Open Threads

Weird, the shelling of Kharkiv stopped after s400 got hit with ATACMS in Belgorod.

Any ideas why? pic.twitter.com/W9wPYM6LKa

— Georgian Legion (@georgian_legion) June 5, 2024

Eez a puzzlement!

More seriously, there are still some issues with the Biden administration’s approval for Ukraine to use American weapons to hit Russian echelons, weapons systems, etc that are attacking Kharkiv Oblast from inside Russia. This morning’s Politico Morning Defense newsletter, which I get courtesy of a former client, reported:

Rep. Gregory Meeks is joining Republicans to press the Biden administration over whether it needs to give Ukraine permission to strike more targets inside Russia, he told your Morning D anchor on Tuesday.

Why it matters: Republicans and Democrats have criticized the Biden administration over its restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons against Russia. Meeks, as HFAC’s top Democrat, could be an influential voice in swaying the White House to go further.

Context: President Joe Biden told Ukraine it can use U.S.-provided weapons only near the area of Kharkiv and only against attacking Russian forces, POLITICO scooped on Thursday. Ukraine cannot use those weapons to hit civilian infrastructure or launch long-range missiles, such as the Army Tactical Missile System, to strike military targets inside Russia.

But lawmakers said President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told them last week he is not allowed to use the shorter-range version of ATACMS either, which is stopping him from effectively defending Kharkiv. Moscow has stepped up its offensive against Ukraine’s second-largest city that is just 12 miles from the Russian border.

The Biden administration, after months of resisting, has sent Ukraine a version of ATACMS that travels 100 miles and carries warheads containing hundreds of cluster bombs and a version with a 200-mile range.

What happened: On the sidelines of last weekend’s IISS Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore, Zelenskyy and his advisers told Meeks, HFAC Chair Michael McCaul and Reps. Joe Courtney, Joe Wilson and Young Kim they need more latitude from Biden.

Bipartisan push: McCaul — who has criticized what he sees as the White House’s slow pace in sending weapons to Ukraine — told reporters Tuesday he and Meeks hope to meet with administration officials in the coming days to get answers. “We’re going to press them really hard to change this because it’s affecting [Ukraine’s] ability to win this,” he said.

“Meeks was not aware that they can only hit like 3 percent” of Russian military targets “because there’s a limitation imposed by [national security adviser] Jake Sullivan,” McCaul said. “We were with Zelenskyy and his generals and they were like, we can’t hit these targets without the ability to use short-range ATACMS, not the long-range but short-range.”

Courtney, a senior HASC member, told your anchor that Zelenskyy and his military advisers described their new freedom as “much more narrow” than lawmakers believed it to be because they cannot use shorter-range ATACMS. High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and 155mm munitions are “usable, but that doesn’t reach where the problems are on the Russian side.”

“They gave very explicit examples of air bases that Russian planes are operating out of to bomb Ukraine. They can’t touch them within the scope of the authority that the president announced. I think there was very much surprise on our side of the table,” Courtney said. “There was definitely a bipartisan agreement that we need to go back to the White House and follow up.”

A wider area: Meeks told your Morning D anchor he also wants the administration to spell out whether the new authorities actually permit Ukraine to strike all the Russians who are hitting Kharkiv or whether it needs a freer hand to target a broader area.

“If there’s evidence or proof that [Russian attacks are] coming from someplace [other than the area of Kharkiv], then that would cause another dialogue and conversation,” Meeks said.

“Then there should be that discussion between the president and President Zelenskyy, ‘This is where they’re coming from.’ Then in my estimation, the administration would consider [that] because the objective is to hit them where they’re being hit from. If they’re being hit from somewhere else, how do we stop them from hitting from that place?”

Meeks also wants the administration to explain whether it’s giving Ukraine timely intelligence about the positions of attacking Russian forces so Kyiv can strike back at them.

Good job overall: Despite his concerns, Meeks defended the administration’s efforts so far. Its strategy of “working in lockstep with our allies” is painstaking but necessary, he said.

“It’s easy if I have a disagreement with somebody just to go punch him right in the mouth,” Meeks said. “It’s hard to negotiate and have a dialogue and a conversation. And I think the administration has been working. It’s harder, it might take longer, but it’s better.”

Looks like the adjustment to policy needs some additional fine tuning.

