Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022-3

[dubsartur]

It looks like Lukashenko brokered the deal, which I think is the core answer to "why Belarus". I don't think any of the other states around Russia really have enough skin in the game to want to broker such a deal (except perhaps the government in Georgia, but they couldn't do it because they can't be publicly involved in Russian-sphere politics for local reasons).

And yeah, I think there's something to the idea that part of the punditry problem is taking general-purpose interested people and publishing their thinkythinks and chatter and treating it as considered expertise, and that's definitely a worse problem with microblogging systems which amplify such chatter and shove it in front of journalists very fast. And then this is doubly tricky when a lot of hearsay is involved in the base information, especially where journalists don't have the linguistic skills for verification (tons of people will cite "someone said this on pro-X telegram channels in Russia" and that's not a very scientific gauge of opinion but it's the sort of nugget it's easy to get excited over if you feel you need to keep up to the minute).

I got very skeptical of Russo-Ukrainian War twitter in late 2022 as new facts became scarce and it shifted from analyst mode to speculation and propaganda.  At least Kyiv Independent is Ukrainian https://kyivindependent.com/prigozhin-says-wagner-will-stop-march-on-moscow/

People read confidence and articulateness as truthiness, so if you want to have a good information system, you have to limit who can speak with confidence for a large audience.  If people come away from a pundit thinking they know something about the subject, but actually the pundit was bullarmadilloting, that is very bad because they are no longer likely to admit that they are ignorant!

[psyanojim]

I'm a little surprised Prigozhin didn't try and keep pushing: I wonder if his situation must have been (in his military judgement) actually a lot worse than the international media seemed to think. In that if you're accepting terms of "disband and go into exile" and the person whose court you're going into exile at is Alexander Lukashenko, this possibly suggests you don't have a lot of other friends. I feel like my initial read of the day might not have been bad, honestly: that Prigozhin was feeling the noose tightening with threats to shut down Wagner and absorb it into the army, and was throwing the dice to try and secure his power base before it was going to be taken from him anyway. He seems to have failed at that.

Yeah, I found the 'top job' ambition to be a little far-fetched, but at the same time, occupying friendly cities and shooting down friendly helicoptors as a negotiating tactic also seemed pretty far-fetched!

I wonder how much of his 'pet army' he'll be allowed to keep now. When it comes to people who could use a battle-hardened personal bodyguard, Lukashenko must be pretty high on the list.

[Jubal]

I wonder if Lukashenko deciding Prigozhin is useful might be his best defence against assassination, but we'll see. Even if Putin doesn't want to bump the man off, surely Shoigu does (and whilst Shoigu has proven to be an amazingly poor minister of war, he got there by being very good at Russian court politics and I would be shocked if he doesn't have the means to attempt to kill Prigozhin).

you have to limit who can speak with confidence for a large audience

It's also "who and on what topic" - I should for example be allowed to speak on medieval Caucasus history if that ever makes the news, but that doesn't make me e.g. an "Eastern Europe History Expert" who could be asked about the prehistory of the current internal divisions in Russia (although I could probably give a more cogent answer than some people who are commentating - but I still shouldn't be asked to!)

[dubsartur]

I wonder if Lukashenko deciding Prigozhin is useful might be his best defence against assassination, but we'll see. Even if Putin doesn't want to bump the man off, surely Shoigu does (and whilst Shoigu has proven to be an amazingly poor minister of war, he got there by being very good at Russian court politics and I would be shocked if he doesn't have the means to attempt to kill Prigozhin).

you have to limit who can speak with confidence for a large audience

It's also "who and on what topic" - I should for example be allowed to speak on medieval Caucasus history if that ever makes the news, but that doesn't make me e.g. an "Eastern Europe History Expert" who could be asked about the prehistory of the current internal divisions in Russia (although I could probably give a more cogent answer than some people who are commentating - but I still shouldn't be asked to!)

Yeah, that was implied.

