Link here.

By Prof. Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe, 12/7/23

As the prospect of a Russian military victory in Ukraine looms ever larger, speculation is growing about the extent of President Vladimir Putin’s territorial ambitions. How far westward into Ukraine will his tanks, drones and troops roll?

There is also a lot of lobbying. Russian hardliners are pressing Putin to seek Ukraine’s total defeat and occupation, while Western moderates hope for a peace that will limit Russia’s territorial acquisitions to Crimea and the already-occupied provinces of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhe. Such a settlement would leave Ukraine with 80% of its prewar territory, a buffer zone against Russia east of the Dnieper river, and economically vital access to the Black Sea.

The stated goals of the so-called Special Military Operation (SMO) launched by Putin in February 2022 were to demilitarise, denazify and neutralise Ukraine. There were no territorial demands or claims. Russia’s official recognition of the secession from Ukraine of Donetsk and Lugansk and the signing of defence pacts with the two statelets provided the pretext for war but they didn’t join the Russian Federation until October 2022.

When Russia attempted to negotiate a ceasefire and a peace deal with Ukraine in March 2022 the proposal on the table was that Donetsk and Lugansk would remain independent. There was even a suggestion the Donbass rebels could eventually return to Ukrainian sovereignty, albeit with a very high degree of regional autonomy.

It was the failure of the Istanbul peace negotiations and the continuation of the war that made Russia’s annexation of the Donbass inevitable; same was true of Kherson and Zaporozhe. Occupied as part of Russia’s military operations to safeguard the Crimean peninsula’s strategic situation, these two Black Sea coastal provinces, also contain large numbers of ethnic Russians who want to secede from Ukraine, though far fewer than those in the Donbass.

in September 2022 all four provinces staged referendums that, predictably, produced astronomical majorities in favour of uniting with Russia. Putin signed the accession decrees on 30 September and was adamant the referendum results reflected the free choice of millions of people. He called on Kiev to return to the negotiating table but told Russia’s Federation Council: ‘the choice of the people in Donetsk, Lugansk. Zaporozhe and Kherson will not be discussed. That decision has been made, and Russia will not betray it’, he proclaimed to rapturous applause.

Yet the boundaries of these newly incorporated territories were not specified. Had Russia annexed the entirety of the four regions or just those bits it currently occupied? In the case of Donetsk, for example, 40% of the province remained under Ukrainian control. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, further muddied the waters when he stated the borders of Donetsk and Lugansk would be those extant in 2014, while the precise boundaries of Zaporozhe and Kherson would be determined following local consultations.

On this matter Putin has kept his own counsel, but for symbolic as well strategic reason, he will certainly strive to complete the conquest of the two Donbass territories, though the question of whether that area is co-terminus with the provincial boundaries of prewar Ukraine remains unclear.

Russian hardliners hope he also harbours ambitions to capture the Black Sea port of Odessa and, in the north, to seize Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkov. But while both cities fall within the territorial boundaries of what Putin regards as historical Russia, they are also populated by large numbers of ethnic Ukrainians as well as Russian speakers, many of whom continue to support the Kiev regime.

Notwithstanding Russia’s many military successes in Ukraine, so far its armed forces have managed to capture and hold only one very large city – Donetsk’s Mariupol. Absent a complete Ukrainian military collapse, the battles for Odessa and Kharkov would be long, hard and costly to the Russian side. There would also be massive civilian casualties, including among pro-Russia Ukrainians.

Some observers believe that sooner or later Russia will seek to occupy all of Ukraine east of the Dnieper including the provinces of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Chernihiv and Poltava – the aim being to reduce Kiev-controlled Ukraine to a rump dysfunctional state that, even with continuing Western support, will no longer constitute a strategic threat to Russia. Such is the fervent hope of many Russian nationalists, but the conquest and sustained occupation of that much territory would require further rounds of Russian military mobilisation and could take years to complete.

The Russian army’s current actions and dispositions indicate an intention to maintain the war of attrition with Ukraine all along the line of contact, to capture Avdiivka and then advance 100 kilometres or so to the Kramatorsk-Slavyansk line, thereby occupying most of Donetsk. Russia is also steadily building up its armed forces and armaments to a level that would enable it to execute large-scale, war-winning offensive manoeuvres, but probably not before summer 2024.

