Russian Strategy in Ukraine Shifts After Setbacks, and a Lengthy War Looms

I've been lagging on my Ukraine blogging since the slapping blowout at the Oscars!

Back at it now, in any case.

At WSJ, "Moscow’s new focus on Donbas and retreats from Kyiv set the stage for a protracted war of attrition":

Russia’s war on Ukraine shifted gears this week, as Moscow, lacking the strength to pursue rapid offensives on multiple fronts, began pulling back from Kyiv and other cities in the north, and refocused for now on seizing parts of the country’s east.

The pivot, after five weeks of intense fighting, was a gauge of the intensity and effectiveness of Ukrainian resistance and signaled a decision by the Kremlin to pursue what is likely to become a prolonged war of attrition.

Ukraine’s counterattacks—including a helicopter strike inside Russian territory—and Moscow’s redeployment toward Donbas in Ukraine’s east suggest that both sides believe they can win, making it unlikely that peace talks will result in a deal anytime soon.

Russia’s “military and political strategy hasn’t changed, it remains to annihilate Ukraine,” said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian minister of defense who advises President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. But he said, “Now, their capabilities no longer match their strategic vision.”

That could be a recipe for a prolonged conflict, increasing the stakes for both sides’ ability to raise troops and money and access weapons, ammunition and supplies.

For Ukraine, with its smaller military resources, such a shift to a lengthy conventional war heightens the need for shipments of heavy weapons such as tanks and artillery, Ukrainian officials said.

Russia’s declared shift toward trying to seize Donbas could allow it to concentrate firepower on a smaller front, shorten supply lines and make air support easier, giving Moscow a better chance at military success. It would also position Russia to try to encircle some of Ukraine’s best units, which are stationed there.

The Russian pullbacks from Kyiv, however, also allow Ukraine to redeploy additional resources to the eastern Donbas front—and to do it much faster because of shorter routes. Ukrainian officials were initially skeptical of Russian announcements that Moscow would limit military operations near Kyiv and Chernihiv, but lengthy convoys of Russian armor began leaving these areas Thursday, and scores of villages in northern Ukraine have been retaken by Ukrainian troops.

Russia appears determined to retain a smaller, blocking force around Kyiv to threaten the Ukrainian capital and prevent a large Ukrainian redeployment to Donbas, Ukrainian officials say. But a threat of encirclement of these Russian forces, northwest or northeast of Kyiv, could still precipitate a full withdrawal toward the Belarus border in coming days, they say.

“The enemy is not fully successful in retaining the areas that it wishes to keep. Our forces are kicking them out in the northwest and northeast, pushing the enemy away from Kyiv and making another attempt at storming it impossible,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said Friday.

Russia sent some of its best units to Kyiv and northern Ukraine. Many of them have been battered by fierce fighting, and would need considerable time to be reconstituted and prepared for redeployment, military analysts say.

U.S. officials estimate that some 10,000 soldiers out of Russia’s 190,000-strong force in Ukraine have been killed, with tens of thousands of others injured or taken prisoner. The elite 4th Guards Tank “Kantemirovskaya” Division lost 46 of its estimated 220 T-80 tanks, according to visual evidence compiled by military analysts.

Seeking to replenish its forces, Russia has been calling up reserves, sending to Ukraine troops deployed in Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia as well as conscripts. Some of these troops, particularly from the Russian National Guard, which usually performs mostly internal-security duties, have refused orders to deploy to Ukraine.

British Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who headed operations for the British Defense Ministry and also helped create Britain’s military training program in Ukraine, said Russia no longer has many additional reserves to throw into new offensives.

“Most of the effective combat power is already assigned to the war,” he said. So Russian President Vladimir Putin “has to build some more, which is tricky without mobilizing and under sanctions, or concentrate the combat power that he has.”

Russian nationalists, dismayed by the retreat from Kyiv, have called on Mr. Putin to mobilize for all-out war...

Still more.  

Biden Administration Looks to Extract Americans from Ukraine If Russia Attacks

Yeah. Right.

Let's see how that goes. (*Eye-roll.*)

At WSJ, "Biden Approves Pentagon Plan to Help Americans Fleeing Ukraine if Russia Invades":

WASHINGTON—The White House has approved a Pentagon plan for U.S. troops in Poland to help thousands of Americans likely to flee Ukraine if Russia attacks, as the Biden administration tries to avoid the kind of chaotic evacuation conducted in Afghanistan.

Some of the 1,700 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division being deployed to Poland to bolster that ally will in coming days begin to set up checkpoints, tent camps and other temporary facilities inside Poland’s border with Ukraine in preparation to serve arriving Americans, U.S. officials said. The troops aren’t authorized to enter Ukraine and won’t evacuate Americans or fly aircraft missions from inside Ukraine, officials said.

Instead, the officials said, the mission would be to provide logistics support to help coordinate the evacuation of Americans from Poland, after they arrive there from Kyiv and other parts of Ukraine, likely by land and without U.S. military support, the officials said. Roughly 30,000 Americans are in Ukraine, and if Russia attacks, some of them as well as Ukrainians and others would likely want to leave quickly, the officials said. Russia has been building up troops along the Ukraine border for months, and Western officials have said an invasion could come within weeks, while the Kremlin has said Russia doesn’t plan to invade Ukraine.

Looming over the current planning on Ukraine, defense officials said, is the memory of the rapid evacuation of more than 100,000 Americans and Afghans that U.S. and allied forces conducted in Kabul last August ending the U.S.’s war in Afghanistan.

Some of the same military commanders who were part of the Kabul mission are now leading the U.S. effort around Ukraine.

“Everyone who lived the evacuation from Afghanistan felt it was remarkable but also chaotic,” one defense official said. “That was a messy, messy withdrawal. We don’t want a chaotic withdrawal from Ukraine.”

Other officials said such evacuation planning is a prudent measure regardless of the Afghan experience, which, U.S. officials said, posed a different set of challenges than Ukraine.

In Afghanistan, the administration scrambled to deal with the Taliban’s lightning takeover of the country and the rapid cratering of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and military. U.S. forces had to be flown into Kabul to augment troops on the ground to evacuate tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and diplomatic personnel and Afghans when the capital was coming under the control of a hostile authority.

Ukraine’s government and military, by contrast, are unlikely to fall as Afghanistan’s did, should Russia launch a full-scale invasion, U.S. officials said. Instead, U.S. officials and military specialists see Russia as more likely to seize parts of Ukraine and the incursion could play out over a protracted period.

The White House rejected comparisons to Afghanistan...

Of course it did! 

No Taliban in the Donbas, no worries! 

But look out for Ivan over there with that shoulder-mounted 9K38 Igla homing infrared surface-to-air missile! 

Keep reading, in any case. It's only 30,000 the 82nd Airborne's got to evacuate. 

 

What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Nuclear Weapons

From Nina Tannenwald, at Foreign Affairs, "The Bomb in the Background":

In a major speech this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he was suspending his country’s participation in the New START treaty, Russia’s only remaining major nuclear arms control agreement with the United States. He also threatened to resume nuclear weapons tests. The declarations sent jitters through the international community. These actions constituted yet another example of Putin’s willingness to leverage his nuclear arsenal, dangling it like the sword of Damocles over the West in order to limit NATO’s support for Ukraine.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, Russian leaders have issued numerous explicit nuclear threats against Ukraine and NATO. In April, Putin promised to respond to outside intervention in the conflict with “swift, lightning fast” retribution. “We have all the tools for this,” he added, “ones that no one can brag about.” So far, however, there has been no significant or observable change in the operational readiness of nuclear weapons in either Russia or in Western countries.

Some observers see Russia’s decision to not use nuclear weapons yet as proof that it will never do so. But that assessment assumes Putin is a rational actor and would not risk the calamity and the pariah status that would follow any Russian deployment of such a weapon. Unfortunately, it is far from clear that Russia’s nuclear brinkmanship is mere bluffing. Moreover, nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are not remarkable in their absence, but rather in how they frame the conflict. By deterring the greater intervention of NATO, the Russian nuclear arsenal has helped prolong the war and make any conventional resolution to the fighting more difficult to attain. The conflict in Ukraine is no doubt the most dangerous nuclear confrontation since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. As the past year of carnage and bluster has shown, nuclear weapons wield devastating power even as they remain locked in their silos—and governments need to reinforce the taboo against their use.

DEADLY DETERRENCE

In the context of the Ukraine war, nuclear weapons have mostly benefited Russia. Putin has invoked his nuclear might to deter NATO from any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf. That deterrence has worked: the West is (rationally) unwilling to enter the war directly or even to give Ukraine long-range firepower that could reach far into Russia, for fear that such help could end up sparking an apocalyptic nuclear conflict. As a result, the war will likely last longer than it would have if the West entered the fray. A longer war will lead to many more deaths and further destruction. Were nuclear weapons not in the calculus, the United States and NATO would be able to employ their superior conventional firepower more effectively in Ukraine’s defense to win the war quickly. But Putin’s nukes neutralize the West’s conventional military superiority.

It is also possible that Russia’s nuclear weapons emboldened Putin to invade in the first place, because he would not have attacked Ukraine without a way of keeping the United States and NATO out of the war. Of course, Putin acutely misjudged the relative strength of the Russian military. But Russian leaders are aware of their conventional military’s inferiority to that of the West. The fact that Russian leaders issued so many explicit nuclear threats suggests that they saw their nuclear arsenal as a way of compensating.

