Looking for Words on the Russo-Ukrainian War

In August I have been trying to think of anything worth saying about the Russian war in Ukraine. The only things I can come up with this August are Perun’s lectures, the odd talk by the Chieftain, some long-form reporting in the Kyiv Independent, and the BBC-Meduza estimate of Russian dead. In July Russia ended the agreement not to attack ships exporting Ukrainian grain. They hoped to reduce Ukraine’s income in foreign currency, and starve people in Africa and Southwest Asia whose UN representatives might push for a ceasefire to get the grain flowing again. Every so often the Ukrainians launch a new attack on Crimea (in September they used cruise missiles and unmanned surface vessels to sink ships in Sevastopol, other times they have attacked supply dumps and the Kerch Strait bridge). The drone attacks on Moscow and the mutiny of Wagner Group certainly show that the Russian government has limited military power everywhere other than the front. The Ukrainians have quietly resumed conscription, which could mean a lot of their soldiers are dead or wounded, or could mean they have trained up all their volunteers and have room in the training courses for conscripts again.

Almost everything else I can find is speculation, trivia, or propaganda. The Ukrainian government and military are too busy fighting for their fatherland to give full and frank reports, and the Russian government and military lie like crypto fraudsters having a heart to heart chat with the kind of investors who have interesting tattoos and assistants the size of pro hockey players. Calling out specific fantasists, propagandists, and useful idiots seems pointless (do they know me? do they care what I think? do my gentle readers know them and care what they think?) and not the kind of thing I want to talk about on this blog. Someone is always wrong on the Internet. Many of the honest commentators such as Oryx are retiring because its so hard to keep watching people be killed and scroll through disgusting Telegram channels looking for a new photo or video. As I said in my last post, the outcome of this stage of the fighting will be determined by how fast the two sides create and lose forces, and nobody knows those numbers for both sides (the Ukrainian military must know their numbers, but I would not want to bet money that the numbers for Russian gains and losses which reach Shoigu are accurate within a factor of two). Control of ground is not important, what matters is the changing relationship between the forces on and above the ground.

The same that applies to the general course of the war applies to how it is being fought. Some people intone that towed artillery are obsolete in the face of drones, but others have seen pictures of Ukrainian artillery pieces next to giant piles of shell cases, so apparently those particular pieces are not moving after firing two or three rounds. The Ukrainians seem happy with their M777 howitzers and have finally set up camouflage nets and anti-suicide-drone screens! The effectiveness of different unmanned vehicles seems to vary from week to week or month to month or sector to sector. The main countries willing to provide Russia with arms are still Iran and North Korea, and NATO is stronger than that coalition in every way that matters.

I also feel uncomfortable with a lot of what passes for commentary because it does not respect what is happening. Millions of Ukrainians live under Russian military occupation. Millions more live under thugs in Donetsk and Luhansk. Millions have been driven from their homes or their countries. At least 100,000 people have been killed. Hundreds of thousands have been forced into uniform. Russian forces are deporting Ukrainian children and murdering people in the occupied territories; prisoners of war are being murdered or mutilated by their captors. The Russian on-again, off-again blockade of the Black Sea threatens the grain supply to whole countries. Something like 20% of Ukrainian territory is still occupied. Arguing about this war is not harmless nerdiness like arguing about WW II tanks or Napoleonic frigate captains. Whoever is coming off better from the fighting, I have trouble imagining any situation where more civil and military aid to Ukraine would not be a net good.

Under circumstances like this, I feel very uncomfortable watching outsiders making up numbers and pronouncing who will run out of troops and weapons first, or grading the combatants’ performance like a middle-school teacher. I don’t think anyone knows how to fight a war like this with the equipment the Ukrainians have available. The Canadian Armed Forces have not fought without overwhelming air superiority since 1942 (and when they fought without overwhelming air superiority at Dieppe and Hong Kong, it did not go well for them). And you don’t have to know which side is ahead today to conclude that the more arms they receive, the more likely Ukraine is to win soon. And the sooner Ukraine wins, the sooner this war will stop getting worse. (Russia ‘winning’ would not stop it getting worse, because many of Russia’s goals are not possible but they have lots of torturers and concentration-camp guards willing to try).

