Freightos, a global freight-booking platform.

Russia’s hopes for surviving sanctions lie primarily with China, which now finds itself with substantial leverage over its northern neighbor. China, the world’s leading exporter, supplies about one-quarter of Russia’s imports. Most aren’t subject to sanctions.

Russia is turning to China to survive sanctions, but it won’t be easy

China’s sprawling manufacturing sector could replace some of the U.S. and European goods that had been heading to Russia but are now blocked, said Mary Lovely, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The country already supplies a large portion of Russia’s machinery and electronics. But replacements aren’t always possible, especially for the highest-tech goods, and there’s no guarantee China will be willing to sell them. Even if China is willing, creating, producing and delivering specific replacements will take China time that Russia may not have.

China also supplies Russia with the vast majority of its furs, that being one of the only product categories where Russia is the dominant consumer market. Nearly one-third of the world’s fur trade goes to Russia.

Meanwhile, China is fairly independent from Russia, since the Russian market accounts for 2 percent of China’s global exports. With the value of Russia’s currency dropping, it’s not clear Chinese suppliers will want to do business there even when it’s legally allowed, said Phil Levy, chief economist of Flexport, a global logistics platform.

“Russia is going to be a very difficult place to do business,” Levy said. “Even without any explicit threat from the West, those conditions in Russia — a swinging currency and banking problems — might make Chinese companies cautious.”

To be sure, the economic wall around Russia is not impregnable. Russia retains significant leverage over Europe because of its vast petroleum reserves. Eastern oil and gas are still flowing into key European markets for now and continue to generate billions of dollars in foreign currency each week, a financial lifeline for the Putin regime.

“The sanctions we have in place are meant to starve the Russian economy,” said Schott of the Peterson Institute. “But the exceptions for oil and gas imports into Europe are a large feeding tube that’s keeping the Russian economy afloat.”

But gaps in the wall are closing.

“Europe is dependent on Russian oil and gas today, but already has announced plans to wean off a good share of its gas imports from Russia in the coming year,” Schott said. “Russia’s leverage on energy will erode over time. Meanwhile, Western sanctions, if continued, would constrain productivity growth in Russian industry and impair Russia’s military capabilities.”

By Andrew Van Dam
Andrew Van Dam covers data and economics. He previously worked for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the Idaho Press-Tribune. Twitter
Image without a caption

By Youjin Shin
Youjin Shin works as graphics reporter at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she worked as multimedia editor at the Wall Street Journal and a research fellow at the MIT SENSEable city lab. Twitter
Image without a caption

By Alyssa Fowers
Alyssa Fowers is a graphics reporter for The Washington Post. Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/18/sanctions-russia-imports/

dneal

March 22nd, 2022, 06:23 AM

Some decent thoughts in this Atlantic piece.

When I visited Iraq during the 2007 surge, I discovered that the conventional wisdom in Washington usually lagged the view from the field by two to four weeks. Something similar applies today. Analysts and commentators have grudgingly declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been blocked, and that the war is stalemated. The more likely truth is that the Ukrainians are winning.
So why can’t Western analysts admit as much? Most professional scholars of the Russian military first predicted a quick and decisive Russian victory; then argued that the Russians would pause, learn from their mistakes, and regroup; then concluded that the Russians would actually have performed much better if they had followed their doctrine; and now tend to mutter that everything can change, that the war is not over, and that the weight of numbers still favors Russia. Their analytic failure will be only one of the elements of this war worth studying in the future.
At the same time, there are few analysts of the Ukrainian military—a rather more esoteric specialty—and thus the West has tended to ignore the progress Ukraine has made since 2014, thanks to hard-won experience and extensive training by the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The Ukrainian military has proved not only motivated and well led but also tactically skilled, integrating light infantry with anti-tank weapons, drones, and artillery fire to repeatedly defeat much larger Russian military formations. The Ukrainians are not merely defending their strong points in urban areas but maneuvering from and between them, following the Clausewitzian dictum that the best defense is a shield of well-directed blows.
The reluctance to admit what is happening on the ground in Ukraine stems perhaps in part from the protectiveness scholars feel for their subject (even if they loathe it on moral grounds), but more from a tendency to emphasize technology (the Russians have some good bits), numbers (which they dominate, though only up to a point), and doctrine. The Russian army remains in some ways very cerebral, and intellectuals can too easily admire elegant tactical and operational thinking without pressing very hard on practice. But the war has forcibly drawn attention to the human dimension. For example, most modern militaries rely on a strong cadre of noncommissioned officers. Sergeants make sure that vehicles are maintained and exercise leadership in squad tactics. The Russian NCO corps is today, as it has always been, both weak and corrupt. And without capable NCOs, even large numbers of technologically sophisticated vehicles deployed according to a compelling doctrine will end up broken or abandoned, and troops will succumb to ambushes or break under fire.
The West’s biggest obstacle to accepting success, though, is that we have become accustomed over the past 20 years to think of our side as being stymied, ineffective, or incompetent. It is time to get beyond that, and consider the facts that we can see.
The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and air-defense system, and the weeks-long paralysis of the 40-mile supply column north of Kyiv are suggestive. Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating—in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.
Add to this the repeated tactical blundering visible on videos even to amateurs: vehicles bunched up on roads, no infantry covering the flanks, no closely coordinated artillery fire, no overhead support from helicopters, and panicky reactions to ambushes. The 1-to-1 ratio of vehicles destroyed to those captured or abandoned bespeaks an army that is unwilling to fight. Russia’s inability to concentrate its forces on one or two axes of attack, or to take a major city, is striking. So, too, are its massive problems in logistics and maintenance, carefully analyzed by technically qualified observers.
[David French: This is a uniquely perilous moment]
The Russian army has committed well more than half its combat forces to the fight. Behind those forces stands very little. Russian reserves have no training to speak of (unlike the U.S. National Guard or Israeli or Finnish reservists), and Putin has vowed that the next wave of conscripts will not be sent over, although he is unlikely to abide by that promise. The swaggering Chechen auxiliaries have been hit badly, and in any case are not used to, or available for, combined-arms operations. Domestic discontent has been suppressed, but bubbles up as brave individuals protest and hundreds of thousands of tech-savvy young people flee.
If Russia is engaging in cyberwar, that is not particularly evident. Russia’s electronic-warfare units have not shut down Ukrainian communications. Half a dozen generals have gotten themselves killed either by poor signal security or trying desperately to unstick things on the front lines. And then there are the negative indicators on the other side—no Ukrainian capitulations, no notable panics or unit collapses, and precious few local quislings, while the bigger Russophilic fish, such as the politician Viktor Medvedchuk, are wisely staying quiet or out of the country. And reports have emerged of local Ukrainian counterattacks and Russian withdrawals.
The coverage has not always emphasized these trends. As the University of St. Andrews’s Phillips P. O’Brien has argued, pictures of shattered hospitals, dead children, and blasted apartment blocks accurately convey the terror and brutality of this war, but they do not convey its military realities. To put it most starkly: If the Russians level a town and slaughter its civilians, they are unlikely to have killed off its defenders, who will do extraordinary and effective things from the rubble to avenge themselves on the invaders. That is, after all, what the Russians did in their cities to the Germans 80 years ago. More sober journalism—The Wall Street Journal has been a standout in this respect—has been analytic, offering detailed reporting on revealing battles, like the annihilation of a Russian battalion tactical group in Voznesensk.
Most commentators have taken too narrow a view of this conflict, presenting it as solely between Russia and Ukraine. Like most wars, though, it is being waged by two coalitions, fought primarily though not exclusively by Russian and Ukrainian nationals. The Russians have some Chechen auxiliaries who have yet to demonstrate much effectiveness (and who lost their commander early on), may get some Syrians (who will be even less able to integrate with Russian units), and find a half-hearted ally in Belarus, whose citizens have begun sabotaging its rail lines and whose army may well mutiny if asked to invade Ukraine.
The Ukrainians have their auxiliaries, too, some 15,000 or so foreign volunteers, some probably worthless or dangerous to their allies, but others valuable—snipers, combat medics, and other specialists who have fought in Western armies. More important, they have behind them the military industries of countries including the United States, Sweden, Turkey, and the Czech Republic. Flowing into Ukraine every day are thousands of advanced weapons: the best anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles in the world, plus drones, sniper rifles, and all the kit of war. Moreover, it should be noted that the United States has had exquisite intelligence not only about Russia’s dispositions but about its intentions and actual operations. The members of the U.S. intelligence community would be fools not to share this information, including real-time intelligence, with the Ukrainians. Judging by the adroitness of Ukrainian air defenses and deployments, one may suppose that they are not, in fact, fools.
Talk of stalemate obscures the dynamic quality of war. The more you succeed, the more likely you are to succeed; the more you fail, the more likely you are to continue to fail. There is no publicly available evidence of the Russians being able to regroup and resupply on a large scale; there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. If the Ukrainians continue to win, we might see more visible collapses of Russian units and perhaps mass surrenders and desertions. Unfortunately, the Russian military will also frantically double down on the one thing it does well—bombarding towns and killing civilians.
[Eliot A. Cohen: America’s hesitation is heartbreaking]
The Ukrainians are doing their part. Now is the time to arm them on the scale and with the urgency needed, as in some cases we are already doing. We must throttle the Russian economy, increasing pressure on a Russian elite that does not, by and large, buy into Vladimir Putin’s bizarre ideology of “passionarity” and paranoid Great Russian nationalism. We must mobilize official and unofficial agencies to penetrate the information cocoon in which Putin’s government is attempting to insulate the Russian people from the news that thousands of their young men will come home maimed, or in coffins, or not at all from a stupid and badly fought war of aggression against a nation that will now hate them forever. We should begin making arrangements for war-crimes trials, and begin naming defendants, as we should have done during World War II. Above all, we must announce that there will be a Marshall Plan to rebuild the Ukrainian economy, for nothing will boost their confidence like the knowledge that we believe in their victory and intend to help create a future worth having for a people willing to fight so resolutely for its freedom.
As for the endgame, it should be driven by an understanding that Putin is a very bad man indeed, but not a shy one. When he wants an off-ramp, he will let us know. Until then, the way to end the war with the minimum of human suffering is to pile on.