To be sure, the nuclear weapons in the arsenals of several NATO member states presumably have deterred Russia from expanding the war to NATO countries, such as Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states. In this regard, nuclear deterrence has clearly helped prevent a wider war.

But it has also prolonged the conventional war, at greater cost to everyone, especially the Ukrainian people. A grinding, brutal war of attrition could persist for a long time, with no side able to land a definitive knockout blow. In such a war, Russia maintains a significant advantage over Ukraine by virtue of its much bigger population and larger military.

A PERILOUS MOMENT

Some Western analysts suggest that the United States and NATO should call the Kremlin’s bluff—they should more forthrightly back the Ukrainians and drive Russian forces out of Ukraine. Russian leaders have repeatedly warned of escalation if the West keeps arming Ukraine, but, the argument goes, the Kremlin will not actually resort to nuclear weapons and break the taboo regarding their use. As a result, many observers, mostly outside government, are taking a cavalier approach to the risk of nuclear escalation.

Some pundits take the fact that Putin has not used nuclear weapons after a year of embarrassing military defeats as evidence that he will not use a nuclear weapon in the future. They argue that the West should do whatever it takes to support Ukraine. They criticize U.S. President Joe Biden for declining to send advanced military equipment to Ukraine and deride the supposed defeatists who fret about escalation. “The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory,” the journalist Eric Schlosser wrote in January in The Atlantic. The historian Timothy Snyder, one of the most perceptive observers of the war, has dismissed Russian threats as mere “talk” designed to scare the West. In February, he went so far as to mock people concerned about nuclear escalation, writing that discussions of the risks of nuclear war are mere media “clickbait” and “a way to claim victimhood” and “blame the actual victims.” But some close observers of Putin, such as the writer Masha Gessen, disagree. They are much less sanguine about Putin’s rationality. In the warped worldview of the Russian president, Gessen has argued, the use of nuclear weapons could be justified as a rational course of action...

Keep reading.

 

Cracks Show in Western Front Against Russia's War in Ukraine

Yeah, I'll bet. 

Problem is Ukraine won't make it without Western help, so if "the West" wants to preserve Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, it'll be the United States that makes it happen. 

Congress just approved $40 billion, against the wishes of just about everyone on Twitter, if that matters. I can't disagree with them. We have so many needs at home, and here we are sending tens of billions of dollars across the pond. For what? How U.S. national security is tied to Western Europe's is not very well defined these days, and I can't for the life of me see how the country will support more "endless wars" via the national checkbook when we just bailed out of Afghanistan most disgracefully and at great risk not only to those we left behind --- Americans and our Afghani allies --- but to international security on the whole. 

Biden's doing extremely poorly, not just in the polls, but among people in his own party and administration. And to think, we've still got to bear two and a half more years of him. *Grunts.*

At the Wall Street Journal, "Allies are increasingly divided on further heavy-weapons shipments to Kyiv":

Cracks are appearing in the Western front against Moscow, with America’s European allies increasingly split over whether to keep shipping more powerful weapons to Ukraine, which some of them fear could prolong the conflict and increase its economic fallout.

At the center of the disagreement—which is splitting a group of Western European powers from the U.S., U.K. and a group of mostly central and northern European nations—are diverging perceptions of the long-term threat posed by Russia and whether Ukraine can actually prevail on the battlefield.

The first bloc, led by France and Germany, is growing reluctant to provide Ukraine the kinds of offensive, long-range weapons it would need to reclaim ground lost to Russia’s armies in the country’s south and east. They doubt Russia would directly threaten the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

On the other side, Washington, London and a group of mainly central and northern European nations, some of them former Soviet bloc members, see the Russian offensive as a harbinger of further expansion by Moscow, making Ukraine the front line in a broader war pitching Russia against the West.

The differences between the two groups—which European officials said have been building in recent weeks, as Ukraine lost ground in its Donbas area—are getting aired more loudly in public this week, as the European Union’s heads of government hold a summit on Ukraine.

Collectively, European governments have been able to agree on measures to isolate Russia’s economy that once would have been unthinkable, including an embargo on most of the crude oil Russia sells to Europe. But opinion is sharply divided on the stakes of the war and Ukraine’s chances.

Public statements by the leaders of France and Germany and comments by those countries’ officials suggest they are skeptical Kyiv can expel the invaders and they have called for a negotiated cease-fire, triggering complaints from Ukraine that it is being pushed to make territorial concessions.

Leaders in the Baltic States, Poland and elsewhere argue instead that supplying Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated heavy weapons is critical to not just hold the line, but reverse Russian advances and deal Moscow the kind of blow that would deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from any further military action in the future.

“This is an unprecedented attack on Ukraine,” said Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks. “Our understanding, which is based on a long history of interactions with Russia, is that we cannot rely on Russian mercy and we see the Russian attack on Ukraine as simply the prelude for further Russian imperial expansionism.” Some Western European nations are losing appetite for sustaining a war they think is unwinnable and has reached a bloody stalemate that is draining European resources and exacerbating a looming recession. By contrast, Poland and the Baltic countries, who once lived under the Kremlin’s boot, see themselves as next in line for Russian imperialist expansion.

The flow of millions of Ukrainian refugees into those countries has brought the war much closer to citizens’ ordinary lives, while for Germany, Austria and Italy, the conflict is primarily felt through higher energy costs.

“Every phone call, ministers from the north of Europe and central Europe are getting more and more angry,” said a senior Czech official. “This is destroying the unity. It’s precisely what Putin wants and what the French and Germans are giving him.”

Unlike the leaders of Britain, Poland, the Baltic nations and several central European countries, French and German leaders have yet to visit Kyiv. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has repeatedly warned that the conflict could lead to a third World War and nuclear annihilation. The goal of Western engagement, Mr. Scholz has said, was to keep Russia from winning.

Germany hasn’t sent tanks to Ukraine and agreed to ship seven pieces of heavy artillery. So far, Europe’s largest economy, with a population exceeding 83 million, has sent military aid worth about €200 million, according to government estimates—less than Estonia, with a population of just over one million. France has sent 12 howitzer-type cannons to Kyiv and no tanks or aerial defenses.

Poland has delivered more than 240 Soviet-designed T72 tanks to Ukraine, alongside drones, rocket launchers, dozens of infantry fighting vehicles and truckloads of ammunition. The Czech Republic has shipped helicopter gunships, tanks, and parts needed to keep Ukraine’s air force flying. Ordinary citizens in Lithuania and the Czech Republic have donated tens of millions of euros to crowdsourcing campaigns to buy Turkish drones and Soviet-era weapons for Ukraine.

“We’re sending whatever we can, whatever we have, and whenever we’re able to,” said Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky twice and speaks to him most days. “Why? Because we believe that this is a war on civilization. This is about a war for the defense of Europe.”

Germany also has yet to replace the Polish and Czech tanks that had been sent to Ukraine with German-made hardware, as it agreed to do as part of a swap. A spokesman for the German government said this was due to lengthy procedures including maintenance, while some Defense Ministry officials decried a lack of political will to act with greater expedience.

“It is very disappointing that neither the federal government nor the Chancellor personally have the courage to speak about a victory for Ukraine and act accordingly in supporting Ukraine with modern, heavy weapons,” said Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin...

 

Biden's Foreign Policy is Driven by Impulse, Not Reason

From Caroline Glick:

Almost every day, questions arise about President Joe Biden‘s ability to make presidential-level decisions. The questions stem mainly from Biden’s repeated rhetorical gaffes.

In a recent column in the Boston Herald, Howie Carr assembled a sampling of dozens of Biden’s misstatements since the start of May. Among the highlights, Biden told guests at the White House, “I thank all of you for being here, and I want you to enjoy the rest of the recession.”

In a speech before an audience of policemen, Biden asked, “How many police officers have multiple time and put a lion and had to do things that they’d have to think they’d have to do?”

Whereas Biden’s domestic policy malapropisms are generally subjects of amusement (or derision) with few consequences, the same cannot be said of his parallel misstatements when it comes to foreign policy.

Consider the war in Ukraine. In late January, as Russian troops were situated on the border with Ukraine awaiting Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s marching orders, Biden gave a press conference in which he exposed NATO‘s disagreements by noting that the alliance would be divided over how to respond to a “minor incursion” by Russian forces.

Confusion, and worse, impulsiveness, have been the hallmarks of Biden’s decisions no less than his pronouncements. The helter-skelter withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan last August remains the paramount example of the impulsive nature of Biden’s foreign policy. Biden ordered U.S. forces to withdraw, ending a 20-year war in humiliation and defeat without first coordinating the move with U.S. allies.

Biden gave the order without first making arrangements for U.S. citizens to depart the country, and apparently without regard to an inspector general report that warned the Afghan military would not be able to maintain control of any part of the country without supporting U.S. air control and contractors.

Biden acted in callous disregard for the safety of the U.S.’s Afghan partners, and without first making arrangements to secure the $90 billion in U.S. weapons that the withdrawing U.S. forces left behind.

Obviously, much of the failure can be laid at the feet of the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department. But it was obvious that in the case of the Afghan withdrawal, it was Biden calling the shots from the top.

The Afghan withdrawal devastated the credibility of the U.S. as both an ally and an enemy. Its direct and indirect consequences will haunt the U.S. and its allies for years to come.

Biden’s actions against Russia since it invaded Ukraine are similarly seen by allies and enemies alike as the product of impulsive decisions, made without sufficient consideration of easily foreseeable consequences. Three decisions stand out, in particular.

