Sunday Review
News and notes from around the world
STALEMATE
The ISW is making a big call:
Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated. Russian forces continue to make limited advances in some parts of the theater but are very unlikely to be able to seize their objectives in this way. The doctrinally sound Russian response to this situation would be to end this campaign, accept a possibly lengthy operational pause, develop the plan for a new campaign, build up resources for that new campaign, and launch it when the resources and other conditions are ready. The Russian military has not yet adopted this approach. It is instead continuing to feed small collections of reinforcements into an ongoing effort to keep the current campaign alive. We assess that that effort will fail. …
… Stalemate will likely be very violent and bloody, especially if it protracts. … If the war in Ukraine settles into a stalemate condition Russian forces will continue to bomb and bombard Ukrainian cities, devastating them and killing civilians, even as Ukrainian forces impose losses on Russian attackers and conduct counter-attacks of their own. The Russians could hope to break Ukrainians’ will to continue fighting under such circumstances by demonstrating Kyiv’s inability to expel Russian forces or stop their attacks even if the Russians are demonstrably unable to take Ukraine’s cities. Ukraine’s defeat of the initial Russian campaign may therefore set conditions for a devastating protraction of the conflict and a dangerous new period testing the resolve of Ukraine and the West. Continued and expanded Western support to Ukraine will be vital to seeing Ukraine through that new period.
Read the whole thing. (By the way, their assessment will make much more sense if you’ve read our series, WAR 101, especially Part I).
Stalemate, they stress, is in no way a synonym for armistice or ceasefire, and it is a condition apt to do massive damage. The battles of the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele were all fought in conditions of stalemate.
Yet another outrageous war crime: Russia bombs Mariupol art school sheltering 400 civilians. This follows the bombing of a theater in Mariupol. Hundreds are beneath the rubble; it isn’t known how many survived.
Putin has taken another leaf from Stalin’s book: Residents of Mariupol are being deported to Russia against their will.
Satellite images reveal extent of damage to Mariupol; displaced families tell harrowing stories of escape. Officials estimate 80 per cent of the city’s homes have been damaged or destroyed.
Anna, another Mariupol resident arriving at Lviv train station, also left her parents behind. “There was no phone connection, but my father managed to call me this morning,” she said. “He says they are still shooting.”
Anna got out on foot with her son and a few belongings. She didn’t know if she could ever return. “I don't know what is going to happen—basically there is no Mariupol anymore.”
Russia’s brutality in Ukraine has roots in earlier conflicts. Its experience in a string of wars led to the conclusion that attacking civilian populations was not only acceptable but militarily sound. …
As Russian artillery and rockets land on Ukrainian hospitals and apartment blocks, devastating residential districts with no military value, the world is watching with horror what is, for Russia, an increasingly standard practice.
Its forces conducted similar attacks in Syria, bombing hospitals and other civilian structures as part of Russia’s intervention to prop up that country’s government.
Moscow went even further in Chechnya, a border region that had sought independence in the Soviet Union’s 1991 breakup. During two formative wars there, Russia’s artillery and air forces turned city blocks to rubble and its ground troops massacred civilians in what was widely seen as a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population into submission. …
… “Massive devastation and collateral fatalities among the civilian population are acceptable in order to limit one’s own casualties,” Alexei Arbatov, a prominent Russian military strategist and at the time a federal legislator, wrote in 2000, during Russia’s second war in Chechnya.
“The use of force is the most efficient problem solver, if applied decisively and massively,” Mr. Arbatov wrote, adding that international horror at Russian actions should be “discounted.”
This has long been well known. But administration after administration decided it wanted to reset relations with Moscow, “get along with Russia,” or have a “stable and predictable” relationship with this regime. Everyone in Europe kept trading with Russia like mad. Until Russia began killing Ukrainians, no one asked, “Is this a good idea?”
An email from a Syrian friend:
… I saw some images of the aftermath of the Russian bombing in Kharkiv and Kyiv and couldn’t stop seeing Aleppo in all of these pictures. I also know from talking to friends and following the Syrian social media that many people feel the same way. I’m sad to see this being repeated in the very continent to which I fled, but I’m equally not shocked. …
Ironically, he treats Syrians and Ukrainians equally.
By the Cosmopolitan Globalists
Monocle interviews Toomas Hendrik Ilves about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and what this means for Estonia and other Baltic nations.
Cosmopolitan Globalist Arun Kapil has a good roundup at his blog, Arun with a View, from which I’ll borrow liberally this morning. He notes that a presidential election campaign is in the home stretch in France—the first round will take place on April 10—“but one would hardly know it from the daily news coverage,” because the news here is dominated by Ukraine and Putin’s atrocities and the war has made Macron’s victory in the upcoming presidential election all but a certainty. (If you missed our recent French Election Twitter Summit, in which we discussed the reasons for this, you can listen to it here.)
Arun recommends you watch this whole speech by Putin, as do I. It was broadcast in two parts on February 21st and 24th. In effect, it was a declaration of war on Ukraine. “If you want to know how the man thinks,” Arun writes, “and why we are headed for, at the very best, a Cold War far more frigid than the last one—then do take the time to watch the speech.”
“There is,” he concludes, “to say the least, no possibility of compromise, let alone peaceful coexistence, with Putin and his regime.”
