By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/28/24

Ukraine was pounded by a deadly missile and drone attack on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was backatcha yesterday during a speech on the occasion of the Ukraine Independence Day celebrations: Ukraine has developed and successfully tested its own ballistic missile that has the range to hit Moscow and well beyond.

Only last week, Zelenskiy announced another new long-range missile, the Palyanytsia, which is named after a local bread and is a word that Russians struggle to pronounce. But they will learn how to say it soon enough if Zelenskiy gets his way. Together with the Kursk incursion, I think we can now say that the war is moving into its fifth, and most dangerous, phase.

The first was the invasion itself and Russia’s botched attempt to take Kyiv. The second was when Ukraine got its act together and Russia abandoned the north, culminating with the Kharkiv offensive. The third was the subsequent stalemate and the failed summer offensive of 2023. The fourth was the start of the drone war. And we are now into a fifth.

What are the characteristics of this fifth phase?

It seems that Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) has taken a leaf out of Israel’s book and the US is losing control of its client. Ukraine is no longer following orders.

Until now, the US has been carefully trying to manage Ukraine’s military response to Russia’s invasion with an “escalation management” policy that can be summed up as “some, but not enough” – Ukraine has been supplied with increasingly more powerful weapons, but always too little, too late so they are never game changes. Ukraine needs some 300 state-of-the-art modern tanks and got 31. It needs some 200 F-16s and got 10. It wanted 22 Patriot batteries but had to make do with seven. And each time only after a huge debate and long delays.

The US doesn’t have a strategy other than to prevent Ukraine from losing. US President Joe Biden has repeatedly ignored Congress’ demands for the White House to lay out its war goals in a policy document despite repeated demands.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has shown amazing patience with this foot-dragging, but after more than two years, Kyiv is finally taking things into its own hands. It’s pretty obvious that the White House would never have okayed the Kursk incursion but as the frontline in Donbas starts to crumble, Zelenskiy had to do something. Crossing the Russian border should have also been crossing one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s red lines, only its turnout not to be a red line. The fact that Bankova dreamt this scheme up in obvious defiance of the White House’s wishes is in itself new.

The same is true with the request to use Nato-supplied long-range missiles on targets deep inside Russia. Zelenskiy is asking for this on a daily basis now. He even drew up a list of high value targets that he wants to hit and submitted it to the White House for approval – which predictably is ignoring it.

Fed up with waiting, and understandably outraged that Russia can hit anywhere in Ukraine with impunity, as it showed again with Monday’s barrage, while Ukraine can’t hit missile launchers parked on the Belgorod highway, just across the Ukrainian border, let alone the airbases 50km in, it’s taken things into its own hands and is developing its own ballistic missile that can strike deep into Russia, without permission from Washington. The US have already said they don’t object to the Kursk inclusion or targeting Russian oil refineries with homemade drones – as they can’t. It’s a fait accompli. The White House can’t do anything to stop Ukraine from using its own missiles to hit things far away in Russia.

And this has actually been going on for a while and the US is not happy about it. If you remember, the attacks on oil refineries started back in January when the Oryolnefteprodukt refinery in Oryol region was hit and have been escalating since then. (I keep a list of the attacks here.)

After a few months of this a semi-public row broke out where the White House asked Bankova to stop the attacks, afraid that they would drive up the price of gas at the pump, a political nightmare for Biden in an election year. But Bankova ignored the request. It hit the Omsk refinery earlier this week, Russia’s biggest.

In the end it didn’t matter as Russia reduced the amount of oil products it exported – it actually banned the export of petrol and diesel – but compensated with increasing the volume of crude exports. All that happened was the weight of refining shifted from Russia to Asia and the amount of oil products on the market stayed the same, as did the prices. The White House needn’t have worried.

Now things are about to go up another level. Up until now Ukraine’s long-range drones can’t carry more than 50kg of explosive so simply putting nets up over Russia’s refineries is enough to prevent serious damage. But if Ukraine can fly a missile carrying several hundred kilos of explosive to the Omsk refinery, that is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Bankova has come a long way from the first token attack on Moscow in March and May last year. Moscow is only 800km from the border, but last week Ukraine hit a target inside the Arctic Circle for the first time, over 2,000km away. I think we can expect some much more serious attacks on Russian energy and military infrastructure that the US will be powerless to prevent, so more red lines will be crossed. Bankova will obviously try to manage this process so hitting residential areas in Moscow is probably off the table, but major energy infrastructure assets or airfields will clearly be on the list.