The first was Biden’s decision to freeze $300 billion in Russian dollar reserves. The decision was unprecedented. And although it harmed Russia economically, it devastated the credibility of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. In response to the move, China and Russia abandoned the dollar in their bilateral trade. Other key countries, including Saudi Arabia and India, have also agreed to sell and purchase oil and gas in local currencies, undermining the petrodollar.

In response to the U.S. move and to Washington’s decision to block Russia from the international banking system, Russia began insisting that foreign purchasers of Russian oil and gas open ruble and foreign currency accounts with Gazprombank. Germany, Italy and more than a dozen other EU member states have thus far complied.

The ruble is as strong as it was before the February invasion. Simultaneously, the U.S. dollar is weak and its role as the world’s reserve currency is being questioned around the world. Time will tell if this is the beginning of the end of the dollar-based international economy. But what is already apparent is that the U.S. move on Russia’s dollar reserves was a net loss for the U.S. A more carefully crafted sanctions package might have had less deleterious consequences.

Then there are the leaks from Washington regarding the direct role the U.S. is apparently playing in Ukrainian military operations against Russia. The sources of the leaks are unclear. Biden is reportedly angry about them. All the same, administration officials have informed reporters that the U.S. provided Ukraine with the intelligence that enabled Ukrainian forces to sink the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in its Black Sea fleet, as well as intelligence that has enabled the Ukrainians to kill Russian generals.

In other words, Biden administration officials are telling the media that the U.S. is not merely supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia; rather, the U.S. is an active participant in that war. Whether it is Biden’s wish to go to war against Russia, or whether he is being led by his advisors, is unclear. But what is clear enough is that the escalatory consequences of these leaks are dangerous. Moreover, the U.S. interest in such escalation is unclear—at best.

The same can be said regarding the sudden decision to add Sweden and Finland to NATO. Is the U.S. really willing to send forces, if need be, to defend these nations? If so, where is that reflected in U.S. military budgets, training, hardware and doctrine?

Finally, there is the issue of the sanctions’ impact on the U.S. economy and on the global food supply. For months ahead of Russia’s invasion, as Putin’s troops deployed along the border grew, the Biden administration signaled that the U.S.’s primary tool for defeating Russia would be economic sanctions. Under the circumstances, Biden and his team could have been expected to calculate the sanctions for their effects on Russia and their blowback for the U.S. and its allies, as well as to consider the implications of Russian counter-sanctions on the U.S. and the global economy. But from the looks of things, it appears that the administration considered neither of these things.

Take the embargo on Russian oil and gas. Due to Biden’s decision to drastically cut U.S. energy production well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. had moved from being a net energy exporter to a net importer. Fuel prices in the U.S. had already risen precipitously. Those price rises aggravated skyrocketing inflation rates caused by a rapidly expanding U.S. money supply unmatched by a corresponding rise in domestic production.

Biden’s embargo on Russian oil and gas, therefore, took a bad situation and made it much worse.

Then there are the banking sanctions on Russian nationals. Russia is the main global exporter of fertilizer. While fertilizer exports weren’t banned, the financial sanctions on Russian nationals have impeded the ability of Russian exporters to do business with foreign purchasers, driving up the cost of fertilizers—and through them, of all foodstuff.

This brings us to the issue of Ukrainian food exports. Ukraine is a major supplier of wheat and corn to global markets. Ukrainian production and exports dropped by roughly 50% following the Russian invasion. And now Russia is blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in order to prevent any exports of what remains of the besieged country’s crop yield. Expectations of a global food shortage are already causing panic worldwide, particularly among poor, unstable nations that are dependent on wheat imports to feed their people.

Russia will bear primary responsibility for global famine. But a better conceived U.S. sanctions strategy might have provoked a less devastating Russian counter-response. Now, with the real prospect of global food shortages, the danger of a naval confrontation between U.S. and NATO forces and Russian forces in the Black Sea rises every day.

Russia’s conventional forces have performed far below expectations. But Russia’s nuclear arsenal is both larger and more advanced than its U.S. counterpart. And unlike the U.S., Russia has built extensive and credible defensive systems to protect its cities and military bases from nuclear attack. Putin and his top advisors are openly threatening to use nuclear weapons if they feel it is necessary. Under the circumstances, any military exchange between the U.S. and Russia has the potential of becoming a nuclear war.

In response to the Ukrainian grain crisis, India announced last week that it is suspending its wheat exports to secure its domestic food supply. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, India has repeatedly flummoxed the Biden administration with its unwillingness to join the U.S. and NATO in their campaign on behalf of Ukraine. India’s early decision to maintain its oil and gas purchases with Russia while moving the trade from dollars to rupees and rubles was the first clear sign that New Delhi was staying loyal to its Cold War ally and moving away from the U.S.

India’s decision to distance itself from the U.S. poses grave consequences to the U.S. in its rising superpower struggle with China. President Biden, like President Donald Trump before him, rightly views India’s participation in a U.S.-led Pacific alliance as a key component of the U.S.’s strategy for containing China.

This brings us to Biden’s latest foreign policy gaffe with strategic implications. In response to a reporter’s question on Monday during his visit to Tokyo about whether the U.S. would use military force to defend Taiwan from China, Biden said, “Yes, that’s the commitment we made.”

But that isn’t the commitment the U.S. has made. For decades, U.S. policy with respect to the defense of Taiwan has been one of “strategic ambiguity.” The context of Biden’s remark, made from Tokyo at a time of heightened Chinese aggression against Taiwan, was significant. And while Biden’s advisors worked feverishly to present his remark as inconsequential, and U.S. policy as unchanged, the president has now “misspoken” numerous times on Taiwan.

Biden’s many gaffes and whispers of possible dementia have led many to wonder whether he is really the one driving U.S. policy. But to the extent he is, Biden’s foreign policy is a bundle of impulsive actions, whose economic and strategic implications have been disastrous for the U.S. and destabilizing to the world as a whole.

 

Ukraine Strikes Russian Navy in Occupied Port City (VIDEO)

Huge moral booster. Watch at the Telegraph U.K., "'We f------ hit them!' Moment Ukraine strikes Russian warship in Odesa," and the Guardian U.K., "Russian ship destroyed in port of Berdiansk, says Ukrainian navy."

The story's at the Wall Street Journal, "Ukraine Strikes Russian Navy as War Enters Second Month: NATO agreed to help Ukraine protect itself against potential biochemical warfare during an emergency meeting in Brussels":

Ukraine said it struck the Russian-occupied port facilities in the Azov Sea city of Berdyansk on Thursday, setting off a large fire and hitting a Russian warship as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization pledged additional help for Kyiv.

Seized by Russia in the first week of the war that began a month ago, Berdyansk has become a major logistics hub for Russian forces. Footage from the area showed smoke billowing from the berthing area and secondary explosions from detonating ammunition.

The attack in Berdyansk—which is 50 miles west of the besieged port of Mariupol and nearly 100 miles from the main front line in southern Ukraine—is a sign Kyiv has retained significant military capabilities as it pursues a large-scale conventional war against Russian forces.

President Biden met with NATO leaders in Brussels on Thursday to agree on new measures to help Ukraine battle Russia’s invasion and address growing concerns Moscow might use chemical, biological or other unconventional weapons in its monthlong war.

“Allies agreed to supply equipment to help Ukraine protect against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said after the summit. That includes equipment to detect such weapons, protect against them, medical support and decontamination equipment, he said.

NATO, he said, also has activated chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense forces. “We are taking measures both to support Ukraine but also to defend ourselves,” he said.

Russian officials didn’t immediately confirm the attack in Berdyansk. Kyiv initially said the strike destroyed the Russian navy landing ship, Orsk. Later Ukrainian news reports from Berdyansk named the targeted ship as Saratov, the same class of large landing ship as Orsk. The Ukrainian military followed up with a statement that it had hit Russian landing ships in Berdyansk, and that one of them was engulfed in fire. It didn’t provide the name.

Footage from Berdyansk also showed two smaller Russian ships fleeing the port after the explosions, one of them on fire.

Berdyansk, where pro-Ukrainian protests erupt regularly, is one of a handful of Ukrainian cities captured by Moscow in the month since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Ukrainian officials haven’t disclosed how Ukraine carried out the attack. Ukraine’s new Neptune antiship missiles have a range of about 200 miles and haven’t been used in the conflict so far. Ukraine also has ballistic missiles with a known range of some 75 miles, though there may be modifications with a longer range.

Andrii Ryzhenko, a former Ukrainian Navy captain now with the Center for Defense Strategies, a Kyiv think tank with close ties to the military, said he believed Ukraine used one or more Tochka-U ballistic missiles to dent Russia’s supply chain along the Azov Sea coast.

“For the Russians, this is the easiest way to bring and feed their contingent,” Mr. Ryzhenko said. “These ships, they can carry a significant amount of cargo. Our specialists say that at least for a few weeks, Berdyansk is closed for them for resupply because of damage to the port.”

Mariupol, another Azov Sea port city, has been surrounded by Russian forces and pummeled with artillery and airstrikes for weeks. Thousands of civilians there have been killed, and most of the city has been destroyed, according to local officials. While Russian troops have entered the eastern side of Mariupol in recent days, Ukrainian forces continue to keep most of the city from falling into Russian hands.

Before Thursday’s strike, Ukraine managed to inflict severe damage on the Russian navy personnel in the Azov area. Moscow has acknowledged that Ukrainian troops killed the deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Navy Capt. Andrey Paliy, and the commander of the fleet’s 810th Marine Infantry Brigade, Col. Aleksey Sharov, both of whom were recently operating in the Mariupol area.

