Russia lost a staggering 1,740 troops in a single day, the highest tally of casualties for Moscow since the start of the invasion in 2022, according to Ukraine.

In the previous 24 hours, Ukraine also claimed Russia had lost 30 tanks and 42 armoured vehicles.

Death toll and military hardware statistics are difficult to assess with both sides giving different or little information.

However, Ukraine‘s armed forces have claimed Russia has so far lost an eye-watering 484,030 men during the course of the ongoing war.

Earlier this month, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) estimated Russia‘s casualties have likely reached 465,000.

French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné recently suggested this figure would be closer to 500,000. The BBC reported that at least 50,000 Russian soldiers had been confirmed dead.

Russia last gave an update on its losses in September 2022, saying 6,000 soldiers had been killed.

Both sides have suffered huge losses in the fighting. Russia is currently advancing in the vicinity of Kharkiv, Ukraine‘s second-largest city.

In recent days, Moscow’s soldiers reportedly took control of nine villages near the city.

Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine‘s military chief, said on Monday: “Units of the defence forces are fighting fierce defensive battles. The attempts of the Russian invaders to break through our defences have been stopped.”

“The situation is difficult, but the defence forces of Ukraine are doing everything to hold defensive lines and positions, (and) inflict damage on the enemy.”

Ukrainian soldiers are still lacking supplies and key ammunition.

Kharkiv regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, has added: “The enemy is trying to deliberately stretch it (front line), attacking in small groups, but in new directions, so to speak.”

Source: Daily Express

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If European countries don’t see defeat coming, we can’t turn the wheel to avoid it

I left my meeting with a senior French officer feeling that the west is so weak it scarcely exists any more. “The West”, a longtime object of obsession for anti-westerners from Egypt’s President Nasser to Vladimir Putin, has shrivelled to a small rump of countries squabbling with each other. At times they seem willing to let Ukraine lose its war.  

 I share the emotional impulse to keep intoning that Ukraine will win. But Panglossian war propaganda is becoming counterproductive. We need to see a possible defeat coming so that we can turn the wheel and avoid it. We can if we want to. 

I met the officer days after Emmanuel Macron suggested that Nato troops could be sent to Ukraine. As usual with France’s attempts to lead, most of its so-called allies responded by saying, in essence: “Shut up, France.” 

The officer thought Macron had spoken in desperation, compelled by French pessimism about Ukraine. Westerners have grown used to the war as a background rumble that never seems to change. One day, this could stop being true. Russian troops have a firepower advantage of perhaps five-to-one over Ukrainians.

Western countries are weak firstly because they lack allies. Non-aligned states in Asia, Africa and the Gulf never cared much about Ukraine’s struggle. They have been further alienated by western double standards over Israel’s killing of 30,000 Palestinians.

If western countries support human rights in Ukraine but not in Palestine, then they don’t support human rights.  Meanwhile, the US seems to be abandoning “The West” like a sinking ship leaving the rats. This goes beyond Donald Trump’s plan, as relayed by his chum Viktor Orbán, to “not give a single penny” to Ukraine if he becomes president again. Even if Trump loses and Republicans win just one chamber of Congress, they can keep blocking aid to Ukraine.  

The French long dreamt of Europe running its own military affairs without the US butting in. Now the dream is coming true, and it’s terrifying. Europeans cannot even agree whether this is an existential war for them (as eastern Europeans believe), a war of choice (as western countries seem to think) or a war to ignore (Olaf Scholz of Germany’s view). 

Western powers have often labelled wars existential — in Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — only to abandon them after realising they were, in fact, wars of choice. European pacifists hope Ukraine’s war will remain similarly self-contained. Perhaps Putin might stop once he’s swallowed the country. After all, western domino theories proved wrong about Vietnam, too.

So uncommitted are western states to arming Ukraine that they are treating it as a public-spending programme of choice, one you can ditch when money gets tight, like the UK’s HS2 train line. It’s not merely that our countries are disunited. France itself — the one western military with much fighting experience this past decade, albeit in the Sahel — is disunited.

A contingent of Putinist French officers still admires Russia and would rather fight what it considers the “Islamic peril” inside France. And in 2027, Putin’s longtime admirer Marine Le Pen could become French president. Putin has another military advantage over us: his willingness to sacrifice his people. Russia might have suffered more casualties taking the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka than all western European deaths in combat put together in the past 50 years.

The French officer told me apologetically: “We’re an old continent, no longer used to making war.”  This is a backhanded tribute to the success of European societies. Much though western Europeans like to whine, their region may be the safest and most liveable in history. It’s the apotheosis of the humanistic project. But Putin suspects we treasure life too much to defend it.  

If he wins, that wouldn’t mean a new Iron Curtain descending across Europe. It would be more like a portable cotton curtain, blown around by Russia’s will. “The West” could shrink to a thin line stretching from Britain to (if we’re lucky) Poland. 

Happily, we can change course. Russia has a poorly trained army and a Canada-sized economy. “This should be feasible, easily,” says Steven Everts of the EU Institute for Security Studies. Victory would require western countries to send non-combat troops such as de-miners, trainers and vehicle engineers. Countries would need to follow Denmark in giving every shell in their cupboards to Ukraine.

Germany would have to send Taurus missiles. Replacing American support for Ukraine would cost the other Nato states about €65 per citizen per year. We could choose to let Ukraine win.

Source: Financial Times

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Long before it was reported, at the end of January, that Volodymyr Zelensky had decided to replace his popular Army chief, Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 had devolved from attempted maneuvers to mutual recriminations. The arrows pointed in multiple directions: Zelensky seemed to think that his commander-in-chief was being defeatist; Zaluzhny, that his President was refusing to face facts. And there were arguments, too, between Ukraine and its allies. In a two-part investigation in the Washington Post, in early December, U.S. officials complained that Ukrainian generals did not follow their advice. They tried to attack in too many places; they were too cautious; and they waited too long to launch the operation. The Ukrainians, in turn, blamed the Americans. They delivered too few weapons and did so too late; they insisted on their tactics even when it was clear these were unsuitable for the terrain and the opponent; and they did all this from the comfort of Washington and Wiesbaden, rather than from the trenches, tree lines, and open fields where Ukrainian soldiers gave their lives.