Journalists have a very hard problem when a topic becomes news and nobody in their news org knows honest, articulate domain experts.  I thought it was easier to pick out useful commentators in spring 2022 because so much was happening and you could see whose analysis was in accord with the facts, but a lot of those people kept talking after new information became scarce (and of course some people fell back on ego-protection rather than admit that their model of Russian foreign policy, military capacity, etc. had been dead wrong).

As we saw in my comments on the numbers of doctors trained in Canada, I am not immune to forgetting where I got information or getting it from sources who seem knowledgeable, so I consume as little punditry, live news, and speculation as possible.

We will see if the rumours that Putin fled Moscow by air when Prigozhin was 200 km away are true.

[Jubal]

Prigozhin still nowhere to be seen, Shoigu being very visible today.

Courtier 1, Military man 0, it seems.

Probably given the rapid resolution it won't bring a huge amount of change on the front lines, I guess, though I may be wrong.

[dubsartur]

It can't have done any good for the morale of the Russian military or for Wagner-MoD relations.  Now that Wagner have actually killed Ministry of Defense troops and shot down aircraft I have trouble imagining Wagner being effectively integrated into the regular military.

While this has been happening the Ukrainians have established a bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper near the ruins of the Antinovski Bridge.  On the weekend I saw figures of 100 men and three tanks from Russian sources.  The Ukrainians would obviously like to be able to get behind the Russian fortifications in the formerly flooded area where the breaking of the dam washed away bunkers, minefields, emplaced weapons, and so on.  The other strategy which people are speculating about is sending the Freedom of Russian Legion around the north end of the Russian lines, which would avoid Ukrainian troops entering Russia on camera.  I don't know if they are big enough for that but clearly once you get away from the front lines Russia has very little armed force available.

Ukrainian propaganda likes photos and videos of Ukrainian patrols crossing the border and taking down Russian signs or taking selfies.  That seems to be OK with the USA, like all the mysterious fires, explosions, and drone attacks within Russia which might or might not be Ukrainian special forces who can say.

Edit: its worth remembering that researchers can't agree why Bush II invaded Iraq in 2003.  That is in a flawed democracy where many participants have left memoirs and there was a lot of discussion in public.  Figuring out what happened between a dictator and a gangster is likely to take longer!

[dubsartur]

I see a claim that Ukraine has resumed conscription although the government states that they wish an all-volunteer force after the war.

The rando social media account @SmartUACat@twitter.com has a story with verisimilitude about training with NATO forces in Afghanistan (but remember, rando social media account!) https://nitter.net/SmartUACat/status/1679223826398212096#m

There is some typical military disorganization and overplanning: combat veterans get assigned to a Reconaissance 101 course and its hard to adjust the curriculum, there is lots of hurry up and wait and it takes some asking around to find ways to productively fill the rest of the days.  There are some more substantive disconnects: the Ukrainian military conducts combat operations with all-digital tools (I hear they have lots of paperwork on paper) whereas the training course wants to make sure everyone can use paper maps and radios, drones are not as ubiquitous in training as they are in combat, and the section on spotting for artillery assumes you have unlimited firepower and a few targets whereas the Ukrainian military has more potential targets than weapons to hit them so needs to choose carefully which fires to direct against which targets.

Soldiers like to gripe, training gets scaled down for all kinds of reasons (complex military exercises are expensive and use up the same things that are needed in combat), and I hear about a lot of scouting on foot in UA (sometimes it can be useful to launch a drone somewhere that the other guy does not expect hostile drones).  And like I said, the Ukrainian military seems to still have a giant pen-and-ink bureaucracy alongside all the tablets and smartphones.  But I am not sure that anyone has a proven solution to this kind of fighting, just the rules of thumb "get air superiority if you can" and "avoid industrial positional warfare if you can."

A contact who was formerly an infantryman in the Territorial Army in the UK says that even a decade or two ago it was really hard to keep moving supplies up to the fighting troops and move the dead and wounded back if the other guys had half decent equipment.  Industrial warfare consumes material fast and the other guy would always prefer to take it out before it is used in combat.

