Austria breaks wind!
BREAKING: Austria begins ejecting Gazprom from its Haidach gas storage facility
— Samuel Ramani (@SamRamani2) July 6, 2022
You know you all were thinking it…
Anyhow, and more seriously, tonight, after the basics – President Zelenskyy’s address and whatever operational updates and assessments have been posted – I’m going to focus on two questions from last night’s comments. And then I’m going to bed!
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier this evening. Video below, English transcript after the jump (emphasis mine):
Ukrainians!
All our defenders!
Today in Kharkiv, the Pedagogical University was destroyed by a Russian missile strike – the main building, lecture halls, university museum, scientific library. This characterizes the Russian invasion with 100% accuracy. When it comes to the definition of barbarism, this strike fits the bill the most. Only an enemy of civilization and humanity can do such things – strike missiles at a university, a pedagogical university.
Already the second object dedicated to Hryhoriy Skovoroda was damaged by this strike – a monument that was on the square in front of the university. It was covered with debris, but still the monument is not broken. And the Skovoroda museum located in the Kharkiv region burned down after Russian shelling back in May. However, paraphrasing the most famous words of Skovoroda, no matter how hard the occupiers try to catch us, they will fail. We will definitely endure. And we will restore everything.
Finally it is felt that the Western artillery – the weapons we received from our partners – started working very powerfully. Its accuracy is exactly as needed. Our defenders inflict very noticeable strikes on depots and other spots that are important for the logistics of the occupiers. And this significantly reduces the offensive potential of the Russian army. The losses of the occupiers will only increase every week, as will the difficulty of supplying them.
Today, the general public became aware that in the south of our country, in the occupied areas, access to social networks, messengers and YouTube was closed. Russian forces have blocked any possibility for people to know the truth about what is happening and about our potential, which we are gradually increasing.
Ukrainian forces are currently advancing in several tactical directions, in particular in the south – in the Kherson region, in the Zaporizhzhia region. We will not give up our land – the entire sovereign territory of Ukraine will be Ukrainian. People should know it. Therefore, if you have an opportunity to speak with people in the south of our country – with Kherson, Henichesk, Berdyansk, Melitopol and other cities and villages – please spread the truth there. Use every opportunity to tell the people in the occupied areas that we remember them and we are fighting for them. We are fighting for our entire south, for the entire Ukrainian Donbas – the most brutal confrontation is currently there, near Slovyansk and Bakhmut. We are fighting for the Kharkiv region. The occupiers should not think that their time on this land is long-lasting and that the superiority of their artillery is eternal.
I held a meeting of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Staff. As always, I listened to the reports both from the military and from intelligence. We jointly determined the directions of action for the near future.
We are expanding our country’s foreign policy vectors. For the first time in the history of Ukrainian-Paraguayan relations, I had a conversation with the President of Paraguay – we appreciate the support from this country, and we will continue to strengthen ties in Latin America. I also spoke with the President of Mozambique today – I congratulated his country on the election to the UN Security Council, and I believe that Africa should get more representation on international platforms and in solving global issues. It is the African countries that are now most threatened by the food crisis provoked by Russia, and we must do everything to force the terrorist state to unblock Ukrainian agricultural exports.
A visit to Kyiv by the Prime Minister of Ireland took place, a country that helps us significantly. Ireland even helped us convince representatives of skeptical states in the European Union that Ukraine deserves candidacy and future membership in the EU. We also remember that the Senate of Ireland recognized the crimes of the Russian occupiers as genocide of the Ukrainian people. This step, as well as Ireland’s support for legal efforts to punish Russian war criminals, is very important. The help of partners together with the work of Ukrainian law enforcement officers are the very bricks from which the restoration of justice for Ukraine will be built.
Every Russian murderer, torturer and rapist who came to our land will be held accountable. And it doesn’t matter how long it takes to complete this task. There will be no peace for any of the occupiers.
I am grateful to everyone who fights for Ukraine!
Glory to Ukraine!