welch

March 22nd, 2022, 08:02 AM

More on "Eurasianism", Putin's grand theory. An Op-Ed from the Times, written by a professor of Russian history, just retired from NYU.

The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War

March 22, 2022, 1:00 a.m. ET

By Jane Burbank

Dr. Burbank is a professor of Russian history, recently retired from New York University.

President Vladimir Putin’s bloody assault on Ukraine, nearly a month in, still seems inexplicable. Rockets raining down on apartment buildings and fleeing families are now Russia’s face to the world. What could induce Russia to take such a fateful step, effectively electing to become a pariah state?

Efforts to understand the invasion tend to fall into two broad schools of thought. The first focuses on Mr. Putin himself — his state of mind, his understanding of history or his K.G.B. past. The second invokes developments external to Russia, chiefly NATO’s eastward expansion after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, as the underlying source of the conflict.

But to understand the war in Ukraine, we must go beyond the political projects of Western leaders and Mr. Putin’s psyche. The ardor and content of Mr. Putin’s declarations are not new or unique to him. Since the 1990s, plans to reunite Ukraine and other post-Soviet states into a transcontinental superpower have been brewing in Russia. A revitalized theory of Eurasian empire informs Mr. Putin’s every move.

The end of the Soviet Union disoriented Russia’s elites, stripping away their special status in a huge Communist empire. What was to be done? For some, the answer was just to make money, the capitalist way. In the wild years after 1991, many were able to amass enormous fortunes in cahoots with an indulgent regime. But for others who had set their goals in Soviet conditions, wealth and a vibrant consumer economy were not enough. Post-imperial egos felt the loss of Russia’s status and significance keenly.

As Communism lost its élan, intellectuals searched for a different principle on which the Russian state could be organized. Their explorations took shape briefly in the formation of political parties, including rabidly nationalist, antisemitic movements, and with more lasting effect in the revival of religion as a foundation for collective life. But as the state ran roughshod over democratic politics in the 1990s, new interpretations of Russia’s essence took hold, offering solace and hope to people who strove to recover their country’s prestige in the world.

One of the most alluring concepts was Eurasianism. Emerging from the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, this idea posited Russia as a Eurasian polity formed by a deep history of cultural exchanges among people of Turkic, Slavic, Mongol and other Asian origins. In 1920, the linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy — one of several Russian émigré intellectuals who developed the concept — published “Europe and Humanity,” a trenchant critique of Western colonialism and Eurocentrism. He called on Russian intellectuals to free themselves from their fixation on Europe and to build on the “legacy of Chinggis Khan” to create a great continent-spanning Russian-Eurasian state.

Trubetzkoy’s Eurasianism was a recipe for imperial recovery, without Communism — a harmful Western import, in his view. Instead, Trubetzkoy emphasized the ability of a reinvigorated Russian Orthodoxy to provide cohesion across Eurasia, with solicitous care for believers in the many other faiths practiced in this enormous region.

Suppressed for decades in the Soviet Union, Eurasianism survived in the underground and burst into public awareness during the perestroika period of the late 1980s. Lev Gumilyov, an eccentric geographer who had spent 13 years in Soviet prisons and forced-labor camps, emerged as an acclaimed guru of the Eurasian revival in the 1980s. Mr. Gumilyov emphasized ethnic diversity as a driver of global history. According to his concept of “ethnogenesis,” an ethnic group could, under the influence of a charismatic leader, develop into a “super-ethnos” — a power spread over a huge geographical area that would clash with other expanding ethnic units.

Mr. Gumilyov’s theories appealed to many people making their way through the chaotic 1990s. But Eurasianism was injected directly into the bloodstream of Russian power in a variant developed by the self-styled philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. After unsuccessful interventions in post-Soviet party politics, Mr. Dugin focused on developing his influence where it counted — with the military and policymakers. With the publication in 1997 of his 600-page textbook, loftily titled “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” Eurasianism moved to the center of strategists' political imagination.

In Mr. Dugin’s adjustment of Eurasianism to present conditions, Russia had a new opponent — no longer just Europe, but the whole of the “Atlantic” world led by the United States. And his Eurasianism was not anti-imperial but the opposite: Russia had always been an empire, Russian people were “imperial people,” and after the crippling 1990s sellout to the “eternal enemy,” Russia could revive in the next phase of global combat and become a “world empire.” On the civilizational front, Mr. Dugin highlighted the long-term connection between Eastern Orthodoxy and Russian empire. Orthodoxy’s combat against Western Christianity and Western decadence could be harnessed to the geopolitical war to come.

