I don't even see how (b) is going to work at this point--with the massive flow of weapons and money that is coming from the West, and NATO safe havens on the borders, Russia will be playing whack-a-mole against insurgency forever no matter how much force they use.
Imagine if the Iraq or Afghanistan insurgencies had had access to an endless supply of top-of-the-line weapons, orders of magnitude more funding, and 'safe zones' where they could operate without the US attacking them... as far as I can tell, Russia is all but guaranteed a bloody and expensive quagmire until they withdraw.
It seems like Putin went on tilt. It's hard to fathom any rational justification for this.
> It's hard to fathom any rational justification for this.
It can only be because they think that it's essential to strike now; they think that if they leave it, terminal decline is inevitable.
This is a military operation that's been planned for years; by 'now', I mean 'this decade'. I imagine they saw the European gas crisis as an opportunity, and one that would slip away quickly if they didn't seize it. That's why it's happened this spring.
That long column: that's mostly logistics for the planned long siege of Kiev. I think those guys have barely begun.
Hmm, I think another reason for this to happen now, is that the border between Belorussia and the Ukraine is covered by the Pripet Marches, that are neary impassible by heavy equipment when not frozen. Without access that way, Russia would have to fight their way from the east, and forced to cross the Dneipr river, which forms a very significant obstacle. This could delay an invasion by a month or more.
Yes; there seems to be a Russian column abandoned near the Belarus border, due to getting bogged down in mud, i.e. it's not actually frozen (a couple of days ago it was reported that Kiev was warmer than Manchester, England).
Yo be fair, those insurgencies did kind of have access to safe zones (Pakistan is next to Afghanistan) and a good supply of weapons which definitely helped them.
Those American forces also had vastly longer supply lines to sustain. What the Russians lack in financing and capability, the make up a lot with proximate borders, time zones, etc.
There are plenty of sayings along the lines of "America doesn't have military, they have a logistics corporation" Supplying enough "X" is rarely an issue for the USM except in the cases where it is something new they didn't realize they needed.
The US has established bases all over the globe and has basically created a worldwide supply chain for its military, so that isn’t really a factor. (Please note, this isn’t being said in an anti-American way.)
Russian military morale is so low it's almost a non-force. You see them unloading into chicken farms and monuments rather than fighting. They are running out of fuel all over the place - probably because they sold it. The corruption in the Russian military is vast and intense.
It’s interesting because the U.S. has an order of magnitude more military funding and was trying to secure a supply line an order of magnitude longer. I wonder if this ratio makes it approximately as difficult?
An additional worry is that these things never end well. I have to dig up this book on the downstream costs to all these countries that were allied w/ the west or USSR during the cold war...they all pay the price economically, socially etc for being part of the global great game. Central America, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa all took a huge hit, if you think about it.
Say Ukraine survives or becomes an Afghanistan-like insurgency power. But now they are rife with guns, warlords, and no national institution or government to organize everything....
> Say Ukraine survives or becomes an Afghanistan-like insurgency power. But now they are rife with guns, warlords, and no national institution or government to organize everything....
Nature abhors vacuums. Especially if those vacuums are easy to fill.
What do you think will happen if Russia backs down?
Ukraine already borders 4 EU members (Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland).
> It seems like Putin went on tilt. It's hard to fathom any rational justification for this.
At least destabilizing Ukraine is necessary to prevent near-term, rapid decline for the Russian Federation. Ukraine's energy production potential and proximity to Europe make them a likely serious competitor, at a time when renewables are already putting pressure on petrostates like Russia.
Russia made Ukrainian resources in the East difficult to exploit with their fomenting or fabricating a persistent rebellion out that way, and seized most of Ukraine's substantial resources in the Black Sea when they took Crimea outright—but Crimea's dependent on Ukrainian fresh water, which has quite literally dried up for obvious reasons, and Russia's having a hell of a time (that is, spending huge amounts of money to limited effect) supporting Crimea without holding some of the mainland.
This is part of a series of actions aimed at creating short- and mid-term economic stability for Russia, while also improving their strategic situation. I would guess that an acceptable, if not perfect, outcome for them would be bringing the Eastern ~1/3 to 1/2 of Ukraine under Russian control, and it looks like they may yet manage to play their hand to effect such a partition, despite their bizarrely-inept invasion.
