Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw. — attributed to VI Lenin
As I type this, the Russian military is continuing a mobilization, movement of forces, and military build up along its border with Ukraine. Analysts are all over the map on whether this means an invasion is imminent or whether it is all a ploy by Putin to rattle everyone. According to the reporting US intelligence seems to be convinced that Putin is planning to invade sometime in January 2022.
As tensions mount between Washington and Moscow over a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence has found the Kremlin is planning a multi-front offensive as soon as early next year involving up to 175,000 troops, according to U.S. officials and an intelligence document obtained by The Washington Post.
The Kremlin has been moving troops toward the border with Ukraine while demanding Washington guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO and that the alliance will refrain from certain military activities in and around Ukrainian territory. The crisis has provoked fears of a renewed war on European soil and comes ahead of a planned virtual meeting next week between President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The Russian plans call for a military offensive against Ukraine as soon as early 2022 with a scale of forces twice what we saw this past spring during Russia’s snap exercise near Ukraine’s borders,” said an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. “The plans involve extensive movement of 100 battalion tactical groups with an estimated 175,000 personnel, along with armor, artillery and equipment.”
The unclassified U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Post, which includes satellite photos, shows Russian forces massing in four locations. Currently, 50 battlefield tactical groups are deployed, along with “newly arrived” tanks and artillery, according to the document.
Go back and reread the first sentence in that last paragraph again: “The unclassified U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Post, which includes satellite photos, shows Russian forces massing in four locations.”
Really, WaPo, you obtained an unclassified US intelligence document with all that and you didn’t think: “why was this unclassified?” I have questions here about what The Washington Post is basing their reporting on, however, we do know that Russia is massing forces because it is both visible and because everyone is reporting on it. Also, just as a quick aside, I have found that open source intelligence is often as good and sometimes better than the stuff that is highly compartmented and classified, so please don’t take this as me crapping on unclassified material. Rather, I just find it hard to believe that this wouldn’t be classified if it was coming from the US Intel Community.
Ukrainian officials, including President Zelensky, have insinuated that Putin is both planning military action against Ukraine and that he has also been trying to orchestrate a coup to bring down Ukraine’s government and replace it with one more to Putin’s liking. Specifically, one that Putin can control and that brings Ukraine back within Russia’s orbit.
Ukraine has uncovered a plot for an attempted coup with the involvement of Russians, due to have taken place next week, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday at a press conference.
Zelensky did not give full details of the coup plot and did not accuse the Russian state of involvement, though he also spoke at length at the press conference of a threat of Russian military escalation, and said Ukraine would be ready for it.
The Kremlin swiftly denied any role in any coup plot, saying it had no plans to take part in such acts.
Russia has been building up forces near its border with Ukraine. Kyiv, the United States and NATO have voiced concerns in recent days about a possible Russian attack — a suggestion the Kremlin has dismissed as false and alarmist.
“We have challenges not only from the Russian Federation and possible escalation – we have big internal challenges. I received information that a coup d’etat will take place in our country on Dec. 1-2,” Zelensky said.
Here’s what we know. First, the Russian military is involved in a significant mobilization of their forces and is moving them into position along their border with Ukraine. Most, but not all, analysts are interpreting this as a prelude to an invasion into eastern Ukraine. And the Ukrainians are obviously concerned about not only that possibility, but also a coup attempt similar to what Putin tried to orchestrate in Montenegro.
This Twitter thread by a Marine who is now doing a PhD in the War Studies Department at King’s College London lays out the interesting argument why this buildup is all for demonstration purposes. I highly suggest you give it a read. This analysis by a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations largely takes the other option and grapples with what happens should Russia indeed invade Ukraine and why it would do choose to do so.
However, the issue here is how Ukraine should respond. As well as how the US, its allies, and partners in NATO should respond. There have been a couple of high profile analysts arguing that Ukraine should just give Putin what he wants, which is to accede to his interpretation of the Minsk Accords. This is the argument of a senior political scientist at RAND who specializes in Russia and eastern Europe. He’s both written an op-ed for Politico and a long Twitter thread under the theory that when digging a deep hole for oneself, one should keep going rather than stop, arguing that since no one wants a war with Russia, Ukraine should just give Putin at least some of what he wants as that is the only thing that might avert a major war in Europe. A professor of international security at Northwestern has made a similar argument, also on Twitter.