Eurasian geopolitics, Russian Orthodoxy and traditional values — these goals shaped Russia’s self-image under Mr. Putin’s leadership. The themes of imperial glory and Western victimization were propagated across the country; in 2017, they were drummed home in the monumental exhibition “Russia, My History.” The expo’s flashy displays featured Mr. Gumilyov’s Eurasian philosophy, the sacrificial martyrdom of the Romanov family and the evils the West had inflicted on Russia.

Where did Ukraine figure in this imperial revival? As an obstacle, from the very beginning. Trubetzkoy argued in his 1927 article “On the Ukrainian Problem” that Ukrainian culture was an “individualization of all-Russian culture” and that Ukrainians and Belarussians should bond with Russians around the organizing principle of their shared Orthodox faith. Mr. Dugin made things more direct in his 1997 text: Ukrainian sovereignty presented a “huge danger to all of Eurasia.” Total military and political control of the whole north coast of the Black Sea was an “absolute imperative” of Russian geopolitics. Ukraine had to become “a purely administrative sector of the Russian centralized state.”

Mr. Putin has taken that message to heart. In 2013, he declared that Eurasia was a major geopolitical zone where Russia’s “genetic code” and its many peoples would be defended against “extreme Western-style liberalism.” In July last year he announced that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people,” and in his furious rant on the eve of invasion, he described Ukraine as a “colony with a puppet regime,” where the Orthodox Church is under assault and NATO prepares for an attack on Russia.

This brew of attitudes — complaints about Western aggression, exaltation of traditional values over the decadence of individual rights, assertions of Russia’s duty to unite Eurasia and subordinate Ukraine — developed in the cauldron of post-imperial resentment. Now they infuse Mr. Putin’s worldview and inspire his brutal war.

The goal, plainly, is empire. And the line will not be drawn at Ukraine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opinion/russia-ukraine-putin-eurasianism.html

welch

March 22nd, 2022, 02:02 PM

Another estimate of losses in Ukraine, this one concluding "The key conclusion of our analysis is that, contrary to the propaganda messaging of the two sides, both would seem able to sustain combat for a considerable time longer. And this implies unrelenting destruction in Ukraine, with ever mounting civilian losses"

Russia-Ukraine War: Estimating Casualties & Military Equipment Losses

Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives, 21 March 2022

Within days of the Russian invasion, it became clear that Moscow’s effort to seize Ukraine had stumbled badly. The Russian military had expected a quick win, but found itself facing a hard slog instead. But why? And how to measure the conflict now?

The “whys” are multiple and intersecting:

First, the operation reflected an exceptionally ambitious goal: complete seizure and “demilitarization” of the largest European country apart from Russia itself. The operational plan supporting this goal was complex, dividing the effort along several axes. It aimed to overtax and section Ukraine’s defenses, isolate the capital, and envelop Ukraine’s main force in the east. But a plan this grand and complex tempts collapse.

Second, the size and complexity of the operation required a deep draw on Russia’s military. The invading force could not be limited to Moscow’s best and most experienced units. And many of the selected units seemed incapable of managing the fog and friction of war.

Third, the Russian military came expecting to fight the weak force it had faced and badly mauled in 2014 and 2015. It planned, organized, and provisioned accordingly. Moscow also expected the Ukrainian populace to be as divided now as it was in 2010. One result was that Russian units initially moved forward in small, light units, hoping to seize the prize with minimal combat and destruction. But both assumptions about Ukraine proved wrong. And as the Russian advance slowed and stalled, logistical problems set in.

Ukraine had begun a process of military reform and revitalization following establishment of the Minsk II cease fire in 2015. The cease fire mostly held for seven years during which time several NATO countries afforded Ukraine increasing levels of military assistance – material, training, and intelligence support. The country’s special operations forces gained special attention. Ukraine’s progress in military reform has been modest, but sufficient to enable it to exploit the weaknesses in Russia’s initial assault, attacking its vulnerable supply lines, relying on portable anti-armor weapons and small unit tactics to ambush armored vehicle, and fighting pitched battles in urban settings as the war progressed.

Within a week of invading, the Russian military was struggling to revise its approach. Earlier errors impeded any quick reorganization and resupply, but Russia has progressively transitioned to a heavier, more balanced mode of warfare, with greater reliance on artillery and siege tactics. Paradoxically, as Russian artillery and air attack now bear down, Ukraine may suffer the most from its relative early success in stalling Russian forces. That is, success called forth the current onslaught, which was always implicit in the lopsided Russia-Ukraine balance of forces.

The contest over measuring gains and losses

How do the two sides compare in terms of personnel and equipment losses? That’s a matter of dispute, of course. These seemingly objective measures are subject to a rather intensive propaganda war, as both sides try to shape the opinion and morale of both fighters and publics, their own and their opponents’.

In fact, the information war is not two sided – Russia vs Ukraine – but multi-sided. The types and degree of risk that US and European governments are willing to bear, and the types and extent of support they are willing to offer Ukraine are influenced by public perception of the war and its progress, which in turn is subject to shaping. And this helps explain the wide divergence in estimates of loss.

What’s at issue is not simply an accurate accounting of the war’s costs, but policy choices – such as declaration of a “no fly” zone or cross-border flights of substitute fighter aircraft – that might tempt a much broader and more destructive conflict. Where the trigger for escalation sits is a policy decision. This post looks at some of the information dynamics that are shaping such decisions.

Personnel losses

Consider that on March 15 official Ukrainian sources claimed that more than 13,500 Russians had been killed. By contrast, Moscow had earlier claimed only ~500. The Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an independent monitoring group based in Russia, estimated Russia’s military dead as ~700 at the time based on their investigations, but also speculated that a complete number might fall between 1,000 and 2,000.

During the week of March 6, one US official put the number of Russian fatalities as high as 6,000, but thought the number could be closer to 3,500. Also that week in testimony before members of the US House of Representatives, the director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency said the best estimate of Russian fatalities was between 2,000 and 4,000, although he also admitted low confidence in the estimate “because it relied on both intelligence sources and ‘open source’ information.” Clearly these US estimates of Russian fatalities range widely. One certainty, however, is that none comport with the estimates offered by either Moscow or Kyiv.

On March 13, President Zelensky claimed that the Ukrainian military had suffered around 1,300 fatalities. Earlier in March Russia estimated that its military operation had killed 2,870 Ukrainian troops. US officials have estimated that between 2,000 and 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed.

Confirmed civilian fatalities as of March 19 have been less: ~902 dead, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. However, the UN office also asserts that the number is surely an under count. (And with Russia having commenced heavier urban assaults in mid-March, the number might climb rapidly.)

Russian equipment losses

Turning to Russian equipment losses: In a March 15 report, the Ukrainian military claimed to have destroyed 81 Russian fixed-wing aircraft and 95 helicopters. It also claimed to have captured or destroyed 404 tanks and 1,279 armored personnel vehicles. Reports verified via online photographs tell a different story.

