69 - Turning the War Tide: Is it Possible?
Yesterday’s Ukrainian drone strike on a fuel refinery across the border is not the first such successful attack inside Russia. Nor should it be the last. Ukraine also shot missiles successfully last week at off shore drilling platforms in the Black Sea. A key way Ukraine can now raise the military and financial toils of war for Russia is by harassing the Russian special operation behind its lines.
Russia has preponderant firepower, so far, in the Donbas, and has steadily, punishingly, pushed valiant Ukrainians out of key salients all along the eastern front. Putin wants to make his conquest of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions secure, so that he can claim a fake recapture of “lost” Russian territory. The region’s steppes -- flat, open, rolling plains – make it easier for Russian artillery to pound and pound, and pound Ukrainian defenses and civilians some more. Ukraine has not received ammunition enough to retaliate in kind, and its troops have had to fall back to more defensible urban and peri-urban positions.
The result has been the maceration of Ukrainian positions in the vulnerable east. But, as in Chechnya and Syria, it has also meant near total destruction of apartment blocks, roads, bridges, and so on, the entombment of civilians, and the immiseration of vast populations. Putin has obviously not wanted to win hearts and minds. Nor does it make his objectives of reclaiming Russians in the “occupied” lands plausible.
President Biden has hesitated to give Ukraine the long guns and missiles that would raise real costs for Putin and Russia. He rightly worries that taking the counter-attack into Russia would involve the entire free world in a third general war -- a cataclysmic undertaking. He also extracted a promise from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the new American and European missile launchers that are on their way will not be used to hit Putin’s army beyond the border.
That conditionality is understandable, but unless Ukraine can take its retaliation to Russian supply lines, there is little to stop Putin’s army from attacking Ukrainian positions and cities with impunity from safe redoubts inside Putinland. Logistical maneuverability is obviously simplified if the Russians need not worry about a Ukrainian attack.
What Ukraine, from deep within a disadvantageous military position, has already demonstrated is that its troops know how to fight, and how to do so in various ways that have forestalled an easy Russian conquest. Now the tough question is how to hit the Russians where they are weakest, and how to gain some useful military leverage. Standing and trying mostly to prevent Putin’s legions from taking the Donbas cities piece-by-piece is not going to turn the battle in Ukraine’s favor, nor give Zelensky negotiating leverage.
Most analysts are predicting a long slog of combat, with hostilities continuing at current levels for months and months. Russia can endure such stasis much more readily than Ukraine. At some point, too, Ukraine’s backers may dry out their wells of support.
Civilians in the rest of Europe will grow restless, and there will be pressure to cut a deal.
Ukraine and Zelensky accordingly need leverage. The ability to do damage with drones across the border and into the Black Sea is helpful, but at a very minimum Ukraine requires the weapons and ammunition supplies that can send armaments into Russian fuel depots, reserve headquarters, logistical centers, and other sensitive behind the lines quarters.
Russia has lost tanks, fighting men, and generals, but it has the ability to replace them (given the absence of knowledgeable public opinion at home). With its ability to sell discounted oil at high prices to China and India, it also has the wherewithal. But if Ukraine soon acquires from the U. S. and its allies more powerful and long-ranging armaments, to NATO standards rather than Soviet ones, perhaps Ukraine will be able to make the Russian army pay a lasting price for its immoral invasion of the cockpit of Europe.
Into the European Union?
By its unexpectedly effective repulse of Russia in the early days of the invasion, and as a result of President Zelensky’s uncommon gifts of leadership and arousal, the rest of Europe now embraces, even cossets, Ukraine. Whether or not Ukraine is eventually admitted into the European Union proper, it has now been taken into the bosom of Europe. That is an altogether positive and ironic result of Putin’s foolish invasion. In the long run, Ukraine in Europe, and Putin humbled, will constitute positive outcomes of the dreadful killing fields that Putin has unleashed -- but at a huge, life-destroying cost.
Prosecuting the Criminals
It is good that Attorney General Merrick Garland stopped inside Ukraine and has assigned a skilled Nazi tracker to the case of Putin and Russian soldiers as war criminals. But Garland should spend equal effort putting someone gifted on the trail of Trump. Then perhaps Trump and Putin can be tried, side-by-side.