Restating what was said yesterday regarding domestic politics, which also applies everywhere else:
There is a single steadfast rule for being alive right now, and it is:
Do not bet against the dumbest possible outcome.
On a nightly talk show this past week, Vladimir Solovyov, a TV presenter known for his anti-Western polemics who is one of the Kremlin’s top propagandists, quoted Vladimir Putin.
“We’ll go to heaven, and they’ll simply die off.”
The remark that Solovyov repeated was made by Putin in 2018, about nuclear war, in which he said that the people of his country would go to heaven, as martyrs.
Solovyov, was responding to Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, who framed the progress of the war as: “either we lose in Ukraine, or World War Three starts.” She went on to say, “I personally think that World War Three is more realistic, because knowing us and our leader Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the most improbable outcome – a nuclear strike – seems more likely than the other course of events.”
Yes, these are scary words. We haven’t heard talk of nuclear war in the 30 years since the USSR voted to dissolve itself and become the Commonwealth of Independent States.
These words were not said from strength. That they were said at all is proof of Russia’s weakness as a state.
As the end of March, Russia abandoned its effort to take Kyiv and Ukraine’s north, with the Russian generals saying s saying that the country would focus on the Donbas, in Ukraine’s east. But a week after the “offensive in the east” supposedly began on Orthodox Easter weekend, even that effort appears to have gone far slower than expected. Reports show relatively small gains are coupled with big losses. To date, the Russian Army has suffered at least 15,000 killed over eight weeks of war, with anywhere from 2,000 - 3,200 armored personnel carriers destroyed and an estimated 560-900 tanks knocked out.
Those losses will not be made good quickly. A modern combat vehicle is filled with electronics that Russia has been cut off from acquiring through the sanctions imposed by the West. If they proceed to produce replacements using fewer electronics or none, these will be far less useful items.
Vladimir Putin has so far achieved the opposite of what he outlined as his goals at the outset of this war. This past week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a gathering of military leaders at Ramstein air base in Germany, representing 40 countries including all the NATO members as well as Japan, Israel, several Gulf states and African states, that Ukraine’s “resistance has brought inspiration to the free world and even greater resolve to NATO.” Vladimir Putin “never imagined that the world would rally behind Ukraine so swiftly and surely.”
These senior defense officials from NATO and non-NATO countries attending the meeting are part of the new Ukraine Defense Consultative Group. Israel and Qatar had representatives present, though they were not included on the official list of attendees. The inclusion of non-NATO countries such as Kenya, Tunisia and Japan was part of an a successful U.S. effort to extend substantive and symbolic support for Ukraine beyond Europe and the NATO alliance.
Everywhere one turns, the fault lines between Russia and the West are growing wider. Responding to the Ramstein meeting, Russian foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused NATO of fighting a proxy war by donating weapons to Kyiv and stated weapons flowing from NATO into Ukraine will be considered “a legitimate target” for Russia’s military.
Russian state energy giant Gazprom acted Tuesday to suspend gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria for their refusal to pay for this gas in rubles via Russian banks, a requirement recently decreed by Putin in a bid to counteract the weight of sanctions. The result is that Europe is now set to end dependence on Russian oil and gas much sooner than anyone expected, with Germany - previously the nation most reluctant to do this - announcing support for ending import of all Russian oil and gas. Poland has already made plans to transition off Russian gas imports. In an ongoing tit-for-tat game with Western governments, Russia also announced a new wave of diplomatic expulsions, including 40 German diplomats this weekend.
Last week, a Russian military commander said that one goal was to establish a corridor through southern Ukraine to Transnistria — a strip of land on the eastern side of Moldova, itself a breakaway from Romania, with a population of nearly 500,000 that is backed by Moscow and hosts Russian troops. The region, which broke away after the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a conflict in the early 1990s, is not recognized as independent by any country, but operates separately from Moldova; it is another of those breakaway separatist statelets recognized by Russia and no one else.
Russian officials have previously hinted at expanding the Ukraine War to this region. However, carving a “land bridge” across southern Ukraine to Transnistria would require Russia to accomplish what it has already tried and failed to do: capture the surrounding intermediate points which would have made it possible to try to conquer Odesa.
The point is that Russia isn’t anywhere close to Transnistria and has already tried and failed to conquer the areas it would have to hold to make any such land corridor feasible.
This is part of a pattern of the Russians threatening or hinting at escalations or expansions of the war while their actual military footprint and hold over territory is diminishing. This points to a deeper potential instability in the conflict overall, a disconnect between the reality of the situation and Russian aspirations which are escalating in the opposite direction.
If Russia were merely a conventional military power, one could say “Sucks to be you, deal with it.” The problem is that Russia is a nuclear power, and beyond the nightmare scenarios of battlefield and even strategic nuclear weapons use, the Russian military has a lot of capacity to break things far from the immediate battlefield.
During the past two months, as they have failed to achieve their goals, Russian officials have hinted they might expand the war into NATO member states like Poland or Romania or the Baltics. While that would obviously be a catastrophic move, the reality is that as long as the war continued as a conventional military conflict it’s not clear Russia would have any success attempting to expand the battle. They can’t operate at any distance further than close to their own borders. To invade Poland they have to get through Ukraine first.
Still, these threats illustrate an instability and danger one can measure in the gap between the reality of how things actually are and these wild aspirations. In many ways this yawning gap between the power pretensions of the Russian state elite and the reality of contemporary Russian military, economic and cultural power is how we got to where we are.