Independently documented Russian equipment losses amount to only half the number claimed four days earlier by the Ukrainian military for armored combat vehicles and only one-fourth the claimed aircraft losses. As of March 19, independent researchers logged the following Russian military losses:

109 tanks destroyed. Another 154 otherwise damaged, abandoned or captured;
225 fighting vehicles, APCs*, and MRAP** vehicles destroyed. Another 281 otherwise removed from Russian service;
14 aircraft destroyed, 1 damaged; 14 of these were combat aircraft;
29 helicopters destroyed, 5 otherwise out of commission.
[*Armored Personnel Carriers, ** MRAP: Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle]

How reliable are these figures? All claims derive from readily available photographic evidence exhaustively linked on the report’s website, which is commendable. The researchers claim efforts to ensure that the photographs are current, related to the Ukraine conflict, and correctly assigned to the appropriate party. And the photos can be reverse searched to aid in their verification.

Under-counting is more likely than over-counting. Although thousands of citizens and soldiers are deluging social media with photo documentation of the war, it’s likely that some disabled or abandoned Russian equipment has not been recorded due to the lingering presence of Russian troops. Also, Russian troops may have carted some away.

A summary of the combat vehicle and aircraft assets that Russia and Belarus brought to the theater can help put estimated losses in context:

1800-2000 tanks by various estimates (links are below)
Up to 8000 other armored combat vehicles (links are below)
300-500 combat aircraft at hand by varying estimates
The source of these baseline estimates are western military and intelligence agencies, diplomatic institutions, security policy centers, and trade and other media. Based on these sources, final ground equipment totals were extrapolated from the Pentagon assessed presence of 117 Russian Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) as well as other unit types and higher levels of organization.

Viewing the observed losses in light these figures suggests a Russian ground equipment loss rate of approximately eight percent over four weeks. Russian combat aircraft losses were less. They have been within the 3-4 percent range. which corresponds with the sense that Russian air power has been underutilized.

It’s difficult to estimate combat activity based on such losses, which include equipment destroyed, disabled, abandoned, and captured. We know that the Russian effort has been plagued by severe logistical problems involving equipment repair and the provision of food and fuel. This might prompt soldiers to not only abandon equipment – which is occurring, in fact – but also to disable or destroy it to prevent its appropriation by Ukrainian forces. (The United States armed forces often did the same when leaving behind equipment in Afghanistan and Iraq.)

What might Russian material losses say about personnel attrition?

Whatever the exact proportion, eight percent of Russian equipment destroyed disabled, or otherwise lost within a period of four weeks is a great deal. The percentage of armored combat vehicles recorded as actually destroyed is ~3.35%.

Equipment losses do not necessarily correlate with personnel losses, nor are all losses the result of combat, but what we’ve seen would be consistent with 3,000 Russian dead and as many or more seriously injured. This assumes that 100,000 troops are forward in 100 Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) and other formations with the remainder in support or reserve. This, in turn, is consistent with Ukrainian claims of as many as 1,000 POWs. (On March 12, the Ukrainian armed forces claimed to be holding 500-600 Russian POWs. President Zelensky was later reported to claim “almost” 1,000 POWs.)

For historical context, units suffering logistics, morale, or leadership problems can disintegrate if they suddenly suffer as little as 15% serious casualties. In the 1990-1991 Gulf War, Iraqi ground units, disintegrated after suffering as little as 2.5% fatalities. And this would generate large amounts of destroyed, disabled, abandoned, and captured equipment.

Ukrainian equipment losses

Drawing on the same source for a verified accounting of Ukrainian equipment losses shows, as of 20 March:

23 tanks destroyed, 42 otherwise abandoned or captured;
39 armored fighting vehicles and APCs destroyed. 84 otherwise abandoned or captured;
11 aircraft destroyed; 10 of these are combat aircraft.

As in the case of counting Russian losses, an undercount is more likely than an over count, both because lost equipment may lie in Russian controlled areas and because Ukrainian photographers and web masters may self-censor.

As best can be determined from other sources, the prewar Ukrainian arsenal included:

~850 usable tanks of varying age and capability
~2,400 infantry fighting vehicles and APCs
~80 combat aircraft – presumably not all of these are usable

Based on these estimates, the war has consumed about 5.8% of Ukraine’s available tanks and other armored combat vehicles. This rate is 83% as high as that calculated for Russian forces, which is not so much less. The percentage of Ukrainian aircraft losses has been significantly greater – 12% compared with 3-4 % on the Russian side. Also, keep in mind that the percentage of Ukrainian aircraft holdings that are actually functional is uncertain. One recent report asserts that Ukraine now holds only 56 functional fighter aircraft. This and combat attrition may explain Kyiv’s insistent requests for replacement aircraft.

Conclusion

Unsurprisingly, Moscow and Kyiv are far apart in their estimation of own and other losses. This testifies to the information or propaganda aspects of the current conflict. Independent sources of equipment losses show the two sides much closer in their levels of attrition than most media coverage would suggest. And this implies lower levels of personnel attrition. Interestingly, the levels of verifiable equipment loss are consistent with the lower range of US official estimates for Russian personnel losses: approximately ~3,000.

Ukrainian resistance is more intense than Moscow anticipated, but Russia’s principal problems are logistical and the impact of logistical shortcomings on morale. Although Russia’s home-based material stores are great, its forces are operating at the end of ever longer and more vulnerable supply lines. By contrast, Ukrainian forces are heavily dependent on uncertain outside support, but when its units are forced back they fall back on their supply lines.

The utter dependence of Ukraine on outside support drives its investment in the propaganda war, whose target is the West. By contrast, Russia’s propaganda efforts are oriented toward maintaining troop morale and Russian public support.

The key conclusion of our analysis is that, contrary to the propaganda messaging of the two sides, both would seem able to sustain combat for a considerable time longer. And this implies unrelenting destruction in Ukraine, with ever mounting civilian losses. While this might argue for increased emphasis on war containment and diplomatic efforts, the most evocative messaging on the western side emphasizes Russian miscalculation and fumbling, Ukraine’s adept resistance, and the promise of war termination via increased investment in the war.

https://comw.org/pda/russia-ukraine-war-estimating-casualties-military-equipment-losses/

dneal

March 22nd, 2022, 04:07 PM

Third, the Russian military came expecting to fight the weak force it had faced and badly mauled in 2014 and 2015. It planned, organized, and provisioned accordingly. Moscow also expected the Ukrainian populace to be as divided now as it was in 2010. One result was that Russian units initially moved forward in small, light units, hoping to seize the prize with minimal combat and destruction. But both assumptions about Ukraine proved wrong. And as the Russian advance slowed and stalled, logistical problems set in.

This is actually “first”. The facts and assumptions of the mission analysis and military decision making process that indicated the “complete seizure and demilitarization” was feasible, if they committed a majority of their power (justifying that commitment).

as Russian artillery and air attack now bear down, Ukraine may suffer the most from its relative early success in stalling Russian forces.

This is my concern. Russia has a lot of artillery and can protect it from air threats. Javelins aren’t as useful, since artillery doesn’t roll into town like tank columns do. Depending on the weapon system, Russia can sit back as far as several hundred kilometers and shell whatever they want. Ukraine won’t be able to attack it from the air, or with its own artillery. Drones could be an effective response.

Chip

March 22nd, 2022, 05:15 PM

https://i.imgur.com/h9dfYEh.jpg

Glory to Ukraine!

dneal

March 22nd, 2022, 06:04 PM

Maybe I missed the pundits mention it - they seem focused on nukes - but if Russia really wanted to be dicks, they should have enough operational heavy bombers to get rid of ordnance that's probably been around since the late 50's - and continuously made and stockpiled till the USSR collapsed.