At Bloomberg, Marc Champion writes that the US and its allies and partners needs to actually formulate a coherent policy, strategy, and strategic narrative regarding Ukraine. (emphasis mine)

Ukraine’s allies need to radically rethink their approach to this devastated nation’s defense.That means delivering more weapons and ammunition, of course, but it’s also about changing the way the war is explained, because getting the “why” right is essential to achieving the “how.”

Back in February 2022, this wasn’t so important. The shock and outrage caused by President Vladimir Putin’s invasion was more than enough to persuade populations to lay down tax money for Ukraine. Countries had redundant weapons stocks; allies committed to help for “as long as it takes,” in the name of protecting both liberal democracy and the rules-based international order.

That’s no longer sufficient. Putin badly underestimated both Ukraine and the West two years ago, but he has adapted and will win unless both the West and Ukraine can build and execute a new strategy.

To begin with, the language used to justify support for Ukraine needs to change as the conflict morphs into a test of strength and will between competing coalitions, led by the US on one side and China on the other, as my fellow columnist Hal Brands has described. At the same time, November’s presidential election in the US could see drastic change in Washington, making it all the more important that a clear policy and viable exit strategy are in place before then.

It has taken until the third year of war for the Biden administration to state openly that it wants Ukraine to win, but what that means remains ill-defined. It’s taken just as long to talk seriously about what to do with the roughly $300 billion of sovereign Russian funds frozen in US and European banks, or to approve sending the long range ATACMS missiles and F-16’s that Ukraine so obviously needs. Debate continues even now on whether Ukraine should be able to use those weapons to strike targets in Russia.

This is a mess, not a strategy, fully understandable at the start of the war, but by now inexcusable. Ukraine’s increasing difficulties on the battlefield are focusing minds, but as they gather in Washington in July to celebrate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary, leaders should use the occasion to decisively reframe Ukraine’s defense. They should set victory as the goal, define parameters for what that means and spell out how they plan to achieve it. Then, and only then, can the pledge of “as long as it takes” be replaced with “whatever it takes.”

Ukraine’s allies should above all state openly that while the final decisions on any peace or ceasefire will be Kyiv’s to make, victory won’t necessarily hang on the return of all lost territory. After all, Ukraine could roll Russian troops back to the two nations’ internationally recognized borders as they stood in February 2014 — before Putin seized Crimea — and still not end the fighting.

“Were Russia to succeed here, it would be another Saigon, another Kabul, in terms of the erosion of American power,’’ former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt told me at the same conference. This would have an even bigger impact on the balance of power in Europe, undermining stability and forcing a much larger rearmament than the European missile defense systems and “drone army” now under discussion.

Next up, stop justifying support for Ukraine as a defense of “liberal” democracy. Ukraine isn’t a liberal cause; it is a just one. In academia, liberal democracy has a very specific meaning. It denotes a political system that both secures the ability of societies to choose their leaders, and has the independent institutions to constrain them once elected. But this isn’t academia.

In an era of culture wars, anything tagged as “liberal” is an instant red flag to conservatives, to whom it signals a much wider policy agenda, from gender transition to migration. Calling democracy liberal also suggests there must be other, equally valid flavors, from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s “Illiberal Democracy,” to the whatever-we-say-it-is variety endorsed by Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping in their latest 7,000-word renewal of marriage vows.

Stay focused: There is democracy, or non-democracy, and having the ability to kick the bums out is as valuable to those with a conservative agenda as it is for liberals – as anyone who ever lived in a totalitarian state can attest.

Similarly, we need to ditch the “rules-based international order,” a concept that even proponents have trouble defining. It’s also open to legitimate attack by Russia, China and their allies for being a construct unilaterally dictated by the US-led West since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and riddled with hypocrisy in its application. Russia has used this straw man to paint itself, absurdly but with some success, as a defender of the United Nations Charter and its core principles of sovereignty, even as it shreds them in Ukraine.

So let’s be clear that by helping Ukraine, NATO is defending the UN’s most fundamental protection against nations having their borders altered by force. This is a principle the vast majority of leaders in Africa, the Middle East and beyond also prize, precisely because their own colonially drawn boundaries are so open to potential dispute. It is the revisionist powers coalescing around Russia’s expansion effort in Ukraine that are breaking this taboo to further their own territorial ambitions – whether in the Levant, the former Soviet space, the Korean Peninsula or the South China Sea. This needs to be called out again, and again.

