Category: Russia and Eastern Europe Page 5 of 17

Well. Maybe hitting the Crimean bridge was less smart than it seemed.

There are two possibilities here:

It’s a tit-for-tat. “You hit our key infrastructure, we’ll hit yours and we can hit harder.” If so, it’s actually a warning from Russia to end the escalation here.

It’s “gloves off” time. Russia has been very restrained going after power and water and sewage. Power is still on in Ukraine, they even kept shipping them gas. (Far more restrained than the US in Gulf I and II, by the way.) For Americans, think of this as “the heavy hand of war.”

If it’s the second, then what happens is another huge refugee wave to Europe. I’d expect it to be even larger than the last one, over ten million. This weakens Ukraine, damages Europe and warns NATO of the consequences of not keeping Ukraine on a leash. It may also lead to further Ukrainian and “Ukrainian” attack on Russian infrastructure, leading to a cycle of escalation.

I don’t know which it is. A lot of powerful people and a large part of the Russian population have wanted “gloves off” for a long time, and there’s a strong military case for doing so, though Russia wants to do it only when it seems justified, mostly because China is uneasy about escalation, and Russia needs China.

(This is also clearly a war crime as well as a tragedy, but it’s the sort of war crime which has become routine over the past 20+ years.)

We’ll see.

(Addendum: some indications Belarus is moving troops to the border.)

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Decided a little more needed to be added to the post, but email went out just before I added it, so I’m putting it here.

Addendum:

Let’s lay it out.

First: the next while belongs to Ukraine. They have the initiative and new Russian troops will take time to arrive.

Second: Russia is almost certainly mobilizing more than 300K troops, the bill allowed for one million. The more they mobilize the more training time will be required; not just because there are more troops but because they are reaching deeper into reserves to people who have been out for longer.

Third: When enough of those troops reach the front, Russia will stop their territorial losses and go back on the offensive. The more Russia mobilizes, the stronger the offensive. If they go up to a million, they will have about 2:1 when added to current troops in Ukraine.

Four: Russia is not fighting just Ukraine. If it was, it would win. It is fighting Ukraine + NATO, and it’s clear that means that NATO officers are doing the majority of the planning and we now know that there are some NATO troops on the ground, we will find out there were more, and that a lot of volunteers were “volunteers.”

Five: Western propaganda has included a lot of declarations that the end-goal is regime change, recapturing Crimea and even breaking up Russia. It has been declared, over and over again, that there will be no negotiated peace with Putin. This means the Russians regard this war as existential.

Six: what Putin said was “all methods” not tac-nukes, that includes things like level bombing, taking out Ukrainian infrastructure (remember, power, water and sewage are on in most of Ukraine and Putin could turn them off tomorrow.) Tac-nukes are part of all-methods, but unlikely to be the first thing reached for. They will be used if necessary to defend Russian territory, which to Moscow includes the Oblasts that recently were declared part of Russia.

Seven: OPEC cutting oil production is, in fact, helpful to Russia. Understand clearly that outside the West and our client states like Japan, Korea and Taiwan, most of the world is not cheering for NATO to win, because for good reason they hate and fear Europe and the US far more than they do Russia.

Eight: The only country which has sufficient leverage over the Russians to force and end to the war is China. However China does not want Russia to lose the war, for their to be regime change, and so on. Russia is their satrapy, their junior ally and absolutely necessary to their security. A regime friendly to them must stay in power. With Russia China can survive a western naval blockade, without it China cannot. It is that simple.

Nine: there is nothing that Russia absolutely must have that it cannot get from China and India. They cannot be choked out economically without those two nations cooperation (though really, it’s about China) and China in particular will not cooperate, though it may make mealy mouthed statements as if it is.

Ten: Europe is suffering more from sanctions than Russia is: significantly more.

Eleven: However bad this war has been, it can be a lot worse. It hasn’t even reached Iraq war levels of destruction of infrastructure, for example, as pointed out in six.

Twelve: the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged so Europe in general and Germany in particular would have less reason to press for peace, especially as the winter makes clear how much they need Russian natural gas. It was done to keep the war going, and to help de-industrialize Germany and Europe so that America can maintain its hegemony.

Thirteen: because the Russians now see this war as existential, they will mobilize as much as they need to. If that is millions of men, it’s millions of men. Though there is clearly some resistance to mobilization, it is unlikely to be enough to stop it, and the more the West threatens to break up Russsia and so on, the less resistance there will be. Russia has traditionally been willing to bear huge losses in what it considers existential wars.

