Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 96

Politico: Ukraine is at great risk of its front lines collapsing

By Jamie Dettmer, Politico, 4/3/24

KYIV — Wayward entrepreneur Elon Musk’s latest pronouncements regarding the war in Ukraine set teeth on edge, as he warned that even though Moscow has “no chance” of conquering all of Ukraine, “the longer the war goes on, the more territory Russia will gain until they hit the Dnipro, which is tough to overcome.”

“However, if the war lasts long enough, Odesa will fall too,” he cautioned.

With a history of urging Ukraine to agree to territorial concessions — and his opposition to the $60 billion U.S. military aid package snarled on Capitol Hill amid partisan wrangling — Musk isn’t Ukraine’s favorite commentator, to say the least. And his remarks received predictable pushback.

But the billionaire entrepreneur’s forecast isn’t actually all that different from the dire warnings Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made in the last few days. According to Zelenskyy, unless the stalled multibillion-dollar package is approved soon, his forces will have to “go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps.” He also warned that some major cities could be at risk of falling.

Obviously, Zelenskyy’s warnings are part of a broad diplomatic effort to free up the military aid his forces so desperately need and have been short of for months — everything from 155-millimeter artillery shells to Patriot air-defense systems and drones. But the sad truth is that even if the package is approved by the U.S. Congress, a massive resupply may not be enough to prevent a major battlefield upset.

And such a setback, especially in the middle of election campaigns in America and Europe, could very well revive Western pressure for negotiations that would obviously favor Russia, leaving the Kremlin free to revive the conflict at a future time of its choosing.

Essentially, everything now depends on where Russia will decide to target its strength in an offensive that’s expected to launch this summer. In a pre-offensive pummeling — stretching from Kharkiv and Sumy in the north to Odesa in the south — Russia’s missile and drone strikes have widely surged in recent weeks, targeting infrastructure and making it hard to guess where it will mount its major push.

And according to high-ranking Ukrainian military officers who served under General Valery Zaluzhny — the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces until he was replaced in February — the military picture is grim.

The officers said there’s a great risk of the front lines collapsing wherever Russian generals decide to focus their offensive. Moreover, thanks to a much greater weight in numbers and the guided aerial bombs that have been smashing Ukrainian positions for weeks now, Russia will likely be able to “penetrate the front line and to crash it in some parts,” they said.

They spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers,” one of the top-ranking military sources told POLITICO.

According to him, it is only Ukrainian grit and resilience as well as errors by Russian commanders that may now alter the grim dynamics. Mistakes like the one made on Saturday, when Russia launched one of the largest tank assaults on Ukrainian positions since its full-scale invasion began, only to have the column smashed by Ukraine’s 25th Brigade, which took out a dozen tanks and 8 infantry fighting vehicles — a third of the column’s strength.

Everything now depends on where Russia will decide to target its strength in an offensive that’s expected to launch this summer | Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images

However, the high-ranking Ukrainian officers reminded that relying on Russian errors is not a strategy, and they were bitter about the missteps they say hamstrung Ukraine’s resistance from the start — missteps made by both the West and Ukraine. They were also scathing about Western foot-dragging, saying supplies and weapons systems came too late and in insufficient numbers to make the difference they otherwise could have.

“Zaluzhny used to call it ‘the War of One Chance,’” one of the officers said. “By that, he meant weapons systems become redundant very quickly because they’re quickly countered by the Russians. For example, we used Storm Shadow and SCALP cruise missiles [supplied by Britain and France] successfully — but just for a short time. The Russians are always studying. They don’t give us a second chance. And they’re successful in this.”

“Don’t believe the hype about them just throwing troops into the meat grinder to be slaughtered,” he added. “They do that too, of course — maximizing even more the impact of their superior numbers — but they also learn and refine.”

The officers said the shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles supplied by the U.K. and U.S. in the first weeks of the invasion came in time, helping them save Kyiv — and so, too, did the HIMARS, the light multiple-launch rocket systems, which were used to great effect, enabling them to push Russia out of Kherson in November 2022.

“But often, we just don’t get the weapons systems at the time we need them — they come when they’re no longer relevant,” another senior officer said, citing the F-16 fighter jets as an example. A dozen or so F-16s are expected to be operational this summer, after basic pilot training has been completed. “Every weapon has its own right time. F-16s were needed in 2023; they won’t be right for 2024,” he said.

And that’s because, according to this officer, Russia is ready to counter them: “In the last few months, we started to notice missiles being fired by the Russians from Dzhankoy in northern Crimea, but without the explosive warheads. We couldn’t understand what they were doing, and then we figured it out: They’re range-finding,” he said. The officer explained that Russia’s been calculating where best to deploy its S-400 missile and radar systems in order to maximize the area they can cover to target the F-16s, keeping them away from the front lines and Russia’s logistical hubs.

The officers also said they now need more basic traditional weapons as well as drones. “We need Howitzers and shells, hundreds of thousands of shells, and rockets,” one of them told POLITICO, estimating that Ukraine needed 4 million shells and 2 million drones. “We told the Western partners all the time that we have the combat experience, we have the battlefield understanding of this war. [They] have the resources, and they need to give us what we need,” he added.

Europe, for its part, is trying to help Ukraine make up for its colossal disadvantage in artillery shells. And in this regard, a proposed Czech-led bulk artillery ammunition purchase could bring Ukraine’s total from both within and outside the EU to around 1.5 million rounds at a cost of $3.3 billion — but that’s still short of what it needs.

The officers emphasized that they need many, many more men too. The country currently doesn’t have enough men on the front lines, and this is compounding the problem of underwhelming Western support.

However, Ukraine has yet to pull the trigger on recruitment ahead of the expected Russian push, as authorities are worried about the political fallout mobilization measures might bring amid draft-dodging and avoidance of conscription papers. Zaluzhny had already publicly called for the mobilization of more troops back in December, estimating Ukraine needed at least an additional 500,000 men. The draft issue has gone back and forth ever since.

Then, last week, General Oleksandr Syrsky — Zaluzhny’s replacement — abruptly announced that Ukraine might not need quite so many fresh troops. After a review of resources, the figure has been “significantly reduced,” and “we expect that we will have enough people capable of defending their motherland,” he told the Ukrinform news agency. “I am talking not only about the mobilized but also about volunteer fighters,” he said.

The plan is to move as many desk-bound uniformed personnel and those in noncombat roles to the front lines as possible, after an intensive three- to four-month training. But the senior officers POLITICO spoke to said that Syrsky was wrong and “playing along with narratives from politicians.” Then, on Tuesday, Zelenskyy signed some additional parts to an old mobilization law tightening the legal requirements for draft-age Ukrainian men to register their details, and lowering the minimum age for call-up from 27 to 25. But in Ukraine, this is just seen as tinkering.

 “We don’t only have a military crisis — we have a political one,” one of the officers said. While Ukraine shies away from a big draft, “Russia is now gathering resources and will be ready to launch a big attack around August, and maybe sooner.”

So, Musk may not be too wide of the mark after all.

Scott Ritter: We are witnessing the bittersweet birth of a new Russia

By Scott Ritter, RT, 3/9/24

Tucker Carlson’s confused exasperation over Russian President Vladmir Putin’s extemporaneous history lesson at the start of their landmark February interview (which has been watched more than a billion times), underscored one realty. For a Western audience, the question of the historical bona fides of Russia’s claim of sovereign interest in territories located on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnieper River, currently claimed by Ukraine, is confusing to the point of incomprehension.

Vladimir Putin, however, did not manufacture his history lesson from thin air. Anyone who has followed the speeches and writings of the Russian president over the years would have found his comments to Carlson quite familiar, echoing both in tone and content previous statements made concerning both the viability of the Ukrainian state from an historic perspective, and the historical ties between what Putin has called Novorossiya (New Russia) and the Russian nation.

For example, on March 18, 2014, during his announcement regarding the annexation of Crimea, the president observed that “after the [Russian] Revolution [of 1917], for a number of reasons the Bolsheviks – let God judge them – added historical sections of the south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic composition of the population, and these regions today form the south-east of Ukraine.”

Later during a televised question-and-answer session, Putin declared that “what was called Novorossiya back in tsarist days – Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet Government. Why? Who knows? They were won by Potemkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars. The center of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.”

Novorossiya isn’t just a construct of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, but rather a notion drawn from historic fact that resonated with the people who populated the territories it encompassed. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an abortive effort by pro-Russia citizens of the new Ukrainian state to restore Novorossiya as an independent region.

While this effort failed, the concept of a greater Novorossiya confederation was revived in May 2014 by the newly proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. But this effort, too, was short-lived, being put on ice in 2015. This, however, did not mean the death of the idea of Novorossiya. On February 21, 2022, Putin delivered a lengthy address to the Russian nation on the eve of his decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine as part of what he termed a Special Military Operation. Those who watched Tucker Carlson’s February 9, 2024, interview with Putin would have been struck by the similarity between the two presentations.

While he did not make a direct reference to Novorossiya, the president did outline fundamental historic and cultural linkages which serve as the foundation for any discussion about the viability and legitimacy of Novorossiya in the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

“I would like to emphasize,” Putin said, “once again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. It is our friends, our relatives, not only colleagues, friends, and former work colleagues, but also our relatives and close family members. Since the oldest times,” Putin continued, “the inhabitants of the south-western historical territories of ancient Russia have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. It was the same in the 17th century, when a part of these territories [i.e., Novorossiya] was reunited with the Russian state, and even after that.”

The Russian president set forth his contention that the modern state of Ukraine was an invention of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. “Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy,” Putin stated, “and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’. He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents.”