The combat performance of the Ukrainian army and the failure of Russian forces to make significant advances have caught U.S. and allied officials by surprise. Weapons supplied to Ukraine before the invasion were tailored to fuel an insurgency campaign, with U.S. officials expecting Russia to seize the capital Kyiv in as little as three days.

However, Ukraine has managed to push Russia’s much bigger and better equipped military to a standstill, at least for now. Western nations are rushing to get more military supplies across Ukraine’s western borders as Kyiv says it risks running short of ammunition.

In Thursday’s address to the NATO summit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the alliance to do more to help Ukraine defend itself. “Ukraine needs military assistance—without limitations. Just as Russia is using all of its arsenal against us without limitations,” he said...

 

Putin Accidentally Revitalized the West's Liberal Order

It's Kori Schake, at the Atlantic, "The Russian president thought he sensed an opportunity to take advantage of a disunited West. He has been proved wrong":

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed a chorus of despair—beyond the cost in Ukrainian lives, the international order that the U.S. and its allies built after World War II is, we are told, crumbling. The writer Paul Kingsnorth has declared that the liberal order is already dead. The Indian journalist Rahul Shivshankar has argued that “in the ruins across Ukraine you will find the remains of Western arrogance.” Even the brilliant historian Margaret MacMillan has written that “the world will never be the same. We have moved already into a new and unstable era.”

The reverse is true. Vladimir Putin has attempted to crush Ukraine’s independence and “Westernness” while also demonstrating NATO’s fecklessness and free countries’ unwillingness to shoulder economic burdens in defense of our values. He has achieved the opposite of each. Endeavoring to destroy the liberal international order, he has been the architect of its revitalization.

Germany has long soft-pedaled policies targeting Russia, but its chancellor, Olaf Scholz, made a moving and extraordinary change, committing an additional $100 billion to defense spending immediately, shipping weapons to Ukraine, and ending the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was constructed to bring gas to Germany from Russia. Hungary, thought to be the weakest link in the Western chain, has supported without question moves by the European Union and NATO to punish Moscow. Turkey, arguably the most Russia-friendly NATO country, having bought missile defense systems from Moscow, has invoked its responsibilities in the 1936 Montreux Convention and closed the Bosporus strait to Russian warships. NATO deployed its rapid-reaction force for the first time, and allies are rushing to send troops to reinforce frontline states. A cascade of places have closed their airspace to Russian craft. The United States has orchestrated action and gracefully let others have the stage, strengthening allies and institutions both.

We are a long way from the ultimate outcome of Russia’s invasion, but even if Ukrainian military forces cannot prevail or President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government are killed or captured, it’s difficult to see how Putin’s broader gamble succeeds. If Zelensky falls, another leader will step forward. Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians have become anti-Russian. The scene depicted in Picasso’s Guernica, one of wanton and barbaric violence, is the best Putin can hope for: Conquering Ukraine will require unspeakable brutality, and even if Moscow succeeds on this count, foreign legions are flowing to Ukraine to assist an insurgency in bleeding Russia’s occupation. If Ukraine fends off Russia’s assault, it will be welcomed into NATO and the EU.

The Ukrainian government that so recently seemed mired in corruption and division has been outstanding: President Zelensky has refused to flee and inspired resistance; outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian military forces seem to have held their own. They understand that they’re in a battle of ideas, establishing, for example, a hotline for Russian prisoners of war to call their families.

Civil activism is the lifeblood of free societies, and Ukrainians have been excelling, including the sunflower lady, who cursed Russian soldiers; civilians lining up to collect arms and make Molotov cocktails, or change out street signs to confuse the invaders; and breweries retooling to produce weaponry.

Ukraine’s tenacity and creativity have ignited civil-society energy, corporate strength, and humanitarian assistance. The hacker group Anonymous has declared war on Russia, disrupting state TV and making public the defense ministry’s personnel rosters. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has promised to help keep Ukraine online. The chipmakers Intel and AMD have stopped sending supplies to Russia; BP is divesting from its stake in the Russian energy giant Rosneft; FedEx and UPS have suspended service to Russia. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is cutting all its investments in Russia. YouTube and Meta have demonetized Russian state media. (Even Pornhub is denying Russians access.) Belarusian hackers disrupted their country’s rail network to prevent their government from sending troops to support the Russian war. Polish citizens collected 100 tons of food for Ukraine in two days. Bars are pouring out Russian vodka. Iconic architecture in cities all over the free world is lit up with the colors of the Ukrainian flag to show solidarity. Sports teams are refusing to play Russia in international tournaments. The London Philharmonic opened its Saturday concert by playing the Ukrainian national anthem, and the Simpsons modeled Ukrainian flags. This is what free societies converging on an idea looks like. And the idea is this: Resist Putin’s evil...

Still more.

 

Vladymir Putin Seeks to Revise Post-Cold War Settlement in Europe

It's Lilia Shevtsova, at the New York Times, "Ukraine Is Only One Small Part of Putin’s Plans":

MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin of Russia is playing a game of suspense.

When he kicked over the global chessboard late last year, amassing thousands of troops at the Ukrainian border, he sent the world into panic. An invasion seemed imminent — and beyond it loomed the threat of a new global confrontation, contested by nuclear-armed powers. Things haven’t calmed down since: A call between Mr. Putin and President Biden on Dec. 30, where the leaders traded threats, did little to take the sting out of the situation. Any incident along the Russian-Ukrainian border could bring an inferno.

The Kremlin’s reasoning for the escalation is curious. It is acting in response, it maintains, to the West’s “drawing Ukraine into NATO” and NATO’s encroachment on what the Kremlin views as Russia’s area of influence. But that looks like a bluff, or even trolling. The truth is that NATO, for all its welcoming gestures, is not ready to offer Ukraine membership.

So what is Mr. Putin’s endgame? The immediate aim, to be sure, is to return Ukraine to Russia’s orbit. But that’s only a brush stroke on a much bigger canvas. Mr. Putin’s design is grand: to refashion the post-Cold War settlement, in the process guaranteeing the survival of Russia’s personalized power system. And judging from the West’s awkward, anguished response so far, he might be close to getting what he wants.

In recent years, Mr. Putin has successfully revived Russia’s tradition of one-man rule by amending the Constitution, rewriting history and clamping down on the opposition. Now he seeks to provide the system with a sturdy Great Power spine, returning to Russia its global glamour. In the past decade, Mr. Putin’s Russia not only demonstrated its readiness to resume control over the former Soviet space, testing its ambitions in Georgia and Ukraine, but also left its footprints all over the world, including through meddling in Western democracies. Yet today’s standoff over Ukraine takes things to a new level.

No longer content with upsetting the West, Mr. Putin is now trying to force it to agree to a new global dispensation, with Russia restored to eminence. It doesn’t stop there, though. Crucially, the geopolitical advance would serve to safeguard Mr. Putin’s rule. So the West, by accepting Russia’s geopolitical position, would effectively underwrite its domestic agenda, too. The United States would become, at home and abroad, Russia’s security provider. It’s quite the gambit.

The timing is crucial. With the European Union consumed by its own challenges and the United States’ rivalry with China yet to reach top gear, the Kremlin is seizing the moment to pursue its grand design. To do so, it could put on the war helmet at any moment. But confrontation is not the Kremlin’s goal. The escalation is about peace on Russia’s terms.

No longer content with upsetting the West, Mr. Putin is now trying to force it to agree to a new global dispensation, with Russia restored to eminence. It doesn’t stop there, though. Crucially, the geopolitical advance would serve to safeguard Mr. Putin’s rule. So the West, by accepting Russia’s geopolitical position, would effectively underwrite its domestic agenda, too. The United States would become, at home and abroad, Russia’s security provider. It’s quite the gambit.

The timing is crucial. With the European Union consumed by its own challenges and the United States’ rivalry with China yet to reach top gear, the Kremlin is seizing the moment to pursue its grand design. To do so, it could put on the war helmet at any moment. But confrontation is not the Kremlin’s goal. The escalation is about peace on Russia’s terms.

Right now, it’s hard to know what comes next. Mr. Putin can’t force his Western opponents to surrender; neither is he ready to retreat. But he could use both concessions and refusals to pursue his agenda. Concessions, such as NATO explicitly pledging not to expand any further east, would be presented as victories, and refusals as the pretext for further escalation. One success is already clear: The West has been forced to reward Russia — through outreach, diplomacy and, above all, attention — for the charitable act of not invading Ukraine.

Russia’s rebellion threatens to turn geopolitics into a battle of threats — force on one side, sanctions on the other. Mr. Putin’s method is tried and tested: He ratchets up the tensions and then demands “binding agreements,” which he does not take seriously. The aim, really, is a Hobbesian world order, built on disruption and readiness for surprise breakthroughs.

This order has nothing in common with those fashioned at the Yalta Conference in 1945, say, or the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Their architects followed the rules. The Kremlin is suggesting something very different: the irrelevance of rules. The norms by which the world has been governed for the past three decades would be thrown out, in favor of creative interpretation of the possible. In this free-for-all, Mr. Putin — mercurial master of suspense and the sudden move — can pursue his fusion of geopolitical power and personal rule...

Ms Shevtsova's article is the most intriguing, perceptive, and troubling so far of all I've posted on this.

Continue reading.