Fourteen: The war will go on until one side or another is actually defeated. That may be economic defeat, political defeat or military defeat, though they tend to go together.

Fifteen: peace can only be made in two ways: crushing your enemies entirely, or negotiating. You can’t make peace with your friends, only with your enemies.

Bonus Point: Kennedy negotiated because Russia then, and now, has enough nukes to end the world. Also the crisis was caused because the US put nukes in Turkey.

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Putin has called up 300K Russian reservists. These are people who had military service, but unlike the National Guard in the US or other similar reserve forces they do not attend regular training.

I’m seeing both reports of Russian men fleeing the country and of volunteers not in the call-up reporting. Bear in mind that Russia has somewhat more than 2 million reservists, this is a little over one-seventh of the men they can call up.  The quality of these forces will be low, but they aren’t raw recruits.

Russia’s primary liability in the war is that they’ve been fight about about 1:3 odds. This will make it so they’re fight at about 5:6 or thereabouts (it’s a little unclear how many many both sides have right now.) The recent loss happened because Russia didn’t have enough money to hold lines, so Ukraine was able to punch through, and Russia also didn’t have enough mobile reserves to counter-attack. These facts are indisputable at this point.

Even low training troops can hold ground. It is a military maxim that the main difference low training (as opposed to no training makes is in the ability to move. Low training troops tend to fight well enough, but they can’t move under fire. This is why Ukraine sends its raw conscripts to die in trenches under artillery bombardment and why western “volunteers” appear to have been the spearhead of the recent counter-offensive.

So the effect of this should be to make it much harder for any Ukrainian counter-offensives to work. They are less likely to break through, and with trained troops not being used to hold ground, there will both be more men in reserve forces to stop any counter-attacks and more trained men for Russia’s own offensives.

Russia will  have to go to partial war footing to keep these men supplied, which is something Putin was trying to avoid, and there will be more death-notices to families who though their men’s time in the military was over. Russia has the world’s second largest arms industry after the US, so don’t expect that they can’t supply their forces, though there may be “last 100 mile” challenges. High end computer chips are not needed for most of what the Russian military will want (and which can be built on this time scale) and China can supply a great deal of what Russia needs even without sending arms.

The West will now need to decide whether to partially move to a war economy and whether to send even more high-end equipment to Ukraine (which will have to, in many cases, be operated by “volunteers” if it is to be fully effective. However, ramp-up times for a lot of what the West has been sending are long, and in many cases will take a year or two to go into effect, so how much can be done is unclear.

That said, one possibility is to simply play for time and do the ramp up. Keep Russian advances slow, make sure there is no negotiated settlement and try and use the Western material advantage to offset Russia’s manpower advantage. Give it a couple years and a ton of material can flood into Ukraine, more than Russia can keep up with unless China decides to fully support them.

(This is a simulation of how the NATO analysts and officers who are actually running the Ukrainian strategy are probably thinking.)

We’ll see how this plays out, but the Russians were never as bad as Western propaganda claimed and the Ukrainians never supermen. Ukraine had a 3:1 manpower advantage and was still losing ground. They had two wins: Kiev and the recent counter-offensive, but have still lost about 20% of the country. And bear in mind that most Ukrainian troops are now barely trained conscripts, they aren’t any better and maybe slightly worse than the Russian reservists.

So, the West will have to send more gear, but there’s only so much they can send and ramping up production of the fancy stuff will take longer than it takes for Russia to get these new troops to the front. That means that Russia needs to make gains during that gap and end the war before the Western production advantage can come to bear.

This winter will be key: ground will be hard, many rivers are likely to be frozen and both armies will be able to move swiftly. If Russia wants to win the war by taking enough ground to force a peace, they need to do much of it in this winter.

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So, Ukraine has had its second significant success in the war, launching a successful counter-offensive which took the important logistical center Izyum. The counter-offensive worked because the Russians didn’t have enough troops defending AND didn’t have reserves for a counter-attack (which could have turned the Ukrainian attack into a fiasco.) The Ukrainian attack was well-telegraphed in advance, and there are very consistent reports of there being a LOT of foreign fighters. The actual area taken is less than the size of Rhode Island, it doesn’t have to be a war-determining catastrophe, but it shouldn’t have happened.

There are two military issues here for the Russians. The first is that the command doesn’t seem to have anticipated this, despite it being known in advance. Certain Generals need to be relieved.

But the second is one which has been known for a long time and which has exercised Russian observers: Russia attacked at 1:3 local odds and for the entire “operation” has been fighting with less troops than the Ukrainian side. Without “mass” they have had to engage in slow attrition warfare, without breakthroughs or significant envelopements.