Ukraine wants to join the club of democracies, which is inspiring and a requirement of its European future. But Kyiv’s defense won’t be helped by casting right wing voters in the West, or a majority of the world’s leaders as part of the enemy camp. There are now 91 autocracies to 88 democracies in the world, with 71% of the global population living under autocratic rule, up from 50% in 2003, according to the V-Dem Institute, a longstanding data collection project on democracy hosted by the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

This is above all a war to preserve the sanctity of borders and so prevent further wars. Ukraine’s allies should make that crystal clear at July’s NATO summit, and perhaps even invite a few “autocrats” to help drive the message home.

More at the link!

The Financial Times has the details on the effects of Russia’s attempts to complete reduce Ukraine’s power generation and transmission capacity and capability.

Russia has knocked out or captured more than half of Ukraine’s power generation, causing the worst rolling blackouts since the start of its full-scale invasion in 2022.

Moscow’s missile and drone attacks in recent months have homed in on Ukrainian power plants, forcing energy companies to impose nationwide shutdowns while scrambling to repair the damage and find alternative supplies.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s domestic energy production was about 55 gigawatts of electricity, among the largest in Europe. That power generation capacity has currently dropped below 20GW, due to bombardments or to Russian occupation taking those plants offline, according to Ukrainian officials.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told government meeting on Thursday that the consequences of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector are “long-term”, which means that saving power “will be part of our daily life in the years to come”.

“Our goal is to save at all levels: from large enterprises to individual houses and apartments,” he said.

A Russian attack on Saturday struck energy facilities in five regions, causing significant damage, said Kyiv energy minister German Galushchenko.

The latest strikes have also targeted pumping facilities for underground natural gas storage being used by EU customers. Though these pumps can be easily replaced, the attacks do highlight concerns about security of supply come winter — both for domestic use and exports to the bloc.

The EU’s ambassador in Kyiv, Katarina Mathernova, said that since March, “Russia has destroyed [a] whooping 9.2GW of energy generation” in Ukraine. She added that she was meeting officials to establish what their “urgent energy equipment needs” were in order to “help alleviate the impact of continuous Russian missile attacks on energy infrastructure”.

Russia’s first aerial bombardment campaign in the winter of 2022-23 targeted the country’s electrical distribution grid — which could be repaired relatively easily, according to officials and experts. But the latest barrages are zeroing in on thermal and hydroelectric power plants which will be much harder and more expensive to fix, rebuild or replace, they said.

One Ukrainian government official described Saturday’s assault as “devastating” while another said it was likely to mean that by winter residents would be spending a vast majority of their day without electricity.

Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the press. One of the officials said 1.2GW of power generation was lost in Saturday’s bombardment alone, while infrastructure critical for transporting gas from underground storage facilities in western Ukraine was badly damaged.

Asked what the damage would mean for the months ahead, one of the officials put it bluntly: “We should prepare for life in the cold and the dark.”

“This is our new normal,” the second official said, gesturing outside a window to the darkness that had descended on Kyiv during a recent emergency power shutdown.

Ukraine’s leadership has blamed the recent destruction on insufficient air defences being provided by western allies. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian missiles were able to hit Kyiv’s largest thermal power plant in April because Ukrainian forces had run out of munitions.

Zelenskyy has urged his allies to send more interceptors and air defence batteries — but so far only Germany and Italy have pledged to do so.

Russia’s aim appears to be to make life untenable for Ukrainians, Oleksandr Lytvynenko, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, told the Financial Times. He described plans to set up a “decentralised energy system” relying on more mini-power plants that would be less vulnerable to Russian attacks.

More at the link!

The hum of defiance. #UkraineWillWin https://t.co/C9VaLjioJK

— Glasnost Gone (@GlasnostGone) June 5, 2024

Michael Isikoff at SpyTalk is reporting that Jared Kushner and his business partner Rick Grenell are under contract to build an anti-NATO memorial in Serbia.

After weathering criticism over its reliance on a gusher of Saudi cash, Jared Kushner’s investment fund made its first big splash last month when it announced it had signed a $500 million deal with the Serbian government to develop a high end real estate project in downtown Belgrade on the site of a bombed down army building destroyed during the 1999 Kosovo war.