Why the West Must Win in Eukraine

The new edition of the Economist is out, and it's a dandy.

See, "Why Ukraine must win: A decisive victory could transform the security of Europe":

When vladimir putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine he was not alone in thinking victory would be swift. Many Western analysts also expected Kyiv, the capital, to fall within 72 hours. Ukrainian valour and ingenuity confounded those assumptions. As the war enters its sixth week, the side that is contemplating victory is not Russia but Ukraine—and it would be a victory that redraws the map of European security.

Speaking to The Economist in Kyiv on March 25th, President Volodymyr Zelensky explained how people power is the secret to Ukraine’s resistance and why the war is shifting in his nation’s favour. “We believe in victory,” he declared. “This is our home, our land, our independence. It’s just a question of time.”

The battlefield is starting to tell the same story as the president. After several weeks in which the Russian assault stalled, Ukrainian forces have begun to counter-attack. On March 29th Russia said that it will “fundamentally cut back” the northern campaign. Its retreat may well be only tactical, but Russia has in effect conceded that, for the moment, it cannot take Kyiv.

Yet a lot of Ukraine remains in Russian hands, including the strip of land on the southern coast that the Russians now claim was their focus all along. A large chunk of the Ukrainian army, in the Donbas region, is vulnerable to encirclement. Nobody should underestimate Russian firepower. Even if its forces are depleted and demoralised they can dig in. Victory for Ukraine means keeping its Donbas brigades intact and using them to deny Russia a secure hold on occupied territory.

For that, Mr Zelensky told us, the West must impose tougher sanctions on Russia and supply more weapons, including aircraft and tanks. Sanctions deplete Russia’s ability to sustain a long war. Arms help Ukraine take back territory. But nato countries are refusing to provide him with what he wants. Given what is at stake, for the West as well as Ukraine, that betrays a reprehensible failure of strategic vision.

For Ukraine, a decisive victory would deter yet another Russian invasion. The more convincingly Ukraine can see off the Russian army, the more able it will be to resist the compromises that could poison the peace. Victory would also be the best basis for launching a post-war democratic state that is less corrupted by oligarchs and Russian infiltration.

The prize for the West would be almost as great. Not only could Ukraine invigorate the cause of democracy, but it would also enhance European security. During 300 years of imperialism, Russia has repeatedly been at war in Europe. Sometimes, as with Poland and Finland, it was the invader. Other times, as with Nazi Germany and Napoleonic France, it was seen as a lethal threat and itself fell victim to aggression.

A strong, democratic Ukraine would thwart Russia’s expansionism—because its borders would be secure. In the short term an angry, defeated dictator would be left in the Kremlin, but eventually Russia, following Ukraine’s example, would be more likely to solve its problems by reform at home rather than adventures abroad. As it did so, nato would become correspondingly less of a drain on budgets and diplomacy. The United States would be freer to attend to its growing rivalry with China.

Alas, much of the West seems blind to this historic chance...

More at the link.

 

How Russia's Revamped Military Fumbled the Invasion of Ukraine

Things aren't going well. 

At. All.

At WSJ, "How Russia’s Revamped Military Fumbled the Invasion of Ukraine":

For over a decade, Russia spent hundreds of billions of dollars restructuring its military into a smaller, better equipped and more-professional force that could face off against the West.

Three weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its first big test, the armed forces have floundered. Western estimates, while highly uncertain, suggest as many as 7,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed.

The dead included four Russian generals—one-fifth of the number estimated to be in Ukraine—along with other senior commanders, according to a Western official and Ukrainian military reports. The generals were close to the front lines, some Western officials said, a sign that lower ranks in forward units were likely unable to make decisions or fearful of advancing.

Russian troops turned to using open telephone and analog radios following the failure of encrypted communications systems, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has said, making them vulnerable to intercept or jamming. Russian officers were likely targeted after their positions were exposed by their use of open communications, Western military analysts said.

In the strategically located town of Voznesensk, Ukrainian forces comprising local volunteers and the professional military drove off an attack early this month, in one of the most comprehensive routs Russian forces have suffered since invading Ukraine.

Russia’s failings appear to trace to factors ranging from the Kremlin’s wrong assumptions about Ukrainian resistance to the use of poorly motivated conscript soldiers. They suggest that Russia and the West overestimated Moscow’s overhauls of its armed forces, which some military analysts say appear to have been undermined by graft and misreporting.

The military’s previous outings in staged maneuvers and smaller operations in Syria didn’t prepare it for a multipronged attack into a country with a military fiercely defending its homeland, said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at CNA, a nonprofit research organization based in Arlington, Va.

“The failures that we’re seeing now is them having to work with a larger force than they’ve ever employed in real combat conditions as opposed to an exercise,” he said. “These exercises that we’ve been shown over the years are very scripted events and closer to theater than anything else.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment on analyses of its performance. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an address to regional authorities on Wednesday, praised the war efforts, which in Russia are described only as a special military operation.

“The operation is being carried out successfully, strictly in accordance with previously laid-out plans,” he said. “And our boys and soldiers and officers are showing courage and heroism and are doing everything to avoid losses among the civilian population.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week said Ukraine had lost around 1,300 soldiers since the start of the invasion. A senior North Atlantic Treaty Organization official said losses were likely on par with the Russians’.

Insurgent Tactics

For sure, Russia’s forces have taken territory, mainly in the south and east of the country against a smaller, less well-equipped adversary. Russian military commanders may also learn from their mistakes as they reposition their forces in readiness for a new offensive.

Western defense analysts say that even if Moscow’s military overcomes Ukraine’s armed forces eventually, they doubt that would end hostilities and merely mark the beginning of an insurgency that could tie up Russian forces for years. Moscow’s declared military objectives of replacing the government and establishing effective Russian control over a submissive population look remote.

But for now, Ukrainian forces have beaten back Russian paratroopers trying to secure airfields, and miles-long convoys of tanks and support trucks have stalled on highways out of fuel, Ukrainian soldiers’ videos and satellite imagery show. Hundreds of Russian military vehicles have been destroyed and others abandoned, sometimes because of mechanical breakdowns and poor-quality equipment, said Western officials and military analysts closely following the campaign.

Ukraine says its forces have downed more than 80 fixed-wing aircraft and 100 helicopters, though many fewer have been independently verified. Western officials have expressed surprise that Russia failed to use its superior air power to establish dominance of the skies, which left Ukraine’s much smaller air force operating.

Still, Russian warplanes flying over Ukraine continue to inflict heavy damage, including against civilians. The mayor of Mariupol said Russia’s air force had bombed the city’s drama theater Wednesday, killing an unknown number of people who had taken shelter there. Russia has denied responsibility. Mr. Zelensky in his video address to U.S. Congress on Wednesday said Ukraine is experiencing terror from the airstrikes every day, as he pressed for further military assistance. Ukrainians have continued to attack long columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles on open roads in formations making them vulnerable to Ukraine’s Turkish Bayraktar drones and its Territorial Defense units that use insurgent tactics to destroy fuel trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers, videos posted by the Ukrainian military show.

In one such attack last week, Ukrainian drone footage posted on the Ukrainian armed forces’ YouTube channel showed the confusion caused by a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian column of dozens of tanks and armored vehicles approaching Brovary on the northeastern outskirts of Kyiv. The convoy suffers apparent drone hits at the front and the rear, trapping vehicles between them.

As soldiers escape their blazing vehicles, further explosions envelop them. Other tanks turn in panic, their tracks churning the road surface, before they retreat. Later footage shows tanks, apparently nearby, destroyed by an antitank weapon fired from a roadside position.

The movement of troops in bumper-to-bumper convoys is a clear sign of “soldiers who are untrained or undisciplined,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe and now chair in strategic studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. “You need sergeants or NCOs constantly telling them to spread out. It’s a human instinct to huddle together when you’re in danger,” he said. “I feel terrible for the young soldiers in the Russian army.”

The NATO official said the Russians’ fighting style surprised Western observers because it didn’t follow the Russian military’s doctrine of using mobile units called battalion tactical groups and a consolidated system to command troops, which would have allowed the military to be nimbler against the enemy without extending supply lines dangerously inside Ukrainian territory.

“For now, they just can’t move,” the official said, adding that Russia has been trying to resupply the army by moving “trash”—civilian trucks and cars—across the country to the front line where they can be used by the military...

There's some dispute on Russia's fatalities numbers. Check Newsweek, "Report of 10,000 Russian Deaths Immediately Deleted by Pro-Putin Tabloid."

Why Ukraine Will Win

From Frances Fukuyama, at the Journal of Democracy, "The country’s military is advancing on the battlefield. If Ukraine defeats Russia’s massive army, the ripple effects will be felt across the globe":

The war in Ukraine, now in its seventh month, marks a critical juncture that will determine the course of global democracy. There are three important points to be made about its significance.

First is the question of why the war occurred in the first place. The argument was made, even before the Russian invasion, that Vladimir Putin was being driven by fear of NATO expansion and was seeking a neutral buffer to protect his country. While Putin doubtless disliked the idea that Ukraine could enter NATO, this was not his real motive. Ukrainian membership was never imminent. NATO expansion was not a plot hatched in Washington, London, or Paris to drive the alliance as far east as possible. It was driven by the former satellites of the former USSR, which had been dominated by that country since 1945 and were convinced that Russia would try to do so again once the balance of power turned to Russia’s favor. Putin, moreover, has explained very clearly what was at stake. In a long article written in 2021 and in a speech on the eve of the invasion, he castigated the breakup of the Soviet Union and asserted that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” artificially separated. More broadly, Russian demands in the leadup to the war made it very clear that Moscow objected to the entire post-1991 European settlement that created a “Europe whole and free.” Russian war aims would not be satisfied by a neutral Ukraine; that neutrality would have to extend across Europe.

