The Wall Street Journal reports Russia’s troops have been exhausted by grinding offensives and Ukrainian resistance, but despite a promised counterblow in the south, neither side is able to advance.
Please consider Violent Stalemate Sets In as Battle Lines Harden in Ukraine’s East
“We’re at the point where Russia can no longer advance, and we can’t advance yet,” Maj. Bereza said at a command post of the Dnipro-1 battalion of Ukraine’s National Guard on the outskirts of Slovyansk.
The war in Ukraine’s east has reached a new phase: a violent stalemate. Russia’s troops have been exhausted by grinding offensives and Ukrainian resistance, bolstered in recent weeks by long-range rocket launchers provided by the U.S. The Ukrainians aim to stymie the Russians in the east and probe in the south in search of a breakthrough.
Long-range Himars rocket systems supplied by the U.S. have allowed Ukraine to strike ammunition depots and command posts deep in the rear, complicating Russia’s resupply effort and limiting its ability to concentrate devastating artillery on Ukrainian defensive lines.
“The situation has become easier but we can’t forget this is a very fragile balance,” said Capt. Serhiy Ivashenko.
“They stand at the maximum range that their artillery allows, scorch through 10 kilometers of earth, then move forward 10 and scorch the next 10,” he said. “They fire shells that simply destroy every living thing and every fortification, and it’s thanks to them that they move forward.”
Impact of Sanctions
Eurointelligence comments that the impact of US and EU sanctions is fading. Eurointelligence provided no more details in its free edition, but this not at all surprising.
There is little more the US or EU can do. Russia oil is flowing despite the sanctions.
Bloomberg reports European Buyers Are Snapping Up the Most Russian Crude Since April.
And Russia has the threat of further cutting off natural gas supplies to the EU. On August 19, Russia announced it would stop gas flows to Europe due to pipeline maintenance.
The shutdown is scheduled for the beginning of September and flows are already down to 20 percent of normal.
There are risks on both sides. Once wells are shut down the loss of pressure makes it costly to restart them.
Inflation in Ukraine
Ukraine’s economy is in worse shape than the picture painted by the Zelensky government and the Western press. Today, I measure Ukraine’s inflation at a stunning 65.06%/yr, nearly 3x the official rate.https://t.co/V5ELaPeV9V
— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) August 27, 2022
Forecasts of Russia’s economic collapse have proved just as wide of the mark, with gross domestic product falling at a grim, but less than catastrophic rate of 4% in the second quarter, as rising energy prices underpin budget revenue. As recently as May, Russia’s own finance ministry forecast a 12% contraction this year for an economy weighed by a blizzard of international sanctions.
While the US and its close allies have imposed sanctions, many countries — from China, to India and the Middle East — have not, continuing to trade with Moscow.
How Long Can This Go On?
That’s the key question and I do not believe anyone can say. But the price of natural gas is likely to increase as long as it does.
Meanwhile, Good Luck to Europe, Biden Threatens Energy Exporters With Stop Exporting Mandate!
BLOOMBERG: The Biden administration is effectively asking refiners to prioritize American consumers over maximizing profits by supplying fuel-starved Europe, which is facing an unprecedented energy crunch after the invasion of Ukraine – export ban coming up pic.twitter.com/3nZoDKmkGo
— Menthor Q (@MenthorQpro) August 27, 2022
After drawing down energy reserves, guess what? The Biden administration says they are too low, tells exporters to stop exporting.
Ultimately, this will end in a negotiated settlement. How long can Ukraine deal with 60% inflation? EU with energy costs? Russia with difficulty in getting parts and losing military equipment?
This post originated at MishTalk.Com
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According to the UN there have been around 5000 civilian deaths and 7000 injured, so about 12,000; but documents from the Ukraine Defense Ministry several weeks ago showed 191,000 Ukrainian military casualties. That is a civilian:military casualty ratio in the order of 1:20
Russia spent 8 years talking during the Minsk accords with LDNR, Kiev, Berlin and Paris. In retrospect it has been said the accords were only to win time and build a NAtO proxy army in the Ukraine. The US wants this war, and certainly will not negotiate: They refused in December and even sent Kamala to Poland to decree that the Ukraine would become a member of NAtO. The European vassals are being sanctioned to death (by the Americans, or their own boomerang sanctions if you prefer) and are not viewed by the Russians as having agency. The Kiev regime? They actually went to the trouble of murdering one of their own negotiators in plain sight, and form a death cult with whom negotiation is about as meaningful as with the Caliphate (except that they are white).