Many people on social media seem to fall into 'NATO troops the best' or 'Ukrainian army the best' and I think both are oversimplistic.  I don't think any military is really prepared for a war like this (the big NATO militaries could go wild for a few weeks or months until they ran out of troops and equipment), and every army has lots of stupid because armies have to take Joe and Jane Average and put them in really difficult conditions.

[Jubal]

Yeah, I think the NATO thing is more that it's not clear that there's a non-nuclear war that NATO couldn't win (at least in terms of defeating any symmetrical/state opposition) well before it ran out of munitions. I don't think that's a question of preparedness so much as scale and the immense relative spending the US puts into its forces? Russia has failed to get air superiority which  feels like a very key failure in modern war doctrine... and I agree it seems probably that nobody has really got the prep for a long, conventional war where air superiority is very lacking. I think Brett Deveraux recently noted that possibly most militaries in the world simply lack combat experience, too.

[dubsartur]

Its hard to say because the old Russian army was used up in 2022.  Before that happened, doing something less stupid than they did, they might have lasted long enough to use up European NATO's supplies of vehicles and munitions and trained soldiers.

Today it looks like eg. Poland or France could march on Moscow and not face much resistance.  Most of the Kaliningrad garrison is supposed to have been sent back to contiguous Russia.

Russian air defense networks are supposed to be really good although again they have used up a lot of munitions and vehicles and radars and trained operators and it seems like the Russian air force can't carry out combat operations of more than 4 aircraft which would be a problem against any major NATO military.

The equipment that has been provided to Ukraine and the commandment not to invade internationally recognized Russian territory does force them to do things the hard way by smashing the Russian forces in Ukraine rather than looping through Russian territory or taking control of the air over the occupied territories.  Nobody who had a choice would attack those Russian fortified lines from the front (and Russia can mass its forces in them because it knows that some places are off limits).

Edit: the Canadaland podcast has an article on freedom of the press in Ukraine during the war (as in the UK during both wars, or the USA during WW I, its not great) https://www.canadaland.com/ukraine-press-freedom-anton-skyba/

Edit: Jeremy Morris doubts Kamil Galeev's claim that ethnic minorities in Russia are disproportionately likely to be conscripted and killed on the ground that "from a poor rural region far from Moscow with many non-russian Russians" is not the same as "ethnic minority" https://postsocialism.org/2023/04/14/why-tim-snyder-is-wrong/

[Jubal]

Some politico reporting on the Ukraine grain issues, which I feel like are going to be a very major issue - generally the coming winter could be horrible in Europe given the mix of war and climate catastrophes pushing food prices sky-high.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/21/ukraine-grain-harvest-00107212

[dubsartur]

Some politico reporting on the Ukraine grain issues, which I feel like are going to be a very major issue - generally the coming winter could be horrible in Europe given the mix of war and climate catastrophes pushing food prices sky-high.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/21/ukraine-grain-harvest-00107212

One thing I don't understand about US and Canadian central bank policy is that they seem to assume that inflation is caused by people borrowing money to bid more and obtain scarce goods, but it seems like the loss of labour due to COVID, fossil fuels due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and forest and farm products due to extreme weather are also factors!  (And zoning problems for housing: if its illegal to build more housing on the same block, or it takes 100 hours of labour over 5 years to get permission to build anything else, housing prices will rise as the local population rises).

Just raising interest rates discourages people from borrowing money to buy things, but it does not put Russian natural gas back on the market, or stop vineyards from being scorched and forests burned, or bring millions of people back to life and health.

Given how weak the Russian military is, it seems plausible that eg. Turkey will call Russia's bluff.  Really not sure why Erdogan sent the Azov POWs back to Ukraine.

[Pentagathus]

Russia's been bombing the armadillo out of Ukraine's ports and grain stores apparently, I guess that makes the question of naval safety kind of irrelevant.

[dubsartur]

I would be surprised if they can burn it all or destroy all the port infrastructure and bulk shipping is so much more efficient then land transport and especially motor vehicle transport (Canada ships its grain to ports by train).  The recent attack on Odessa is said to have destroyed 60 kt but 33 mt were shipped under the grain deal.  So they would have to repeat that attack 1000 times to destroy one year of Ukraine's grain exports (realistically there is some point before that where all the grain silos near the ports are broken, but still).