Putin went on to issue a threat which, when seen in the context of the present, proved ominously prescient. “And today the ’grateful progeny’ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine.”

In September 2022 Putin followed through on this, ordering referendums in four territories (Kherson and Zaporozhye, and the newly independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) to determine whether the populations residing there wished to join the Russian Federation. All four did so. Putin has since then referred to these new Russian territories as Novorossiya, perhaps nowhere more poignantly that in June 2023, when he praised the Russian soldiers “who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya and for the unity of the Russian world.”

The story of those who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya is one that I have wanted to tell for some time now. I have borne witness here in the United States to the extremely one-sided coverage of the military aspects of Russia’s military operation. Like many of my fellow analysts, I had to undertake the extremely difficult task of trying to parse out fact from an overwhelmingly fictional narrative. Nor was I helped in any way in this regard by the Russian side, which was parsimonious in the release of information that reflected its side of reality.

In preparing for my December 2023 visit to Russia, I had hoped to be able to visit the four new Russian territories to see for myself what the truth was when it came to the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. I also wanted to interview the Russian military and civilian leadership to get a broader perspective of the conflict. I had reached out to the Russian Foreign and Defense ministries through the Russian Embassy in the US, bending the ear of both the Ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, and the Defense Attache, Major-General Evgeny Bobkin, about my plans.

While both men supported my project and wrote recommendations back to their respective ministries in this regard, the Russian Defense Ministry, which had the final say over what happened in the four new territories, vetoed the idea. This veto was not because they didn’t like the idea of me writing an in-depth analysis of the conflict from the Russian perspective, but rather that the project as I outlined it, which would have required sustained access to frontline units and personnel, was deemed too dangerous. In short, the Russian Defense Ministry did not relish the idea of me being killed on its watch.

Under normal circumstances, I would have backed off. I had no desire to create any difficulty with the Russian government, and I was always cognizant of the reality that I was a guest in the country.

The last thing I wanted to be was a “war tourist,” where I put myself and others at risk for purely personal reasons. But I also felt strongly that if I were going to continue to provide so-called “expert analysis” about the military operation and the geopolitical realities of Novorossiya and Crimea, then I needed to see these places firsthand. I strongly believed that I had a professional obligation to see the new territories. Fortunately for me, Aleksandr Zyryanov, a Crimea native and director general of the Novosibirsk Region Development Corporation, agreed.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

We first tried to enter the new territories via Donetsk, driving west out of Rostov-on-Don. However, when we arrived at the checkpoint, we were told that the Ministry of Defense had not cleared us for entry. Not willing to take no for an answer, Aleksandr drove south, towards Krasnodar, and then – after making some phone calls – across the Crimean Bridge into Crimea. Once it became clear that we were planning on entering the new territories from Crimea, the Ministry of Defense yielded, granting permission for me to visit the four new Russian territories under one non-negotiable condition – I was not to go anywhere near the frontlines.

We left Feodosia early on the morning of January 15, 2024. At Dzhankoy, in northern Crimea, we took highway 18 north toward the Tup-Dzhankoy Peninsula and the Chongar Strait, which separates the Sivash lagoon system that forms the border between Crimea and the mainland into eastern and western portions. It was here that Red Army forces, on the night of November 12, 1920, broke through the defenses of the White Army of General Wrangel, leading to the capture of the Crimean Peninsula by Soviet forces. And it was also here that the Russian Army, on February 24, 2022, crossed into the Kherson Region from Crimea.

The Chongar Bridge is one of three highway crossings that connect Crimea with Kherson. It has been struck twice by Ukrainian forces seeking to disrupt Russian supply lines, once, in June 2023, when it was hit by British-made Storm Shadow missiles, and once again that August when it was hit by French-made SCALP missiles (a variant of the Storm Shadow.) In both instances, the bridge was temporarily shut down for repairs, evidence of which was clearly visible as we made our way across, and on to the Chongar checkpoint, where we were cleared by Russian soldiers for entry into the Kherson Region.

At the checkpoint we picked up a vehicle carrying a bodyguard detachment from the reconnaissance company of the Sparta Battalion, a veteran military formation whose roots date back to the very beginning of the Donbass revolt against the Ukrainian nationalists who seized power in Kiev during the February 2014 Maidan coup. They would be our escort through the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions – even though we were going to give the frontlines a wide berth, Ukrainian “deep reconnaissance groups”, or DRGs, were known to target traffic along the M18 highway. Aleksandr was driving an armored Chevrolet Suburban, and the Sparta detachment had their own armored SUV. If we were to come under attack, our response would be to try and drive through the ambush. If that failed, then the Sparta boys would have to go to work.

Our first destination was the city of Genichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov. Genichesk is the capital of the Genichesk District of the Kherson Region and, since November 9, 2022, when Russian forces withdrew from the city of Kherson, it has served as the temporary capital of the region. Aleksandr had been on his phone since morning, and his efforts had paid off – I was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Saldo, the local Governor.

Genichesk is – literally – off the beaten path. When we reached the town of Novoalekseyevka, we got off the M18 highway and headed east along a two-lane road that took us toward the Sea of Azov. There were armed checkpoints all along the route, but the Sparta bodyguards were able to get us waved through without any issues. But the effect of these checkpoints was chilling – there was no doubt that one was in a region at war.

To call Genichesk a ghost town would be misleading – it is populated, and the evidence of civilian life is everywhere you look. The problem was, there didn’t seem to be enough people present. The city, like the region, is in a general state of decay, a holdover from the neglect it had suffered at the hands of a Ukrainian government that largely ignored territories that had, since 2004, voted in favor of the Party of Regions, the party of former President Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in the February 2014 Maidan coup. Nearly two years of war had likewise contributed to the atmosphere of societal neglect, an impression which was magnified by the weather – overcast, cold, with a light sleet blowing in off the water.

As we made our way into the building where the government of the Kherson Region had established its temporary offices, I couldn’t help but notice a statue of Lenin in the courtyard. Ukrainian nationalists had taken it down in July 2015, but the citizens of Genichesk had reinstalled it in April 2022, once the Russians had taken control of the city. Given Putin’s feeling about the role Lenin played in creating Ukraine, I found both the presence of this monument, and the role of the Russian citizens of Genichesk in restoring it, curiously ironic.

Vladimir Saldo is a man imbued with enthusiasm for his work. A civil engineer by profession, with a PhD in economics, Saldo had served in senior management positions in the “Khersonbud” Project and Construction Company before moving on into politics, serving on the Kherson City Council, the Kherson Regional Administration, and two terms as the mayor of the city of Kherson. Saldo, as a member of the Party of Regions, moved to the opposition and was effectively subjected to political ostracism in 2014, when the Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power all but forced it out of politics.

Aleksandr and I had the pleasure of meeting with Saldo in his office in the government building in downtown Genichesk. We talked about a wide range of issues, including his own path from a Ukrainian construction specialist to his current position as the governor of Kherson Oblast.

We talked about the war.

But Saldo’s passion was the economy, and how he could help revive the civilian economy of Kherson in a manner that best served the interests of its diminished population. On the eve of the military operation, back in early 2022, the population of the Kherson Region stood at just over a million, of which some 280,000 were residing in the city of Kherson. By November 2022, following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper River – including the city of Kherson – the population of the region had fallen below 400,000 and, with dismal economic prospects, the numbers kept falling. Many of those who left were Ukrainians who did not want to live under Russian rule. But others were Russians and Ukrainians who felt that they had no future in the war-torn region, and as such sought their fortunes elsewhere in Russia.

“My job is to give the people of Kherson hope for a better future,” Saldo told me. “And the time for this to happen is now, not when the war ends.”

Restoration of Kherson’s once vibrant agricultural sector is a top priority, and Saldo has personally taken the lead in signing agreements for the provision of Kherson produce to Moscow supermarkets. Saldo has also turned the region into a special economic zone, where potential investors and entrepreneurs can receive preferential loans and financial support, as well as organizational and legal assistance for businesses willing to open shop there.

The man responsible for making this vision a reality is Mikhail Panchenko, the Director of the Kherson Region Industry Development Fund. I met Mikhail in a restaurant located across the street from the governmental building which Saldo called home. Mikhail had come to Kherson in the summer of 2022, leaving a prominent position in Moscow in the process. “The Russian government was interested in rebuilding Kherson,” Mikhail told me, “and established the Industry Development Fund as a way of attracting businesses to the region.” Mikhail, who was born in 1968, was too old to enlist in the military. “When the opportunity came to direct the Industry Development Fund, I jumped at it as a way to do my patriotic duty.”

The first year of the fund’s operation saw Mikhail hand out 300 million rubles (almost $3.3 million at the current rate) in loans and grants (some of which was used to open the very restaurant where we were meeting.) The second year saw the allotment grow to some 700 million rubles. One of the biggest projects was the opening of a concrete production line capable of producing 60 cubic meters of concrete per hour. Mikhail took Alexander and me on a tour of the plant, which had grown to three production lines generating some 180 cubic meters of concrete an hour. Mikhail had just approved funding for an additional four production lines, for a total concrete production rate of 420 cubic meters per hour.

“That’s a lot of concrete,” I remarked to Mikhail.

“We are making good use of it,” he replied. “We are rebuilding schools, hospitals, and government buildings that had been neglected over the years. Revitalizing the basic infrastructure a society needs if it is to nurture a growing population.”

The problem Mikhail faces, however, is that most of the population growth being experienced in Kherson today comes from the military. The war can’t last forever, Mikhail noted. “Someday the army will leave, and we will need civilians. Right now, the people who left are not returning, and we’re having a hard time attracting newcomers. But we will keep building in anticipation of a time when the population of the Kherson region will grow from an impetus other than war. And for that,” he said, a twinkle in his eye, “we need concrete!”