I just want to take a moment here regarding the the western artillery that President Zelenskyy is referring to. Russia has falsely claimed that they destroyed two of the HIMARS systems we have provided to the Ukrainians. This is a lie! Russia’s evidence is a video clip from a video game:
WINNING? The RU Ministry of Defense has dropped a 'video game' clip purporting to show the destruction of a pair of Ukrainian M-142 HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems. Russia’s MoD previously released doctored video of a ‘hyper-sonic’ Zircon missile attack; it was fake too. https://t.co/j6mmycHqbQ
— Chuck Pfarrer (@ChuckPfarrer) July 6, 2022
There was no operational update today from Ukraine’s MOD. Nor was there a DOD background briefing.
Here is today’s assessment from Britain’s MOD:
They also posted an updated map:
The British are predicting that the next Russian target will be Sloviansk.
Here is former NAVDEVGRU Squadron Commander Chuck Pfarrer’s updated analysis and map of the battle in the Donbas:
KRAMATORSK AXIS / 1710 UTC 6 JULY / RU forces now assessed as likely to concentrate forces on the H-20 HWY axis in an attempt to take the city of Sloviansk. Russian units east of Siversk will likely remain static. Upcoming map series will concentrate on Sloviansk urban areas. pic.twitter.com/zjFMbfkoNB
— Chuck Pfarrer (@ChuckPfarrer) July 6, 2022
The Russian occupiers, mistakenly referred to as separatists, in the self declared Donetsk People’s Republic have seized – as in STOLEN!!! – two foreign owned ships. Reuters has the details:
LONDON, July 5 (Reuters) – Russian-backed separatists have seized two foreign-flagged ships in the eastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, saying they are now “state property”, in the first such moves against commercial shipping, letters seen by Reuters showed.
Mariupol, on Ukraine’s southern coast, fell under the control of Russian and separatist forces in May after a months-long siege. Russia, which invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, is fighting to seize the whole of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
The self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, via its foreign ministry, informed two shipping companies that their vessels were the subject of “forcible appropriation of movable property with forced conversion into state property”, without any compensation to the owners, according to two separate letters.
Donetsk officials did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, while others could not be reached by phone.
Liberia registered Smarta Shipping, the owner of the Liberia-flagged Smarta bulk vessel, one of the two vessels taken, said it was informed of the seizure by email on June 30, calling it unlawful and “against all norms of international law”.
“Such forced appropriation is in breach of fundamental human rights in so far as property rights are concerned,” the company said in a statement.
“Such action is a serious threat to shipping and to maritime safety.”
The company said the Smarta arrived in Mariupol on Feb. 21 to load a steel cargo and was hit by shelling on March 20 that seriously damaged its bridge.
It said the 19-member crew had been forcibly taken by the Russian military to Donetsk and released a month later.
The other vessel seized was the Panama-flagged Blue Star I, according to the letter.
This ties directly into the first question from last night. Which was from Andrya:
Second, I want to highlight Ksmiami’s post about the russian naval blockade in yesterday’s thread. I thought Ksmiami was right on target. Here is how I see the problem:
- Ukraine’s economy depends on agricultural exports through the Black Sea, to the Mediterranean, to the world. Even though it’s now clear that russia cannot occupy the southern Ukrainian coast or the port of Odessa, a few russian submarines lurking north of the Turkish straits can strangle the Ukrainian economy and create famine in the countries that depend on Ukrainian food exports.
- The Ukrainians have an effective army, but they do not have a navy. Missiles from NATO, Finland, and Sweden cannot take out submarines lurking north of the Turkish straits.
- I cannot imagine putin/strangelove calling off the submarines, despite his lying statement about a “goodwill gesture”.
- If I were president, I would “lend” (as in Lend Lease) US anti-submarine technology to Ukraine, but the Biden administration is clearly afraid to do that. An incoming Republican administration never would.
- Is there any way out of this dilemma?
Adding to the problem, russia is not the only totalitarian state that has been challenging traditional “Law of the Sea” rights passage in international waters, etc. China has been claiming much of the South China Sea as territorial waters, as well as claiming some of the territorial waters of the Philippines as Chinese.
As far as I can see, both russia and China have no better justification for this than “I can, and I wants it, precious, precious, gollum, gollum”.
There’s only really three solutions to this. The first is to acquiesce to what the Russians are doing in the areas of Ukraine they’re occupying as well as in the Black Sea. This is unacceptable for a variety of reasons.
