By Igor Kossov, The Kyiv Independent, 3/5/23

KOSTIANTYNIVKA, Donetsk Oblast – Russia’s relentless assault on Bakhmut is sacrificing waves and waves of unprepared men being sent to their deaths.

But multiple defenders of this embattled city in Donetsk Oblast feel that they are in a similar boat, according to interviews with more than a dozen soldiers currently fighting in or around Bakhmut.

During their brief visits to the nearby town of Kostiantynivka, Ukrainian infantrymen told the Kyiv Independent of unprepared, poorly-trained battalions being thrown into the front line meat grinder to survive as best they could with little support from armored vehicles, mortars, artillery, drones and tactical information.

“We don’t get any support,” says a soldier named Serhiy, who has been fighting on the front lines in Bakhmut, sitting down with his friend, also named Serhiy, for a conversation in a small cafe in the Kostiantynivka market. Both men are in their 40s but one of them is a bit older than the other.

All soldiers in this article have been identified only by first name or callsign because they spoke to a publication without authorization by a press officer. 

They say that Russian artillery, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers are often allowed to strike Ukrainian positions for hours or days without being shut down by Ukrainian heavy weapons. Some complained of poor coordination and situational awareness, allowing this to happen or making it even worse.

Mortarmen spoke of extreme ammunition scarcity and having to use weapons dating back to World War II. Drones that are supposed to provide critical reconnaissance information are also scarce and are being lost at very high rates in some parts of the battlefield.

All this leads to terrifying casualties of both dead and wounded. “The battalion came in in the middle of December… between all the different platoons, there were 500 of us,” says Borys, a combat medic from Odesa Oblast fighting around Bakhmut. “A month ago, there were literally 150 of us.”

“When you go out to the position, it’s not even a 50/50 chance that you’ll come out of there (alive),” says the older Serhiy. “It’s more like 30/70.”

The Office of the President of Ukraine has claimed that Russia may have lost tens of thousands of men during the Battle of Bakhmut as of mid-January. Fighting has since only intensified, with Ukraine repeatedly claiming close to a thousand Russians dead in its daily updates. As Bakhmut is seeing the heaviest fighting, most of these casualties are likely in that area. Authorities haven’t revealed any information on Ukrainian losses in the Battle of Bakhmut.

Based on the soldiers’ testimonies, Ukrainian losses appear to be high as well.

Worse by the day

Bakhmut has been the site of very heavy fighting for months, but in the past few weeks, Russian attacks have intensified to an insane degree according to most interviewees. 

Multiple soldiers say that they are under massive assault from both Wagner Group mercenaries and regular Russian forces.

“There’s Wagner and there’s two brigades of airborne assault,” says Oleksandr, an infantryman from Sumy, who is part of a Ukrainian assault battalion in Bakhmut. “It’s rough. Constant waves, nonstop.”

Some have characterized the Russian attacks as huge waves of cannon fodder, while others say that the invaders’ tactics have evolved to keep up with the battlefield.

The older Serhiy says that the enemy likes to send a team of three or four expendable foot soldiers to attack and make the Ukrainians expose themselves by shooting at them. At that point, the more elite forces zero in on the defenders’ position.

Once they begin exchanging fire, the Ukrainians are struck with heavier weapons like Russian mortars and rockets from Grad multiple launch rocket systems or BMP infantry fighting vehicles and BTR armored personnel carriers with machine guns.

“They get the positions where we are, establish the coordinates, then they hit us from seven to nine kilometers out with mortars,” as well as from closer by with grenade launchers, says the older Serhiy. “They wait for the house to fall so we have to jump out. The building catches fire and then they try to finish us off.”

“Their birds come out and they chase us with fire,” adds the younger Serhiy, referring to Russian UAVs, like quadcopters and Orlan-10 fixed wing drones that spot distant heavy weapons. “They hit accurately.”

As Russians destroy more and more buildings, Ukrainians keep losing more places where they can reliably take cover. Borys the medic says people have been lost when their entrenched positions collapsed from heavy Russian fire, suffocating them.

“I’ll put it like this, we should get our people out because if we don’t take off, then in the next few weeks, it’s going to be bad,” says Oleksandr. A mortarman named Illia agrees that Bakhmut is “practically encircled.”

