billbindc

Lawrence Freedman's email today on Russia, nukes and Ukraine. Pretty much the gold standard on how to think about the topic.

To which I'd only add...the "no good Russian but a dead Russian" approach does a pretty bad job for talking about all of the Russians I personally know who abhor and are actively fighting against Putin as we speak. It's a complicated world out there folks, Russia is a pretty nasty autocracy and you personally haven't had to make the choices one makes in that environment. Here's hoping you never have to.

Possibly but it's hard to parse with any high degree of confidence. We can't really know because a lot of the players in Russian power politics don't really know themselves. They are groping towards safety or power or simply to stay afloat (and Prigozhin maybe all three) and the alliances they are making along the way are often provisional at best.

The Seth Harp who hasn't the foggiest idea what American China policy is? That guy? Sorry, but Harp is a bit of a clown. He seems to not understand what actually happened in Kharkiv, ditto what's currently happening in Kherson and I'm less than impressed with the realtor style list of 'comps' he used (Syria? Iraq? WTF?) to try and support his point. That's not analysis, that's just "my gut says X and I'm going to fill in reasons why it feels that way". And somehow all the way through he manages not to mention sanctions or manpower issues suffered by Russia. Absurd, bad and worse than useless.

Looks like the satellites are starting maneuver on their own. Stay away from under windows in the Donbas.

The impression one gets from the Ukrainian forces right now is that they are pretty sure that significant help isn't coming for the Russians. Given that assumption, there's no reason to take big risks. They are taking a bite, chewing it up, swallowing and taking another. There is a lot to be said for that approach. The Russian economy is going to get ever grimmer, the wear and tear on Russian equipment will get worse, the forces West of the Dnieper hungrier still and always, every day, there are fewer and fewer Russians to hold the line. That strategy also has one big benefit...it lowers the chances that Putin panics and does something truly catastrophic.

The Russian economy can't keep doing what it's doing by early next spring. By that point, Ukrainian utilities are going to be way down on their list of problems.

100% this is being read by the relevant state agencies of the opposition. On the up side, most of the things being said here are so unpalatably true to the bosses that it is of little use to them.

Of interest....

The tell will be if the Russians can either reinforce the Kherson salient or if they are able to rotate units out. If neither is possible in any significant way then essentially Russia's best regular army units are stuck in a grinder and offensive capabilities are denuded while Ukraine can decide where else to strike. A huge collapse would be great but the current situation seems pretty good from the Ukraine perspective. Winning on maneuver in the east while fixing and destroying with attrition in the west.

One thing that still worries people is that the Russians seem so obtuse and isolated that they might not really get the message. That's why Xi made the statement about Kazakhstan and why both Xi and Modi were so blunt about Ukraine. Like Austria-Hungary then, Russia seems to be violently drifting along without quite coming to terms with what's happened. There's a strange national mental collapse going on in Moscow and while I'm happy India/China seem to be pulling in the right direction, I think a lot of folks have the nagging worry that Russia just can't hear it. We'll see.

It's a large bureaucracy speaking into a political environment and they can't predict unlooked for events. If they try to and are wrong, they get pilloried for it. And if they try to and are wrong, they could damage political support for the war. So the language remains oblique and cautious. That may annoy you but it's smart comms.

Yep, yep, yep. And one of the options that is narrowing is escalating the war beyond conventional means. Both Xi and Modi have made it publicly clear that they aren't happy and want Russia to negotiate an end. I'd suspect the private exchanges were more blunt still.

By "non-linear" they are saying that they expect repeats of the outcome of the Kharkiv offensive. I don't think that's obfuscating anything.

