billbindc

The reality is that Xi has already made his move and it was to downgrade the wolf warrior diplomats and make the managed competition acolyte/former ambassador to the US Qin Gang, the foreign minister. China is reorienting from a policy of confronting everyone to attempting a version of Ost politic with Europe and moderate detente with the US. It's an enormous change, a complete revision from pre-Ukraine invasion plans and one more nail to hammer into the orientalist idea that China culturally has a predilection/special skill for long range planning.

Now that they are throwing in the VDV, are we at the point yet where we can say that the real strategic goal at Bakhmut is that Wagner wants to gain position back at the Kremlin while Soledar is about the MOD making Prigozhin look bad? Because there's no strategic/military goal that comes close to justifying this expenditure of ammunition and blood.

Per the strategy/no-strategy discussion, I would suggest a third option: There was a formal strategy in the first few weeks before it became obvious it was a disaster. That disaster provoked reactions domestically that convinced Putin that cutting his losses after a certain point was likely fatal to him and the regime. Since then, the strategy, such as it is, is pure spaghetti at the fridge in order to buy time to figure out a solution to the potential for a power struggle in Moscow. Everything else is subordinate to that issue. Time spent on parsing out some sort of thought out military campaign is wasted without thinking of the political effect back home for Putin. Also, Prigozhin's influence is likely quite over rated. He acted as a stick for Putin against the MOD in the domestic struggle but also as a sink for radicals who flocked to the banners to die...and more importantly to fail...in the Donbas. Two birds, one stone.

A useful primer on what's coming up in Russian politics. I'm somewhat less inclined than most to see a future dominated by Prigozhin and his ilk. https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/88753

To the latter point, perhaps what happened here is that after the initial failure Putin realized that accepting less than what he wished for was potentially a fatal personal or regime outcome.

As noted above, the elite crisis wasn't significant when he decided to start the war...it is becoming so now that he's likely losing it.

Since we cannot read his mind, we can only look at what Putin does...which is to continue to pour manpower, political capital, economic resources into a war that on paper he could end at any time. As I read that, Putin's calculation is that he faces higher risks in acquiescing to a Ukrainian victory than he does in mobilization, global isolation, economic collapse, etc. And he's empowering the more radically committed segments of the power structure as he does so. That says pretty clearly that he believes that he's in greater danger from a loss on the domestic political front than anywhere else.

To be clear, I'm saying that the decisions being made *after* the initial failure that most of us look at and puzzle of find war winning logic in are often about shoring up domestic positions. Wagner's ludicrous, expensive and bloody antics in front of Bakhmut are a prime example.

I would be wary of having too much confidence in our interpretation of what Putin's options were. Could he have declared victory and gone home? I personally don't see it and if he didn't do it, I would bet he didn't either.

It's a mistake, I think, to view Russian strategizing as being primarily military in nature. Russia is a nuclear power. It is *not* going to be invaded so the only zone of conflict that ultimately matters for Putin personally is within the elites of his regime. If you treat the decisions of the Russian war against Ukraine as being driven at first by an attempt to absorb a neighbor (that Russian elites considered to be an errant province) and then a series of attempts to manage domestic reactions to failure to so, I think you can parse the Russian decision tree fairly easily.

Epitome: there is little evidence after the first several months of the war for any Russian initiative other than reaction to an outwardly imposed condition.

Aka, “the bomber always gets through” and then civilian resistance becomes stronger.

This is a big step and very much confirmed in DC. The effects on the battlefield in terms of firepower and mobility for Ukraine are going to be immense over time. There are going to be some grim conversations in the Kremlin tonight.

It's also a big question that Russian asymmetric warfare will be as effective as in the past. Before the war, Russian propaganda and grey ops were effective in large part because it remained below the attention of public opprobrium and political will in the West. The invasion of Ukraine has changed that on every level. Public opinion is now decisively against Russia, the propaganda coming out of Moscow is a subject of derision and the motivations of Ukrainians to support any sort of Russian operation have collapsed. A frozen conflict was one thing in 2014...totally different in 2024.

A quibble on the slow progress idea. This war began less than 11 months ago. Ukraine has retaken something like half of the territory it lost in the first phases of the war, has wrecked whatever options Moscow still had to widen or change the trajectory and is one big victory in the south away from potentially putting the war into it's end phase. That's *fast*.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/misunderstanding-soviet-power-in-761?sd=pf Not sure where I came across this but well worth reading with high application to the current war.

Sure. But Russia isn't a hardscrabble insurgency decades in the making with a compelling invasion narrative to work from. If anything, that's Ukraine. And at some point, the resources just aren't there anymore as Ukraine's build and build.

The frozen conflict scenario that you envision above isn't really sustainable for a sanctioned and ever devolving Russian economy. And believe me, those sanctions aren't going anywhere in any significant way until Russia has made peace with Ukraine. In fact, from what I hear, the ability of the US and allies to tighten the screws is getting better as time goes on. The die has been cast. Russia has a year or two at best.

It's clear that the Russian system already lacks the resilience and the depth to do the most basic things such that it is almost working against itself at this point. Too few few officers and NCOs? Well, then you cannot properly disperse your troops if you don't want them wandering off and they are susceptible to catastrophic HIMARS strikes. A completely fubared replacement system? Well, then you are stuck throwing untrained or incorrectly matched troops towards whatever crisis is currently most dire. Etc, rinse and repeat. I wouldn't dare say when this war will end but it's quite clear that some form of collapse has been happening for 6 months already. Also, it's quite notable that Xi chose Qin Gang as his foreign minister. China's not coming to save Putin and that will add to the political stresses bubbling below the surface.

Great analysis as usual. I've been wondering for a while why anyone would expect the UA to attempt to militarily seize Crimea. Potential escalation issues aside, it's bottlenecked to a Ukrainian attack from the West and bottlenecked for Russian supplies to the East. It's a perfect sink for Russian resources if Ukraine can cleave the front North of it.

I've been banging on about Kerensky for the last 4 months to anyone who will listen. What Putin is doing is quite similar in effect. It's just a question of where the collapse point is...this offensive or the next one?

“For the sake of the nation’s life, it was necessary to restore the army’s will to die.” Alexander Kerensky on the June Offensive Strelkov today:

I would add a couple of days to those estimates. You'll have a frozen crust after a day or so but it will take some time for the mass of mud beneath it to freeze fully.

This. If you read the reports on this carefully, pretty much all they say is that nobody's fingerprints were left on the operation. That's all. You then get a bunch of quotes from politicians who plant their favored scenario on the reporter. That's what politicians do but it's not evidence in any sense and the vast preponderance of circumstance points at Russia.

Absolutely. The tendency is reactionary whether on the left or right and against democratic government (i.e. small 'L' liberal ideas of government). John Ganz writes about this a lot in a substack called Unpopular Front where he goes deeply into the Dreyfus Affair, the attempted coup of 1934 in Paris, etc. He speaks from somewhere in the middle/left but is well worth reading for everyone because what we are looking at in modern American politics is not a normal partisan dispute. It's about the basics of what our society considers to be a legitimate way to govern. His take is that we are in a similar moment to post-Dreyfus France. https://johnganz.substack.com/p/feb-6-1934jan-6-2021 What does this have to do with Ukraine? Simply that the global rise in this sort of politics has it's spiritual home and inspiration in Putin's mode of government as much as the Bund looked to Berlin. This is part of and the point of the war.