Zelenskiy’s military goal will be to drive Russia’s forces back from the border like the success Kyiv already has had with emptying the Crimea of Russia’s Black Sea fleet after the peninsula came into range. And airfields will be the first to go as Russia introduced the deadly 3000kg FAB glide bombs this summer against which Ukraine has few defences, but have to be dropped from a fighter jet and only have a 50km range. Russia dropped over two dozen of these on the AFU in Kursk in a single day last week, according to Zelenskiy.

All this will freak the White House out as red lines will start to be crossed on a monthly basis, if – and it remains a very big if – Ukraine can produce enough of these $1mn-a-pop ballistic missiles fast enough. However, even a few hits will escalate tensions again – especially if Russian civilians are blown up in their beds, as Ukrainian civilians are on a daily basis. Having lost control of Ukraine’s access to powerful missiles, the White House will also have lost control of its escalation management programme.

This will only heighten tensions between Kyiv and Washington, which have, as I was writing about yesterday, very different risk profiles.

The US will worry about sparking a direct conflict between Russia and Nato. Zelenskiy doesn’t care. Why should he? An entire generation of Ukrainians have already been killed and the country is in ruins and will take at least two generations to recover if then. Zelenskiy is in this war to win. “I need ammo, not a ride,” he famously said right at the start of this war when the US offered to evacuate him.

Besides, everyone in the West – European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, I’m looking at you – have repeatedly said that they will back Ukraine “for as long as it takes” and until Ukraine’s “victory” which is clearly not the plan. The White House and Brussels will get caught up in its own rhetoric and have to support whatever the AFU decides to do.

Finally, to note that this new even more aggressive fifth stage strategy is also a race against time. Kyiv needs to make a difference before Pokrovsk falls in the next months and the first snows arrive, either of which could contribute a collapse of Ukraine’s defence. Yesterday, Kyiv reported that Russia has brought up 30,000 troops to Kursk, without weakening the Donbas frontline, who will go up against an estimated 12,000 AFU troops in the region. Even military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that the fight around Pokrovsk is not going well in his Independence Day speech.

Still, Ukraine has been fighting like a lion until now and there is no sign that Zelenskiy has any intention of giving up anytime soon. And now he has some powerful long-range missiles of his own.

On September 1st, 1983, a civilian Korean Airlines Flight (007) is shot down by a Soviet fighter jet for violating Soviet airspace. Because of a fatal mistake before take off, all 269 passengers on board tragically died. Tensions between the US and the Soviet Union were extremely high at this point.

Because this program was made well after the end of the Cold War, the Soviet fighter pilot who actually shot down flight 007 is interviewed.

From the Mayday: Air Crash Investigation series.

YouTube link here.

By Anatol Lieven, Foreign Policy, 8/27/24

Discussions have been happening for some time among Western policymakers, experts, and the wider public about how the war in Ukraine ought to end. I can confirm that the same type of conversations are happening in Russia.

I recently had the opportunity to speak, on the basis of confidentiality, to a wide range of members of the Russian establishment, including former diplomats, members of think tanks, academics, and businesspeople, as well as a few members of the wider public. Their ideas about the war, and the shape of its eventual ending, deserve to be better understood in the West and in Ukraine itself.

Only a small minority believed that Russia should fight for complete victory in Ukraine, including the annexation of large new areas of Ukrainian territory or the creation of a client regime in Kyiv. A large majority wanted an early cease-fire roughly along the existing battle lines. There is high confidence that the Ukrainian military will never be able to break through and reconquer significant amounts of Ukraine’s lost territories.

