Summary
Stavo scrivendo un articolo sulla situazione attuale in Ucraina, ma documentandolo ho trovato questo “pezzo” di Andrew Tanner, che era praticamente uguale ma molto meglio scritto e argomentato. Quindi, anche per dimostrare che non sono il solo a pensarla così, posto direttamente lui.
Ovviamente ci sono punti di discordanza, ma mi pare una cosa naturale. Per esempio Tanner lamenta la mancata consegna di materiali occidentali all’Ucraina, e io mi limito a constatare che non si può consegnare ciò che non si possiede (come i mezzi del genio), mentre se anche avessimo consegnato i nostri stessi carri armati francamente non credo che le cose sarebbero andate molto diversamente questa estate. Ma complessivamente sui risultati concordo quasi su tutto.
Il pezzo è piuttosto lungo, ma direi che la prima parte sia quella fondamentale mentre il resto sono dettagli per chi è tecnicamente più interessato e/o preparato. Ricordo a tutti quelli che litigano con l’inglese che esiste il traduttore automatico.
Ukraine War: The Third Phase
Kyiv is signaling the start of a new - and hopefully final - phase of the conflict.
ANDREW TANNER
DEC 4
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I agree with Zelensky’s recent comments: Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine has gone through two distinct phases since February 2022.
In the first, Moscow was on the march despite suffering astonishing losses, Kyiv parrying every attack it could in a resistance that was nothing short of remarkable, putting paid to nearly every major expert analysis going in. Though Ukraine’s allies criminally failed to deter Putin and only made preparations to support an insurgent campaign, slowly modern arms began to enter Ukrainian inventories. While most of the firepower Kyiv already had on hand throughout the spring was responsible for stopping the onslaught, when Moscow’s unprepared forces finally began to get organized in June long-range artillery systems became Ukraine’s most potent counter.
Artillery superiority enabled Ukraine to launch a series of counterattacks during the second half of 2022 that built upon the repulsion of Moscow’s invasion of the north. Most of Kharkiv and Kherson were liberated in large part thanks to Putin’s forces literally running out of troops and being unable to cover the long frontline. With the withdrawal of Moscow’s over-extended forces across the Dnipro a year ago and the partial mobilization ordered to draw on Moscow’s deep well of reserves, this vulnerability began to fade.
In the second phase of the war, Ukraine withstood Moscow’s bombardment of its energy infrastructure and absorbed the first tranche of modern frontline gear donated from partners abroad. Putin, unwilling to bide his time, sacked the competent commander Surovikin who had salvaged the battlefield situation and ordered his forces to advance as soon as the winter freeze deepened. Relying on the Wagner private military group and waves of ill-prepared disposable soldiers, all Moscow was able to achieve was the blood-drenched conquest of Bakhmut, a technical win that did nothing more than place its forces in a trap that is still bleeding them.
Failure to blunt Ukraine’s upcoming counteroffensive by striking first was, thankfully for Putin, matched by Ukraine’s partners failing to give Ukraine more than a third of the modern gear it asked for. Training of Ukrainian forces by foreign partners failed to understand the reality of the drone-dominated battlefield of today and despite the longstanding reliance by the Soviets of old and Putin’s ruscist horde of today on mines, Ukraine was not given enough mine-clearing gear. Similarly, even though ruscist electronic warfare has been one of its few areas of strength, Ukraine has not been equipped with enough EW assets of its own. The story is the same with air power, where Ukraine only lacks modern capabilities because it took a year and a half to begin training pilots, despite the efforts of the late “Juice” and other Ukrainian aviators to prove their need.
Thanks to the combination of Moscow growing stronger in the field - at the cost of the bulk of its reserves of military gear, with early Cold War vintages appearing often now - and Ukraine’s partners not coming to grips with the necessity of sacrificing their own short-term ability to repel an invasion of NATO territory to make sure one is never possible at all, the summer counteroffensive fell far short of hopes. Yet vital victories were won on multiple fronts - here’s a partial list:
The Black Sea blockade was broken, and most of Moscow’s fleet forced to fleet its main base, Sevastopol, after several losing ships to missile and drone strikes.
Ukraine pierced the Surovikin Line, giving it a jumping off point for further progress towards the Azov coast and/or flanking neighboring portions.
