The Stalemate in Ukraine: no way through the minefields in the ground, or is it the minefields in the minds of US/NATO Leaders?
No modern Western aircraft, much less air superiority; not enough artillery; not even modern tanks...The US/NATO military would never send their own troops through 20 km of enemy defenses this way...
Both images from the Guardian newspaper, Nov. 16, 2022: by photographer Alessio Mamo from the article “‘The Russians Mined Everything…’” by Lorenzo Tondo and Isobel Koshiw
Editor’s Update: September 13, 2023
My views are very close, down the line, to those of retired British Army General Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy commandeer of NATO forces in Europe; Twenty-Six minutes long and no “hemming and hawing” as a Brit might say, it would be the same message I would deliver to President Biden and his National Security advisors, and of course, the Secretary of State. Towards the end, if things don’t go well for Ukraine, NATO air power might have to get involved. Well, there it is, my long running position from the start of the war: either give Ukraine the weapons it needs to win, or watch them lose, which is unacceptable, therefore Western direct involvement may be needed. And a Western show of force prior to Russian invading in Feb. of 2022, might have headed off the worst of what we are now witnessing.
…and as an addendum to the General’s views (added Thursday, September 14, 2023), here is Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s view with an especially direct analysis aimed at the anti-war left in the US: the essence of his message to them is that stopping the war won’t end the killing inside Ukraine, because Russia is intent on cleansing that country with methods we thought WWII had put an end to (but of course did not…my additions to Snyder’s point: see the Balkans, 1990’s; the war in Syria with deep Russian involvement, or the Russian wars against Chechnya…). Therefore the only way to stop the killing with eventual humanatarian outcomes is to make sure Russia is defeated:
Editor’s Note: I was interviewed about the War by Hal Ginsberg at his YouTube station, “Halitics,” here: One hour and a couple of minutes.
The YouTube address is https://youtube.com/@halitics
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I thought it was time for an update on the war upon Ukraine, since my last full posting on June 11, 2023 here. It’s title was “The Gift Biden has given Putin, and the Yoke he has placed upon Ukrainian shoulders, civilian and military.” Here’s what I meant by that “Yoke”:
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For example: the Russian massing of troops and tanks months before the invasion day of Feb. 24, 2022 was broadcast for all to see, by US intelligence, thus giving, if we had had the nerve, plenty of time to send Western troops inside Ukraine to head it off, even if that deployment might have been seen as a bit of a bluff in terms of actual numbers. However, that might have upset Mr. Putin, and we mustn’t do that. Much more than Biden has taken the measure of Putin, Putin has climbed inside Biden’s cautious head and knows the Kremlin retains the initiative and has control of the nuclear panic button. And going a bit further, what a gift President Biden has given the Kremlin’s military, and what a yoke he has placed upon Ukraine’s shoulders - military and civilian - by allowing this: Russia can hit Ukraine day and night, front lines, supply lines, cities and hospitals, schools, water and electric supply facilities anywhere in the country, but Ukraine can only hit back at the military targets inside their own territory captured by the Russians. This allows Russia a tremendous advantage as to where they can place troops, reinforcements, crucial supplies - out of reach of the furthest artillery and rocketry so far supplied by the “Allies,” and with the Ukrainian’s aging Air Force unable to reach the Russian bases far behind the front lines. It’s nearly crippling: thus the complete passitivity as Russia has used the past 5-6 months to build impressive looking defensive lines and fortifications - with no interference that I’m aware of.
Since June, all through July and now into the third week of August, 2023, Ukraine’s much anticipated offensive has made only grudging progress of at best, a few miles, far from the 60 miles it would take to get to the Sea of Azov which military experts see as the real key area of the offensive, thrusts West (seizing parts of the East bank of the Dnipro River, just East of Kherson) and further East (pushing south along the Mokri Yaly River valley) , both to the South of Zaporizhzhya, the main objective being to cut off Crimea. In most of this area the Russian defenses, building since October of 2022, are roughly 20 km or 12 miles in depth, consisting of a deep anti-tank ditch, minefields, dragon’s teeth above ground obstacles, more minefields, trenches and dugouts, more minefields and trenches, and Russian artillery positions at key locations in the rear. Early attempts to breach such positions with the newly trained and equipped brigades, some using the German Leopard tanks and American Bradley fighting vehicles from the Gulf Wars, couldn’t make it through the minefields before losing treads to the anti-tank mines, then worse to the Russian artillery, then being pounded by Russian aircraft and attack helicopters. The attack was brutal, with high casualties and loss of the new equipment. The only good thing to say about the bravery of the Ukrainian troops was that their commanders backed off from these “modern, Western” tactics and have turned to smaller more incremental attacks, backed up by precision artillery and rocket attacks on Russian artillery and munition depots near the front. But the switch in tactics has been going on for more than a month, with not much greater progress. The consensus seems to be: “stalemate.” (Although retired General Hodges believes that even without the key weapons Biden/NATO has denied them, the shift in Ukrainian tactics to constant probing for weak spots keeps constant pressure on a Russian military which may at some time crack due to low morale and the constant dilemma of where the “main thrust” will come. This optimism comes after Hodges criticism of the decisions to withhold key weapons from Ukraine. I hope he is right, but I’m more cautious and even pessimistic about the chances for a key breakthrough.