At the Valdai Club annual meeting in Sochi in early October, Putin described the Ukraine war as primarily a ‘civilisational’ rather than territorial a conflict, the SMO’s initial main aim being to protect the people of the Donbass, who were being bombarded by Ukraine’s armed forces.

At that same gathering, Margarita Simonyan, the RT TV chief, asked Putin where the SMO would stop, specifically whether its territorial bounds would include the historically Russian city of Odessa. Putin replied:

“As for where we should stop, it is not about territories, it is about security guarantees for the peoples of Russia and the Russian state, and this is a more complex issue than some territory. It is about the security of people who consider Russia their Motherland and whom we consider our people. This is a complex question that requires discussion.”

Another Valdai question for Putin was: wherein lies Russia’s ‘greatness.’ Again, he sidestepped the territorial issue:

“With regard to Russia’s greatness, it currently lies in strengthening its sovereignty. Sovereignty is based on self-sufficiency in technology, finance, the economy in general, defence and security.”

At a meeting of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation on 3 November. Vladimir Rogov, the head of occupied Zaporozhe’s regional government, pressed Putin to commit to capturing the province’s namesake capital, which remains under Ukrainian control:

“I come from the city of Zaporozhe which is occupied by a gang of drug addicts and Nazis at the moment. When other locals learnt that I would attend a meeting with you, they wanted to relate to you that the city of Zaporozhe is waiting for Russian troops. Zaporozhe residents say: “Russians Help Russians”, and “Everything for the Front, Everything for Victory.”

Putin refused to be drawn. Instead he restated his well-known views about the arbitrary historical formation of modern Ukraine’s frontiers and reminded his audience that the root causes of the war were Ukrainian persecution of its ethnic Russian citizens and NATO expansion into Ukraine. Pointedly, he added that had Russia’s relations with Ukraine remained ‘fraternal’, it would not have been necessary to take any action at all, not even in relation to Crimea. But ‘we had to protect people from this Nazi scum. What were we supposed to do? They simply forced on us a choice where we could do nothing else but stand up in defence of the people living there. The same thing happened with Donbass and with Novorossiya [i.e. Kherson & Zaporozhe].Of course, we need to do everything we can to ensure that the entry of these territories is smooth, natural, and that people feel the result as quickly as possible.

Another local politician keen to commit Putin to specific territorial goals is Vladimir Saldo, the chief of the Russian-occupied parts of Kherson province. In a speech to a conference on the theme of ‘Proud Russia’ organised by Putin’s United Russia party at the end of November, he pledged that Kherson’s namesake provincial capital – from which Russia’s armed forces had been forced to retreat a year earlier – would definitely return to Russian control. On his Telegram channel he went even further, writing:

“I spoke on Friday with the Supreme Commander-in-Chief [Putin] and with the military – everyone is determined to return to Kherson. We will liberate our land. Next will be Nikolaev, Odessa and Izmail”.

So far, there has been no Kremlin confirmation that Putin said or indicated any such thing, or that the SMO’s aims include the capture or re-capture of these cities. In all likelihood Saldo’s claim is no more than his wishful thinking, which is not to say his dreams will remain unfulfilled.

On the basis of Putin’s stated position, his territorial ambitions in Ukraine could be quite limited and he may be willing to forego future territorial gains for the sake of peace terms that will guarantee Russia’s security and safeguard the welfare of his compatriots that remain part of Ukraine. Howeve, his security before territory stance keeps all options open, including the occupation of far more Ukrainian territory.

The longer the war goes on, the further into Ukraine that Russia’s armed forces advance, the more Ukraine’s defences falter – the greater will be the temptation for Putin to listen to the siren voices of his so-called turbo-patriots and grab as much Ukrainian territory as he can.

By James Carden, ACURA, 12/11/23

Well-heeled and highly credentialed, the proteges of powerful political patrons with ties to New Haven, Cambridge, Oxbridge and corporate America occupy the highest councils of government and advise a sitting US president who, while blessed with long experience as a US Senator, hails from rather less-exalted circumstances than his own advisers. These advisers, with their degrees and pedigrees, stir within their chief a toxic combination of envy, resentment and insecurity which manifests itself through occasional outbursts of bad temper.

The president’s advisers believe (or say they do) in a theory of international relations called the Domino Theory, which means, in the shortest of shorthand, that should a democratic country fall to a hostile authoritarian state, then others will soon meet a similar fate. Hence it is imperative that the United States, beacon of goodness and protector of democracy, stave off the darkness, no matter the cost.