It does appear that they've blundered, overall, and not just though military fuck-ups—the sanctions are likely causing a ton of pain, NATO and the EU are more united against them than they've been in a long time and are re-arming (as in Germany), and they managed to bump energy independence way up the priority list for the EU. However, there are good reasons for them to (have tried to) do what they're doing.
> This is part of a series of actions aimed at creating short- and mid-term economic stability for Russia, while also improving their strategic situation
I don't know if you're fully aware of what effect the sanctions are having or going to have on Russia, but anything resembling economic stability is absolutely NOT it.
Russia will face a humanitarian crisis, perhaps almost as severe as Ukraine itself, especially in its poorer regions, with anything resembling a tech industry evaporating nearly overnight, and massive unemployment following.
These effects will not dissipate in the short or mid-term.
At least I don't see them being resolved unless they massively pivot to selling petro-chemicals to China instead.
I suppose this was a huge miscalculation. As far as I can see, the effect will be as follows:
- EU countries are re-arming (Germany in particular). If they go through with that, they will be able to surpass Russia in terms of conventional force strength in a few years, even without US support.
- The EU will remove their dependency on Russian oil&gas, removing Russian leverage and profits at the same time.
- Even if Russia is able to gain military control of the Ukrain, it will take decades of suppression for them to derive any net economic benefit. And by doing this, they will continously remind the world that they are the "bad guys", ensuring continues isolation.
Russia doesn't have a big track military track record in recent years, but there's one thing that they have proven to do really well: leveling a city to the ground while slaughtering the civilians who didn't flee.
Having the Ukrainian legitimate government agree to surrender to save Kiev (or “just” Khariv) from such a fate isn't completely impossible to imagine. And giving infantry weapons isn't going to be enough to stop Putin from doing so if he wanted. I don't know how many FОАВ[1] the Russian air force has at its disposal, but Javelin aren't gonna help against that…
And after this hypothetical surrender from the Ukrainian government, setting up a bloody dictatorship with a special police arresting, torturing and executing whoever is suspected to belong to the insurgency, relying on pro-russian locals to provide intelligence is not an impossible feat unfortunately…
Fallujah and Mosul were pretty bad in terms of city levelling. We just don't like to remember them, or think about depleted uranium dust causing birth defects, or what happened to the refugees, or a million other things.
You can't just compare Fallujah and Grozny. Of course urban warfare is destructive to the city no matter what, but the US and Russian tactics are very different, and so is the destruction. Dropping tons of low precision thermobaric weapons on a city is a Russian thing, unmatched in its destruction. (The is no American equivalent to the TOS-1[1] for instance).
That being said, that doesn't mean I approve US invasion of Irak in any way (because I do not), it just feels you're comparing Pearl Harbor with Stalingrad… (Ok, not literally, because there is a two orders of magnitude difference between Pearl Harbor and Stalingrad, but you get the idea).
There not discussion that DU has terrible long term impact, of course it has. The US aren't “good guys” who don't hurt civilians, nobody is arguing that!
Yet, “in terms of city leveling” Fallujah and Grozny are not comparable. That's it.
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1994%E2%80... the Russian army started to destroy Grozny with heavy bombings only after the initial plan, which was to drive the tank columns straight to the presidential palace, badly failed.
Their stated objective in Ukraine is not to take Kyiv, let's hope it's true.
That thing is only really useful against static, or near static high value targets. Against insurgents dispersed across the countryside with Javelins the weapon itself is effectively useless while the aircraft delivering it is still vulnerable.
> That thing is only really useful against static, or near static high value targets.
Exactly, like the the capital of your country for instance. Noting that I'm not talking about defeating an insurgency with it, just overthrow the legitimate government and put a pro-russian dictatorship in charge. Exterminating the insurgents would then be the job of the local dictator. Obviously it's not guaranteed, but torture, kidnapping, and assassination have proven an effective mean of counter-insurgency… In real life the bad guy sometimes win…
The thing is, once they do that, they'll cross another one of those imaginary lines.
And the sanctions Russia is under will be nothing like the ones that will be heaped on top.
Europe is highly sensitive about local conflicts, especially after what happened to Srebrenica. Grozny didn't really count since it was:
a) an internal war
b) at the end of Europe
If Putin flattens a major European city (for Europe any city above ~2m or so is major), the outrage in Europe will be huge. Even bigger than it is now.
> If Putin flattens a major European city, the outrage in Europe will be huge.