On August 18th, I just had to answer a NY Times article which presented the grim casualty figures for the war as a whole, 500,000, more Russians than Ukrainians, but bad enough for the underdog. What brought me up out of my seat was the anonymous comment from someone in NATO that Ukraine was casualty “averse,” referring to their unwillingness to continue the NATO/US advised strategy of “combined'“ operations against miles of defenses.
Maryland51m ago
Yes very costly. I must add however, a note of criticism on some of the US commentary. To call Ukraine casualty "averse" during the offensive, is deeply “offensive” for the following reasons. As retired former European commander Gen. Ben Hodges has repeatedly said, no NATO or US commander would order attacks on the Russian minefields and three rows of defensive positions without first achieving air superiority. The Ukrainians do not even have artillery superiority, as many photographs offered in the Times frontline accounts show: they show a moon like landscape, thousands of shell craters clustered around the tactical objective of the moment, and most of those - 10:1 according to Ukraine accounts of the Bakhmut fighting - are Russian shell craters. There is no mention in any Times accounts of the fighting to the South, of Ukrainian aircraft flying sorties: mostly Russian planes and helicopers, which have proven very effective. General Hodges has been raising the point I've made repeatedly here in Times comments: it was not until the Allies mustered massive thousand plane (and more) bombing attacks on narrow fronts (3 km) of German lines in Normandy inJuly of 1944 that the allies were able to break the German lines which had penned them up since D-Day. Does the US/Germany want Ukraine to win, to push the Russians out and back to the 1991 borders ? Then give them the weapons we would use ourselves. And stop using Ukrainian bodies to bleed Russia at U's expense. It's cynical.
@William Neil Bomb craters in an open field are not evidence of superiority in artillery. They are only a demonstration of a lack of accuracy, a waste of shells, and an over reliance on area fire. Russian war bloggers are decrying Russia's inability to conduct effective counter battery fire. The evidence points to a Ukrainian advantage in both tube and rocket artillery. And, this is being used to great effect in attacking Russian supply centers and resupply routs. I agree, however, that we should give Ukraine whatever else it needs to bleed the Russians and send them home or to . . . .
@William Neil I agree with your sentiment. I have nothing to contribute. I can only say I feel particularly sad for Ukraine when I read the sentence: "American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse"
@William Neil 100% correct. A Biden tragedy. A president too slow to comprehend the immorality of this war and of our refusal to properly arm Ukraine.
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(The New York Times article headline is “Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say".”
Now I’ve been posting steadily in the NY Times online commenting section, sometimes 2 and 3 times per week since my last posting here at Substack, and I’ll generalize from what I’ve been saying and then list some of the more pertinent online comments.
Just in case readers were wondering about my sources, here are some of the most frequented. My top ranked one is retired American General Ben Hodges, former commander of NATO troops in Europe, in a very relevant time frame for today’s troubles; a slew of senior retired British military officers and intelligence officials at The Times radio YouTube site; a Danish military academy teacher who is also a naval officer; and a retired American Master Sargeant whose speciality later was as a defense contractor designing explosives to blow up tanks (Ryan McBeth, a MoCo, MD resident). I thought that being on the left politically in America required me to dip down into the ranks a bit, and I liked this Sargent’s answer to a reader who queried him on how to sort through all the propoganda and disinformation about this war: the response was to read as much as you can: articles, books, read widely from serious authors, and the broader one’s knowledge the easier it is to sift through the nonsense if not downright bullshit that seems to dominate our age. No guarantees though. I also liked McBeth’s comment that he was for Ukraine because Americans traditionally root for the “underdog.” (Well, I wish this still applied to domestic politics too). The “read as widely as you can” comment was bound to appeal to someone who as young boy grew up learning to read, after graduating from the Babar illustrated books, courtesy of histories of the Second World War, someone who spent a considerable hours when he was 9-12 in Samuel Eliot Morison’s 15 volume “History of American Naval Operations in World War II.” (As well as histories of our Revolution and Civil War).
