It may be a sign of my inability to escape map thinking. But despite accelerating progress on the battlefield and more and more Ukraine bucking under relentless Russian pressure, Russia may not be as close to a resolution as its military overmatch suggests. The question is how Russia achieves its Special Military Operation goals, which all Russian officials ritually maintain will be achieved in full. The one that seems most problematic is denazification, as we will discuss.
Because the kinetic war is the most visible and resource-consuming aspect of this conflict, commentators have tended to focus on that as what will determine when the war is over. We have been trying to look at this in an analogy to good old fashioned chemistry: what might be rate determining steps or processes? In chemistry, the rate determining step is the slowest and winds up determining the rate of the overall reaction.
Of course, real life with human agency is a lot messier than chem labs. Here, political considerations that are (for obvious reasons) not fully transparent are having a big impact on the way this war is being conducted and therefore its speed of resolution. So while it is impossible to work out exactly what processes where might be extending the timetable for this war, thinking this way may lead to considering the situation in a more integrated manner and identifying key leverage points and impediments.
The pace and manner in which Russia subdues Ukraine is not purely military. Russia follows Clausewitzian thinking and Clausewitz stresses that war is an extension of politics.
For instance, Russia has held back on taking steps the US routinely inflicts on its enemies early in battle, such as taking out its comms (internet, phone, broadcast) and electrical supply. That appears to be the result, at the outset, of Russia seeing the war as being conducted against a fraternal people, as Putin is wont to point out; indeed, many Russians have relatives in Ukraine. So Russia had the contradictory aims of wanting to bring Ukraine to heel yet at relatively limited human costs to both sides. That contradiction seems less nutty when you realize the SMO was intended, not to take territory or achieve regime change, but simply to force Ukraine to get real and enter into a serious pact to end Ukraine’s war on the Donbass and scuttle its plans to enter NATO. And in fact, that plan was on track until Boris Johnson and other Western officials told Zelensky to abandon the talks, that the West would back them fully in beating back the Russian invasion.
Russia was slow to adapt militarily to the failure of Plan A. It is an open question as to whether they have yet fully grasped the political implications of the West, having invested way too much in credibility and an awful lot in treasure and materiel, rejecting possible solutions that would recognize Russian concerns with prejudice.1
In other words, Russia did come up with a military plan B and is executing on it. But even though Russia also recognizes that the US and NATO remain implacably hostile and that they are highly likely to use any negotiations once again merely as a ruse to try to shore up their positions, Russia still does not seem to be engaging with the resulting big issue we have kept hammering on: what does it do about Western Ukraine?
To achieve its goal of improving domestic security, as we sketch out below, it seems the least bad option is to occupy most of Western Ukraine, which is not a trivial task
In particular, the original denazification goal depended on having a cooperative government in Kiev implement it. The plan likely would have included at a minimum getting rid of Bandera statues, re-writing textbooks to end demonization of Russians (yes, that’s in them post 2014) and return to teaching that shows respect for Russian culture, ending discriminatory practices towards ethnic Russians and Russian speakers, barring neo-Nazi parties and publications, and restoring the rights of the Ukraine Orthodox Church and its members, and returning land and property seized. Russia will have to implement these steps itself or install a puppet regime to take that on. But a project that puts a new government at odds with a big swathe of its population that is dominant in a big part of the country reduces further any hollow claims to legitimacy.
Back to the evolution of the military Plan B. Recall that Russia did not decide it needed to engage in a more aggressive campaign until pulled back in Kherson and Kharkiv rather than lose many good soldiers. That retreat alarmed residents of the Donbass, since it raised the specter that Russia could abandon them too, US-style, exposing them to Ukraine reprisals. So Russia launched its partial mobilization, ramped up arms production, and constructed enormous fortified lines to protect the land bridge to Crimea. Ukraine similarly sought to intensify the conflict and land a decisive blow against the occupiers via its super duper failure of a summer counteroffensive.
Many sources, including some Western ones, are reporting an accelerating Russian advance on many points in the front line. Alexander Mercouris notes that Russian forces have advanced into Toretsk much faster than they have previously with any other fortified city so far. Ukraine surrenders, which once were unheard of, are now beginning to happen.
Even though Ukraine forces are running out of men and short of weapons, it may still be some time before the military can no longer hold the Russians back. Mark Sleboda contends the Ukraine forces are still fighting hard despite their losses, and that the war will thus go into 2025. Its neo-Nazi stiffeners assure they will hold out as long as possible. Before the bitter end, Zelensky may flee or be assassinated, with Banderite-led and military-dominated government taking over. A related scenario is moving the seat of government to Lvov, a solidly pro-neo-Nazi enclave.
At the moment, the Russian leadership appears willing to continue with its current plan of attrition until things on the Ukraine side break in some big way. But Russia is oddly moving slowly with its showstopper of taking out electric power entirely. Russia has been relentlessly destroying more and more components of electricity generation in addition to its destruction of transmission assets. Perhaps it does not want to be in “You broke it, you own it” mode, meaning not just the grid but the entire country. Some updates, first from TCH:
Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has attacked “DTEK Energy” facilities over 180 times. The most destructive shelling occurred in the spring and summer of 2024.
DTEK is not the sole but the biggest power company. Aside from the shut-down Zaporzhizhia Power Plant, Ukraine’s other nuclear facilities are operating. In the story, DTEK makes brave noises that perhaps it can make some repairs by the fall but pointedly warns about being unable to anticipate what happens in the winter. In keeping, the press has reported that in many cities, scheduled outages are so frequent as to make it hard to impossible to keep food refrigerated.
From the top of the July 28 report from Ukraine’s Energy Ministry:
As of today, it is planned that hourly outage schedules will be applied only during peak consumption hours – from 18:00 to 22:00. Restrictions will apply to the extent of one queue.
For information on changes in the schedules, please visit the official websites of the regional power distribution companies in your region.
There will be no blackouts for critical infrastructure companies and companies that import more than 80% of electricity for their needs in accordance with a Government decree.
A significant capacity deficit in the power system remains. As a result of massive hostile attacks on the energy sector, 9 GW of production capacity was lost. There is constant shelling, especially in the frontline and border areas. Substations and power transmission lines are often targeted. As a result of missile and drone strikes, there are restrictions on the transmission of available electricity.
Another fresh story describes how Ukraine is pressing its communications providers to develop plans to handle outages of 10 hours a day, up from the current level of 4 hours.
Now again, even here the “slower than possible” pace may have some design. By putting citizens (and business) in a very difficult but not totally untenable position in the summer, it gives them the opportunity to leave Ukraine (assuming that actually can be done; we have posted reports that Ukraine has sealed its borders hard to prevent desperately-needed workers from decamping). Fewer civilians reduces the cost and complexity of any occupation and rebuilding. It does not take a lot in the way of powers of perception to see that the mere arrival of winter, with its much greater energy/grid demands, will on its own force longer daily outages and probably system breakdown.
A noisy minority of Russia society argues should be prosecuting the war more aggressively. The arguments against that are operational effectiveness (going faster results in more loss of life and trained combat personnel cannot be replaced quickly) and not causing undue harm to civilians.
But perhaps another reason for the continued cautious pace is the lack of much indication that Russia is readying itself for an occupation. Perhaps Russian readers can correct me, but I have no sign from the Western commentators that this topic has gotten meaningful discussion among Russian pundits or officials. That does not mean the General Staff and top Russian officials are not looking hard into this matter, but you’d think they would need to prepare civil society at some point if this were a serious plan. For instance, in a recent press conference, Putin remarked, faux casually, that he didn’t see any need for further conscription2 but that might change if Russia decided it needed to take Kiev.
It is not only less costly in terms of manpower and materiel to keep grinding slowly; it also makes for an easier “liberation” process to chew up Ukraine bit by bit.
However, Russia looks set to exhaust this approach. At a bare minimum. Russia has committed itself to take all of the four oblasts that it officially integrated into Russia in September 2022. That means all of Kherson and Zaporzhizhia. The map below is dated; it’s as August 2022. Nevertheless, I have yet to hear of Russia making any meaningful incursions into Zaporzhizhia since then, so it would appear to be useful even as of now. The yellow section is the part Russia does not control:
If I were Putin, I would insist on securing all the now-Russian oblasts before making bolder undertakings. That means securing Zaprozhizhia city, which had a population of 750,000 before the war. Contrast that with Mariupol, which had about 450,000 residents then.
Zaporzhizhia, like Kherson City, straddles the Dnieper. Russia marching up to the Dnieper alone would focus Western minds, as in make it very hard for Western leaders to deny that the Ukraine defenses were crumbling.
And even in the event of Russia merely taking what it now deems to be part of Russia, we have the wee problem we have taken to regularly pointing out to readers, thanks to PlutoniumKun. Russia will need to control the entire Dnieper river basin if it liberates any sizeable cities on the Dnieper. A hostile power on the same system can wreak all sorts of havoc, from creating floods, as we saw with the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, to dumping raw sewage.
Now of course I am ignoring the possibility of a true military collapse happening in the not-too-distant future. Perhaps Russia has intel that indicates that that is probable. But in that event, it would seem to force the question of how to occupy and stabilize the country. The normal rule of thumb for combatting insurgencies is about 11 soldiers for every 1,000 residents. That would suggest 440,000 servicemembers, assuming 20 million in not-already-Russian-held Ukraine.
But Ukraine is very large country, and would seem to have many more infrastructure vulnerabilities than the above mentioned watershed problem (as in I wonder if the old normal assumes the classic guys in sandals with AK-47s in underdeveloped countries). So I suspect the typical assumptions are too low.
And an occupation would seem necessary given the hostility to all things Russian in many parts of Western Ukraine. An occupation would seem a necessary precondition to installing a puppet interim government (where Russia actually has a pretty good legal fig leaf3) before Russia figures out how to roust the (potentially many) Banderite sympathizers and win enough hearts and minds via competent restoration of services. But this is hard and costly even if Russia executes extremely well.
And that’s before getting to the fact that Ukraine was and is fabulously corrupt. Even if Russia were to succeed in making it a Belarus-level friendly, it will still have to exercise a lot of hard and soft control for quite some time. How does it get that intimately involved and not have some of that Ukraine corruption prove infectious or necessary? For instance, Russia is going to have to rely on many current Ukraine officials and other personnel to administer the place.
John Helmer’s solution, of a great big de-electrified DMZ in Western Ukraine seems a lot simpler, even if it could be depicted as ethnic cleansing.
In other words, Russia has some very thorny problems to solve and there’s a weird lack of much visible consideration of them. Again, the risk remains that Russia will win the war and lose the peace.
____
1 Please do not tell me of various press and pundit mentions of negotiations or negotiation feelers. Well-intentioned moves by Viktor Orban, merely to try to open up communications, have generated a vicious response from the EU. The last NATO summit earlier this month featured all members signing a declaration that Ukraine was on an an irreversible path to membership. Deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, commented:
The conclusion is obvious. We have to do everything to make sure that the “irreversible path of Ukraine” towards NATO ends with either the disappearance of Ukraine, or the disappearance of NATO. Better, both.
Zelensky has been giving lip service to peace talks of late, while not having indicated any retreat from his earlier peace plan, which included Russia going back to Ukraine’s 1991 borders and paying reparations. And in any event, neo-Nazis have threatened him if he does negotiate.
2 Keep in in mind enlistments are still at a healthy pace.
3 The Maidan coup violated the then-current constitution. Former prime minister Yanukovich’s opponents did not secure enough votes in the Rada to remove him. They just did it and changed the Constitution too, again violating the required procedures. So Russia could reinstall Yanukovich as the last legally-elected prime minister. Zelensky continuing to remain in office after his term expired makes that easier.
183 comments
Comments are closed.
I have a feeling azov is stronger than ever in west Ukraine and they are one pushing people to the front line while they stay back.This maybe explain why Zelensky haven’t push national mobilization they get choose who go to the front line. I dont think this war will end if Putin is not ready surround kiev
Feelings are like opinions…they rarely meet reality
With Azov specifically and strictly speaking it’s a bit more complicated than that.
You might have seen that Irina Faryon was assassinated last week on the street in the middle of Lvov. That was done by Azov.
Why?
Because there is in fact real beef between Azov and Galicians.
The reason is that Azov comes from Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk, i.e. Russian east Ukraine. And the ideology, while fascist and Nazi, is in fact not quite the same as that of the Galician Nazis.
Meanwhile the Galician Nazis consider everybody who speaks Russian a literal mongoloid mongrel subhuman.
Currently the alliance is holding because there is a common enemy, but fundamentally that is an irreconcilable contradiction.
Irina Faryon made the big mistake of openly talking multiple times how anyone who speaks Russian is not a real Ukraine, is “biological waste”, etc., including going as far as calling out Azov for speaking Russian between themselves (which most of them indeed do). Big, big, big mistake.
Her stories about how she instructed her grandson to beat up on all kids in the kindergarten who had Russian names or spoke Russian can be forgiven. But going after Azov crossed the final line.
It’s a bit like what would have happened if imperial Japan and Nazi Germany had won WWII. At some point they meet somewhere in Central Asia, Then what? Did the German Nazis consider the Japanese equal? Of course not. So one can easily see where that one would have gone. Similar situation here.
Keep this in mind.
Actually, Philip Dick wrote a novel depicting an alternate history in which the Axis won, but the Japanese and Nazis meet in the middle of America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle
Made into a TV series on Amazon.
I thought that the TV adaptation was rather good, albeit with some notable differences from the book and a highly suspicious happy ending. Worth a watch though.
It is my belief that Russia is moving deliberately slowly to preserve infrastructure, and the entire process is just incredibly convenient for them, because NATO has set up a conveyor belt to deliver NATO personnel (let’s face reality here) and materiel directly to the Russians to destroy. Why move forward when you can let your enemy do much of the work for you?
