Ukrainian War Developments

Part 2:

The View from Russia

The air is thick with wild interpretations of Russian motives. As portrayed in the Western press, it is Putin and the Russians who are thirsting to change the status quo. He wants to conquer and absorb Ukraine. He wants to restore the Soviet Union. He wants to bring Russia to the geopolitical position the Soviet Union . He wants the United States from Europe. Since our Russia experts proceed on the assumption that you cannot believe a word he says, they are freed from all evidentiary restraint in their explication of what Putin wants. Since they rule out by hypothesis that he could conceivably have defensive motives, we are left with the choice of aims ranging from the aggressively obnoxious to the insanely aggressive.

The hawks are not ashamed to make stuff up. Putin, they say, is daily threatening war to take over Ukraine. No, that is what the United States and its media sycophants are saying that Putin is saying and doing. He says the military deployments are nothing. The Russian Foreign Ministry reminds people just about every day that it is not threatening any such war.

On Putin’s putative desire to conquer and absorb Ukraine, consider that Ukraine, a nation of 43.3 million people, would be impossible to rule effectively and profitably from Moscow, while the attempt to do so would emphatically impose huge financial and political costs. One of the pristine memories of Soviet history is that when Josef Stalin ordered his mercilessly cruel and wholly irrational campaign of dekulakization and collectivized agriculture, the Ukrainian peasantry half its grain and half its livestock rather than surrender it to the commissars.

U.S. intelligence has focused laser-like on the course and objectives of a Russian invasion, but what they have ignored, as they did in 2003 (Iraq) and 2011 (Libya), is what comes after Mission Accomplished. They are thinking about the forces required for an invasion like that which the United States undertook in Iraq, but the real numbers game, as we subsequently discovered in that now dimly remembered war, must take into account the forces required for an occupation. In sizing such forces, military historians identify ratios of one soldier for sixty people in unfriendly terrain, and a one to 100 ratio in friendlier environs. As Ukraine would be more like the former than the latter for Russia, that generates a force requirement of 721,000, way beyond existing Russian capabilities. Even the lesser number of 430,000 would require stripping the rest of the country of its defenses and imposing onerous new requirements for conscripts, a veritable mass mobilization. One does wonder if the U.S. officials predicting the imminent ingurgitation of this indigestible mass ever look beyond the first fifteen days of the plan they have implanted in the mind of the Russian military. On the surface, at least, U.S. “intelligence” appears not too bright, because it posits a complete disconnection between the ends foreseen and the means available. Putin, it is reasonable to assume, is not so blind.

The problem with conquering Ukraine is not primarily a function of the Ukrainian willingness to fight a guerilla war, but the impossibility of making any positive and profitable use of the territory after a big invasion. It is like asking the Russians whether they want to repeat the Holodomor. No, they don’t. The high-end numbers provided by “senior administration officials,” even if given a credence they do not deserve, are still totally inadequate if seen in relation to the political goals they say that Putin has in mind. Forgotten is that Putin’s central critique of both the Iraq invasion of 2003 and the Libyan invasion of 2011 is that the Americans proclaimed a victory and left anarchy. Why would he want to repeat those fiascos?

james smith esq said:

What is this, a science experiment?

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Kind of. We have a lot of pontification here. I'm asking people to make solid predictions just for this next week. Not long term.

Let's see how accurate people are.

I don't know is a perfectly acceptable answer.