The arguments were painful and significant. Was Zelensky right that, given the wobbliness of Western support, Ukraine had to keep up a brave face and the so-called military momentum, no matter the cost? Or was Zaluzhny right that a change of strategy and more troops were needed, no matter how unpopular these choices might be? The argument with the U.S. was significant, too. Was the failure of the counter-offensive, as the Americans argued, one of strategy or, as the Ukrainians counter-argued, one of equipment?

There was a third option: neither. The dominant factor was the Russian military. It was better than people had given it credit for, after its disastrous performance in the first year of the war. It was not demoralized, incompetent, or ill-equipped. Russian soldiers and their officers were fighting to the death. They had executed a brutal and effective defense and, despite all the losses they had incurred, they still had attack helicopters, drones, and mines. “People came to very strong conclusions based off the first month of the war,” Rob Lee, a former marine and an analyst of the Russian military at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said. “And I think a lot of those conclusions were wrong.”

Being wrong about war can be disastrous, yet it is extremely common. The political scientist Stephen Biddle’s influential book, “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle,” begins by listing a century of analytical mistakes. “In 1914,” he writes, “Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement. None foresaw a nearly four-year trench stalemate—if they had, the war might never have happened. In 1940 Allied leaders were astonished by the Germans’ lightning victory over France. They had expected something closer to the trench warfare of 1914-18; even the victors were surprised.” Biddle goes on to describe the debate over the tank, deemed obsolete after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and then resurrected by its awesome performance in the Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991. Biddle’s book came out in 2004; since then, two major American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not gone as anyone had planned.

“It’s impossible, basically, to predict a future war,” Bettina Renz, an international-security professor at the University of Nottingham and an expert on the Russian military, said. “Most people who start a war think it will be over quickly. And, of course, nobody starts a war that they think they can’t win.”

Once a war ends, or even earlier, military historians begin to describe what happened and who was right. Some debates remain unsettled, because the war they theorize never takes place. A famous instance is a debate many years ago, on the pages of the journal International Security, over whether nato was adequately prepared for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The political scientists John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen, having calculated the relative balance of forces, said that it was; the defense intellectual Eliot Cohen, who had worked in the Pentagon’s famous Office of Net Assessment, said that it was not. The debate stretched over several months, in 1988 and 1989. A short while later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

The war in Ukraine has led to more than its share of arguments. In the run-up, the U.S. spent months warning skeptical allies that an invasion was imminent. This argument was mirrored inside Ukraine: Zaluzhny became convinced that the Russians were coming, and spent the weeks before the war urging a mobilization; Zelensky remained uncertain, and resisted the advice, worried that it would panic the population and give Russia an excuse to invade. There was widespread consensus that, in the event of an invasion, Russia would quickly win. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told congressional leaders in early February of 2022 that the Russian military might take Kyiv in as little as seventy-two hours.

When this did not happen, in part because Zaluzhny repositioned some of his forces without authorization and moved or camouflaged the country’s military hardware, a new round of arguments broke out. Was Russia a paper tiger, or did it simply fight in the stupidest possible way? Was China also overrated? Was the tank dead (again)?

Some of the figures in the argument were familiar: Eliot Cohen was back, urging the West to take a harder line with Russia (and China); so were Mearsheimer and Posen, counselling caution. (Mearsheimer sometimes went further, blaming the West for provoking the Russian bear and for violating the tenets of his books, which posit that great-power conflict is inevitable.) Both sides invoked Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist. Cohen cited Clausewitz’s observation that intangible “moral factors,” like the will to fight, are the most important thing in war; Cohen’s opponents held up Clausewitz’s arguments that defense always has the advantage, and also that war is the realm of contingency and chance. (“Clausewitz is like the Bible,” the American University international-relations scholar Joshua Rovner told me. “You can pull out parts of it to suit basically any argument.”)

Among analysts who had studied the Russian military and thought it would do much better than it did, there was some soul-searching. Russian units turned out to be shorthanded, and neither their cyberattacks nor their Air Force were as dominant as expected. The Ukrainian military had better cyber defenses than people realized, and they fought tenaciously. Importantly, they also had the full support of U.S. intelligence, which was able to tell them when and where Russian forces would try to land, and to help them prepare for it. But the biggest surprise was Vladimir Putin’s terrible war plan, which assumed that Ukrainians would not resist, and which he kept secret from his own Army until the eve of the invasion. “No one would have done a Ukraine war game that was set with the political and strategic starting conditions of the Ukraine conflict,” Scott Boston, a defense analyst at the rand Corporation who often “plays Russia” in the think tank’s war games, said. “You’d be kicked out of the room.”

So, was the Russian military as bad as it seemed, and would Russian lines collapse if subjected to a bit of pressure? Or was it a fundamentally competent military that had been given an impossible task? Boston said he kept thinking of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, between Somali militants and American special forces, in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and eighteen Americans were killed in a misbegotten snatch-and-grab mission inside the Somali capital: “You can take the best soldiers on the planet, and, if you throw them in a bad enough situation, it’s not going to go well.” Russian soldiers were not the best on the planet, but they were probably not as bad as they looked in that first month of the war, running out of gas for their tanks and asking locals for directions to Kyiv.

The very successful Ukrainian counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 presented evidence for both sides. In the Kharkiv region, thinly defended Russian lines collapsed when confronted with mobile Ukrainian units, allowing Ukraine to take back significant amounts of territory and cut off key Russian supply lines. But along the other axis of attack, in the city of Kherson, Russian forces held out for a long time and then made a large and orderly retreat, saving much manpower and matériel. The question became which army Ukraine would face in the summer and fall of 2023: the undermanned and demoralized one they saw in Kharkiv, or the organized and capable one they saw in Kherson?