On March 3, a key bridge connecting Bakhmut with the village of Khromove on its edge was destroyed. This was a vital artery for evacuating civilians and transporting supplies from the town of Chasiv Yar. CNN reported and soldiers confirmed that the bridge was destroyed by a Russian attack.

The Institute for the Study of War on March 3 said that it appeared that Ukrainian forces were preparing the battlefield for an orderly withdrawal from Bakhmut, but followed up with a March 4 evaluation that Russian forces are unlikely to surround the city soon.

Military leadership denied that Ukrainian forces are pulling out and said that Ukrainian forces will only withdraw from the city if they have to.

No support

Some infantrymen told the Kyiv Independent that they often can’t rely on friendly artillery and mortar attacks against heavier Russian weapons.

“A mortar could be attacking us for three hours, we wait for support, there’s no support,” says the older Serhiy.

“They tell us hang on, you will get support in half an hour to an hour. We wait for seven hours, there’s no support,” the younger Serhiy chimes in.

Russian forces don’t seem to have this problem, the two comrades say. Russian shelling and attacks with vehicle-mounted weapons are abundant. When Ukrainian forces do get mortar support, the mortars often miss by a wide margin, some soldiers claim.

Ukrainian troops also say they acutely feel the lack of infantry vehicles on the front lines. With the exception of light Territorial Defense forces, the Ukrainian infantry is supposed to be mechanized, per military policy.

“I heard that infantry (units) need to be mechanized,” says the older Serhiy. “We, it seems, are following the old system, no one knows this. Where are our BMPs? Where is our artillery?”

Illia confirms that what is supposed to be mechanized infantry on paper, is often just infantry on foot in practice. He says Ukraine critically needs infantry vehicles, as the insufficiently few that it has are being expended in combat.

The two Serhiys questioned why they were seeing Ukrainian infantry fighting vehicles in the rear lines, while on the front they barely see them at all.

“Why are they here? They should be over there,” says the older Serhiy. “Here, it’s waiting for them (the Russians) to come. It could have been used to destroy them over there.”

No ammo

Illia, a mortarman with the 3017th unit of Ukraine’s National Guard offers a simple explanation for the lack of indirect support fire.

“When we get ammo, we get 10 shells per day, 120 millimeter shells,” Illia says. “That’s enough for one minute of work.”    

The mortars themselves date back to the years 1938-1943 and hitting something with them “takes a miracle.” But Ukrainian mortars still manage to hit their targets despite all these challenges, he says.”We need ammo, ammo, ammo,” Illia adds. “If we keep getting 10 shells, Bakhmut will quickly be surrounded.”

The younger Serhiy says the mortar shells are often old and useless, either failing to fly on target or failing to explode.

This is not the case everywhere. Mykola, a mortarman from Odesa Oblast, says that with Soviet ammo dwindling to critical levels, his unit now gets NATO mortar shells, even though their tubes are still from World War II.

But Mykola confirms that they don’t get enough ammo. Mortar shells were more abundant when Ukraine defended the town of Soledar but since the battle moved to Bakhmut itself, there were shortages, he says.

Poor communication

Some say the disorganization goes beyond ammunition shortages. 

The younger Serhiy says that logistics and signals are of very poor quality, adding that his battalion fails to make good use of its drone, which provides no help in the urban battlefield.

While units have access to radios to communicate, a lack of better communication equipment and specialists to operate it leads to some very difficult moments, the younger Serhiy adds.

A Russian BTR terrorized Ukrainian infantry around a part of Bakhmut for a month, without being shot by heavy weapons even once, even though it had been reported up the chain of command multiple times and multiple soldiers confirmed the casualties it was causing.

“That’s why positions get given up,” says the younger Serhiy. “They wouldn’t be given up if you could transmit that a BTR’s been riding around for a month (shooting people). If they took care of that BTR, the positions would have been secure.”

Multiple soldiers say there aren’t enough drones or people to use them properly, which is why they are often being lost, on top of being forced down by the Russians’ electronic countermeasures.

Callsign Lawyer, an aerial reconnaissance specialist based in Kostyantinivka who goes on missions closer to the front with a drone team, says drones are in fewer numbers in Bakhmut than they are outside it and attrition rates are higher there. Russians have many directional electronic weapons that can force close-flying drones to land.