Most of my conversations took place before the Ukrainian invasion of the Russian province of Kursk. As far as I can make out, however, this Ukrainian success has not changed basic Russian calculations and views—not least because, at the same time, the Russian army has continued to make significant progress farther east, in the Donbas, where the Russians are closing in on the key town of Pokrovsk. “The attack on Kursk may help Ukraine eventually to get rather better terms, but nothing like a real victory,” in the words of one Russian security expert. “They will sooner or later have to withdraw from Kursk, but we will never withdraw from Crimea and the Donbas.”

The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk has undoubtedly been a serious embarrassment to the Putin administration. It comes on top of a long row of other embarrassing failures, beginning with the appallingly bad planning of the initial invasion. And among the informed Russian elites, I get very little sense of genuine respect for Russian President Vladimir Putin as a military leader—though by contrast, there is much more widespread approval of the government’s economic record in resisting Western sanctions and rebuilding Russian industry for war.

Yet a key reason for my contacts’ desires for compromise was that they believed that Russia should not, and probably could not, attempt to capture major Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv by force of arms. They pointed to the length of time, the high casualties, and the huge destruction that have been involved in taking even small cities like Bakhmut in the face of strong Ukrainian resistance. Any areas of the countryside in Kharkiv province that can be taken should therefore be regarded not as prizes but as bargaining counters in future negotiations.

Underlying this attitude is the belief that to create a Russian army large enough to attempt such a complete victory would require a massive new round of conscription and mobilization—perhaps leading to the kind of popular resistance now seen in Ukraine. The government has been careful to avoid conscripting people from Moscow and St. Petersburg, and to pay large salaries to soldiers conscripted from poorer areas. Neither of these limits could be maintained in the context of full mobilization.

Partly for the same reason, the idea of going beyond Ukraine to launch a future attack on NATO was dismissed by everyone with derision. As I was told, “Look, the whole point of all these warnings to NATO has been to stop NATO from joining the fight against us in Ukraine, because of the horrible dangers involved. Why in the name of God would we ourselves attack NATO and bring these dangers on ourselves? What could we hope to gain? That’s absurd!”

On the other hand, every single person with whom I spoke stated that there could be no withdrawal from territory held by Russia in the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims to have annexed. A majority suggested that any territory in other provinces like Kharkiv could be returned to Ukraine in return for them being demilitarized. This would help guarantee a cease-fire and would also allow Putin to claim that he had ensured the safety of adjacent Russian provinces, which in recent months have been subject to Ukrainian bombardment. Some more optimistic Russians thought that it might be possible to exchange territory in Kharkiv for territory in the four provinces, none of which is currently fully occupied by Russia.

I found this balance of opinion among the people with whom I spoke to be fairly plausible as a wider picture, because on the whole it corresponds closely to the views of the wider Russian public, as expressed in opinion polls conducted by organizations that in the past have been found reliable. Thus in a poll last year by the Levada Center, sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, respondents were exactly equal (62 percent) in their desire for immediate peace talks and in their refusal to return the annexed territories to Ukraine.

Among my contacts, there were no differences on the subject of Ukrainian neutrality, which everyone declared essential. However, it would seem that serious thought is being given by sections of the Russian establishment to the vexed question of how a peace settlement could be secured without formal Western military guarantees and supplies to Ukraine. Hence the widely discussed ideas of a peace treaty ratified by the U.N. Security Council and the BRICS, and of broad demilitarized zones secured by a U.N. force.

As a leading Russian foreign-policy analyst told me, “In the West, you seem to think that only military guarantees are any good. But political factors are also critical. We have invested enormous diplomatic effort in building up our relations with the global south, which certainly would not want a new war. Do you think that if we could get a peace deal that met our basic requirements, we would throw all that away by starting one?”

Most said that if in negotiations the West agreed with key Russian demands, Russia would scale down others. Thus on the Russian demand for the “denazification” of Ukraine, a few said that Russia should still aim for a “friendly” government in Kyiv. This seems to be code for regime change, since it is very hard to imagine any freely elected Ukrainian government being friendly to Russia for a very long time to come.

A large majority, however, said that if Russian conditions in other areas were met, Russia should content itself with the passage of a law banning neo-Nazi parties and symbols, modeled on a clause of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. My Russian interlocutors referred here to the treaty’s provisions for restrictions on certain categories of Austrian arms and for minority rights—in the case of Ukraine, the linguistic and cultural rights of the Russian-speaking population.