That's exactly what they've been doing in Syria for many years now - although they haven't brought out the big boys (TU-95 is a prop equivalent to a B52, for example). We do still use ours... We got rid of a bunch of that in Desert Storm. Rember watching on TV 30 straight days of B52's carpet bombing Iraqi defensive positions and those huge crowds of people surrendering? What do we do when that happens to a Ukranian city? Does Zelensky surrender? Do we let that happen?

It's the next level of escalation. The talking heads are all chattering about 'no fly zones', but that's a feasible option for him if he wants to escalate within conventional munitions. That would truly force a "no fly zone" decision. That's real world stuff that happens before nukes come into play - and that's when you need to start seriously considering that question. Do we do that? Whose national interest in Ukraine in? If NATO fighters have to start shooting down Russian bombers (and their fighter escorts); that's a shootin' war. That's the first fight of WWIII - or maybe the last fight before it escalates to that.

Putin has an enormous range of options right now. He's the only one who is weighing out all the stuff our talking heads are babbling about. It's anyone's guess what he'll do. All we can do is observe the fight and see what develops - while we ponder the moral weights of philosophical questions that real decisions will rest on.

welch

March 23rd, 2022, 06:45 AM

https://www.classicfm.com/composers/chopin/ukrainian-pianist-rubble-kyiv-home/

welch

March 23rd, 2022, 07:42 PM

Not exactly chaos inside the Russian economy, but the head of the Russian central bank wants to quit. She wants to run the financial system but not to hold it together through a war and these sanctions. I bold-faced a few spots that amazed me.

Russia central banker tried to quit over Ukraine; Putin said no

Much of Nabiullina’s legacy came undone in a matter of hours after sanctions laid siege to Russia’s economy.

Elvira Nabiullina, favoured by investors and hailed by publications as one of the world’s best monetary policymakers, now faces a wartime economy isolated by international sanctions and starved for investment [File: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg]
By Bloomberg NewsBloomberg
Published On 23 Mar 2022
23 Mar 2022

Russia’s highly regarded central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina sought to resign after Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine, only to be told by the president to stay, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions.

Nominated for a new five-year term last week, Nabiullina’s current views couldn’t be learned. She is left to manage the fallout from a war that’s quickly undone much of what’s she’s accomplished in the nine years since she took office. The people said departure now would be seen as a betrayal by the president, with whom she has worked closely for nearly two decades.

Nabiullina, 58, hasn’t commented publicly on her reappointment and didn’t respond to a query for this article. Spokespeople for the central bank and the Kremlin didn’t reply to requests for comment. Only one senior official has quit over the war: longtime economic reformer Anatoly Chubais stepped down as Putin’s climate envoy this week and left the country, according to people familiar with the situation.

Nabiullina, favored by investors and hailed by publications including Euromoney and The Banker as one of the world’s best monetary policymakers, now faces a wartime economy isolated by international sanctions and starved for investment as foreign companies leave.

With the ruble plunging as the U.S. and its allies imposed sweeping sanctions — including on the central bank itself — in the wake of the Feb. 24 invasion, she more than doubled the key interest rate and imposed capital controls to stanch the outflow of cash.

The central bank said it gave up interventions to defend the ruble after international restrictions froze more than half of its $643 billion in reserves.

“So long as there’s an escalation, the central bank can only adapt to shocks,” said Oleg Vyugin, a former top Bank of Russia official who’s known Nabiullina for over 20 years.

Hopelessness

Some central bank officials describe a state of hopelessness in the weeks since the invasion, feeling trapped in an institution that they fear will have little use for their market-oriented skills and experience as Russia is cut off from the world. At one point, the pace of departures was intense enough that the IT department was short of hands to terminate accounts. Arrows plastered along passageways steered employees through the final bureaucracy on their way out.

Other departments hunkered down under a heavier work load than usual and even saw a barrage of resumes arrive from banks targeted by sanctions.

Before the invasion, officials modeled scenarios that included a possible cut-off from the SWIFT financial messaging service but considered the possibility of sanctions on the central bank’s reserves too extreme to be anything but hypothetical, people familiar with the situation said.

Nabiullina kept rates elevated for years to contain prices but inflation shock looms

Putin said earlier this month he’s confident Russia will overcome the current economic difficulties and emerge more independent. Comparing the current wave of restrictions to those imposed on the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, he said, “the Soviet Union lived under sanctions, developed and attained colossal successes.”

In a brief statement last Friday after deciding to keep rates near a two-decade high of 20%, Nabiullina put off achieving her 4% inflation target until 2024 and warned the economy is headed for contraction and upheaval with no clear end in sight. In a break with recent tradition, she didn’t take questions after the rate meeting.

Economists predict a double-digit drop in output this year, while the ruble’s collapse and shortages of goods may touch off inflation of as much as 25%, a level not seen in Russia since the government’s 1998 debt default.

The ruble's value has plunged over Nabiullina's years as central banker

In a short video to the central bank’s staff on March 2, Nabiullina hinted at the upheaval inside, pleading to avoid “political debates” that “only burn our energy, which we need to do our job.” Describing an economic situation she called “extreme,” the governor said “all of us would have wanted for this not to happen.”

Until now, the crisis that followed Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was the biggest test of Nabiullina’s free-market mettle.

She fought against capital controls — advice that was then heeded by Putin — and set the ruble free, shifting to inflation targeting earlier than planned.

Frozen Reserves

Under her stewardship, the central bank amassed one of the world’s biggest stockpiles of foreign currency and gold, cracked down on lenders deemed mismanaged or under-capitalized, and brought inflation to the lowest in Russia’s post-Soviet history.

“When Nabiullina came in, no one thought she’d be able to stabilize inflation,” recalls Natalia Orlova, economist at Alfa-Bank. “She brought the central bank up to absolutely international standards.”

European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde, a fellow opera-lover then in charge of the International Monetary Fund, in 2018 likened her qualities to those of a great conductor.

Foreign investors poured billions into Russian debt. Putin trusted her, listened to her opinion and defended her tight-money policies in front of other government officials. But much of her legacy came undone in a matter of hours after the sanctions laid siege to Russia’s economy.

The path forward is less obvious than in crises past. An emergency rate hike and restrictions on foreign-exchange transactions have for now bottled up problems in the banking industry, with Russian markets seeing only a piecemeal reopening. The threat of default is stalking the government and companies.

“There’s no hope for the central bank to return to its old policies,” said Sergei Guriev, professor of economics at Sciences Po Paris.

Guriev, who fled to Paris in 2013 and served as chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, has known Nabiullina for about 15 years.

“She didn’t sign up to work in wartime,” he said. “She’s not the kind of person who can work with financial markets shut off and catastrophic sanctions.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/23/russia-central-banker-tried-to-quit-over-ukraine-putin-said-no

welch

March 24th, 2022, 09:39 AM

Frederick W. Kagan, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko

March 23, 5:00pm ET

Russian forces continued to settle in for a protracted and stalemated conflict over the last 24 hours, with more reports emerging of Russian troops digging in and laying mines—indications that they have gone over to the defensive. Ukrainian forces continued to conduct limited and effective counterattacks to relieve pressure on Kyiv, although the extent of those counterattacks is likely less than what some Ukrainian officials are claiming. Russian efforts to mobilize additional forces to keep their offensive moving continue to be halting and limited. Russian progress in taking Mariupol city remains slow and grinding. Increasing Russian emphasis on using air, artillery, and rocket/missile bombardments of Ukrainian cities to offset forward offensive momentum raises the urgency of providing Ukraine with systems to defend against these attacks.