This is something I haven’t understood, because Putin’s political calculus about the war is fairly simple, as I’ve said before. His actual opposition is to his right, and if he loses the war, he will almost certainly lose power. If he loses power, he’ll probably wind up dead, and so will his family. He can’t afford to lose this war.

Russia, even without full mobilization, has a much larger military than Ukraine, and no, it isn’t all crap. (Besides, as Stalin observed “quantity has a quality of its own.” Even third echelon units, in sufficient numbers, would have been sufficient to stop this counter-attack.)

So, what I’ve said since the beginning is “Putin has to win this war or he will probably wind up dead, and he has the resources to do so, so he will win the war.” This logic is good and I still think it’s accurate, but it has been contradicted by the fact that Putin wasn’t using the resources. One reason might be that the Russian military beyond this 200K force is so bad and under-equipped it’s essentially paper only, but I’ve never found that convincing.

What appears to be the case, on further investigation, is that domestic political considerations are the problem. Again, Putin’s opposition is his right. There is no liberal or left wing opposition of significance. The people who will replace Putin are the ones who have been saying that Putin should use much more of the military and “take off the gloves.” Understand that power and water is still on in Ukraine, and Russia could “bomb it off” tomorrow if it wanted to, along with taking out most of the core rail and road infrastructure.

If Putin uses more troops, he essentially gives weapons to his opposition. Even without general mobilization, when those troops go to war, the careful control over who has what weapons at all times goes away. Weapons will wind up in the hands of the right wing opposition, and will stay there after the war, and that appears to be what concerns Putin.

This is the strongman’s dance, and indicates more weakness in Putin’s position than I had realized was the case. Putin, in the Russian context is a moderate (not a liberal, which is what that would mean in the West, but a moderate). He played a cautious game thru his entire tenure as leader, trying to avoid a final rift with the West.

But the time of the moderate is done in Russia. The liberals have fled to the West or been completely dis-empowered by this war. Russia is now firmly anti-West, games can be played with sanctions, but even after the war, unless Russia loses in a way that allows the West to put its own government(s) in charge, there will be no long-term resumption of trade, but a titration off. China and the 2nd and 3rd world (BRICS, Africa, etc…) are Russia’s future, and Russia is at best a locked-in Junior Ally to China and arguably a powerful satrapy.

Russia has chosen or been forced to choose its side in the upcoming cold war and struggle for world supremacy: it’s on China’s side.

This means that the day of the moderate is all but over. There’s no need or reason to play moderate games with the West and try and balance the West vs. China any more. It’s cold war (and almost hot) and the people who recognize that are likely to take power after Putin. Putin appears unwilling to take on the right wing mantle

The question for Putin is if he can take on the mantle, or how the transition occurs: does he or at least his family get out alive, with their assets intact, or do they wind up dead and/or lose their wealth? Putin, even though he politically disagreed with Yeltsin, made sure that Yeltsin’s family was kept safe, but if Putin can’t be sure that his successor will do that for him.

A good bell-weather here is Dimitry Medvedev, the man who Putin chose as President when he had to step aside for one term. Medvedev has gone full right wing, one of the most rabid warmongers in Russian politics, but he was considered a moderate and near-liberal before. He sees where the future is, and knows whose support he needs.

So Putin has a problem: if he loses the war in Russian perception he loses power and probably his life. A stab-in-the-back narrative (not, actually, unjustified, in this case) will be used by his domestic opposition to take him out. He had hoped to win the war using the minimum number of troops possible in order to not empower his internal opposition and give their followers weapons, but it may be that’s not possible.

If he wants to stick to the current force structure of only about 200K men, I’d guess he has about 2 months to show that this counter-offensive didn’t matter: it was just one of those things that happens. If by then Russia isn’t clearly back on its front foot, I’d say he’s at genuine risk, because he’s losing the army’s political support and it’s not clear the secret police will back him because winning this war is genuinely in Russia’s interest: if it loses or is seen to lose the hit to its prestige and perceived power will be massive and its position with China will definitely be “satrapy” not “junior ally.”

Understand that winter is actually the best time to advance in Ukraine, for both sides: the ground is solid, the rivers may well be frozen.

We’ll see in the next few days what Putin decides to do: try and finesse it out with the current force structure, or send in more troops and resources. But this is, for him, a genuine problem and shows that his personal interests have now diverged from those of Russia itself. That’s not a good position for him to be in and I suspect the best path forward for him might be to let loose the military, win the war, and negotiate a safe retirement with his domestic opposition, since it’s better for them if he goes peaceful into that good political night.

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