The second and the third are related. The second is that the US, EU, non-EU, and non-NATO allies supporting Ukraine would need to reflag the ships transiting through the Black Sea and provide escorts for them. The US and our allies have done this before. For instance, in the Arab/Persian Gulf in regard to Iranian attempts to disrupt shipping into and out of the gulf via the Shat al Arab.
The third is for the US and our allies in supporting Ukraine to conduct freedom of movement navigation into, through, and out of the Black Sea. You could even do it as part of a training exercise if you want to put a fig leaf on it. Focus it on a disaster like a major gas or petroleum pipeline breaking and there is a major leak and/or spill. This would center the exercise on the US Coast Guard with US and allied navies in support. The US Coast Guard does these partnering exercises with partner countries all over the world.
I’m not sure there’s any appetite in the Biden administration for assuming the strategic risk that doing either of these would entail, but those are basically your three options given that the Russians aren’t going to respond to being asked to stop.
The second question was posed by Carlo Graziani and, like Andrya’s, needs to be dealt with in the body of a post, not just in a comment. Here’s Carlo’s question:
Christopher Miller’s commentary pointing to “huge casualties” incurred by the Ukrainian armed forces is part of a recent reporting trend on the war. Michael Kofman also singled out this factor as significant on another recent War On The Rocks podcast. The trend among analysts appears to be that Russia and Ukraine are in symmetrical situations with respect to manpower attrition, and that the Donbas death-grapple is certain to leave both of them in exhausted, in need of an operational pause to rest and reset.
I need help understanding this certainty. It seems to me completely out of line with the respective manning policies of the two armies, which could not be more different.
Russia has limited, 1-year conscription, and mainly staffs its army using “contract” (i.e. volunteer) soldiers. It was behind it’s recruitment quota at the beginning of the war, and has fallen far behind quota now that service risk is clearly perceived due to the war. As a consequence, the Russians are resorting to expedients such as rushing untrained recruits to the front, and feeding training formations into the battle that are tantamount to eating their seed corn — they can do this once, but it is disinvestment, and leaves them weaker in the long term. They really are exhausted.
Ukraine, on the other hand, according to Wikipedia has had universal male military conscription since the Soviet era, briefly suspended but immediately reinstated in 2014. All draftees serve 18 months, after which they enter an inactive reserve and are eligible for recall to military service until age 55, or 60 for officers. In principle the Ukrainians ought to have a long rolodex of trained infantrymen, artillerymen, tankers, etc. ages 18-55 available for service, in priority order of necessity.
So, here is my problem: why would the manpower issues of these two armies be reported and discussed by subject matter experts as if they were the same thing, simply because they are engaged in the same high-attrition battle? To me it seems perfectly clear from the above that the situation is not symmetrical at all.
Am I missing something?
You are not and you are. Well that was easy, g’night!
Fine… I’ll answer the question!
Carlo’s assessment is correct in the sense that the Russians have expended a significant portion of their land forces over the past four months. They’ve burned through somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/4 of the battalion tactical groups they had/had assembled for the invasion. By burned through I mean used them in combat, have had them seriously attrited, tried to reconstitute them as best they can by combining units, bringing in conscripts, bringing veterans back on contracts, etc. So in that respect when one – Carlo, me, you all, or anyone else – looks at what has happened since the end of February, what we’re seeing is a seriously degraded Russian military in terms of personnel and equipment.
However, this isn’t the whole story and that’s where the “yes, you are missing something” comes in. Russia has far greater strategic depth in terms of its population. It has, as Gin&Tonic indicated in his reply to Carlo last night, something like four times the population of Ukraine. And even without actually declaring his re-invasion of Ukraine an actual war instead of a “special mission”, which would allow for a general mobilization, Putin has enough funds coming in from petroleum and natural gas sales, the sale of stolen grain, and other sources of revenues to incentivize potential conscripts, veterans to come back onto active service via contract, etc. Within just the past few weeks I’ve seen several articles focusing on increased contract soldier mobilization from the ethnic states and enclaves in the north Caucuses.