The Velyka Novosilka wedge was eliminated, eradicating the last real hope Moscow had of striking the flank of Ukraine’s defense lines in Donbas.
Heights south of Bakhmut were reclaimed, leaving the ruins in a partial pocket with its supply lines vulnerable to drone attack and possibly a new offensive.
Ukraine held the line everywhere else despite almost constant attacks by ruscist forces on the Kupiansk, Lyman, Vuhledar, and Avdiivka fronts.
The third phase of the war will be about leveraging key ruscist military weaknesses against it to force a major portion of the front line to collapse. The Kherson-Crimea front appears to have become the strategic focal point of the entire war because of the political importance Putin has placed on it. If Ukraine is able to even secure a beachehad on Crimea the door opens to an apocalyptic political crisis in Moscow. No one doubts that Putin has staked everything on holding Crimea, and if Ukraine can demonstrate that its fall is inevitable in time the incredible cost in blood and material Moscow is paying to sustain Putin’s imperial war will be proven a waste in terms that even ruscists can’t deny.
A recent media report has it that Ukraine’s military commander Zaluzhnyi told his counterpart Lloyd Austin during a visit that Ukraine needs up to $400 billion in support and 17 million shells to fully liberate the lands Moscow has occupied. If forced to physically liberate all of Donbas in a years-long grind, this is absolutely what it would cost because Ukraine would be required to neutralize all of Moscow’s military spending for the upcoming year - in the ballpark of $150 billion - then do it again in 2025. However, control over Donbas becomes dramatically less important for Moscow if Crimea falls. It will suddenly have to worry about the security of the Black Sea coast and perhaps even the stability of the restive Caucasus region - this will bring Putin to his knees.
This is what makes the ongoing effort to control both banks of the Dnipro so important to Ukraine. A hard battle is clearly unfolding there, and in the coming month Ukraine’s ability to expand its bridgeheads will be tested. A BBC report that unfortunately lacks vital context nevertheless reveals the situation that many Ukrainian troops face trying to maintain their positions over the river.
Over the past month the media coverage of the Ukraine War has turned very grim. This was to be expected and is in a sense healthy: the failure of the summer campaign to bring a quick and decisive victory hurts. It means more blood, sweat, toil and tears for everyone. While some voices, particularly in the US, appear entirely content to have the fighting last indefinitely - it gives many of them a reason to appear in the news, after all - I doubt there is more than a handful of Ukrainians who don’t want this to simply be over.
And if it were a normal conflict, some battle between leaders over some border territory, then it wouldn’t be worth fighting at all. But Putin has made it clear that his long-term aim is to destroy Ukraine and fight NATO. This isn’t a war that anyone sane ever wanted - watching a real-life enactment of Tom Clancy and Larry Bird’s Red Storm Rising is a lot less thrilling than you might imagine. I look forward to never having cause to bear witness to some poor dude getting blown up by a grenade a drone dropped into his lap.
Putin is either stopped in Ukraine - or Finland, Estonia, Poland, or some other country whose invasion would - at least in theory - trigger a war between NATO and Moscow that almost has to go nuclear for either side to win. There are costs that have to be paid now, no matter how horrible, to prevent something worse down the line. Sometimes, countries effectively go mad. Until none have sufficient power to threaten any other with annihilation, terrible wars will continue to happen.
Ukrainians are understandably frustrated by the war not ending in 2023, especially knowing that it could have if Kyiv’s allies were properly realistic about what victory means - and why it is necessary. But a collapse in expectations is often a healthy thing: it’s what produces the drive for new approaches and innovative solutions.
I’ll come back to this idea in the third part. For the present, I’ll go over what has happened on the ground.
The Active Fronts
During winter, fronts are likely to switch between periods of higher and lower intensity fighting thanks to the weather. Both sides are using periods of limited visibility to resupply, reinforce, and rotate forces while the risk of drone observation and attack is reduced. Infiltration is also attempted in bad weather, though these days most soldiers want drone support to keep an eye out for ambushes.
Avdiivka is the hottest front of all at the moment, with the crisis there continuing over the past week and Ukraine sending at least one more brigade from the Orihiv front to reinforce the defense along with at least detachments from the 67th Mechanized Brigade. Just like last week, the ruscist attacks have focused on breaching the Ukrainian line north of the Avdiivka Coke Plant (the fuel, not the drink), an industrial park that anchors the northern flank of the defense.