The answer, unfortunately, turned out to be the latter. “The Russian military adapted,” Lee said. “They often require some painful lessons, but then they do adapt.” Lee agrees with some of the criticisms lobbed by both sides in the aftermath of the offensive. Strategically, he thinks the defense of Bakhmut was carried out for too long by Ukrainian forces, for political reasons; materially, he agrees that the West should have got its act together a little sooner to provide more advanced weaponry to the front. But, for him, these are secondary matters: “Most of it came down to the Russian side.” A failure to appreciate this was a major problem in U.S. discussions of the war. Dara Massicot, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that the emphasis on Russian incompetence in the first months of the war created unrealistic expectations and complacency. “The narratives that the Russian military is an incompetent clown car, incapable of learning, that they are about to collapse, and so on, are unhelpful and have done real damage,” Massicot said. “They have not collapsed. They’re still there. They have stood in the field and absorbed billions’ worth of Western weapons and aid over two years.”

In early November, the behind-the-scenes disagreements over Russian capabilities broke out into the open, in the form of an extraordinary essay by Zaluzhny and accompanying interview published in The Economist. Zaluzhny admitted that the counter-offensive had stalled and that the war was now in what he called a stalemate. He identified several factors—technological breakthroughs, achieving air superiority, improving electronic-warfare capabilities—that, he hoped, might move the war into a new phase. But Zaluzhny had lost faith in the idea that, by imposing devastating casualties on the invader, he would be able to take them out of the fight: “That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” Zelensky, in turn, was frustrated that the commander-in-chief was making his views public—worsening an already tense relationship between the two.

Some analysts hope that the upcoming introduction of the American F-16 fighter to the Ukrainian side will change the course of the war. (Most predict that the F-16 will be helpful but not decisive.) Some believe that dropping a requirement that Western weaponry not be used to strike inside Russia could help. (Others, while agreeing, caution that deep strikes cannot be a substitute for conventional warfare; ultimately, Ukraine will have to take back territory in a ground offensive.) Many are concerned about the fact that Oleksandr Syrsky, Zelensky’s new choice for commander-in-chief, is the general who insisted on defending Bakhmut even after it became indefensible; they are even more concerned about the military-assistance package that is being held up in the U.S. Congress. But if, as Zaluzhny told The Economist, there will be no “deep and beautiful breakthrough,” what will happen instead?

The political-science literature on war duration (as opposed to war outcomes) is pretty clear: If a war is not over quickly, then it will last a long time. This is because incentives change. Blood and treasure have been expended. Society has been mobilized, the enemy vilified. People are angry. The war must go on.

There is a wrinkle to this story, however, when it comes to regime types. The standard work is “Democracies at War,” by Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, from 2002. Reiter and Stam argue, based on a slew of examples, that democracies have a better war-fighting record than autocracies. The reason is that they are better at fighting (the soldiers are more motivated) and that they start fewer dumb wars of choice. In a late chapter of the book, however, Reiter and Stam sound a cautionary note. For the same reason that democracies tend to start fewer wars, they tend to grow weary of them faster: “When the promised quick victory does not materialize . . . the people may reconsider their decision to consent to the war at hand and actively withdraw their support.” According to Reiter and Stam, this is the main reason that Harry Truman decided to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in the summer of 1945. When wars drag on, democracies’ chances of victory diminish. In fact, Reiter and Stam write, “The longer a war continues, the more likely autocracies are to win.”

Putin has probably not read Chapter 7 of “Democracies at War,” but he has long been counting on the dynamics it describes. He has what he likes to think of as stability—he can decide on a policy and stick with it—whereas Western democracies are constantly changing their leaders and their minds. It was apparently his calculation, in the run-up to the war, that European voters would not long stand for the high energy prices that a war with Russia would entail; he believed, too, that the U.S. was preoccupied with its own difficulties and would not mount a sustained response. For nearly two years, he was wrong. Western democracies rallied to the side of Ukraine, and Russia seemed a lot less stable than Putin had supposed: a partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 was unpopular, and, in the summer of 2023, one of Putin’s longtime loyal oligarchs, Yevgeny Prigozhin, gathered a column of men and started marching toward Moscow. But Prigozhin was assassinated, and, in recent months, Putin’s expectations of Western disarray have finally begun to be met. Largely owing to Hungarian recalcitrance, the European Union took months to agree on a large aid package to Ukraine; more worrisome still, a group of Republicans has been able to stall a similarly large aid package in the U.S. Congress. And inside Ukraine, too, politics have reappeared. It is widely thought that Zelensky decided to remove Zaluzhny because he worried that Zaluzhny was becoming a political rival. (Zaluzhny’s public disagreements with his boss did not help.)

Hamas’s violent incursion into Israel on October 7th of last year, followed by Israel’s hugely disproportionate response, has scrambled the international map. It has also occupied the time of senior U.S. officials and weakened Joe Biden politically. Then there is this year’s U.S. Presidential election. The fact that, back in 2019, Donald Trump appeared to attempt to extort Zelensky—conditioning military aid on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate the Biden family—is not an encouraging sign for supporters of Ukraine. Neither is Trump’s long-standing skepticism of nato, expressed most recently in his comment that he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that did not “pay.”

Most military analysts believe that, in the coming year, even if U.S. aid finally comes through, Russia has the advantage. Russia has used continued revenues from the sale of oil and gas to pay for weapons manufacturing: it’s producing munitions, missiles, and tanks at rates double and triple what they were before the war. Though Ukrainian forces have driven drone innovation on the battlefield, Russia, over the past year, has produced more drones. And the state has managed, by hook and by crook, to continue recruiting men into the armed forces. “Let’s be honest,” Zaluzhny told The Economist, “it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life.”

Ukraine has some advantages. Western-supplied long-range missile systems possess precision and evasion capabilities that Russian missiles cannot match. These have allowed Ukraine to strike Russian airfields, barracks, and weapons depots well behind the front lines, including in Crimea; they have also helped Ukraine break the blockade of its Black Sea shipping lanes. Ukrainian soldiers have a better sense of what they’re fighting for, and the Army is the most respected institution in the country. Though Zaluzhny has been replaced, there is reason to believe that the reforms he’s been advocating, including a substantial increase in troop mobilization, will be carried out without him.