Faced with a deepening personnel crisis within its military, Russia is scrambling to find fighters for its war in Ukraine and recruiting heavily from its North Caucasus region to form new units along ethnic lines who are then deployed with minimal training.
Regional officials from Daghestan, Ingushetia, and Kalmykia have announced plans to form rifle companies that are each made up of soldiers from a particular Russian republic. According to reporting by Caucasus.Realities, a regional news outlet of RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service, these national units are formed primarily of contract soldiers who have previous military training and have been targeted by local recruitment drives aimed at pressuring and enticing men of military age to join the war in Ukraine.
“It seems that the governors [of these North Caucasus republics] were instructed to form extra forces in addition to official recruitment through the military registration and enlistment offices,” Sergei Krivenko, director of the Citizen. Army. Law human rights group, told RFE/RL.
If you recall, and I can’t go and pull up the update post and link to it because they’re still working out the details of restoring our archives, I spent most of one of these updates a couple of months ago focusing on the ethnic makeup of the Russian army. It relied heavily on an interview with a subject matter expert on these communities. For a lot of the ethnic citizens of the Russian Federation, the only way out of abject poverty and the complete impoverishment and neglect of their states and societies is through joining the Russian military. It brings them stable wages, societal status, etc. Provided they live through it. This is also why there have been so few casualties, both killed and wounded in action, among actual ethnic Russians in Russia proper. They’re almost all among the ethnic populations.
As long as Putin can offer these men money for their service, which also brings them social status, he will be able to continue to regenerate his manpower. And since his theater strategy, at least for now, is to consolidate his control over eastern Ukraine, establish it over southern Ukraine, and functionally turn Ukraine into rump state cut off from the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, solving his manpower problems in this way will be sufficient. Especially as the Ukrainians are also taking a lot of military casualties of their own.
The Russians still have the advantage over Ukrainian forces, who are suffering, too. Ukrainian officials put the number of their soldiers killed in action at as many as 200 a day.
Until or unless Putin decides he needs to try to expand the parts of Ukraine he is either occupying in the east or thinks/feels he needs to occupy in the south, then what Russia is doing to generate new manpower combined with the damage they are inflicting on the Ukrainians will be sufficient to continue the war.
I think that’s enough for tonight.
Your daily Patron!
40 mortar and other "arrivals" were in my native Chernihiv region today. I'm not afraid of the sound of explosions because of my work. But a little girl wrote to me at night: "What just exploded?". I asked where she lives now, and find out that it was just thunder. #dogpatron pic.twitter.com/52HYPTXiYy
— Patron (@PatronDsns) July 5, 2022
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@patron__dsns
Open thread!
Ohio Mom
Adam, yesterday I was going to leave a comment saying I don’t leave comments because I have nothing to add. But then the blog broke and I couldn’t.
I read all your Ukraine posts, either just after they go up or the next day, if I’ve fallen asleep too early. I’ve learned a lot and I appreciate you always trying to end with that puppy. Because after everything I read here, I need that respite.
Adam L. Silverman
@Ohio Mom: No worries. My housekeeping note wasn’t intended to draw people into commenting. Additionally, they’re still trying to figure out what the problem was last night.
Alison Rose
Thank you for such detailed responses to those comments. You have a way of wording things where I can understand what’s going on. Well, mostly.
I watched Zelenskyy’s address this afternoon and the destruction of the university made me want to scream. “An enemy of civilization and humanity” is exactly correct. Every day I am more and more disturbed by what kind of creature Putin really is.
But Patron is the bestest boy.
Thank you as always, Adam.
(One note: Russia has far greater strategic depth in terms of its population. It has, as Gin&Tonic indicated in his reply to Carlo last night, something like four times the population of Russia. – should that last word be Ukraine?)
Andrya
Adam, I have no idea how to thank you. What an incredible answer to my question. I will be writing to POTUS Biden saying we need to do more to establish freedom of access to international waters- including escorts in the Black Sea. (Wasn’t that what we fought WWI over?) It certainly makes me feel that FDR was totally, totally right in deciding (before Pearl Harbor) that the US Navy would escort British convoys (in WWII) as far east as Iceland.