General situation around Avdiivka as of early December, as well as apparent ruscist goals and possible Ukrainian counters.
The village of Stepove has been the site of intense battles, ruscist forces apparently seeing a better chance of cutting Avdiivka off by driving around the coke plant instead of punching straight through. The facility apparently has underground tunnels large enough to hide Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, with one entrance targeted recently but not destroyed by a ruscist precision attack. That means seizing it will be tough, though in the past Moscow has managed to reduce complex terrain by leveling it with air strikes then carpeting it with incendiaries that can burn the oxygen anyone sheltering in the rubble needs to draw breath.
Efforts to drive around the plant may not pan out, however. Ruscist forces are back to launching infantry waves led by disposables to tire out Ukrainian defenders and reveal their positions. Better troops follow up, backed by armored vehicles. Where they have any success, usually by advancing a tree line or two, the survivors dig in as fast as they can and rely on fire support to break up Ukrainian counterattacks.
Costly as these tactics are, they do have the effect of forcing Ukraine to commit substantial numbers of troops close to the front line at all times. And counterattacks run into the same trouble as any other attempts to dislodge an enemy force of any size from a position: drones and artillery strikes. The net effect is an ability to move the front lines a kilometer or two each week, and over time this does let Moscow create area-level emergencies like Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
Overall, Moscow’s badly diminished military capabilities are on full display during the Avdiivka Offensive - this is essentially a repeat of Bakhmut on a smaller scale. There is logic to attacking Avdiivka like this, as it is a suburb of occupied Donetsk City, with the front lines in 2022 running along the edge of the former international airport, the site of intense battles back in 2014. As a teaching assistant during grad school I showed students a fair few non-graphic videos published online from this area, not knowing that they were only a taste of what was to come. A reminder, if any policymakers out there are listening, that these sorts of conflicts have to be resolved sooner rather than later. I can’t help but wonder where my Ukrainian colleagues are today.
As to the immediate future of the fighting for Avdiivka, I’m still inclined to think that Ukraine will stabilize the situation and probably mount a local counterattack along the northern flank of the ruscist push when the ground freezes hard and Moscow’s own efforts have petered out. The timing on these sorts of things is always the real trick to success, but the appearance of the 116th Mechanized Brigade alongside the 31st, which showed up at least a week prior, as well as at least part of the highly experienced 67th indicates rising Ukrainian combat potential in this area.
Some soldiers with the 67th working with a Bradley from the 47th published a nice documentary short of one attack in the area. Mostly non-graphic (corpses don’t appear until about 1:30), the first minute or so offers an excellent view into what frontline assault operations are like - and the mud, the clinging, sticky mud!
Ukrainian troops assaulting a ruscist position between the Avdiivka Coke Plant and Stepove.
If Moscow can close the ring around Avdiivka, Ukraine will be forced to mount a major counterattack whether ready or not to save its troops despite the likely costs. As was the case in Bakhmut, Ukraine will almost certainly hold the area unless and until Moscow executes a block-by-block ground push through the town itself. The prospects for inflicting many multiples of the casualties Ukraine will suffer are high.
Speaking of Bakhmut, over the past week it too has become more active. Ruscist forces are trying to punch south from it towards the heights between Klischchiivka and Andriivka that several Ukrainian brigades seized this summer. So far they haven’t had substantial success, but Ukrainian efforts to move forward have mostly halted.
Here the weather is reported to be very bad; farther from the coast than Orihiv conditions likely resemble those in Avdiivka. Mud allegedly makes minefields more visible, but wheeled vehicles have a hard time moving around and both sides rely on these to sustain their logistics.
Ongoing attacks at multiple points along the Donbas stretch of the front line as well as pushes towards Kupiansk and Lyman in the north as the ground hardens are Putin’s probable minimum goals this winter. The Orihiv front, which remains mostly static despite constant ruscist efforts to advance over the past week, might also see waves of attacks as Putin seeks anything he can spin as a win.