As to western Ukraine-
I also firmly believe that the Nazis will eventually turn on the west. They are people with a fundamental anger management problem, and are not generally rational, but they do believe in convenience, so they will take their anger out on what they perceive is the weakest target to have wronged them. As to the how to set up a buffer zone, it has occurred to me that, given that Russia really does not care about territory, and that Poland, who is the biggest problem for them, most definitely has territorial ambitions, it is quite possible a deal can be struck. Poland wants power and prosperity, and is achieving this via the war, but I suspect the Poles are smart enough to understand that once the war concludes, they will have tapped Europe and America dry. There will be people in Poland smart enough to understand that switching sides will be a very profitable action. They get additional territory, economic ties with the Eurasian block, an exit from a dying Europe, and from Russia’s perspective, Poland effectively becomes the buffer. The same deal can be made with Hungary (ready to take such a deal right now, from the way it looks), and Romania. Belarus will probably see it’s ethnic lands returned as well, albeit with far fewer strings attached. All of these actions would drastically reduce the area Russia would have to police. Plus, I also suspect there will be some very angry Ukrainians, that have heretofore kept very quiet under the current regime, that will happily assume positions of power in any new government, whether that government is a puppet regime or not.
In short, I suspect that although Russia has a problem that it must work out, this problem is not as intractable as many assume.
They were never that many. There was this clip from maybe 2019 with an Azov type bousting how the violence of up to 10% turned the Maidan around and solidified the coup.
Now many have died and even more will die among them.
We will never surrender the Carpathian Forest. Putin is welcome to send the remains of his army there to perish.
Brave talk for someone in California. I get multiple (not all that different but different enough) specific locations, which is not what you usually see with using a VPN.
Perhaps you are one of those Americans who wants Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian.
Sorry I tripped over the Royal “WE” tripwire … ego and ideology ex ante is what started this debacle decades in the making and prey tell who is really paying for it … the unwashed …
No to mention Russia has every advantage right now, booming economy requiring increased IR, Capital is coming home for investment, higher sense of social unity against NATO et al, better weapons systems with better R/D and Mfg, etc.
All of this in the face that it is holding back just in case the NATO posse loses the plot or it could really put on a show of force. That tells you two things, they have a long term view, its progressive and reacts to NATO machinations and not blind thunkit[tm]. Would rather an outcome that is not punitive to the West yet not fall into all the old traps.
Buy a ticket and get your Carpathian Forest on ….
(via Simplicius- July 28)
⚡️🇺🇦”Arestovich recorded a video in which he announced the complete collapse of the Ukrainian energy system for 2-3 Russian missile strikes. Now Ukraine still has a nuclear power plant and an energy bridge with Europe. But Russia can destroy all this with two or three missile strikes, literally throwing the whole country back to the 17th century in a couple of days.
Only the village will survive, the lighting will be from splinters. Winter will drive hundreds of thousands of people out of the cities and the whole country will be engaged in survival, not war. Russia, according to him, simply feels sorry for ordinary farmers.”
https://x.com/simpatico771/status/1817434742234423744
Onw question that I’ve had looking at maps is how much long term alliance considerations will shape Russian war goals: are they planning on linking Budapest, Belgrade, and Bratislava to Eurasia? Linling them would require control over all of Western Ukraine, more or less. Futher, how practical would a high speed/high capacity rail going through the Dukla Pass (other suitable routes tbrough the Carpathians?) be, in afdktion to the obviois cost of bringing all of Ukraine under control?
I’ve been thinking same.
Russia has been put (or put itself) in a situation where the next couple hundred years of history will be built on the sacrifice made now. To that end, if Russia and China are serious about a Eurasian future, then Odessa, Vinntsya, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frakivsk and Zakapattia are must-have Obasts as connecting Serbia, Slovakia, Austria, Italy and Hungry to Russia & China is a key requirement for success.
I agree in spirit, but the next couple of hundred years is a stretch.
The collapse of the environment will overtake any petty blood feuds currently underway.
I’d say this may be an issue for 100 years, tops.
I’ll take the under. I’ve got global collapse via hostile climate by 2030.
That is exponential acceleration. A not excessive speed, but still due to positive feedback loops would take us maybe to 2070. Really hot, droughts and atmospheric rivers, big weather turmoils. And Hansen’s team is predicting a faster sea level rise than IPCC…
It’s not so much acceleration as revealed momentum.
It isn’t Newtonian physics, but chemical processes. The momentum would be reversed if burning would stop and other negative feedback loops were reinforced.
We only move forward through this devil’s labyrinth. The burning stops when the fuel’s expired.
Reading this link immediately below, it looks like decreasing aerosols will up the temp. That’s where Gates gets his chemical cloud blocker idea?
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2024/MayEmail.2024.05.16.pdf
And this from Alfred W. McCoy…
McCoy is in his heart an American imperialist. If one reads his books carefully you will find not objection to the concept of the Empire, but dissatisfaction with it not being liberal enough.
American loyalists and “liberal order” goofballs have coped with China’s rise with a series of “will save us” theories. First, the assumption was that the Chinese could not think or innovate, then that the housing bubble will get them, then that “it will grow older before it grows wealthy, and now, hilariously, that “climate change” will get the Chinese and save global liberalism. He’s a messianic oddball.
Without their exports, I think his point was the cascade of events precipitated by climate change will get us. Because, if you’ve got to rig up new ports [the old ones too far underwater], what’s in it for China? By then they’ll have their own place to keep their profits. They might want to continue importing some of our fracked oil/gas; but then Venezuela has lots of oil. I don’t blame China if this happens, since they followed our capitalist model…and McCoy’s point doesn’t seem to me to be that it’s China’s big loss. And I can’t believe McCoy’s trying to deny what can happen with examples like Formosa Plastics. It’s obvious. Formosa Plastics doesn’t lose; we lose.
I can’t see how anybody’s reason would say China will be the big losers. If Russia could somehow tap the permafrost’s methane…and workers survive the Siberian fires…that’s another source China would have.
They must occupy 100% of Ukraine regardless of the consideration of linking with Hungary and Serbia, though they do have to achieve that objective too.
They absolutely must, there is no other option.
Leaving any independent Ukraine means drones and missiles with ever increasing range and potency flying into Russia forever. Already what Ukraine has in terms of range means that they can be launching these from Uzhgorod and they can still reach Moscow. It only gets worse from here.
So any realistic buffer zone means a total end of Ukrainian statehood.
Then there is the even more important consideration that there are two NPPs in western Ukraine, which means an independent Ukraine, even if reduced to just core Banderistan, would also be able to acquire nukes quite easily.
Again, there is no other option left.
The problem is the current Kremlin is very clearly not preparing for carrying out that vital task. Why that is a very long discussion on its own, but suffice to say that as usual domestic policy drives foreign policy, and the interests of elites, who are in control of decision making, are not the same as the interests of the “state”.
Not necessarily. They must control the western borders and the skies, to try preventing any resuplying from the west. As well as monitoring production facilities.
Remember that there are dozens of political parties banned by Zelensky that could be used politically and also a lot of POWs that could be employed to replaced a lot of the current security forces in Ukraine.
Helmer has taken up on the Lavrov comments some time back that said the longer the range of the Western missiles used, the further Russia would have to go into Ukraine to secure Russian territory.
Since Russia legally deems Kherson and Zaprozhizhia (and of course the Donbass) as part of Russia, once Russia has secured all of them, presumably the missile cordon line goes from their furthest west points.
The longest range ATACMS is 300 KM (190 miles). The German Taurus has a range of 500 KM and is the longest-range missile (tracked delivery system) made by NATO members. Helmer, who appears to have sources in the General Staff, has taken Lavrov pretty literally and draws maps with a 300 KM DMZ. Perhaps instead it would be 500 KM.
The point is Russia can do this at low cost, as he and we have pointed out, by creating a de-electrified zone. See the Unorganized Territory of Maine. The result is a very low population density area, inhabited by hardy survivalists, which the locals call Men with Beards.
Let’s make Ukraine Borderlands again!
Let’s put the back in Ukraine again? :P
Yes, this is important. Russia can flip the switch at anytime. And, as major exporters of electrical power to Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia can too now….
There was also discussion in Russian Twitter that:
– pace of Russian advance has increased lately. It was thirty years to Kiev last month but only two years at this months’ pace. Comment by pro-UA Julian Roepke.
– Russia has called for readiness of military hospitals in Moscow and European oblasts
– there is discussion (Medvedev?) about increasing enlistment service to two years for “new Russians” (Donbass?).
It is quite likely we won’t see big arrow tactics this year but we may see intensification of entire front line, seizing strategic rail heads and high ground and launching large pinning attacks from all directions to destabilise UA disposition of troops etc.
One eventual big arrow option might be to encircle Kharkov from north and south and then turn the lights out and filter the evacuees, into Russia or into the Ukraine / prison, but it could be at a high price for Russia. Everything else involves river crossings (taking or surrounding Kiev, Kherson, Odessa, Zaporozhia, Dnipropetrovsk). However, if Russia wanted to force partition, these might be necessary to swing for, to establish a Russian sector on the right bank of Dniepr, instead of the current strategy of attrition.
And as the Ukraine has just shut down some of the Russian oil going to Slovakia and Hungary, they have even more incentive to cut off electricity supplies to the Ukraine.
Whether or not the war that is currently being waged in Ukraine ever ends seems to depend a lot on the outcome of this year’s US presidential election, does it not? If Harris, then the GAE will fight on to the bitter end, or if Trump, then some kind of negotiation. And if Harris, then a Russian conquest of Ukraine, whatever that looks like, wouldn’t be the end of anything. It’s not as if the GAE, in that instance, would say, oh well tough break, we’ll get em next time. Point being, the fate of Ukraine is not the end game of the war, which will go on with or without Ukraine, barring a negotiated peace.
Trump has made clear that his idea is to offer Russia about half of what they have asked for, so Trump will NOT end any war – in fact, if negotiations on his basis are turned down by Russia, all Hell is promised. Plus we have further war with China. unless Trump has changed his mind about them (don’t think so). The American dream of Russian collapse will leave BRICS and any sympathetic nations up a proverbial creek, will guarantee Israeli dominance in the Middle East, and allow the Neo-cons a stunning command of this nation for some time. The result is I don’t think they will give up on anything currently in progress.
Doubtful it would matter much even if Trump wins: there are plenty of influential neocons in GOP and they’ll have a lot of influence. I don’t see Trump, even if he were willing, being able to negotiate earnestly. About the best I’m hoping out of Trump is that he’d have some ideas for an exit should thing reach an irretrievable point, rather than betting everything on winning everything. But we have to get near that point before things unfold.
Scott Ritter and Alexander Mercouris both said today the Russians don’t expect any change in US policy under Trump.
To use your metaphor, How do you cut a reaction in half? DMZs don’t really work. The Berlin Wall folded because imo the USSR was running on fumes financially. The “iron curtain” was mostly propaganda to keep ,imo, western finance separate. But I’d submit we can’t keep cutting our systems off from each other. BRICS seems to be good evidence that cooperation has a life of its own. And since China has moved into Western Asia, now building a port for Georgia on the Black Sea, it is taking an active interest in Ukraine. There was a recent blurb that China was angry with Ukrainian negotiators because of their disingenuousness. Ha. Irresistible force meets immovable object. Does China realize Ukraine has no actual sovereignty and has sold out completely to Boris the Johnson and Genocide Joe? Even so, my guess is that China wins this one mostly because Ukraine is so completely devastated it will require resources. The size of China’s.
Is there a reason you trust Scott/ Alexander? I listen to them too but Scott has not exactly been correct on Russia….
Ritter has a bias of being too gung ho for anti-US overreach actors. His highly visible bad call was early in the war, and there were Western military sources making the same bad call. He regularly provides unique details about operation in Ukraine and the Gaza conflict.
Given the tendency of the US establishment to accuse Trump of being pro-Putin, it is possible that the Russians are, in their public statements, deliberately downplaying the possibility of a resolution in the war following a change of government in Washington.
While I don’t like to say anything about the operational progress of the war, if we assume that the battle is going as well for the Russians as stated here, then the pending US election might be a reason why the Russians are not more vigorously pressing their apparent advantage. A rapid military collapse of Ukraine would put the European war into the forefront of the US election campaign, and give urgency to the hawks across the West.
In any case, if Donald Trump loses the election, then the Ukraine War will escalate. Harris will escalate because the Western establishment is deeply committed to the maintenance of US hegemony–the Western globalists see themselves as fighting a war for their whole idea of what the world should be. Therefore, for example, Aurelian’s critique of NATO’s current ability to intervene won’t apply. The commitment level is such that NATO will intervene whether it’s rational for them to do so, or not. Like Britain in 1915, a “Shell Crisis” won’t change their minds about whether to fight.
Donald Trump has never committed himself to Ukrainian membership in NATO. Since that’s the main power-political cause of the war, it is reasonable to say that Trump’s return to the presidency would offer the best chance for a return to peace in Europe.
> or if Trump, then some kind of negotiation.
If I am accurately remembering and understanding what I have heard, RF insists on negotiations regarding security architecture of the entire Eurasian continent. Would US Senate ratify a treaty that tied its hands with respect to belligerence toward China? DJT has repudiated treaty obligations (JCPOA, INF treaty) of his predecessors; can his undertakings be relied on?
Perhaps capitulation of one side or the other is the only stable outcome.
—
Reference to the “forever war” global context of the novel 1984 is not uncommon in NC comments. It really does feel like that is where we are headed, if not already arrived at.
How The Defense Industry Became A Defining Feature Of The U.S. Economy
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/07/27/ukrainian-drones-may-have-flown-a-record-1100-miles-to-target-russian-bombers-at-their-northern-base/
“Our” economy cannot afford peace.
“Our democracy…” yeah, fill-in the rest.
And also can’t currently, in terms of effective hardware, provide for war either, it seems.
Need to change swords into plowshares. Let them have their money — just put them to work doing something useful. Win-win
It looks that the MIC is reliant of imports from China. So, if things were to continue, those imports would likely cease.
The West is hobbled from a human capital perspective and will lack the endurance – the systems and people will get attrited at a faster pace.