In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin complained, “What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: ‘The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are those guarantees?”
Putin was quoting correctly. He might have added, as we know from newly declassified documents, that Woerner also “stressed that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO (13 out of 16 NATO members support this point of view).” The NATO Secretary General also assured the Russians on July 1, 1991 that, in an upcoming meeting with Poland’s Lech Walesa and Romania’s Ion Iliescu, “he will oppose Poland and Romania joining NATO, and earlier this was stated to Hungary and Czechoslovakia” (document 30).
Many have accused Putin of historical revisionism and denied that the West ever promised Russia that, if a unified Germany were permitted to join NATO, NATO would not expand east. But, as these three quotations from the highest level of NATO show, the declassified documents firmly establish that NATO was lying when it said in a 2014 report that “No such pledge was made, and no evidence to back up Russia’s claims has ever been produced.”
Secretary of State James Baker has also insisted no such promise was made. On February 9, 1990, Baker famously offered Gorbachev a choice: “I want to ask you a question, and you need not answer it right now. Supposing unification takes place, what would you prefer: a united Germany outside of NATO, absolutely independent and without American troops; or a united Germany keeping its connections with NATO, but with the guarantee that NATO’s jurisdiction or troops will not spread east of the present boundary?”
Baker has been dismissive of this statement, categorizing it as only a hypothetical question. But Baker’s next statement, not previously included in the quotation but now placed back in the script by the documentary record, refutes that claim. After Gorbachev answers Baker’s question, saying, “It goes without saying that a broadening of the NATO zone is not acceptable,” Baker replies categorically, “We agree with that” (document 6).
There are four other declassified statements that now solidify the evidence against Baker’s claim. The most important is Baker’s own interpretation of his question to Gorbachev at the time. At a press conference immediately following this most crucial meeting with Gorbachev, Baker announced that NATO’s “jurisdiction would not be moved eastward.”
The second is that, while Baker was meeting with Gorbachev, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates was asking the same question of KGB leader Vladimir Kryuchkov in clearly non-hypothetical terms. He asked Kryuchkov what he thought of the “proposal under which a united Germany would be associated with NATO, but in which NATO troops would move no further east than they now were?” Gates then added, “It seems to us to be a sound proposal” (document 7).
The third is that, on the same day, Baker posed the same question to Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Shevardnadze. He asked if there “might be an outcome that would guarantee that there would be no NATO forces in the eastern part of Germany. In fact, there could be an absolute ban on that.” How did Baker intend that offer? In Not One Inch, M.E. Sarotte reports that in his own notes, Baker wrote, “End result: Unified Ger. Anchored in a changed (polit.) NATO – whose juris. would not be moved eastward!” According to a now declassified State department memorandum of their conversation, Baker had already in this conversation assured Shevardnadze that “There would, of course, have to be ironclad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward” (document 4).
Finally, according to a declassified State Department memorandum of the conversation, on still the same busy day, Baker told Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, not in the form of a question at all, that “If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east” (document 5).
Thought these are Secretary of State Baker’s most important assurances, they are not his only assurances. On May 18, 1990, Baker told Gorbachev in a meeting in Moscow, “I wanted to emphasize that our policies are not aimed at separating Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union” (document 18). And, yet again, on February 12, 1990, the promise is made. According to notes taken for Shevardnadze at the Open Skies Conference in Ottawa, Baker told Gorbachev that “if U[united] G[ermany] stays in NATO, we should take care about non-expansion of its jurisdiction to the East” (document 10).
Baker’s assurances to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were confirmed and shared by the State Department who, on February 13, 1990, informed US embassies that “[t]he Secretary made clear that. . . we supported a unified Germany within NATO, but that we were prepared to ensure that NATO’s military presence would not extend further eastward.”
A 1996 State Department investigation by John Herbst and John Kornblum not only became official US policy but, according to Sarotte “because of the official imprimatur and the broad distribution . . .helped shape American attitudes toward the controversy of what, exactly had been said. . . .” Herbst and Kornblum concluded that the assurances that were given had no legal force. They were able to make this judgment by separating the verbal promises from the written documents that make “no mention of NATO deployments beyond the boundaries of Germany.”