On the ground, the best hopes for Ukraine’s counteroffensive work over winter reside with the evolving fight along the lower Dnipro. The Krynky bridgehead alone is now reported to continuously host up to 400 marines from one of Ukraine’s four Marine Corps brigades, and Moscow is doing whatever it can to throw them back from the village, if not across the river entirely. So far these efforts have not been successful, though at present all the various bridgeheads seem to be largely contained.
For Moscow, however, contained is not good enough. Armored vehicles can often swim across water bodies, and there are enough trees along the Dnipro to create good hides. Their potential lies in supporting rapid movement if and when ruscist forces at the perimeter are paralyzed or too weak to intervene. An explosive charge just a short distance south of Ukraine’s present positions would cut off a key supply route supporting ruscist positions downriver.
Again, rapid movement is unlikely, and Moscow is going to assemble a lot of firepower to throw the Marines back. But if Ukraine does better in the fire support struggle, this could become another personnel sink for Moscow in a hurry.
Attacking Under Total Surveillance
One of the most difficult aspects of modern warfare for most people to grasp is just how difficult it is to achieve anything resembling surprise. To win a fight requires having more effective combat power than your opponent. Traditionally, you physically mass assets so that once you secure a geographic advantage of any kind you can translate that into a broken enemy front and an opportunity to disrupt their operations well behind the lines. Ideally, they aren’t able to recover, or if they do it’s at a line much farther away from their starting point.
Military professionals talk about surprise, mass, momentum, and exploitation to describe this basic process. From a systems point of view, they’re creating a power mismatch at one scale that unravels a higher-order level of organization. If the collapse you induce in your opponent is sharp and severe enough, the effects can cascade.
If you can’t create surprise or generate mass, you aren’t building momentum or exploiting any breach created. With time to recover and adjust, the enemy can use the fact that you’ve revealed your intentions by committing combat power against you, sowing minefields and laying traps that do disproportionate damage to the attacker. Done right, a successful elastic defense can pull the attacker into a trap, creating the conditions for a rapid spring through their disorganized ranks.
Surprise is generated by the enemy not realizing how vulnerable they are until it’s too late. This involves smashing exposed forces faster than they can cope and playing havoc with their ability to see the battlespace.
Drones, networks, and precision weapons have made virtually any movement bloody and difficult. Attacking enemy positions has always entailed suppressing them with firepower before sending people in to seize ground; now, the number of firing points that can intervene in a fight taking place at a specific place has increased exponentially.
The situation is even more complicated because most cameras can detect parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye isn’t sensitive to. Thermal/infrared wavelengths are highly sensitive to temperature, so a human body radiating at 98F while the ground is only 50F will show up like a light bulb on a starless night regardless of the color of their clothing. Below I’ve included a still from a compilation of sniper shots (not sure if they count as graphic), one of which has shows a human near a long abandoned Ukrainian tank.
One casualty meets another.
Even a tank that has been switched off for days or weeks in winter is visible in detail through a good thermal scope thanks to the difference between it and the ground, which heats and cools at a different rate than steel. One actively running will positively glow under the right optics unless covered in thermal protection of some kind.
Visibility in a digital sense is largely a function of contrast, and cameras can combine visual with infrared information to detect decoys, something that will require these to become much more sophisticated in an age when simple image-recognition algorithms have been used in missiles like the Javelin for decades. This world requires markedly different tactics to keep personnel alive as they go about their work than anything NATO countries have so far developed.
To advance without suffering fatalities - which must be the objective of all military operations given the cost of training competent professionals to conduct assault operations (if compassion isn’t sufficient) - now requires that a set of conditions be set before committing to any major movement in an area. The basic idea of a combined arms assault hasn’t changed, only its immediate purpose: you aren’t generating a breakthrough or momentum across space until hostile forces have been sufficiently thinned across a given operational area. Until a break point comes where organized operational maneuvers can take place, fighting at the local/tactical level is everything and entirely focused on inflicting disproportionate attrition.
This needs to happen at multiple points across the front line and not be focused on a single target area, as is more typical in conventional combined arms doctrine. Once a vulnerability is created it will be exploited with maximum aggression, but its location may not be predictable until the enemy is so off-balance after responding to numerous other crises that the opportunity for a killing blow presents.
Whether an attack is conducted on a larger smaller scale has to depend on whether near-total dominance in multiple domains of warfare can be achieved for some duration of time. To advance at all first necessitates taking control of the electromagnetic domain, jamming enemy signals while protecting your own ability to control drones over the battlefield.