What's interesting to me is how much both strategies are designed to subvert the supports that maintain US hegemony and how badly they perform at it: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-in-many-countries/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/06/22/ratings-for-russia-drop-to-record-lows/ The danger for both Russia and China...that's fast becoming the reality...is that they don't provide a model that is more attractive than the US/EU because their aims are simply to install a cruder, more restrictive hegemony for themselves. Therefore, their interactions with likeminded nations don't turn into countervailing coalitions but simply accommodations based on mutual and typically short term interest. You can see that, not all surprisingly, mostly clearly in their relations with each other. Perforce, they must act like insurgents on the state scale. They act as spoilers, subvert the order of things, put grit in the machinery and try to inhabit (in China's case) parts of the global economy that allow them to exert control. But this has limits. Western oriented states have resilient systems, they are easy to influence but generally hard to subvert outright. And all the while, the clock ticks for China and Russia given the profound demographic problems they face. I get your take and in many ways I'm sympathetic to it. But over all, I think the historical record comes down pretty heavily on the side of the socially and economically dynamic nations over the episodic pulses of authoritarian states.

Super interesting. I think I'm less impressed than you are with the opposition and I think there are many problems with their model of conflict that will get worse over time. Not least, I think that's why Russia decided to force their hand. This, on Xi's Belt and Road is quite informative not just on that topic but also on the larger, self defeating Chinese zeitgeist. https://asiasociety.org/switzerland/oxford-debate-belt-and-road-initiative-china-pays-worsening-its-own-image To be as pithy as possible, I'd say that the challenges to 'the West' since the end of the Cold War whether by AQI/Russia/PRC have been sideways because it's the only way to do it and survive its preponderance of power. Until the foundations of that power subside, our biggest worry is ourselves.

Where most people look at Prigozhin and see Stalin, I look at Prigozhin and see Kornilov or Wrangel.

I would be wary of putting too many chips down on Prigozhin. There are other players out there (Patrushev pere and fils, Ivanov, etc) who are much more formidable than the Wagner PMC boss when you look at the coalitions they can put together. Remember, Prigozhin gets a lot of his power from being Putin's favored leashed dog. If there's a change in power, it is unlikely to be for someone who got them into this in the first place.

Can you elucidate this?

I think the general idea is good if some of it is exaggerated. It's also important to note that this is apparently from a European's perspective and that comports with what I hear as well. Americans often don't understand the hesitation they see on the issue of Ukraine from Macron/Scholtz/etc but part of it is based on this sort of thinking. Under the former guy, they were starting to gain more elbow room geopolitically. Ukraine and Biden's response has reversed that trend and then some....a lot of then some really. On reconstruction and arms costs, I think we are very likely to see that age old American tradition of aid given that must be paid to American firms with profits mostly heading right back to the US. So, sure...it's a "cost" up front but it's less of one than meets the eye and again, the political and strategic benefits are obvious. On China, I certainly agree that they are picking up lots of intel. At the same time, they are realizing both the enormity of any attempt on Taiwan while those nations disinclined to accept that proposition are seeing how it can be done successfully. I think this is particularly interesting in that context: https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/3156126/gray-dragons-assessing-chinas-senior-military-leadership/

I agree he goes a bit overboard at times but even the weapons that are given to Ukraine are typically later in their life cycle systems that were due to be replaced anyway. In other words, they were billions already spent that will now not cost anything to store, destroy, refurb. The bigger point is that even if you tone him down some, the benefits to the US strategic position are enormous relative to the costs.

I must confess to not knowing a thing about who @gummibear737 is but whoever they are, this is about as clear eyed a thread as it gets on how ruthlessly the US is going to benefit from the war in Ukraine.

Definitely not accidental but it's not clear if the strike was simply a strategic punishment strike, an operational strike to slow down the UA in Kherson or some mix of the two. I'd personally suppose the latter. It's anyone's guess not in the Ukrainian general staff whether this is a bad or good thing for them. It comes down to the delta between how much it further damages Russian force generation vs how much it does that to the Ukrainians. I'd be fairly sure the Russians don't really know themselves.

A very interesting thread:

Of interest: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russian-public-opinion-ukraine-war-putin-approval-rating-by-andrei-kolesnikov-and-denis-volkov-2022-09