Key Takeaways

- Russian forces continue to go over to the defensive, conducting restricted and localized ground attacks that make little progress.

- Ukrainian forces are conducting limited and successful counterattacks around Kyiv to disrupt Russian operations to encircle the city (which has now become extremely unlikely) and relieve the pressure on the capital.

- The Battle of Mariupol continues as a block-by-block struggle with fierce Ukrainian resistance and limited Russian gains.

- Russia is likely struggling to obtain fresh combat power from Syria and elsewhere rapidly.

Click here to expand the map below.

Russian efforts to bring Syrian forces into Ukraine may be encountering challenges. Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR) reports that a Russian commander in Syria met with the commander of the Syrian Arab Army’s 8th Brigade to request a list of Syrian personnel ready to fight in Ukraine, but that the Syrian commander promised only to respond after consulting with his colleagues.[1] We have no independent verification of this report. ISW’s Middle East Team is preparing a brief report on Russian efforts to mobilize Syrian forces to support the war in Ukraine and will publish it in the coming days.

Russian mobilization efforts are likely becoming urgent given Russian losses in the war. The Wall Street Journal cites an unnamed NATO official claiming that Russia has lost as many as 40,000 troops killed, wounded, or missing of the roughly 190,000 deployed to invade Ukraine.[2] That assessment, which is plausible given previous estimates of Russian combat deaths, must be considered in the context of the assessment offered by an unnamed Department of Defense official on March 21 that Russia had committed a high proportion of its available battalion tactical groups to the war already.[3] The protracting pause of Russian offensive operations in Ukraine and increasing anecdotal reporting of breakdowns in the morale and capability of Russian combat units all accord with these assessments. These reports and assessments collectively suggest that Russia may not be able to find new combat power with which to regain offensive momentum for weeks or even months.

Russian forces are increasingly preparing for protracted defensive operations in various parts of the theater. Numerous reports and satellite images of Russian troops digging defensive positions and laying mines suggest that they have gone over to the defensive and do not anticipate conducting renewed large-scale offensive operations in the near future in a number of locations across Ukraine.

We do not report in detail on the deliberate Russian targeting of civilian infrastructure and attacks on unarmed civilians, which are war crimes, because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:

Main effort—Kyiv (comprised of three subordinate supporting efforts);
Supporting effort 1—Kharkiv;
Supporting effort 1a—Luhansk Oblast;
Supporting effort 2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast; and
Supporting effort 3—Kherson and advances northward and westward.
Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east.

Subordinate main effort along the west bank of the Dnipro

Ukrainian forces have launched counterattacks to regain territory occupied by Russian troops, liberating the town of Makariv as noted in the update of March 22. The counterattack, probably conducted primarily by Ukrainian forces from the west of the forwardmost Russian positions, has likely made more significant progress than our map of March 22 showed. We have updated our map considerably since March 22 to show our current assessment of the probable front line west of Kyiv. Some of the Ukrainian gains shown likely occurred on March 21, but we have only just acquired sufficient evidence and clarity on the Ukrainian operations to reflect them accurately in the map of March 23.

Local Ukrainian officials claimed on March 23 that Ukrainian forces have encircled Russian troops in Irpin, Bucha, and Hostomel.[4] The mayor of Kyiv claimed that Ukrainian troops have almost pushed Russian forces out of Irpin.[5] The mayor of Irpin claimed that Ukrainian forces controlled 80% of the city as of March 23 but noted that the Russians continue to fire mortars and Grad rockets at the town and that Russian saboteurs and looters are pervasive.[6]

We are unable to corroborate most of these claims, particularly the claimed encirclement of large groups of Russian forces or the liberation of Irpin. The head of the Kyiv Oblast military administration stated on March 22 that Russian forces still controlled Bucha and Hostomel, that Ukrainian forces could conduct only local counterattacks, and that Ukrainian troops were preparing for a larger offensive operation—all of which would suggest that Ukrainian troops have likely not yet encircled Russian troops in these areas.[7] These Ukrainian claims may reflect the expectation that the Ukrainian counteroffensive will continue and cut off Russian forces currently in the Irpin salient. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and update our assessment and map if and when we find clear corroborating evidence of these claimed Ukrainian advances.

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on March 23 that Russian forces attempted to advance on Teterivsk, roughly 70 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, but were repelled.[8] A local Ukrainian government social media report supports that assessment.[9]

Subordinate supporting effort—Chernihiv and Sumy axis

Fighting in and around Chernihiv has continued over the past several days without changing the front line materially.[10]

Russian forces did not attempt new advances in and around Kyiv’s eastern suburbs in the past 24 hours. The Ukrainian General Staff reports that the Russians are continuing to dig themselves in and mine the area, likely indicating that the Russians have gone over to the defensive in these areas.[11]

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv:

Russian forces did not conduct any significant offensive operations around Kharkiv or around the city of Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv, on March 23 although limited operations continued.[12]

Supporting Effort #1a—Luhansk Oblast:

Russian forces continued efforts to advance in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, concentrating on limited ground attacks on Popasna and Avdiivka and missile strikes on Kramatorsk airfield.[13]

Note: We have updated our map of northeastern Ukraine to show Russian control over considerably more terrain than we had previously assessed. This change reflects newly acquired historical data rather than new Russian gains. We do NOT assess that Russian forces have made significant territorial gains in northeastern Ukraine for several days, and the revised control of terrain in this part of the theater does NOT reflect new Russian advances or the consolidation of Russian control.

Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol and Donetsk Oblast:

Block-by-block fighting continued in Mariupol City, as Russian forces increased their bombardment using artillery, drones, and naval guns.[14] Russian troops made limited gains.

Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and advances northward and westward:

Russian forces in and around Kherson and Mykolayiv, as well as those advancing on Kryvyih Ryh and Zaporizhiya, did not conduct significant offensive operations in the past 24 hours.[15] Ukrainian military intelligence reported that Russian forces are preparing to block the Kerch Bridge to prevent Russians from leaving Crimea.[16] The GUR claims that this measure is a response to panic among Russians in Crimea, particularly those who moved to the peninsula after 2014, especially among the families of Russian military and government personnel. We have no independent verification of these GUR reports.

Immediate items to watch

Russian forces will likely capture Mariupol or force the city to capitulate within the coming weeks.
Russia will expand its air, missile, and artillery bombardments of Ukrainian cities.
Ukrainian officials suggest that Ukrainian forces may launch a larger counterattack in western Kyiv Oblast in the coming days.
The continued involvement of the Black Sea Fleet in the Battle of Mariupol reduces the likelihood of an amphibious landing near Odesa, Russian naval shelling of Odesa in recent days notwithstanding.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/DefenceIntelligenceofUkraine/posts/276849944626433

[2] NATO Estimates Steep Russian Losses in Ukraine as Biden Heads to Europe - WSJ

[3] Senior Defense Official Holds a Background Briefing > U.S. Department of Defense > Transcript

[4] https://www.facebook.com/bucharada.gov.ua/posts/1834800930059636

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/23/world/ukraine-russia-war/kyiv-ma...