Electromagnetic and drone warfare are so closely linked that the two might as well be seen as a distinct new branch of all modern ground forces along with armor, artillery, infantry, and the rest. To operate your own drones demands destroying hostile jammers, which fortunately have to emit signals to interfere with yours and can so be triangulated and struck with artillery or drones. Moscow uses a lot of jammers, from the squad up to the regiment level, so it takes work. You’ve also got to deploy and protect your own jammers, which are needed to stop hostile drones from wreaking havoc.
Direct anti-drone defenses are also necessary, ranging from guns that jam individual drones or even take them over completely to active protection systems that detect and shoot them down. The use of surveillance drones to tell one-way drones what to target shows that incoming attackers, even if small, are always visible far enough away that an AI-assisted weapon, even a shotgun, could cause most to detonate before impacting a target. Shelters are another tool in guarding against drones - most vehicle fighting positions need overhead cover, even a layer of thin branches if you’re an artillery piece mostly facing long-range Lancets.
Only once the electromagnetic domain is reasonably secure can surveillance and attack drones secure low altitude air superiority over a target area. Then short-range artillery like mortars as well as attack drones can hit any obvious fighting position or vehicle while ground-based scout drones test paths through the grey zone to check for minefields and draw fire. Until ground drones are fielded in large numbers, human bodies have to substitute, meaning that they need armored vehicles nearby for fire support and casualty evacuation. Truth be told, even when drones are plentiful they’ll still be closely followed by small groups of infantry backed by two or maybe four armored vehicles, because a place just isn’t secure until a person can physically occupy it.
Naturally, the moment you start shooting at the enemy positions their own artillery will get involved. That’s why assault units will have to be small and dispersed in order to withstand the initial barrages and creep close to the enemy lines. You’ve also got to have substantial heavy artillery, 155mm howitzers, HIMARS or M270 rocket systems, and long-range attack drones to hit the enemy guns when they open up. This in turn means having a large number of counter-battery radars to triangulate firing areas as well as surveillance drones operating at higher altitudes.
So: before you can even get to launching more than localized ground raids it is necessary to first gain signals and then fires superiority. This might have to happen across a fairly large area, too, even dozens of kilometers in length. The goal is to isolate and overwhelm one or more frontline enemy units in their full depth. When they begin to move reinforcements forward, long-range strikes with ballistic and cruise missiles hit transportation nodes, supply points, and command centers.
For the best effect, the geographic area should be as isolated as possible from the bulk of the enemy’s logistics network and have several defined choke points where deep attacks can be concentrated. Sabotage operations are ideal, but greater importance has to be placed on simply collecting information about troop movements which can be used to plan attacks.
But even if and when you are able to get an edge in the signals, artillery, and logistics fight, there is still the sky to worry about. It is highly unlikely that lasting air superiority will ever again be a feature of a conflict between two fully-armed military organizations. It is too easy to threaten air bases and aircraft in flight - even stealthy ones, as AI plus distributes sensors will soon make short work of existing technology - with portable defense systems.
Instead, each side will aim to expand an air denial umbrella as far behind the front as possible, to the point of making it impossible to fly mid-sized drones or crewed aircraft above very low altitudes closer than about 20-25 km to the front and medium to high altitudes out to around 50-60km. This will have to be achieved by deploying a layered air defense network and pairing it with constant fighter patrols, not unlike the system used by the U.S. Navy to protect its carrier battle groups.
Aircraft will likely conduct what amount to aerial jousts, dashing closer to the line to fire weapons at targets in the air or on the ground as opportunity allows. The side with the better situational awareness will tend to prevail more often.
Moscow is reportedly moving its A-50 “Mainstay” AWACS aircraft in position to support Mig-31 and Su-35 air patrols and presently relies on Su-34s to truck in glide bombs whenever Ukrainian forces mass close to the front line. While not very accurate, they still require Ukrainian forces to react and slow them down. Mainstays can interface with the S-400 SAM system, but ruscist pilots are not trained to operate as independently as those in NATO countries.