I’m still a bit confused about the commenting issue. I’ve been exercising self-restraint on commenting: asking myself each time “is this important enough to take up space/attention on the BJ comments section?” If comments in some way help the enterprise, hey, I can post my first thoughts without censoring them. Tell me- which approach would be better?
Jerzy Russian
Did Austria do the “pull my finger” bit before this happened?
Also, who among us hasn’t confused real life with a video game, or have tried to convince others that parts of a video game are real life?
debbie
Anything that delays or impedes Putin’s determination to grind down Ukraine’s resistance can’t be a bad thing. My day was too long and troubled to remember what I heard/read, but I remember thinking that what happened would tick Vlad off and so I choose to count that as a positive. Until the world can truly stand up to Putin, kick him out of the UN, label him and his “federation” as criminal thugs, and slam sanctions all over his ass, I’m not sure what more we can do. But we must do SOMETHING. We need to find a way to grind down Russia’s resistance or foment a revolution within Russia.
Where’s our cyber stuff? Surely we’re not incompetent?
debbie
@Alison Rose :
Boy, Patron’s welcome to the hours of thunder booming overnight right over my apartment last night!
The Lodger
If the Austrians were using gas to power vehicles, would a fahrt joke work?
MobiusKlein
About right of way in the seas – what amount of blockading is considered allowable without an official War?
It feels like attacking cargo ships in transit is an act of war, just like bombing an oil pipeline would be.
BeautifulPlumage
Could someone explain ‘ejecting Gazprom from its Haidach gas storage facility”? Are these storage tanks being emptied, a pipeline being shut down? TYIA
Chetan Murthy
@BeautifulPlumage: The following tweet has more info in an embedded image (o/w I’d have pasted the text).
https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1544626124323438592
Thor Heyerdahl
@Andrya: The entrance and exit to the Black Sea is subject to the will of the Turks (apologies in advance if I mischaracterize anything)
Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits
BeautifulPlumage
@Chetan Murthy: thank you, now I understand. They’re losing their claim to storage space.
dp
My big question was the relative manpower situation. You’ve shown Russia is going to be fine. How about Ukraine? Are casualties going to break them?
Andrya
@Thor Heyerdahl: Absolutely true. However, Turkey is part of NATO, and if russia starts sinking commercial shipping from Ukraine, it doesn’t seem to me impossible to get the Turkish government to cooperate. As I’ve said before, my familial/social network includes Turkish Kurds, so my opinion of Erdogan could hardly be lower. (OK, he is better than Hitler or Stalin.) Still, Erdogan is for sale, he has already extorted “screw the Kurds” from Finland and Sweden, so I have some hope that he could be persuaded to enforce free passage in the Black Sea.
Chetan Murthy
@Andrya:
I also have a low opinion of Erdogan. It seems to me he won’t be persuaded until UA is clearly winning. Until then, he’ll stay on the fence, waiting to see what the “smart move” is.
Steeplejack
Small glitch in post: “[Russia has] something like four times the population of
RussiaUkraine.”JCJ
@The Lodger: Sehr witzig!
Andrya
@Chetan Murthy: We both agree Erdogan is for sale, I am simply hoping that he goes for cheaper than you expect. Time will tell who was right. Obviously, he would have to be leaned on.
Mallard Filmore
A few days ago I said that Russia was headed toward Junior Partner status in relation to China (pretty sure *I* did not say “client state”). In Joe Blogs YouTube video, he says that China is leaning toward First Among Equals status when assembling a new BRICS inter-country bank network.
https://youtu.be/eLBNGrrgjQg?t=535 (at 535 seconds)
https://youtu.be/eLBNGrrgjQg?t=785 (at 785 seconds)
From the Austria news, the West better get used to being cut off of Russia’s energy supply.
My interpretation: We have nukes. Therefore, no countries can be allowed to band together to resist our armies in any form as they murder, loot, and rape on a massive scale.
Another Scott
@Mallard Filmore: Medvedev seems to be the designated sabre-rattler. He said months ago (actually at least as far back as 2015) that cutting Russia off from SWIFT would be an “act of war”. I assume everyone in authority is ignoring his pronouncements and instead listening to VVP and Lavrov, and mostly (overwhelmingly) watching what they do as opposed to what they say.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L. Silverman
@Alison Rose : That was supposed to be Ukraine. I’ve fixed it. Thanks.