PS. I have scheduled this post 2 1/2 months in advance because I believe nobody, even the Ukrainian high command, can know what will happen. So if the Ukrainians break through or launch a massed attack and lose hundreds of vehicles in a week, there will be no need to update this post.

Further Reading

“Bring out your dead: A joint investigation by Meduza and Mediazona reveals the true number of Russian soldiers killed so far in the invasion of Ukraine,” Meduza, 10 July 2023 https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/07/10/bring-out-your-dead

The Chieftain, “Designing the Tank of the Future,” 21 July 2023 {try minute 19:48 for the Ukrainian talk on UAV defense} https://piped.garudalinux.org/watch?v=iFs6LG0TEyU

Perun (YouTube) https://piped.mha.fi/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q

https://kyivindependent.com/its-a-lottery-how-ukraines-assault-brigade-counterattacks-near-bakhmut/

https://kyivindependent.com/ukrainian-troops-regularly-cross-dnipro-river-probing-russian-defenses-in-kherson-oblast/

https://kyivindependent.com/pro-russian-sympathies-make-life-harder-for-soldiers-cops-in-kupiansk-district/ {do the 2014 borders precisely divide people who want to be part of Russia from people who want to be part of Ukraine? Probably not. But without this stupid war people could come to an arrangement similar to that between Italy and South Tirol, or Spain and Catalonia. As the Kenyan delegate to the UN said, the borders left over from the European empires of the early 20th century don’t make sense, but it would make even less sense to fight over them}

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/11/zelenskiy-sacks-all-military-recruitment-heads-over-frontline-bribes-scandal-ukraine {Shakespeare makes jokes about the practice of taking bribes to conscript the moneyless and friendless, and Sir John Smythe got in trouble for criticizing it}

https://euromaidanpress.com/2023/08/23/the-one-most-important-thing-for-ukraines-counteroffensive/ {semi-official statement from a Ukrainian think tank: if Ukraine runs out of weapons and ammunition before breaking through Russian lines in 2023, it will hold until ammunition production in the EU increases then attack in fall 2024 or spring 2025}

https://theins.ru/en/confession/263400 {Russian sex workers on their military clients, I don’t know the venue}

PNAS Political Science with one of the less bad casualty estimate by academics https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2307372120

Holger Roonemaa and Eero Epner, “How Estonia’s Military Intelligence Secretly Helped Ukraine,” vsquare 15 September 2023 https://vsquare.org/how-estonias-military-intelligence-secretly-helped-ukraine/ ‘Although his agency picked up early signals ahead of the current war, this time they fell short of predicting the start of the war. “When you looked at the composition and concentration of Russia’s forces [along the Ukrainian borders], the answer was that they wouldn’t be able to do it. As it became clear, they really can make very stupid decisions and conduct the operation with only a third of required forces,” (retiring Estonian military intelligence chief) Grosberg says.’

Wong, Leonard and Gerras, Stephen J., “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession” (2015). US Army War College Press. Monographs, Books, and Publications. 466.
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/466 {sometimes the difference between an army that fights well and an army that collapses in lies, theft, and crimes against civilians is as thin as the edge of a knife; the problems of Russian ground and naval forces are not unique to them, just especially severe and visible; cp. the observations of journalists who cover court cases that Canadian cops perjure themselves a lot}

US General Zaluzhnyi, UDC 355: MODERN POSITIONAL WARFARE AND HOW TO WIN IN IT https://infographics.economist.com/2023/ExternalContent/ZALUZHNYI_FULL_VERSION.pdf

(scheduled 23 August 2023, updated 15 September 2023, added link 28 October 2023, 5 November)