Some relevant memories to the problem at hand: first, from the American Revolution: it took French imperial “score settling” after the losses of the Seven Year’s War, to intervene in our War for Independence and to intervene beyond muskets, bayonets and gunpowder (where an 18th century “Biden” might have stopped): it took the landing of thousands of French regulars at Newport, Rhode Island, in July of 1780 (notice the late date), and then the intervention of a large French fleet at Yorktown, VA in the autumn of 1781, with the trapped British troops playing a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down” as they stacked their arms and colors during the formal surrender ceremony. The French king who made this momentous decision to aid the upstart American rebels was none other than young Louis XVI, the king who was guillotined during the French Revolution which began in 1789,
While most younger Americans have gotten their WWII history from movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and the series “Band of Brothers,” actually the fighting in Normandy was bloodiest after Omaha Beach, the allies being battered and bottled up in hedgegrow country by skilled and determined German defenders, many still teenagers…until massive concentrated air power was called in to saturate narrow portions of the German line. Here’s how I stated it in a NY Times comment: (Sunday, August 13, 2023) in response to an article entitled Would F-16s Have Made the Difference in Ukraine’s Counteroffensive? link
William Neil
Maryland6h ago
Interesting that no one mentioned Normandy, July 1944 when after suffering 100,000 casualities since the June 6 landings, allied forces - American, British, Canadian and French troops needed massive attacks by massed bombers (B-17's, B-24's and then medium bombers, thousands of them) to drop their loads on a very narrow 3-7 km section of German front lines, to enable the famous breakout. It was called operation Cobra on the American end. And it seems to me, the German defenses were not as in depth or as organized as the Russian ones built since Oct. of 2022, in full view of the U.S. and NATO - with no counter action. I feel for the US military commentators who must talk their way around the stark fact that Ukrainians must fight a war our generals would never allow their own troops to have to fight; it isn't only the delayed, political decision to involve US aircraft for even training. F-16's would not be enough without two other layers of modern air warfare: disruption of the enemies eyes (all forms of electronic spectrum detection and interference/jamming), then the dogfights to clear off the enemy’s planes, and then finally the ground attack aircraft who can come in after air superiority was won (the A-10 Warthogs). By the way, in the whole Normandy operation in June-August 1944, there was no German Air Force left in France to offer opposition: the Allies had total air superiority. I don't blame the Ukraine leaders for their frustration; it is in the Biden-Putin chess match that Putin decisively wins.
@William Neil Well argued. USA has hardly any adequately combat experience that is substantial and meaningful right now. Schooling and booklearning and lots of (useful) training and "modeling" are what these people have got. They really cannot put themselves in Ukr's shoes. Biden is showing his lack of understanding of military matters, despite almost 40 years in national security, including, military affairs, at the policy and political levels. And we have three times more flag officers today for a military that is about one-tenth the size of the WWII force. And they are often full of medals, some given for triumphs such as completing training of the Afghani military.
@Granpanda Thank you Granpanda. I will be working up an essay on where the war in (on) Ukraine stands now, and how it got to the bloody stalemate, which is not Ukraine's fault. I took note this morning that Fareed Zakaria's GPS guest expert, Dr. Alina Polyalcova, raised the issue of the US/NATO failure to supply air power as a key factor, with the politics in the West holding back giving Ukraine the weapons they need to win: does Biden/NATO want them to win, because they haven't defined win the way Ukraine has (or, in fact in any way): to push Russians back to the 1991 borders, and most certainly, to regain control of Crimea. The West is missing a key opportunity to intervene decisively by not countering Russian moves to choke off the grain trade, right up to the ports so close to NATO on the lower Danube. And freedom of navigation in both the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. Pretty hollow that Section 5 of NATO if it doesn't include freedom of the seas on NATO's borders, which is an international issue, freedom of the seas and commerce. And something the US has fought for in the War of 1812, the Barbary Coast wars in the following decades, and in the run up to our intervention in WWI. I recommend to the American foreign policy establishment that they listen to some of the comments of ret. General Ben Hodges about Putin and tactical nukes, and how Putin dominates western heads. Putin being "ruthless, resilient and rational" according to one US psychiatrist/diplomat.
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How We Got Here, to Stalemate
Let me give the critics of the U.S. and NATO involvement their space here, and try to put them in a perspective they probably won’t like. For readers who haven’t been following the news, the leading academic criticizing the war and US/NATO conduct long before it began is John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. His postings and speeches at various sites have drawn millions of views, truly astounding numbers for someone who is kept out of the mainstream commentary despite his credentials and crisp presentations. His argument comes from a “Realism,” balance-of-power perspective which asserts that major powers do not tolerate interference in their own “spheres of interest” - whether it is the U.S. in Mexico, Cuba, Central and South America - or Russia, which drew the line, after its old Soviet “satellites” peeled off, one after the other, from 1989-1991, and others threatened to do so, including Belarus and Chechnya before that.
A substantial portion of the American left puts an immoral stamp upon alleged American broken promises (verbal) to Mikhail Gorbachev - that we would not push NATO up to Russian borders - and on representations made about Ukraine and Georgia entering NATO at a 2008 conference, with Putin’s invasion of Georgia being the Kremlin’s commentary/response on those gambits. And one will get pages if not essays and books on American hypocrisy over respecting international rules and boundaries (military interventions rife in Latin American history, Iran, two Gulf wars (1991, 2003) and Balkan expeditions in the late 1990’s.
