BY SCOTT RITTER

 

Kiev's broken record: No matter what advanced weaponry the West sends, there is no magic wand to conjure a Ukrainian victory

 

Zelensky's team keeps asking for more advanced military hardware as though hoping for a divine intervention that can turn the tide of war

 

In Japanese, the term Kamikaze, or ‘Divine Wind’, has taken on a dark interpretation, linked as it is to the suicidal pilots who flew their aircraft into enemy ships in the closing months of the Second World War. The original meaning of the phrase, however, was much different, drawn from Japan’s history when, in 1274 and again in 1281, powerful typhoons destroyed the fleets of the invading Mongols, saving the Japanese islands and their people from the wrath of the Mongol leader Kublai Khan. 

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhail Podoliak appeared to be invoking a modern-day manifestation of the ‘Divine Wind’ of 13th century Japanese history when, in response to a statement made by the Italian Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto, he advocated for a political solution to the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine by calling on the West to provide F-16 fighters, ATACMS long-range artillery rockets, and modern missile and air defense systems to Ukraine.

According to Podoliak, these weapons are needed by Ukraine to forcibly evict Russian forces from territory Ukraine claims is illegally occupied by Russia (including Crimea). Anything less than this, he contends, “will result in the collapse of the global security order and the triumph of bloody cannibals around the world.”

Putting aside Podoliak’s twisted analysis of the political reality on the ground in what Russia today calls Novorossiya, or ‘New Russia’ (the territories of Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, and Lugansk, which became part of the Russian Federation following referendums held at the end of September 2022), the emphasis placed by the Ukrainian politician on the impact the requested weapons would have on the outcome of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is telling. On its face, Podoliak’s statement at once reveals the depth of Ukraine’s military difficulties, and the reality that nothing – not even the provision of the requested weapons systems – can reverse the trajectory of strategic defeat that Kiev currently finds itself on.

Back in December 2022, the commander of Ukrainian forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, articulated what material support he wanted from NATO, Western Europe, and the US in order to defeat Russia. “We need tanks,” Zaluzhny said. “We need armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles. And we need ammo. Please note, I’m not talking about the F-16 now.”

At the end of June 2023, however, Zaluzhny, confronted with the fact that the counteroffensive he had promised if he received the requested weapons (he did) was failing, sang a different tune. “I do not need 120 planes [i.e., F-16’s]. I’m not going to threaten the whole world. A very limited number would be enough. But they are needed. Because there is no other way. Because the enemy is using a different generation of aviation. It’s like we’d go on the offensive with bows and arrows now, and everyone would say, ‘Are you crazy’?”

The US and its NATO allies are currently providing training to Ukrainian pilots on the F-16, and it is expected that Ukraine may receive a small number of the aircraft sometime later this year. But they will not be available in time to have an impact on Ukraine’s faltering counteroffensive, something Zaluzhny believes to be a mistake on the part of his Western partners.

Zaluzhny’s American counterpart, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, disagrees. Following a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which coordinates the supply of weaponry to Ukraine, Milley told the press that the provision of F-16s made no sense from a financial perspective. “If you look at the F-16, 10 F-16s [cost] a billion dollars, the sustainment cost another billion dollars, so you’re talking about $2 billion for 10 aircraft,” Milley said, noting that if the US had provided F-16s earlier, Ukraine would not have gotten much of the equipment Zaluzhny claimed he needed to carry out the Ukrainian counteroffensive. “There are no magic weapons in war,” Milley said. “F-16s are not and neither is anything else.”

Podoliak and the Ukrainians disagree. While hopes for an F-16-powered ‘Divine Wind’ remain quashed for the moment, Kiev is hoping that the US will lift its prohibition on the supply of ATACMS long-range artillery rockets. As things currently stand, however, such a decision is not in the works, with the Biden administration continuing to be worried about any possible escalation in the Ukraine conflict that could lead to a direct military-on-military clash between the US and Russia.

The third ‘Divine Wind’ intervention hoped for by Podoliak is the provision of modern missile and air defense systems to Ukraine. Unfortunately for Podoliak, this question has already been asked and answered, so to speak. Ukraine’s Western partners have poured billions of dollars’ worth of advanced air defense systems into Ukraine, including the US-made Patriot, the German-made IRIS-T, the Spanish-Italian Skyguard/ASPIDE, and the US-Norwegian NASAMS. 

The problem facing Ukraine is that Russia has responded to the provisions of these weapons by unleashing a massive suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) campaign designed to neutralize them, and all of Ukraine’s air defense for that matter. This campaign has been successful at stripping away air defense from the front lines and weakening it around critical strategic targets inside Ukraine. Russia today enjoys air superiority throughout Ukraine, able to strike any target it desires at any time. While Ukraine continues to ask for modern air defense systems to replace those destroyed by Russia, the bottom line is these will suffer the same fate as those that preceded them – being destroyed or rendered ineffective. 