The problem with these suggestions is, as John Sipher, the former CIA chief at Moscow Station, reminds us, Ukraine already made that type of deal with Russia. Specifically, Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union had placed in Ukraine and Russia would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty forever. Something that Putin has already violated, repeatedly. Believing that if you give Putin what he wants, again, that he’ll then live up to his promises and Russia’s obligations is just naive. Actually doing it would also be strategic malpractice.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us already right of boom. We simply do not have the forces, specifically the ground forces, on the continent to deter Putin from invading Ukraine again provided this is not simply a diversion of sorts. And we certainly don’t have enough to dig him out and liberate Ukraine if he chooses to actually do so. V Corps has been reestablished. It is headquartered at Ft. Knox. While the Army has recently reestablished the 56th Artillery Command – full disclosure: I’ve served with its commanding general – US Army Europe does not have the capabilities to respond even with the 56th’s reactivation. US ArmY Europe’s subordinate elements in Europe are focused on training and sustainment. This means that forces would have to be brought from the US. And in order to be in place to deter an invasion, the sea lift of troops and equipment would have needed to start about three to four weeks ago. So if we have to mount a military response, we’re way behind the curve.
And this brings us to the strategic problem of what to do and when to do it. In order to deter Putin, the time to begin doing something militarily – the movement of personnel and material – is a month behind us. So if we’re going to do something, now would be a good time to start! Like right now. Because the strategic problem is that Putin looks for weakness, he probes for mush. When he detects it he continues to advance his interests. I was at US Army Europe headquarters in January 2014 when Putin was clearly building up to do something to Ukraine. The timelines then were different because he had to wait for the winter olympics in Sochi to finish and then for everyone to stop paying attention to him and Russia as the host. And also because his plans were to take action in case the Maidan movement toppled his puppet Yanukovych. Once the Maidan movement pushed Yanukovych out, Putin executed his strategy. He scarfed up Crimea, destabilized and then effectively seized the Donbas in eastern Ukraine using his little green men – a combination of Russian special forces and Wagner mercenaries.
In 2014 President Obama decided that it was not worth risking a war with another state with a major stockpile of nuclear weapons. Especially as Russia’s military doctrine asserts that it will use nuclear weapons tactically in a conventional war if its conventional forces are overmatched and losing to its adversaries. This Russian doctrinal assertion has long frozen American and NATO decision making about how to respond to Putin’s aggression. This is exactly what Russia, Putin, and his senior military advisors want. It leaves them free to maneuver and everyone else constrained because of a doctrinal assertion. Obama’s considered and measured decision not to engage militarily, which to mark one’s beliefs to market, I agreed with in 2014, were then followed by four years of Trump’s sucking up to and siding with Putin whenever he thought he could get away with it. Which was both the objective of Putin’s low intensity war targeting the US during and since the 2016 election – to insure that America would not have a president (Hilary Clinton) who would push back against him – and only further encouraged Putin.
It is now 2021. In the past seven years Putin has been waging a low intensity war against the US, the EU, NATO, and several other countries. He continually probes and finds mush. As a result he keeps advancing his strategy to achieve his objectives. In the case of Ukraine, as well as the Baltics, it is to bring them back within Russia’s orbit and influence, which is where he believes they belong and need to be in order for Russia to be whole. I suggest that this time, the US and NATO need to meet his probing with steel. We know what happens when we fail to do so.
I was wrong in 2014. Putin needed to be given a bloody nose and knocked on his ass to deter future aggression. Our failure to risk going to war over Crimea only emboldened him. It would be strategic malpractice to make the same mistake again. Especially as Putin isn’t the only one probing for mush!
Here's another one. If Russia and China were planning simultaneous attacks (Ukraine, Taiwan) in early 2022, what would they be doing differently?
— Bryan McGrath (@ConsWahoo) December 5, 2021
Open thread!
Small Business Sunday, Loosely Speaking
WaterGirl
Please don’t bite my head off for offering, but i am willing to fix your spacing issues if you would like.
Not a criticism, just an offer.
Adam L Silverman
@WaterGirl: I just fixed them. But thanks. The coding that gets pulled over when copying and pasting from WaPo and some other news sites is both annoying and obnoxious. I thought I’d gotten it all, but I hadn’t and had to go back and delete the rest of it.
WaterGirl
@Adam L Silverman: Yep, there’s a lot of crap HTML on the news sites.
Have you tried “Paste and match style”? When you do that, it gets rid of the crap. Then you have to go in and add the line between paragraphs, but at least you don’t have to deal with all the extraneous
crapHTML code.debbie
I’m sorry the meeting next week won’t be face to face. Joe can look Putin in the eyes and tell him invading Ukraine will not be tolerated, and then he can remind Putin that Trump isn’t around to protect him this time.