Poor preparation

Multiple soldiers say Bakhmut troops are barely given enough time to learn to shoot a rifle – sometimes their training is just 2 weeks, before they’re dropped into the hottest parts of the most intense current battle of the war. They would have preferred for troops to get a minimum of two or three months of training before being deployed to such a hot spot.

“Two weeks’ live training and they’re sent here. You can’t do that,” says the older Serhiy. “Or it’s a person who once served in the army, how long ago was that? Obviously they forgot everything.”

“We were promised that we wouldn’t be sent to the zero line right away, that at first we’d be sent to the second or third line,” he continues. “And then we came here in the middle of the night and they immediately sent us to Bakhmut.”

“Obviously a person starts freaking out. To tell you the truth, if they didn’t fire at me first, I wouldn’t have fired a shot. But I have bullets coming within 50 centimeters of me, that’s when I started shooting.”

According to both soldiers named Serhiy, most brigades are insufficiently trained and lack the experience for an environment as brutal as Bakhmut. People are taken at night to a place they’d never seen before and the battle starts in the morning.

“This is why positions are abandoned, people are there for the first time,” says the younger Serhiy. “I went to a position three times and was given six people who hadn’t fought at all before. We had a few dead and wounded that had to be evacuated… Our people are not being protected.”

Oleksandr confirms that while some battalions fighting in Bakhmut are well-trained and ready, most of them aren’t and many were thrown in at night without much preparation. “Yes, that’s true, my battalion was not prepared,” he says. After five months without a single break from the fighting, only half of Oleksandr’s battalion is left, he says.

“They shouldn’t have rushed to throw everyone in there,” says the younger Serhiy. “Better to abandon those positions, who cares? It’s better to properly train people.”

TASS, 2/22/23

MOSCOW, February 22. /TASS/. Pollsters have noted significant growth in all the main indicators characterizing Russians’ attitudes toward President Vladimir Putin and other institutions of power over the past year, head of the political analysis division of the Russian Public Opinion Research Center Mikhail Mamonov said.

“The effect of consolidation around the leader remains. Over the past year, we have recorded a significant increase in all the main indicators of attitudes toward the president. First of all, this is the trust indicator: it stood at 78% by the end of 2022, which is 13 percentage points higher compared to 2021 (65%) – that’s a lot, an insane amount,” Mamonov said on Wednesday during a roundtable discussion at the Expert Institute for Social Research, commenting on the poll results conducted over the year among 1,600 adults aged 18 and over.

According to his information, the increase in the annual average of the president’s approval in 2022 was 15 percentage points (75% vs. 60% in 2021). “The biggest dynamic was seen in the legitimacy indicator, which we assess through the attitude towards the actions in whose interests the government works, the majority or the minority. About 73% of respondents now say that the president acts in the interests of the majority, which is a 20-point increase (53% in 2021). This is a lot,” Mamonov said.

According to him, the polls also show an increase in the legitimacy of all government bodies. “This applies to the federal authorities, the government, the State Duma, the Federation Council, and regional authorities. The level of support and approval of the activities of these institutions has increased significantly. This allows us to talk about the growth of stability of the system, about the strengthening of its legitimacy as a whole,” Mamonov stressed.

According to him, 54% of respondents say that “the country’s top leaders have a long-term development strategy.” Mamonov points out that the polls were conducted before President Putin’s State of the Nation Address to the Federal Assembly, so “this number will increase now, since the public has heard the answers to some of the questions it has been interested in.”

By Krishen Mehta, ACURA, 2/22/23

In October 2022, about eight months after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the University of Cambridge in the UK harmonized surveys that asked the inhabitants of 137 countries about their views of the West, Russia, and China. The findings in the combined study are robust enough to demand our serious attention.

• Of the 6.3 billion people who live outside of the West, 66% feel positively towards Russia, and 70% feel positively towards China.
• 75% of respondents in South Asia, 68% of respondents  in Francophone Africa, and 62% of respondents in Southeast Asia report feeling positively toward Russia.
• Public opinion of Russia remains positive in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam. 

These findings have caused some surprise and even anger in the West. It’s difficult for Western thought leaders to comprehend that two-thirds of the world’s population is just not lining up with the West in this conflict. However, I believe there are five reasons why the Global South is not taking the West’s side. I discuss these reasons in the short essay below. 

