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Yours truly plans to write a broader post about the increasingly sorry state of the Ukraine conflict, at least from the Western perspective. Within a very short period of time, the messaging has changed from exhortations about the inevitability of Ukraine success to tight media focuses on itty bitty parts of the conflict to depict Ukraine as gaining ground, to now admissions not only that the great Ukraine counteroffensive failed, but that Ukraine itself will have to go on the defensive.
We’ll give a very short recap of the state of events, and then turn to a question that, as far as I can tell, has gotten just about no attention. I am no military expert, but from what I can tell, the proxy war + coalition backers approach to the Ukraine conflict seems unique, certainly in large-ish wars between major powers. And it has worked to Ukraine’s disadvantage and is almost certainly continuing to make its bad situation worse.
As various stories in today’s Links described (Simplicius the Thinker provided good one-stop shopping), Zelensky’s last-ditch effort to win a $60 billion Ukraine funding package this year is coming a cropper. Even diehard hawk Lindsay Graham has finally found a war he does not like much. The Republicans are refusing to retreat from demand for border control funding, more accountability for Ukraine spending, and a plausible Ukraine plan for how it was going to prevail. It seems vanishingly unlikely that the Ukraine monies will be approved before Congress goes into recess, which means the question won’t be taken up again until a bit into the New Year. And having said “no” twice, why should Ukraine expect a “yes”, or more than a much smaller allocation?
The EU is also rushing to get a Ukraine funding package approved, in this case 50 billion euros. Hungary’s president Viktor Orban has been the big holdout. Politico claimed Orban would be willing to trade his approval for the EU releasing all of Hungary’s funds it has withheld. But as of this morning Europe time, Orban is still acting as if he is playing hard to get.
And even if the EU succeeds in goading Orban into line, various EU officials have said the Europe can’t’ fund Ukraine alone. So how will voters react to see the EU keeping the money spigot open wide while the US (who was the lead actor in Project Ukraine) looks to have turned the tap all the way off?
As the New York Times reports (Simplicius again has a good recap), the US can’t even come up with new wishful thinking.
It seems to believe that if Ukraine can last long enough, Russia will ease up or be depleted and Ukraine can then somehow score gains so it can come to the negotiating table in a better position in late 2024/2025. This is a bad rerun of the Mark Milley proposal as of November 2022, then roundly shouted down, that Ukraine should try one more offensive (what was supposed to be a spring counteroffensive) and then negotiate from a supposed position of strength. Remember how that turned out:
The updated version is “hold and build.” From the Times:
Some in the U.S. military want Ukraine to pursue a “hold and build” strategy — to focus on holding the territory it has and building its ability to produce weapons over 2024. The United States believes the strategy will improve Ukraine’s self-sufficiency and ensure Kyiv is in a position to repel any new Russian drive.
The goal would be to create enough of a credible threat that Russia might consider engaging in meaningful negotiations at the end of next year or in 2025.
In most wars, the limiting factor is military capability. The military is defeated, or its leaders surrender, or the two sides decide the costs have become too high (or one side has achieved enough success) so that they negotiate a peace, or dial back hostilities to the skirmish level.
Here, more like a dying patient, Ukraine is having multiple systems break down, and armed capability may not turn out to be the one that drives the timetable. Mark Sleboda has pointed out that if Ukraine goes on the defensive, it could hold out for a very long time without horrific resource expenditure. Douglas Macgregor, who has regularly taken to depicting Ukraine as having lost the war, is almost always quick to add that World War II was over as of the Battle of Kursk, but it took another two years to vanquish the German army.
Sleboda has also pointed out that political upheaval in Ukraine could accelerate the end, particularly since he depicted the Ukraine forces as still fighting very hard, meaning they still hold out hope of some sort of success. Sleboda thinks a leadership breakdown or regime change could greatly weaken Ukraine morale and its already-flagging recruitment.
Other systems breaking down are government funding and the domestic economy. The loss of foreign welfare will turn Ukraine’s budget hole into a yawning chasm. The IMF is (amusingly or pathetically) urging Ukraine to raise taxes. It is more likely to curtail spending as best it can and deficit spend. Ukraine is already suffering 30% inflation. That will rise much further and the currency will fall, increasing the cost and difficulty of buying imports.
The economy was similarly in immediate and long-term dire shape. Many companies have been hollowed out by conscription. Many fields are similarly reportedly grown over. Citizens have fled to Europe and are not coming back. Money to repair Russia’s damage to the electrical grid last winter was largely looted.
Ukraine’s status as a proxy pf big rich countries meant by some measures it was bulked up to unsustainable levels, much like a steroid dependent bodybuilder or a science fiction figure kitted out in an exoskeleton. Remember that depending on how you count it, the US and NATO constituted three or even four Ukraine armies. So it is not hard to think that the military hypertrophy did even more societal damage than you’d normally see in a war (save the Carthage/Gaza salt-the-earth type), as illustrated by the intensification of Ukraine’s demographic disaster. So a sudden reduction of support from this super-high level is likely to produce cliff effects, including unexpected ones.