What’s missing here in part is Putin’s ambitious efforts to rebuild the broken remains of the Soviet Union after it’s nadir in the 1990’s (with a plunge in GDP which many economists say was greater than any nation in the West during the Great Depression - 50 percent, plus plunging life spans for men); to rebuild that despairing country on the basis of so many leaders in Eastern European history before him: on a stern traditional morality and the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonization of the decadent West, and of course a rebuilt military along with endless glorification of Russian heroism during the “Great Patriotic War” of 1941-1945. Like some hyper-militarized version of the “Curse of Oak Island” (the most watched series on the History Channel), YouTube is loaded with videos of Russian men using metal detectors to uncover relics from the enormous extent of those WWII battlefields. This then was trouble brewing for the West, and for Ukraine too, as the West dangled, but never clearly offered membership in NATO, always pushing it off further into the future and harping on the reality of poor Ukrainian governance and deep set corruption, which had some strong basis in fact as the events of 2004-2014 would show. And for me, these repeated Western/US overtures to Ukraine add to our moral responsibility, doubly so, to make up for the intervention of the Russian Bear, now mauling Ukraine, whether one thinks Putin was justified or not. He wasn’t, unless one accepts Mearsheimer’s case at full face value, which I don’t. And even Mearsheimer doesn’t believe the invasion was justified, which is rather strange given the logic of his tracing of the history of diplomacy from 1989-2014.
And now for the personal history, to be clear about this author’s “interevention” history: he was strongly opposed to US intervention in Vietnam; the little Reagan demonstrations of “stomping” on red Island incursions; the disastrous Reagan-Democratic Party (the Right wing of the Party) policies in Central and South America (and the AFL-CIO’s role in foreign policy - documented thanks to Thomas Ferguson’s “Golden Rule” {1995}, and his “Right Turn” {1986}; I was against the first Gulf War 1991 (when I had lost the thread of weapon advances in the West vs old Soviet equipment); against the invasion of Iraq (Iran being the 1st target of choice by the Neocons) on the dubious grounds of weapons of mass destruction as well as bringing democracy to a nation/region where it was unlikely to flourish; and in favor of intervention in the Balkans in the late 1990’s to stop genocide; I liked Sec. of State Madeleine Albright’s comment that we have built an enormous military, “…are we ever going to use it…?” - I say that reluctantly, but that vast war machine was there, like it or not in the military-industrial complex sense, so why not, in a very fallen world, use it if we could stop budding instances of genocide? (and today, on the Ukraine War Professor Timothy Snyder believes Russian actions are genocidal in its tactics against the people of Ukraine). Oh yes, and on the very sore point of Afghanstan: no major power in history would ever have acted stoically, and not militarily, after the 9/11 attacks on the symbols of American power; action was warranted and taken, which was ineffective (even with the use of a giant “thermobaric bomb” ) - we just - (sound familiar?) - couldn’t define after that futile chase of Bin Laden what we were going to do there - fill a vacuum I guess. A very old historical vacuum in that country.
Now as observant critics of Mearsheimer’s “realpolitic” have noted, it is decidely “ammoral,” back to the old European chessboard of Bismark, the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs. And it seems to me, in the hands of commentators like the author of “Naked Capitalism” blogsite, it almost completely removes the “standing” (a word I prefer to academe’s “agency”) of the smaller nations themselves. Thus the US was to have given the most serious weight to Putin’s views 2000-2014, and much less to the desires of the peoples and governments who were formerly under the treads (literally) of the USSR until 1989-1991. Seriously: would they not all have desired to come under NATO’s supposedly protective wings after their experience of European history, 1917-1991? And wouldn’t the history of Europe, 1871-1945, have taught them by now that small countries in Central and Eastern Europe have always been at the mercy of Prussia-Germany, the Hapsburgs, the Russians, and dependent on the intervention of the West to keep their independence. Poland knows that history too well, and Czechoslovakia too, both having learned it the hard way, 1936-1939: the West doesn’t seem to be able to “get there in time.” (Echoes of Biden’s watching 120,000 Russians mass for months before they crossed into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2021, uttering at one time, in public that he hoped Russia wouldn’t “take too big a slice.”)
Is it no factor in the left’s calculations that Putin has been bumping off - murdering - opponents of alls stripes since 2003 - ten prominent political murders listed by a Washington Post article from March of 2017? Murders pursued even across the English Channel …to the very home of “liberal” dissent which once tolerated Marx living there himself? It’s hard not to see more than a touch of Stalin’s pursuit of ideological deviants - like Trotsky’s murder in Mexico. But hey, we can do “business” with Putin, right (Germany)?
Now let me concede some additional ground to the critics of this war, although not on the exact grounds of alleged Neoliberal/NATO aggrandizement for its own sake. From what I have learned from Professor Timothy Snyder’s Yale course, including from his guest lecturers, it seems to me that there was a civil war brewing inside Ukraine since at least 2004, breaking out in full violence in the famous Maidan Square struggle, every bit as intense between pro-Russian and pro-Western factions as the struggles in Spain’s Civil War, 1936-1938. I concede that US diplomats and most likely our intelligence services were active in trying to push out Russian leaning leaders, and seeing to it that Western leaning ones prevailed. I defer to visiting Professor Marci Shore, in Class 20, from Nov. 11, 2022, here to show that the uprising was beyond the control of US manipulation:
This picks up and amplifies my point about the democratic “standing” of citizens themselves vs the high level East-West (Putin’s Russia vs NATO/US) politics. Here Professor Shore says it was the Ukrainian students and then their middle class parents who intervened, at great cost and risk of being killed, and many were killed, to make it clear they wanted to go “with the West.” Whether this was a vote for the Neoliberalism we have come to be dominated by in the US and Western Europe (see any number of books and lectures by Yanis Varoufakis on that huge scorecard) or a reluctant embrace of an obviously less bad alternative is not easy to determine. After their success in the square, and in pushing Russian-leaning leaders out, the reaction to Ukrainian assertions of Western leaning sovereignity - was Putin’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas, invasions preceded led by the “little green men” of barely disguised Russian Special Forces - and aided by pro-Russian Ukrainian elements in both these locations. And we should remember this: when a nation-wide vote was held in 1991 to see if Ukraine should break away from Russia, even these two now Russian occupied regions voted to leave the old USSR…although by smaller majorities than in the rest of Ukraine, where the vote was overwhelming for independence.