I agree with Politico that loss of fertilizers, the seizure of labour and land, and destruction from fighting and occupation are likely to reduce Ukraine's production of grain.

Edit: I see a claim that the Ukrainian military can't train above company level (~150 guys) within Ukraine's borders for fear of air attack.  .

Edit: and here is another description of a peculiar kind of assault which is carried out at platoon strength (~30 guys) lead by a section-sized assault group (~10 guys) because anything bigger gets shelled and airstruck to death but the other guy also has to spread out so ten guys suddenly arriving at their position can be bad news https://kyivindependent.com/its-a-lottery-how-ukraines-assault-brigade-counterattacks-near-bakhmut/  Ukrainian propaganda includes clips of single IVFs driving up to Ukrainian positions, dismounting their infantry, and being blown up so some Russian counterattacks are very small too.

[dubsartur]

Kyiv Independent has a piece on the raids across the Dnipro.  I see figures of up to 40 Ukrainian troops. https://kyivindependent.com/ukrainian-troops-regularly-cross-dnipro-river-probing-russian-defenses-in-kherson-oblast/  The Ukrainians have also stated to The Times that in December 2022 they almost ordered the evacuation of Kyiv due to attacks on heat and electrical systems. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-bombers-us-patriot-surface-to-air-missiles-ukraine-dh6x8vcgn (paywalled)

Edit: one of the weird things about this war is that on one hand its utterly inhumane (you are most likely to die when some drone signals back that there are hostiles at this latitude and longitude and an artillery piece 15 km away opens fire for a few minutes then changes targets) and on the other hand the units that carry out many combat operations are tiny and human-sized. 

Edit: some people claim to have seen recent photos of Ukrainian artillery next to mountains of empty shell casings.  They fired vast numbers of shells to defend Kyiv in the first 30 days of the war and I doubt they were repositioning after every few shots.  So excited claims such as that drones make fixed artillery positions obsolete and guns have to shoot a few times then move before bad stuff starts landing on them may not be true.  It also suggests that the situation may be more complicated than "endless supply of low-tech Russian artillery versus a few high-tech NATO systems operated by Ukrainians." 

Edit: UA has confirmed that they have resumed conscription with the usual result that people are paying bribes to be excluded https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/11/zelenskiy-sacks-all-military-recruitment-heads-over-frontline-bribes-scandal-ukraine

Edit: another article on the NATO training provide to Ukrainian troops and the trouble adapting it to a positional war against opponents with sometimes-superior firepower and superior airpower https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-russia-training-nato-west-military/

This Chieftain talk has a summary of a talk by Ukrainian officers on anti-drone defenses (starts around 19 minutes in).  They seem to have started using lots of MGs and autocannons sometimes aided by searchlights! Those might be easier to get cleared to talk about than the electronic methods which the UK MoD report alluded to. https://piped.garudalinux.org/watch?v=iFs6LG0TEyU

We can just hope that as both sides acquire and lose troops and equipment, the relative strengths are tilting towards Ukraine. 

[Jubal]

I was interested, in a grim way, in the news about how Russia is pushing its Ukraine propaganda into school textbooks. It's hardly unexpected that they will justify it that way, but the precise mechanisms and arguments they're going for are interesting and quite 21st century. It's not so long ago in historical terms that even somewhat more democratic major powers could proclaim victory through strength as their rationale for things in one way or another. Now even Russia, one of the most obviously fascist medium to large powers, has to fall back on portraying itself as a reluctant invader and ultimately a wounded, put upon party. I get that Russia do that line for the international media, but that they're doing it in school textbooks too rather than a more flatly jingoistic account of matters kind of interests me.


Also apparently Domino's Pizza is leaving Russia. I think that sort of thing has low immediate impact - pizza restaurants can keep going under another name and be bought up - but the longer the war goes on, the longer the lack of investment must surely start biting in the bits of the Russian economy that aren't oil. Which are bits that Russia can usually ignore because the tax revenue mostly comes from the oil... but everyone else needs to eat at some point.