Yutsano
If there was somehow a way to cut off Russian gas supplies in Europe, it would be one deterrent to keep Vladdie in check. Otherwise, without some direct military alliance, Ukraine has really no good options here. It would be nice if the pipelines from Turkey and Algeria could take up the slack, but that doesn’t seem to be an option, especially with the mess Algeria is right now. This was planned for winter precisely because gas supplies are so important to Europe in winter. I wish there were better options for deterrence but I’m not seeing anything right now.
Adam L Silverman
@WaterGirl: I’ll try to keep it in mind.
Cermet
While I agree putin probes and looks for weakness – actually invading and taking heavy casualties is not something he would be keen on. He wants chaos and to divide NATO. But launching an invasion of eastern Ukraine would create sanctions like he has never experienced and could cripple Russia during a pandemic; worse, most Russians wouldn’t see those sanctions as unjustified. Making it clear we would respond with military supplies/aid to Ukraine and use all non-military means to retaliate would deter him. Threatening real military forces would be insane. They are, in fact, a nuclear super power unlike China. That is a bridge too far for us.
As for the Baltics – that is NATO. While making them NATO was a bad idea that is water under the gate. They are not touchable by Russia through military means.
SpaceUnit
What exactly would steel look like in this scenario?
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: It would also be a good way to ensure a lot of Europeans freeze to death this winter. You can’t cut off the natural gas supply from Russia until you have an alternative supply for European countries.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: Other than threatening more sanctions and, possibly, action after the fact, I have seen nothing that indicates that President Biden is prepared to do this via video-teleconference or in person.
Adam L Silverman
@Cermet:
Where exactly do you think Russians get their news from?
Butter Emails!!!
I mean Russia isn’t living up to their side of the agreement, so it only seems proper that Ukraine gets nuclear weapons back.
Cermet
Also, making a big show of military force isn’t the Russian way of invasion – more of political muscle flexing. Last I checked, telling the ahead of time with the Ukraine – which does have military forces that could hurt Russian forces – isn’t good military strategy.
Kent
Russia has a GDP that is smaller than Texas. They produce basically nothing the rest of the world wants except perhaps for oil/gas, grain, and weapons. For the past two decades their oligarchs have been busy stripping the place of assets and parking them in London real estate and Maltese banks rather than investing in productive projects within Russia. Where is the Russian iPhone or Toyota or Samsung TV? Is there anything at all that they make that anyone outside Russia actually wants?
I expect that these sorts of foreign adventures are exceedingly expensive. Interventions in Syria, interventions in Ukraine. Interventions in the Caucuses. At least when the US does the same thing the cost is astronomical. I’m not sure why the same rule doesn’t apply to Russia.
If we are looking to lessons from history. Perhaps one of them is that Russia under Putin is going down the same road and making the same mistakes as the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. Overextending militarily while bleeding and mismanaging their own economy dry. Perhaps Russia would have been much better off to be content to be the Canada of eastern Europe. For that matter, Canada has a larger GDP than Russia. It probably would have been a much better place to live had they chosen to go down that path.
That doesn’t answer the question as to how the west should respond to Putin. But I don’t think the west necessarily needs to respond symmetrically to whatever Russia is doing. Our strength is economic not military in a continental sense. Meet them on the battlefield of our choice, not theirs. Sanction their economy like we have done with Iran. Make them an international pariah. Rather than trying to send 50,000 ground troops to the Ukraine border.
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
I know. I’d still like to see Biden staring down Putin.
Cermet
@Adam L Silverman: Russian people aren’t stupid – if Russia invades Ukraine, their news certainly tells them that; they can and will hear through other channels the West’s response and see it isn’t exactly the West being unfair. Russia needs the West – there is a country of over a billion that has no fond memories of a Russia that it is seeing that country shrinking in both population size and economic might.
Adam L Silverman
@SpaceUnit: I’d move an Army Corps, 1st Armored Division, all four of its brigade combat teams, its division artillery, the 10th Special Forces Group country team and a number of its Operational Detachments-Alpha (ODAs), a country team and a number of Civil Affairs Teams-Alpha (CAT-A) from the 353rd Civil Affairs Command, and a country team from the 4th Psychological Operations Group’s 6th Psychological Operations Battalion into theater. And then let them get to work.
Adam L Silverman
@Cermet: That’s the problem, we don’t know if it’s a Maskirovka or if it’s legit. I’d argue we no longer have the strategic flexibility to assume the former.