I thought long and hard about the words of Vladimir Saldo and Panchenko as Aleksandr drove back onto the M18 highway, heading northeast, toward Donetsk. The reconstruction efforts being undertaken are impressive. But the number that kept coming to mind was the precipitous decline in the population – more than 60% of the pre-war population has left the Kherson region since the Russian military operation began.

According to statistics provided by the Russian Central Election Commission, some 571,000 voters took part in the referendum on joining Russia that was held in late September 2022. A little over 497,000, or some 87%, voted in favor, while slightly more than 68,800, or 12%, voted against. The turnout was almost 77%.

These numbers, if accurate, implied that there was a population of over 740,000 eligible voters at the time of the election. While the loss of the city of Kherson in November 2022 could account for a significant source of the population drop that took place between September 2022 and the time of my visit in January 2024, it could not account for all of it.

The Russian population of Kherson in 2022 stood at approximately 20%, or around 200,000. One can safely say that the number of Russians who fled west to Kiev following the start of the military operation amounts to a negligible figure. If one assumes that the Russian population of the Kherson Region remained relatively stable, then most of the population decline came from the Ukrainian population.

While Saldo did not admit to such, the Governor of the neighboring Zaporozhya Region, Yevgeny Balitsky, has acknowledged that many Ukrainian families deemed by the authorities to be anti-Russian were deported following the initiation of the military operation (Russians accounted for a little more than 25% of the pre-conflict Zaporozhye population.) Many others fled to Russia to escape the deprivations of war.

Evidence of the war was everywhere to be seen. While the conflict in Kherson has stabilized along a line defined by the Dnieper River, Zaporozhye is very much a frontline region. Indeed, the main direction of attack of the summer 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was from the Zaporozhye region village of Rabotino, toward the town of Tokmak, and on towards the temporary regional capital of Melitopol (the city of Zaporozhye has remained under Ukrainian control throughout the conflict to date.)

I had petitioned to visit the frontlines near Rabotino but had been denied by the Russian Ministry of Defense. So, too, was my request to visit units deployed in the vicinity of Tokmak – too close to the front. The closest I would get would be the city of Melitopol, the ultimate objective of the Ukrainian counterattack. We drove past fields filled with the concrete “dragon’s teeth” and antitank ditches that marked the final layer of defenses that constituted the “Surovikin Line,” named after the Russian General, Sergey Surovikin, who had commanded the forces when the defenses were put in place.

The Ukrainians had hoped to reach the city of Melitopol in a matter of days once their attack began; they never breached the first line of defense situated to the southeast of Rabotino.

Melitopol, however, is not immune to the horrors of war, with Ukrainian artillery and rockets targeting it often to disrupt Russian military logistics. I kept this in mind as we drove through the streets of the city, past military checkpoints, and roving patrols. I was struck by the fact that the civilians I saw were going about their business, seemingly oblivious to the everyday reality of war that existed around them.

As was the case in Kherson, the entirety of the Zaporozhye Region seemed strangely depopulated, as if one were driving through the French capital of Paris in August, when half the city is away on vacation. I had hoped to be able to talk with Balitsky about the reduced population and other questions I had about life in the region during wartime, but this time Aleksandr’s phone could not produce the desired result – Balitsky was away from the region and unavailable.

If he had been available, I would have asked him the same question I had put to Saldo earlier in the day: given that Putin was apparently willing to return the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to Ukraine as part of the peace deal negotiated in March 2022, how does the population of his region feel about being part of Russia today? Are they convinced that Russia is, in fact, there to stay? Do they feel like they are a genuine part of the Novorossiya that Putin speaks about?

Saldo had talked in depth about the transition from being occupied by Russian forces, which lasted until April-May 2022 (about the time that Ukraine backed out of the ceasefire agreement), to being administered by Moscow. “There never was a doubt in my mind, or anyone else’s, that Kherson was historically a part of Russia,” Saldo said, “or that, once Russian troops arrived, that we would forever be Russian again.”

But the declining population, and the admission of forced deportations on the part of Balitsky, suggests that there was a significant part of the population that had, in fact, taken umbrage at such a future.

I would have liked to hear what Balitsky had to say about this question.

Reality, however, doesn’t deal with hypotheticals, and the present reality is that both Kherson and Zaporozhye are today part of the Russian Federation, and that both regions are populated by people who had made the decision to remain there as citizens of Russia. We will never know what the fate of these two territories would have been had the Ukrainian government honored the ceasefire agreement negotiated in March 2022. What we do know is that today both Kherson and Zaporozhye are part of the “New Territories” – Novorossiya.

Russia will for some time find its acquisition of the “new territories” challenged by nations who question the legitimacy of Russia’s military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the Russian Federation. The reticence of foreigners to recognize these regions as being part of Russia, however, is the least of Russia’s problems. As was the case with Crimea, the Russian government will proceed irrespective of any international opposition.

The real challenge facing Russia is to convince Russians that the new territories are as integral to the Russian motherland as Crimea, a region reabsorbed by Russia in 2014 which has seen its economic fortunes and its population grow over the past decade. The diminished demographics of Kherson and Zaporozhye represent a litmus test of sorts for the Russian government, and for the governments of both Kherson and Zaporozhye. If the populations of these regions cannot regenerate, then these regions will wither on the vine. If, however, these new Russian lands can be transformed into places where Russians can envision themselves raising families in an environment free from want and fear, then Novorossiya will flourish.

Novorossiya is a reality, and the people who live there are citizens by choice more than circumstances. They are well served by men like Saldo and Balitsky, who are dedicated to the giant task of making these regions part of the Russian Motherland in actuality, not just in name.

Behind Saldo and Balitsky are men like Panchenko, people who left an easy life in Moscow or some other Russian city to come to the “New Territories” not for the purpose of seeking their fortunes, but rather to improve the lives of the new Russian citizens of Novorossiya.

For this to happen, Russia must emerge victorious in its struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists ensconced in Kiev, and their Western allies. Thanks to the sacrifices of the Russian military, this victory is in the process of being accomplished.

Then the real test begins – turning Novorossiya into a place Russians will want to call home.

Tony Kevin: Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview with Izvestia MIC (March 28, 2024)

By Tony Kevin, Facebook, 3/31/24

https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1941530/

Key talking points:

• The West tries hard to convince everyone that ISIS is behind [the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack] & there is apparently no point in suspecting anyone else, above all… Ukraine. They mention that country directly & regularly to the point of becoming obsessive.

• We will wait for the investigation to complete before drawing final conclusions. The West is suspiciously assertive as it tries to convince us, not only publicly but also in their contacts with our diplomatic missions, that we should not suspect Ukraine, without explaining why.

• The US sent us these signals [regarding talks on strategic stability]. We explained that it was impossible to talk about strategic stability in a situation when we were declared a strategic enemy that needed to be “strategically defeated.”

• The irreparable confidence of the US in its own righteousness, omnipotence and impunity has led to the fact that the US foreign policy is now led by people who do not know how to do diplomacy.

• You know that European ambassadors have refused to attend a meeting with me. We have notified them that, from now on, we will consider every request for meetings with Russian authorities at all levels, on a case-by-case basis to decide if we want to hold such meetings or not.

• Globalisation, which the Americans forced on everyone based on their own terms, has shown that nobody can set it hopes or rely on the US. It can weaponize the dollar, terminate contracts regardless of the presumption of innocence and the inviolability of property.

• If [the West] comes to its senses & sees that it is no longer possible to act as the neo-colonial power, & that there are new centres of power it must respect, it will be able to join these processes [of regionalisation of global development and revival of the global process] on the basis of equality, respect for each other and a balance of interests.

Prof. Andrei P. Tsygankov: Russia and Its Four Wests

By Prof. Andrei P. Tsygankov, E-International Relations, 3/9/24

Andrei P. Tsygankov is Professor of International Relations at San Francisco State University. His is the author of (among other works) Russia’s Foreign Policy (Rowman and Littlefield 2022, 6th ed.), Russian Realism: Defending ‘Derzhava’ in International Relations (Routledge 2022) and The “Russian Idea” in International Relations Civilization and National Distinctiveness (Routledge 2023). He teaches Russian/post-Soviet relations, comparative foreign policy, and IR theory. He is a graduate of Moscow State University (Candidate of Sciences, 1991) and the University of Southern California (Ph.D., 2000).

Since the 16th century, many Russians associated change with the rising and increasingly global civilization of the West. At the same time, they have sought to build upon Russia’s own identity and power. The common dilemma of how to borrow from the advanced West while remaining ‘Russia’ has been at the center of Russian political debates for centuries. In the 19th century, the dynamic group of Russian thinkers with Western leanings, known as Westernizers, proposed to resolve this dilemma. They aspired to do so with Russia in their heart, yet primarily on Western ideological and value terms. Russian Westernizers then and now include those viewing Russia’s values as inferior to the West and advocating the country’s integration with Western institutions. While differing in definitions of the West, Westernizers invariably support Russia-Western partnership based on shared values. They tend to view history in progressive terms and believe in a linear, rather than pluralistic, interpretation of human development. Because of their association with the mighty Western civilization, Russian Westernizers have a considerable influence at home whenever the Russian state decides to improve relations with the West.

In my forthcoming book on Russian Westernizers, I identify four broad schools of Russian Westernizers with radical and conservative leanings. I also analyze conditions of their relative influence and marginalization. Finally, I discuss contemporary challenges for Westernizers and the prospects of their development.