[6] https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-23-22/... https://t dot me/stranaua/32439

[7] https://t dot me/stranaua/32219

[8] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/278882447758174.

[9] https://t dot me/chernigivskaODA/602

[10] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/279066061073146; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1506400007800373254; https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1506325529678520328; https://www.facebook.com/watch/?av=364162252256693; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/278882447758174

[11] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/278882447758174; https://t dot me/chernigivskaODA/602

[12] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/278882447758174; https://twitter.com/The_Lookout_N/status/1506281912624631825; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1506404938825584645; https://t.me/milinfolive/79342; https://twitter.com/aletweetsnews/status/1505282455531577344; https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1506376700157992972

[13] https://twitter.com/ELINTNews/status/1506278639977086989; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1506354159532052498; https://t.me/oko_x/8857; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/278882447758174; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/278733361106416; https://www.facebook.com/sergey.gaidai.loga; https://twitter.com/chupakabra_75/status/1506481913405530113; https://twitter.com/hu_svetlodarsk/status/1506472207442141188; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1506514381873549317; https://twitter.com/Jose_Pinoche/status/1506310937115910148.

[14] https://twitter.com/DanLamothe/status/1506300830760280065; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1506426222959550469; https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1506309789915045889 ; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1506311885070774274; https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/1561; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1506293554951372803; https://t.me/izvestia/82685

[15] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/278882447758174; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/279066061073146

[16] https://www.facebook.com/DefenceIntelligenceofUkraine/posts/276571667987594

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-23

The summary assessment links the report in PDF at https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Operations%20Assessments%20March%2023.pd f

dneal

March 24th, 2022, 07:07 PM

Interesting, and unexpected. WSJ LINK (https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-strikes-russian-navy-in-berdyansk-as-war-enters-second-month-11648119468)

Ukraine Strikes Russian Navy as War Enters Second Month
The attack on a logistics hub for Russian forces came as Kyiv has tried to capitalize on Moscow’s struggle to supply its forces in Ukraine

Ukraine said it struck the Russian-occupied port in the Azov Sea city of Berdyansk on Thursday, igniting a large fire and hitting a Russian warship at the site, which has become a major logistics hub for Moscow’s invasion forces.

Footage from the area showed smoke billowing from a ship and secondary explosions from detonating ammunition. Footage also showed two smaller Russian ships fleeing the port after the explosions, one of the ships on fire.

The attack in Berdyansk—50 miles west of the besieged port of Mariupol and nearly 100 miles from the main front line in southern Ukraine—is a sign Kyiv has retained significant military capabilities in its fight against larger Russian forces that are struggling to maintain supply lines in the country.

also, from Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/exclusive-us-assesses-up-60-failure-rate-some-russian-missiles-officials-say-2022-03-24/)

U.S. assesses up to 60% failure rate for some Russian missiles, officials say

WASHINGTON, March 24 (Reuters) - The United States assesses that Russia is suffering failure rates as high as 60% for some of the precision-guided missiles it is using to attack Ukraine, three U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence told Reuters.

The disclosure could help explain why Russia has failed to achieve what most could consider basic objectives since its invasion a month ago, such as neutralizing Ukraine's air force, despite the apparent strength of its military against Ukraine's much smaller armed forces.

The failures don't surprise me. The failure rate does. I would have expected 10-20%.

Chip

March 24th, 2022, 10:20 PM

A simple proposition:

If the Russian missiles are indeed precision-guided, then the targeting of hospitals, theaters, malls, maternity hospitals, schools, etc. is a vicious war crime on a huge scale.

If they aren't very precise, launching blind strikes is still a vicious war crime on a huge scale.

dneal

March 24th, 2022, 10:42 PM

They are the same country that produced the Lada…

welch

March 25th, 2022, 08:13 AM

They are the same country that produced the Lada…

Russia is the same country that imports computer technology. It lives on exports of raw materials. Twenty years ago, economists predicted that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) would make the giant leap into advanced industrial societies, joining the US, Europe, Japan, and a few others. China made it, but Russia went nowhere. And now there are reports that members of the technological middle class are leaving Russia as fast as they can for as long as the invasion lasts...or maybe permanently.

Want to help the U.S. economy, promote democratic values abroad and punish Russia in one fell swoop?

One option: Drain Russia’s brains.

The United States, coordinating with Western allies, has deployed many economic weapons against Russia. We’ve weakened its financial system. We’ve stopped buying Russian oil, caviar, vodka. We’ve vowed to find and seize Russian oligarchs’ yachts and apartments. But we haven’t, to date, gone after the country’s most precious resource: its people.

I don’t mean attacking the Russian people. I mean welcoming them here, particularly if they have significant economic and national security value to Russia.

We should start by expediting the most compelling humanitarian cases in the region. In Russia, these include dissidents and journalists risking their necks to challenge Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war. But we should also actively court those who might be less political: the technical, creative, high-skilled workers upon whom Russia’s economic (and military) fortunes depend.

Already, Russian talent is rushing for the exits, in what might represent the seventh great wave of Russian emigration over the past century.

An estimated 50,000 to 70,000 IT specialists alone have recently left, according to a Russian technology trade group, which predicts another 100,000 might leave by the end of April. Others in the outbound stampede include entrepreneurs, researchers and artists. The pace of this brain drain is especially impressive given how difficult sanctions have made it to buy plane tickets or otherwise conduct transactions across borders, as well as how expensive travel has become. The Russian government hasn’t yet blocked emigration, but it is trying to slow the flow by interrogating those who leave or offering enticements to tech workers who stay.

Russians are fleeing for multiple reasons. Some object to their government’s actions. Many are likely motivated by the threats to their livelihoods and freedoms, resulting from both Western sanctions and Putin’s domestic crackdown. Day-to-day work has become more challenging, foreign-based tech firms have pulled out of the country, and basic websites have been blocked. Getting paid has also become difficult, thanks to sanctions affecting the financial system.

If a worker’s compensation is tied to an employer’s (tanking) stock price, even worse.

“Lots of people are not ideological; they just want an opportunity for a good life,” says Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on immigration and trade. “They see that as extremely difficult to do in Russia right now.”

Russian self-exiles are mostly flooding into nearby countries such as Turkey, Armenia and Georgia, but we could smooth their pathway to the United States. Congress already has one blueprint: In early February, the House passed the America Competes Act, which would, among other things, increase immigration of entrepreneurs and PhD scientists from around the world (not just Russia). Alternatively, Congress could tailor a measure toward Russian STEM talent, or the Biden administration could make Russians more broadly eligible for refugee status. (We did something similar for people fleeing the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.)

The Biden administration announced Thursday it will welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainians, which is a good start. Scaling up immigration and refugee admissions is both the right thing to do and in our own interests. Refugees and other emigres have a long history of supercharging U.S. innovation, winning Nobel Prizes and contributing to our national security. These include Soviet defectors during the Cold War and a larger-scale exodus of mathematicians and scientists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We would benefit from a comparable influx of talent today.

But the prospect of doing this while imminently draining Russia’s talent pool should make the policy even more attractive.

The many Russians contemplating whether to leave or wait out the conflict, or those who have fled to neighboring countries, might revise their plans if they know there are more opportunities to connect with U.S. employers and universities.