While global warming will hit us all…
A hotter Australia for instance will make Australian rethink their financial commitments to AUKUS…
Trump likes to talk big but I don’t see him finding his way to get the blob, the media, nearly all of Europe and NATO to do a 180, which is what it would take to satisfy RF. I don’t think he cares enough to make that his hill to die on.
Trump signed off on House Speaker Johnson’s agreeing to release the billions that some Republicans were holding up for Ukraine. With notably few exceptions – tax cuts for the wealthy, Supreme Court nominations, TPP – his only consistency over the course of his entire career has been reneging on deals or promises. It’s folly to think he’s do otherwise regarding Ukraine and Russia, or that he’d consider (let alone be allowed) to negotiate on Putin’s stated terms.
It unfortunately appears that in the Kremlin they are once again deluding themselves that it matters who is in the White House and that they can make a deal. This is the only explanation I can see for the absence of any real serious effort to finish off Ukraine once and forever.
In the Kremlin they seem to think that once Trump is in power, they will make a deal, and they will avoid having to mobilize seriously for real war and for occupation of the whole of Ukraine. Which would hurt a lot of oligarch interests in a big way, plus it will threaten the whole foundation of the current still largely neoliberal oligarchic power structure in Russia.
Why anyone would think so after everything that has happened in the last 40-50 years remains a mystery. Maybe it’s because previous deals were made with Republicans and then it was Democrats that reneged on them (e.g. deal to end the Cold War with Reagan and Bush I, but then Clinton launches NATO expansion)? I don’t know, but the likes of Lindsey Graham are definitely no Democrats, plus the deal made in the 1980s was effectively signing surrender terms and one of the grandest betrayal elites of any state have ever committed against their own population in the history of humanity.
But again, that is precisely the issue now too — back then Russian elites betrayed their country so that they could get rich, and it is still largely the same elites in power. So what makes us think it is any different now? This time it is not about getting rich, they already are, but about not having to risk that wealth.
Absolutely nobody cares about ordinary Russian people. Putin certainly doesn’t the slightest bit. If he did, there would have been strikes first on the local Ukrainian oligarchy very early in the war once they started with the atrocities against civilians in the Donbas and along the border, and then eventually on the Western oligarchy too, once NATO personnel decided to have some fun too, with a clear message attached “stop slaughtering our people, or more of you will die”. That was and remains the only way to protect Russian civilians short of nuking Europe and physically destroying the weapon supply chain. But there hasn’t been a single such strike, not even against Ukrainian elites, which indicates clearly who is considered more valuable — the “dear partners” or your own people…
Sorry, that is NOT what Lavrov has been saying. Putin has been making polite noises but the government is under no illusion that a change in leadership in the US would make any difference.
“Absolutely nobody cares about ordinary Russian people. Putin certainly doesn’t the slightest bit.”
Maybe you should look at some statistics of what life was like for ordinary Russians during the Yeltsin years, compared to nowadays under Putin.
i have no idea where you get the idea Putin does not care, perhaps from western mainstream media ever determined to publish US UK and EU anti Russia propaganda?
It’s not MSM US UK and EU anti Russia propaganda, but Russian 6th column narrative (Strelkov, Prigozhin, etc), from blogs/subtacks/wherever.
It is comical when westerners pretend to be bigger Russians than Russians themselves. Instead of teaching Russians how to be proper Russian, they should focus on something more constructive, like giving swimming lessons to dolphins.
Good luck to Putin defenestrating the Banderites. Unfortunately, they will all come in for a soft landing in Chicago, Calgary and Winnipeg joining the existing primitive death cult. Heroic fodder for Freeland and her ilk. And the beat goes on.
Freeland and her ilk also includes Poilievre and the Conservative party. The beat will go on.
https://www.conservative.ca/statement-from-conservative-leader-pierre-poilievre-on-day-of-dignity-and-freedom/
There is a nazi lurking in the human spleen. It exists for a reason which is hard to decipher because Nazis are so hot headed they are the perfect stooges to start wars and stagger through regardless of the insanity. For the opening ceremony of the next Olympics extravaganza we need an even stronger dose of parody. One that attacks head on the sinister manipulation of our fear of losing, fading, becoming pointless. Still using The Last Supper as a metaphor of our existential confusion, somebody needs to perform The Last Food Fight of The Puppets.
I continue to see this conflict as a civil war resulting from the disorderly collapse of the USSR the subsequent machinations of neo-con Cold Warriors to break up the former Soviet republics to establish western imperial hegemony. As was the case in the American Civil War, where the generals on both sides were former West Point classmates, it can take years to break fraternal bonds in such a conflict.
The Russian concern has always been about resolving the issue of their only “warm water port” in Sevastopol. Khrushchev created the problem in 1954 when he ceded Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in what appears to have been a power-play by his “Dniepropetrovsk Mafia” that included later CPSU General Secretaries Brezhnev and Andropov. Sevastopol remained the home port of the Russian Black Sea Fleet after the “Ukrainian” secession thanks to a series of negotiations and treaties culminating in the 2010 Kharkov Accords with the Yanukovych government. This drove the western neo-cons nuts.
From the Russian perspective Crimea has been part of Russia since 1783 and the region has a Russian-speaking majority who repeatedly voted to withdraw from “Ukraine” beginning even before the breakup of the USSR. This was always seen as a matter for negotiation. Things got complicated when western machinations and billions of dollars caused the illegal coup in 2014 and civil war broke-out in the eastern oblasts.
I don’t think for a minute that the Russians want to take Kiev or any other nonsense still being put forth by the scriveners in the western press. They certainly have no intention of occupying territory west of the Dnieper River. They are simply waiting for the army and government of “Ukraine” to collapse and be replaced by someone (anyone) who is capable of accepting that Khrushchev‘s “Dniepropetrovsk Mafia” power-plays need to be undone in the region of the former Crimean Khanate annexed 250 years ago by Catherine the Great as Novorussia. This will take time — perhaps until the end of the current decade.
I think the Civil War analogy suggests something different: would the Union have been content retaking just Norfolk or New Orleans? Would Lincoln have just let go of a Confederate Texas Republic, say, especially one that might be armed by Napoleon III from his dominion in Mexico, vowing to “retake” New Orleans, or, as they would insist, “Nouve Orleans,” in addition to tne general principle of things? In fact, we might need to wait until the modern equivalents of Emperor Maximilian and Napoleon III to fall before the whole thing is over.
Do keep in mind that Kiev has been a part of Russia for much longer than Crimea or Novorossiya, even if we don’t count Kievan Rus. I’m not sure the historical precedent is the important part here. Certainly not if we’re not also going after Kiev (although we might; we’ve maintained strategic ambiguity from the start).
Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa are culturally and historically fundamentally Russian cities. This cannot be subject to dispute. “Ukrainian” nationalism appears to be a late 19th century invention of the Hapsburg dual-monarchy.
I don’t think that post-Soviet Russians, both in and out of government, have much in the way of stomach for being an occupying army. If “Ukrainian” city-dwellers in the culturally Russian areas can be disabused of their fantasies about new Porsches, jetting to Saint-Tropez, and acting like rock-stars then maybe they might voluntarily go back to being Russians.
The Russian consumer economy appears to be on-track to be more appealing to “Ukrainians” by the end of this decade than a collapsing Western Europe. We shall see. Another reason for the Russian political leadership to be patient.
That is a popular line but it is only partly true. Shevchenko for one lived earlier and wasn’t from Austria-Hungary. Galicia was the origin of a particular strand of Ukrainean nationalism that was encouraged at various times by Habsburgs, Germans, Americans and Soviets alike, allowing its modern descendant to attain its current dominance. Doesn’t mean it’s the only one even now, or that it is a wholly artificial foreign invention.
That aside, from your mouth to God’s ears…
Shevchenko indeed lived in the mid-19th century, but that does not mean there was an Ukrainian nation, far from it.
The story of 19th century national movements/revivals is, as usual, not the one that is usually told, i.e. of heroic resistance to oppressive empires (most of continental Europe at one point was divided between four of those) with young brave leaders leading a reawakening of national consciousness.
The reality was much more cynical — the bourgeoise class was growing and that produced a class of young intellectuals who were dreaming of becoming princes and kings themselves, or at least the equivalent of, but were locked out of the existing power structure. So how do you rise up in such a situation? Well, becoming the leader of a national movement fighting for “freedom” is one way. Now don’t get me wrong, many of them genuinely believed in what they were doing, but the socioeconomic morivation was very strong in many cases too, and we know that from the surviving documents and testimonies, in which you often see revolutionaries dreaming what kind of positions in the new government each of them would hold one day.
Then the task at hand becomes to find such a movement to lead.
In some cases it was relatively straightforward — there had been a number of medieval kingdoms that disappeared in the late Middle Ages/early Modern period, which could now be resurrected. That was the situation of Czech, of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, you can add Georgia and Armenia, etc.
In other cases there was never such a medieval kingdom, but there was a clearly distinct ethnicity around which to build a new country, even if it had no tradition of independent statehood. Finland is such a case, Estonia kind of. Greece, Italy and Germany are special cases because while they are new creations where nothing of the sort existed previously, there were major empires centered on those regions in the past, and there was common language to unite around (well, almost, but it was unified eventually).
The third type of situation is one in which a new ethnicity was amalgamated from pre-existing groups in the early Modern period. Romania and Latvia come to mind. By the time the 19th century came, you could rally a national movement around that.
But what do you do if you had none of these preconditions to work with? Well, then you make it up from scratch.
And that is the story of Ukraine, and the “Ukrainian” intellectuals of the 19th century.
Belarus started even later, which means that there it’s even more obvious how fake the whole thing is. And because it started so late (they were in 1918 where Ukrainians had been in the mid-19th century), it never really caught on even to this day. But Ukraine got enough of a boost from the Austrians to get on the trajectory that has led us to the current situation. But had Galicia not being under Austrian control, the way Belarus was entirely inside the Russian empire, would we be in the current situation? Highly doubtful….
From the Russian perspective most of Ukraine, except for Galicia, is core Russian territory.
Russians definitely want to take Kiev. It is the people in the Kremlin that don’t want to be bothered.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter what anyone wants, at this point things have gone so far that there will never be peace as long as an “Ukraine” exists.
Moscow MUST take not only Kiev, but also everything to the Polish border, and then de-Ukrainize.
Always remember that there are two nuclear power plants in western Ukraine, plus another one in Yuzhnoukrainsk in Nikolaev oblast. While Yuzhnoukrainsk is in the core Russian region, Rovno and Khmelnytskyi have now become core Banderistan (originally it was just Galicia, but it has now expanded quite a bit). If those are not under Russian control, Ukraine will acquire nukes very soon after hostilities end. Then what?
That was Brezhnev, not Khrushchev
Russians, in my experience, want peace. We/they don’t want our country’s abject surrender, true. But peace without taking Kiev would probably suit most people just fine so long as we keep the oblasts we officially annexed via referendum and attacks on our territory cease. The people who want a total victory over Ukraine at any cost are the same as the people who want us to capitulate: a vocal but isolated minority. I don’t have many good words for the people in the Kremlin either, but they are right not to pay too much attention to either group.
Putin has for quite a long time been reminding Russians that Kiev is part of Ancient Rus. So I don’t agree here. I see this as leaving his options open.
Perhaps a related point is Putin values keeping options open too much when clearer signaling would be better. If you believe in Myers-Briggs (I do find it useful for how people behave in organizations, IMHO less useful as a personality diagnostic), they distinguish between perceiving and judging types. Judging types LOVE making decision and throwing things out. They would rather decide and reopen a decision than have something hanging unsettled.
Perceiving types do not like decisions. They feel regret in closing options.
BTW Bill Clinton was like that so it is not an obstacle to holding executive positions.
I think Putin has more “perceiving” tendencies than is ideal in this situation.
Russia is not on our timetable and has no desire to re-enact the Afghanistan invasion with Afghanistan-II. The existing generations of Ukraine neo-nazis will get the Gaza treatment, and will be encouraged to migrate westward to further pollute NATO countries with their NATO-taught Nazi thoughts. Phase-1 (demilitarization) will proceed at the current pace for 5 more years.
The outcome of the war in Chechnya may be instructive regarding the future of Ukraine. The Chechen rebels were at least as ferocious as the Banderites, but Chechnya is today a loyal backer of Moscow. Total defeat changes a lot of minds, and I don’t think Ukraine will be an exception. When western aid evaporates, there will be little support for a guerrilla resistance. The Russian win will be ugly, but decisive. They understand that there can be no foothold left for a resumption of hostilities.
I was thinking the same, the Ukrainians have demonstrated (as in Bucha, but also as early as the May 2 2014 atrocity in Odessa) that they remember, with fondness, how to practice Einsatzgruppen-style tactics.
I imagine they will be cleaning house, as a matter of self-defense, survival, life or death.
And, hence Yves post.
Because of the scale and population of Ukraine, the difference in scope becomes a difference in kind.
Decisive, comprehensive defeat and re-construction were manageable in Chechnya with 1.5M population and a land mass the size of Crimea. Ukraine is the size of New England plus New York and Pennsylvania, the only way something like you propose becomes manageable is de-population from its current guesstimated 20M down to 2-3M, a process Yves suggests would look a lot like ethnic cleansing which won’t help Moscow’s new brand in the ROW.
Wikipedia has the population of Lviv Oblast as roughly 2.5 million.
Agree. In no plausible universe would Russia be able to occupy all of Ukraine and absent a total occupation where you would take over the school curriculum and media such as the US in Japan or Germany in 1945, you will never stomp out Ukrainian nationalism.