The investigation did not deny that spoken assurances had been made. And no Russian official has ever claimed that they were written in the documents; in fact, they have regretted that they were not. But written agreements can be broken too, and the US record on keeping written promises is not much better than its record on keeping spoken ones, as Trump’s breaking of the JCPOA Iran nuclear agreement and Biden’s frequent violations of the joint communiqués signed with China regarding Taiwan testify. That record led Putin to complain on December 21, 2021 that “we know very well that even legal guarantees cannot be completely fail-safe, because the United States easily pulls out of any international treaty that has ceased to be interesting to it. . . .”
The distinction that Herbst and Kornblum rely on is an act of legal sophistry. In “Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson argues that verbal agreements can be legally binding and that “analysts have long understood that states do not need formal agreements on which to base their future expectations.” Verbal agreements are the foundation of diplomacy. Shifrinson argues that informal deals are important to politics and that they were particularly important to diplomacy between the US and Russia during the Cold War. As examples, he cites the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis through informal verbal agreements and the “Cold War order [that] emerged from tacit US and Soviet initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s that helped the two sides to find ways to coexist.” Verbal agreements between the US and Russia “abounded during the Cold War,” Shifrinson says. Trusting spoken promises made in 1990 was nothing new.
Furthermore, verbal agreements, Shifrinson points out, “can constitute a binding agreement provided one party gives up something of value in consideration” of what the other party promised in return. Gorbachev certainly understood Baker’s promises in this way, as he agreed to allow a unified Germany to be absorbed by NATO in return for the “ironclad” guarantee that NATO would expand no further east. It was only after these talks with Baker that Gorbachev agreed to German reunification and ascension to NATO. The “not one inch” promise was the condition for Gorbachev agreeing to a united Germany in NATO. In his memoir, Gorbachev called his February 9 conversation with Baker the moment that “cleared the way for a compromise.”
And the promises made by Baker were not the only promises made to Russia. Assurances came from the highest level of NATO and from Robert Gates, who, unlike Baker and NATO never deceived about his promises. In July 2000, Gates criticized “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”
The same promises were made by the leaders of several other nations. On July 15, 1996, now foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov, who had “been looking at the material in our archives from 1990 and 1991,” declared, according to Sarotte, that “It was clear . . . that Baker, Kohl and the British and French leaders John Major and François Mitterrand had all ‘told Gorbachev that not one country leaving the Warsaw Pact would enter NATO – that NATO wouldn’t move one inch closer to Russia.”
Importantly, those same promises were made by German officials. West German chancellor Helmut Kohl met with Gorbachev the day after Baker on February 10. He assured Gorbachev that “naturally, NATO could not expand its territory to the current territory of the GDR [East Germany].” Clearer still, he told Gorbachev that “We believe that NATO should not expand its scope” (document 9). Simultaneously, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was pointedly telling Shevardnadze that “For us, it is clear: NATO will not extend itself to the East.”
On March 5, 1991, British Ambassador to Russia Rodric Braithwaite recorded in his diary that when Russian Minister of Defense Dmitry Yazov had expressed that he was “worried that the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians will join NATO,” British Prime Minister John “Major assure[d] him that nothing of the sort will happen” (document 28). When Yazov specifically asked Major about “NATO’s plans in the region,” the British Prime Minister told him that he “did not himself foresee circumstances now or in the future where East European countries would become members of NATO” (document 28). On March 26, 1991, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd informed Soviet Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh that “there are no plans in NATO to include the countries of Eastern and Central Europe in NATO in one form or another” (document 28). In a July 2016 article, Braithwaite wrote that “US Secretary of State James Baker stated on 9 February 1990: “We consider that the consultations and discussions in the framework of the 2+4 mechanism should give a guarantee that the reunification of Germany will not lead to the enlargement of NATO’s military organization to the East”.
The clarity of the documentary record is still relevant today because it indicates that when Russia talks of a final red line at NATO expansion into Ukraine and right up to Russia’s border and of Western promises that neither NATO jurisdiction nor forces would expand beyond Germany’s borders, they are not engaging in historical revisionism as the West accuses but are expressing real existential fears and expressing legitimate expectations that the West will keep the promises they made in exchange for Russia keeping the promise it made in those 1990 and 1991 negotiations.
Whataboutism is propaganda for please excuse my glaring & insuffrable hypocrisy.
“The Russian offense has stalled, but Ukraine does not have
the weapons or manpower for a huge offensive move.”
True but the fact that Russia can no long conquer territory
is not a good sign for them. Ukraine started the war with old Soviet weapons.
It will finish the war with Nato level weapons, tactics and indirectly Nato manpower.