But the fine print of the deal includes a commitment that seems destined to stir up even more international controversy: a pledge by Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, to construct a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression”— an allusion to the U.S.-backed bombing campaign that brought the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic to its knees a quarter century ago in response to its relentless campaign of repression and savage massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Among those exercised over the Kushner deal is retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the war.

While he has no objection to a U.S. firm investing in Serbia, the planned revisionist memorial—officially proclaiming America’s adversary in the war to have been a victim of “aggression”— “is worse than a reversal” of U.S. policies in the region, said Clark in an interview with SpyTalk. “It’s a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.”

Just as concerning as the whitewashing of Serbian war crimes, Clark said, is the just announced deal between Kushner’s firm and the Serbian government of Aleksander Vučić, a pro-Russian hardliner who once served as minister of information in Milosevic’s government. The memorial project needs to be viewed in a wider geopolitical context: It serves the Kremlin’s core interests in undermining NATO at a time the alliance is engaged in resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine.

“This is part of a broader Russian intelligence movement to split, discredit and weaken NATO,” Clark said. “It’s Russian imperial pushback…Should Kushner participate in this? Of course he should not.”

Neither Kushner nor representatives of his Miami-based firm responded to requests for comment. But the remarks by Clark are likely to draw further attention to a project that has generated strong criticism from Serbian opposition leaders as well as questions about potential conflicts of interest if Kushner’s father in law, Donald Trump (for whom he is once again raising money) is elected president in November.

Those questions have intensified in recent weeks in light of the reported role in the Belgrade deal of Richard Grenell, Trump’s former U.S. ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence, who has forged close ties to Serbian officials and made no secret of his hopes of becoming secretary of state in a second Trump administration.

The New York Times recently reported that Grenell is a partner of Kushner’s in the proposed $500 million project, which includes plans to build a luxury hotel, retail space and 1,500 residential units on the bombed out site of the former Serbian Army headquarters pulverized by NATO forces under Clark’s command in 1999.

He was quoted by the Times as saying he saw the project—an earlier version of which he pushed during a period he also served as Trump’s special envoy to the region—as promoting “healing” between the U.S. and Serbia. (Efforts to reach Grenell for comment for this story were unsuccessful.)

Personal finances over party over country.

Speaking of, Trump has once again communicated that he’s reached an accord with Putin to release imprisoned on bullshit trumped up charges Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich once Trump is (re)elected:

Convicted Felon Trump says his good friend Putin will release WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich as soon as Trump wins the election, but he won’t do it if Biden wins. pic.twitter.com/EeUQLyzJyR

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 4, 2024

This is the second time that Trump has made this assertion in the past two weeks and it has left everyone not in the cult exactly what kind of deal has been cut between Trump and Putin this time.

It is important to remember that we now have documentation in the national archives that Nixon working through Kissinger, who was supposed to be representing/advising the Johnson administration, subverted the peace negotiations with the Vietnamese communists in order to ratfuck the election. And that we have documentation in the national archives that representatives of the Reagan campaign subverted the Carter administration’s attempts to negotiate a return of the hostages in order to ratfuck the 1980 election. And that we also have documentation, thanks to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, signed by then chair of the committee Marco Rubio (R-FL), that the Trump campaign subverted the 2016 election by conspiring with a variety of Russian and Russian aligned actors. So whatever it is that Trump may have concocted here would be at least the fourth time that Republican candidates have conspired with America’s enemies to subvert presidential elections.

Speaking of Putinized Republican elected officials:

my god https://t.co/708uuuhcUV

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) June 5, 2024

If you had 144 Senator Tubervilles you’d have gross stupidity!

NBC News has reported that the French have arrested a Ukrainian-Russian citizen on terrorism related charges that may be related to Russia’s sabotage campaign in Europe:

PARIS — A dual Ukrainian-Russian citizen was arrested after he suffered “significant burns following an explosion” at a hotel in Val d’Oise, France, on Monday evening, according to French officials.

Multiple U.S. officials briefed on the matter said authorities were looking into whether the arrested person was trying to conduct a pro-Russian act of sabotage against a French facility that supported Ukraine’s war efforts.

A source with the French National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office, which announced the arrest of the 26-year-old, said that its investigation found materials used to make explosive devices and that one of those devices had exploded. No other injuries were reported.