If you haven’t time to watch the whole speech, Max Fisher summarized it in a two-part analysis:
Arun continues:
If one seeks further insight into Mr. Putin’s Weltanschauung, take ten minutes to listen to this 2016 BBC interview with Aleksandr Dugin, who has been called “Putin’s favorite philosopher” and even “Putin’s brain.” If one is not familiar with Dugin—and one really should be, as he’s a pretty important and influential intellectual and thinker, and not just in Russia (Eric Zemmour and Stephen Bannon are certainly fans)—here are a few articles and papers from the websites of Stanford University’s The Europe Center, the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, The Conversation, and The Jewish Chronicle. Pure unadulterated fascism.
If you have an hour to spare and want to be both informed and entertained, watch the 2019 debate between Dugin and Bernard-Henri Lévy. Talk about a clash of diametrically opposed world-views. Never have I had such warm sentiments for BHL.
Must-listen podcast discussions from the past week: Timothy Snyder, Masha Gessen, and Fiona Hill, all with Ezra Klein; and Stephen Kotkin with David Remnick. Also, from a couple of weeks ago, the conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, Timothy Snyder, and Anne Applebaum. You will learn things listening to any one of these.
Arun also included more reading for those who remain convinced the cause of the war was NATO’s expansion:
[P]olitical scientists Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel (of McGill and Tufts, respectively) drive the nail into the coffin with a piece cross-posted in Just Security and Slate, “Putin’s war was never actually about NATO expansion.” One notes that the leading insister of the NATO canard, the overrated and increasingly irrelevant John Mearsheimer, is doubling down, as is his wont, on his insistence, witnessed by his guest essay in The Economist, which is but an updated version of his now famous 2015 lecture on the subject, which has been watched by millions (I was personally unimpressed). Much more interesting than anything the U of Chicago IR realist has to say is Adam Tooze’s piece in the New Statesman, “John Mearsheimer and the dark origins of realism.”
Those of the Mearsheimer bent—plus many who are not—are advocating formal neutrality for Ukraine, akin to that of Finland during the Cold War. What “Finlandization” actually meant for the Finns was the subject of a full-page tribune in Le Monde dated March 7th by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, “‘Pour la Russie, l’idéal serait de finlandiser toute l’Europe, et pas seulement l’Ukraine’” (For Russia, the ideal would be to Finlandize all of Europe, not just Ukraine).
Arun translated the first part of the essay into English from the French (which was translated in turn from the Finnish) you can read it on his site. He’s also translated an article by Jean-François Bouthors, published this month in the French journal Esprit: “The true nature of Russian humiliation.” Here’s the first paragraph:
Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, all commentaries are in agreement in condemning Vladimir Putin. But an unfortunate refrain persists, which is that of the humiliation of Russia by the West and of NATO provocations against it. It is continually repeated by those who had already opposed the sanctions imposed on Russia after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the secessionist rebellion in the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk; and we can see today how insufficient these sanctions were. This rhetoric of humiliation is not only repeated today by the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen and Thierry Mariani, by Éric Zemmour, who saw Putin as a true political genius, as by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but it has also been for the past eight years by a part of the French political class, including Philippe de Villiers, François Fillon—who cashed in on it, as it were, by working for big Russian hydrocarbon companies until the war triggered by Putin rendered his position untenable—and, last but not least, Hubert Védrine, who has nonetheless been well-placed to know the veritable situation.
You can read the rest here, along with Arun’s reflections on Russian propaganda aimed at foreigners and the story of his student who went on to be the deputy editor of RT.
By Cristina Maza:
During war, Ukraine’s parliamentarians are showing up to vote. Here's a look at how Ukraine's leaders continue to govern, including changing tax laws and approving more funding for the military.
Investigations into suspected war crimes in Ukraine are already underway. Cristina wrote about the evidence being collected and what it would take to secure justice.
White House officials gave a closed briefing to members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs about efforts to renew the Iran nuclear deal. But some lawmakers are unsatisfied with the information they’re getting about the terms of the agreement.
Nicolas Tenzer: The medium-term consequences of attempts to re-engage with the Russian regime:
The search for a “stable and predictable relationship” with Russia, marking the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term in office, or President Emmanuel Macron’s ambition to build an “architecture of security and trust” with Russia are now, as expected, relegated to the dustbin of history. The same applies to the attempts of Germany and Italy to do the same. There is progress already.
However, borrowing a metaphor from physics, there are still afterglows. …
From the UN High Commissioner for Refugees:
Belarusian morgues and hospitals offer clues about Russia’s losses. In the regions bordering Ukraine, residents and medical workers have reported a rising tide of corpses and maimed servicemen being shipped out of Ukraine and then sent elsewhere for further treatment or burial. “There are so many wounded Russians there—it’s just a horror. Terribly disfigured. It is impossible to listen to their moans throughout the whole hospital,” said a patient who had been treated in a hospital in Homel.
Play the game: Did a Paid Russian Shill write this, or was it a Prominent Western Idiot? (I did extremely poorly—Claire.)
Russian hearts and minds matter. Here’s how to reach them. Don’t leave the information war to governments. Civilians have a crucial role to play.
The dangers of Putin’s paranoia. Why isolation encourages escalation.
… Unfortunately, the same qualities that led Putin to hide his battle plans from senior leaders in his cabinet make him likely to escalate a conflict that is not going his way. The United States and its allies are in uncharted territory as they attempt to force Putin to back down. Further economic sanctions and even retaliatory cyber-strikes may be necessary if Russia launches cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure, but Washington must not forget that a paranoid and increasingly isolated man rules Russia—one who has already made a series of costly miscalculations.
A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv. The ‘anti-imperialism of idiots’ meant people turned a blind eye to Russia’s actions.
Global Eyes
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