Russian Westernizers

Intellectually, Westernizers fall into four distinct groups – Christian Westernizers, economic liberals, political liberals or advocates of the Western-style political system of individual rights, and supporters of the social state. To a considerable degree, their differences are defined by varying images of the West. Christian Westernizers stress the unity of Russia and the West’s religious roots and argue for restoring such harmony. From their perspective, the historical split between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity should not stand in the way of such unity.

The second group of Westernizers includes admirers of the West’s dynamism in economic development, commercial and technological successes, and financial institutions. Russian economic liberals tend to associate the achievements of Western civilization with the institutions of private property and free market competition rather than geography, scientific discoveries, or any other advantages. This group rose to prominence in the second half of the 19th century when Russia embarked on the path of capitalist development. The views of Russian economic liberals reflected the country’s growing trade ties with European nations. Russia successfully exported grains to Britain and France, while the British-French capital was increasingly present on the Russian exchange market.

The third group favored the development of political freedoms and constitutional legitimacy in Russia. The group became active in the first half of the 19th century under the influence of the Western nations’ transition from absolutist rule to popular sovereignty and defense of individual rights.

Finally, in the second half of the 19th century, Russia followed the West in becoming increasingly industrialized. As a result, Russian Westernizers grew critical of the state’s lack of attention to the economic and social rights of the lower classes. Many Russian Westernizers became socialist, rather than liberal, in their orientation. Even those who were not socially radical became sensitive to what the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyev defined as “the right to a decent human existence” (dostoinoye suchshestvovaniye).

In addition to different definitions of Western values, Russian Westernizers diverge in perceiving Russia’s goals and methods of their achievement. While viewing integration with the West as the ultimate objective, they disagree on how far Russia should go to accomplish the objective. Radical Westernizers assess the country’s rapid integration with the West as the most practical and perhaps the only way to bring Russia in line with the West. In the view of conservative or moderate Westernizers, the transition toward the West must be based on sufficiently broad support inside the country rather than imposed from the above. For these reasons, Russia’s overall objective cannot be a complete integration with the West but rather a strategic partnership with Western nations based on broadly shared values.

The difference between radical and moderate Westernizers was on display during Russia’s late Soviet and post-Soviet transformation. While radicals supported Boris Yeltsin’s policies of rapid Westernization, moderates or conservatives cautioned against doing so at the expense of established social values and national interests. Radical and moderate trends competed within the pro-Yeltsin party, Democratic Russia. Another liberal party, Yabloko, advocated a gradual transition and development of foreign relations with both Western and non-Western countries. Yabloko-affiliated intellectuals supported pro-Western reforms at home while insisting on Russia’s special interests in protecting national security interests in Eurasia, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Conditions of Rise and Fall

Both Russia and the West are responsible for the success and failure of Russia’s Westernization. The first condition is the West’s relative openness to and demonstration of recognition of Russia. Such recognition can come in different forms. It can include rhetorical support for Russian reforms and reformers. It can also include financial assistance and the development of joint projects in political, economic, and cultural areas. Russian Westernizers depend on such recognition by the West in rallying domestic support for reforms. They are not likely to be successful if, instead of recognition, the West criticizes Russia’s actions or policies that aim to isolate Russia from international and Western markets.

The second critical condition of Russia’s Westernization is the relative openness of Russian society and its political leaders. Russia’s cultural differences have often prevented its leaders from implementing pro-Western reforms. However, other leaders have done so, sometimes taking personal risks to introduce reforms and having to resign because of their commitment to Westernizing Russia.

For the success of the Russia-West rapprochement, both sides must be sufficiently open to initiate and sustain it. This is difficult because the two sides are culturally different and have historically disagreed on various issues. At times, their disagreements were even constitutive of their national self-definition: Russia’s values were defined in terms of their difference from and superiority to those of the West, and vice-versa. In addition to cultural differences, the contemporary interests of Russia and Western nations diverge. The two sides cannot forge a partnership because they have different geopolitical priorities and stakes in the international system.

Challenges and Prospects

Therefore, Russian Westernizers could only be successful if they had sufficient support at home and in the West. Both conditions are missing in today’s Russia. Russia’s war in Ukraine and confrontation with Western nations have encouraged the rallying around the flag effect rather than liberal reforms at home. Western leaders did not hide their goals to degrade Russia’s power, rather than merely support Ukraine’s territorial integrity. They did little to facilitate negotiations and cease-fire. Furthermore, plagued by domestic instability and polarization, the West has also relied on presenting others, including Russia, as threatening its values. As a result, Russian Westernizers have remained weakened and marginalized.

Today, when the West’s global standing is declining relative to those of rising non-Western powers, the ability of Russian Westernizers to influence national discussions will still be more limited. The global transition from the West-centered world to a pluralist international system will make the demand for defining and developing national values and interests all the more pressing. In the best scenario, this predicament may prompt Russian Westernizers to move away from their radicalism, becoming more sensitive to national realities and more critical of the West’s international priorities.

In terms of IR theory, this suggests the need for Westernizers to learn from other intellectual traditions in Russia. Today, pro-Western policies and theories are even less able to serve as a guide to Russia than they have in the past. The post-conflict Russia is unlikely to become a pro-Western Russia. Advocating for improving relations with Europe and the United States following the end of the war in Ukraine may have an appeal in Russia if such relations enhance, not undermine, Russia’s national interests. In the post-Western world, the country’s main priorities include the survival and the reframing of historically built national values, political sovereignty, and strengthening relations with the global South.

Lex Fridman Interviews John Mearsheimer on Russia-Ukraine, NATO, China, Israel-Palestine and WWIII

Excellent interview from start to finish.

YouTube link here.

Gordon Hahn: UKRAINIAN WAR PEACE TALKS: To Be or Not To Be?

By Gordon Hahn, Russian and Eurasian Politics, 4/2/24

Despite Western media reports over recent months and weeks regarding supposed secret talks between Westerners and Russians to settle or at least stop the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, there are no such talks ongoing. But this does not mean that they cannot emerge.

First we heard of supposedly secret talks between Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff Chief Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy and Russian General Staff Chief Gen. Valerii Gerasimov. Then there were Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged ‘signals’ indicating that he seeks negotiations. In reality, there are no peace talks underway between Russia, on the one hand, and the West and/or Ukraine, on the other hand. There are no signals that Putin is seeking negotiations. Although he is willing to hold talks, he expects that any negotiations be requested first by the West and/or Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy. The New York Times piece about ‘Putin’s signals’ published just before Christmas was nothing more than another attempt to portray Russia and Putin as ‘losing the war’ and desperate for an exit ramp, and it was nothing less than a contribution in support of US President Joseph Biden’s desperate re-election prospects as the American presidential campaign is about to kickoff.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the tale of Russian desperation told since the war began. This is most evident now for anyone following the recent course of events on the front; a front that is collapsing on the Ukrainian side. In Zelenskiy’s eternal PR mode, the Ukrainian front’s collapse will be framed as an orderly retreat to new defense lines and part of a new defensive strategy replacing the offensive one that so ignominiously failed with this summer’s predictably disastrous counteroffensive. Nevertheless, the hard, cold realities of the summer campaign’s defeat following the fall of the strategic hub of Bakhmut (Artyomevsk) and preceding the fall of the heavily fortified town of Avdiivka (Avdeevka) are trumping Zelenskiy’s simulated reality productions both in the West and Ukraine ever so gradually. 

As Russian forces slowly but but surely advance westward across the entire front ranging from Zaporozhe (and perhaps soon Kherson) to Kharkov — an advance that is likely to accelerate in spring and summer, the Kremlin has no burning need to negotiate. To be sure, Moscow would prefer ending the war, but on its own terms. The longer Washington, Brussels, and Kiev refuse negotiations, the more fluid the situation becomes and the less likely Moscow will be easy to negotiate with before its forces reach the Dnieper River. Some Russian officials are trumpeting a hard line. For example, a month ago Russian ambassador to the UN Dmitri Polyanskiy said that Kiev’s chance for talks had passed and now only capitulation talks are possible (https://t.me/RusskajaIdea/5265 and https://t.me/Slavyangrad/79622).

But Putin appears open to talks. However, he certainly is not desperate for them and may prefer holding off until more Ukrainian military force and territory is attritted. He has indicated numerous times since the war began that he is open to talks. In a speech to the Defense Ministry Collegium last December, Putin summed up the course of the war in 2023 by saying: “This is what everyone should understand: in Ukraine, those in Europe and the USA who are aggressive towards Russia in Ukraine, if they want to negotiate, let them negotiate. But we will do this based only on our interests” (http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73035). He repeated this for Americans in his interview with Tucker Carlson and for Russians in his most recent interview with Dmitrii Kisilev.

The lack of talks is best explained by the West’s and Ukraine’s unwillingness to negotiate. In fact, since December 2022 Ukrainian law forbids Ukrainians from conducting peace talks with Putin’s Russia. The U.S. has apparently held to its proclaimed policy of ‘no talks about Ukraine without Ukraine’ at least in terms of any peace negotiations, though the US’s CIA chief, William Burns, and his Russian counterpart, SVR chief Sergei Narynskii met a few months back for discussions on undisclosed issues. Therefore, Zelenskiy consistently rejects talks until such time as Russia has withdrawn all of its troops beyond Ukraine’s 1991 borders—the core of his supposed ‘peace plan.’ Obviously, without defeat on the battlefield Russia will not give up Crimea and the four oblasts it now considers to be its sovereign territory. Recently, Zelenskiy rejected negotiations out of hand. Several weeks ago, visiting Turkey, Zelenskiy spurned Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan’s entreaties to start talks with Moscow under Ankara’s mediation. Earlier, Zelenskiy made an unclear statement that talks with Russia were not urgent at this time. He also noted that Ukraine and the West still are working of a “peace formula” that will be handed to Russia as soon as it is ready. If Russia accepts it, then “the issue of negotiations will be relevant,” but the fact that Putin states his goals — neutralization (no NATO membership), demilitarization, and denazification of Ukraine – still hold means he is against talks, stated Zelenskiy (https://strana.news/news/453348-perehovory-ukrainy-s-rossiej-sejchas-ne-aktualny-zelenskij.html and https://t.me/stranaua/133310).