Ukraine will be a geopolitical thorn for generations to come and the best we can hope for is they realize that they have been treated worse than a dirty rag by NATO and at least acknowledge the idiocy of another war with Russia.
if one assumes 5% of the population is young mail fighting age *see demographics image belows, then 20 million would have 1 million, remaining. if half could be mobilized (doubtful, many many would flee), then you have 500k. If the war goes on another year, with ukraine losing 50k/month, there will be a massive depopulation of the fighting age and it wont matter if the population shrinks further to 10 million – the guerilla fighter age group will be dead or fled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Ukraine#/media/File:Ukraine_population_pyramid_2024_UN.png
The Soviet Union occupied all of Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1990. Yes, there were some outbreaks of violence: East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956, and Czechoslovakia 1968. The Soviets quickly crushed these outbreaks. Occupying Western Ukraine might be problematic but the Russians have demonstrated they are very effective at maintaining internal security.
Back to one of Yves main points: there’s no evidence of planning or social preparations on the home front for this scale of mobilization.
The US and Soviet mobilizations in WW2 were each deep, integrated, and engaged their entire populations, in the US from the very beginning of the New Deal, in the Soviet Union from the minute the Nazis overran the border.
Nothing similar in evidence here.
Sorry mate, but the Red Army left Romania in 1956 and never came back.
They also left Poland, and I am not sure they stayed in Bulgaria. Were definitely not in Yugoslavia.
They also left Czechoslovakia in 1947 and returned only in 1968.
Russia isn´t the Soviet Union. Young men in the big cities are just as game addicted and smart phone distracted as their counterparts in the West. I used to run an outdoors business in Central Asia and had trips into Siberia. Local Siberian tour companies have exactly the same problems with young Muscovites as we had with young Westerners. No war for them and certainly no occupation duties. The Ivan who walked from the Urals to Berlin munching subflower seeds is long a thing of the past.
FWIW Martyanov strongly believes Russia will incorporate Odessa and Kharkiv.
See above. I don’t see how they do anything less than take pretty much all of Ukraine if they are to achieve the stated goals of the SMO. And at least Medvedev agrees.
Kharkiv is a given. They have to take the entire Dnieper basin (nearly all of the northern half of Western Ukraine, including of course Kiev) to protect Kherson and Zarorzhizhia. Odessa becomes almost an afterthought in light of that, ex that it will totally enrage the US to have Russia secure control of the Black Sea. But Odessa is separately a priority due to its status as a historically important Russian city and the horrible trade hall fire/massacre in the Maidan coup.
Geographical considerations have two aspects: bringing majority speaking areas under Russian protection, and providing Russia with a secure position when the conflict concludes. The four oblasts mentioned as preconditions for negotiations, plus Odessa, Kharkiv, and yes Kiev, are necessary and probably sufficient for the first. For the second, given events to date, I don’t think annexation of Ukrainian territory gets it done, not since the original SMO morphed into a conflict between the US (and NATO) and Russia. Not with the US scheduling deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles in Germany and Poland beefing up its army.
If NATO dissolves, some version of Medvedev’s map may work, with Hungary and Poland chewing off parts of Western Ukraine. If NATO stays intact, another possible outcome would be seeing how well the S-550s perform during a nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia, if that can be contained to Europe.
Meanwhile, Turkey is threatening to send troops into NATO prompting calls for Turkey’s expulsion from NATO and Israeli calls for Erdogan’s assassination.
Last sentence should be Turkey threatening to send troops into Israel
> … a nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia, if that can be contained to Europe.
I’d surmise that once any nuke was fired at Russia, whether a ‘tactical’ device targeting Russian forces in the Ukraine or a strategic weapon delivered upon Russia itself, then the chances of any such exchange being ‘contained to Europe’ are about 0%. Since NATO is the US and the US is NATO, any nuclear attack on Russia means the immolation of American cities.
The fracturing of NATO and the relsulting de minimus might put a chokehold on western aid. Poland, I’m sure, is salivating over the western rump. Putin may be happy to let Poland have Azov and co. Let it be Poland’s problem.
Expelling Turkey from NATO seems like a non starter. Any EU shill calling for that should take a quick look at a map.
Only if Poland leaves NATO. Recall the security guarantees Moscow wants from the west.
I did look at a map. I did not see a border erdogan shares w/ the izzies. How is he going to deploy an expeditionary force, magic carpets?
Nah, the magic carpets are needed to support the Turkish troops in Libya and Azerbaijan since neither Erdogan or Turkey shares a border with either one.
Imagine if there was an island in Mediterranean sea within a Bayrakhtar range from Israel where Turkish army had a military presence. If such an island existed, it would be quite handy for Erdogan to make good of his threats.
Shouldn’t they need to control about a third of that island first? ;)
Thank you. I still do not see how drones are going to help ferry infantry. Landing under hostile fire is not a trivial exercise unless you have magic carpets.
IMO Erdogan will not do anything but talk. He is no Hussain Al-Houthie.
It could be done if in the process it helps Syria recover the Golan Heights…
Exactly.
But how is that to happen with the current force allocation and inexplicable restrictions on strikes on Ukrainian logistics?
When one looks at ALL the factors facing Russia, they have no choice but to resolve ALL that is before them. The fight for a non-hostile Ukraine is existential for them.
And the “all” that is before Russia is the mad cow disease of neoliberal neoconservative would-be imperial colonialism.
What happens with respect to Country 404 is interesting, but is just part of the effort Russia has to put forth, hopefully with working arrangements with China, BRICS and the multimodal rest of the world outside the “golden Billion,” to demilitarize and denazify the “West.”
Currently unknowable is the ability of the Empire and its minions to re—generate an effective and sufficiently consequential continental-scale war economy and war machine. Not clear if the West has the real wealth, energies, and intellect any more to undertake the effort, but Nuland, Blinken, Netanyahu and the rest seem all-in on the Big Plan and their noxious influence is deep rooted. It seems pretty clear that the Empire’s dark minions are working on bio weapons, cyberweapons, particle beams, more iterations of nuclear weapons , you name it, and evil-hearted geniuses are looking for knockout punches or total-global-Ragnarok-death weapons, in service to the mindset that the East must be reduced to slaves or corpses and we take all their stuff, or we exercise the Samson Option on a global scale (which is written into the US OPLAN — if we’re losing bad, we nuke and blast every other place where “Civilization” might re-emerge.) Hey, it worked for the Israelites, according to the Holy Writ they wrote for themselves. And the Rapturists in the US military, and the boys and girls of RAND, and the financial and death-ray weapons makers of the Empire, are for sure working to that playbook.
The 404 effort is clearly a Russian-historical-scale task, asked of a society of many parts (with a lot of Fifth Columnists still) that is not on the kind of war footing that led to nominally defeating the Nazis in 1945. Unarguable that “denazification” was not accomplished then — the Nazis just changed shirts and epaulets, and assisted, and in many ways took over, the corporatist imperials of US and rump UK. Leading maybe inevitably to the current almost-negative-sum game between the insane monsters setting “policy” in the West, and Russia and its partners. The Empire will never be agreement-capable. While Russian leadership keeps hoping for rational, durable and honorable “security architecture” under which nations can pursue interests that don’t involve “taking over” other nations.
I’m guessing that Putin, Lavrov and the other Russian leaders are studying hard and burning the midnight oil to paint and direct the world’s attention to that “new way of fair dealing” that is so violently anathema to the hegemonists all over. Russian leaders speak in terms of a “civilizational struggle,” and to me that is right on the money. 404 is to both sides a means to hopefully bleed the other to death. The Empire insists that Russia and China are barbarians, to be reduced to the appropriate level of bondage. Those same thought leaders think the same thing about the vast majority of “their” populations, and the bits of wealth they have not already vacuumed up. Russia and China ain’t perfect, not utopias by any stretch. But what they seem to be working toward is a whole lot more attractive to this particular mope, and many of my acquaintance.
Human behavior, over the long haul, has not given a lot of hope that the Machiavellian sneaks and liars and would-be despots can be kept, in the future, from raising hordes of “Nazi”—form zombies from the residues of a climate- or global-war horror show. And of course “we” collectively have maybe already lit the fires of our own global climate crematorium, so worrying about who might prevail in the civilizational conflict might be moot. Bu I for one and hoping that the Russians have mastered the multidimensional chess matrix and have gamed out a way to beat the hegemonist-corporatists in the end game of the Great Game.
Of course, finally, all one can say with some degree of certainty is that
“We shall see,” and “time will tell.”
https://www.rt.com/news/601806-us-rogue-actor-international-stage/
I kind of see this ending up in a stalemate akin to the Korean War. That is, in a partition of Ukraine into East and West, with a narrow strip of DMZ between them, or if you prefer European examples East and West Germany. A new Cold War requires new partitions. You could also end up with more of a Taiwan style situation, with the West considering parts or all of Ukraine independent with Russia vehemently opposed.
This is another way of saying the Ukraine war and how it ends up resolved is not without precedent. We’ve been down similar paths before.
The Cold War occured during a time when the west and the Soviets were industrial giants. Not now. We don’t have anywhere near the industrial base to continue arming this conflict, and, unless it’s being done in secret, I don’t see war factories happening soon. At the same time, we are arming the Israelis and threatening a war with Iran, and banging war drums against China. Where will all of these weapons come from?
Then there’s the manpower issue. We would have to bring back a serious draft to man a decent force to fight in both Ukraine and Iran, but because we have been way off in volunteer recruitment targets, they’re scraping barrels. (We do have the largest population of incarcerated on Earth, so, since that’s a thing these days, who knows) Europe is worse. Britain beats it’s chest, but has a miniscule army and a pathetic navy these days. Politically, they would need a major false flag to keep the pitchforks and torches from the gates if they demanded conscription.
Putin is a patient man. From what I understand, even though his KIA is approaching 100,000, his people are generally behind him. Some want a more violent response. We’ll see in January, with a new President and sub freezing temps in Ukraine.
The West’s efforts in this direction are simply expanding the capability asymmetry between The Garden and the rest of the world.
Since the oligarchy in the West can’t do anything anymore but buy stuff, their outsourcing to their non-China vendors (from links this morning). And Aurelian has been going through in excruciating detail how delusional the “bring back the draft” narrative is. We’re already attritting our fighting class with unmitigated Covid19.
The Russians appear to be waiting for the West to just plan collapse, and we’re doing what we can in that regard, but I don’t see how we pull it off in less than five years which leaves a lot more dead and a nastier baseline whenever its established.
they’re outsourcing..
The Cold War occured during a time when the west and the Soviets were industrial giants. Not now.
[…]
Then there’s the manpower issue.
The Cold War occurred during a time when the West and the Soviets had a young population. Not now.
Europe, especially Western Europe, but also Russia, are aging populations. Look at the median age for the major countries (from Wikipedia):
48.1 Italy
46.7 Germany
46.3 Spain
44.0 France
42.4 Poland
40.6 Great Britain
45.3 Ukraine
41.5 Russia
41.7 Byelorussia
In Western countries, the demographic basis needed to form the numerous battalions for a large scale war is shrinking unremittingly. Compare with:
19.0 Somalia
19.2 Palestine (Gaza)
19.9 Afghanistan
21.6 Yemen
21.7 Palestine (West Bank)
33.3 Iran
35.8 Lebanon
This may partly explain why Russia launched the operation in 2022: it could not wait any longer — ten more years, and recruitment of sufficient troops would have become very difficult.
And this partly explains why the war is carried out as it is: Russia just cannot afford to waste its youth.
To put this in context, those were the median ages in 2023. Here they are in 1980 (i.e. fully in the Cold War):
33.1 Italy
35.8 Germany
29.8 Spain
31.4 France
28.5 Poland
33.3 Great Britain
32.6 Ukraine
30.1 Russia
29.9 Byelorussia
16.6 Somalia
13.9 Palestine
15.9 Afghanistan
14.9 Yemen
17.2 Iran
18.9 Lebanon
Very persuasive, thanks.
Excellent data, thanks for taking the time to post this. Demography is destiny.
A primary goal of Russia’s slow-as-pondwater SMO is to reduce drastically Ukraine’s already-low population of military-age males. There is a method to Russia’s madness. Grindingly slow, but effective.
Once the battlefield fighting in Ukraine is over (and that might take a while, as nobody seems to be in a rush to stop the killing), the risk of a long-term patriotic resistance movement is actually pretty low. If for no other reason than 50-year-olds are unlikely to be very keen on guerilla warfare (i.e., risking one’s life daily, sleeping outdoors in the cold and rain, constant dysentery and stress, etc.) And 50 Ukrainian male years are the equivalent of perhaps 65 western EU years, given the gap in living standards and healthcare. Also, most of Ukraine is flat (“Iowa without the charm”, as one wag put it) and really not suitable for Afghanistan-style resistance, aside from maybe the Carpathians in the very far west of the country (which aren’t exactly the Hindu Kush either).
My guess is that Russia will partition Ukraine and leave the west of the country under nominal Ukrainian control. And let the locals police each other.
Iowa has charm?
How can Iowa not have charm when its capital means “Sh1tface“? ;)
(Yes yes I know that explanation is heavily disputed/debunked but it is very funny)
Fascinating numbers, thank you. As a side, look at (delta) Somalia. And Afghanistan.
I’ve said this before, but Biden only needs to fabricate a Pearl Harbor event to get the manpower. Part of the reason he’s probably annoyed about having to step aside is he’s robbed of this moment. He has 6 months if he wants his name on it.
It doesn’t end with a DMZ.
South Korea has never been a death cult.
Ukrainian nationalism is.
Neither South Koreans nor North Koreans were ever thought to see each other as subhumans. Ukrainians are taught, in their schoolbooks, that the Moskals are subhuman mongoloid mongrels.
Etc.
Peace will last a few months, then drones and missiles will be flying over the DMZ towards Russia once again.
Irreversible disappearance of Ukraine is the only practical solution to impose the peace in Eastern Europe.
An anecdata is pointing to the tattoo removal service gaining popularity for these who wish to stay in the Russian speaking world. If one would rephrase occupation to liberation of Ukraine, then this could work out well for the future. Please note, that in the minds of Kremlin they are liberating Russian lands and they don’t see themselves as occupiers.
