Are Russia’s gains in eastern Ukraine turning the tide of its war? Not all victories are created equal
PETER WEBER — MAY 27, 2022
Russia appears to have significantly scaled back its immediate ambitions in Ukraine, throwing the bulk of its remaining military might at a handful of cities in the eastern Donbas region. And the Russians are making inroads.
Russia’s forces are on the outskirts of Lyman, “conducting an intense offensive” to take control of the important rail hub in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said. If they take Lyman, nearby Sloviansk is within shelling range, and the last Ukrainian strongholds in Luhansk Oblast — Lysychansk and Severodonetsk — are a big step closer to being encircled. The situation in Severodonetsk “is serious,” Luhansk regional governor Serhiy Haidai said Wednesday. “Our guys are holding on,” but “the city is constantly being shelled with every possible weapon in the enemy’s possession.”
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, “on almost every front, Russia has underachieved, while Ukraine has overachieved,” NPR reports. But are Russia’s scorched-earth advances in the Donbas a sign that the tide of war has shifted in its favor?
UKRAINE MAY BE IN TROUBLE
Russia’s recent gains in the Donbas “offer a sobering check on expectations for the near term,” writes Michael Kofman, a Russia expert at the Center for a New American Security. The breakthrough at Popsana and nascent encirclement of Lyman threat to cut off Sevorodonetsk and Lysychansk from reinforcements and supply lines, and the fact that Russia is making these advances, “despite a relatively weak military advantage, suggest that Ukrainian forces have suffered significant attrition.”
“Russian forces may not be prosecuting offensives with much enthusiasm, but it is equally difficult to expect them to rout or melt away,” Kofman adds. “Similarly, the situation within Ukraine’s army remains a major unknown, but it is clear the war is taking its toll.”
RUSSIA CAN’T KEEP UP THIS PACE
Russia is making progress in Donbas, but it’s “paying a steep price for the gains it has made,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “The Kremlin is sending units from southern Ukraine to fight in Donbas, according to Ukrainian officials, and losing so many men that continued Ukrainian resistance could eventually force it to shift strategies again,” even with its already “scaled back” ambitions. “Three months ago, Russia was widely assumed to have the resources to grind down Ukraine in an extended war,” NPR adds. “Now some think the opposite is true.”
The Russians “are no more bulletproof than anyone else,” said Haidai, the Luhansk governor. “If they do not succeed during this week — by Saturday, Sunday — they will get tired, and the situation will at least stabilize for us.”
“War is a test of will and it’s a test of logistics,” retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former U.S. Army commander in Europe, tells NPR. “Clearly, the Ukrainians have the stronger will. And my assessment is that the logistical situation for them gets a little bit better every day, while for the Russians, it gets a little bit worse every day.”
ALL OF UKRAINE IS UP FOR GRABS
“Russia has not yet solidified its control” over the parts of Ukraine it has captured, but “control over Ukraine remains Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal, and that goal is not going to change,” Nataliya Bugayova, a Russia researcher at the Institute for the Study of War, writes in Foreign Policy. “The time is now for Ukraine to expand its counteroffensive,” because “a Russian military foothold in the southeast would make any scenario to end this war costlier in lives and resources” and endanger “Ukraine’s long-term economic viability.”
“What the Russians want” is to “strangle” Odesa and the remainder of Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline in a “death by 1,000 cuts scenario,” retired Col. Cedric Leighton told CNN. They want to seize the east and south of Ukraine and then “gradually move westward” until “eventually they could potentially control the rest of the country. The goal is still to topple the Ukrainian government, to eliminate the Ukrainian culture,” and ultimately “eliminate Ukraine from the map.”
“Russia is approaching the limits of the combat-capable manpower it can make available for the war in the short term,” having suffered heavy losses and pulled troops “from every possible direction,” Bugayova writes. “Once rejuvenated, however, Russian military progress in Ukraine could look very different.”
WARS ARE UNPREDICTABLE, BUT IT’S STILL BETTER TO BE UKRAINE
Russia is “nibbling one little bit at a time into Ukrainian territory,” but “there are lots of Ukrainian forces well dug-in and very battle hardened. These are some of the best troops Ukraine has got,” Joe Inwood notes at BBC News. Still, even if “the Russians take this whole oblast” and thus “cut off a large number of Ukrainian forces,” he adds, “it won’t change the overall dynamic of the war. It would just be another stage in the Russian advance.”
“The overall military balance in this war still trends in Ukraine’s favor, given manpower availability and access to extensive Western military support,” Kofman agrees. “There are rumors that Ukraine is bringing in reinforcements to prevent a larger Russian breakout. Either way, the fight in the Donbas is much less significant for Ukraine than it is for Russia. If it must, Ukraine can trade territory for attrition, then hope to retake it later.”
But “it is too early to make predictions on how the battle for the Donbas will go,” and more generally “it is difficult to tell where you are in a war,” Kofman writes. “Big turning points are easiest to discern in hindsight.”
“War is uncertain and you cannot predict the outcome,” Australian retired general and military analyst Mick Ryan tells NPR. “I can only go on past performance of the Ukrainians, and their past performance at the political and the military strategic level has been excellent.”
Washington Post – History haunts the global elites at Davos
Ishaan Tharoor — May 26, 2022
DAVOS, Switzerland — The World Economic Forum is known for its forward-looking optimism. But this year’s annual meeting of global political and financial elites was dominated by gloomy invocations of the past.