Part 3:

Ukraine is Not a Country

It is now said repeatedly by our talking heads that Putin denies that Ukraine is even a country. In their reconstruction, Putin thinks it is totally illegitimate and therefore ripe for takeover. “When you say things like, ‘Ukraine does not now and has never had a right to exist as a sovereign state, there is no such thing as the Ukrainian people,’ where does your rhetoric go from there?” a senior Western intelligence officer. The media cite Putin’s 5,000-word in July 2021 detailing the history of Russia’s relations with Ukraine. But Putin’s argument in that essay is totally different from what it has been to be by our media , who in this case have definitely learned to speak but cannot read. In brief, Putin’s pitch was this:

Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus share a common history. For long stretches of time, their inhabitants considered themselves “a triune people comprising Velikorussians, Malorussians and Belorussians” rather than separate Slavic peoples. The Ukrainians, however, declared their independence and opted for separation rather than common nationhood. How do you treat such a people, Putin asked, and said there was only one answer: “with respect!” His essay explicitly acknowledged the right of the Ukrainians to form a separate and independent state. His language was that of a husband pleading with his wife not to leave him, while acknowledging that she has the right to do so and even some reason to do so. At least she shouldn’t hate him.
The nub of Putin’s argument concerned the terms of the divorce. He wrote that the Ukrainians, in deciding to leave, could not take out of the partnership more than they’d brought in the first place. The critical year was 1922, when the Ukrainian communists joined with the Russian communists and others to make that formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At that time, Crimea was not part of Ukraine, though the Donbas was. Nor were the territories in the west that Stalin annexed in 1940 in the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Putin’s discussion of the 1924 Soviet constitution and the right of secession it conferred is very revealing. He insists that this provision of the constitution was real and had to be respected, though it was also written at a time when the source of cohesion lay in central party control, so was effectively meaningless during the party’s reign. His conclusion, however, is clear: the Soviet Constitution, however defectively, did indeed provide a right of secession in 1924, reaffirmed in 1936, and on this basis, Ukraine had a right to secede. Far from making a claim for all Ukraine, he didn’t even make a claim to the Donbas. He pointed out that the Donbas and some surrounding areas were included in Ukraine at Lenin’s insistence, as part of the Bolshevik scheme for managing the minorities question, but acknowledged that Ukraine came into the union with those territories. There was, he wrote, still no alternative to the Minsk agreements, which explicitly recognize the Donbas as part of Ukraine....contd

Putin’s stated vision for Russia and Ukraine is not absorption into a common state, but the sort of relationship that exists between the United States and Canada, in which people who share a common ancestry cooperate and profit from their relationship, while still having separate states.

The reader will at this point object that I am making Putin seem very reasonable. Could it be? Don’t you know he’s a liar? That you can’t trust anything he says and therefore you can make him say anything you want? What is most objectionable about these objections is that they aren’t really about Putin at all, but about Russia and Russians. It is the Russian viewpoint, not Putin’s viewpoint as such, that is destitute of legitimacy in the eyes of America’s officialdom and commentariat.

The real guarantee of these views is not Putin’s bona fides but the nature and character of the people he rules. The biggest thing that our imaginative Russia experts miss is that Putin is constrained by Russian public opinion. By repeatedly chanting “autocracy,” they make it seem as if Putin is entirely disjoined from his nation, which is not so. The Russian nation sees the obvious point that the conquest of Ukraine would inevitably come at the expense of the Russian people. The hawks actually twist themselves into contradictions here, because they say that Putin is in fact deeply unpopular and yet he’s going to do the thing for which there is very little support in Russian opinion, and which would further rouse the Ukrainian nation against him. It’s like they expect him to commit hari-kari.

Read the rest on the link below.

anzha said:

Kind of. We have a lot of pontification here. I'm asking people to make solid predictions just for this next week. Not long term.

Let's see how accurate people are.

I don't know is a perfectly acceptable answer.

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Trying to anticipate upcoming events is not an easy task. Instead of describing the scenario so far of the probable Russian "invasion" in Ukraine, as reported by Western journalists and analysts, I will give you a general opinion of what I think of this crisis in Ukraine and what could eventually happen.

But there are four scenarios that I think are possible, one in which there is no use of military power and another three in which the invasion takes place:

1. Russia extracts some guarantees from the West, public or secret, and minimizes the current escalation of the crisis, presenting its population with reasons that demonstrate that it achieved its objectives and avoided a war. I think this is the most likely scenario. Military action in Ukraine would have huge consequences for the Russians, and they know it.