An anti-terrorism investigation opened Tuesday led to several terrorism-related charges. The person has not be formally charged.

The office said it was “too early for us to say” if the case was connected to the Russian sabotage campaign and pattern.

The U.S. officials said the device that exploded included the homemade explosive compound TATP, which has been used in some terror attacks in the last three decades.

The incident could be one of several recently documented examples of pro-Russian sabotage throughout Europe, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the case.

U.S. and European officials say that Russia is conducting a sabotage campaign across Europe in an increasingly aggressive effort by President Vladimir Putin to undermine Western support for Ukraine, seeking to damage railways, military bases and other sites used to supply arms to Kyiv.

Novosel’skii:

Russian Kh-101 missile crashed 365km from the front line. Novosel’skii village area, 2nd of June. pic.twitter.com/jAYn9bAERv

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) June 5, 2024

The Kharkiv front:

The road of destroyed Russian equipment on Kharkiv front from the point of view of a Russian military on a motorcycle.https://t.co/HZfBSoqvVL pic.twitter.com/NufFwOX0pg

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) June 5, 2024

The Bakhmut front:

Full video of the Russian attack on Bakhmut front:

«About 50 invaders, supported by armored vehicles and tanks, moved towards the positions of the “Phoenix” unit in the Kurdyumivka area of Donetsk region. Three Russian BTR-82s were blown up thanks to remotely installed mines,… https://t.co/wERuwOwS5E pic.twitter.com/F4M5JGgN5H

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) June 5, 2024

Full video of the Russian attack on Bakhmut front:

«About 50 invaders, supported by armored vehicles and tanks, moved towards the positions of the “Phoenix” unit in the Kurdyumivka area of Donetsk region. Three Russian BTR-82s were blown up thanks to remotely installed mines, and UAVs finished them off. The fighters stopped and later destroyed the T-80 tank with an FPV drone. “Pomsta” brigade knocked out a T-90M from the “Korsar” ATGM, which was also finished off by drone operators.

During the failed assault attempt, 7 Russians were killed, 13 more were wounded. Part of the enemy’s equipment and infantry was destroyed by comrades from the 28th Brigade.»

https://t.me/DPSUkr/20325

Russian T-90M ‘number 815’ elegantly destroyed by FPV drone operator of Pomsta Brigade. Bakhmut front. https://t.co/OgFuEzucob pic.twitter.com/c6xkBxbdpV

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) June 5, 2024

The Zaporizhzhia front:

Ukrainian soldiers reported about a new Russian attack attempt on Urozhaine, Zaporizhzhia front:

“The direction of Urozhaine and Staromayorske became one of the hottest in the last month. Yesterday, Russians again tried to gather forces to storm our positions in Urozhaine, but… pic.twitter.com/rrj7bYcUSb

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) June 5, 2024

Ukrainian soldiers reported about a new Russian attack attempt on Urozhaine, Zaporizhzhia front:

“The direction of Urozhaine and Staromayorske became one of the hottest in the last month. Yesterday, Russians again tried to gather forces to storm our positions in Urozhaine, but the group was defeated 4-5 km away from the frontline, Russians lost 2 tanks and an infantry fighting vehicle, the enemy’s personnel ‘heroically’ retreated. However, the situation there is still difficult.”

https://t.me/officer_alex33/2959

Moscow:

Off we go. The expired “president” of Russia again put people with serious faces under good cameras to make several statements about negotiations. Although it took him a couple of seconds to remember what denazification actually meant, he still managed to summarize the essence.… pic.twitter.com/LJRFFFgR43

— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated) June 5, 2024

Off we go. The expired “president” of Russia again put people with serious faces under good cameras to make several statements about negotiations. Although it took him a couple of seconds to remember what denazification actually meant, he still managed to summarize the essence.

Once again the character’s lunacy was confirmed. Turns out that killing and maiming a couple of hundred thousand people is not a problem at all for the sake of a “legal ban on nazi propaganda in Ukraine.”

Putin: “Russia has no imperial ambitions.”

Of course it hasn’t. Not anymore.

— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated) June 5, 2024

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron!

A new video from Patron’s official TikTok!

@patron__dsns

🌝 #песпатрон

♬ original sound – 𝔸𝕫𝕦𝕤𝕒

Open thread!