On one important point, opinion was unanimous: that there is no chance whatsoever of any international formal and legal recognition of the Russian annexations of Ukrainian territory, and that Russia would not press for this. It was recognized that this would be rejected not just by Ukraine and the West, but by China, India, and South Africa, none of which recognized Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The hope is therefore that as part of a peace settlement, the issue of these territories’ status will be deferred for endless future negotiation (as the Ukrainian government proposed with regard to Crimea in March 2022), until eventually everyone forgets about it. The example of the (unrecognized but practically uncontested) Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was mentioned. This means that Ukraine would not be asked publicly to “give up” these territories; only to recognize the impossibility of reconquering them by force.

In the end, of course, Russia’s negotiating position will be decided by Putin—with whom I did not speak. His public position was set out in his “peace proposal” on the eve of the West’s “peace summit” in Switzerland in June. In this, he offered an immediate cease-fire if Ukraine withdrew its forces from the remainder of the Ukrainian provinces claimed by Russia and promised not to seek admission to NATO.

On the face of it, this is ridiculous. Ukraine is never going to voluntarily abandon the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. However, Putin did not say that Russia will then occupy these territories. This leaves open the possibility that Putin would accept a deal in which these areas would be demilitarized but under Ukrainian administration and that—like the Russian-occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces—their status would be subject to future negotiation.

Nobody I spoke to in Moscow claimed to know for sure what Putin is thinking. However, the consensus was that while he made terrible mistakes at the start of the war, he is a pragmatist capable of taking military advice and recognizing military reality. Thus when in November 2022 Russian generals advised him that to attempt to hold Kherson city risked military disaster, he ordered withdrawal —even though Kherson was in territory that Russia claimed to have annexed and was also Russia’s only bridgehead west of the Dnipro River. Its loss has vastly reduced Russian hopes of being able to capture Odessa and the rest of Ukraine’s coast.

But while Putin might accept what he would regard as a compromise now, everyone with whom I spoke in Moscow said that Russian demands will be determined by what happens on the battlefield. If the Ukrainians can hold roughly their existing line, then it will be along this line that an eventual cease-fire will run. But if the Ukrainians collapse, then in the words of one Russian ex-soldier, “Peter and Catherine are still waiting”; and Peter the Great and Catherine the Great between them conquered the whole of what is now eastern and southern Ukraine for Russia.

By Malcom Kyeyune, UnHerd, 8/21/24

To understand the truth about the Nord Stream pipeline, one needs to master a certain form of “Kremlinology”. Everything about it is designed to obfuscate, every strand shrouded in prevarication and deceit.

From the start, the investigation was a textbook cover-up. The Swedish government rushed to secure evidence, citing their putative rights under international law, consciously boxing out any sort of independent, UN-backed inspection. Of course, after gathering all the evidence, the Swedish authorities studiously did exactly nothing, only to then belatedly admit that it actually had no legal right to monopolise the information in the first place.

The Germans, for their part, were also supremely uninterested in figuring out who pulled off the worst act of industrial sabotage in living memory against their country. In fact, over the course of a year-long non-investigation, we’ve mostly been treated to leaks and off-the-record statements indicating that nobody really wants to know who blew up the pipeline. The rationale here is bluntly obvious: it would be awfully inconvenient if Germany, and the West, learned the true answer.

Thus, the recent revelation that the true mastermind behind the ongoing deindustrialisation of Germany was none other than a Ukrainian by the name of “Volodymyr Z.” must have come as an unwelcome surprise. For not only is the idea that the authorities have suddenly cracked open the Nord Stream case not credible in the slightest, but the sloppy way in which the entire country of Ukraine is now being fingered is likely not an accident. Indeed, at the same time as the ghost of Nord Stream has risen from the grave, the German government announced its plans to halve its budget for Ukraine aid: whatever is already in the pipeline will be sent over, but no new grants of equipment are forthcoming. The German government is hunkering down for increased austerity, and so it is cutting Ukraine loose.