Though Russia has been doing well economically despite some very silly sanctions it is not ready to roll through Western Ukraine or really go beyond the Dnieper River. I think the current policy of attrition is useful in many ways. First, its slow progress is much less threatening to a massive “full-scale” invasion and less likely to inspire Europe to remilitarize even though their are “noises” coming out of the EU to do so going full bore into military drafts, massive arms production is just not going to motivate European publics to back such a project. The main forcus of Western European civilization is the theology of hedonism and economic “security” which would be threatened by higher taxes and some loss of the social democracy that has worked in Europe since the end of WWII. Though the West has, in general, excelled on propaganda/mind-control it can only go so far. For Europe to go all-out into militarism would take a truly Orwellian state which the “leaders” of the EU would certainly like and many states, particularly Germany, are certainly trying to go in that direction it simply does not and will not be able to get support for that project. With Russia bumbling around gaining 500 meters here and there it is hard to turn it into a genuine threat to conquer the continent. It seems to me that Putin is always eyeing European public opinion with one eyes and Russian public opinion with the other.
Thus I see no reason for Russia to change its policy. Ukraine, on the other hand, is full of wild-eyed fanatics who are willing to fight to the death and, in fact, take great joy in doing so which is why they are doing fairly well despite being outgunned and out-manned. Despite poorly trained troops, they are successfully resisting the Russian military which seems reluctant to put its troops in harms way. Ukrainians do not have a Western culture–they thrive on difficulty or so it seems from a distance. I’m guessing that Ukraine’s ability to send troops into battle and rapidly repair equipment and their energy grid shows it is a more vibrant society than many people think. Western Europeans have little real meaning in their lives and war gives Ukrainians meaning as as Victor Frankl pointed out long ago, meaning is a primal drive for human beings. I don’t think enough has been said on this subject.
I’m not sure if I agree with your comparison between Ukraine and Western Europe. It may simply be the product of circumstance rather than anything deeper. No Western country has been through anything comparable in the last few decades. I suspect that if pressed hard enough and openly enough from the outside Europeans may also turn out to be more “vibrant” than they appear to be now. Whether that would be a good thing or worth the blood is another question.
Of course, circumstances can fundamentally change national character at least on the surface. But are Japanese, Italian and German peoples that fundamentally different after WWII? I’ve lived in those countries and studied their culture and literature and they weren’t that different from their pre-war condition.
That’s precisely my point, though. The hedonism and complacency is surface level. In the past, all those societies withstood considerable privation, time and again. If they were put in the same situation as Ukraine, after a while those who don’t run or die would learn to thrive on difficulty once more.
More broadly, I think practically any society is much harder to crush than it may seem before it is put to the test. There is a lot of ruin in any nation. It’s part of why economic warfare has proved so unrewarding.
The idea of stopping at the Dnieper is a canard. Many important cities straddle the Dnieper. Russia has to take the entire Dnieper watershed to protect Kherson and Zaporzhizhia. To re-hoist PlutoniumKun:
i don’t disagree–control of the Dnieper is a requirement for Russia but a treaty could put control of the Dnieper system to some kind of jointly run authority or a multi-national non-profit or as part of an international force as part of a DMZ of some kind. Who knows maybe in a few years we may transition to more peace-oriented leadership in the West.
Can’t do treaties with people you don’t trust. So that means sorting out the Nazi influence first and then setting up a competent, agreement-capable government before negotiating a water resources administration into existence with them.
No to put too fine a point on it, this is Ukraine we’re talking about; the most corrupt country in Europe that has not invested in infrastructure since 1991.
In 2020, 40% of the Kiev wastewater was discharged to Dniepr unprocessed nor is a drop of the rainwater taking the garbage and chemicals from the streets to Dniepr is processed in any way.
The same year the State environmental inspectorate of Ukraine recorded 3777 water treatment violations. Given the state of the lawlessness it’s plausible there were 2-3 times as many unrecorded.
There used to be zoning laws leaving river beds free of construction to protect the water from the worst, but nobody has enforced those for years. Ukraine ranks as number 125 on the list of Renewable water sources per capita, which is a small wonder from a country with 73,000 rivers and 40,000 lakes.
Honestly, if Ukrainians flooded the Dniepr with all the sewage they could mange, people downstream would be hard pressed to notice it.
Which is why Russia has build 500 km pipelines (in less than two years) connecting Donbass water system to the Don water system.
> The idea of stopping at the Dnieper is a canard. Many important cities straddle the Dnieper.
Yes! Plus linking with Transnistria makes a lot of sense for the boundary being further west. Not just to Odessa.
Russia’s difficulty in controlling the peace will fall significantly when Europe & it’s economy is exhausted and demoralised. A significant proportion of Ukraine will change sentiment from pro-West to pro-Russia. And the Azov brigades in the far west of the remaining Ukraine will focus on criminal activities exploiting a weakened Europe. Russian economic gains from eastern Ukraine will far outweigh the cost of maintaining peace. While for Europe the ongoing cost of failure will be high.
A couple of major players in the EU have to be prepared to not think of Russia as a threat. Then it could be closer to over.
For now they are making a big show of going in the direction of war with RF. The only way that can change is with populist politics and for now only right wingers and nationalist are pursuing populism.
I don’t believe any major leader thinks Russia is a threat at least in the short and medium term. They use the idea as a way to control their populations. When you spread the idea of danger then a large part of the population (particularly women) will cling to authority.
Idk. There’s a number of reasons to suspect these guys believe their own media narratives.
Do not underestimate the commitment level of Western elites to the current globalist system enforced by US/NATO. That commitment is earnest, and is not merely based on the rational consideration of gain and loss.
Look at the hysteria voiced daily by these elites across the West. They really do fear the development of a more peer-based world order. Russia’s defiance of the West inspires further defiance elsewhere, because it shows that there can other ways for the world to work.
The Western elites are not willing to accept that. They could have accomodated any number of times during the past 20-25 years, but instead they’ll fight to stop it. They might fight badly, but they’ll still fight.
The current philosophical vogue among Western elites doesn’t help things. I find an increasing prevalence of a wish-fulfillment metaphysics, which maintains that reality ultimately conforms to desire. This philosophy usually comes dressed in Kanty-pants to make it seem respectable (c.f. Harari), but underneath it all, it’s just personal coaching and motivational technique, run amok into the realm of Big Ideas. I suppose that’s a fitting enough philosophy, for a bourgeois ruling class that has long since shed the high culture of the old aristocracy.
Short form: the West today is run by scared vain rich people with nukes, whose collective intellect reaches about the level of The Secret.
Quite frankly the West/NATO insanity of keeping Ukraine afloat and having to thus “re-arm the West” is going to do more to collapse all of the West’s economies (spending trillions on the MIC which will generate MASSIVE profits, but not any game changing weapons) than anything that the BRICS could otherwise possibly do. Russia should be well supported by the rest of the BRICS for prolonging the West’s insane polices as long as possible.
What could change this is America’s forward deployment of nukes into Germany and drawing even more players into a hot zone of war (EU leaders are also insane to allow this to happen), or America and the West doing fundamental economic reform which could result in real industrial based economies in the West. Of these two, the first will happen, but the odds of American reforming in any significant way is very low (since the first significant reform would be to end this war.)
As to Ukraine’s concerns, short of some big changes (like Azov realizing they were suckers), they are in grave danger of being completely destroyed.
For now, this war will grind on and the coming winter will be on Russia’s side while Ukraine struggles to keep the lights and heat on.
A problem i see with these questions is that we are not (mentally) prepared to look at things in Ukraine without the influence of the hubristic and toxic vision of the “Collective West”. At least it is how i personally feel it. No matter how much you try to distance from it. Too little I know about the region and what I believe to “know” might be totally at odds with what the people there feel and know.
For me it is nearly impossible to seek through internet opinions on the matter by people other than USians and Europeans.
(regrettable self-reply I know)- After writing the previous commentary I remembered that I could use Yandex as search engine to find other opinions. I believe the Russians (at least some of therm) know very well how difficult is the issue of denazification. They think for instance in the denazification of Germany after WWII. They also distinguish among the different factions of the Ukrainian nationalists (a messy group with very different ideologies behind). Russia will have to tighten the belt because they will need to help Ukraine economically and to reconstruct, and at the same time do whatever they choose to do to denazify the country as much as possible during decades. I think this might explain the relatively “soft” military treatment of Ukraine. Amongst the possible measures one might be to “export” the most heroic Nazis to Europe.
I use Yandex frequently– Russia has a surprisingly vibrant and diverse media-culture… or maybe not surprising, if one is aware of the esteem literature holds in Russian society.
This site hosts links to trending topics in Russian news-media, and the SMO barely registers:
https://www.nakanune.ru/
Germany was denazified? Really?
I’ve just read Le Carre’s The Pigeon Tunnel (the unreliable autobiography of a certified spook) and one of his reminiscences was of visiting the headquarters of the German secret service in the 1970s and seeing what amounted to their hall of fame on the wall of a luxurious conference room; just two photographs, one of Admiral Canaris, head of Hitler’s Abwehr and the other of General Gehlen, head of Hitler’s Foreign Armies East. He admired the decorations on the building, and his host said, drily, “Yes, Martin Bormann had excellent taste”; the building had previously been Nazi Party HQ.
Whatever the Russians do in Ukraine I don’t think their activities will be that tolerant of Nazis.
Was Canaris a continuing Nazi right along till the end? I found a wikipage about Canaris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Canaris
Part of the description that wiki offers of Canaris is this . . . ” Canaris was initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, however, Canaris turned against Hitler and committed acts of both passive and active resistance during the war.” The article claims that he started working clandestinely against the HitlerGov, and when he was found out . . . ” By 1945, his acts of resistance and sabotage against the Nazi regime came to light and Canaris was hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp for high treason as the Allied forces advanced through Southern Germany.”
So is a picture of Canaris on the wall the same sort of veneration for Core Nazis that Gehlen’s picture could well be?
The transcendental pretence of Rosseau is still fully operational in Western thinking, post modernism never really made its way to the Borrell’s of the Western world. The situation will look different after the unconditional surrender of the UAF which I believe is the immediate goal, not any land grab.
Denazification will have to be done just like in WW2, everyone in the camps and sorted out at leisure. I believe the Russians have a list of over 90,000 people they are after. Think of it like one of Wellington’s campaigns in Spain where he used to put himself at the start of every season in fortune’s way and see what happens while being ready for anything. The Russians have taken their 85 best young leaders from the SMO and put them into the interface between the Armed Forces and economy, they could end up with something like Alexander’s forces
Without somebody to negotiate with who has both legal authority and freedom from extortion and blackmail by the neo-Nazi faction, Russia has no choice but to grind on. It’s obvious that the stated shortage of personnel and weaponry for the Ukrainian side has not gotten bad enough that the front is going to collapse anytime soon. I expected once Russia took Ocheretyne that they would move the front west pretty rapidly, but that has not been the case. The MoD is reporting “heavy fighting” in the same set of towns for a week or more, so the UAF is putting up a ferocious resistance (and probably taking huge casualties). Both armies have been inside Chasiv Yar and New York battling fiercely for over a week, and something similar is happening with the Kharkov incursion. Russia has been trying to cut the road supplying Ugledar for months, and the attacks at Kupyansk have been going on for almost a year. It’s World War I with missiles, drones and advanced ISR, so the book on how to conduct that kind of war is still being written now and nowhere near finished.
Having a government turnover (or revolution) in Kiev may be the only way any real negotiations happen, which could shorten things. Otherwise the fighting will continue with Russia inching forward and more and more NATO troops in disguise getting to shed their blood on Ukrainian soil. In the spring I would have said (probably did say) this would be over by January or February next year, but that looks way too optimistic now.
I guess the question is “What happens and how quickly when western aid dries up?” Netanyahu has cut the line at the soup kitchen. There’s only so much soup.
Interesting times. Events in Ukraine will not be happening in a global vacuum.
The West — anyway, the US with its commitment to its Wolfowitz doctrine — is about to become further tested and distracted as Israel and the ME move even more to the front-burner, according to Alastair Crooke’s latest.
Crooke claims that Netanyahu’s recent trip to Washington was about gaining assent for Israel to (a) go into Lebanon against Hezbollah with the US providing some lesser or greater degree of logistical, military participation and (b) also — and ideally from Netanyahu’s POV — commencing a larger war against Iran, again with the US military directly participating in this.
Netanyahu has gotten assent from US policymakers for at least (a), Crooke claims. He also thinks it’s realistically crazy, but that the majority of Israelis are now operating from an eschatological, messianic way of thinking rather than a rational one.
Alastair Crooke on Judge Napolitano: Will there be war in Lebanon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDERjMb3ZIs
Crooke in Strategic Culture
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/07/29/is-there-a-risk-that-kamala-harris-might-go-soft-on-foreign-policy/
‘Netanyahu also insists that Israel needs the support and practical assistance of the ‘free world’ ‘to counter the regime at the heart of the existential threat – Iran’. What if Iran intervenes in Lebanon in response to a massive Israeli assault? Netanyahu casts this as the ‘barbarians’ coming for western civilisation – coming too for America as much as Israel ….
‘Of course, hitting out at Iran is entirely a different proposition. And that’s why Netanyahu is seeking U.S. support … There is a photograph of Netanyahu and his wife aboard the Wing of Zion (the new Israeli State aircraft) with a MAGA-style baseball cap on the desk beside him, only it is blue, not red, and is emblazoned with two words: “Total Victory”.
‘“Total Victory” plainly is Israel ‘winning together, with the U.S., in confronting Iran’s axis of evil’: Is the U.S. aboard? Or are U.S. foreign policy circles so distracted by the extraordinary succession events cascading out in the U.S. and Ukraine that the élites cannot, at the same time, attend to Bibi’s “crossroads of history”? We shall see.’
What are the odds the US pulls a Saddam on Netanyahu by “inadvertently” giving him the green light.
Netanyahu’s government is run by its junior coalition partner Eschatologists. But Netanyahu himself also has the grubby little motivation of wanting to delay the start of his ( and his wife’s too, I believe) trials for various acts of corruption. The longer he can keep various parts of the war going, the further into the future he can delay and put off his eventual trial.