1. The Global South does not believe that the West understands or empathizes with its problems.

India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, summed it up succinctly in a recent interview: “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” Developing countries face many challenges, from the aftermath of the pandemic, the high cost of debt service, and the climate crisis that is ravaging their environments, to the pain of poverty, food shortages, droughts, and high energy prices. Yet the West has barely given lip service to the seriousness of many of these issues, even while insisting that the Global South join it in sanctioning Russia. 

The Covid pandemic is a perfect example. Despite the Global South’s repeated pleas to share intellectual property on the vaccines with the goal of saving lives, no Western nation has been willing to do so. Africa remains to this day the most unvaccinated continent in the world. African nations have the manufacturing capability to make the vaccines, but without the necessary intellectual property, they remain dependent on imports. 

But help did come from Russia, China, and India. Algeria launched a vaccination program in January 2021 after it received its first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines. Egypt started vaccinations after receiving China’s Sinopharm vaccine at about the same time, while South Africa procured a million doses of AstraZeneca from the Serum Institute of India. In Argentina, Sputnik became the backbone of the national vaccine program. This all happened while the West was using its financial resources to buy millions of doses in advance, then often destroying them when they expired. The message to the Global South was clear — the pandemic in your countries is your problem, not ours. 

2. History matters: who stood where during colonialism and after independence? 

Many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia view the war in Ukraine through a different lens than the West. They see their former colonial powers regrouped as members of the Western alliance. This alliance — for the most part, members of the European Union and NATO or the closest allies of the US in the Asia-Pacific region — makes up the countries that have sanctioned Russia. By contrast, many countries in Asia, and almost all countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, have tried to remain on good terms with both Russia and the West, shunning sanctions against Russia. Could this be because they remember their history at the receiving end of the West’s colonial policies, a trauma that they still live with but which the West has mostly forgotten?

Nelson Mandela often said that it was the Soviet Union’s support, both moral and material, that helped inspire South Africans to overthrow the Apartheid regime. Because of this, Russia is still viewed in a favorable light by many African countries. And once independence came for these countries, it was the Soviet Union that supported them, despite its own limited resources. Egypt’s Aswan Dam, completed in 1971, was designed by the Moscow-based Hydro Project Institute and financed in large part by the Soviet Union. The Bhilai Steel Plant, one of the first large infrastructure projects in newly independent India, was set up by the USSR in 1959. 

Other countries also benefited from the political and economic support provided by the former Soviet Union, including Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Mozambique. On February 18, 2023, at the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the foreign minister of Uganda, Jeje Odongo, had this to say: “We were colonized and forgave those who colonized us. Now the colonizers are asking us to be enemies of Russia, who never colonized us. Is that fair? Not for us. Their enemies are their enemies. Our friends are our friends.”

Rightly or wrongly, present-day Russia is seen by many countries in the Global South as an ideological successor to the former Soviet Union. Fondly remembering the USSR’s help, they now view Russia in a unique and often favorable light. Given the painful history of colonization, can we blame them?

3. The war in Ukraine is seen by the Global South as mainly about the future of Europe rather than the future of the entire world.

The history of the Cold War has taught developing countries that getting embroiled in great power conflicts carries enormous risks but returns scant, if any, rewards. As a consequence, they view the Ukraine proxy war as one that is more about the future of European security than the future of the entire world. From the Global South’s perspective, the Ukraine war seems to be an expensive distraction from its own most pressing issues. These include higher fuel prices, rising food prices, higher debt service costs, and more inflation, all of which Western sanctions against Russia have greatly aggravated.

A recent survey published by Nature Energy states that up to 140 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty by the soaring energy prices seen over the past year. High energy prices not only directly impact energy bills — they also lead to upward price pressures along supply chains and ultimately on consumer items, including food and other necessities. This across-the-board inflation inevitably hurts developing countries much more than the West.  

The West can sustain the war “as long as it takes.” They have the financial resources and the capital markets to do so, and of course they remain deeply invested in the future of European security. But the Global South does not have the same luxury, and a war for the future of security in Europe has the potential to devastate the security of the entire world. The Global South is alarmed that the West is not pursuing negotiations that could bring this war to an early end, beginning with the missed opportunity in December 2021, when Russia proposed revised security treaties for Europe that could have prevented the war but which were rejected by the West. The peace negotiations of April 2022 in Istanbul were also rejected by the West in part to “weaken” Russia. Now, the entire world — but especially the developing world — is paying the price for an invasion that the Western media like to call “unprovoked” but which likely could have been avoided, and which the Global South has always seen as a local rather than an international conflict.