Ukraine will probably use the first F-16s it fields this spring as radar pickets, using their position in the sky to offset the biggest weakness in long-range ground based air defense systems like the Patriot SAMP/T, or S-400 for that matter: the curvature of the Earth creates a radar shadow past the horizon that technology and networks can only partially offset. The moment that Ukraine has half a dozen F-16s, one or two will probably stay on duty over each Patriot battery 100km behind the front to close the skies to hostiles within 60km of the edge of Ukrainian positions. In terms of Ukraine’s Dnipro campaign, assuming one Patriot battery was emplaced near Mykolaiv and another is - as a recent interview implies - near Odesa, the two could cover each other and most of Ukraine’s coast line. Each would itself be protected by at least one NASAMS or IRIS-T medium range air defense system to create an added layer of protection.
Ukraine is already reportedly using these systems close to the Dnipro to establish an air denial bubble over the bridgeheads which prevents ruscist helicopters or Su-25 jets from coming close enough to fire rockets, a common practice for both sides. Pushing the Patriot battery closer to Kherson as the Dnipro bridgehead expands would extend the air denial bubble to Crimea.
Base image from Liveuamap. Simple comparison of Patriot range using PAC 2 missiles with airborne radar. A no-fly zone for Kherson.
Moscow stopped launching glide bombs against Chernihiv after a Patriot system - likely spotting for S-300 launchers closer to the border, or else Moscow would have produced wreckage and claimed it was hit by NATO weaponry - took down at least two jets and a pair of helicopters flying an electronic warfare mission in support. The same could happen over occupied Kherson as soon as half a squadrons of F-16s arrive.
I would go so far as to say that there is little point in Ukraine going on the offensive anywhere without signals and fires dominance as well as parity in the skies. While the ongoing attrition of ruscist forces is vital, the truth is that were I in Ukraine’s place I would plan to slowly retreat on the Kupiansk and Lyman fronts rather than force troops to hold positions at all costs - and possibly even Avdiivka as well. Crimea is the key to all hopes for a quick end to the war. That’s worth investing in.
Warfare has reached another point where human density is more of an impediment to success than most military professionals - who naturally like to command big formations - presently recognize. It was fascinating to learn that, according to a Washington Post report, my evaluation that Zaluzhnyi rapidly shifted tactics in June to avoid serious casualties was correct. Ukraine’s allies, particularly in the Pentagon, are failing to see that the “right” way to run combined arms operations has changed. Until a working solution is found, offensive operations need to be limited and focused on inflicting maximum casualties at the lowest cost - even if that sometimes means giving up some ground in the short run.
The Information Struggle
Pointing towards the shifting nature of the new phase of the fight - several strategic attacks of note took place the past week, chief among them the sabotage of two railway tunnels that connect Moscow to its Pacific colonies and Asia. With at than a million artillery rounds shipped in from North Korea and perhaps more on the way, this is a significant blow that will complicate Moscow’s logistics, especially if other attacks of a similar nature are carried out. As a huge empire, Putin’s is also inherently vulnerable to infiltration and sabotage - something Moscow’s leaders have always been paranoid about, making Ukraine’s success highly dangerous.
During the Second World War, the primary impact the allied bombing campaigns against German cities had was to make the civilian population more bound to Hitler. Germany more than offset the loss of productive capacity in a variety of ingenious ways, especially dispersing industries and relying on slave labor working in vast underground factories that were little better than death camps in terms of mortality. Not only this, but the air raids up until 1944 were largely conducted by bombers operating without fighter escorts, leading to atrocious casualty rates among bomber air crews.
The experience of smashing most of France’s infrastructure ahead of D-Day and the consequent inability of German forces to move to destroy the Normandy beachhead before it was consolidated showed the Allies that there was a better way. It was once Allied bombing raids turned to critical infrastructure nodes that all war material requires at multiple stages of its life cycle - bridges, transportation junctions, rail yards - that the German war effort because utterly paralyzed. The collapse of the German war effort in early 1945 was a direct result of six months of bombing that left factories full of war material they couldn’t actually get to the front, much less fuel.
Allied myths about the effectiveness of air power against a broad spectrum of targets have had deleterious consequences on military effectiveness for close to eighty years. After the war, air power boosters bent on having their own branch of the United States Armed forces with an assumption of receiving an equal share of the defense budget passed air strikes off as a cheap way of winning wars that has led to mass civilian casualties with few if any gains - just a lot of hatred abroad. Military professionals and politicians will point to ruins and claim success, but is rubble the proper metric… or just an excuse for a lack of scientific creativity?