Yes, there are many cases of states forming coalitions to defeat a foe. European countries and Russia v. Napoleon. The Allies v. Axis in World War II. But these were cases of armed forces formed and funded by states sent, with their own commanders, to join the conflict, hopefully with a sensible plan and allocation of responsibilities among the major forces.1
The US and NATO set up the largest country in Europe, Ukraine, to act as a proxy in fighting Russia. Because the West assumed Russia to be weak and incompetent, it further believed that Russia could be cowed or further depleted so that Putin would be turfed out and replaced with a more compliant leader.
Again, as far as I can tell, Washington and friends did not seriously entertain the idea of hot war in Ukraine at a much bigger scale than the Donbass militia bulked up with some Russian forces and more materiel (which Russia was believed to be supplying2). An indicator is the size of the Ukraine forces massing in Donbass in February 2021, widely believed to be readying a big campaign to finally subdue the pesky rebels If my memory is accurate, the troop level was on the order of 100,000 to 200,000. Ukraine also had reserves, so say it could have beefed up the manning level probably by another 50% without much difficulty. They may also have believed in the superiority of their weaponry and training.
Nevertheless, if you go by the conventional rule of thumb, that the attacker should have 3x as many forces as the defender, Ukraine’s numbers suggested it expected Donbass defenders to be at most 100,000. So it also looks like a baseline assumption of the US/NATO/Ukraine forces was (at least in terms of manpower) that Russia would not meaningfully send troops to augment the militia men. Or put it another way, Russia was not willing to enter into direct confrontation and would be limited practically and appearance-wise as to how much stealthy backing they could provide.
The short version is the US and NATO got much more than they bargained for. And because this was a war where they weren’t risking their own men or territory, they could walk away when things got to be untenable.
But how does the coalition part play into this conflict in a bad way?
Consider some examples: Alex Vershinin of RUSI pointed out in passing that the Ukraine conflict being a coalition war meant Ukraine (and the US) had to keep the coalition on board. That resulted in even more distortedly upbeat accounts of how things were going than seems normal in war, not just to the great unwashed public, but also to coalition officials and leaders who normally ought to know better. I am reminded of a scene in the Daniel Ellsberg book Secrets, where Ellsberg has a shor meeting with Bob McNamara, I believe on a helicopter. Ellsberg basically tells him things are going to crap. McNamara says that’s what he expected, then gets out of the chopper and immediately gives an upbeat speech.
As bad as that sounds, that is more functional fabrication, officials knowing the score but covering it up for political reasons, rather than decision makers operating off wildly false information. At least in the former they have some dim appreciation of the risks they are running.
The US knew Ukraine had a massive PR operation and was also fabulously corrupt. Well into the war the US and NATO took all of its information from Ukraine without question, even though we had the capability to sanity check at least a fair bit and ask questions. But everyone seemed high on the idea that plucky Ukraine would trounce the evil Putin, and the behaviors around them became habitual.
Another is the way coalition plans were telegraphed in public. The Ukraine side make clear what it intended to achieve with its Great Counteroffensive. It even presented its strategy, that it intended to puncture Russian defense lines in the south, which would so terrorize Russian forces that they would drop their weapons and run away. Remember this?
Coming. Soon.
Be. Fearful. Enemy. pic.twitter.com/cyEf7UkfQA— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) January 26, 2023
This line of thinking ws so comical the Russians may have assumed it was a big disinformation campaign (hence the construction of the massive defense lines, as in they were not about to be lulled into slacking off) but the shambolic Ukraine performance during the offensive strongly suggests the too-public presentation was more or less right.
Similarly, the big arguments among coalition members about how would send which weapons and how many again gave Russia a lot more easy intel about US/NATO plans and materiel than it ought to have had.
Now in world of ISR, perhaps I am over-estimating the importance of information visibility. But Russia has been and continues to be pretty tight lipped as a matter of military discipline, as was regularly criticized within Russia for the cost of being bad at, or at best, indifferent to, PR. But it is hard to see how all of the squabbling about how the war was to be conducted and equipped didn’t help Russia, at least at the margin. And now that Project Ukraine is going pear-shaped, again the very public nature of the disputes gives Russia a good deal of insight into the widening fault lines.
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1 Aside from issues like prima-donna general squabbles (at least in World War II there was a Supreme Command, and so someone set to arbitrate), there were cases of casual decisions about which national force did what causing serious problems. Big Serge described how who landed where at Normandy was an afterthought, with the result that the heavily mechanized US forces wound up facing French hedgerows, where they were boxed in, while the British forces wound up in much more open terrain where the American vehicles would have been enormously effective.
2 At least in 2014 and 2015, the level of Russian support for the militias appears to have been exaggerated by the Western press. UN small weapons inspector Jacques Baud was tasked to find Russian small arms in Ukraine in 2014 and came up empty. There was a lot of Soviet gear in Donbass…but at the start of the war, many Ukraine regular forces refused to shoot on countrymen and abandoned their posts and gear, and on top of that, the militias also captured equipment in battle. So how much Soviet gear actually came from Russia is hard to determine.
Many Ukrainians of Russian extraction no doubt have relative in Russia. I have thought the Russian armed forces could easily have allowed services members to go to Ukraine on a voluntary basis for periods of time. There were also likely many little green men giving advice to the militias. But Putin repeatedly rejected requests from militia leaders to have their republics join Russia; Minsk was to be the way to end the persecution without getting into a row about territory.