But the above does not necessarily mean that talks may not be in the offing this year or early next year. By then Russian troops will likely have attained the Dnieper River at several points and may even be storming eastern Kiev on the Left Bank. That would be a good time, a logical time for Putin to offer what would then be outright desperate Western capitols and Kiev to begin talks. For Moscow, this stage would also be pivotal. The arrival of Russian troops at, even all along the entire Dnieper, would pose the question of advancing farther in order to force the West and Kiev to negotiate. Russian forces would face the logistical challenge of crossing the Dnieper, which could be mitigated by 1-200,000 Russian and Belarusian troops invading western Ukraine through its northern border with Belarus, and then waging a costly and more escalation-threatening next phase of the ground-air war by moving into more hostile western Ukrainian territory and towards the border with NATO. Russia would be taking on greater costs and risks, while at the same time eliminating the very buffer zone it has been pursuing before and after the February 2022 invasion by way of establishing a neutral Ukraine.

Needless to say, obviously Putin will not accept any obstinacy from the West or Ukraine, as they are at present losing and appear condemned to lose the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, unless NATO intervenes to prolong the war and/or Putin suffers health problems, sparking a political crisis or shift in Moscow perhaps. The Russians will make tough, perhaps near capitulationist terms but leave some room for actual horse-trading. There would be some limited magnanimity — as was demonstrated by Moscow in the March-April 2022 talks — as Russians do see Ukrainians as a ‘fraternal people’, given their overlapping history, languages, and cultures. But Russia will insist on and likely be able to dictate its core terms: Ukrainian neutrality, “demilitarization” (a small Ukrainian army restricted in its deployment to areas far from the new Russian border), and “denazification” (some limit or bans on political activity by ultranationalists and neofascists). Protections of ethnic Russians’ political, linguistic, and cultural rights or autonomy will also be required by Moscow. A starting position here may also include such protections for Ukraine’s beleaguered Hungarian and Romanian minorities. Ukraine’s political and economic autonomy will not be blocked by Moscow, including possible EU membership. NATO membership is red line for Putin, and any Western or Ukrainian insistence on preserving Kiev’s right to that will scuttle any and all talks with Moscow. Period.

Russia would likely agree to security guarantees for Ukraine as its central compromise with the defeated party. Details that would be acceptable would be those in discussion back in March 2022 under the Istanbul process before the West scuttled them by refusing to back guarantees, convincing Zelenskiy to continue the war. This included dual guarantees from Russia and Western parties and an unclear “international mechanism” perhaps beyond that of a mere treaty (https://strana.news/news/383394-vtorzhenie-rf-dmitrij-medvedev-vyskazalsja-o-harantijakh-bezopasnosti-ukrainy.html). Now, however, 71% percent of the European public wants an immediate end to the conflict (https://szazadveg.hu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Sovereignty-Conference-Presentation-Results-of-the-Project-Europe-Research-Aron-Hidvegi.pdf).

A key decision for Moscow in deciding whether or not to negotiate will be whether or not, by not crossing the Dniester, to forego seizing Odessa, western Kiev, and a ‘land bridge’ to the pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova, Transnistria. Taking them would be costly and, again, risky but has its advantages, so any recalcitrance on the West’s and/or Kiev’s part to talk in good faith could lead Putin to opt to cross the Dniester. Regarding Odessa, the city is a Russian-made city, founded by Catherine the Great, and is a lucrative port. On the other hand, leaving the port as part of Ukraine would make the rump Ukrainian state more viable, and Moscow would prefer not having a dysfunctional state on its border. Such a state would be a shaky buffer. Kiev for centuries was part of Russia for centuries and so was called by Russians ‘the mother of all Russian cities.’ It was the seat of one of the first Russian kingdoms — Kievan Rus’ — and incorporated or had close ties with all the others. It was the birthplace of the Russian Orthodoxy and the Russian Orthodox Church. It was removed from Russian sovereignty by what most in the West and many in today’s Russia consider a illegal, criminal regime: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Incidentally, Ukraine’s 1991 territory is a conglomeration was cobbled together by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Taking either Kiev or Odessa (as so Kharkov) would be more costly in Russian lives and equipment to take than Mariupol, Bakhmut (Artyomovsk), or Avdiivka (Avdeevka), and they are not majority pro-Russian regions, meaning they would be more difficult to control and integrate into Russia. Finally, in the event of any Western machinations, particularly if the Ukrainian peace treaty fails to hold, Transnistria would be a new focal point in Russo-Western conflict. Russia’s dearth of trust in the West makes being in a position to protect Moldova’s Russian- and Ukrainian-populated breakaway republic.

In sum, the prospects for negotiations occurring, no less bringing a lasting peace are on the decline as Russian forces continue moving west. The configuration of the conflict is becoming exceedingly complex across multiple levels. A watershed moment will be the Russian army’s arrival at the Dnieper in strength and breadth. Moscow will have a complex decision to make, and the willingness of the West and Kiev to propose talks will be weighty in determining that decision. A decision to cross the Dniester and move into western Ukraine is fraught with danger for all, but Moscow’s ‘partners’ may leave Putin with little to no choice. NATO and Kiev also will have their moment of decision: whether to propose negotiations or abandon ‘escalation management’ and send in NATO troops in collective or individual guise on the Macron model. Will it choose to In lieu of a peace agreement, Russian troops’ forcing the Dnieper will increase the likelihood of open NATO involvement in the war and present Moscow with the daunting task of having to put down a hostile population capable of forming a partisan insurgency; one that would certainly be funded, armed, and equipped by the West. The latter would keep the threat of an all-out, full-scale NATO-Russia war alive, threatening not just Ukraine’s future but that of the world.

Kit Klarenberg: FAILED ICJ CASE AGAINST RUSSIA BACKFIRES, PAVES WAY FOR GENOCIDE CHARGES AGAINST UKRAINE

By Kit Klarenberg, Mint Press News, 3/13/24

As January became February, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a pair of legal body blows to Ukraine and its Western backers. First, on January 31, it ruled on a case brought by Kiev against Russia in 2017, which accused Moscow of presiding over a campaign of “terrorism” in Donbas, including the July 2014 downing of MH17. It also charged that Russia racially discriminated against Ukrainian and Tatar residents of Crimea following its reunification with Moscow.

The ICJ summarily rejected most charges. Then, on February 2, the Court made a preliminary judgment in a case where Kiev accused Moscow of exploiting false claims of an ongoing genocide of Russians and Russian speakers in Donbas to justify its invasion. Ukraine further charged the Special Military Operation breached the Genocide Convention despite not itself constituting genocide. Almost unanimously, ICJ judges rejected these arguments.

Western media universally ignored or distorted the substance of the ICJ rulings. When outlets did acknowledge the judgments, they misrepresented the first by focusing prominently on the accepted charges while downplaying all dismissed allegations. The second was wildly spun as a significant loss for Moscow. The BBC and others focused on how the Court agreed that “part” of Ukraine’s case could proceed. That this “part” is the question of whether Kiev itself committed genocide in Donbas post-2014 was unmentioned.

Ukraine’s failed lawfare effort was backed by 47 EU and NATO member states, leading to the farce of 32 separate international legal teams submitting representations to The Hague in September 2023. Among other things, they supported Kiev’s bizarre contention that the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were comparable to Al-Qaeda. Judges comprehensively rejected that assertion. Markedly, in its submitted arguments, Russia drew attention to how the same countries backing Kiev justified their illegal, unilateral destruction of Yugoslavia under the “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

This may not be the only area where Ukraine and its overseas sponsors are in trouble moving forward. A closer inspection of the Court’s rulings comprehensively discredits the established mainstream narrative of what transpired in Crimea and Donbas following the Western-orchestrated Maidan coup in February 2014.

In sum, the judgments raise serious questions about Kiev’s eight-year-long “anti-terrorist operation” against “pro-Russian separatists,” following months of vast protests and violent clashes throughout eastern Ukraine between Russian-speaking pro-federal activists and authorities.

DAMNING FINDING AFTER DAMNING FINDING

In its first judgment, the ICJ ruled the Donbas and Lugansk People’s Republics were not “terrorist” entities, as “[neither] group has previously been characterized as being terrorist in nature by an organ of the United Nations” and could not be branded such simply because Kiev labeled them so. This gravely undermined Ukraine’s allegations of Russia “funding…terrorist groups” in Donbas, let alone committing “terrorist” acts there itself.

Other revelatory findings reinforced this bombshell. The ICJ held that Moscow wasn’t liable for committing or even failing to prevent terrorism, as the Kremlin had no “reasonable grounds to suspect” material provided by Ukraine, including details of “accounts, bank cards and other financial instruments” allegedly used by accused “terrorists” in Donbas, were used for such purposes. Moscow was also ruled to have launched investigations into “alleged offenders” but concluded they “d[id] not exist… or their location could not be identified”.