Adam L. Silverman
@Andrya: Commenting makes no difference to the site as we measure discreet page views. The issue was G&T, for who this war is exceedingly, familialy personal, lamenting that commenting had fallen off because of the temporary disruption of the site and wondering if this was an indicator of war fatigue setting in. I chose to try to address this as a housekeeping note to a post a few days ago, which seems to have been taken as me appealing for people to comment, which was not my intention.
Adam L. Silverman
@Andrya: Also, my apologies for misspelling your name. I’ve fixed it.
Adam L. Silverman
@MobiusKlein: A blockade is an act of war.
Adam L. Silverman
@dp: I don’t think so, but I’m not sure anyone has any certainty on that.
Andrya
@Adam L. Silverman: For Gin & Tonic: if there is anything whatever I can do, now or in the future, as a private person and/or a citizen, support for Ukraine will not fall off. But we absolutely must win the 2024 election.
jnfr
I can’t thank you enough for these updates.
Adam L. Silverman
@jnfr: You, and everyone else, are most welcome.
Sebastian
Thank you for this update, Adam.
Ksmiami
@Adam L. Silverman: I want our subs to hunt down the Russians- sink one at a time. The blockade is an act of war against the world
Dan B
@Adam L. Silverman: I’m not commenting as much about your Ukraine posts because the war has become an ultra marathon. The energy must be conserved. We may see some dramatic shifts. Having the energy to focus on those will be important to our spirits.
I’m continually concerned that leaders like Scholz seem to believe that Putin are no threat to Getmany while the Baltics and Poland, plus Finland and Sweden of course seem very certain that Putin will not stop at Ukraine. It’s difficult to see a good outcome for Ukraine when Scholz feels that Putin has no plans past Ukraine.
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L. Silverman: I thought of it as an observation, not a lament.
At any rate, long-term, having a larger number of Dagestanis and Ingush and Ossetians with military training will make things exciting for mother russia.
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: In a different time and circumstance, this was a big reason segregationists resisted having African Americans serve in combat units during the First and Second World Wars. The presence of Black Korean War combat veterans in the American South was a factor in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s.
James Farmer had an interesting anecdote about this in a speech he gave at Washington and Lee University. He described the night he and a large group of people were holed up in a Mississippi town’s funeral home. They were surrounded by a mob including police, who demanded that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee organizer be handed over. Farmer was placed in a coffin and smuggled out in a hearse.
When they reached a safe destination and Farmer was let out of the coffin, he saw that the five men with him were armed. The men told him they were Army veterans. They said they knew Farmer was non-violent so they hadn’t let him in on the plan, but that the mob and the police knew who they were and knew what they had, and that’s why they were let through.
Quiltingfool
I don’t comment much on these posts as I don’t have the knowledge that Adam or other commenters have on Ukraine, military tactics, Russia, etc. I read to learn, and have learned much.
Not as many comments as before bothered me; I wondered if we were starting to forget Ukrainians and their fight for freedom. I’m not. I just don’t comment. So maybe others here are like me?
I have surrounded myself with blue and yellow fabric and I fashion it into quilts. For Ukraine. I have one right now ready to auction/sell for Ukraine. I’m working on one today and have another quilt drafted to be done when the current one is complete. I have not forgotten Ukraine and I am not done doing what I can to help.
Alce_e_ardillo
@Gin & Tonic: Particularly if they are treated as disposable cogs by their ( presumably Russian officers). The breakup of the Russian Federation may come sooner than we think.
YY_Sima Qian
@Mallard Filmore: Not a surprise that China is “1st among equals” in the restructured BRICS Development Bank / New Development Bank. After all, China’s GDP is significantly larger than the other members combined. Even if all of the prospective members (such as Argentina & Iran) all end up joining, China will still dwarf the others. Likewise, China occupies the “1st among equals” position in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that it established in 2012, similar to the privileged position that Japan occupies in the Asian Development Bank & the US in the World Bank.