2. Russia adopts low-intensity military actions and in the field of hybrid warfare, acting heavily with cyber warfare and propaganda, occupying only the Luhansk and Donetsk regions (see figure below), claiming to be acting in defense of those populations, mostly ethnic Russians .

3. Russia acts militarily in a slightly more incisive way, also in the regions of Zaporizhia and Kherson (see figure below), in the southeast of the country, creating a land corridor that would unite Russia to Crimea, which would be an important gain for the geostrategic point of view for the country.

4. Russia would invade Ukraine up to the cut of the Dnieper River, which separates the country into the eastern and western portions, trying to provoke the creation of a buffer state in the eastern portion of the country.

5. Russia would carry out the capture of the entire coastal region of Ukraine, covering the territory stretching from Odessa to Zaporizhia (see figure below). Russian strategic gain is even greater, the Sea of Azov would become a Russian lake and Russia's position in the Black Sea would improve dramatically. From a military point of view, this operation I think is relatively easier for the Russians to succeed, Ukraine is relatively weak militarily in the coastal region, even larger than the other regions.

Still in the risky field of predictions, let us consider the options in which Russia decides to use its military power. I believe that, if the option chosen were number 4 or 5, there would be a strong military reaction from Ukraine, decisively supported by NATO and some other European countries, such as Sweden and Finland. The possibilities of numbers 2 and 3 would only be the worsening of the crisis already underway in Ukraine since 2014. If effective, they would provoke North American and European trade sanctions, but not much more than that.

Thus, in the case of the use of military power, I believe that options 2 and 3 are the most likely.

Of course, the assessments above are based on the information I have had access to so far. Other facts, data and information can considerably alter the course of events.

It is worth remembering that on December 17, the Russians released a proposal for an agreement, with measures to guarantee the security of the Russian Federation and the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.


In the document the Russians basically listed the following requirements:

1. That NATO does not deploy troops on the territory of non-NATO countries in 1997, the date on which the Alliance and Russia celebrated the “Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security Act”;

2. The commitment not to install short- and medium-range missiles capable of reaching Russian territory;

3. That NATO commits itself not to accept any new members, especially Ukraine and;

4. That NATO undertakes not to conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine, as well as in other States of Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Russia would make the same commitment in the corresponding territorial strip on its side of the border.

The outcome of the negotiations did not point to a solution to the impasse. The Americans proposed to the Russians to schedule new talks. The Russians spoke of a “dead end”. It was a predictable result that everyone was already expecting.

The US and NATO reiterated that the organization's "open-door" policy is non-negotiable. The Alliance considers that, as a sovereign country, it is up to Ukraine alone to decide to apply for membership in the group and only to the 30 members of the organization to decide whether or not to accept a new member. This eliminates the possibility for Russia – or any other non-NATO member country – to veto in advance any expansion of the organization in any direction.

The second non-negotiable point is the freedom that the Alliance arrogates to position troops and material for military use in the territory of any member state, at any time, in the quantities it deems necessary. This evidently includes the 14 countries, many of them former Soviet republics, that joined NATO between 1999 and 2020.

Despite taking an irreducible position on the two aspects above, NATO left some room for maneuver in relation to proposals regarding the positioning of short and medium-range missiles, as well as regarding the limitation of military exercises in the eastern part of Europe. , inviting the Russian side to schedule further rounds of negotiations on these specific points.

A curious fact draws attention to the actions of Europe and the US after the publication of the Russian demands. Then, between January 9 and 14, 2022, already knowing the Russian demands, the USA, NATO and other European countries held a series of meetings with the Russians to deal with the crisis. The format adopted to gather the powers is noteworthy. Initially, only Russians and Americans gathered. Two days later it was the turn of NATO allies and, the next day, the 57 members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had the opportunity to participate. Interestingly, it was only at this third meeting that Ukraine and Russia sat at the same table.