Podoliak knows the hard truth, yet he and other senior Ukrainian officials continue to call upon the collective West to provide a miracle weapon that will tip the scales in Ukraine’s favor. In doing so, Podoliak and his fellow countrymen resemble Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon in the classic play ‘Waiting for Godot’. Confronted with the reality that Godot (the West) will never come, Podoliak (Vladimir) and his compatriots (Estragon) contemplate suicide, but lack the rope to do the deed. Instead, they talk about getting a rope, only to remain in place, unmoving, waiting for something that will never occur.

 

https://www.rt.com/russia/580768-ukraine-western-weapons-victory/

 

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by 
Geoffrey Roberts

 

Are historians, as Serhii Plokhy suggests, really the worst interpreters of current events, except for everyone else?

As a historian myself, I would like to believe so. It’s a comforting thought at a time of extreme pressure on scholars to pick a side in the Russo-Ukrainian war — to jettison objectivity, pluralism, fairness, and fidelity to evidence.

Professor Plokhy — a world-renowned Ukrainian-American historian and the author of many notable books about Russian, Ukrainian and international history — makes no secret of his sympathies. His new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History, is dedicated to “the many thousands of Ukrainians who sacrificed their lives defending their country,” among them his cousin, Andriy, who fell at Bakhmut.

Plokhy characterizes the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an imperial war in which Russian elites are attempting to crush Ukraine’s independence as part of their overall project to restore a Soviet or Russian empire.

Plokhy’s bias toward Ukraine’s cause is obvious in his narrative about the course of the war in which readers will find a chronicle of Ukrainian triumph in the face of adversity; the dramatic failure of Putin’s attempted blitzkrieg conquest of Ukraine; the halting of the enemy at the very gates of Kyiv; the defiant defense of Mariupol; the Russians’ summer advance in the Donbass; and the great table-turning Ukrainian counter-offensives of autumn 2022. It’s a compelling story that Plokhy tells very well, sometimes excitingly so. 

But Plokhy has no privileged access to sources or material evidence. Like all outside observers of these ongoing events, he must rely on information emerging from a very murky pool fed into by media reports, unsourced anonymous intelligence briefings, uninterrogated witness statements, participants’ post hoc memoirs, internet sources and an incessant stream of propaganda claims.

Arguably, the most vital contribution historians can make to public discourse about the war is to be consistently critical of dubious evidence being used to underpin contentious claims. Yet nowhere in this book does Plokhy proffer an evaluation of his sources or even suggest his audience should take care to avoid uncritically accepting the torrent of misinformation released through the war’s intense propaganda battles.

Plokhy’s book was written during the first year of the war. Its narrative ends in early 2023 when, having survived and turned back the initial Russian onslaught, Ukraine appeared on course to achieve new victories, and the idea that Russia was now losing the war seemed credible. Ukraine’s infrastructure was being bombarded by Russian rockets, but its civil society remained functional, and its citizens persisted in their resistance to Putin’s invasion. Ukraine’s armed forces were being NATO-trained and equipped in new formations. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valerii Zaluzhny, was confident he could beat the Russians, provided that his Western allies supplied him with the tanks, airplanes, artillery and armored vehicles he needed.

Today, Ukraine’s supporters continue to claim victory is possible, even if it is no longer just around the corner. But post-Bakhmut, and in the midst of Ukraine’s ailing counteroffensive, Kyiv’s situation does not look so rosy. The Ukrainians’ recapture of large tracts of territory in Kharkiv and Kherson did not change the strategic situation in their favor. In a sense, it may even have benefited the Russians by forcing Moscow to shorten its defensive lines.

Russia’s armed forces have proven to be neither brittle nor demoralized. Putin has successfully mobilized hundreds of thousands of additional troops, and Russian armaments have been highly effective. Western military experts who lauded the superior abilities and capacities of Ukraine’s armed forces now write reports about the adaptability, versatility and creativity of Russia’s soldiers and technicians. 

Buttressed by considerable Western help, Ukraine may be able to prosecute a grueling war of attrition with Russia, but the cost is already approaching tragically Pyrrhic proportions.

It would be unfair to criticize Plokhy for failing to accurately predict a still-unfolding future. But had he adopted a more skeptical and detached view of evidence and sources, he might have reined in his over-optimistic narrative of Ukraine’s battlefield successes.

The longer-term perspective — what Plokhy calls la longue durée — is another important contribution historians can bring to discussions of current affairs. About half this book is devoted to the war’s historical background, including a masterly account of the triangular relationship between Russia, Ukraine and the West during the post-Soviet decades. However, it is Plokhy’s analysis of independent Ukraine’s adroit cultivation and deployment of its particular identity as a non-nuclear state that I found the most fascinating.

When the USSR imploded in 1991, thousands of Soviet nuclear missiles remained on Ukraine’s territory. Ukraine had physical control of the weapons but lacked the launch codes to make use of them. Its commitment to nuclear non-proliferation was made both before and after its formal declaration of independence, as was its insistence that it should supervise the destruction of Soviet-era nuclear missiles. By doing so, Ukraine asserted its sovereignty while also securing a beneficial package of financial compensation from both Russia and the United States.