4. The world economy is no longer dominated by America or led by the West. The Global South now has other options.

Several countries in the Global South increasingly see their futures as tied to countries that are no longer in the Western sphere of influence. Whether this view reflects an accurate perception of the shifting balance of power or wishful thinking is partially an empirical question, so let’s look at some metrics.

The US share of global output declined from 21 percent in 1991 to 15 percent in 2021, while China’s share rose from 4% to 19% during the same period. China is the largest trading partner for most of the world, and its GDP in purchasing power parity already exceeds that of the US. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa) had a combined GDP in 2021 of $42 trillion, compared with $41 trillion in the US-led G7. Their population of 3.2 billion is more than 4.5 times the combined population of the G7 countries, which stands at 700 million. 

The BRICS are not imposing sanctions on Russia nor supplying arms to the opposing side. Russia is one of the biggest suppliers of energy and foodgrains for the Global South, while China’s Belt and Road Initiative remains a major supplier of financing and infrastructure projects. When it comes to financing, food, energy, and infrastructure, the Global South must rely more on China and Russia more than on the West. The Global South also sees the Shanghai Cooperation Organization expanding, more countries wanting to join the BRICS, and some countries now trading in currencies that move them away from the dollar, the Euro, or the West. Meanwhile, some countries in Europe are risking deindustrialization thanks to higher energy costs. This reveals an economic vulnerability in the West that was not so evident before the war. With developing countries having an obligation to put the interests of their own citizens first, is it any wonder that they see their future more and more tied to countries outside the West?

5. The “rules-based international order” is losing credibility and in decline.

The vaunted “rules-based international order” is the bulwark of post–World War II liberalism, but many countries in the Global South see it as having been conceived by the West and imposed unilaterally on other countries. Few if any non-Western countries ever signed on to this order. The South is not opposed to a rules-based order, but rather to the present content of these rules as conceived by the West.

But one must also ask, does the rules-based international order apply even to the West?

For decades now, many in the Global South have seen the West as having its way with the world without much concern for playing by the rules. Several countries were invaded at will, mostly without United Nations Security Council authorization. These include the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Under what “rules” were those countries attacked or devastated, and were those wars provoked or unprovoked? Julian Assange is languishing in prison and Ed Snowden remains in exile, both for having the courage (or perhaps the audacity) to expose the truths behind these and similar actions.  

Even today, sanctions imposed on over 40 countries by the West impose considerable hardship and suffering. Under what international law or “rules-based order” did the West use its economic strength to impose these sanctions? Why are the assets of Afghanistan still frozen in Western banks while the country is facing starvation and famine? Why is Venezuelan gold still held hostage in the UK while the people of Venezuela are living at subsistence levels? And if Sy Hersh’s expose is true, under what ‘rules-based order’ did the West destroy the Nord Stream pipelines? 

A paradigm shift appears to be taking place. We’re moving from a Western-dominated to a more multipolar world. The war in Ukraine has made more evident the international divergences that are driving this shift. Partly because of its own history, and partly because of emerging economic realities, the Global South sees a multipolar world as a preferable outcome, one in which its voice is more likely to be heard. 

President Kennedy ended his American University speech in 1963 with the following words: “We must do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless for its success. Confident and unafraid, we must labor on towards a strategy of peace.” That strategy of peace was the challenge before us in 1963, and it remains a challenge for us today. The voices for peace, including those of the Global South, need to be heard.

Krishen Mehta is a member of the Board of the American Committee for US Russia Accord, and a Senior Global Justice Fellow at Yale University.

By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 3/4/23

Stephen Bryen is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute.

Ukrainian forces are pulling out of Bakhmut and the battle for the small Donetsk city is nearly finished. So what happens next?

There appear to be two stages to the Bakhmut pullout. The first started perhaps a month ago, though that isn’t certain. The troops pulled out comprised foreign fighters and Yellow Armband troops.

The Russians say they have not seen any foreign fighters for about a month. Most of these were said to be from Georgia and Abkhazia. (Abkhazia is the area in Georgia carved out by the Russians and declared an independent entity.)

