Before we get started, and there will be more below the jump, the last reporting I’ve seen indicates that the Azov Regiment and the 36th Separate Marine Brigade are still, just barely holding on.
I want to start tonight with this question from commenter egorelick from the comments to last night’s update post:
I really appreciate these updates, but since I can’t really [neither predict or conceive work] the possible outcomes, I don’t know what to think of these updates.
There’s more questions in that comment, which I’ll get to in a bit, but first:
First off, like everyone else thanks for the kind words and you are most welcome. I wish I didn’t have to do them, I hope that soon I won’t have to do them, but until then…
To answer your question, there are several reasons for these updates and, perhaps, one of them will help you to make sense of them. The first reason is that Cole asked me to do an update on the first day of the reinvasion, then called me to talk about what was going on on the second day and asked if I was going to do another update, and that basically set the pattern. Beyond that, however, is that I am not currently formally working on this problem set. As in I am not on a funded line nor on a project where I get paid to try to help senior leaders better understand what is going on so they can make the best decisions possible to help the Ukrainians get to a successful battlefield outcome as quickly as possible. Right now I’m just finishing up a project I was working on with my boss and several colleagues that had nothing to do with Ukraine and waiting to hear what my next project or assignment might be.
Beyond that, however, this war is of some professional importance to me. By now all of you know, and if you don’t you must just now be tuning in, I was the Cultural Advisor/Senior Civilian Advisor assigned to the Commanding General of US Army Europe from December 2013 through the end of August 2014. I was actually assigned to him to assist US Army Europe with the Army’s part of then Secretary of State Kerry’s 2014 Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative. However, by the middle of January it became apparent that something bad was brewing in Moscow. And since I was his only cultural subject matter expert if I didn’t provide him the socio-cultural strategic assessments of what was going on in Ukraine and between Ukraine and Russia, no one would. In fact at that point thanks to the sequester/Budget Control Act and Army politics between the Training and Doctrine Command, its subordinate command the Combined Arms Center, and US Army War College where I was assigned full time and which had taken over funding my billet, I was not just the only civilian cultural subject matter expert to have ever worked at the strategic level or the most senior one to have been mobilized as part of the Army Culture and Foreign Language Directorate’s providing us to the Army’s centers and schools, I was the only one left. All fourteen of my colleagues and counterparts had been demobilized and either returned to the universities they were mobilized from or moved on to other things. As a result, in February 2014 I quickly prepared an assessment of the Maidan movement, oligarchism and kleptocracy, and what I anticipated would be Putin’s plans to scarf up at least Crimea. Because of the work I’d done on the Syrian Civil War for the Army, I had been working my way through a lot of the material on Putin, how he rose to power, how he ran Russia, his connections to organized crime, etc because all of that was pertinent to his intervention in the Syrian Civil War. And because of other work I’d done over the years I knew a lot about oligarchism, kleptocracy, and organized crime. So I wasn’t coming in completely cold. While I think my 2014 assessment holds up well, there is one section – on Crimean political attitudes – that I wished I’d written knowing what I know now rather than just relying on the year on year, election on election polling data.
To tie this part up, the point of these updates is to basically do for everyone at Balloon Juice what I’d be doing if I was actually working this problem set. This means continually staying updated on the open source reporting and information regarding what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, as well as in the US, the EU, NATO, and non-EU and non-NATO allies and partners. So that I can then sift the information to highlight what is more important versus what is less important, what is more verified and verifiable versus what is closer to Rumor Intelligence (RUMINT), and then present it in a digestible manner for you all. This includes deciding what not to include right away because I want to see further, reliable reporting on it versus what I think needs to be in any specific update.
I was professionally involved in 2014 when this all started, when Putin invaded Ukraine to scarf up parts of the Donbas and Crimea both to punish Ukraine and to make it impossible for it to join NATO. I was one of the voices around a conference table that at the time in 2014 stated “we’re not going to risk a war with a nuclear power over Crimea.” I was technically correct, but over the past eight years I have come to think I was both strategically and morally wrong. I was strategically wrong because until/unless someone bloodies Putin’s nose and knocks him on his ass, he will not stop doing what he’s been doing since the early 00s. And morally wrong because being technically correct meant recognizing that we would do nothing as Putin set the conditions to eventually do what he is doing now with the reinvasion of Ukraine.
So that’s what you should make of these posts. That aside from me making some donations, in one case buying a Ghost of Kyiv shirt from the St. Javelin folks who are donating all profits to the Ukrainians, this is my way of making sure that we’re all tracking what Putin is doing to Ukraine, as well as the heroism of the Ukrainians and what their efforts and sacrifices are doing for us.
Here’s the rest of egorelick’s question:
I’m begging for someone to help me see the endgame. The security of the world (or at least Europe) requires a Putin/Russian defeat. Do we really expect Ukraine to endure this much longer. The complete destruction of every soldier in Mariupol is bad enough, but add the tens of thousands of civilian casualties and the billions of dollars of damage plus the horrors that await when Russia actually achieves its objective in the city. Ukraine is still strong and does not plan to surrender or negotiate. Russia appears to still be able to wage a savage war even if they are unable to achieve all of their objectives. A Ukrainian outright victory seems unlikely. A Russian outright victory seems unlikely. A stalemate seems intolerable.
I can only speak for myself here, but I’m not sure anyone can clearly see the endgame. And anyone who claims they can is either a liar or a fool. All we can do is make the efforts to ensure our elected and appointed officials do everything they can to support Ukraine to win this war. To ensure that Ukraine has the resources necessary to inflict enough pain on the Russian military that it can no longer fight, thereby securing a successful battlefield outcome that establishes the conditions to secure the post-war peace. Which is that Russia is no longer able to threaten Ukraine or any of its other neighbors ever again. That should be the strategic objective.
Enough navel gazing.
Here’s today’s address by President Zelenskyy. As always there are English subtitles in the video and the transcript is after the jump (emphasis mine):