Leto
@Adam L Silverman: I’d also look for air elements to be moved over in support, specifically B-52s and B-1s being moved to RAF Fairford. Aviano, Lakenheath, and Spangdalehm have probably been on high alert for a while now, with fighters/tankers prepped. I can’t remember if we still have temp bases in Poland, but as we both know our airframes have many, many, many hours on them. I’m glad that we have been conducting BALTOPs for the past almost 10 years, as that joint training/experience is invaluable.
Leto
Also, pulled from that Marines twitter thread (and you spoke about it above):
Mike in NC
Donald Trump spent decades whining about NATO being obsolete and member countries not paying enough. According to the book I Alone Can Fix It, after installing himself as dictator-for-life, Trump planned to withdraw from NATO, and pull all of our forces from Germany, South Korea, and Japan. His slogan “America First” was first used by Charles Lindberg, another Nazi-loving isolationist.
Brachiator
China lied about respecting the sovereignty of Hong Kong.
I can see economic sanctions. But no military action.
I note, however, that parts of Europe really wants Russian natural gas. And its mineral wealth seems to be substantial.
Betty Cracker
@Mike in NC: Trump is a goddamned idiot. But sometimes I wonder if the U.S. might come to regret not dissolving NATO the day after the USSR fell for all kinds of reasons, including the rise of authoritarianism in member countries like Hungary and Turkey.
Another Scott
Thanks for this.
CSIS has Maxar (nee Digital Globe) pictures from mid-November.
Given how easily news outfits/think-tanks/etc. can get high-quality satellite pictures now, trying to classify a lot of this stuff is probably a losing battle.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Kent:
Remember that vlad is very wealthy person, very extremely wealthy. He didn’t get that way by inventing, well anything, he did it by control and taking. He’s good at that and he understands his limitations, even as he works to expand them. It’s how he’s stayed in power and gotten that wealthy. He is always going to push his boundaries but very likely only as far as he can, and no farther. He knows the cost of too far. He also understands the limitations he plots and acts under. If he didn’t he would have crossed those lines many times before.
I’m not in any way defending him, just pointing out that while he is a very greedy person, he is not a stupid person and while he got where he is by what we might consider the wrong methods, he is where he is. Which seems like a rather strong position and it certainly has that public of an appearance, I wonder if it is actually as strong as it seems, or if his age likely demands that if he wants to continue to be considered a strong person in the world he has to thump his chest and push a bit harder than he has in the past. He is getting up there although at just having turned 69 yrs old he’s not so old that he’s counting the days, and likely has a few more years of dictatorship left.
Adam L Silverman
@Leto: I would expect that too. But I don’t know that it’ll happen.
Geminid
@Adam L Silverman: I am curious about the airspace over Ukraine. Russia has a lot of capable ground to air missiles with a range greater than 250 miles. I know you are talking about deterrence, but if we get into a shooting war could we fly combat aircraft over Ukraine, or resupply troops by air?
Also, if you care to comment, I’m curious as to what you think about the effect on Israel of Russian ground to air missiles based in Northwest Syria. Israeli Prime Ministers and Defense Ministers travel to Moscow often, and I figure they work on keeping the Russians from shooting down their jets.
Gin & Tonic
The Budapest Memorandum, unfortunately, has no enforcement mechanism.
The issue with Donbas is that any attempt to re-integrate it into Ukraine politically is likely to fail. It is an economic sink of major proportions, and the population there has been on the receiving end of Russian TV and radio for 7 years now. Many Ukrainians argue for redrawing the eastern border and giving up Donetsk, Luhansk and environs completely. Make Putin pay the bills there. Just as some Ukrainians have argued for some time for giving up Crimea – it, also, is economically unsustainable on its own, plus it has no reliable fresh water without the mainland. Cut it off and let is sink is the argument.
Conventional invasion/occupation is viewed as a long shot. Ukraine is a big country, its armed forces have been significantly strengthened in the last seven years, and many people, especially west of Kyiv, have grown up hearing heroic stories of resistance from their grandparents. They would be only too happy to form another partisan army. So conventional occupation would be bad for Ukrainians, of course, but it would be bad for the Russians as well, as there’s only so much support Putin can get from Russian parents whose sons go to Ukraine and don’t come home (note that they won’t come home in body bags, as that will be too embarrassing – they will just not come home.)
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
I don’t even remember how Putin came to power. The battle to succeed him when his reign is over will probably be brutal.