Can Ukraine “Breakthrough” without the weapons the US and NATO would supply to its own troops?
There have been growing signs that the stalemate and its costs to the West are beginning to erode the support of Western publics. CNN disclosed a July poll on August 4th which found that 55% of respondents said “no more funding for Ukraine” vs. 45% who wanted it to continue. 51% said we had done enough although they would continue with other types of aid but not military, which had only 17% further support.
And in a very strange Times Radio interview on August 11th (YouTube, 38:24 in length) Dr. Kenneth Dekleva, a long time combination psychiatrist and diplomat who has served in some key posts between 2002-2016 (Moscow, Mexico City, New Delhi, Vienna, London, speaking Balkan dialects as well as German), I heard the following: “if Putin can’t win, he’ll make Ukraine a failed state”; Putin has an incentive to hold out until the US election of 2024; “Putin will never give up Crimea”; he doesn’t think the US or West. Europe will go for rebuilding Ukraine at the cost of $2-3 Trillion (yup, with a T); he thinks the war will end in a messy, unsatisfactory negotiated settlement and lists anumber of dismal historic precedents, with perhaps China or India brokering it.
That’s a glimpse of the mood growing about the stalemate. I think this diplomat underestimates how far things have gone in the war from the perspective of Ukraine. They have lost so much in both military and civilian lives, had a good % (25-30%) of their crucial infrastructure destroyed, and have no reason to settle now - for what - a shaky compromise peace if that leaves the status quo in terms of Russian occupation; such a settlement cannot last, not in the “Gateway to Europe.” Like France and England in the First World War, 1916-1917, they have given up so much in lives and physical damage that they must see the war through to victory, even if French regiments are in the act of mutiny…
Ukraine is now in the phase of desperate innovation with drones, airborne and seaborne, increasing their range to strike naval targets hundreds of miles away and even Moscow itself, although the deep attacks inside Russian via aerial drones are more psychological than significant militarily, just like the American Doolittle Raid in April, 1942, after our humiliation at Pearl Harbor in Dec. of 1941.
Look for more imaginative and perhaps more effective attacks on key Russian infrastructure, especially the Kerch Bridge, attacks which have sparked murderous and nearly instantaneous retaliations by Putin on civilian targets in Ukraine.
Ukraine will fight on, and must, even in the absence of the missing long range ATACMS missiles, enough mobile artillery, and far too few modern western tanks and the dangled F-16’s jets, still many months from showing up, long after this offensive stage ends for 2023. “Wait ‘til Next Year,” like the American baseball cry of losing teams.
And yet General Hodges is still an optimist, albeit with increasingly critical comments about the American/NATO refusal to give the weapons Ukraine needs to win, which he defines, unlike NATO and the Biden Administration, as pushing the Russians out and back to the 1991 border. Hodges is especially strident in his view that Ukraine must succeed in winning back Crimea; without regaining that peninsula, Ukraine will be a failed state.
Hodges says the key to military victory is will and determination, and industrial-military capacity, in all wars, not just this one; Ukraine has determination and skill in spades. The question remains whether the US/NATO will define victory the way Ukraine does. So far the answer is no, it’s as vague and stalled as the Biden-Manchin domestic negotiations throughout 2022.
On the great question which seems to keep the left and many Democrats in Biden’s strategic camp, I side with Hodges’ view of the chances of Putin using nuclear weapons, and here we are talking about tactical battlefield weapons, not an ICBM exchange of the large warheads that Russia and the US possess in the thousands. Hodges says the burden for running the risk falls on Ukraine; tactical nukes (this is my view as well) would be used by Putin (if he could get the Russian professional military to go along with him) if Ukraine would achieve the breakthrough that all their probing is pointing towards, and Russia would use the tactical nuke to prevent the open field maneuvering it so greatly fears after the successes Ukraine had in the fall of 2022 - in the East.
So it would be Ukrainian troops and towns being blown up over a 1/2 mile extent or so. Perhaps the greater fear would be Putin launching a tactical nuke upon a major city…either way, I would hope (despite the stranded Senate Resolution) that either use would bring NATO and US forces in full bore, air and ground power, to push Russia out. But before it ever gets to that point, ATACMS missiles are needed to strike at Russian targets both within captured Ukrainian territory and also wherever they can reach targets on Russian soil which are now pummeling all parts of civilian Ukraine, including the grain ports on the Danube right next to NATO’s borders.