The Yellow Armband troops are professional and well-trained Ukrainian “heavy” military units. They have mostly been used on the flanks protecting the city of Bakhmut, trying to stop the Russian encirclement.

Within the city are so-called Green Armband troops. They are not well trained and are mostly recent conscripts. Mainly they carry small arms, which they fire from buildings and other covered positions. Many of them are underage or, alternatively, overage.

According to Yevgeny Prighozin, head of the Wagner Group paramilitary organization, the Green Armbands are starting to leave the city, having already pulled out from most of the eastern parts. Reports say they are either using a country road or walking across farm fields.

As it now stands, the end of the battle is at most a few days away, although the Ukrainians have launched a counteroffensive to the west and south of a town called Ivanivske. The operation may be meant to hold off a wider encirclement of Ukrainian forces that the Russians appear to have launched.

The Yellow Armband Ukrainian forces trying to relieve Ivanivske are deploying a number of infantry fighting vehicles, but so far few if any tanks. Whether Ukraine’s army can actually hold off a wider Russian operation remains to be seen.

But the Ukrainians are low on soldiers and ammunition, so it isn’t clear they can sustain a hard hit if that’s what the Russians intend to launch.

Up next: Crimea

The US and NATO likely see the handwriting on the wall if the Ukrainians continue to try and hold territory in the Donbas region.

While the US thinks that Russia failed to succeed in its original objectives in the Donbas and in forcing a governmental change in Kiev, the long-term picture looks troublesome as the Russians have not only improved their tactics but also appear willing to pay the price and grind down Ukraine’s army.

Likewise, it is by now clear that it will take more than a few years in the US and Europe to rebuild ammunition and equipment stocks, while the Russians seem to have put their defense manufacturing on a full-time, day-and-night basis to bring supplies to the front.

There are two key signals of a possible US-NATO change in strategy that are perceptible if we understand that NATO, at least so far, does what the US says it needs to do.

New deliveries of special types of long-range ammunition to Kiev are the first signal. The second is the publicized switch by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland to favoring a refocus on retaking Crimea in a new Ukrainian offensive.

“[W]e will support Ukraine for as long as it takes. Ukraine is fighting for the return of all of its land within its international borders. We are supporting them, including in preparing a next hard push to regain their territory…Crimea must be—at a minimum, at a minimum—demilitarized.”

Nuland’s view is not supported fully by the State Department or the Pentagon, largely because of concern Russia may choose to attack Western supply lines in retaliation, leading to a broader war in Eastern Europe, starting with Poland and Romania.

Both Poland and Romania, one should recall, are historical Russian stomping grounds. Joseph Stalin decided to support the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in August 1939 because the Soviet leader saw it as giving him part of Poland and Romania’s oil fields.

There is a famous story that circulated during the Cold War about a Polish soldier facing an invasion by Russian tanks on one axis and German tanks on the other. Standing there with one antitank weapon, what should he choose? Deciding to fire on the Russian tanks, the Polish soldier supposedly says, “Business before pleasure.”

Fast forward to the present, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is known to worry about a wider conflict but may well have lost out to Nuland, a major proponent of the Ukraine war who wants at a minimum regime change in Moscow.

The evidence that Nuland has won the argument starts with the fact Biden has announced a new long-range weapons program for Ukraine and is also sending mobile bridging equipment that could help the Ukrainian army attack Russian forces in a Crimea offensive.

Such an operation itself would start with long-range glide bombs – joint direct attack munitions (JADAM), HIMARS with long-range, ground-launched, small-diameter bombs (GLDSB) and artillery strikes. It would then develop into a land offensive against Crimea. 

The operational problem is that this scenario would require fighter planes that can fly to high altitudes of around 30,000 feet before launching JDAMS, kits that fit on “iron” bombs to give them GPS guidance. But a bomb glides to its target, so to achieve standoff range high-flying aircraft are required.

This would require Ukraine to use its MIG-29s, but it has few of the fighters left. Thus the latest arms deliveries may include, in some form or another, Western aircraft probably flown by NATO pilots.

This would amount to a direct declaration of war, as both Blinken (who is against it) and Nuland (who is for it) understand. To launch such an offensive, for example as soon as this May, there’s no alternative to using Western aircraft.

There is bipartisan Congressional support for F-16s for Ukraine, although that support is for Ukrainians to fly them, which is unlikely in the next three months.