If indeed a cease-fire is being slowly engineered into existence for Gaza, then Netanyahu will want another war ready to go for when Gaza is no longer available for continued delay of his trial through continued war-fighting. But a low to mid intensity war with Hezbollah could be kept going for as long as Hezbollah is willing to tolerate such a war remaining low-to-mid intensity. Netanyahu would like to keep it going for years and years and years, so as to stay out of court for years and years and years.
In my purely amateur opinion.
Couples of points I’ve come across in the history of the area, and in some recent articles:
First and foremost, according to Jacques Baud the sde-nazification was mostly achieved when the Azovstal garrison surrendered. Yes, there are still plenty of neo-Nazis or wannabes around, but the big difference (according to some Russian articles) is that the current stock is of Russian ethic origin – they are not hard-line ethno-nationalist anymore.
One of the big indicators of this is the recent execution of Irina Farion on the street in Lviv. She was one of the most prominent ethno-fanatics and was deemed as “too divisive” by the neo-Nazis. Oddly enough, the modern day Azov is fighting for a Ukraine where Russian culture is allowed. At least for the time being.
As it is, some Russian observers say that the most persistent fighter on the Ukrainian side right now are the Dnipro and Zaporoshye oblast Russians, who in 2014 made the bet for the EU to come and save them. According to them, based on information received POWs, there’s not much fight left anymore in the Galician stock of Ukrainians – they are the ones desperately avoiding pressing gangs or risking their lives in order to escape from Ukraine trough minefields.
Nope, Ukrainian army is currently standing by the share will power of the more-or-less ethnic Russians who jumped into the ethno-Ukrainian bandwagon in the hope of finding a bright future as part of the EU. And that is one huge reason for the immense effort Russia puts in re-construction and rising standard of living in Donbass. Mostly it’s for the people in Donbass, of course, but the speed is also part of the long game of winning, if not hearts, at least most minds in the “central” Ukraine.
Now, as for occupation vs. demilitarized zone, It’s my understanding that maintaining 1200 km long and 400 km wide zone would require more troops (if we use Korean DMZ as any kind of base for calculations) than occupation. After all, in 1919 Polish Army needed 60,000 men to crush Western Ukrainian Republic and occupy it. Next year Red Army used 100,000 men to conquer and occupy the whole Ukraine (which at the time did not have Donbass included). And in 1947-50 Red Army and NKVD managed to suppress the remaining resistance with “only” 36,000 men (but it was brutal!). This was all done without the modern surveillance capabilities, I might add.
The main thing absolute majority of Ukrainians of any ethnicity or political persuasion want is a chance for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which have been denied from them for several decades. That’s how it was 100 years ago, and that’s how it will be today. Based on the history, it’s quite plausible that the aftermath of the war will not last long, and it won’t require too many troops.
The troops would be from FSB and Rosgvardija, not army, as they have been responsible for pacifying the areas under Russian control. Russian policy is to use police for policing actions, which usually leads to faster and longer lasting results.
Compared to that, maintaining an effective demilitarized zone of the size required would demand easily permanent deployment of 300-400,000 men (still less than South Korea has for 120 km of DMZ). If we have learned something from the current war, it’s the fact that drones and bombs just are not enough.
And finally, Dniepr is not just a river, it’s a system of tributaries, waterways and reservoirs. Six of the nine main tributaries of Dniepr in Ukraine are on the “Russian side”, which means Ukraine has very few means to cause problems with access to fresh water, should Russia advance to Dniepr. As Ukraine has used denial of fresh water as a weapon for a decade now, there are several artificial channels in Donbass connecting the Kherson area (and thus also Zaporozhye) to Don water system.
It won’t be easy – as it hasn’t been since 2014 – but the Russian bank of Dniepr is not strategically dependent on the Dnipr water. Should Ukraine take to low road and do some sewage shenanigans, it suffer itself much more, given that the Ukrainian side has less sources of fresh water and is generally much higher, so more pumping would be needed – provided they have any electricity left.
And once again, awfully sorry for the wall of text.
Interesting point about how “Russian” the remaining “Ukrainian” army, including Azovites are. Certainly makes sense given a lot of stories that have come out over last year, including the conflict between the “real Banderites” and Azovites over language, etc. It really does feel like a civil war…
It seems that there are a lot of Russian citizens living in Russia who have placed, and who are still placing, their bets on the West. Not sure how big that group is. Seems like the Russian government is working on reducing the numbers of the worst Fifth Columnists. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/21/europe/russia-vladimir-putin-z-fifth-columnists-intl-cmd/index.html
See an early comment by GM above. I do not think this is an area of Baud’s expertise.
First, the neo-Nazis in the West are different than those in the East, so the loss of the Azov battalion has no impact on them. There were also other gangs. I don’t recall many of the names but one was Right Sector.
Second, there are enough Azovitesleft to credibly threaten Zelensky with assassination if he were to negotiate.
Just to name a few:
– Stepan Bandera All-Ukrainian Organization Tryzyb (from the coat of Arms)
– Patriot of Ukraine
– UNA-UNSO
– Social-Nationalist Assembly
– C14
– White Hammer
I understood that Baud’s point was – also mentioned in some Russian articles – that when the SMO commenced in 2022, the Ukrainian army was composed almost completely of these groups (neo-nazis and football hooligans). And as the Ukrainians rushed to volunteer, the army picked up the rest, preferring those with previous experience in the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” and rejecting “ideologically unsuitable” persons.
By the end of 2022, majority of these had been killed or maimed. As Ukraine was sending men abroad to be trained (as they run out of those with previous experience) we also saw the first busses driving around cities and collecting men from the streets (as they had run out of volunteers).
Now, this summer even the western media has verified this by letting the remaining Ukrainian officers state that the original army has been decimated several times over, and they only have a fraction left of those who volunteered and were motivated – and they are totally exhausted now.
Of course there’s a room for disagreement, but Baud considers this as rather successful de-nazification and de-militarization – Ukraine has been mostly depleted of the cadres that are willing to fight Russia again in the future. It’s already wasting enormous effort in pressing men to service, and has to enable more and more draconian laws to find new sources of raw meat to prevent the front from collapsing totally.
Ukraine is already in a situation that whatever survives this war, will not want to nor will be capable of fighting Russia for several generations. Yes, the die-hard will be capable of terrorism and nuisance, but if history is any guide here, they will eventually run out of the of the support of the population and be ratted out, killed, emigrate or surrender. Russia has a lot of recent experience on this process from Syria.
It’s hard to make much sense sometimes of what Russia’s strategy is. A big WTF moment was this article on Ukrainian steel production: Ukrainian Steel Surge: Production Soars by One-Third in 2024
Just why in the hell is Ukraine able to export any steel at all? One would think that a strategic industry like steel would be a primo target in a war of attrition, and would have been shut down by now.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I saw today that both Hungary and Slovakia are going to cut electricity supplies (somewhere around sixty percent of supply now) to Ukraine in retaliation for their having cut H & S’s Russian gas supplies. As a result, Ukraine is prepping its’ population for power cuts going from four hours a day to ten.
Steel production takes a lot of energy, so perhaps Russia’s thinking is that further suffering of the population to benefit the steel exports prioritized by the Ukrainian government is something that will further weaken them.
Maybe, I think it’s evidence that Moscow wants to limit the damage they do overall and not completely destroy any post-war Ukraine. Even so, if that is why, it is still baffling because steel is such a strategic material, used in armor, fortifications, machinery, etc.. Think of all the fortifications the Ukrainians could be building with steel rebar while you dither and let the industry continue to exist? Even if none of it is used in Ukraine and all of it is exported, it’s still bad because those exports are bringing in money that will be used to prolong things even further (instead of forcing the Western backers to supply all the steel themselves and putting more pressure on them).
It makes zero sense to me, but I’m not the Kremlin.
Something that has been cropping up a lot in my YT feed are vlogs about the rebuilding of Mariupol. I couldn’t say how organic they are, but that city is looking a lot nicer these days than it was last year. Kind of reminds me of that Russian vlog a couple of years ago of the gas stove going twenty-four seven with the meter showing how much it was costing; the one YT had to shut down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StYKfo3mh6Q
Anyone watching those from the other side of the line of contact must be getting a little angry by now. People in Mariupol, former home of the Azov Battalion, are out shopping for their new homes while those in Ukrainian cities are having difficulties refrigerating whatever they can find. That is some very quiet soft power there.
Mariupol is not rebuilding randomly, either. I’ve seen masterplan drawings for the rebuilding city: pedestrian/bicycle orientation, strong tree planting scheme, and a greater emphasis to the waterfront (the Don) with public/tourist opportunity. Mariupol will be transformed.
I remember gas stove stream on Twitch. All four were runninng when he was at home, and only one when he went out.
I think most of those new apartments are given for free to those that have lost their old ones in war, so no shopping.
Some of those watching from the other side of the line of contact are dismissing it as Russian propaganda, just like everything else. Others are laying low, waiting for red army.
Well, again, there is what the Russian government would prefer, what they’re likely to get…and what they explicitly do not want.
In my view, they really, really do not want any of the following:
– Further mobilization of the Russian populace; among other things, this would exacerbate an already noticeable labour shortage.
– Paying for Ukraine’s reconstruction, which they would have to do for any areas they occupy or turn into a puppet state. Especially since, as evidenced in the annexed regions (starting with Crimea), this means not just remedying war damage, but addressing decades (!) of infrastructure non-investment.
– Long-term large-scale policing responsibilities. Deploying 50k-100k Rosgvardia troops for six months and then ratcheting it down by an order of magnitude is doable, and is essentially what they have been doing in the annexed regions that they control (as well as in the Belgorod region to back up the Border Guards). Russian TV news crews regularly visit with these Rosgvardia deployments. Anything greater, however, or more permanent, is an issue in terms of both cost and manpower.
– Converting “Ukrainians” back into “Russians”. Or, let me amend that – Ukraine’s population can basically be split into three groups: Russian speakers who would prefer to be Russian (and skew “old” and “east”); Ukrainian speakers who’ve been raised to hate everything Russian (e.g. L’vov a.k.a. L’viv a.k.a. Lemberg); and “hybrid” speakers, who speak a truly bewildering fusion of the two languages that varies from town to town (from having visited the place a long time ago), and who don’t really care about Big Politics, so long as their personal economic and lifestyle needs are met. I would argue this latter group is in the majority, tangentially confirmed by the Ukrainian government recently complaining that a majority of schoolkids speak Russian outside of class. There is no profit to the Russian government from trying to conquer and assimilate the “Ukrainian Ukrainians”. Moreover, they don’t even seem to necessarily want a big influx of “hybrid” Ukrainians, as evidenced by the fact that many of the ones trying to come into Russia from the EU are being turned away at the border for, ostensibly, having previously supported the current Kiev regime in some fashion.
– Sorting out Ukraine’s sovereign debt and foreign holdings problems. Sovereign debt alone, I think, is now in the $140 billion range, but someone check me on that; and big chunks of land and other assets have been bought up by Western companies, with more to come.
So just based on these things, the solution is kind-of-sort-of obvious, and I think Medvedev even mentioned it offhandedly in one of his Telegram tirades – “federalization”. Imagine splitting Ukraine into three parts: annexed Russian territories, which get a full rebuild with all the fixings; a friendly Ukraine managed by a puppet regime out of Kiev, backed by a few billion in annual aid plus a 20k-strong Rosgvardia contingent until they can build up their own security forces (e.g. reconstitute Berkut, wouldn’t that be ironic); and a hostile “true” Ukraine comprising the westerly provinces, backed and armed by the West, with a DMZ in-between.
If you can somehow achieve this, then a) Russian economic and military costs, including after the war, are controlled; b) even if “true” Ukraine gets into NATO, it will be way over there, literally 700-800 kilometres from the Belgorod region border; c) all the “Ukrainian Ukrainians” will also be someone else’s problem, as will Ukraine’s sovereign debts (abrogated by the puppet regime in Kiev, assumed by the puppet regime in L’vov-L’viv-Lemberg); and d) to the Indians and the Chinese in the room, you can present a panoply of democratic self-determination via referenda or some suchlike.
To achieve anything like this, however, the Ukrainian army has to completely collapse. Russian troops then can enter Kiev and install a pro-Russian regime, while the current government and several millions of civilians can run away to the westerly provinces. All that’s left then is to establish a DMZ (and announce it as such), and sort out what happens to the different eastern and central provinces.
Remember, the Russians love their historical parallels. They went in back in 2022 thinking they could replicate the 08/08/08 5-day war against Georgia (which Georgia had started, but that’s besides the point). They had considerable success in Syria dumping all the anti-government forces and their families into Idlib and sealing that part of the country off from the rest. They have been looking back to WW2 practices like population filtration in territories under their control, and can look back to the post-war era for how to set up and support pro-Russian governments. Finally, they’ve seen Americans cut and run before, including as recently as 2020.
The problem, of course, is if Ukrainian army does not collapse, or, at least, takes its sweet time. I am sure the General Staff has its projections, which they, for some strange reason, have declined to share with me. But I will say that there isn’t much more that the Russians can do right now given their operating framework. Storming Kiev or Odessa, or even Kharkov, is a non-starter – the Russians are far better off just surrounding them and waiting for the inhabitants to surrender, but even that takes up a lot of manpower (even with a much lower casualty rate than an actual assault). [Remember, Mariupol they had to have, to secure a land corridor to Crimea; Kharkov is not quite as important at the moment.] Crashing down from Belarus again before the Ukrainian army begins to collapse just means more losses for who knows what gains. So they grind it out, and hope their preferred scenario comes to pass in some fashion. Fortunately for them, popular sentiment is still firmly in the pro-SVO camp, so we’ll see.
Did not know about “Ukrainian” refugees in Europe trying to go to Russia. What kind of numbers are we talking about, from which (Western) countries? More details, please?
Doesn’t work.
Ukraine already has heavy strike drones, and will soon have missiles too, that can reach Moscow from the Lvov area.