Ukraine is getting very performing arms and their effect is devastating to
Russia’s ability to advance. A key part of Nato’s tactics is airpower which
Ukraine lacks but Nato is now training Ukraine pilots in F-16s and that will go
long to break the ground stalemate. Russia started the war with refurbished
Soviet era hardware plus some new weapon systems in limited quantity and that
have not been the game-changer that they were expected to be. As the war drags
on the Russian and equipment losses mount Russia is obliged to pull out of
storage the older equipment to furnish their armed forces. To be brief Russia’s
ground forces are becoming more and more low-tech as time goes on. For manpower
Ukraine has mobilized everyone so it does have a superiority over Russia for
the moment but it takes time to train them and equip then but that part is
happening slowly than we want but it is happening. Russia has done a partial stealth
mobilization only and hesitates to go all the way because of the government’s uncertainty as to the population’s reaction.
There is a point where when the enemy fails in their
objectives and their offensive falters in face of fierce resistance resulting
in a stalemate where the front lines move very little. We saw this in World War
I in 1915 and in World War II in mid-1943. When this occurs the aggressors
seeing that they no longer can advance like before and the defenders seeing
that they although they stopped the advance but cannot push the aggressor back
both sides become very worried that they are losing. To the peace-loving
outsider this looks like the perfect moment to broker a deal because to him it
seems logical, doable and laudable but it is a mirage. The aggressor although exhausted
and still wanting to keep the land and resources it has stolen puts out through
third parties that it wants peace now. The defender although exhausted cannot
accept this offer of peace because it leaves the enemy with a good chunk of its
territory but also because the defender knows that the aggressor once rested
will come back for the rest. Generally if the aggressor doesn’t deliver the
knockout blow quickly to overwhelm the defense completely then it turns first
into a stalemate and then as the defenders mobilize their resources and those
of their allies the stalemate becomes a pushback.
“They
stand at the maximum range that their artillery allows, scorch through
10 kilometers of earth, then move forward 10 and scorch the next 10,” he
said. “They fire shells that simply destroy every living thing and
every fortification, and it’s thanks to them that they move forward.”
Impact of Sanctions
Stick a fork in Ukraine. It is done. Reminds one of the saying that while it could be dangerous to be an enemy of the US, it is fatal to be its friend.
That means Russia is only interested in the areas marked in pink and light purple. And that is exactly what they are doing. Maybe by late winter i.e. Feb-Mar 2023, they would get there. Of course, the progress has been slower than those who have been fed on “shock and awe” brutality would expect. However, Russia knows it makes no sense to “liberate” a region by killing lots and lots of the civilians living there, which is what the US did with Iraq.
No whataboutism there. Just basic common sense. Which alas, is something that you Dumbocrats don’t have.
Mercouris.
not kooky enough for you to believe ?
Keep them jokes coming please! ROFL.
Ukraine arms shipments following on the heels of Berlin boosting its
military budget by €100 billion. They’ve sent a letter to German
Chancellor Olaf Scholz with the title, “The weapons must be silent!”
Instead
of pumping weapons into a hot conflict with a nuclear-armed superpower,
the group within Scholz’s own party are demanding the pursuit of a
diplomatic negotiations, pushing the Ukrainians to the peace talks
table. “The escalation spiral must be stopped,”
Russians have taken off their gloves few times already.
Day 1, top russian spetsnaz forces were decimated – everyone laughed at their ground movements as amateurs.
The real russian army must be hiding behind a very big tree.
Well your appeal to your own authority and the supreme knowledge that must be behind your clandestine papers has convinced me, I dont even need to google casual observer’s graduate thesis to know I was wrong
explain it very well too) have made it abundantly clear. I highly
recommend “real revolution in military affairs” by martyanov. But they
both provide tons of evidence on their blogs.
Pls say again. Did not get your point.
This would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.
The rest of the Ukraine would be a land confined, mostly agricultural state, disarmed and too poor to be build up to a new threat to Russia anytime soon. Politically it would be dominated by fascists from Galicia which would then become a major problem for the European Union.
Thanks to Stalin’s additions to the Ukraine three countries, Poland, Hungary and Romania, have claims to certain areas in the Ukraine’s western regions. If they want to snatch those up again it is now probably the best time to do so. Despite being part of NATO, which likely would not support such moves, those three will have domestic policy difficulties to withstand the urge.”
I don’t believe you. Prove it, and not from some whackjob site.
Outside of Ukraine, I think the outlook for Britain is quite shaky.