What was surprising at the time was that China chose to forego the de facto veto power in the AIIB that the US has in the WB. Probably was a condition to woo the entry of western nations. Since its establishment, India has been the largest beneficiary of the AIIB’s infrastructure loans (I think India is the 2nd largest shareholder), this despite the border tensions (& other economic tensions) between India & China over the past 2 years.
YY_Sima Qian
@Adam L. Silverman: Thanks for the explanation for how Russia is managing its manpower issues. The challenge for both Ukraine & Russia is that freshly train recruits will simply not perform to the level of combat veterans, doubly so for operating high tech weaponry & executing complex combined arms maneuvers. So it is also a contest to see who can better integrate the veterans w/ the new recruits to maximize the overall effectiveness of the force.
I personally would caution against expecting a clear Ukrainian victory in the coming months. This war will likely last years, w/ pauses for one side or the other or both to regroup. This is especially true if Putin avoids overstretching the Russian Army again by going for Odesa or Dnipro. Evicting the Russian Army from occupied Ukrainian territories will be a costly & arduous task, & possibly requires a differently organized Ukrainian Army.
YY_Sima Qian
@Gin & Tonic: That is true. Experience fighting in Afghanistan helped birth & fuel the insurgency for independence in Chechnya. The Caucasus has been a difficult region for empires to being to heel, be it the Persians (whichever iteration), the Ottomans or the Russians.
YY_Sima Qian
@Andrya: Erdogan may be for sale, but he doesn’t stay sold for long. Utterly unreliable as a partner.
hummbumm
yes Russia has 4X the pop but that includes ethnic Russians (St Petersburg, Moscow etc…) who are not being targeted so you cant talk about Russia’s population at large without general mobilization which will severely disrupt the economy. The Caucus regions alone are not enough…. so we shall see, but i think attrition favors Ukraine and certainly on attrition of equipment as long as foreign support persists for both military and the broader civil society.
J R in WV
@YY_Sima Qian:
We have a saying here in the Mountain State of West Virginia: Mountaineers Are Always Free. It used to be “are always free men,” but I’ve rendered it with more modern equality. But that’s why places like Afghanistan and the Caucasus give tyrants lots of trouble.
And Thanks to Adam for the heavy lifting on this war reporting!
pat
How can this war go on for years when russia is destroying the entire infrastructure, hospitals, universities, museums, apartment blocks…..
What will be left, and how long is it until they begin to target the site of the government?
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: But there is still an unexamined assumption of similarity between the two force designs that are in fact quite dissimilar here.
Note that the Ukrainians do not need to integrate “new recruits”: their active reserve, which is 36+ years deep, consists of personnel who are already trained, and (I believe, although I haven’t been able to verify this part) partly subject to periodic military refresher call-ups on the Swiss model.
So there continues to be a failure of a necessary distinction between systems and available numbers between the two adversaries. Adam has provided here a good data point on how Russia is scrambling to make up for the mismatch between it’s force design an it’s war aims. To date, however, no military authority that I have been able to locate has written a single line on the subject of what the Ukrainian armed forces are doing to meet their manpower needs in light of the evolving battle, and whether their pre-war force design is adequate or inadequate to the war that they are being forced to fight.
The only reference I’ve seen that comes close is some Russian milblogger chatter on Telegram reported by Andrei Soldatov several weeks ago, before the Donbas onslaught got rolling, in which the conduct of the war by the Russian military was severely criticized, and in passing some notice was taken of the risks of taking on a nation of 44 million people and universal male conscription with a “small” largely contract-soldier army such as Russia’s.
Again, I find this blank space in the analyses baffling. Everyone is counting Russian manpower to the last Chechen and Dagestani, but I can find no professional assessments of Ukrainian manpower. I wouldn’t expect the UA MOD to supply them, of course, but it seems a bit intellectually lazy of other military analysis specialists to simply assume some simple model of UA manpower will suit the case, and only Russian details really matter.
Ben Vernia
Totally random question: Are Letters of Marque still a thing? If so, could Ukraine issue a Letter of Marque to a private vessel to go after Russian-flagged ships outside of the Black Sea? (Yes, I’ve perhaps read too many Patrick O’Brian novels.)
Carlo Graziani
@Ben Vernia: I loved those. And The Letter of Marque was one of the best.
But it’s straight-up piracy nowadays, very likely.