Germany, of course, is hardly alone. Even if there were enough money to go around, Europe is increasingly not just deindustrialising but demilitarising. Its stores of ammunition and vehicles are increasingly empty, and the idea of military rearmament — that is, creating entirely new military factories and supply chains — at a time when factories are closing down across the continent due to energy shortages and lack of funding is a non-starter. Neither France, the United Kingdom nor even the United States are in a position to maintain the flow of arms to Ukraine. This is a particular concern inside Washington DC, where planners are now trying to juggle the prospect of managing three theatres of war at the same time — in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific — even though US military production is arguably insufficient to comfortably handle one.

And so, in an effort to save face in this impossible situation, Ukraine is now being held solely responsible for doing something it either did not do at all, or only did with the permission, knowledge, and/or support of the broader West. This speaks to the adolescent dynamic that now governs Western foreign policy in a multipolar world: when our impotence is revealed, find someone to blame.

The war in Ukraine, after all, was already supposed to be won, and Russia was supposed to be a rickety gas station incapable of matching the West either economically or militarily. Yet here we are: our own economies are deindustrialising, our military factories have proven completely incapable of handling the strain of a real conflict, and the Americans themselves are now openly admitting that the Russian military remains in a significantly stronger position. Meanwhile, Germany’s economic model is broken, and as its economy falls, it will drag many countries such as Sweden with it, given how dependent they are on exporting to German industrial firms.

10 years ago, during the 2014 Maidan protests, the realist John Mearsheimer caused a lot of controversy when he began warning that the collective West was leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and that our actions would lead to the destruction of the country. Well, here we are. At present, our only saving grace is the continuing offensive in Kursk — a bold offensive that will surely be remembered as a symptom of Ukraine’s increasing desperation.

Indeed, a far better guide of things to come can be found in the fingering of “Volodymyr Z.” as the true culprit behind the Nord Stream sabotage. Here, rather than accept responsibility for the fact that Ukraine was goaded into a war it could not win — mainly because the West vastly overestimated its own ability to fight a real war over the long haul — European geopolitical discourse will take a sharp turn towards a peculiar sort of victim-blaming. No doubt it will be “discovered” that parts of Ukraine’s military consisted of very unsavoury characters waving around Nazi Germany-style emblems, just as it will be “discovered” that journalists have been persecuted by oligarchs and criminals in Kyiv, or that money given by the West has been stolen, and that arms sent have been sold for profit to criminal cartels around the world.

All of these developments will duly be “discovered” by a Western political class that will completely refuse to accept any responsibility for them. Far easier, it seems, to calm one’s nerves with a distorting myth: it’s the Ukrainians’ fault that their country is destroyed; our choices had nothing to do with it; and besides, they were bad people who tricked us!

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 8/27/24

In my last appearance on Judging Freedom, Judge Napolitano asked me whether the Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk region would be ended by the time of our next chat, two days from today. The implicit assumption behind this question is that the Russians were doing so well destroying all the NATO-supplied tanks, personnel carriers and other advanced equipment, they were killing and maiming so many Ukrainian troops by their carpet bombing and heavy glide bombing of the region, that none but a rag tag collection of invaders would be left to liquidate or take prisoner in the several days ahead.

This assumption was founded in the confident declarations of my peers in the Opposition or, shall we say, ‘dissident’ movement in the United States. And their certainty, which was reflected in the over-hyped titles given to the recordings of their interviews on youtube came from back channels in Russia that my peers have been using for their public statements.

For example, the very widely watched Scott Ritter revealed in a recent interview that he has been in touch with the commander of the Chechen forces now engaged in Kursk, Alaudinov. Such contact is entirely credible given the fact that Ritter visited Grozny earlier this year, met with the republic’s leader Kadyrov, participated in a review of the Chechen troops and surely met with some of their military chiefs.

Indeed, in view of the seeming consensus that the Russian recovery of Kursk is proceeding apace, with 4,000 of the estimated 12,000 invaders having been killed up to last Thursday, I also foresaw an early end to the conflict, though not necessarily measured in one week. As I explained, the Russian Ministry of Defense only claims territorial gains when it has thoroughly combed the territory and assured itself there are no enemy forces hiding out here or there. The 1,000 square kilometers initially occupied by the Ukrainians are a lot of ground to comb

However, I have had my reasonable doubts about the value of using such back channels as Alaudinov. Back in the days of the battle for Bakhmut, we saw a lot of Alaudinov on the Sixty Minutes news and talk show. Each day presenter Olga Skabeyeva warmly welcomed him on air and he handled himself very well, speaking optimistically of Russia’s progress but giving no specifics that could be of use to the enemy. In short, his lips were sealed. I find it hard to believe that such a professional soldier and patriot would give anything of use to a foreigner, however friendly he or she might be to the Russian cause.