The real threat perceived by Putin was in the end not to the security of Russia, but to its political model. He has asserted that liberal democracy didn’t work generally, but was particularly inappropriate in the Slavic world. A free Ukraine belied that assertion, and for that reason had to be eliminated.

The second critical point concerns Western solidarity in support of Ukraine. Up to now, the continuing supply of weapons and economic sanctions have been absolutely critical to Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian power. Most observers have in fact been surprised by the degree of solidarity shown by NATO, and particularly by the turnaround in German foreign policy. However, the Russians have now cut off a large part of the gas they supply to Europe in retaliation for Western sanctions, and there are huge uncertainties as to whether foreign support will continue as the weather gets colder and energy prices continue to rise all over Europe.

In this respect, the most critical variable to watch is the outcome of the current military conflict. Political analysts typically believe that military outcomes reflect underlying political forces, but in Ukraine today the opposite is true: The country’s political future will depend first and foremost on its battlefield success in the short run.

Over the summer, when Russia had withdrawn from its initial effort to occupy Kyiv and the fighting was centered in the Donbas, a conventional wisdom emerged that Ukraine and Russia were locked in a “long war” (featured on the cover of the Economist). Many asserted it was inevitable that there would be a stalemate and war of attrition that might go on for years. As Ukraine’s forward military momentum slowed, there were Western voices arguing that peace negotiations and territorial concessions from Ukraine were necessary.

Had this advice been followed, it would have led to a terrible outcome: Russia keeping the parts of Ukraine it had swallowed, leaving a rump country unable to ship exports out of its southern ports. Such a negotiation would not bring peace; Russia would simply wait until it had reconstituted its military to restart the war.

By contrast, if Ukraine can regain military momentum before the end of 2022, it will be much easier for leaders of Western democracies to argue that their people should tighten their belts over the coming winter. For that reason, military progress in the short term is critical for the Western coalition to hold together.

The prospect that Ukraine can actually regain military momentum is entirely possible; indeed, it is likely in my view and unfolding as we speak. The Ukrainian general staff has been extremely smart in its overall strategy, focusing not on the Donbas but on liberating parts of the south that were occupied by Russia in the first weeks of the war. Ukrainian forces have used NATO-supplied weapons, particularly the HIMARS long-range rocket system, to attack ammunition depots, command posts, and logistics hubs all along the front. They have succeeded in attacking supposedly secure Russian rear areas deep in the Crimean peninsula. At the moment, 25,000 to 30,000 Russian troops are trapped in a pocket around the southern city of Kherson, which lies on the west bank of the Dnipro River. The Ukrainians have succeeded in taking out the bridges connecting Kherson to Russia, and have been slowly tightening the noose around these forces. It is possible that the Russian position there will collapse catastrophically and that Moscow will lose a good part of its remaining army.

More broadly, morale on the Ukrainian side has been immensely higher than on the Russian side. Ukrainians are fighting for their own land, and have seen the atrocities committed by Russian forces in areas the latter have already occupied. The Russian military, by contrast, has had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to replace the manpower it has already lost, recruiting prison convicts and people from the poorer ethnic minorities to do the fighting that ethnic Russians seem unwilling to do themselves.

Thirdly, a Russian military failure—meaning at minimum the liberation of territories conquered after 24 February 2022—will have enormous political reverberations around the world...

 

'Realists' Misjudged Ukraine

From Jamie Kirchick, at the Daily Beast, "How the ‘Realists’ Misjudged Ukraine":

2014 will now forever be bound with the years 1956 and 1968, when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia, respectively. Then, as now, Russia used phony pretexts to violate other nations’ sovereignty. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union justified its sackings of Budapest and Prague by claiming to rescue socialism from “counterrevolutionary” forces. Today, Russia intervenes to “protect” Russian minorities from “fascist” elements in Kiev. In all these episodes, Moscow was confronted with popular, democratic revolutions against its domination.

The Russian invasions of the past and present share another similarity: defenders in the West. Whereas Soviet imperialism could only rely upon the support of orthodox communists (and not even then could Moscow depend on all of its adherents to follow the party line; the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia instilling a fatal disillusionment with the Soviet project among many Western communists), today’s apologists for Russian imperialism span the political spectrum. These foreign policy “realists,” identifiable by their abjuring a role for morality in American foreign policy and the necessity of US global leadership, locate the real imperialists in Washington and Brussels, not Moscow. For years, they have been proven embarrassingly wrong about Russia and its intentions, and in the unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine, their failure of analysis is now laid bare for the world to witness.

The most noxious of these figures is New York University professor and Nation magazine contributor Stephen Cohen. His recent opus, “Distorting Russia,” will go down in history as one of the most slavish defenses of Putinism. “Mainstream American press coverage of Russia,” Cohen writes, has been “shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory.” Western readers, he complains, have been subject to a “relentless demonization of Putin, with little regard for facts.” Putin—a man who presides over a rubber stamp parliament, subjects his political opponents to show trials, dispatches riot police to beat peaceful protestors, and has restricted freedom of speech and association by banning pro-gay language and demonstrations—is unfairly portrayed as an “autocrat,” Cohen says (scare quotes original).

On the contrary, the Russian president is something of a hero. Cohen lauds Putin for granting amnesty to 1,000 prisoners in December, failing to note that some of those individuals—most famously members of the punk band Pussy Riot and opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky—would never have been jailed in a democratic country with an independent judiciary. Cohen cites Putin’s 65 percent approval rating as evidence of his legitimacy, as if such a metric is a valid indicator in a country where every major media outlet is state-run and political opposition invites harassment and physical abuse. Rather than isolate Putin and stand with these beleaguered Russian democrats, Cohen asks, “Should not Obama himself have gone to [the] Sochi [Olympics]—either out of gratitude to Putin, or to stand with Russia’s leader against international terrorists who have struck both of our countries?”

As for Ukraine, Cohen believes Russia is protecting a set of legitimate interests in that formerly sovereign nation and the West is engaging in imperialist meddling. To engage in such sophistry, he has to portray the criminal former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych—who ordered the murder, in broad daylight, of dozens of his own citizens—as a decent ruler. In January, without any public hearing or parliamentary debate, the Ukrainian legislature adopted, and Yanukovych signed, a set of 10 laws that collectively smothered freedom of speech, press and association, a draft of regulations that led Yale University professor and Ukraine expert Timothy Snyder to conclude that, “On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship.” Cohen furiously defended Yanukovych, writing that, “In fact, the ‘paper’ legislation he’s referring to hardly constituted dictatorship, and in any event was soon repealed.” Like Putin releasing the prisoners he should never have jailed, Cohen wants us to give credit to a dictator for (temporarily, and only to save his own skin) undoing a trapping of dictatorship. The dictator giveth, and the dictator taketh away.

For the realists, the seeds of today’s antagonism between Russia and the West are found not in Putin’s KGB mentality, but in the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include former members of the Soviet-era Warsaw Pact. For the past 25 years, they have been warning that NATO is an outdated alliance with no purpose other than to “antagonize” a Russia that wants nothing more than peace and which deserves to have “spheres of privileged interests,” to use Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s phrase, in the lands it occupied for over four decades. Responsibility for today’s crisis, Cohen writes, can be laid at the feet of “provocative US policies,” namely NATO enlargement, a process that stalled, perhaps irreversibly, in 2008, when the body, caving to Russian pressure, voted against Membership Action Plans (MAP) for Georgia and Ukraine. Both of these nations, incidentally, are now home to Russian occupation forces.

For anyone paying the remotest bit of attention to Russia since Putin took office, the events of the past week should not have come as a surprise. Five years after he came to power in 2000, Putin remarked that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Slowly but surely, he has gone about attempting to right that tragedy, the invasion of Ukraine—which, he remarked to George W. Bush in 2008, is not a real state—being the latest gambit. Demonstrating his utter credulousness about Putin’s intentions, Cohen scoffed last month that, “Without any verified evidence, [Snyder] warns of a Putin-backed ‘armed intervention’ in Ukraine after the Olympics.” Oops.

Russia and the West do indeed have competing interests in the post-Soviet space. The problem with the realists is that they fail to see the moral, tactical and legal disparities that exist between the aims and methods of East and West. When Brussels and Washington propose EU and NATO membership, they are offering association in alliances of liberal, democratic states, achieved through a democratic, consensual process. Russia, meanwhile, cajoles, blackmails and threatens its former vassals into “joining” its newfangled “Eurasian Union,” whose similarity to the Soviet Union of yore Putin barely conceals. The right of sovereign countries to choose the alliances they wish is one Russia respects only if they choose to ally themselves with Russia. Should these countries try to join Western institutions then there will be hell to pay.

Despite all this, Cohen complains of a “Cold War double standard” in the ways we describe Western and Russian approaches to the former Soviet space. The West’s “trade leverage” to persuade Ukraine is treated benignly, Cohen writes, while Putin’s use of “similar carrots” is portrayed as nefarious. A crucial difference, however, is that when a country turns down a Western diplomatic package, as Ukraine did at the November Vilnius Summit (thus sparking the massive protests in Kiev that ultimately overthrew Yanukovych), the EU does not invade.