In your scenario what happens next is that NATO uses the rump state as a launchpad for even more missile and drone strikes on Russia, in perpetuity, with increasing severity over time.
It will never be admitted into NATO precisely in order to maintain the current proxy war scheme, and thus any total nuclear war mutual deterrent that might ever have been provided by Article 5, i.e. currently Poland is not going to ever directly strike Russia, because it will be WW3, but Ukraine is used to do that, and if rump Ukraine was in NATO presumably that would not be possible.
And all that is assuming the missile strikes on Russia don’t cross some kind of line long before we get to that point. By the traditional understanding of where those lines lay, that happened two years ago, so who knows. But from the perspective of Russian interests (**Russian** interests, not those of Russian elites, which are a very different thing), a rump hostile Ukraine is an inadmissible situation. You have to just end Ukraine forever, whatever it takes. Too much has happened to allow for a different outcome that is favorable to Russia.
P.S. Oh, and I forgot — that rump state will have two NPPs to source fissile material from…
Russia’s strategy seems more about attrition now, dragging this out longer. But honestly, the idea of “denazification” feels like a smokescreen for deeper geopolitical goals. Ukraine’s sovereignty is at stake, and they deserve support in their fight. The West’s involvement is crucial, but the constant push and pull in politics and military actions is exhausting.
Russia’s goal, as far as I can make out, is to take Eastern Ukraine, which is mainly Russian and discourage the Washington imperial project from claiming Russia as victim as it nearly did. Russia was fine with Ukraine independence until the US engineered the overthrow of the elected gov’t in Kiev–using similar tactics to what it used in Iran back in the day.
We have to understand that the Western/Washington Empire has clearly state a couple of decades ago to dominate the entire globe and outer space as well. It wants not even the possibility of a rival that is the official position of the Empire and it is the only empire or, hopefully, the last empire that the West will host.
I see Trump offering Putin a deal where the US agrees to some face-saving resolution in Ukraine in exchange for Russia throwing China and Iran under the bus. Putin is way too smart to take such a cartoonish deal.
Color me clueless, but what does the Russian government stand to gain by the reconquest of the rest of Ukraine?
The USSR undertook a massive denazification operation in roughly the same area 80 some odd years ago – is the possibility of another 80 years of peace and stability in the region (no guarantees of that btw) worth the significant outlay that such an operation demands? The fact that a bean counter is running the MOD indicates something, at least to me, and lest we forget, operation denazify v1.0 was executed with the support of the “western partners,” who are today assisting Ukraine.
How is the Russian government’s denazification operation the same as the US’s Global War on Terror? How is it different? Significantly, the Global War on Terror took place “over there.” Denazification is happening right on the border. The Russian government doesn’t have the luxury of, as I’ve heard it put, “sailing away.” They can only continue fighting – Ukraine (233,000+/- sq. mi.) isn’t Chechnya (6700+/- sq. mi.) – and fighting opportunistically, rather than decisively. Did we ever get a ruling on whether wars of attrition are just or unjust?
Maybe the Russian government continues fighting indefinitely, but in this latest episode of East v. West, only one party has consistently moved off their maximalist position in the interest of peace and stability.
Its own survival.
Aside from the whole geostrategic catastrophy that is the modern-day direct ancestors of the original Nazis (that is, NATO) stationing nukes on the territory where the original Nazis stayed for three years from 1941 to 1943, there is the fundamental identity issue.
The Ukrainian is the Mr. Hyde to the Russian Dr. Jekyll.
And that cancer has been spreading east steadily for the last 30 years, consuming more and more of the Russian world.
Take a look at the Ukrainian leadership during the war. Most of them are ethnic Russians. Even some of the most rabidly Russophobic ones, like Danilov and Budanov.
Russians refer to it as a “virus”, and for a good reason. You either kill it off completely, or it will destroy you from within, i.e. once such a big chunk of the Russian world (remember, Ukraine was 50M people in 1991, while Russia was 150M, of which ~125M were Russians, plus you had 10M people in Belarus, and another 20-30M Russians in the other republics, so this is one quarter or so of the whole) has been successfully detached from it, then you can do it again and again using the same tricks, and finally finish off the country for good.
Oh, please. There may be good reasons to fight Ukraine to the last Ukrainean, but our government is under no real threat from it and never has been. Perhaps Putin thinks otherwise, but to me his very restrained approach suggests that he does not truly think this is existential for him (as opposed to people closer to the frontlines) either. And thank God for that.
The issue is NATO and that any remaining Ukraine will be part of NATO.
Please see the first footnote in the post, which has Medvedev confirming GM’s point. From Putin on down, since the 2008 Munich Security Conference, if not earlier via private channels, Russia has made clear it sees Ukraine in NATO as an existential threat.
A defeated Ukraine will have no friends, and this applies for any reasonable definition of “defeated,” independent of where exactly the Russians stop. Whatever government survives will not be “pro-Russian” necessarily, but rather a government that knows how fragile the country is, and how little help it can expect from a Europe and United States bled dry by the war. They will therefore do what they are told, as is traditional with relationships of force in that part of the world.
Even if it wanted to, the West has no real power to affect the outcome, nor to reverse the situation Ukraine will find itself in. Rearming the West, let alone Ukraine, is mostly a fantasy, and there’s little the West itself can do other than make rude faces. This is not the early Cold War, when it was possible to imagine Stalin’s regime falling, either from internal conflict or as a result of a war with NATO, and therefore it made a kind of sense to cultivate anti-communist militants. The situation is not remotely similar now. There is no possibility of reinstalling a pro-western government in Kiev, and that’s it. The rest is detail. I suspect that western governments will want to run away from this disaster and forget about it as soon as they can, except for the participants finding ways to excuse themselves and blame each other in their memoirs.
Amen.
«I suspect that western governments will want to run away from this disaster and forget about it as soon as they can»
May it be so! Trump and Kamala will blame each other. But where will VDL run? I’ve heard she has another 5 years left to serve on her sentence…
If you were Putin, you would listen to what Gerasimov et al. tell you, and they will tell you to stay away from Zaprozhizhie city. Going for it sounds like something NATO experts would recommend (the same ones that came up with the Zaprozhizhie “conteroffensive”).
If you want ot engage into map thinking, you need to get some military grade ones, instead of this adult-coloring-book stuff. In war there is no bonus for filling some random surface area with one color, and the ink is made out of real blood.
My guess is that not too many people in Russia, especially the government and military, play the Game of RISK! (Tm). Except for clues to the weakness of Western “thinking.”
You forget your Clausewitz. Military operations are to achieve political ends.
Legally, Putin HAS to secure all of Zaporzhizhia oblast. Putin reaffirmed that all of it and all of Kherson are Russia. He must clear the occupation. That has to be a priority, even if not first on the list.
Russia is moving to retake Kherson City even though militarily that does not make a lot of sense. But it is comparatively low cost.
Sorry for late reply. My Interner provider claims force majeure.
I never forget my Clausewitz, nor Sun Tzu. Taking control of those four regions is not why this war is fought and, even if it was, it would not automatically end when one side takes 100% of them. It’s a sidequest that will be automatically sorted when the main quest is dealth with.
Equally importanat as end and intermediate goals, are non-Pyrrhic ways to achieve them. Military art/craft, and terrain, dictate that Odessa should be taken from the north, Kherson City too (not to mention Mariupol that was done by-the-book). Zaporozhie City is split between two sides of the Dnieper river, and western side should be attacked from the west. Russians won’t do Krinky-style suicidal river crossings.
In addition to that, Russians avoid fighting in big cities, because they don’t want Bakhmut replay on a greater scale. They want to walk into big cities after the enemy army is no longer able to provide significant resistance. My point is that they won’t be going anywhere near Zaporozhie City anytime soon, unless some collapse happens.
My guess is that the SMO goals will not be fully achieved but by the time Galicia joins NATO, the Banderastan will be no more of a threat than the Baltics or Bulgaria. Oblasts that want electricity will vote accordingly in referenda.
Here’s the Art of the Deal:
1) Russia continues to attrite Ukraine
2) General Winter helps
3) Ukraine sues for peace, dressed up as a NATO win:
Hungarian sector in W Ukraine
Polish sector in NW Ukraine
Romanian sector in SW Ukraine
Russia incorporates the four oblasts and possibly Odessa (for itself, for Black Sea littoral and for Transdnistria) into Russia proper and runs a Russian sector everywhere else in central and eastern Ukraine.
Kiev is an international city with matching sectors, pace post WW2 Berlin or Vienna
Conflict is frozen, like West Germany and East
Large Russian reparations, spent almost entirely on Russian sector (where the damage is). Maybe also in Hungarian and Romanian sectors because Russia’s interests lie here.
Reparations to Polish sector will be technically agreed but indefinitely blocked because Poles / Galicians will refuse accompanying de-Nazification measures, population exchanges etc. but Russia will nevertheless send cheap gas to Poland.
Russia is only serious about de-Nazifying Russian oblasts and sector, rump Ukraine is of no concern.
The sectoral powers will sign an eastern European non proliferation / intermediate missile treaty. Maybe NATO signs for a NATO win (Russia withdraws missiles to behind the Urals! Bear defanged!).
I think that for all the reasons Yves and Aurelien, etc., have pointed out, there won’t be a formal ‘deal’, but there will be an ‘outcome’, and what you paint looks like a pretty reasonable one. But I can see a few potential flies in the ointment.
One is what happens if and when the Ukraine military collapses. Its assumed that it will just crumble, but I could foresee a situation whereby it breaks up into potentially very dangerous smaller warlord-led units (i.e. Banderite) that would be perfectly capable of refusing to accept any outcome, and they could seize enough individual cities to make life very difficult for both the Russians and a future weakened Kiev government. Odessa alone is big enough that it could become a sort of city state, nominally part of Ukraine, but effectively run by whoever has the most guns.
The other is internal Russian politics, which could make a ‘reasonable’ outcome such as full control of the four main oblasts impossible. The problem is that even against a very weakened Ukraine, crossing the Dnieper to take Odessa, etc., not to mention the big cities at the crossing points, could be very difficult and enormously destructive. I can’t claim any insights into Russian or Ukrainian internal politics, but it does seem to me that there has been a very strong hardening on both sides. The former fluidity of Russian and Ukrainian identity is dead. People have chosen sides. This makes an ambiguous ‘solution’ nearly impossible. There will only be winners or losers.
I think we are reaching a point where any sort of ‘solution’ is impossible, or at best highly problematic. Geography makes a definitive final border very hard to achieve – it seems to me that its more and more likely that we will see much of Ukraine becoming a sort of fluid conflict zone (as we’ve seen in many parts of Africa, or Afghanistan, or closer to home, parts of the Balkans), which could continue to cause problems for everyone for years or even decades to come. Some regions are condemned by geography, Ukraine increasingly looks like one of them.
The point about the segmentation of Ukraine is interesting. I have been wondering for while what people think will happen in Ukraine win or lose given the hardened military personal, increased weaponry, radicalized nationalism and established mafia/black markets coupled with the oligarchy.
As we see now Ukraine is already willing to punish Hungary and Slovakia economically for not supporting correctly. What will a hypermilitarized mafia-state do to countries that don’t support whatever geopolitical ambitions they (Ukraine) might have in the future?
When it comes to radicalized nationalist and organized crime, they both prefer, nay, need a somewhat working society to exist. So breaking the country into a multiple warlord regions in not in their interest.
I’m no more privy to either Ukrainian or Russian thinking at any level, so can’t claim any expertise here. That said, at the moment I don’t see total Ukrainian military collapse in the cards, and should it happen, absolute majority of the troops would just go home to start building a new life.
If any warlords emerge in that situation, they’re more likely to be from the very corrupted professional general staffers who won’t have any future to return to, but enough loot to pay for loyalty. According to the Rada member Maryana Bazuglaya the “dead souls” scam run by the high echelons of the army is worth $50 million a month.
The remaining neo-nazis have been already concentrated on to few capable brigades and the SBU. The brigades are more likely to choose a hill to die on that go totally rogue – there’s a lot of death cult elements in Banderism. The rest will just dissipate and try to reach Canada.
If one is to believe the former Ukrainian politicians now writing from Russia, the Ukrainian armed forces are in the middle of several internal conflicts:
– Zelensky is about to get rid of Syrsky, who a week ago categorically refused to mount a new massive counteroffensive and instead is building reserves on western bank of Dniepr to form a new line of defense when the front in the east collapses.
– the oligarchs want to get rid of Zelensky, and hope to get Syrsky (and army) on their side to neuter the security forces around the president. That’s why we’ve seen Zelesnky’s supporters (like Bazuglaya) attack Syrky relentlessly blaming him for everything.
– at least 15% of the Ukrainian brigade commanders have been fired recently because they refused to hold positions (or even attack) at any cost, but unlike last year the lower ranks support their commanders as almost all younger officers in the current army are now conscripted civilians, not career military, and have no qualms opposing obviously dumb orders.
I know you keep on top of thing more than most, but despite Russia sticking to its attrition tactics and as far as I can tell, not having added significantly to their forces in eastern Ukraine, Russia advances have picked up markedly (given that they are still often in well-fortified areas) and pretty much entirely across the extended line of contact.
And despite ritual interjections of inevitable Ukraine victory, General Syrskyi in this recent Guardian interview depicts Ukraine as hopelessly outmatched. He’s rumored to be telling Zelensky to negotiate.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/24/i-know-we-will-win-and-how-ukraines-top-general-on-turning-the-tables-against-russia
Thank you.
Indeed, I don’t disagree here at all. In the previous comment I was referring to collapse as “disintegration”, which I don’t see happening. But collapse as “forced, orderly or un-orderly retreat” from Donetsk, maybe even behind Dniepr (between Zaporozhye and Dnipro) I can see as more and more plausible event even before the end of this year.
Hard to say where the line of contact would settle in that case, so I won’t even try. Ukrainian armed forces would still retain coherence and ability to resist, but it would be already the endgame.
