The Ukraine war thread
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IIRC, think I read where the Russians are in the midst of a big call-up.
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Couple of things.
One news report (ABC?) claimed that Russian casualties are now in excess of 100,000. The surprising thing is not the number (Ukranian sources have been saying this for months), but that a major news outlet is reporting that number. IIRC, the British Ministry of Defence reported that number a few months ago.
And this:
U.S. officials advise Ukraine to wait on offensive
Senior U.S. officials are advising Ukraine to hold off on launching a major offensive against Russian forces until the latest supply of U.S. weaponry is in place and training has been provided, a senior Biden administration official said on Friday.
The official, speaking to a small group of reporters on condition of anonymity, said the United States was holding fast to its decision not to provide Abrams tanks to Ukraine at this time, amid a controversy with Germany over tanks.
President Joe Biden, who approved a new $2.5 billion weapons package for Ukraine this week, told reporters at the White House, "Ukraine is going to get all the help they need," when asked if he supports Poland's intention to send German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
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Proxies and Puppets. A long analytical essay but well worth the read:
https://open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/proxies-and-puppets?r=17wfy3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
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Putin continues to ramp up the rhetoric at the Stalingrad memorial ceremony:
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Russia’s Casualties in Ukraine Near 200,000
Close to 200,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the war in Ukraine, according to estimates from U.S. and European officials, a toll that is likely to continue to rise as the Kremlin readies a fresh offensive in the coming weeks.
The U.S. military, which keeps rough estimates on Russian casualties in Ukraine, puts the figure for wounded and dead at roughly 180,000, though officials stressed such figures aren’t precise, a U.S. defense official said.
The tally matched assessments by Norway’s defense chief Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen, who said last week that the number of Russian soldiers killed or injured was approaching 180,000. Mr. Kristoffersen estimated that 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded, in line with an estimate Pentagon officials put out in November.
The casualty count comes as Moscow’s forces press an eastern offensive in an effort to seize the advantage on the battlefield before tanks pledged by Kyiv’s allies begin to arrive in Ukraine and as the conflict approaches its one-year mark on Feb. 24.
The Kremlin and Ministry of Defense didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the Western casualty assessments.
In September, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, said 5,937 Russian military personnel had been killed in the conflict in Ukraine. That was only the second time Russian authorities had released any official casualty count. That figure hasn’t been updated since.
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SpaceX bars Kyiv from using Starlink tech for drone control
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64579267SpaceX says it provided its technology for humanitarian use, does not want its technology "weaponized," using it for communications is OK but not for offensive purposes.
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SpaceX bars Kyiv from using Starlink tech for drone control
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64579267SpaceX says it provided its technology for humanitarian use, does not want its technology "weaponized," using it for communications is OK but not for offensive purposes.
….does not want its technology "weaponized," using it for communications is OK but not for offensive purposes..
I guess SpaceX BOD and management didn’t get the memo that the Kremlin is about to launch a a massive offensive with the objective of annihilating the Ukrainian army, the total destructionof Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and, the subjugation the Ukrainian nation under the jackboot of Putinism and great Russian chauvinism.
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Is the Wagner group on their way out?
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Long article - some highlights (paywall)
He had reached that moment in life when a man abandons himself to his demons or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.”
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Stuck in a war he can neither win nor walk away from, Vladimir Putin is in a bad place. It can only get worse. His options are narrowing quickly: no longer low- and high-risk but between very dangerous and more perilous still. The proverbial desperate times may call for desperate measures. The West should anticipate them, no matter how unlikely or even absurd they may seem.Mired in the longest economic stagnation in modern Russian history for most of the decade before the war, the economy is projected to shrink this year and next. In the long run, it is headed for at best an anemic performance. As very little of quality is made in Russia, the sanctions on high-technology items are slowly but inexorably degrading entire industries. Machine-building, car-making, and aviation are atrophying the fastest. Labor shortages have deepened as some of Russia’s best educated, most skilled, and entrepreneurial citizens were among the hundreds of thousands, perhaps close to a million, men and women who fled the country immediately after the invasion of Ukraine.
Just as the cost of war grows fast and is projected to consume about a quarter of next year’s state budget, income from energy exports, which account for at least half of the government revenues, is bound to shrink: Russian natural gas and oil are no longer expensive enough to make up for the volumes decreased by the EU and G-7 sanctions. (At an equivalent of $417 billion, Russia’s budget last year was about one-sixth of Apple’s market capitalization.)Yet the war’s greatest damage is in tarnished symbols and discredited official mythology. When early in his third presidential term, 2012–18, Putin began to shift the foundation of his support — and thus his regime’s legitimacy — from economic progress and the growth of incomes to militarized patriotism, he reinvented himself as a wartime president, the unyielding and victorious defender of Russia against the perennially plotting West. He became Vladimir the Vanquisher, like Russia’s patron saint, George the Victorious on the country’s coat of arms, spearing the NATO dragon writhing under the hoofs of his steed.
Like Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait to make up for the eight-year stalemated war with Iran and for the lost lives of an estimated quarter-million Iraqi soldiers, Putin could hope to rekindle the patriotic euphoria that followed Crimea’s “return to the motherland” and to obscure the bloody slog of the Ukraine campaign with a swift military triumph.
Putin would not lack targets among Russia’s neighbors.
He could teach a lesson in deference to Moldova and Georgia, both of which are flirting with the EU. Then there are the Kazakhs, who, Putin averred, never had their own state until the fall of the Soviet Union. He almost certainly had in mind Kazakhstan’s six northern provinces, where most of the country’s 3.5 million ethnic Russians live, when he blamed former Soviet republics for exiting the Soviet Union and “dragging” with them vast areas of historically Russian lands, “presents from the Russian people.”A few years back, RAND war-gamers assessed that Russian troops could be in Riga or Tallinn in 36 to 60 hours after the beginning of hostilities. Deepened by the devastation visited on Russia’s armies in Ukraine, the enormous qualitative and quantitative gap between Russia’s and NATO’s militaries would render such an operation moot. A conventional war of any significant length would suicidal for Moscow. But Putin will not be looking for such a war. Instead, he is likely to opt for a smash-and-grab occupation of narrow slivers of land with large ethnic Russia populations, the better to claim their “liberation” and then “reunification with the motherland.”
In Estonia, the target would likely be Idu-Viru county, where three-quarters of the inhabitants are ethically Russian and its largest city, Narva, on the Estonian–Russian border, is 80 percent Russian. Alternatively, in Latvia, Moscow’s target would be the Latgale province, which is one-third Russian and whose capital, Daugavpils, is almost half Russian.
Of course, even a very limited aggression against a NATO country is irrationally risky in conventional military-strategic terms. But we know that Putin is no longer “rational” in the common sense of the word. If he were, he would not have invaded Ukraine.
A different kind of “rationality” takes over. A triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson famously said of ill-fated endeavors. Or, to recall the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s paean to Nazism, “a triumph of will” — of determination over reality. “Possunt quia posse videntur,” Vergil wrote. They can because they think they can.