It should not come as a surprise why countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and other former Warsaw Pact nations that lived under the heel of Russian domination for so long might want to join the NATO alliance, which, according to its charter, is purely defensive. NATO has no designs on Russian territory and never has. But in the fervid and paranoid minds of the men running the Kremlin (and, apparently, in that of Stephen Cohen and other opponents of NATO expansion), the alliance’s defensive nature is irrelevant. If Russia were a healthy, liberal, pluralistic society at peace with itself and its neighbors, it would have nothing to fear from America, the EU, or NATO. Indeed, as crazy as it may sound today, in the 1990s, some Russian and Western leaders spoke optimistically of Moscow joining the latter two institutions. But these hopes of a European Russia were dashed when Putin came to power.

In the world of Cohen and the other realists, it is “Washington’s 20-year winner-take-all approach to post-Soviet Russia” that has brought us to the present impasse. He describes NATO expansion in martial terms, writing of “the West’s ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia,” civil society organizations, gay rights groups, and democracy promotion programs described as if they were the equivalent of CIA political assassination plots. Indeed, while Russia’s open meddling in the politics of its neighbors goes unmentioned by Cohen, he condemns anything the US and its Western allies do to promote democracy in the former Soviet Union. Commenting on a leaked telephone conversation between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the American Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, in which the two diplomats hashed out scenarios for the creation of a coalition government to replace the faltering Yanukovych regime, Cohen says that, “the essential revelation was that high-level US officials were plotting to ‘midwife’ a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president—that is, a coup.”

Washington’s alleged engineering coup d’etats has become an oft-repeated accusation of realist critics of robust American involvement overseas. “Is it the job of the American ambassador to act as a local potentate, choosing who does, and does not, get to serve in a coalition government?” Jacob Heilbrunn asked in The National Interest, the premier realist journal. In that same publication, David Rieff observed that Nuland was behaving like “a British resident agent in one of the princely states of India during the Raj” who “conspired with the US ambassador to Kiev to overthrow the current president of Ukraine.”

For many realists, American “restraint” now means not just withdrawing America’s overseas troop presence and drastically cutting the defense budget, but curtailing diplomacy itself.

This indictment of American meddling was also echoed by uber-realist Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard. “Amazing thing re #Ukraine: US & EU colluded to help oust corrupt but pro-Russ leader, yet expected Moscow to do nothing about it,” he tweeted the other day. According to Walt, who in a single tweet distilled a week’s worth of Kremlin propaganda, it was not hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians braving the harsh Kiev winter and rooftop snipers who deserve credit for overthrowing Yanukovych, but rather their US and EU puppet-masters. (This paranoid and illiterate analysis of the situation in Ukraine, by the author of The Israel Lobby, is of a piece with his theories of a Jewish cabal controlling American politics).

Herein lies a paradox at the heart of foreign policy realism: that same, all-powerful US and EU octopus which is capable of overthrowing governments with the flip of a switch is somehow incapable of confronting Russian hard power. Any attempt at repelling Moscow’s aggression is quickly derided as “warmongering,” with requisite references to the mistakes of Iraq thrown in for good measure. Perhaps we should stop calling these people “realists.” “Isolationist” seems more apt.

Looks like Kirchick's settling some scores on this one, heh.

No matter. Stephen Walt's a vile Israel-hating asshole, and don't get me going about the Stalin-coddling idiot's at the Nation. (Keep reading here.)

And here's the Cohen piece --- he's even attacking the far-left New York Review for bashing Putin (and he loathes Julia Ioffe, my favorite Russia expert who is herself ethnic Russian).
Read the full thing at the link.

PHOTO: At Huffington Post, "Obama, Putin Tensions Signal Tough Times For U.S.-Russian Relations."

Putin Orders Draft of Reservists for War in Ukraine, Threatens Nuclear Response

A big day in great power politics.

At the Wall Street Journal, "The Russian president’s move sought to bolster his faltering military, while China urged the Kremlin to de-escalate":

MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the threat of a nuclear response in the conflict and ordered reservists to mobilize, an escalation of the war in Ukraine as Moscow seeks to buttress its army’s flagging manpower and regain the offensive following stinging losses on the battlefield.

“Russia will use all the instruments at its disposal to counter a threat against its territorial integrity—this is not a bluff,” Mr. Putin said in a national address that blamed the West for the conflict in Ukraine, where he said his troops were facing the best of Western troops and weapons.

The speech is the clearest sign yet that seven months into the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II, Russia is unable to counter Ukraine and the West, which has largely united in the face of the Russian invasion. It also raises the stakes for Ukraine’s backers, which have sent billions of dollars of military aid since the beginning of the conflict.

Without providing evidence, Mr. Putin said top officials at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had said that it would be acceptable to carry out nuclear strikes on Russia. He also blamed Ukraine for strikes against the nuclear-power plant in the Zaporizhzhia region, which has been occupied by Russian troops since near the start of the war.

“To those who allow themselves such statements, I would like to remind them, Russia also has many types of weapons of destruction, the components of which in some cases are more modern than those of the countries of NATO,” said Mr. Putin.

In his speech, Mr. Putin cast the partial mobilization—Russia’s first since World War II—as a response to what he called a decadeslong Western plot to break up Russia. He repeated false accusations that the West had stirred rebellion inside the country’s borders, armed terrorist rebels in the Muslim-dominated south, arranged a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and transformed Ukraine into an “anti-Russian bridgehead, turning the Ukrainians themselves into cannon fodder.”

The bellicose address to the nation comes after officials in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine on Tuesday announced plans for Russia to annex four regions in the country’s east and south. The move would allow Mr. Putin to describe a Ukrainian offensive on that territory as tantamount to an attack on Russia.

“He has been pushed into a corner and his only hope is to demonstrate resolve and readiness for escalation to compel the Ukrainians to sit down at the negotiating table,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a Russian political analyst and a former speech writer for Mr. Putin. “I don’t think he believes in victory any longer. He wants to show Ukrainians that victory will be too expensive and it’s better to negotiate.”

Shortly after Mr. Putin’s speech, China urged the Kremlin to de-escalate.

“We call on the parties concerned to achieve a cease-fire and an end to the war through dialogue and negotiation, and find a way to take into account the legitimate security concerns of all parties as soon as possible,” said Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “We also hope that the international community will create conditions and space for this.”

Western leaders expressed their resolve to continue supporting Ukraine despite Mr. Putin’s threat.

The partial mobilization and annexation of parts of Ukraine are “an admission that [Mr. Putin’s] invasion is failing,” U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in a tweet Wednesday. “No amount of threats and propaganda can hide the fact that Ukraine is winning this war, the international community are united and Russia is becoming a global pariah.”

Mr. Putin has sought to avoid a full mobilization of troops, fearing that the broad support for the war could become fragile once average Russians are forced to serve.

While both state-run and independent polls show that most Russians support the war, the enthusiasm has been more subdued than eight years ago, when Mr. Putin ignited the conflict with Ukraine by seizing the southern peninsula of Crimea and announcing its annexation to great fanfare in a Kremlin ceremony.

In its mobilization efforts, the Kremlin has so far taken a calibrated approach, avoiding a widespread call-up that would be a shock to Russian society.

The decision, however, is likely to silence nationalist critics of Mr. Putin’s approach, which has seen him stop short of declaring war.

“Nuclear signaling is directed to the West and Ukraine, but it’s also meant to satisfy radical domestic critiques that are turning into a serious opposition,” said Dmitry Adamsky, a Russian expert at the School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel...

 

War With Russia Enters New Phase as Ukraine Readies Southern Counterblow

The Ukraine war grinds on.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Ukrainian offensive to reclaim key port city could be pivot in conflict, with success reinforcing support for Kyiv’s fight in parts of the West":

After months of Russian forces making painfully slow gains in Ukraine’s east, the focus of the war is moving to the south, where a potentially decisive phase of the conflict will play out.

Ukraine has used long-range artillery and rocket systems, including the American M142 Himars, to halt Russia’s grinding advances in the east, destroying ammunition dumps, command-and-control centers and air-defense systems that appear to have limited Moscow’s ability to supply its front lines. Now, with the help of these Western weapons, Ukraine says it is mounting a counteroffensive to take back the Southern port city of Kherson.

Russia continues its bombardment of cities across Ukraine including in the early hours of Sunday, when it launched an assault on the port of Mykolaiv, killing a prominent businessman. But for Ukraine, Kherson is an important strategic objective as the largest population center occupied by the Russians and the first city to fall. As a port, it is economically important to the Ukrainians and taking it back would deny Russian forces access to the southern coast toward Odessa.

Mick Ryan, a military strategist and retired major general in the Australian army, said the offensive will force Russia to make hard decisions about keeping troops in the Donbas or moving them south to protect Kherson.

If the Ukrainians retake the city, he said, they could be in a position to threaten Russia’s main Black Sea naval base, 150 miles away, at Sevastopol.

The Ukrainian effort to retake Kherson represents a significant development in the conflict, said Gen. Ryan. “If the Ukrainians can take that back, that will be a turning point,” he said. “But we’re not at a turning point yet.”

Symbolic importance Eliot Cohen, a military historian and strategist with the bipartisan policy research group the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Kherson carried great symbolic importance.

“Taking back the original city that the Russians took without much effort in the beginning, would be psychologically very significant,” he said. It would be a bigger deal than either Ukraine’s recapture of Snake Island in June or the sinking of Russia’s flagship, the Moskva, in April.