ETA. It is interesting how accommodating the UK and other financial centers are to the Russian oligarchs. They don’t care where the money came from and overlook almost any crime.
Kent
Well yes, but the oligarchs in places like Nigeria are also phenomenally wealthy and got that way the same was as Putin did. That doesn’t make Nigeria a world power in any meaningful way. To the contrary.
Another Scott
Speaking of Syria, … FPRI (from September 2021):
My gut tells me that Putin wants to achieve his goals with the lowest possible cost – especially given his experience in Syria. He’ll bluster, maybe send more quasi-deniable little green men, etc., etc., but he doesn’t want to march the
RedRussian Army to the Hungarian border because he knows there would be great resistance. As you say, he’s probing for weakness and will take any easy advantage he gets in return.I think Biden and NATO are playing this right so far. We know that Putin is looking for anything to try to claim that poor, poor, innocent, peace-loving Russia was provoked and had no choice.
We’ll see…
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris Johnson
@Brachiator: That’s just global late stage capitalism. Of course they overlook almost any crime: there’s no mechanism by which they would care about things like crimes and they’re entirely unaccountable.
Capital will side with Russia if and only if there’s profit in it. This is both a serious threat, and an angle of attack. It’s not unlike bitcoin: overthrow the world and facilitate global anarchy? Sure! says the capital. Right up to where the crypto anarchists fail to prevail over, say, China’s state power… and then suddenly the big capital is bailing the hell out and the crypto is crashing, with the anarchists crying ‘HODL!’, unheard.
Damn right big capital will back Russia, unless it’s a recipe for losing money.
burnspbesq
Kick Russia out of SWIFT. Tomorrow.
Followed by offensive cyber operations on a scale that not even Tom Clancy could have imagined.
Leto
@Geminid: as you state, Russia has a lot of ground-to-air missiles, but so does Ukraine (it’s mentioned in the Marine twitter). We could operate there but it would be a heavily contested/dangerous area. We, or more succinctly, the Ukrainian AF would have to conduct a SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) mission. I don’t know if they have those type of aerial assets to do that. Aviano and Spangdahelm Air Bases potentially have those assets in the form of F-16CJs. I know Spang has those, not sure about Aviano. Spang also has A-10s which will also accomplish that mission. These are assets immediately available in theater which could response ASAP.
Here’s a quicker version of the answer: we could potentially do it, but it’d be a major escalation; aka it’d be committing assets to this fight, and so far we’re continually saying we won’t do that.
Gin & Tonic
@burnspbesq: The SWIFT thing is the only action that will really hurt. Unfortunately, it will also be considered an act of war by Russia.
Leto
@burnspbesq: We spoke about this a few days ago. Not going to happen.
How Disastrous Would Disconnection From SWIFT Be for Russia?
Gin & Tonic
@Leto: If “assets” means personnel, then no, there is no stomach in the US for putting its airmen on the firing line for a country that’s not a NATO member; likewise, there is no expectation in Ukraine that that will happen. Hardware, though, is another story, and a lot has ended up in Ukraine in recent years.
Steeplejack
Adam, you didn’t answer the most important question: how is this bad for Joe Biden?
Also . . .
“Mr. Chamberlain to the white courtesy phone! Neville Chamberlain!”
Chief Oshkosh
Is the Russian domestic power grid vulnerable to temporary but massive disruption?
slybrarian
@Adam L Silverman:
The failure of Europe to reduce dependence on Russian natural gas is a big problem and solutions needed to start years ago. Electrification of residential heating shouldn’t be that difficult and is part of carbon reduction anyways, but it’s been slow and Germany in particular has just shifted dependence from individual residences to the grid by decommissioning all their nuclear plants. Renewables are catching up and improvements to the European grid helps deal with winter shortages there but more effort needs to be made.
Leto
@Gin & Tonic: Yes, roughly 90% of Ukraine’s military is supplied via the US (specifically from the last seven years). What I’m talking about, above, is the US sending in it’s own assets, which, so far, won’t happen. Also I was laying out in broad terms what we’d need in the area to conduct aerial missions over Ukraine.
New Deal democrat
“If Russia and China were planning simultaneous attacks (Ukraine, Taiwan)”…
That’s how I’d do it, if I were in their shoes.
Best counter-argument: so, why didn’t they do it during Trump’s Presidency, when there was virtually no chance he would do anything to stop them?
Best counter-counter-argument: their intelligence services concluded that Trump was so nuts, he might actually do something really drastic, if it crossed his mind that it might help him, even for the shortest term.