That’s the way I see it. And maybe someone out there in our vast military industrial complex will tell me why “thermobaric” weapons wouldn’t be the weapon of choice, not tank flails and plows, to blast a way through the minefields. I’ll spare readers the link, but it was easy to find the patents from the US military for just such weapons and their delivery systems. I guess when it comes to Ukranian infantry blowing themselves up in minefields or risking going deeper into the US aresenal, Ukrainian blood is “expendable.”
Best to all my readers…
Postscript: I just added the following comment at a CNN-YouTube commentary featuring ret. General Spider Marks (Aug. 20, 2023):
I think that ret. General Spider Marks is way off base as are the anonymous US service (active) critics of Ukraine's strategy, and I might add, very much at odds with former NATO Commander ret. Gen. Ben Hodges. It's a bit nervy, if not downright callous to criticize attacks on Moscow, which have their purpose and origin in the same thinking as led to the U.S. Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April of 1942, to hit back with no military illusions, but symbolically indicate for the future and morale, that we could hit back and homeland Japan was not immune from attack. Marks is missing what Hodges stresses over and over: the key strategic thought behind the attacks on Crimean infrastructure, esp. the bridges like the famous Kerch one, is to cut it off from resupply and achieve its evacuation, Hodges stressing that Ukraine is not a viable state without a liberated Crimea. I agree, economically and from a military perspective. Finally, Marks himself seems to dodge the key question and hypocrisy here: neither he nor any current US or NATO general would send their troops into those Russian defenses without air superiority which we have denied now since the war began; oh yes, now we say start training on F-16's - British sources say its for only 5-6 pilots but Ukraine needs 4-6 squadrons of planes, 18-24 planes per squadron. And it’s a year too late. Has General Marks ever heard of operation Cobra in July of 1944 and how it was achieved, the fabled "Normandy" breakout? It is the failure of nerve of Biden, Germany and NATO to define winning as pushing Russia out to the 1991 borders, and to give Ukraine the weapons we would use for our own troops if they were being thrown against those miles deep triple Russian defense lines - which by the way, general, the West and Biden did nothing, nothing, to stop over the 4-6 month Russian construction period. A fuller, deeper critique of the stalemate can be found here: https://williamrneil.substack.com/p/the-stalemate-in-ukraine-no-way-through I am the author and the site is free and I earn no money for writing it from any source.
The YouTube video can be found here:
Postscript II: added August 21, 2023.
This is a good interview with Professor Mearsheimer interviewed by journalist Aaron Mate, about a month old, but current enough to capture the Wall Street Journal’s opinion that the West asked Ukraine to launch its offensive without the weapons it needed to breakthrough, much less win. The Professor agrees, the debate centering around whether Biden/NATO’s policy is sheer cynicism or stupidity (Mearsheimer leans towards stupidity, admitting that neither interpretation has enough evidence to be determinative.) Having watching domestic Democrats over the years on labor law reform, national health insurance, a national minimum wage and on and on…I have to keep cynicism high on the factors, letting Ukraine do the bleeding in the hope it will weaken Russia. It’s one hour long; Mearsheimer’s style is sincere, direct and lucid, and reminds me of the best lecturers I had as an undergraduate at Lafayette College. Their style as well as content always influenced my subsequent judgements on American politicians.
Update from August 23, 2023:
While I continue to work to understand the positions of some very well known names on the American left, like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Matt Taibbi and their stance on the war, Mearsheimer included although I wouldn’t place him on the left, I came across someone who was born in Russia, emigrated to Britain, has a MA from Oxford in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in the same from the University of East Anglia. I’ve viewed about 8 of his videos so far and how can I fail to respond to my own work in Russian history when Vlad Vexler quotes from Gogol, cites Alexander Herzen, Isaiah Berlin and John Gray’s “False Dawn” all figures who resonante in my own intellectual history.
Here he is, Vlad Vexler, taking on the conventional wisdom on the left. It should be easy to find his other talks given the way YouTube works once you view one:
Left to right on this screen: Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Sachs. Some on the left would dispute including Sachs. But that’s a long story.
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I can't think of a better way for the public to spend an hour, besides reading this posting, than listening to Professor Mearsheimer's YouTube video with Aaron Mate, which I featured just above in an update dated today, Aug. 21st. He really needs to have a prominent debate with Timothy Snyder on the nature of Putin's regime, which is about the only key issue he doesn't disuss, and the Russian track record in Syria, Chechnya and now in its conduct towards civilians in Ukraine. That's almost built in to the "realist" position in foreign policy, where poaching on what a major power views as its "sphere of interest" becomes never a moral issue but one of existential threats to power "prerogatives" (my term). But think through Castro's overthrow of Batista: we saw him as an existential threat before Russia placed any missiles in Cuba - and the key question of Oct. 1962 is whether Russia's missile bases were defensive or offensive...the US decided they were existential in potential and had to go out...which they did with an out of public view trade of our old missiles in Turkey. Therefore in part my answer to Mearsheimer on Russia's view of Ukraine is that the US learned to live with an ideologically hostile regime under Castro 90 miles away...and no one I know of in NATO or Ukraine advocates any Ukrainian advance into Russian territory with the exception of hitting the bases serving to kill Ukrainian civilians, which Ben Hodges says is an International right to respond when attacked. Therefor I'm with Mearsheimer about 80% of the way in his analysis, but haven't changed my view that the US and NATO will eventually have to use their airpower to salvage any semblance of a functional state in Ukrainian. Russia will leave a only a dysfunctional, crippled rump state if they are left on the battlefield where it stands now.