We should likewise be aggressively recruiting Russian international students to U.S. universities, contrary to the knee-jerk suggestions of some Democratic congressmen to expel the roughly 5,000 Russian exchange students here. (Among those who would be booted under such a policy: Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s daughter, a Stanford University student.)

We want these students not only because some of them might stick around after graduation and contribute to the U.S. economy, but also because their studies here expose them to liberal democratic values. If they or other skilled Russian immigrant workers return home one day, they can be emissaries for American goodwill. Educating the world’s talent is a useful diplomatic tool (as China has learned).

No doubt the usual anti-immigrant forces will claim that admitting more Russians would mean inviting spies into our midst. There is already, however, an intricate security screening process for refugees, skilled workers and other visa applicants; we could always add more layers of vetting, too.

Our goal should be to punish Putin while minimizing harm to American consumers and innocent Russians. A convenient way to do that: Offer more Russians a better life, here.

Chip

March 25th, 2022, 03:07 PM

The Guardian reports that a Russian brigade commander was run over by a tank driven by his troops.

Evidently, they had suffered around 50% casualties and were rather disgruntled.

TSherbs

March 25th, 2022, 05:54 PM

The Guardian reports that a Russian brigade commander was run over by a tank driven by his troops.

Evidently, they had suffered around 50% casualties and were rather disgruntled.
Intentional? Yikes!

welch

March 25th, 2022, 08:54 PM

The Guardian reports that a Russian brigade commander was run over by a tank driven by his troops.

Evidently, they had suffered around 50% casualties and were rather disgruntled.
Intentional? Yikes!

Guardian cautions that it does not have reliable sources and details. However, Ukraine says it has killed another Russian general.

Today's assessment from ISW warns against headlines in the Times and the Post that say Russians have shifted focus to Luhansk and Donetsk. Yes, a Russian army spokesman says that the invasion has accomplished stage one goals and is now moving to "liberate" the breakaway regions, but this was all for a Russian audience. Russians, ISW says, remain dug in near Kyiv and Kharkiv, and might be trying to reassemble units from broken remains of units hurt earlier. Russian army wants Russian people to believe it never wanted Kyiv.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-25

Scrawler

March 26th, 2022, 05:17 AM

Some of my fathers family lives in Poland 40 miles west of Ukraine. They are experiencing refuges and empty store shelves.

I have 9 cousins hiding out at a farm near Lviv and one in Truskavets. I am able to communicate with Truskavets but not the farm. The only thing that has disgusted me more than this invasion was the stories my mother and father told me about how the Russians treated them. Putin is not getting his Russian Empire.

Scrawler

March 26th, 2022, 05:20 AM

They are the same country that produced the Lada…

If you ever are interested in Russian hot rodding and seeing what they can do with a Lada, take a look at Garage 54 on YouTube.

dneal

March 26th, 2022, 05:41 AM

From Reuters.

If correct, it looks like Putin will “settle” for the land bridge and Crimea - consolidating his gains there.

EUROPE NEWS
MARCH 26, 2022 / 03:16 AM
As Ukraine forces counter near Kyiv, Russia scales back goals
MARIUPOL/LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy pushed for further talks with Russia as Moscow signalled it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists in the east after attacks elsewhere stalled.
In an announcement on Friday appearing to indicate more limited goals, the Russian Defence Ministry said a first phase of its operation was mostly complete and it would now focus on the Donbas region bordering Russia, which has pro-Moscow separatist enclaves.
“The combat potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has been considerably reduced, which ... makes it possible to focus our core efforts on achieving the main goal, the liberation of Donbas,” said Sergei Rudskoi, head of the Russian General Staff’s Main Operational Directorate.
Breakaway Russian-backed forces have been fighting Ukrainian forces in Donbas and the adjoining Luhansk region since 2014. They declared independence with Moscow’s blessing - but not recognised by the West - soon before the Feb. 24 invasion.
Reframing Russia’s goals may make it easier for President Vladimir Putin to claim a face-saving victory, military analysts said.
Moscow had said the goals for what it calls its “special operation” include demilitarising and “denazifying” its neighbour. Western officials say the invasion is unjustified and illegal, aimed at toppling Zelenskiy’s pro-NATO government.
Weeks of on-and-off peace talks have failed to make significant progress. In a video address late Friday, Zelenskiy said his troops’ resistance had dealt Russia “powerful blows”.
“Our defenders are leading the Russian leadership to a simple and logical idea: we must talk, talk meaningfully, urgently and fairly,” Zelenskiy said.
In what officials billed as a major address in Poland U.S. President Joe Biden on Saturday “will deliver remarks on the united efforts of the free world to support the people of Ukraine, hold Russia accountable for its brutal war, and defend a future that is rooted in democratic principles,” the White House said in a statement.
The United Nations has confirmed 1,081 civilian deaths and 1,707 injuries in Ukraine since the invasion but says the real toll is likely higher.
Some 136 children have been killed so far been during the invasion, Ukraine’s prosecutor general office said on Saturday.
Russia’s defence ministry said 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed and 3,825 wounded, the Interfax news agency reported. Ukraine says 15,000 Russian soldiers have died. Reuters could not independently verify the claims.
LAID WASTE
Despite the carnage, Russian troops have failed to capture and hold any major city in the month since invading Ukraine. Instead, they have bombarded cities, laid waste to urban areas and driven a quarter of Ukraine’s 44 million people from their homes.
More than 3.7 million of them have fled abroad, half to neighbouring Poland in the west, where Biden on Friday met soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division bolstering the NATO alliance’s eastern flank.
“Hundreds of thousands of people are being cut off from help by Russian forces and are besieged in places like Mariupol,” Biden said. “It’s like something out of a science fiction movie.”
Footage from the southeastern port, home to 400,000 before the war, showed destroyed buildings, burnt out vehicles and shell-shocked survivors venturing out for water and provisions. Residents have buried victims in makeshift graves as the ground thaws.
Local officials, citing witness accounts, said they estimated 300 people were killed in the bombing of a theatre in Mariupol on March 16.
The city council had not previously provided a toll and made clear it was not possible to determine an exact figure after the incident. Russia has denied bombing the theatre or targeting civilians.
COUNTERATTACKS AROUND KYIV
Battle lines near Kyiv have been frozen for weeks with two main Russian armoured columns stuck northwest and east of the capital. A British intelligence report described a Ukrainian counteroffensive that had pushed Russians back in the east.
“Ukrainian counterattacks, and Russian forces falling back on overextended supply lines, have allowed Ukraine to reoccupy towns and defensive positions up to 35 km (22 miles) east of Kyiv,” the report said.
Volodymyr Borysenko, mayor of Boryspol, an eastern suburb where Kyiv’s main airport is located, said 20,000 civilians had evacuated the area, answering a call to clear out so Ukrainian troops could counterattack.
On the other main front outside Kyiv, to the capital’s northwest, Ukrainian forces have been trying to encircle Russian troops in the suburbs of Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel, reduced to ruins by heavy fighting.
The cities of Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy north and east of Kyiv have also endured devastating bombardment. Chernihiv was effectively surrounded by Russian forces, its governor said.
Britain said it would fund 2 million pounds ($2.6 million) worth of food supplies for areas encircled by Russian forces, following a request from the Ukrainian government.
Thousands of miles from Ukraine, Russia was conducting military drills on islands claimed by Tokyo, Japanese media said on Saturday, days after Moscow halted peace talks with Japan because of its sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.