Ukraine’s denuclearization paved the way to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances that guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and then the 1997 friendship treaty between Ukraine and Russia. But, as Plokhy points out, the absence of any practical commitments to protect Ukraine was a problem. Having divested itself of the security provided by possession of nuclear weapons, Ukraine faced a choice between aligning with Russia or seeking NATO membership.

Had Ukraine and the United States followed U.S. political scientist John Mearsheimer’s advice that Kyiv should retain nuclear weapons to deter the potential disaster of a Russo-Ukrainian war, the outcome may have been surprisingly benign compared with the current situation.

Ironically, this strand of the story was completed when Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky implied at the Munich Security Conference in February 2022 that because it had not been given substantial enough security guarantees, Ukraine might someday renounce its non-nuclear status. Putin interpreted Zelensky’s statement as a threat to re-arm with nuclear weapons – a “threat” that may have factored into Putin’s decision to invade a few days later.

The grand theme of Plokhy’s account of Russo-Ukrainian relations in the post-Soviet era is how Russia’s domestic politics became increasingly authoritarian while Ukraine continued on the perilous path of democracy. Ukraine’s democratic choice, he points out, was the result of necessity, not inherent virtue, since it was the only way to contain the country’s deep-seated politico-ethnic divisions. 

Plokhy claims that Putin feared the contagion of Russia by Ukrainian democracy. But my personal experience of the view from Moscow was that most Russians were aghast at Ukraine’s anarchic democracy and much preferred their home-grown, managed form of government.

No book on the war would be complete without consideration of Putin’s views and motivations. Plokhy skillfully deconstructs the mythology underpinning Putin’s now notorious 2021 claim that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, though he omits mention of the contemporary opinion poll (before the invasion) that showed 40 percent of Ukraine’s citizens (two-thirds of them from Eastern Ukraine) broadly agreed with him. (To be fair, some people claim the question asked was skewed in Putin’s favor.)

Plokhy pieces together the different elements of Putin’s diffuse worldview but chooses to skate over his public statements vocalizing a resistance to Russian ethnic nationalism and his commitment to a Soviet-style multinationalism in which Russians are the leading but not overly dominant group.

Whatever the final outcome of the war, the most enduring parts of Plokhy’s book will be the pre-war sections based on solid documentary evidence. While his account of the war itself provides a good snapshot of the pro-Ukraine point of view, its problematic sources will leave many readers wondering if that is the whole story.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/08/02/the-trouble-with-telling-history-as-it-happens/

 

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Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has accused the New York Times of “mistranslating” a quote by him implying that Russian elections are rigged. While next year’s election will be democratic, Peskov suggested that President Vladimir Putin’s public support is so high that he will almost certainly win another term.

In a lengthy feature on the impact of the conflict in Ukraine on life in Russia, the New York Times quoted Peskov as saying “our presidential election is not really democracy, it is costly bureaucracy. Mr. Putin will be re-elected next year with more than 90 percent of the vote.”

The quote came amid a section of the story talking about how the ongoing military operation in Ukraine has consolidated support for Putin. According to Russia’s Levada polling center – an organization generally cited favorably by Western media – Putin has enjoyed an 80% approval rating through the entire conflict, except for immediately after he announced a partial mobilization last September.

Speaking to Russia’s ‘Podiom’ media on Sunday, Peskov said his words were “conveyed incorrectly.” While the New York Times’ version of the quote implies that the Russia does not hold democratic elections, Peskov actually said that, when Putin’s popularity and the “consolidation of society” due to the conflict are considered, “it can be said with confidence that if Putin is nominated, he will be re-elected with a huge advantage.”

“But elections are democratic, the president himself spoke about this,” he continued. “Although, on the other hand, they cost a lot of money, and it is clear in advance that Putin will be re-elected by a huge margin. This is what was discussed, and the published quote is, of course, a mistranslation.”

Peskov did not explicitly state whether he thought this “mistranslation” was intentional.

Peskov has previously condemned Western media for its one-sided coverage of the conflict. Speaking to reporters after a deadly Ukrainian missile strike on the Crimean Bridge last month, he declared that “the collective West is ready to turn a blind eye to any terrorist attacks that the Kiev regime organizes in our country.”

“This is not news. It was like this before and it will continue to be like this. We understand that perfectly well,” he added.

https://www.rt.com/russia/580916-peskov-nyt-democracy-interview/

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gruiMmDGMS4

After visit China, Kissinger warned Biden, ‘3 countries will attack US!' Not China!    No China!NeverChina!

 

Welcome to CHINA NEWS EXPRESS. This channel focuses on news from China. We will bring viewers the latest, most compelling, first-hand newsletters from the country, keeping you up to speed on its most important military, political, and cultural developments.

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FygBixBG7E0

Expectations for Ukraine Victory Vanishing in the West w/Matthew Hoh

 

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THE WEST IS NOT TRUSTWORTHY.... PUTIN TRIED TO NEGOTIATE WITH WESTERN TURDS.... 

 

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