Military analysts are, however, a little hard-pressed to describe an actual military victory for Ukraine. Boston says he has not heard anyone discussing the equipment and firepower Ukraine would need. “Let’s say I want to have a breakthrough operation against Russian forces,” he said. “I need to have substantial artillery superiority at the point of the attack. I need to find a way to introduce land forces in sufficient numbers and have a way that they will not all get blown up by enemy artillery. The enemy artillery needs to be suppressed, needs to be destroyed, or needs to be blinded so that you can get enough of the land forces to punch the hole.” This needs to happen, furthermore, at multiple points, and Ukraine needs to have forces in reserve so that, if a breakthrough is achieved, those troops can take advantage of it. “That all, to me, sounds remarkably expensive,” Boston said. In a situation where a roughly base level of support is having trouble making it through a divided Congress, Boston found it hard to see a way toward an even greater level.

“Ukraine needs to prepare for a long war,” Olga Oliker, a former rand analyst and Pentagon staffer who is now the head of the Europe and Central Asia program at the International Crisis Group, told me. Oliker believes that a long war could be won, but it may not look like the victory some maximalists have been promising. “You have to create the space for Ukraine to claim victory under less-than-ideal conditions,” she said. “Because, if you say the only thing that is victory is the Russians go home entirely from Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine is in nato, and Moscow somehow disappears off the face of the earth—that’s an unrealistic goal. To me, Ukrainian victory is a situation in which Russia can’t do this again or at least is going to have a very hard time doing it again.”

This could mean that the Russian military is constrained by some agreement that it’s been forced into, but it could also mean that Ukraine’s defenses are sufficiently bolstered, and its allies sufficiently clear in their resolve, that the cost to Russia of a renewed offensive would simply be too high. There is also the hope, not entirely illusory, that Russian vulnerabilities will eventually become too much for the Putin regime to handle. “There’s a certain amount of instability that’s built into the Russian system that the Russians worry about,” Oliker said. “At some point, if they’re worried enough, they might be willing to negotiate.”

A senior Biden Administration official who has helped develop sanctions against Russia expounded on this theory. He said that, for some time, the Administration’s view has been that Russia can continue its current level of war expenditures into the spring of 2025, at which point it will run into trouble. He pointed to the freezing of Russian assets abroad, the running down of its hard-currency reserves, and the increasingly complex supply lines that Russia needs to evade Western sanctions. “It’s like a top that’s slowing down,” the official said. “They’re going to have to start making harder and harder choices, faster and faster, as we get into 2025. That’s a far cry from whatever Putin’s aim was in this war—which was, you know, reinstating Catherine the Great’s empire or something.”

The Administration official was painting an optimistic picture—one that depends on continued Western support. When I asked whether there was a contingency plan if the aid did not come through, he said there wasn’t one: “The contingency plan, frankly, is that the Ukrainians will keep fighting with less and less.” Ukraine is already running short of artillery shells, and it could eventually run out of air-defense interceptors. “So it’s a very stark choice in terms of the security assistance,” the official said. He estimated that, with the help of Western air-defense systems, Ukrainian forces could shoot down as many as ninety per cent of Russian air-attack assets. “Without it, that number will be zero soon.”

There is a third option for how the war might develop, beyond a “mutually hurting stalemate,” as it’s known in the literature, and a measured Ukrainian victory. As Michael Kofman, a longtime analyst of the Russian military who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, stressed to me, Ukraine could start to lose. That could mean a breakthrough by Russian forces, though they have so far been unable to achieve one, or just enough wearing down of Ukrainian and Western will that Ukraine is forced to negotiate concessions from a position of weakness. The question then becomes what, aside from the catastrophic humanitarian and political consequences in Ukraine, a Russian victory would mean for the world. If Putin wins, or feels like he has won, what will he do next?

Some argue that he would do nothing—that Ukraine is a special case, more central to Russia’s conception of itself as an imperial power than any other country. The counter-argument is that we don’t know. “In Moscow, they have all sorts of assessments of nato power,” Massicot said. “I don’t think they can confront it directly. For one thing, the Russian Army is partially destroyed. The Russian Air Force has not exactly covered themselves in glory in this war. But they will downgrade their assessment of nato as a cohesive alliance on the basis of our political will. From their point of view, they will feel that they have won a proxy war with nato. And they’re going to be angry, they’re going to want revenge, and now they think we’re weaker than we are. That’s a dangerous situation.” Right now, the U.S. has about a hundred thousand troops in Europe; in 1989, there were three times that many. An ambiguous result in Ukraine, which leaves Russia capable of further offensive action, could mean a movement toward old troop levels. And Mearsheimer, Posen, and Cohen would have to dust off their essays on nato preparedness.

It feels, in fact, like all the old Cold War arguments are back. Clearly, the Russian leadership is capable of brutal expansionist aggression. But just how far are they willing to go, and what exactly will they think of next? “The problem that I see is that the Russian economy has undergone a structural transition and is now on a militarized footing,” Kofman said. “So the Russian government is probably going to be focussed on regenerating military power for some time, both because it’s a matter of strategy but also because the militarized economy is going to be producing military goods and they will not have an easy way to transition it back.” This, Kofman concluded, means “that they could be in a position sooner than people think to actually contest the security and stability of Europe.”

Kofman, Lee, and Massicot recently published an article on the national-security Web site War on the Rocks in which they outlined a strategy for Ukrainian victory. “Hold, Build, and Strike,” they called it. In the essay, they urged Ukraine to hold the line of contact in the coming months, spend 2024 building up its forces, and then strike, in 2025, when they could see an advantage. These ideas were not far from what Zaluzhny had been advocating over the past several months. “You shouldn’t fight a war till your first failed offensive,” Kofman said. “That’s not how most conventional wars go. If that’s how they went, they’d all be over really fast.” He went on to give an example from the Second World War. “You know Stalin’s famous ten blows?” These were ten major offensives, several of them on Ukrainian territory, that the Soviets undertook against Germany in 1944. But there were, in fact, far more than ten offensives, Kofman said: “They just don’t include all the offensives that failed.” Last summer was a good opportunity for Ukraine to take back territory from the Russian Army, but it will not, Kofman believes, be the last such opportunity.