Nonetheless, the ICJ ruled that Moscow had failed “to investigate allegations of the commission of terrorism financing offenses by alleged offenders present in its territory.” This was due to the Kremlin not providing “additional information” upon Kiev’s request and failing to “specify to Ukraine what further information may have been required.” Ironically, judges conversely condemned Kiev’s allegations of “terrorism” by Russia as “vague and highly generalized,” based on highly dubious evidence and documentation, including – strikingly – Western media reports:

The Court has held that certain materials, such as press articles and extracts from publications, are regarded ‘not as evidence capable of proving facts.’

The ICJ was also highly condemnatory of the quality of witnesses and witness evidence produced by Kiev to support these charges. Judges were particularly scathing of Ukraine’s reliance on testimony supporting a systematic, state-sanctioned “pattern of racial discrimination” discrimination against Ukrainians and Tatars in Crimea since 2014. Statements attesting to this were “collected many years after the relevant events” and “not supported by corroborating documentation”:

The reports relied on by Ukraine are of limited value in confirming that the relevant measures are of a racially discriminatory character…Ukraine has not demonstrated… reasonable grounds to suspect that racial discrimination had taken place, which should have prompted the Russian authorities to investigate.

Elsewhere, Ukraine argued that “legal consequences” for residents of Crimea if they opted to maintain Ukrainian citizenship post-2014 and a “steep decline in the number of students receiving their school education in the Ukrainian language between 2014 and 2016,” amounting to an alleged 80% drop in the first year and a further 50% reduction in 2015, were signifiers of a discriminatory environment for non-Russians in the peninsula.

In support, Kiev submitted witness statements from parents claiming they were “subjected to harassment and manipulative conduct with a view to deterring” their children from receiving “instruction in Ukrainian,” which judges did not accept. By contrast, Moscow provided testimony not only demonstrating that parents made a “genuine” choice “not subject to pressure” to have their children taught in Russian but also “unresponsiveness on the part of parents to some teachers’ active encouragement [emphasis added] to continue having their children receive instruction in Ukrainian.”

The ICJ lent weight to these submissions, noting, “It is undisputed that no such decline has taken place with respect to school education in other languages, including the Crimean Tatar language.” Judges attributed much of the drop in demand for Ukrainian language “school instruction” to “a dominant Russian cultural environment and the departure of thousands of pro-Ukrainian Crimean residents to mainland Ukraine.” Moscow moreover “produced evidence substantiating its attempts at preserving Ukrainian cultural heritage and… explanations for the measures undertaken with respect to that heritage.”

Russia supplied documentation showing that “Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar organizations have been successful in applying to hold events” in the peninsula. In contrast, “multiple events organized by ethnic Russians have been denied.” Evidently, Russian authorities are even-handed towards Crimea’s population – the color of someone’s passport and their mother tongue are immaterial. On the same grounds, judges rejected Kiev’s accusation that “measures taken against Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian media outlets were based on the ethnic origin of the persons affiliated with them.”

Still, the Court contradictorily concluded Russia “violated its obligations of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” as Moscow “[did not demonstrate] that it complied with its duty to protect the rights of ethnic Ukrainians from a disparate adverse effect based on their ethnic origin.”

How US and UK Government Propaganda Specialists Collaborated with Nazis in Ukraine

The prominent role of Banderite Neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s government propaganda operations suggests that Nazi apologism has spread into the core institutions of its government – perhaps more than the dominant Western view is able to admit.

KIEV GOES IN FOR THE KILL

The ICJ has now effectively confirmed that the entire mainstream narrative of what happened in Crimea and Donbas over the previous decade was fraudulent. Some legal scholars have argued Ukraine’s acquittal on charges of genocide to be inevitable. Yet, many statements made by Ukrainian nationalists since Maidan unambiguously indicate such an intent.

Moreover, in June 2020, a British immigration court granted asylum to Ukrainian citizens who fled the country to avoid conscription. They successfully argued that military service in Donbas would necessarily entail perpetrating and being implicated in “acts contrary to the basic rules of human conduct” – in other words, war crimes – against the civilian population.

The Court’s ruling noted the Ukrainian military routinely engaged in “unlawful capture and detention of civilians with no legal or military justification…motivated by the need for ‘currency’ for prisoner exchanges.” It added there was “systemic mistreatment” of detainees during the “anti-terrorist operation” in Donbas. This included “torture and other conduct that is cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.” An “attitude and atmosphere of impunity for those involved in mistreating detainees” was observed.

The judgment also recorded “widespread civilian loss of life and the extensive destruction of residential property” in Donbas, “attributable to poorly targeted and disproportionate attacks carried out by the Ukrainian military.” Water installations, it recorded, “have been a particular and repeated target by Ukrainian armed forces, despite civilian maintenance and transport vehicles being clearly marked…and despite the protected status such installations enjoy” under international law.

All of this could quite reasonably be argued to constitute genocide. Regardless, the British asylum judgment amply underlines who Ukraine was truly fighting all along – its own citizens. Moscow could furthermore reasonably cite recent disclosures from Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande that the 2014-15 Minsk Accords were, in fact, a con, never intended to be implemented, buying Kiev time to bolster its stockpiles of Western weapons, vehicles, and ammunition, as yet further proof of Ukraine’s malign intentions in Donbas.

The Accords did not provide for secession or independence for the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics but for their full autonomy within Ukraine. Russia was named a mediator, not a party, to the conflict. Kiev was to resolve the dispute directly with rebel leaders. These were crucial legal distinctions about which Ukraine and its overseas backers were immensely displeased. They repeatedly attempted over subsequent years to compel Moscow to designate itself formally as a party to the conflict despite Russia’s minimal role in the conflict.

As a 2019 report published by the Soros-funded International Crisis Group (ICG), “Rebels Without A Cause” found, “the conflict in eastern Ukraine started as a grassroots movement… Demonstrations were led by local citizens claiming to represent the region’s Russian-speaking majority.” Moscow only began providing financial and material support to the rebels after Ukraine’s “counter-terror” operation in Donbas started in April 2014. And it was meager at that.

The ICG found that Russia’s position was consistent: the two breakaway republics remain autonomous subjects within Ukraine. This frequently put the Kremlin at significant odds with the rebel leadership, who acted in their own interests and rarely followed orders. The report concluded that Moscow was ultimately “beholden” to the breakaway republics, not vice versa. Rebel fighters wouldn’t put down their arms even if Vladimir Putin personally demanded them to.

Given present-day events, the report’s conclusions are eerie. The ICG declared the situation in Donbas “ought not to be narrowly defined as a matter of Russian occupation” and criticized Kiev’s “tendency to conflate” the Kremlin and the rebels. It expressed hope that newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelensky could “peacefully reunify with the rebel-held territories” and “[engage] the alienated east.”

The 2017 ICJ case explicitly concerned validating allegations of Russia’s direct, active involvement in Donbas. We are left to ponder whether this lawfare effort was intended to secure Kiev’s specious legal grounds for claiming it was invaded in 2014. After all, this could, in turn, have precipitated an all-out Western proxy war in Donbas of the kind that erupted in February 2022.

At the start of that month, French President Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed his commitment to Minsk, claiming he had Zelensky’s personal assurance it would be implemented. However, on February 11, talks between representatives of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine collapsed after nine hours without tangible results. Notably, Kiev rejected demands for “direct dialogue” with the rebels, insisting Moscow formally designate itself a party to the conflict in keeping with its past obstructionist position.

Then, as documented in multiple contemporary eyewitness reports from OSCE observers, mass Ukrainian artillery shelling of Donbas erupted. On February 15, alarmed representatives of the Duma, led by Russia’s influential Communist Party, formally requested that the Kremlin recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Putin initially refused, reiterating his commitment to Minsk. The shelling intensified. A February 19 OSCE report recorded 591 ceasefire violations over the past 24 hours, including 553 explosions in rebel-held areas.

Civilians were harmed in the strikes, and civilian structures, including schools, were apparently targeted directly. Meanwhile, that same day, Donetsk rebels claimed they thwarted two sabotage attacks by Polish-speaking operatives on ammonia and oil reservoirs in their territory. Perhaps not coincidentally, in January 2022, it was revealed that the CIA had been training a secret paramilitary army in Ukraine to carry out precisely such strikes in the event of a Russian invasion since 2015.

So, on February 21, the Kremlin formally accepted the Duma’s plea from a week earlier to recognize Donetsk and Lugansk as independent republics. And now here we are.

Ian Proud: Ukraine’s Economy Will, Ultimately, Lose It the War

by Ian Proud, Antiwar.com, 4/2/24

Ian Proud is a former British diplomat and was the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to 2019. While in Russia, Ian advised UK Ministers on Russia’s political economy, and that of neighbouring former Soviet states, including Ukraine. He recently published his memoir, a Misfit in Moscow: how British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019.

In his recent article on attritional warfare, Alex Vershinin at the Royal United Services Institute remarked that ‘war is won by economies, not armies’. Put another way, the country that can outspend its rival in military endeavour will ultimately prevail. [https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/attritional-art-war-lessons-russian-war-ukraine]

To defeat Russia, Ukraine would need economic resources that it does not have and will not be able to obtain.

It isn’t just that Ukraine’s economy is now more than ten times smaller than Russia’s. The problem runs much deeper. Since the Ukraine crisis started in 2014, Ukraine has ducked opportunities to enact the structural reforms it needs to tackle deep-seated corruption and diversify/strengthen its economy.

Ukraine needed either to set a course towards an economic model that exports and has spare capital to invest, including overseas, or towards an economic model that is comfortable to import and can attract foreign investment to offset the difference. At the moment, Ukraine is neither and it can’t make the cardinal shift while war is raging. Real economic reform in Ukraine has therefore sat in the pending tray for a decade.