Regardless, Ukraine’s efforts to hit Muscovite pressure points is well-developed at this point and a major advantage Kyiv likely has over Putin going forward. Particularly as disgruntled military families realize the cost and futility of the conflict, Kyiv will find increasing numbers of sympathizers motivated by the idea that they can be free from Moscow’s corrupt rule once Putin falls.
And in this kind of war, pressure must be applied at every possible point. Ukraine’s moment for rapid and spectacular progress in defiance of all the critics can come again, but the way Ukraine’s backers approach the conflict has to change, both in the magnitude of equipment delivered and how it is used.
Over the past month, media narratives about the Ukraine War have undergone a phase shift. All of a sudden, if you looked only at mainstream and official reports from the English-speaking world, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether Ukraine was losing.
Part of the reason for this is that three information operations are underway. Ukraine’s is the simplest: convince its partners to give it all the aid it requires to win. Virtually every once-inconceivable violation of Putin’s “red lines” has resulted in no meaningful escalation to date. Finally Ukraine is set to receive the full spectrum of military kit, though so far the quantities have not been sufficient.
Ukraine might not have been using a lot of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles of late because it’s running low, or because it’s building up a stockpile. The latter is what I’d do, because in an ideal world Ukraine could hit so many ruscist air defense systems and bases across Crimea at once that Moscow would need months to replace the losses, leaving the peninsula vulnerable to follow-on strikes. Is this planned? Who knows at this stage?
I would have thought it a given that Ukraine be pledged hundreds of Leopard 2s by now, not taking Cold War relic Leopard 1s into service - at least one of which was already disabled by a mine on the northern front. And while “F-16” is used as a shorthand to mean any comparable NATO-standard fighter, including F-18, Gripen, or (less likely) Typhoon, Rafale, or F-15 jets, the three squadrons’ worth of early models pledged so far could be all that Ukraine gets.
Until the US Congress decides how much money it will deign to offer to Kyiv - if it’s less than $60 billion out of the $850 billion Pentagon budget it’ll be a crime - not much can be said about where it will choose to invest the cash. Germany is stepping up financially, but either the Bundeswehr is literally a paper tiger or it’s holding back a lot of inventory as a hedge against all-out war with Moscow. The same could be said of many NATO countries.
When the US allocates money for Ukraine, what’s really happening is that Congress is authorizing taxpayers to fund contracts that mostly go to US factories to replace stuff the Pentagon ships to Ukraine. There isn’t any chance of corruption because Ukraine is given the value in kind - tanks, jets, bullets, and other stuff American companies still manufacture. So more US support for Ukraine is a win-win, if you consider the lack of having to fight a war in the future at a higher cost a benefit to Americans, as is only proper.
But Biden appears to care about Israel a lot more than he does Ukraine - or, by all appearances American democracy, since the best thing he could possibly do for it is retire, yet refuses to - so much for the man’s alleged humility. Must be where he leaves his famed empathy when Palestinian children are dyng under Israeli bombs. Biden has been unwilling to use the bully pulpit of his position for Ukraine as he ought, and worse, tries to act like Ukraine’s war is the same as Israel’s, which it manifestly is not - Hamas can’t destroy Israel, but Putin can destroy Ukraine.
This, for the record, is why I commit the heresy of not believing that a second Trump term will make much of a difference to Ukraine. By 2025 either the war will be over or Americans will be beyond caring: either way Europe will have to step up to protect Ukraine, just like the Pacific democracies will have to balance China’s ambitions with respect to Taiwan. If the West Coast states or even just Cascadia is part of that, the rest of the world will have to count itself lucky. Considering the USA’s track record I’d say it would be more so, in fact.
In any case, Ukraine’s information war today is the same as it was two years ago: making its so-called allies recognize that there’s only one way out of a fight like this. Kyiv’s partners need to make good on all their rhetoric about democracy and freedom and give Ukraine the tools to secure both. And as a year of promising that Ukraine can win if only it gets enough support only to not receive even half of what Zaluzhnyi said a year ago was required hasn’t done the job, perhaps reminding the world that Ukraine could still lose will reach them.