Yet as the course of the war proceeds, it becomes clear to many that victory, once assured, has slipped further and further from reach. In the face of an increasingly skeptical public, the president, who also believes in the Domino Theory (or says he does), urges Congress to stay the course.

If this sounds familiar, it is because it is.

But in this newest iteration of the drama, the title role is filled not by Lyndon Johnson of the Texas Hill Country, but by Joe Biden of Scranton, Pennsylvania. And while the mise en scene of the war in question has moved from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, the rationale laid out by the President’s men for continued American involvement remains much the same. As Biden’s Secretary of State, a product of Dalton, Harvard and Columbia, recently put it, “The issue here is not just Ukraine’s security it is the security and safety of the entire Euro-Atlantic space.”

When President Biden named Jake Sullivan to the position of Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, he referred to Sullivan as a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” People used to talk that way about Johnson’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who, among other laurels, was, at age 34, the youngest Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

As it happens, Sullivan, at 44, is the youngest national security adviser since Bundy. And here is how Sullivan, in a gushing profile published this October in The New Yorker, describes his view of what is at stake in the war in Ukraine,

…As a child of the eighties and ‘Rocky’ and ‘Red Dawn’ I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes, and I believe the Ukrainians have one. There are very few conflicts that I have seen–maybe none–in the post-Cold War era where there’s such a clear good guy and bad guy, and we have to do a lot for that person.”

This “once-in-a-generation” intellect then went on to compare the foreign policy challenge posed by Russia to a scene from the Mike Meyers comedy Austin Powers, in which…

…there’s a steamroller on the far side of the room, and a guy standing there, holding up his hand, and shouting, ‘No!’ Then they zoom out, and the steamroller is moving incredibly slowly and is really far away.” He added, “I was determined that we were not going to be that guy—just waiting for the steamroller to roll over Ukraine. We were going to act.”

Whatever the merits of these reflections, what is true is that the policy of near limitless financial and material support to the Zelensky regime has only succeeded in killing thousands of Ukrainian civilians and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who might otherwise have lived had Sullivan, Blinken and Biden showed even a modicum of interest in the very real peace proposals that circulated between Russia and Ukraine in the opening months of the conflict.

A key difference between then and now is that Johnson had, within the highest councils of State, a brilliant, determined dissenter. George Ball, who served as under secretary of state, and later, as US Ambassador to the UN, tirelessly pressed Johnson and his inner circle to re-think the wisdom of their chosen course with regard to the war in Vietnam.

The lesson to which Ball worked for years to draw Johnson’s attention was how quickly, despite the best laid plans, wars can escalate. And like Johnson, Biden has been drawn into an escalatory spiral from which he will find it increasingly difficult to jump off.

As recounted by the journalist and author David Halberstam, Ball challenged “that greatest of American assumptions, that somehow, whatever we did, the other side would lie down and accept it.” In a 1964 memo to Bundy and Pentagon chief Robert McNamara, Ball pointed out that, “Once on the tiger’s back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.”

As Biden sinks the US and what little is left of its reputation into a second war now being waged with the full, indeed shameless, support of the administration, Ball’s warnings about the dangers of inadvertent escalation from a half century ago take on a renewed urgency.

One wonders then: Does Biden have a George Ball of his own; a seasoned veteran who can cut through the cant and nonsense funneled to him on a daily basis from the likes of Blinken and Sullivan? Or is Biden wholly reliant on the slim reeds of his own intellect and the disastrous advice of his most senior aides? Is there anyone else  – besides this latest iteration of the American establishment’s “best and brightest“- advising Mr. Biden?

And if so, does he possess the strength of character to find it within himself to listen?

James W. Carden, senior advisor to ACURA, writes from Washington, DC. 

Link here.

In this clip from journalist Kevin Gosztola’s weekly show, he honors the lives of 10 Palestinian journalists who were killed in the first days of the Israeli government’s war on Gaza. Around 75 or more journalists have died after two months of a siege and invasion by Israeli military forces. This is the first of several segments to commemorate their lives and call attention to clear attacks on members of the press.

Link here.

About halfway through the video, Sakwa states that Kremlin sources have told him that Britain’s decision to sail its warship into an area of the Black Sea near Crimea in June of 2021 infuriated Putin and contributed to his actions in February of 2022. – Natylie