Data from the National Bank of Ukraine shows that the country consistently imports more than it exports. Not since 2022. Since 2006, the year after the Orange revolution. While on average, Ukraine’s yearly trading shortfall was $11bn in the ten years before war broke out, that figure almost tripled to $31.6bn in 2022 and 2023. Yes, exports of goods have fallen since war broke out, by 17% and 30% in 2022 and 2023 respectively compared to the average. But, critically, imports of services have also doubled since 2021. Ukraine’s trading surplus in services amounted to $3bn p.a. between 2012 and 2021; since 2022 it has slumped to a deficit of $9.8bn.

Service imports have in large part been driven by the large scale relocation of Ukrainians to other countries. Ukrainian people spending Ukrainian money in other countries counts as an import, just as spending by foreign tourists in London counts as a service export for Britain. For Ukraine, that imbalance won’t be resolved until war ends and its citizens return en masse.

Why does this matter? When a country imports more than it exports, it burns up supplies of foreign currency. If it runs out of foreign currency, then it can’t pay for imports and external debt. Just look at what happened in Sri Lanka in 2022, which ran out of reserves and defaulted for the first time in its history. Functional economies avoid this trap by attracting foreign investment, look at the US and the UK for example, which consistently run deficits but maintain healthy foreign exchange reserves.

Ukraine, however, isn’t a functional economy. Few foreign companies are making productive investments in Ukraine, and this challenge dates back to 2014, and the onset of the Ukraine crisis. Foreign investment into Ukraine’s private sector since then has averaged a paltry $2.2bn p.a. compared to $15.6bn p.a. from 2010 to 2013. That’s mostly because investors generally avoid zones of conflict and war. But it is also partly driven by the power vertical in Ukraine in which a handful of Oligarchs maintain an iron grip on business interests across the country.

The war hasn’t changed and won’t change that fundamentally negative economic picture. Ukraine can’t attract significant foreign capital while at war. And efforts to boost its exports have run into headwinds, particularly in Europe, with EU farmers rebelling against the flood of cheap imports from Ukraine.

So Ukraine needs to depend on a friendly lender of last resort. In the Soviet Union, that would have been Russia. Today, it is western donor nations. Look at Ukraine’s balance of payments and you’d see that it received on average $5bn p.a. in secondary income between 2010 and 2021; largely hand-outs from other governments. In 2022 and 2023 respectively it received massive inflows of $28bn and $24bn, to help stabilise its current account and prevent a collapse in foreign exchange reserves.

More concerning, with Kyiv now spending an astonishing half of its ballooning budget on defence it has been forced to go to the lenders as well, borrowing a staggering $40bn in the two years since 2022, or almost one quarter of its current GDP. That’s a 2000% increase in central government borrowing compared to the average in the ten years prior to war. After much huffing and puffing, Victor Orban reluctantly agreed the EU’s most recent programme of support to Ukraine, amounting to 50bn Euro which runs to 2027. But 33bn Euro of this is loans, equating to another 19.9% of Ukraine’s current GDP.

Today, Ukraine’s gross external debt is already around 90% of GDP. In a downside scenario, the EU has predicted that Ukrainian debt could hit 140% of GDP as early as 2026. If that doesn’t worry you, it should. With war widening Ukraine’s current account deficit, western nations will need to provide ever greater amounts of macro-financial assistance just to prop up the country’s reserves. Because if Ukraine ran out of reserves and had to devalue the Hryvnia, then it would simply not be able to service its debt and would go into economic meltdown, requiring even greater western assistance.

Across the line of contact, much boiler plate analysis is churned out daily about Russia’s putative economic woes, but what does the data from Russia’s Central Bank tell us? Despite the structural challenges it faces, and notwithstanding the legally questionable freezing of $300bn (or around half) of its foreign exchange reserves, Russia is anything but short of liquidity.

With western journalists blowing a collective raspberry at the rouble’s collapse after war broke out, Russia nevertheless brought in a staggeringly large current account surplus of £238bn in 2022. That’s more than Ukraine’s pre-war yearly economic output, and over two times the value of western financial and military assistance to Ukraine in 2022. It is almost four times larger than Russia’s average current account surplus in the ten preceding years. Russia’s current account surplus stabilised to $50bn in 2023, which is consistent with the long-term trend, and from the first two months of data, may come in slightly higher in 2024.

The Russian economy is trimmed to export and reinvest earnings. The country hasn’t run a yearly current account deficit since 1998, the year it defaulted. Largely because of this, Russia has very low external debt, at less than 20% of GDP. Russia’s military spending could rise to 10% of GDP this year, with defence spending comfortably outstripping Ukraine’s by three times. It doesn’t need to borrow significantly and has enough liquidity left in the tank to fund huge social programmes, which mean consumer spending in the economy remains strong.

Russia’s current economic model brings downside risks in terms of the country’s inability to diversify into new, more value-adding sectors of industry. These risks have been acknowledged by Putin but are too long-term to affect decision making on Ukraine. For now, Russia holds a significantly better economic hand in prosecuting an attritional war.

No credible western military analyst now predicts a complete victory by Ukraine in this war that would push Russia back to its pre-war (let alone pre-2014) lines. But, in any case, it is clear that victory hinges on the balance sheet, more than on the battlefield. Ukraine will never have the economic resources it needs to out gun Russia. So, setting aside issues of weapons’ supplies to Ukraine and, indeed, who will pay the reconstruction bill when war ends, how long are western powers prepared to keep plying Ukraine with more debt as it prosecutes an unwinnable war?

The economic policy no-mans-land that Ukraine has chosen to occupy didn’t start in 2022, but rather in 2014, when the Ukraine crisis began. We were told that Ukraine wanted to make a ‘European choice’ and cast off the rusted-over shackles of Soviet era mismanagement. It is therefore an irony that western assistance has not prompted a genuine and meaningful effort at reform in Ukraine that would speed the process towards eventual EU membership. Rather, it has created and will continue to solidify a state of truculent dependence which weakens Ukraine economically and leaves it as ungrateful for western support as it was for Russian.

Ukraine could still make its European choice. But first that would require painful political choices. A choice to end the war through negotiations and a choice, for the first time, to face down vested interests and undertake meaningful reform in Ukraine. It’s far from clear to me that Zelensky has the power to make either choice. For now, and to paraphrase from the movie Top Gun, I fear Zelensky’s ego is writing cheques his country can’t cash.

Moss Robeson: Bandera Lobby Blob Summit (Excerpt)

By Moss Robeson, Website, 3/6/24

Introduction: The ‘Bandera Lobbyists’

This year’s “US-Ukraine Security Dialogue” took place at an event space located one block from the White House. The annual conference is organized by the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations (CUSUR), an OUN-B front group established in 2000. According to the program, the executive coordinator of the event was Christine Balko. She is probably still the director of the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Statehood Front” in the United States.

The “Front” is a coalition of OUN-B “facade structures,” some of which include Balko in the leadership. For example, Christine Balko is the treasurer of the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU) and the secretary of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, which according to contemporary OUN-B documents is the financial arm of the Banderite “Land Leadership of America.”

The administrative coordinator of the event was Mykola Hryckowian, who is the Washington bureau chief of CUSUR and the president of ODFFU. He attained the presidency in a pyrrhic coup d’etat in 2019. The technical coordinator was Andrij Dobriansky, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which the “Front” has dominated since another damaging coup in 1980. The program coordinator was Walter Zaryckyj, the executive director of CUSUR and the president of the Ukrainian American Freedom Foundation, who has allegedly been replaced as the chairman of the OUN-B’s “Land Leadership of America.”

As always, the neoconservative American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) was the main sponsor of the “security dialogue.” The steering committee for this year’s event consisted of three AFPC leaders, at least four OUN-B members, and three Banderite proxies from the corrupt Ukrainian Congress Committee. The small list of patrons included two additions featured in the latest post of the “Bandera Lobby Blog” — the Vovk Foundation and Civil Military Innovation Institute, based in Morgantown, West Virginia. The Banderite brothers behind this new support for CUSUR have also tried to reactivate the ODFFU in nearby Pittsburgh, and one of them (a subscriber of this newsletter) said that I should be hearing from their attorney.

The illegitimate ODFFU president, Hryckowian from eastern Pennsylvania, accompanied an AFPC delegation that traveled to Ukraine in late January. Ostap Kryvdyk, a friend of the “Bandera Lobby” in Kyiv, arranged their itinerary, which included meetings with the leadership of the ministry of defense (on the eve of Zelensky firing Zaluzhny), the deputy chair of Ukrainian parliament Olena Kondratiuk, deputy minister of foreign affairs Iryna Borovets, deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration Olha Stefanishyna, and other officials.

AFPC’s president Herman Pirchner and director of external relations Annie Swingen joined the trip to Ukraine and the steering committee of this CUSUR event, which concluded with a reception at the AFPC headquarters in Washington. The front room has a framed picture of the think tank’s leadership with far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy, who led a neo-Nazi paramilitary organization in the 1990s. When Parubiy played the role of statesman in Ukraine (2014-19), his foreign policy advisor, Ostap Kryvdyk, organized his trips to DC with the Banderite “Statehood Front.”