Ukraine is not in NATO. And I'm afraid if NATO and EU have to choose between a direct military confrontation of nuclear-capable powers and a genocide of 40-million-and-dwidling Ukrainian population, they'd choose the latter as long as Putin keeps this contained in Ukraine.
Would it turn Russia into Greater North Korea? Absolutely. Would it cause outrage and grave concern? You bet. Would it make NATO to move in and stop it? Unlikely at the moment.
But in Europe that outrage will also be from a place of fear: maybe Russia will do it to you, too. So it will be longer lasting and a more intense and probably a truer feeling. Not fake outrage.
The German Army isn't capable of much at the moment.
And even if it were, no NATO member will set foot in Ukraine while this war and the following insurgency are happening.
What will happen is, depending on how hard Putin pushes, the reaction will be just as strong. More attacks targeting civilians? More weapons sent to Ukraine. Harder sanctions, with actual teeth. I wouldn't be shocked if by next winter 60%+ of the gas supply for Western Europe will be covered from other vendors, more or less bankrupting Russia (a huge percentage of Russian exports are raw materials, primarily oil and gas).
> I wouldn't be shocked if by next winter 60%+ of the gas supply for Western Europe will be covered from other vendors, more or less bankrupting Russia
you will be shocked to discover that Russia is going to fuel China's economy instead [1]
Possible, but risky for China to do that. A dollar buying Chinese made goods, is a dollar China has to buy Russian oil products, is a dollar Russia has to pay soldiers and build more weapons to bomb whoever they're bombing. I'm in favor of global free trade, but not without limits. The U.N. Charter is more important. The non-violent multilateral institution of resolving disputes is too important. Anyone outside that arrangement is calling to past demons. And for what? What does China gain by being seen as funding Russia's war effort?
CCP is at least sane and thinks long-term. They don't want nuclear war, at least. I'd honestly feel relieved if Xi were pulling Putin's puppet strings at this point.
Russia has claimed that the mission is to liberate Ukraine from Nazis, which is why you see videos of unarmed civilians not being immediately run over by trucks.
If the mission changes to kill as many civilians as possible, the army is going to have an even worse morale problem and the international community will come up with a creative solution like giving part of Poland to Ukraine, giving Ukrainian citizenship to anyone within that part of Poland and then launching attacks with all the military resources that just happen to now be in Ukraine.
On a more historic note, it took the Soviets a couple of days before they ran over people with tanks during the January Events in Vilnius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events_(Lithuania)#Tim... note how they also claimed it was acting against a "nationalist" (equivalent to "nazi" in the USSR) government.
Just sign a paper that Poland rocket is now Ukrainian rocket and then shoot it over border. Ukraine will not protest if a Ukrainian rocket will hit an enemy target on territory of Ukraine. Nobody can easily check who operates a rocket or drone.
> Russia has claimed that the mission is to liberate Ukraine from Nazis, which is why you see videos of unarmed civilians not being immediately run over by trucks.
> If the mission changes to kill as many civilians as possible, the army is going to have an even worse morale problem
I agree. This is indeed one of the biggest challenge the Russian army will face if they decide to do so.
> the international community will come up with a creative solution like giving part of Poland to Ukraine, giving Ukrainian citizenship to anyone within that part of Poland and then launching attacks with all the military resources that just happen to now be in Ukraine.
This is hilarious, I love it. Never gonna happen, but I love the creativity here. This is “thinking out of the box”.
The more realistic "creative use of borders" I anticipate is citing historic claims of (mostly) Poland to carve off a big chunk of Ukraine in the West into a new state, and put it under explicit or implied ("just try and see what happens") NATO protection. I don't expect that unless Russia starts having a lot more success, though, and both they and Ukraine start to signal that they might accept a partition of the country to end hostilities.
[EDIT] Further caveat that it'd have to be before substantial Russian ground forces reach that part of the country. This is still a low-likelihood scenario, but certainly far more likely than declaring part of Poland to be in Ukraine (?!)
Imagine if the Iraq or Afghanistan insurgencies had had access to an endless supply of top-of-the-line weapons, orders of magnitude more funding, and 'safe zones' where they could operate without the US attacking them... as far as I can tell, Russia is all but guaranteed a bloody and expensive quagmire until they withdraw.
It seems like Putin went on tilt. It's hard to fathom any rational justification for this.