Last night’s edition of the talk show The Great Game gave a very different picture of the state of conflict in Kursk from what my peers are saying and of where this proxy war may be headed NOW, not in some distant future.

See https://rutube.ru/video/f8abcf8a37c43568ef44089025726934/

The key personality in this discussion was Frants Klintsevich, identified on the video as leader of the Russian Union of Veterans of Afghanistan. His Wikipedia entry further informs us that after serving as a Duma member for many years he is now a Senator, i.e., a member of the upper chamber of Russia’s bicameral legislature. He has represented the city administration of Smolensk in the western part of the Russian Federation, where he is no stranger, having been born just across the border in what is now the independent state of Belarus.

For 22 years ending in 1997, Klintsevich was an officer in Russia’s Armed Forces, serving primarily with the parachutists, meaning that he has guts and knows what it means to face battle. He retired with the rank of colonel, but continued his military education in the Military Academy of the General Staff, graduating in 2004. He also has a Ph.D. in psychology and is a gifted linguist, with command of German, Polish, and Belarussian. He is a member of the steering committee of the ruling United Russia party. I bring this out to make the point that Klintsevich is no garden variety ‘talking head’ but a very authoritative source.

And his testimony on The Great Game is the kind of Open Source on which I rely to say what I do about current Russian affairs.

Klintsevich’s commentary last night was intended to sober up the television audience and explain why the fight in Kursk is far more complicated and challenging than anyone is saying either on Russian or on Western news. It suggests that Russian casualties among its armed forces may be far more serious than anyone would suppose.

Klintsevich’s commentary lays the foundation for a dramatic Russian escalation of the proxy war into a hot war threatening to become WWIII. Why? Because the so-called Zelensky gambit in Kursk is fully enabled by the United States and its NATO allies, using skills, satellite and airborne reconnaissance, command and control resources in real time that are superior to anything the Russians possess. It also has Western including U.S. boots on the ground. And in conditions like this, the disadvantaged side faces a strong temptation to go for the great equalizer, nuclear arms, to defend itself and to assure its victory.

Klintsevich also said what I have not seen elsewhere, given the ubiquitous belief in Opposition interviews that the Ukrainians in Kursk are cut off from sources of supply: that Kiev has now raised the number of its forces sent to Kursk from 12,000 to 20,000.

In short, the Zelensky gambit that is being enabled fully by the United States is not a PR stunt but a full-blown invasion intended to be the vanguard of what will be an air assault on Russia’s strategic assets far in the rear using JASSM, Storm Shadow and other long-range missiles launched from F16s.

Klintsevich has further intimated that the two U.S. aircraft carriers and their escorts now in the Eastern Mediterranean may be there not to contain Iran but for an all-out attack on Russia using their jets to deliver nuclear strikes. I add to his analysis that this may explain the knock-out of Russia’s early warning radar stations in the south of the country by Ukrainian drones acting on orders from Washington.

So far, the Russian response to these gathering storm clouds has been two days in succession of massive missile and drone attacks on critical infrastructure in Ukraine. But let us not have any illusions: if the Russians sense that the United States is about to pounce on them, to use the assets in Ukraine and beyond not just against Russian planes, which have been moved back beyond the 900 km range of the JASSM and Storm Shadows, but on critical civilian infrastructure to disable the war effort, then a preventive Russian attack on NATO, on the continental United States. not to mince words, is entirely conceivable.

All of this is sure to play out in the weeks before 4 November and the U.S. elections. The Biden administration is evidently committed to a struggle to the death. Who will flinch? Who will “win” is an open question. Washington, you have been forewarned by Mr. Klintsevich, who is surely speaking on behalf of the Kremlin.