February 29, 2024: ‘US-Ukraine Security Dialogue’

The livestream started a little late, after Walter Zaryckyj delivered his opening remarks, in which he typically marvels at hosting an event with such distinguished speakers. (He privately boasts of his powerful contacts, for example, “fucking generals.”) In this case, the first speaker, Kyle Parker of the Helsinki Commission that advises Congress, was recently tarnished by a report in the New York Times: “A senior Capitol Hill staff member who is a longtime voice on Russia policy is under congressional investigation over his frequent trips to Ukraine’s war zones and providing what he said was $30,000 in sniper gear to its military.” He spoke at a CUSUR conference in 2022, and served on the steering committee of five of these events by 2005 (usually with Steve Bandera, the Canadian grandson of the infamous OUN-B leader). The livestream started just in time to hear Parker channel the Banderite spirit world: “Helping Ukraine defeat a neo-Stalinist Russia should be seen as unfinished business from the Second World War.”

The first panel discussion was moderated by retired diplomat William B. Taylor, a vice president of the Orwellian-named U.S. Institute of Peace, which is supposedly “an American federal institution tasked with promoting conflict resolution and prevention worldwide.” It was three years ago, shortly after Joe Biden took office, that Taylor and his colleagues from the influential Atlantic Council addressed CUSUR’s “security dialogue” on the eve of publishing a militarist policy paper, Biden and Ukraine: A strategy for the new administration. Taylor reported that they already met with “members of the Biden administration team that’s focused on Ukraine,” and asked the White House to sharply increase military aid for Kyiv to half a billion dollars per year.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the United States has committed tens of billions of dollars in “security assistance,” the vast majority of which is going to the U.S. arms industry that bankrolls think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the Center for European Policy Analysis. The latter employed retired U.S. general Ben Hodges, who commanded the army in Europe from 2014-18. His commentary about World War II — “it was actually millions of Ukrainians, not millions of Russians, that died” — was a highlight of the 2021 “security dialogue.” This year during the first panel discussion, Hodges downplayed the significance of Ukraine losing Avdiivka, but acknowledged his reputation as a “cheerleader.” After the session ended, he returned to his front row seat adjacent to OUN-B member Christine Balko.

Luke Coffey oversaw foreign policy at the far-right Heritage Foundation from 2015 until 2022, when he made the move to the neoconservative Hudson Institute. During the first panel discussion, he said that the U.S. needs to prepare for a long war in Ukraine. “I hear this all the time in Washington about ‘forever wars’ and ‘endless wars,’ I absolutely hate this. I hate these terms,” Coffey said. “Americans are not tired of forever wars. I think this has been a made up, inside the Beltway argument.”

Almost three hours later, Kurt Volker insisted that “we need to have our own people embedded in Ukrainian fighting forces.” Formerly the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine (2017-19), a vocal opponent of the Minsk peace process, and lobbyist for Raytheon, which produces Javelin missiles, Volker turned his head toward his fellow panelist, a Banderite defense contractor, and lamented “the fact that we prohibit uniformed personnel from being present in Ukraine alongside the Ukrainians means that we are not learning, and getting real time feedback, and knowing what we actually ought to be doing.”

During the next Q&A period, Col. Vince Mucker, sitting behind Ben Hodges and Christine Balko, introduced himself as the next U.S. military attaché in Kyiv. Philip Breedlove, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe, stressed to Mucker that “a big part of solving the conundrum … is completely about policy, when we get a policy that allows us to shoot the archer [in Russia] … we can put dumb 2000 pound GPS bombs on these sites.”

Volker, the moderator of this panel, chimed in, “I would add to that [analogy], not only shoot the archer, but shoot the arrow factory.” With Breedlove nodding along, Volker chuckled and continued, “or maybe you don’t have to shoot it, maybe you can go right up to it and blow it up, with a little help from some friends in the Middle East.” He laughed again but got serious. “So I think that’s something, frankly, we should be talking with Israel about.”

A few minutes later, Volker said to Mucker in the audience, “as you take up your new duties, I hope you’re able to make a persuasive case about how some active duty [U.S.] personnel embedded in Ukrainian forces as observers—not participants, but observers—would actually help us give much better advice and much better equipment.” After the lunch break, the deputy chief of mission at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington predicted that “American soldiers will have to be engaged, sooner or later.”

The second half of the all-day event inadvertently dedicated about thirty minutes to the scenario that Ukraine collapses, and the West is faced with the question of supporting a nationalist insurgency. The main speaker, Paul Goble, is the Jamestown Foundation’s “specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia.” His apocalyptic obsession with breaking up Russia rivals any Banderite. According to Jamestown, “he served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.”

Goble absurdly claimed that “even Stalin couldn’t defeat the UPA,” referring to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the extremist paramilitary wing of OUN-B that butchered Poles and Jews under Nazi occupation before resisting Soviet control of western Ukraine with death squad brutality. Goble argued that “talking about these things is terribly important,” to let Moscow know that Russia cannot occupy Ukraine. Almost ten minutes later, he said, “I think the most important thing we can do is to encourage the Ukrainians to recover their own tradition” (of Banderite insurgency)….

John Helmer: HOW THE ELECTRIC WAR IS REDRAWING THE UKRAINE MAP – IN BLACK (excerpt)

By John Helmer, Website, 4/1/24

The electric war, which in its first phase commenced in September [3] 2022, has now entered its second and final phase – final, that is, for the Ukraine.

This is strategic; war has never been fought like this in Europe. The US and NATO general staffs and politicians have been taken by complete surprise. “The Ukrainians are building Maginot and Siegfried lines according to the instructions of their foreign advisers,” according to a Moscow analyst, “as if the Russian offensive will be men, artillery and tanks running across the landscape towards Kiev. But they won’t have to. The offensive against Ukrainian electricity cannot be stopped at these lines.”

Without effective defence for its power generating plants, distribution hubs, and grid lines, the Kiev regime’s power is being stopped across the country; the major Novorussian cities in the east – Odessa, Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk – are being blacked out and their populations forced to evacuate; the warmaking resupplies of the NATO allies are being cut off at borders which are now exposed to reversal of electricity surges threatening the plants and grids of southern Poland, Romania and Moldova. Even European and American money for President Vladimir Zelensky’s regime needs electricity to move. 

“The Russian General Staff is thinking electrically,” comments a NATO veteran and expert in applying electrical engineering to war. “The way the strikes are unfolding causes the Ukrainians to perform at lot of switching. Anyone who knows anything about high-voltage switching understands that the more it’s done, the greater the likelihood there is of some kind of fault occurring, including surges or transients [4], occurring. So, leaving enough power on today so the Ukrainians can throw switches tomorrow may be part of the plan.”

“Even if the French/NATO plan a deployment in the Ukraine, what will they be deploying to?” the military engineer adds. “If the current Russian plan of attack is causing swings of 300+ volts, it’s not even safe to plug in a cell phone. We can safely assume that all manner of appliances and other expensive electrical or electronic equipment has been destroyed in the affected areas. Indeed, even if the power engineers manage to get the power back on, millions of light fixtures, especially the electronic/LED variety, are burned out. Diagnostic equipment (medical and technical), process instruments, programmable logic controllers, power supplies, inverters, frequency drives, bank machines, computerized checkout, refrigeration equipment, are burned up”

“Who knows what’s happening there. It must be chaos, and if it isn’t, it will be soon.”

The Russian General Staff doesn’t telegraph its punches. The daily Ministry of Defense operations briefing – blocked for many US and allied audiences – concentrates on the five combat groups, Western, Southern, Eastern, Centre, and Dniepr;  and their operational directions along the Donbass line of contact; at present, they are Kupyansk, Donetsk, Avdeyevka, South Donetsk, and Kherson.

Last Friday, for example, the briefing began almost nonchalantly [5]: “Tonight [March 29], the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a group strike with high-precision long-range air, sea and land-based weapons, including aeroballistic hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles, at energy facilities and air defence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The objectives of the strike have been achieved. All objects are affected.”  

The next day, March 30, petroleum and fuel oil storages, which have been dispersed to shield them from attack and are necessary to power the emergency generators, were destroyed in the Poltava region [6]. On Sunday, March 31, the targeting of gas storage and gas production around Lvov was also reported by the Defense Ministry in Moscow. “The Russian Aerospace Forces carried out a group strike with high-precision weapons on the facilities of energy infrastructure and the gas-producing industry of Ukraine. As a result of the strike, the work of the defense industry enterprises for the manufacture and repair of weapons, military equipment and ammunition was disrupted. All targets of the strike have been achieved. The objects are affected.”

The detailed targeting of the electric war campaign can be found in the Russian military bloggers who compile their reports and maps from a range of Russian and Ukrainian sources, including videoclips from residents in the targeted cities.

The westward extension of the missile and drone targeting has included Khmelnitsky, Rivne and Burshtyn, around the Galician capital of Lvov, in this map and summary from Militarist for March 29 [7].  

MAP OF RUSSIAN STRIKES AGAINST UKRAINE POWER PLANT TARGETS, MARCH 29

Source: https://t.me/infantmilitario/123071 [7]

“Ukraine is moving towards a truly definitive energy crisis”, Militarist reported on March 30. “In the east and west, thermal power plants are being eliminated one by one by completely demolishing the main turbine and generator sections. Dams also began to collapse from south to north. It is expected that all dams and thermal power plants will be put out of operation in the near future. The Ukrainian military industry will be destroyed both by direct attacks and by the energy crisis. The possibility of NATO-supported domestic production and maintenance will also be excluded. Thus, the logistics infrastructure in the rear may not be able to cope with events at the front.”

The Russian ordnance used is overwhelming; this is corroborated by Ukrainian reports. Tactically, drones are launched in swarms, the first wave to identify and activate the air defence missile and artillery systems around the electricity targets; in the second wave drones and missiles strike their targets. According to Ukrainian data, in just two days from March 22 to 24, 208 missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were fired at the country’s energy facilities [9]….