The Russians made clear that the point of this invasion was to rewrite the post-Cold War European security order. Russia would no longer be a second order power with a sphere of influence that ran no further than its national borders. It would negotiate European security with the United States as an equal, an effort that has failed spectacularly. They did rewrite the post-Cold War order, but not as intended. NATO, which up to the end of February had largely become a somewhat complacent, tripwire-focused, directionless defense alliance is now highly militarized, expanding to include historic neutrals Sweden and Finland.
The result is that Russia is dangerous precisely because it is weak; its geopolitical pretensions are vastly out of whack with its actual power.
On the ground in Ukraine, from all appearances Russia has failed miserably and is now trying to grind out much more limited ambitions in the east. But, within Russia and in Russian media, political rhetoric has escalated to the point Ukraine itself is almost a side issue. Russia is portrayed as in an existential struggle or holy war, a war which is really against NATO and the US. Russian television has been flooded with statements urging escalation as part of an existential struggle, a metaphysical clash between the forces of good and evil, a holy war they are waging and must win.
Yes. This is crazy stuff.
Within the Russia national security establishment, some have concluded Russia is really in a war with NATO and that the key error was launching a war tied specifically to Ukraine. They now argue that NATO and the West is fighting all out through the supply of increasingly sophisticated weaponry. The military is now demanding all-out war, including mobilization.”
Yikes. When you pump people up that hard it becomes hard not to do something.
Nuclear scenarios are the ones that create nightmares. But there is another possibility. May 9th, Russia’s “Victory Day,” celebrates the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. Analysts have pointed to that date looming in the distance and declared it would be a disaster for the government if Russia hadn’t chalked up some battlefield successes by then.
But there is new speculation by people “in the know” that May 9th could be used as a launching point to declare a broader war with NATO and declare a national mobilization which could dramatically increase the manpower and resources available to prosecute the war. The government and the media it controls don’t seem to be preparing the home population for any kind of climb down. Quite the opposite.
Perhaps this is all talk. Putting the whole country on a war-footing raises the stakes dramatically for Putin. But we should have our eyes open that there are real chances of desperate and unpredictable acts that could reach beyond Ukraine.
The Kremlin has sought to minimize discussion of Russian war losses.Given Russians’ broad support for the war, incursions on Russian soil like the apparent Ukrainian drone strikes in Russia are likely to provoke public calls for escalation, rather than the opposite. These attacks threaten to upend Putin’s effort to insulate his citizens from the results of the fighting he started.
The attacks on Monday, during which two Turkish-made Bayraktar drones were shot down over the region, which one senior Ukrainian adviser described last Wednesday as “karma,” show that Kyiv is able to reach into Russian territory as the war continues. Empowered by NATO’s military aid, Ukrainian troops are hitting infrastructure and military targets.
Ukraine’s Western backers support the idea of strikes on military sites inside Russian territory. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a congressional panel on Wednesday that Ukraine should “do whatever is necessary to defend against Russian aggression.” On Thursday, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC it would be “legitimate under international law” for Ukraine to attack “the logistics structure of the Russian army.”Yet such strikes challenge the Kremlin’s domestic narrative that what is happening in Ukraine is a “special operation” and not a war.
The attacks are more likely intended as messages to Russian leaders rather than efforts to turn the broader public against the fighting, but from all reports Russian society is not ready for peace and expects Ukraine will be defeated. As the public sees the attacks as a threat, there is going to be pressure from below for Putin to act.
To survive, Putin and his government, at some point, have to deliver what looks like a victory.
On Thursday, President Biden said, “Despite the disturbing rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin, the facts are plain for everybody to see: We’re not attacking Russia. We’re helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression.” With reference to Lavrov’s nuclear warnings, he said: “They do concern me because it shows the desperation that Russia is feeling.”
Russian propaganda rhetoric is getting more heated. The West is ramping up its delivery of arms, with the United States renewing the 1941 Lend-Lease Act and approving $33 Billion in military assistance to Ukraine; that is roughly half the annual Russian defense budget. Over time, it is entirely possible for the United States to spend Russia into defeat, the way the Soviet Union was defeated in the 1980s with the “Star Wars” ICBM defense program, which was never going to be successful, but forced the Soviets to try and match it. Putin cannot accept this outcome.
In a special report analyzing the war to date, Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, concluded: “Russia is now preparing, diplomatically, militarily and economically, for a protracted conflict.”
The Ukraine conflict is growing more dangerous for everyone.
Do. Not. Bet. Against. The. Dumbest. Possible. Outcome.
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If I still drank alcohol this would be a good reason to open a nice old single malt and pour myself a three finger glass. I concur with everything you have laid out. The Russian military has been an abject failure for so many reasons, I don’t think the average Russian has any idea just how badly their revered military has preformed, the generals know, they know that they are sending ill equipped and ill trained men to almost certain death, if their officer corps is anything like ours or any of the NATO countries, this has to disturb them deeply. We and the Ukrainians are facing a lunatic that has no moral compass, what we have been seeing on a daily basis is proof positive of that. There is no way that the Russians are going to win, even if they go nuclear they will still loose, their generals know that, many more people will join the cannon fodder they have thrown into this ill conceived war. So I guess we have to look to their common humanity for them to put a stop to this disaster. One man can not be allowed to drive us all off a cliff, you and I are old enough that if our lives were to end today we would have had a good life and we are going to go soon anyhow, but what of the young that are just starting life’s journey? These questions have to be being asked within the Russian officer corps, they just have to be. I’m not holding my breath but I believe that some of them must be saying to themselves enough of this shit, I hope so anyhow 🙏🇺🇦
For American warfighters fighting for Ukraine and destroying Putin’s aggressive strength would be the first war or fight worthwhile since the Korean War. IMHO