The Nuland threat to Crimea appears more and more to be a foregone conclusion: a US policy with existential implications for Europe and perhaps also for America.

The issue was decided by the new arms shipments (two separate announcements as late as March 3 US time). While no published decision has been made and Biden has been silent, the equipment being sent could only be intended for Nuland’s offensive on Crimea.

If there were a public announcement of a decision supporting Nuland, Blinken would likely have a heart attack – but the US is sending long-range bombs and artillery as well as bridging equipment essential to attack Crimea. If such an attack is not envisioned, the Ukrainians don’t need this kit.

Meanwhile, there seems to be very little coherent US opposition to the unfolding scenario of what could quickly become a general war in Europe.

By Bradley Devlin, The American Conservative, 2/16/23

“It is obvious that American business can become the locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a late January address to the Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce, boasting that BlackRock, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, and others “have already become part of our Ukrainian way.”

Zelensky did not elaborate on what the “Ukrainian way” is. Maybe the “Ukrainian way” is one of rampant corruption—two of the presidents before Zelensky have either been charged with or convicted of high treason and numerous government officials have been fired or forced to resign for improper use of wartime funds. Whatever it may be, JP Morgan wants more of it. 

On Monday, news broke that JP Morgan and Zelensky had signed a memorandum of understanding stipulating that JP Morgan would assist Ukraine in its reconstruction. A release of the meeting posted on the President of Ukraine’s website said, “The parties discussed the creation of a platform for attracting private capital to rebuild Ukraine and promising directions of large investment projects in Ukraine, in particular in the sectors of green energy, IT, and agricultural technologies.”

JP Morgan executives spent a few days in Ukraine last week. They met with Zelensky and other government ministers and officials in Ukraine, and visited a number of Ukrainian cities to assess the damage sustained by the Ukrainian economy. After making some initial assessments, JP Morgan executives discussed at a meeting with Zelensky the creation of a fund endowed with between $20 billion to $30 billion of private capital to help fund Ukraine’s reconstruction, according to Fox Business. Other ideas reportedly floated in the meeting was establishing a bank run by Wall Street giants to make investments in various kinds of vital infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, and oil refineries.

During the meeting, Zelensky told the JP Morgan executives, “I understand very well that doing business and investing cannot be beneficial to only one party. We want you to invest in Ukraine and earn money.” To which JP Morgan Chase’s chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, replied, “We are proud of our long-standing support of Ukraine and committed to doing our part to lift up the country and its people. The full resources of JPMorgan Chase are available to Ukraine as it charts its post-conflict path to growth.”

Towards the end of the JP Morgan executives’ time in Ukraine, they gifted Zelensky with a New England Patriots jersey with the number 91 on it for the year Ukraine gained its independence from the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Dimon has called the current war in Ukraine “an inflection point for the Western world for a hundred years.”

“Do we get our act together to help win this war, help the Ukrainians, help rebuild Ukraine?” Dimon said previously.

While JP Morgan may see itself as one of Ukraine’s chief financial advisors alongside other U.S.-based companies such as BlackRock, which has also entered into a memorandum of agreement with the Ukrainian government on marshaling reconstruction funding, JP Morgan also has current market positions that suggest the finance giant is set to profit off of the war’s continuation. For example, JPMorgan Investment Management held more than $2.5 billion in Raytheon stock, and over $1.3 billion worth of both Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics stock as of February 15.

This doesn’t mean that JP Morgan is necessarily doing anything illegal by working with the Ukrainian government while having large holdings in U.S. defense contractors. Rather, it serves as an indictment of the incentive structures at play in our over-financialized economy. JP Morgan, BlackRock, and other financial giants can profit from prolonging the war via continued transfer of weapons and equipment to Ukraine by taking out large positions in defense contractors. At the very same time, these same corporations are free to swoop in and compound their profits by investing in the reconstruction of Ukraine, a project that only seems to become larger and potentially more profitable thanks to the conflict’s protraction.

As Saint Thomas Aquinas reminds us, the goal of political life is peace. But why would Ukraine ever be open to negotiating a peace with Russia when the Biden administration—though its doctrinaire support of Ukraine for “as long as it takes”—and powerful Wall Street players are so heavily invested in a Ukrainian victory that they pretend it is a fait accompli?

JP Morgan may consider itself Ukraine’s angel investor. Maybe it’s the angel of death.