Leto
@New Deal democrat: You did have Gen Miley calling his Chinese counterpart promising to not let Trumpov nuke China on the way out the door, so you might be on to something there.
VOR
I watched a YouTube video recently about why Climate Change may be favorable to Russia. Top reasons:
So Vlad doesn’t want to stop selling fossil fuels, both because of current exports and long term.
Leto
This is an article from two years ago, but it’s still relevant today: How U.S. Military Aid Has Helped Ukraine Since 2014
burnspbesq
@Gin & Tonic:
They can consider it anything they want. What’s the likely response?
Geminid
@New Deal democrat: As far as Taiwan is concerned, time is on the side of the Chinese. They don’t need to be opportunistic. In ten years they will have enough anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to dominate the air and sea around Taiwan. If they move on Taiwan miltarily, they will do it when there is no possibility of failure.
SiubhanDuinne
Test
Bill Arnold
Reading the replies on those threads reminded me of how much I loath tankies.
Gah.
The past year+ Russian government entities have been deliberately rubbing lies[1] about their COVID-19 statistics in the faces of western statisticians and analysts. They are overt liars.
[1] there is a Russian word for such lying but I do not speak/read Russian.
Barry
What gets me is that Putin is frighteningly to winning the USA. It’s really likely that the GOP will take Congress, and given voter suppression/gerrymandering/tossing out votes, really close to imposing a de facto one-party state in the US which would be run by Putin’s allies in the USA.
That would give Putin literally a 100% free hand to move in Europe.
Right now the glide path to victory is clear.
Chris
@Barry:
I don’t think anybody’s quite gamed out just how catastrophic the end of democracy in the U.S. would (will?) be for democracy worldwide. (Understandably as most people are reasonably fixated on what how catastrophic it’ll be for American people).
It might not be quite the death blow for democracy that the end of the USSR was for communism, but it would be an enormous blow both in practical terms, in that threatened democracies like Taiwan or the Baltics would lose their strongest security partner, and in ideological terms, in that autocrats all over the world would go all-out on “see, democracy doesn’t work! Even the people who have been preaching at the rest of the world to adopt it for two hundred years have finally realized that and given up!” And there are a lot of these autocrats in countries that currently seem “safe,” democracy-wise, looking to take their countries down the same path the GOP has taken the U.S.
kindness
Will the US be willing to be directly involved in a two front was with Russia and China? I wish the answer was yes but it isn’t. If either/both of them invade the Ukraine/Taiwan those countries are toast and the US loses in every category. Honestly I don’t think China is ready to invade yet but if the US allows Ukraine to be reclaimed by Russia what do you think the message they take away from it will be?
James E Powell
Where is Bob in Portland on all this? Inquiring minds want to know.
RS in Kyiv
@Gin & Tonic:
I don’t comment on this site normally, but this topic is sort of close to home as I’ve lived about 6 months per year in Kyiv since 2001 and know a little about the ground environment and attitudes in the government.
I think you are right about the occupied areas of the Donbas. My interpretation of comments made in private is that the region was, and now more than ever is, a black hole financially and socially. Therefore, publically condemn Russia for its occupation and support of the separatists (whose original leadership has been either killed or removed by Moscow anyway), but privately don’t ask for it back because of the astonishing financial/social burden it would represent to Kyiv. The educated already have left the region for Lviv, Kyiv and Odesa (and Poland) and they are mostly young. Donbas is dying. Protest the occupation but let it bleed Russia.
The other point you made about a conventional invasion seems also correct. Ukraine’s military is no pushover now. The losses it can inflict on Russia could be unacceptable to Putin. He had a hard enough time hiding the bodies of Russian soldiers in Donbas – remember the white trucks? The estimate was 2,000 Russians killed. Now multiply that by 10, at least.
Back in 2015 or so, I think Bellingcat but not certain, published an analysis of what it would take for Russia to seize and hold a land bridge from occupied Donbas to occupied Crimea. It was 250,000. So, I don’t think an invasion will take place either unless Putin no longer cares about actions and troop losses.
Of course, a promise to throw Russia out of SWIFT, seizure of all Russian bank accounts in the EU and the UK, suspension of Nordstream 2 and basically making Putin’s Russia a pariah might deter him from making any such move into Ukraine.
Of course, beginning the movement of men and material to Europe – especially Poland and the Baltics – would also get his attention. Pity that has not started – because Putin only understands force.
Chris
@James E Powell:
In Portland, I would assume.