Oliker, whose job at the International Crisis Group is to seek ways to end conflicts, does not see how this one can end just yet. She admitted that, in the aftermath of the failed counter-offensive, in the midst of a long cold winter, and with Western support in doubt, Ukraine is facing a very difficult moment. “But it was not a good moment for Russia in spring and summer of 2022,” Oliker said. “That’s war. If it is, in fact, a long war, prepare for a few more back-and-forths.”

Source: The New Yorker

The post Can Ukraine Still Win? appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday. Presidency’s Communications Directorate said in a statement that two leaders discussed the Palestine-Israel conflict as well as the arising humanitarian crisis.

Erdoğan highlighted the “deepening” violence targeting Palestinian territories, and the “civilian deaths increasing by the minute.” The Directorate’s statement said that Erdoğan also pointed out that the “silence” of the West brought the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to a level that is not “preventable.” He also stressed that Türkiye would exert every effort to restore calm in the region.

On Monday, Putin called for “unhindered access” for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza in a telephone call with his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Kremlin said.

Türkiye is among the staunch defenders of Palestinian rights and repeatedly calls for a two-state solution to the ongoing conflict. Under the leadership of Erdoğan, the country pioneered efforts for a peaceful solution to the conflict while denouncing Israel’s brutal airstrikes and blockade of Gaza that deprived thousands of food and other necessities. At the same time, Ankara continues sending humanitarian aid to the besieged Palestinian city. Protests have erupted across Türkiye against Israel’s attacks in Gaza, especially after an attack at a hospital that killed hundreds of civilians. Erdoğan is expected to attend a rally for solidarity with Palestinians organized by his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) on Saturday.

Source: Daily Sabah

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He was so keen to stroke the ego of his Turkish counterpart and fellow “strongman” leader that he didn’t even wait for the official results of the vote before singling out Mr Erdogan’s “independent foreign policy” as a reason for his victory.

We can safely assume the Turkish policy that Russia is particularly fond of is Mr Erdogan’s refusal to ostracise the Kremlin after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, even as Turkey’s allies in Nato imposed sanctions and slashed their energy reliance on Russia.

Trade between Turkey and Russia even increased significantly since the start of the war in Ukraine.

But also hot on Mr Putin’s congratulatory heels on Sunday were US President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.

Despite their dislike of Mr Erdogan’s cosying up to the Kremlin and his slashing of free speech and democratic norms at home during his first two decades in power, to them Turkey is a crucial – if difficult and unpredictable – ally of the West.

• What to expect from newly emboldened Erdogan

Turkey is a key member of the Nato military alliance, taking part in all its missions.

Mr Erdogan may maintain close ties with Russia – but he also provides military aid to Ukraine.

He famously brokered a deal whereby Russia ended a blockade on Ukraine grain supplies, allowing them to flow to parts of the world that rely on them. He also – after long hesitation – gave his official approval to Russia’s neighbour Finland joining Nato.

Once a passionate advocate of Turkey joining the EU, Mr Erdogan these days speaks of “making Turkey great again”.

For him, that has entailed having a more independent foreign policy. Over the years, he’s developed highly transactional relationships with all his allies.

The White House has made no secret of its impatience to try to persuade Mr Erdogan to approve Nato membership for Sweden too.

Sweden would provide important Baltic Sea cover for the alliance against Russia.

The West hopes the dire state of Turkey’s economy – and the likelihood that Mr Erdogan will have to concentrate on stabilising finances and attracting foreign investment – could prove a soft spot to push for Sweden’s Nato accession as a quid pro quo.

Turkey and Hungary are the only Nato countries still blocking Stockholm’s membership.

President Macron, meanwhile, worries about migration to the EU and hopes to win assurances from President Erdogan as soon as possible.

During the migration crisis of 2015 more than a million refugees and asylum seekers – mainly from Syria – made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to the EU in people-smugglers’ boats.

Brussels subsequently made a deal with Turkey. In exchange for a large sum of money and visa-free travel for Turks into the EU – the latter never fully arrived because of EU objections to Mr Erdogan’s jailing of critics and political opponents – the Turkish president would do his best to prevent migrants without papers leaving Turkish waters to reach the bloc.

• Turkey says millions of migrants may head to EU

But swelling numbers of Syrian refugees at home proved extremely unpopular with Turkish voters.

This month, every political party running in Turkey’s parliamentary elections promised to take action to solve “the migrant issue”.

The EU frets about the prospect of refugees being pushed back by Turkey into Syria at risk to their safety – and of Turkey allowing people smugglers free rein again to send boats of asylum seekers and other migrants over the Mediterranean.

Brussels is also on the defensive as EU member Greece is involved in a number of disputes with Mr Erdogan centred on the Aegean Sea, while EU member Cyprus is still seething after Mr Erdogan called for a two-state solution (Greek and Turkish) to decades-long divisions there following a Turkish invasion nearly 50 years ago.

The West used to describe Turkey’s strategic importance as the bridge between Europe and the Middle East – but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed Turkey’s status.

Few expect big foreign policy surprises from Mr Erdogan as he enters his third decade in power. But Ankara’s strategic allies are watching very closely indeed.

What Turkey does matters.

Source: BBC

The post Why Erdogan’s victory matters for the West appeared first on Ankara Haftalik.



At about 1am on February 24 last year, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, received a troubling phone call.

After spending months building up a more than 100,000-strong invasion force on the border with Ukraine, Vladimir Putin had given the go-ahead to invade.

The decision caught Lavrov completely by surprise. Just days earlier, the Russian president had polled his security council for their opinions on recognising two separatist statelets in the Donbas, an industrial border region in Ukraine, at an excruciatingly awkward televised session — but had left them none the wiser about his true intentions.