Let me address, along a different axis of response, those on the left who are very critical of the US and especially its "use" of NATO to threaten Russia by running NATO increasingly up to Russia's borders with "the last straw" for Putin being the alleged actions of the US inside Ukrainian politics, essentially to push the Ukranian state if not the people, to oust the Russian leaning leaders. I think a pretty fair summary of this spectrum of left criticism of the war can be found here, in a recent article by Eve Ottenberg, a novelist (26 and counting), Maryland resident, and left commentator at a number of sites, with this article at Counter Punch dated Aug. 18, '23: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/18/the-world-would-be-better-off-without-nato/
The piece has a series of amazing accusations againt the West, with nothing much to say about Putin's Russia and Putin's evolution to rebuild a twice decayed empire (Romanovs and Stalinists)....I looked into one charge which occurs right up front in the first paragraph, that there was extensive Ukrainian "ethnic cleansing" against Russian sympathizers in the Donbas (the Eastern contested provinces), the cause of the not quite Russian acknowledged invasions in 2014, there and Crimea. I went to Wikipedia for some clarification and you can read it on your own, the most illuminating comment being that Russia creates a "mirror" image of counter charges to confuse and deflect scrutiny away from its own actual conduct of ethnic cleansing against Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_genocide_in_Donbas#:~:text=Since%202014%2C%20Russia%20falsely%20accused,against%20Russian%20speakers%20of%20Ukraine.
In this article, the charge and counter charge have been escalated from ethnic cleansing to "genocide."
I was thinking this morning about the further charges, rife and ripe online, about how corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine, and Neo-nazis on the way to, if not there already there, into becoming Nazis, dominate the administration of President Zelensky. I find this another version of the counter mirror, with perhaps some truths on corruption and Ukrainian oligarchs - after all - this was part of the revolt in Maidan Square in late 2013 and early 2014 with the key question in this now open war bursting forth from the hidden one, being what the bulk of the citizens, not oligarchs in Ukraine, were thinking - and wanted. Going further, it's an amazing charge against Ukraine to level, given the nature of Russian society under Putin - both "civic life" and economic being dominated by oligarchs like Yevgeniy Prigozhin, he with his own economic empire, broadcast/online propaganda outlets, and indeed, his own army. By the way, Prigozin is quoted as saying, at Wikipedia, that Ukraine was not ethnic cleansing in Donbas thereby allegedly provoking Putin's invasion there and the ultimate step of mass invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
This all leads me back to Yanis Varoufakis, author or five or so books on the political economy, including "Adults in the Room: My Battle with European Establishment," (2017) about his brief role as Greek finance minister in 2015. It has been called the modern day equal, in style and content, of Keynes' famous work warning of looming disaster in the wake of the punitive Versailles Treaty of 1919 - "The Economic Consequences of the Peace."
Varoufakis' latest book, due out in Feb. of 2024, is called "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" and while it may be aimed at the "evolution" - or rather devolution - of Capitalism in the West, surely the "Feudal" aspects of economic oligarchy are there for all to see in Russia - as my brief note on Prigozhin indicated, reminding me, if not others, of the similar feel to the landed military Barons in England countering the absolute power of the King with some preliminary "checks and balances" at a famous field in 1205.
I know of no reason why Ukraine was not suffering from some of the same problems as Russia, 1989-2022, the difference being that Ukraine is now undergoing a hopeful transformation via a defensive war solidifying a nation which was there in boundaries in 1991, but had its independence from Russia deeply contested from above and behind the scenes, economically and politically.
I hope that the realization that the trend to economic oligarchy is a powerful force in the modern world might temper some of the left's attacks on Zelensky and the Ukraine power structure, keeping in mind the state of American democracy in 2023 and the shaky oligarch from real estate who is rehearsing for another coup in 2024. And I would offer not only reading Varoufakis as an antidote, but also Thomas Ferguson's "Golden Rule: the Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems" (1995, Univ. of Chicago Press). I'm a bit late in reading it (though not his essays and he's been on my Email list for a long time) and I can't think of a better endorsement than noting the authors who praised it on the back cover: the late William Greider, Walter Dean Burnham, Theodor Lowi, and the still living and writing James Galbraith.