The fact that negotiations were initiated between Russians and North Americans, without the presence of any European, to deal with a problem in Europe, caused a lot of discomfort in the old continent. Despite the fact that US representatives repeatedly reaffirmed that nothing would be decided without the participation of Europe and Ukraine itself, for the Europeans there was a feeling that they were being overtaken in decision-making. It will be seen, in the future, whether this episode will leave marks on relations between North Americans and Europeans. Macron's trip to Moscow only confirms this hypothesis and it is worth noting that Olaf is not Merkel, because if she were still in power, Merkel would have gone to Moscow long ago to try to minimize the situation.

The Russians, for their part, expressed their dissatisfaction with the results of the talks, saying that the negotiations had not progressed and that they were leading to “a dead end”. However, they did not close the door to future negotiations.

anzha said:

Kind of. We have a lot of pontification here. I'm asking people to make solid predictions just for this next week. Not long term.

Let's see how accurate people are.

I don't know is a perfectly acceptable answer.

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What does this show me?

Putin has made a list of impossible demands to really get what he wants.

What the US is already considering:

The US response says Washington is ready to discuss mutual obligations with Moscow on not deploying land-based missile launchers and boots on Ukraine's territory on a permanent basis.

The United States is also ready to discuss with its allies the possibility of granting Russia the right to verify the non-deployment of Tomahawk missiles on launchers in Poland and Romania in exchange for Russia providing guarantees for such verifications on Russian missile launchers.

In addition, the United States is ready to discuss further reductions in the nuclear arsenal, confidence-building measures in the conduct of exercises in Europe, as well as the control of intermediate and short-range missiles.

Russia does not appear to be planning, as far as we know, to attack any of the NATO countries, the main tension is on Ukraine's borders. But I think these are certain signs for Putin, because Putin said that "we don't want NATO to come any closer to our borders," but instead, he has brought additional American forces closer to his borders. So this is probably a message in response to Putin's pressure - the West has decided to respond with this step.

The US and NATO responses seem very unambiguous: they will not give Russia any guarantees about NATO's non-expansion, but they are ready to talk about non-deployment of weapons in Ukraine itself.

The NATO document is quite dry, that is, it only emphasizes the basic principles on which the organization, the Alliance, builds its activities, some countries such as Estonia were even more incisive in not negotiating with the Russians. The American document is a little different, it is in fact more creative, it gives Russia certain areas to cooperate, although Lavrov recently said that this is secondary.

Even without any agreement between both parties, Washington is already reviewing its positions on the regional situation in Europe in relation to Russia, a few months ago this list of cooperative areas that Russians and Americans can embrace would not even have been suggested, even without the Russia extracting real concessions from NATO/USA, is already managing to put some concessions to be analyzed and put on the table.

If we are going to analyze it based on the list of Russian requirements, I would say that only item 1 is non-negotiable.

Item 2 is what is being put into Washington's perspective ahead of time.

Item 3, NATO itself has already declared that it is non-negotiable, but I'm sure the Russians know they won't be able to get that concession, maybe in relation to Ukraine, but outside of that I think it's totally unrealistic.

Item 4 is also one of the two items (item 2) most likely to be put on the table, Washington is considering such a requirement.

ZeEa5KPul said:

Oh, yes it is. Not all fights are waged with bombs and bullets. It's the West that brought this on Ukraine.

Hey, @Mohsin77, remember that exchange we had about ultimatums some time ago and your approval of that Stratfor guy's analysis? What do you make of what's happening now?

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You're trying to hedge your bet. But it's too late for that.

Recap: I said I don't expect a Russian invasion, and you were on the opposite side.

That was the hypothesis test.

And so far... I don't see any invasion.

Seen in Belgorod or there abouts:

anzha said:

Seen in Belgorod or there abouts:

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Well, it sure looks like they’re preparing for something!
I sure hope the Russians are really ready for what they’ve planned; sub-par military performance and economy-breaking sanctions wouldn’t bode well for Putin’s crony crew!
Unfortunately, Putin is not too smart for this!