Keeping Lavrov in the dark was not unusual for Putin, who tended to concentrate his foreign policy decision-making among a handful of close confidants, even when it undermined Russia’s diplomatic efforts.

On this occasion, the phone call made Lavrov one of the very few people who had any knowledge of the plan ahead of time. The Kremlin’s senior leadership all found out about the invasion only when they saw Putin declare a “special military operation” on television that morning.

Later that day, several dozen oligarchs gathered at the Kremlin for a meeting arranged only the day before, aware that the invasion would trigger western sanctions that could destroy their empires. “Everyone was completely losing it,” says a person who attended the event.

While they waited, one of the oligarchs spied Lavrov exiting another meeting and pressed him for an explanation about why Putin had decided to invade. Lavrov had no answer: the officials he was there to see in the Kremlin had known less about it than he did.

Stunned, the oligarch asked Lavrov how Putin could have planned such an enormous invasion in such a tiny circle — so much so that most of the senior officials at the Kremlin, Russia’s economic cabinet and its business elite had not believed it was even possible.

“He has three advisers,” Lavrov replied, according to the oligarch. “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

Under Putin’s invasion plan, Russia’s troops were to seize Kyiv within a matter of days in a brilliant, comparatively bloodless blitzkrieg.

Instead, the war has proved to be a quagmire of historic proportions for Russia. A year on, Putin’s invasion has claimed well over 200,000 dead and injured among Russia’s armed forces, according to US and European officials; depleted its stock of tanks, artillery and cruise missiles; and cut the country off from global financial markets and western supply chains.

Nor has the fighting in Ukraine brought Putin any closer to his vaguely defined goals of “demilitarising” and “de-Nazifying” Kyiv. Though Russia now controls 17 per cent of Ukraine’s internationally recognised territory, it has abandoned half of the land it seized in the war’s early weeks — including a humiliating retreat from Kherson, the only provincial capital under its control, just weeks after Putin attempted to annex it.

But as the war rumbles on with no end in sight, Putin has given no indication he intends to back down on his war efforts.

At his state-of-the-union address on Tuesday, Putin insisted the war was “about the very existence of our country” and said the west had forced him to invade Ukraine. “They’re the ones who started the war. We are using force to stop it,” he said.

Even as the huge cost of the invasion to Russia becomes apparent to him, Putin is more determined than ever to see it through, people who know him say.

“The idea was never for hundreds of thousands of people to die. It’s all gone horribly wrong,” a former senior Russian official says. With the initial plan in tatters, Putin is searching for new rationales to justify the war effort, insisting he had no choice but to pursue the invasion by any means necessary, current and former officials say.

“He tells people close to him, ‘It turns out we were completely unprepared. The army is a mess. Our industry is a mess. But it’s good that we found out about it this way, rather than when Nato invades us,’” the former official adds.

The Financial Times spoke to six longtime Putin confidants as well as people involved in Russia’s war effort, and current and former senior officials in the west and Ukraine for this account of how Putin blundered his way into the invasion — then doubled down rather than admit his mistake. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The people who know Putin describe a leader who has become even more isolated since the start of the war. “Stalin was a villain, but a good manager, because he couldn’t be lied to. But nobody can tell Putin the truth,” says one. “People who don’t trust anyone start trusting a very small number of people who lie to them.”

‘If you don’t agree with it, you can leave’Last year was not the first time Putin had withheld plans of an invasion from close advisers. When Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, he did not inform his own security council — instead on one occasion gaming out the peninsula’s annexation with his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and three top security officials all night until 7am.

Initially, the advisers urged Putin against sending troops into Crimea, according to a former senior Russian official and a former senior US official. “Putin said, ‘This is a historic moment. If you don’t agree with it, you can leave,’” the former Russian official recalls.

When the west, fearful of escalating tensions to a point of no return and jeopardising Europe’s economic ties with Russia, responded with only a slap on the wrist, Putin was convinced he had made the right decision, according to several people who know the president.

In the years after the 2014 invasion, Putin’s inner circle began to shrink further as he became increasingly consumed with what he saw as growing western threats to Russia’s security, the people say. His isolation deepened when the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020: for fear they could infect a germaphobic Putin, even top officials were forced to spend weeks at a time quarantining for a personal audience.

One of the few people to spend extended time with Putin was his friend Yuri Kovalchuk, a former physicist who in the 1990s owned a dacha adjoining the future president’s in the countryside outside St Petersburg.

The secretive Kovalchuk — a banker and media mogul who the US says manages Putin’s personal finances — almost never speaks in public and did not reply to a request for comment.

People who know him say he shares a passion for Russian imperial revanchism with his older brother Mikhail, a physicist whose conspiracy theory-laden rants about US plans to develop super-soldiers and “ethnic weapons” have, on occasion, popped up later in Putin’s speeches.

During the height of the pandemic, Putin was largely cut off from comparatively liberal, western-minded confidants who had previously had his ear. Instead he spent the first few months in his residence at Valdai, a bucolic town on a lake in northern Russia, essentially on lockdown with the younger Kovalchuk, who inspired Putin to think of his historic mission to assert Russia’s greatness, much as Peter the Great had.

“He really believes all the stuff he says about sacrality and Peter the Great. He thinks he will be remembered like Peter,” a former senior official says.

Increasingly, Putin became fixated on Ukraine as his relations soured with its energetic young president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

One of Zelenskyy’s early moves was to curb the influence of Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin’s who headed the largest opposition party in parliament. Whereas former president Petro Poroshenko had used Medvedchuk as a crucial go-between with Moscow, Zelenskyy’s team sought other intermediaries in the belief that his influence on Putin had begun to wane.

But as Putin began drawing up plans for a possible invasion, Medvedchuk insisted that Ukrainians would greet Russia’s forces with open arms.

One part of the plan involved Viktor Yanukovych, a former president who has been in Russian exile since fleeing the 2014 revolution against him. He was to deliver a video message conferring legitimacy on Medvedchuk — and anointing him to rule Ukraine with Russia’s backing.