In his virtual address to delegates, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky summoned the legacies of Sarajevo in 1914 and Munich in 1938: The supposition behind the first reference was that actions in a seemingly faraway place — such as the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke by a Serbian nationalist — can trigger a far wider, spiraling calamity, as we now see with the global disruptions and price surges that followed Russia’s invasions. The invocation of the latter was a warning not to appease Russia’s hegemonic designs.
The allusions kept coming. With an elaborate literary metaphor delivered in what was the meeting’s last major address Thursday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz summoned the “thunderbolt” of the start of World War I and said that Feb. 24 — the date Russia invaded Ukraine — was its own “thunderbolt.” He also said Russia was returning the world to the 18th and 19th centuries with its war of “aggression” and “imperialism.”
On Wednesday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba briefed reporters in Davos on recent Russian advances in Ukraine’s east. “The battle for Donbas is very much like the battles of the Second World War,” he said. “Some villages and towns, they do not exist anymore.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen fumed at Russia’s apparent weaponization of food supplies and blockade of Ukrainian ports, as well as its capture of vast stores of Ukrainian grain. She said it was tantamount to the resurrection of “a dark past — the times of the Soviets’ crop seizures and the devastating famine of the 1930s.
Calls grow for Russia to free up Ukrainian ports for grain exports
This year’s gathering had been billed as a moment to reckon with history at a turning point. The world (and particularly the Davos set, who wield such influence over it) were face to up to a cascading series of crises — the war in Ukraine, the turbulent tail-end of the pandemic and surging food and fuel prices that are destabilizing societies and governments in every continent.
Instead, the discussions exposed big gaps between participants. Analysts and policymakers from regions outside the West questioned for whom history was actually turning. Some rolled their eyes at the emotional European reaction to events in Ukraine, and pointed to double standards in their neglect of ruinous conflicts elsewhere and disdain for earlier waves of refugees.
“For us, superpower rivalry has always been at our doorstep — it was Soviet Union and the U.S., now it’s China at the U.S.,” Malaysian Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin told me. “So to us, [the Ukraine war] is really just a blip, not really a turning point.”
Jamaluddin lamented that “the ‘color of your skin’ argument” still seemed relevant. Now that violence and state terror “affects somebody who looks like you” — that is, a White Westerner — “suddenly, there’s this moral outrage from Washington to Davos,” he said.
Ukraine war brings an unusual moral edge to Davos
The moral outrage comes with a deepening of fault lines in global politics. Alexander Stubb, former prime minister of Finland and director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute, described the moment to me as “a kind of reverse 1989,” where rather than an Iron Curtain coming tumbling down, new ramparts between rival powers are rising up.
“We are seeing the hardening of geopolitical competition along ideological lines,” said Lynn Kuok, a Singapore-based senior fellow for the International Institute for Strategic Studies. No matter the pearl-clutching in Davos over Russia’s violations of international law, “Asia has already seen its own erosion of the rules-based order” in the form of various coercive measures taken by China in recent years, Kuok added.
But countries in Southeast Asia remain “uncomfortable,” she said, with the “democracy vs. autocracy” frame that many in the United States and Europe seem to want to place around contemporary challenges.
“There’s a Manichaean, Occidental urge to see the world in binaries,” Samir Saran, president of the Observer Research Foundation, an influential New Delhi think tank, told me. “We work in shades of gray.”
The absence of prominent Russian and Chinese voices this week in Davos — an unusual development for a forum that prides itself on convening diverse participants — itself spoke volumes.
“What do liberal values really mean?” said Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistani minister of state for foreign affairs. “They mean room for other opinions to coexist.” Khar added that she saw the prevailing moment as a “really dangerous” one, with antipathies mounting and dialogue fading.
Zelensky calls out a ‘state of war criminals’ and Davos ‘Russia House’ makeover
That’s all the more unfortunate at a time when the main “structures in global governance” are failing, as Adam Tooze, economic historian at Columbia University and Davos regular, put it to me.
The war in Ukraine has undermined the ability of the Group of 20 nations — a bloc in which the United States, major European economies and Russia all belong — to be an effective platform for global cooperation at a time of looming economic crisis. Ongoing trade wars and rising protectionism have hollowed out the World Trade Organization’s efficacy, while many countries in the Global South remain furious with the West over its hoarding of coronavirus vaccine doses during the pandemic and its slowness in distributing jabs to the rest of the world.
“The sense of anxiety that arises from these converging crises,” Tooze argued, has in part to do with the reality that “the organizations we do have are not just inadequate to the task, but there’s actually warlike antagonism” within them.
In shadow of war, there’s no ‘business as usual’ in Davos
To be fair, many Western politicians attending the events in Davos seemed aware of the challenges ahead. “We really do a disservice to our potential role in the world by projecting a lack of humility about the limitations to our role in the world,” Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), a leading member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Today’s WorldView.
Coons pointed to the importance of recognizing differing perspectives from democracies in Asia and Africa, considering the pressures of mounting food prices around the world and the ongoing toll of the pandemic. Western unity in support of Ukraine marks “an important moment,” he said, “but we have to see it in context.”
The question facing policymakers in Davos and elsewhere, Germany’s Scholz suggested, is a tough one: “How can we create an order in which very different centers of power can interact in the interests of everyone?”
The answer, the German chancellor said, has no precedent in history.