I can’t see the Kremlin, or the Russian people, putting up with a semi-permanent running sore on their border. That’s what the SMO was implemented to end. It would make a mockery of all the lives lost. And such an area of ‘fluid conflict’ would be an open invitation to the possible advent of a home made Ukrainian nuclear bomb, among other more minor obscenities.
Russia should think about moonshot/unconventional strategies. The conflict between Russia and the West will continue as long the current incarnation of the US stands as it is. The US is nothing more than a big hedge fund attached to a “country”. The stock market is but a human creation so Russia needs to put its smartest people together and come up with a plan that ends with the decimation of the US stock market. Every other problem listed here will just resolve itself in no time once the US collapses.
Right now, I feel like Russia is fighting in a way that allows Putin to tour Europe one more time before he goes off to the great beyond many years from now. He should understand he will never be welcome again in Europe/Western countries and act appropriately.
Outstanding and clear-eyed summary as usual Yves. Just because we don’t swallow Western propaganda doesn’t mean we delude ourselves into thinking that Russia is running the table*.
The bitter irony is that–with the benefit of hindsight–the ‘white-gloved’ approach may have ended up costing a lot more lives.
Nevertheless:
– We can be thankful for the incredibly low proportion of civilian casualties so far.
– War is unpredictable, and while there were certainly planning failures by Russia, there’s no guarantee that a harsher opener would have ended the war sooner.
– It may be that Russia was effectively incapable of a stronger Plan A for political and military reasons anyway.
* Except on the sanctions/economy front: Russia has done shockingly well there.
The neighbors, mostly but not all NATO allies, would also have an interest in intervention to stabilize a precarious rump Ukraine exhibiting a seriously diminished state capacity. Maybe, Russia gambles on a rump Ukraine choosing a “frozen conflict” on lines that concede Russian claims to the four oblasts plus Crimea.
And, things are allowed to develop from there. In a competition of reconstructions Russia is bound to win if it limits the geographical scope.
I think that puts Russia at serious risk of losing the peace, but the Russians may see it differently. They might expect that tempting the neighbors to make protective claims on humanitarian grounds, natch, would set up the necessary conditions for a “return” to more “normal” state relations. Neoliberalism broken by the temptations of nationalist greed justified as mercy and undermined as post-war austerity fails to match the “generous” support funded by onerous war debt of death and destruction.
The ability of NATO to do anything is much exaggerated plus Aurelien has described in excruciating detail the considerable difficulty that NATO would have operationally and governance-wise in trying to operate as NATO, as opposed to individual states.
Not disputing that it will make a lot of noises and try. But even early on, before the war severely depleted NATO stocks, Colonel Macgregor put the maximum forces a NATO “coalition of the willing” could muster v. Ukraine at 100,000.
And Hungary has said it won’t let NATO forces transit to attack Russia.
I do not think I said anything about an “attack on Russia”.
Some variation of “frozen conflict” may be in Putin’s playbook. If the Russian Federation sticks to its current territorial claim after the Ukrainian state loses the capacity to fight, the Russian advance stops near a well-defined line and a tacit armistice may follow. Russia might have to enforce such a tacit armistice with demonstrations of escalation dominance in a further game of tit-4-tat, but once the kinetic war ceases, things will go from bad to worse inside rump Ukraine. It is not obvious to me that Russia will see any advantage in immediately taking a direct hand (even refraining from sticking an hand into a Russian puppet) especially if NATO has no capacity to intervene. Which, as you say, it may not. An Hungarian humanitarian intervention to protect ethnic Hungarians in a small territory adjacent to Hungary proper is not difficult to imagine. Such an adventure would not please NATO, but it might be seen as a desirable development by Russia, not least because of the damage to NATO.
Gambling on an uncontrolled political implosion following a tacit armistice may seem high-risk. It does to me. But so do the alternatives. I am not sure that the chaos inside Ukraine would permit a quiet period and a cessation of provocative attacks on Russia or things Russian. I am only suggesting that it may be sensible to expect the Russians to grope their way in the near term toward a tacit armistice and a period of “frozen conflict” rather than an occupation of vast hostile territory. Even if the Russians do head in that strategic direction for a time, it may not work out; they may lose the peace on such a tact, but I think they may try it.
Your opening comment was “The neighbors, mostly but not all NATO allies, would also have an interest in intervention to stabilize a precarious rump Ukraine.” NATO is a military alliance. They don’t do nation building. And per NATO being a military organization, and if they saw Ukraine as “precarious”, their tendency would be to use arms in some way to stop Russia from gobbling up more of Ukraine, even if Russia said or even took steps consistent with it being over.
So I saw an attack as implied here by your choice of agent. If you had meant having European states assist the Ukraine government, that would come via the EU, not NATO.
I think Russia is not bothered about an “open sore” on its border, per se. Russia wants a new security architecture for Europe. The old security architecture was built on the zonal occupation of Germany and was destabilised by the reunification of Germany. The new order will be built on the zonal occupation of rump Ukraine (Ukraine minus Novorossiya).
Russia will attrite Ukraine up to the Dnieper below Kiev. It will then wait, if Ukraine falls apart and threatens Europe, or start pushing down from Belarus if Ukraine somehow holds together. I think NATO and EU will see the writing on the wall before these points and offer what Russia wants, the Ukrainian fly trapped in the amber of a newly crystallised European security architecture, in a face-saving way for NATO.
NB: the Ukraine has weird symmetry with Germany. Advanced export industries compared with their neighbours, indefensible flat plains between big rivers running south (north) to an inland sea, the Black Sea (Baltic), sectarian split of Orthodox vs Catholic (Lutheran vs Catholic) etc.
*Sigh*
Did you read the post, or look at a map???
It HAS to cross the Dnieper to secure all of Kherson and all of Zaporzhizhia, including the oblast capitals.
Taking those cities will necessitate securing the Dnieper watershed. Otherwise they will be vulnerable to all sort of nasty actions upstream.
And many other major Ukraine cities straddle the Dnieper, such as Dnipro and Kiev.
Back in 1979, the US instigated a war between the USSR and Afghanistan that would last up until 1989. Rightly or wrongly, the US saw this as the key element leading to the fall of the USSR. It is now doing the same thing with Russia with the same goal. Russia may win the battle but lose the war yet.
The US does not care about Ukraine any more than it cared about Afghanistan. It has no real interest in the conflict beyond it dragging out as long as possible. Ukraine will pay a very high price but so will the countries bordering it, including the EU and Russia. The end result may yet be a break up of both (Western Europe will need a buffer between themselves and Ukraine and Russia may cry uncle upon Putin’s exit) or nuclear volleys.
Furthermore, the US is looking to ignite other tinderboxes on Russia’s border with highl corrupt, pliable governments in Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. For now, Georgia is valiantly resisting thanks to its courageous Prime Minister in defiance of the Western puppet president.
For the US, the gamble is also high stakes. Win or lose, they may end up increasingly isolated, especially in light of their highly discrediting support for the Israeli extermination campaign against the Palestinians.
For now, Russia’s economy is bucking the expectations. Further hot zones on its border may break that as troops would need to be split. The wild card will be China.
The conflict will end when Russia has achieved its must haves as opposed to its would like to have. It also needs to be in a position of holding territories which are least hostile to if not supportive of Russian governance, and which are militarily defensible should the remaining Ukrainian state facilitate (if not outright organise) continued attacks from anti Russian elements on Russian held territory. Ideally it includes a Ukrainian commitment to (and western support for) neutrality and exclusion from NATO membership.
Conversely, I think that admitting what remains as independent Ukraine into NATO will be the only victory the current Ukrainian regime and its Western supporters will be able to achieve. If it happens their will be ongoing military tension with Russia which could potentially escalate at any time.
To me this resolves to a position of Russia taking all territory East of the Dnieper. This is the most defensible frontier which could be achieved, which include the least proportion of unsympathetic/oppositionist Ukrainians in the remaining population.
If this is the end result it means Kharkov will be Russian, but Kherson City, Milolaev and especially Odessa will be painful compromises remaining outside Russian control, although perhaps they can negotiate international city status to protect the pro-Russian population there. Kiev west of Dnieper will also remain under Ukrainian control, although the administrative capital will probably need to move to one of the large West Ukrainian cities.
First, Russia has made clear that Ukraine will not join NATO. That was the reason for this war. Russia will not go wobbly on this goal.
Second, as explained earlier by me in comments, the idea of stopping at the Dnieper is a canard. Many important cities straddle the Dniper, starting with Kherson, Zaporzhizhia, and Kiev. And we also explained, when Russia takes Kherson and Zaporzhizhia, that will necessitate eventually controlling the entire Dnieper river basin. They have to control upstream bridges and prevent sewage dumping.
Mercouris gave Yves’ posting high praise, which this piece merits.
That said, it may be worth considering:
1. That RF already views the war easier to manage & maintain than any foreseeable peace, and is therefore content stay with the slow grind for as long as UkroNATO counter-productively enables it.
2. RF’s primary concern is no longer UKR, and is focussed on breaking the West, which UKR provides an acceptable instrument for doing. Worst case, some rump of a destroyed West UKR joins NATO; while a chaotic Mad Max UKR that is the toy of NATO but remains outside it is a necessary evil while NATO is being bled out by RF and, as NATO weakens ever further, by NK, Iran, China, et al.
3. RF may consider itself already at war with NATO, and may be planning to confront it directly once UKR is broken as a military force with a politically expendable army and populace. UKR stops being a Western cat’s paw only when the West’s appetite for baiting Russia is broken.
Even annexation of all of UKR would be consistent with the NATO Plan A–which was to give an occupying Russia (“3 days to Kiev) an indigestible Afghanistan/hedge hog, or a variation of the CIA/Gehlenesque post WW2 fascist insurgency.
Perhaps RF have decided to put an end to that by kicking the US’s teeth in.
The NATO angle you suggest does not work for Russia. The reason Russia regards any version of Ukraine entry into NATO as existential is the NATO can put nuclear-capable missiles close to Russia. Medvedev made clear that even rump Ukraine in NATO is a non-starter, and NATO insisting that whatever Ukraine survives the war will enter NATO = “then there must be no remaining Ukraine” to Russia.
There is one scenario where Ukraine in NATO would be acceptable to Russia: Ukraine in NATO, Russia in NATO, Belarus in NATO, US, Canada, and maybe UK expelled from NATO, and possibly, China and Iran in NATO. Obviously, not a serious suggestion, but given how crazy things have been, who knows?
Yves, my point was not that RF would find a rump UKR acceptable (they wouldn’t), but that a Mad Max UKR *outside* NATO is a negative outcome only slightly less unpalatable than this.
The deeper problem is UKR as a proxy. The SMO has shown that *non-NATO* proxies are arguably more damaging to RF than NATO countries themselves are, at least in a direct sense, insofar as they give NATO a platform for launching free shots on Russia.
The NATO proxy problem in UKR and elsewhere only really ends if NATO loses its appetite for confrontation w/ Russia, which might only happen after direct confrontation.
As for nukes, is Galicia closer to Russia than Romania, Finland or the Baltics? I think not. What makes nukes in Galicia more concerning is not distance but factions within it fanatical enough to see themselves destroyed as the price of launching a nuke on Russia.
Confrontation with Russia is NATO’s raison d’etre. It will not give that up. European leaders not only continue to hyperventilate about Russia despite NATO weapons being bled dry but are desperately seeing how to rearm. Ray McGovern has suggested they may like military Keynesianism as an excuse to break EU fiscal rules and/or implement Eurobonds.
Aurelien has also explained, IIRC taking up nearly all of a 5,000 word post, that NATO served a ton of other functions for member states, both socially (getting closer to the US, yuk) and administratively, and that was why it did not fold up or have a reduced role after the USSR fell.
Thanks for the well-reasoned response. Agreed on NATO’s raison d’être. Arguably, on a Clausewitzean view, RF can’t accomplish its political ends in UKR without backing NATO down. Putin and his administration may be so habituated to Cold War skullduggery from WW2 onwards that they are prepared to accept continued NATO aggression below a certain threshold.
Where this clearly differs from Cold War is the very nearly direct confrontation of NATO w/ RF forces, not seen since the Korean War. NATO is clearly committing acts of war against Russia proper. But NATO countries are also seeing direct impacts–including economic damage–that the Cold War’s military Keynesianism (AKA the Keynesianism with the lowest multiplier effect) does not come close to offsetting.
This might in itself be sufficient to peel off Hungary, Slovakia and Turkey (but conceivably also a Trumpian US & Nordstream-exposed Germany & nationalist France) from NATO, since war w/ Russia also seems to entail a catastrophic economic war with China.
But Russia is already very much at war, and I think plausibly considers itself at war with the West. So there is also the outside chance that once the politically expendable UKR army is fully neutralized, Russia may confront NATO directly, for example demanding withdrawal of all foreign forces from NATO-country bases beyond pre-1991 borders. This might begin with a Cuban-missile-crisis style ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Aegis Ashore complexes from Poland and Romania.
Over the next 2 years Russia will have achieved its greatest military power short of full-scale war mobilization, is already socially & industrially mobilized. Meanwhile the West has never been weaker, less resilient and more confused. If Russia determines that continued NATO aggression is intolerable, the hour may be approaching for them to act on it.
I think the only condition, other than my joke suggestion below, where even rump Ukraine might be acceptable to Russia is when Germany, France, Turkiye, and italy are allies or at least dependencies of Russia, ie when NATO is as hopelessly shattered as Napoleonic Empire and Russia is where it was in 1815. That won’t happen within next decade or two, I think.
Sorry for being late to comment. Am I somehow dumb, or is your math a little off? 11 soldiers per 1000 population would mean 220 k soldiers for 20 mil population. That does not seem beyond reach, when even Ukrainian talking heads have hinted at around 700 k Russian force. I have actually not considered taking the whole of Ukraine a possibility, but with that kind of math it seems at least possible, if maybe not quite preferable. Then again, if you CAN do that — it means you can let others know you can, and have quite a bargaining chip.