The vision was starkly at odds with political realities in Ukraine, where the pro-Russian minority that Medvedchuk represented was vastly outnumbered by those who despised him for his ties to Moscow. But it proved seductive for Putin, who authorised payments through Medvedchuk’s party to pay off local collaborators.

There was plenty of scepticism in Moscow. “If Medvedchuk says it’s raining, you need to look out of the window — it’ll be sunny,” says another former senior Russian official. “You have polls, you have the secret services — how can you do anything serious based on what Medvedchuk says?”

However, his assessment was backed up by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, which assured Putin victory was certain — and paid large sums in bribes to officials in Ukraine in the hope that this would guarantee success.

“The FSB had built a whole system of telling the boss what he wanted to hear. There were huge budgets given out and corruption at every level,” a western intelligence official says. “You tell the right story up top and you skim off a bit for yourself.”

Dissenting voices in the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, and Russia’s general staff attempted to raise doubts. At the security council meeting three days before the invasion, even Nikolai Patrushev, security council secretary and Putin’s longest-standing and most hawkish ally, suggested giving diplomacy another chance.

“He knew what a bad state the army was in and told Putin as much,” a person close to the Kremlin says.

But just as he had in 2014, Putin overruled them, insisting he was better informed.

“Putin was overconfident,” a former senior US official says. “He knows better than his advisers just the way Hitler knew better than his generals.”

The invasion began to unravel almost immediately after Putin set it into motion. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, had drawn up a plan to seize the Hostomel airfield outside Kyiv, giving Russian elite paratrooper squadrons a platform from which to attack Zelenskyy’s government headquarters.

Some of Medvedchuk’s collaborators worked as spotters for the advancing Russian forces, painting markings on buildings and highways to direct the invaders to key locations. Others joined in the attack on the government quarter. In southern Ukraine, they helped Russia capture a large swath of territory including Kherson with little to no resistance.

Most of Medvedchuk’s network, however, simply took the money and ran, refusing to join in the invasion — or went straight to Ukrainian authorities and warned them of the instructions they had been given, according to a senior Ukrainian official and former US and Russian officials.

Prewar predictions that Ukraine’s army would collapse had largely been based on the assumption Russia’s air force would quickly establish control of Ukraine’s skies.

Instead, amid widespread disarray among the invaders, Russia’s army shot down a number of its own aircraft in the early days of the invasion. As a result, it ran out of pilots with experience of combat operations involving ground forces who were also prepared to fly, according to two western officials and a Ukrainian official.

“It may not have been double digits, but it’s more than one or two” Russian aircraft shot down by friendly fire, says the former senior US official. “There was a lot of fratricide.”

He adds: “They may not have had pilots with combat experience who were willing to fly over Ukraine and risk their necks in that crazy environment.”

Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukrainian military intelligence, adds: “It happened. From artillery units, from tanks, and we even saw it from our intercepts of their conversations. They shot down their own helicopters and they shot down their own planes.”

On the ground, Russia’s advances came at the price of huge casualties and did not help it capture any major cities apart from Kherson. By the end of March, the invading forces were in such a poor state that they withdrew from most of central and north-eastern Ukraine, which it portrayed as a “gesture of goodwill”.

The brilliant plan had proved a failure.

“Russia screwed up,” says Skibitsky. “Gerasimov initially didn’t want to go in from all sides like he did. But the FSB and everyone else convinced him everyone was waiting for him to show up and there wouldn’t be any resistance.”

‘A unique war in world history’As the consequences of his invasion became clear, Putin searched for a scapegoat to hold responsible for the intelligence blunders underpinning it. That person was Sergei Beseda, the head of the FSB’s fifth directorate, which is responsible for foreign operations and had laid the groundwork for the invasion by paying off Ukrainian collaborators, according to two western officials.

Initially, Beseda was placed under house arrest, according to the officials. His time in the doghouse, however, did not last long. Weeks later, US officials arrived for a meeting on bilateral issues with their Russian counterparts wondering, after news of Beseda’s detention leaked to the Russian media, whether he would turn up and how the Russians might explain where he was.

Instead, Beseda walked in and said, paraphrasing Mark Twain: “You know, the rumours of my demise are greatly exaggerated,” according to the former US official.

Beseda’s quick comeback demonstrated what advisers see as some of Putin’s biggest weaknesses. The Russian president prizes loyalty over competence; is obsessive about secrecy to a fault; and presides over a bureaucratic culture where his underlings tell him what he wants to hear, according to people who know him.

The steady drumbeat of propaganda around the war and Putin’s demands for loyalty from the elite have only increased the incentive for advisers to tell him what he wants to hear, the people say.

“He’s of sound mind. He’s reasonable. He’s not crazy. But nobody can be an expert on everything. They need to be honest with him and they are not,” another longtime Putin confidant says. “The management system is a huge problem. It creates big gaps in his knowledge and the quality of the information he gets is poor.”

For many in the elite, the stream of lies is a survival tactic: most of Putin’s presidential administration and economic cabinet have told friends they oppose the war but feel they are powerless to do anything about it. “It’s really a unique war in world history, when all the elite is against it,” says a former senior official.

A small number, including former climate special representative Anatoly Chubais, have quietly resigned. One former senior official who now heads a major state-run company went so far as to apply for an Israeli passport while still in his post, and started making plans to leave the country, according to two people close to him.

As the war continues to sputter, the scale of Russia’s miscalculation has begun to dawn on Putin, prompting him to seek out more information from people at lower levels, people who know him say. A cohort of ultranationalist bloggers who are critical of the military establishment have held at least two closed-door meetings with Putin since last summer; some were guests of honour at a ceremony to annex the four Ukrainian provinces in September.

On occasion, Putin has used information from his informal channels to trip up senior officials in public. Last month, Denis Manturov, a deputy prime minister, told Putin the government had signed contracts with Russian aviation factories to produce new aircraft, one of the industries worst hit by the difficulty of procuring components under the sanctions. Putin replied: “I know the factories don’t have contracts, the directors told me. What are you playing the fool for? When will the contracts be ready? Here’s what I’m talking about: the factory directors say they don’t have contracts. And you’re telling me it’s all on paper.”