This explains the generally grim turn in the Ukrainian press of late. The media reliably over-states the impact of any given event, and is drawn to drama like one of our cats is catnip. A divide between Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi is reported, sparking all kinds of rumors about the different players and their political goals.
I see Ukraine’s government as feeding this in the interests of giving the natural discontent with the way the counteroffensive went this summer an outlet. In fact, the political and military arms of any government should be at odds on a whole variety of issues: this is what a healthy democratic system looks like. The alternative is the groupthink that dominates the American Beltway establishment from top to bottom, creating a mutant sub-society that sees itself as the rightful guardians of all matters related to security.
No country that has gone through a struggle like Ukraine’s will be without some level of internal strife. And since the US media about a month ago started looking for scapegoats other than Joe Biden to blame for the Ukraine War dragging on, it was inevitable that Ukraine would draw Beltway fire. So I assess that Ukraine’s leaders are letting this play out, using it as cover to push through necessary reforms in the war effort.
The danger, of course, is that Ukraine’s narrative about being in real danger if its allies don’t get their act together - correct as it may be - can easily be conflated with the information op the Americans are running. This, exemplified by a notable shift in media focus to the horrors of war and feeding rumors about divides in Ukraine’s leadership, is part of the slow-burn effort to freeze the war that got underway before the all-out invasion even began.
It is possible that this could snowball into a new conventional wisdom among the Very Smart People who set media trends that Ukraine has to negotiate because Moscow is too strong. Never mind that many outlets would have decried anyone suggesting this a year and a half ago, now that that scholars in Foreign Affairs and Foreign policy want to act like Ukraine is suddenly in a different position than it was six months ago, the rest of the media talking heads had better join the game.
On the whole, the US media navel gazes too much, over-stating the impacts of its obsessions. But Putin’s own information war is also shifting, embracing many of the exact same talking points as American pundits and politicians on both sides of the partisan divide. His aim is to promote the idea that Ukraine’s government could collapse at any time - and also to encourage Americans to believe that a Trump win in 2024 will be a victory for Putin.
This helps divide Americans, advancing his agenda by tying the entire Republican Party to his ridiculous claim to be looking after the interests of traditional cultures around the world. It’s rank propaganda, but no less lethal for that in a context where most people have lost trust in government in the USA because it keeps promising stuff like victory in Ukraine that it then fails to deliver.
Both the American and ruscist narratives are rooted in an inability to see past the ongoing collapse of the postwar order to something new and different - unless it’s worse, of course. Fear of apocalypse drives them both, and so they bring it upon themselves, powerful people always somehow forgetting that the rest of us don’t need them anyway.
The forecast for the Ukraine War this December is a lot of bloodshed, most of it inconclusive. Ukraine’s goal for winter is to preserve its people, develop new tactics, and get more modern equipment in the field. The counteroffensive isn’t stopping, but it also won’t bring the war to a swift end in its second phase as everyone was hoping.
Instead, a third and likely final stage has commenced: the last because it will either last for a few years before both sides’ military efforts collapse or come to a close sooner because Ukraine was given everything that it needed at last. War is fought across every domain, and weakness in one can undermine efforts in all the rest.
The similarities between the end of 1943 and 2023 are illustrative. Though largely forgotten in triumphant US histories that begin with Pearl Harbor then jump right to D-Day, from mid 1942 to mid 1944 the Allied War effort wasn’t all that spectacular. US forces were mauled at Kassereine against Rommel, then Italy turned into a slow slog that didn’t succeed in reaching the Alps until the war was over. The US lost the bulk of its pre-war fleet, including aircraft carriers, in the struggle for the Solomon Islands. Marines assaults on islands like Tarawa were blood-drenched successes of limited value considering the effect of the carrier and submarine raids that severed most of Japan’s possessions from Tokyo by the end of the fighting.
It took a lot of work to transform the often hapless American military of 1942 into the one that rushed across France in a matter of weeks in 1944. War is adaptation, and the side able to more swiftly and effectively innovate tends to win. And it usually loses fewer lives in the process, too.
Il post soviet ha una storia simile, legata alla protezione che i “nazionalisti” di molte repubbliche sovietiche o invase hanno ricevuto in altre parti d’Europa, cosa che ha aiutato a formare un movimento di ribellione.