Military offensives are more challenging than defensive operations. Analysts caution that Ukraine shouldn’t—and likely won’t—rush into the fight in the south because it must continue to check Russian advances in the east. But demonstrating that it can retake ground in the south would provide an important victory for Ukrainian morale and show its backers, particularly those in Europe as the continent faces a tough winter with likely energy shortages, that their support is yielding results on the ground.

If Ukraine’s push to dislodge Russians from Kherson fails or falters, however, it could weaken support for Kyiv’s fight in some Western capitals. Ukrainians are likely to continue fighting whatever happens, but an unsuccessful campaign could prompt more calls for a negotiated settlement, particularly from parts of Western Europe facing reduced flows of Russian natural gas.

U.S. officials say Ukrainian forces are advancing in the south, and public assessments from British defense intelligence suggest the counteroffensive in Kherson is gathering momentum. The British intelligence said Thursday that Ukrainian forces have likely established a bridgehead south of the Ingulets River, which forms the northern boundary of the Kherson region, and have damaged at least three bridges that Russia uses to deliver supplies to the area. One—the 1,100-yard Antonivsky bridge near Kherson city—is now probably unusable.

This has exposed Russia’s 49th Army, stationed on the west bank of the Dnipro River, and has cut off Kherson city from other occupied territories, the British intelligence said. On Saturday, they said Russian forces were highly likely to have established two pontoon bridges and a ferry system to compensate for the bridge damage.

‘One bite at a time’

This phase of the war will look different from the first one, when Moscow unsuccessfully mounted an effort to strike at Kyiv and topple the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the second that continues in the east, where grueling exchanges of artillery fire have yielded modest advantages for Russian forces at great cost.

Mr. Cohen says this phase will likely have parallels with what happened in the last year of World War I, when the Germans on the one side and the British and Australians on the other sought to “break in” past the front lines, exploit weakness and infiltrate forces.

This requires “meticulously planned operations, which take one bite at a time out of the enemy’s front line. And then you move artillery forward, you consolidate your position, let them counterattack if they want to, and then you take another bite,” he said.

Analysts point out that this phase won’t depend on artillery alone. Konrad Muzyka, president of Rochan Consulting, military analysts based in Gdansk, Poland, said, “Himars cripple Russia’s ability to conduct offensive operations, but they won’t force the Russians to leave Ukraine. For that you need manpower and armor.”

This requires “meticulously planned operations, which take one bite at a time out of the enemy’s front line. And then you move artillery forward, you consolidate your position, let them counterattack if they want to, and then you take another bite,” he said.

Analysts point out that this phase won’t depend on artillery alone. Konrad Muzyka, president of Rochan Consulting, military analysts based in Gdansk, Poland, said, “Himars cripple Russia’s ability to conduct offensive operations, but they won’t force the Russians to leave Ukraine. For that you need manpower and armor.”

This brings in the big unknown: “We don’t know what the structure of the Ukrainian army is, we don’t know its number of troops or the state of their morale,” he said. Ukraine has lost thousands of soldiers in recent months and many good leaders.

Chris Dougherty, a former U.S. Defense Department strategist now at the Center for a New American Security, said that, despite all the materiel the West has given to Ukraine, it probably still lacks the equipment and trained forces to retake ground successfully and quickly.

“The worry I have is we give advanced equipment to the Ukrainians and they use it to stop the bleeding,” he said. “That makes sense if you’re bleeding to death. But what’s the next thing you do?” He said Russia has been unable to capitalize on its massive artillery blitzes to take significant ground, and Ukraine risks falling into the same trap...

 

Ukraine Fears Minor Attacks Are in Russia's Game Plan

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba's not too pleased with Slow Joe.

At WSJ, "Foreign minister says President Biden’s ‘minor incursion’ comment plays down Moscow’s intentions, which Kyiv sees as destabilizing country, not invading":

KYIV, Ukraine—Russia wants to destabilize Ukraine using a variety of attacks, Ukrainian officials said, pushing back against a suggestion from President Biden that the U.S. and its allies would respond differently to a small-scale incursion than a full-on invasion.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Thursday responded to Mr. Biden’s comment suggesting that Western nations weren’t in tandem on how to respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the event of a “minor incursion” on Ukraine. His statement was later clarified by the White House.

“Speaking of minor and full incursions or full invasion, you cannot be half-aggressive. You’re either aggressive or you’re not aggressive,” Mr. Kuleba said. “We should not give Putin the slightest chance to play with quasi-aggression or small-incursion operations. This aggression was there since 2014. This is the fact.”

Ukraine, already unnerved by the presence of almost 100,000 Russian troops near its borders, was shaken by the comments from Mr. Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron Wednesday that raised questions about the West’s unity and conviction in helping the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went on Twitter Thursday to “remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations. Just as there are no minor casualties and little grief from the loss of loved ones.”

Mr. Biden, speaking at a White House event Thursday, didn’t directly address the Ukrainian criticism but said he has been very clear with Mr. Putin about an invasion.

“Let there be no doubt at all that if Putin makes this choice, Russia will pay a heavy price,” he said.

Ukrainian officials are touchy in part because their analysis is that a large-scale attack isn’t Russia’s probable course. Stiff Ukrainian resistance to a direct assault and pressure from the West would act as a deterrent, they say. Instead, the Kremlin would probably deploy more covert measures to destabilize its neighbor and remove its leadership, top Ukrainian officials say.

As a result, Ukrainian officials want Western leaders not to play down apparently less-lethal aggression by Moscow.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in an interview that a military invasion would be very costly for Russia, given the size of Ukraine’s army, the population’s will to fight and pressure from the West. More likely, he said, Russia would seek, at least in the short term, to intensify a campaign of cyberattacks, provocations, disinformation and economic pressure.

“It will be very difficult for them to achieve their aims by military means. I think, impossible,” said Mr. Danilov. “They have a multifaceted plan to destabilize the domestic situation on the territory of our country. That’s the number one task for them.”

Mr. Biden, at a news conference marking his first year in office Wednesday, said Russia would be held accountable if it invaded Ukraine, adding, “It depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.”

He said that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “it is going to be a disaster,” and the U.S. and its allies would respond with measures including economic sanctions.

The White House said in a statement following Mr. Biden’s remarks that if any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, it would be regarded as “a renewed invasion” and met with swift consequences from the U.S. and its allies.

Ukrainian leaders are trying to reassure citizens and stave off panic as the number of Russian troops around the country, already in the tens of thousands, continues to swell. Mr. Zelensky in a televised address Wednesday noted that the country had lived under the threat of war since 2014, when Russia first invaded.

“The risks have been present for more than a day, and they haven’t grown,” Mr. Zelensky said. “The hype around them has grown.”

Mr. Kuleba, the foreign minister, said that despite differing threat assessments, he believes Mr. Biden sincerely wants to help and work with Ukraine..

Still more.

 

Pro-Russia Gunmen Seize Parliament in Ukraine's Crimea

This is getting to be like some real great power politics. Almost like old times, frankly.

At the Washington Post, "Pro-Russia separatists flex muscle in Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula":

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — The revolutionary upheaval in Ukraine’s faraway capital has awakened the separatist dreams of ethnic Russians living here on the Crimean Peninsula, where on Thursday pro-Russia gunmen who occupied the regional parliament building were met with an outpouring of support.

A group of men dressed in camouflage and armed with rocket-­propelled grenades entered the building early Thursday in the capital of Ukraine’s Crimea region, according to local reporters, then barricaded themselves inside and raised the Russian flag on the roof — a succinct answer to warnings from the United States and Europe that Ukraine remain united and Russia stand back.

Also at Time, "Gunmen Seize Parliament in Ukraine’s Russian Stronghold":

Since revolutionaries took over Ukraine’s capital a week ago, the ethnic Russian majority in the Crimea has largely refused to recognize the new government. In some Crimean cities, citizens have begun forming pro-Russian militias to resist the new authorities. “There’s not a chance in hell we’re going to accept the rule of that fascist scum,” Sergei Bochenko, the commander of a local militia group in the Crimea, told TIME last week in the city of Sevastopol. He said his battalion was armed with assault rifles and had begun training to “defend our land.”

Resting on the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula, Sevastopol is home to a major Russian military base. Some of its ethnic Russian citizens have appealed for Moscow‘s help to protect them from the new government, which they widely believe to be a fascist force backed by the United States and European Union.

On Thursday, as the siege unfolded in the Crimean capital, Russia received a similar appeal from Yanukovych, Ukraine’s ousted president, who is wanted in his homeland on charges of mass murder after police under his command slaughtered dozens of protesters last week. “As before, I consider myself the rightful head of the Ukrainian state,” he wrote in an appeal distributed to the press. “My allies and I have received threats of revenge, urging me to ask the authorities of the Russian Federation to ensure my personal safety from the actions of extremists,” he added, referring to the revolutionaries.

So far, Russia has refused all appeals to interfere in Ukraine. On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said during a trip to the E.U. that Russia had “confirmed our principled position of nonintervention in Ukraine’s internal affairs.” But a few days earlier, on Feb. 22, a senior delegation of Russian officials attended a summit of officials from the fallen regime and, in a resolution passed at the summit, called on Ukrainians to form militias to resist the revolutionary government.

“The provocateurs are on the march,” Ukraine’s acting Interior Minister, Arsen Avakov, said in reaction to the seizure of the Crimean parliament.

Still more at the Los Angeles Times, "Ukraine's fugitive president turns up in Russia."