I can't think of a better way for the public to spend an hour, besides reading this posting, than listening to Professor Mearsheimer's YouTube video with Aaron Mate, which I featured just above in an update dated today, Aug. 21st. He really needs to have a prominent debate with Timothy Snyder on the nature of Putin's regime, which is about the only key issue he doesn't disuss, and the Russian track record in Syria, Chechnya and now in its conduct towards civilians in Ukraine. That's almost built in to the "realist" position in foreign policy, where poaching on what a major power views as its "sphere of interest" becomes never a moral issue but one of existential threats to power "prerogatives" (my term). But think through Castro's overthrow of Batista: we saw him as an existential threat before Russia placed any missiles in Cuba - and the key question of Oct. 1962 is whether Russia's missile bases were defensive or offensive...the US decided they were existential in potential and had to go out...which they did with an out of public view trade of our old missiles in Turkey. Therefore in part my answer to Mearsheimer on Russia's view of Ukraine is that the US learned to live with an ideologically hostile regime under Castro 90 miles away...and no one I know of in NATO or Ukraine advocates any Ukrainian advance into Russian territory with the exception of hitting the bases serving to kill Ukrainian civilians, which Ben Hodges says is an International right to respond when attacked. Therefor I'm with Mearsheimer about 80% of the way in his analysis, but haven't changed my view that the US and NATO will eventually have to use their airpower to salvage any semblance of a functional state in Ukrainian. Russia will leave a only a dysfunctional, crippled rump state if they are left on the battlefield where it stands now.
Let me address, along a different axis of response, those on the left who are very critical of the US and especially its "use" of NATO to threaten Russia by running NATO increasingly up to Russia's borders with "the last straw" for Putin being the alleged actions of the US inside Ukrainian politics, essentially to push the Ukranian state if not the people, to oust the Russian leaning leaders. I think a pretty fair summary of this spectrum of left criticism of the war can be found here, in a recent article by Eve Ottenberg, a novelist (26 and counting), Maryland resident, and left commentator at a number of sites, with this article at Counter Punch dated Aug. 18, '23: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/18/the-world-would-be-better-off-without-nato/
The piece has a series of amazing accusations againt the West, with nothing much to say about Putin's Russia and Putin's evolution to rebuild a twice decayed empire (Romanovs and Stalinists)....I looked into one charge which occurs right up front in the first paragraph, that there was extensive Ukrainian "ethnic cleansing" against Russian sympathizers in the Donbas (the Eastern contested provinces), the cause of the not quite Russian acknowledged invasions in 2014, there and Crimea. I went to Wikipedia for some clarification and you can read it on your own, the most illuminating comment being that Russia creates a "mirror" image of counter charges to confuse and deflect scrutiny away from its own actual conduct of ethnic cleansing against Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_genocide_in_Donbas#:~:text=Since%202014%2C%20Russia%20falsely%20accused,against%20Russian%20speakers%20of%20Ukraine.
In this article, the charge and counter charge have been escalated from ethnic cleansing to "genocide."
I was thinking this morning about the further charges, rife and ripe online, about how corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine, and Neo-nazis on the way to, if not there already there, into becoming Nazis, dominate the administration of President Zelensky. I find this another version of the counter mirror, with perhaps some truths on corruption and Ukrainian oligarchs - after all - this was part of the revolt in Maidan Square in late 2013 and early 2014 with the key question in this now open war bursting forth from the hidden one, being what the bulk of the citizens, not oligarchs in Ukraine, were thinking - and wanted. Going further, it's an amazing charge against Ukraine to level, given the nature of Russian society under Putin - both "civic life" and economic being dominated by oligarchs like Yevgeniy Prigozhin, he with his own economic empire, broadcast/online propaganda outlets, and indeed, his own army. By the way, Prigozin is quoted as saying, at Wikipedia, that Ukraine was not ethnic cleansing in Donbas thereby allegedly provoking Putin's invasion there and the ultimate step of mass invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
This all leads me back to Yanis Varoufakis, author or five or so books on the political economy, including "Adults in the Room: My Battle with European Establishment," (2017) about his brief role as Greek finance minister in 2015. It has been called the modern day equal, in style and content, of Keynes' famous work warning of looming disaster in the wake of the punitive Versailles Treaty of 1919 - "The Economic Consequences of the Peace."
Varoufakis' latest book, due out in Feb. of 2024, is called "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" and while it may be aimed at the "evolution" - or rather devolution - of Capitalism in the West, surely the "Feudal" aspects of economic oligarchy are there for all to see in Russia - as my brief note on Prigozhin indicated, reminding me, if not others, of the similar feel to the landed military Barons in England countering the absolute power of the King with some preliminary "checks and balances" at a famous field in 1205.
I know of no reason why Ukraine was not suffering from some of the same problems as Russia, 1989-2022, the difference being that Ukraine is now undergoing a hopeful transformation via a defensive war solidifying a nation which was there in boundaries in 1991, but had its independence from Russia deeply contested from above and behind the scenes, economically and politically.
I hope that the realization that the trend to economic oligarchy is a powerful force in the modern world might temper some of the left's attacks on Zelensky and the Ukraine power structure, keeping in mind the state of American democracy in 2023 and the shaky oligarch from real estate who is rehearsing for another coup in 2024. And I would offer not only reading Varoufakis as an antidote, but also Thomas Ferguson's "Golden Rule: the Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems" (1995, Univ. of Chicago Press). I'm a bit late in reading it (though not his essays and he's been on my Email list for a long time) and I can't think of a better endorsement than noting the authors who praised it on the back cover: the late William Greider, Walter Dean Burnham, Theodor Lowi, and the still living and writing James Galbraith.