Putin’s newfound scepticism, however, is limited by his unwillingness to admit the invasion was a mistake in the first place, the people say. Some of the liberal officials who oppose the war have attempted to convince him to end it by pointing out the economic damage the sanctions are likely to wreak on Russia’s economy.

But Putin tells them “he has already factored in the discounts”, another former senior Russian official says. “He says, ‘We pay a huge price, I get it. We underestimated how difficult it could be.’ But how can you convince a crazy man? His brain will collapse if he realises it was a mistake,” the person adds. “He doesn’t trust anyone.”

Asked about the discrepancy between the defence ministry’s statements and complaints from fighters at the front about poor equipment in December, Putin paraphrased a character from his favourite TV show, the Soviet espionage drama Seventeen Moments of Spring: “You can’t trust anyone. Only me.” Then he chuckled.

Existential fight continuesPutin’s state-of-the-union address on Tuesday demonstrated his determination to “solve the tasks before us step by step” as he insisted Russia’s war would go on until a victorious end.

The remarks underscored how existential the fight has become for Putin as the threat he sees from a hostile west consumes him. Putin spent comparatively little time discussing Ukraine itself, instead focusing his ire on the US, which he accused of trying to “destroy” Russia and use “national traitors” to break it up.

The speech marked his first return to nuclear rhetoric since last autumn, when he made veiled warnings to “use all the means at our disposal” in defence of Russia’s conquests and suggested Russia could carry out a nuclear first strike.

Those threats worried western countries sufficiently that the US, UK, and France, Nato’s three nuclear powers, delivered a joint message to Russia vowing to retaliate with conventional weapons if Putin decided to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, according to the former US and Russian officials.

According to two people close to the Kremlin, Putin has already gamed out the possibility of using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine and has come to the conclusion that even a limited strike would do nothing to benefit Russia.

“He has no reason to press the button. What is the point of bombing Ukraine? You detonate a tactical nuke on Zaporizhzhia,” says a former Russian official, referring to the Ukrainian-held capital of a province Putin has claimed for Russia. “Everything is totally irradiated, you can’t go in there, and it’s supposedly Russia anyway, so what was the point?”

Instead, Putin said Russia would suspend its participation in New Start, the last remaining arms treaty with the US governing the countries’ nuclear arsenals. The suspension was the most concrete step Putin has taken on the escalation ladder since the war began: Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, said “the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.”

This time, however, Putin made no threats to actually use nuclear weapons — which analysts interpreted as a sign he had begun to realise Russia’s limitations.

“The war’s been going on for a year. Putin has been saying he’s fighting the west, not Ukraine, for a long time. You can’t just keep talking about it, you need to take steps to demonstrate something tangible,” says Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter. “Otherwise in his paradigm it’s going to look like the west is wiping the floor with Russia and [he] can’t say anything in response.”

Putin’s calculation, people close to the Kremlin say, is that Russia is more committed to the war than the west is to Ukraine, and resilient enough to see out the economic pain. Senior Republicans have openly questioned how long the US can go on supporting Ukraine to the same extent and the party retains a realistic chance of capturing the White House in 2024.

In ramping up military support for Ukraine, western officials are mindful anything less than a crushing defeat for Russia risks failing to deal with the problem.

“We need to ask ourselves: How do we want to this end up? Do we want to end up in a situation when Putin will survive and he will have more time?” says an EU foreign minister. “Something like the lull between the first and second world war.”

Putin, by contrast, is betting that he can see through that strategic turbulence, people who know him say. Instead of insisting that most Russians are unaffected by the war, as the Kremlin did in its early months when life largely went on as normal, Putin has adopted mobilisation rhetoric, urging all of society to unite behind the invasion.

The scenes at a patriotic rally on Wednesday underscored how far Putin had come down that road in just a few years. At Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, where the World Cup final was held five years ago, a soldier rapped about “the difficult hour we did not anticipate” alongside Russia’s military choir and the parents of people killed fighting for Russia made speeches to a huge flag-waving crowd. The rally’s hosts welcomed a group of children “saved” by the Russian army in Mariupol, a city in south-eastern Ukraine it razed to the ground last spring.

Then Putin appeared, shook hands with a select group of soldiers, and told Russians to take inspiration from them. “The motherland is our family,” Putin said. “The people standing up here are deciding to defend the most valuable and dear thing they have — our family. They are fighting heroically, courageously, bravely.”

Russian independent media reported that tens of thousands of state employees and students were paid small sums or forced to attend. The fact the Kremlin evidently did not think it could fill a stadium to support Putin without forcing people to go suggests officials know how difficult mobilising society around the war will be.

“Even in his own mind, he realises it’s not going to happen soon. It’s going to be a costly, lengthy process,” the former US official says. “He’s got, he thinks, the time — he’s 70 — and the resources, the oil and gas money to achieve it. And that’s what he’ll be remembered for: gathering the Russian lands the way Peter the Great did.”

But the alternative, one former senior Kremlin official says, may be too difficult for Putin to contemplate.

“It’s scary to think what happens if this ends in a disastrous defeat for Russia,” the former official says. “That means disastrous mistakes were made and the man behind it needs to exit this life, whether it’s via a bullet, cyanide, or something else. And if there’s no justice in this world, then nobody gets to have it,” he adds.

“It’s like when two chess players are playing. One of them is losing and bashes the other one over the head with the chessboard. Does that mean he won? No, it’s just an act of desperation.”

Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels and Anastasia Stognei in Riga

Russia at war: a two-part seriesHow Putin’s technocrats steadied Russia’s economyOnce thought of as reformers, the president’s economic confidants have ended up as enablers of an invasion they warned against

A country Learning to Live without ImportsRather than provoking a collapse, international sanctions are causing a steady degradation of the country’s productive capacity.



Source: Informed

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