What About Ukraine?

The two intelligence experts I quoted yesterday (if that's what they are) are in agreement that the documents in the Teixeira leaks are valid, and they suggest an imminent reassessment of Western policy. But the overall context of the war had begun to convince me that there was going to have to be a reassessment whether secret documents were released or not. An expected winter counteroffensive didn't take place, while the consensus now is that the spring counteroffensive has been delayed.

Here is a CNN assessment from last Friday of what the Teixeira documents say about the Ukraine war. It's worth noting that the US right has been opposed to the war from the start, while CNN, aligned with the left, has up to now supported it. Somne of the documents

divulge key weaknesses in Ukrainian weaponry, air defense, and battalion sizes and readiness at a critical point in the war, as Ukrainian forces gear up to launch a counteroffensive against the Russians – and just as the US and Ukraine have begun to develop a more mutually trusting relationship over intelligence-sharing.

. . . Yet another document describes, in remarkable detail, a conversation between two senior South Korean national security officials about concerns by the country’s National Security Council over a US request for ammunition.

The officials worried that supplying the ammunition, which the US would then send to Ukraine, would violate South Korea’s policy of not supplying lethal aid to countries at war. According to the document, one of the officials then suggested a way of getting around the policy without actually changing it – by selling the ammunition to Poland.

The problem of ammunition is troubling. This story goes into more detail on current Ukrainian weaknesses, agaain based on the Teixeira documents:

The planned Ukrainian late Spring offensive could be a death trap for the US, NATO and even America’s Asian allies.

A brigade is normally between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers. Using the higher number, Ukraine is planning to commit 60,000 troops in the counteroffensive, focused on an effort to break Russia’s control over Black Sea ports other than Sevastopol.

However, it is likely Ukraine will launch some sort of simultaneous attack on Crimea and Sevastopol, if it can.

. . . The planned counteroffensive, despite US and NATO support, faces some significant obstacles. The nine US-NATO-equipped brigades have less armor than promised by NATO.

. . . maintaining a gaggle of dissimilar equipment will not be easy and field repairs will be next to impossible. This will pose a significant challenge to the Ukrainians, who also will have no equipment reserves to replace what may be lost in battle.

. . . The lack of ammunition is also a major problem to support the promised offensive, even to continue the war itself.

Consider for example ammunition for artillery. The US has supplied 155mm howitzers, mostly with high explosive shells. The M-777 howitzer has a range of around 21 kilometers (13 miles). By now, Ukraine has fired off nearly 1 million 155mm shells, a huge amount.

According to the Pentagon report, there are none in the pipeline right now. While some additional thousands may be found, given the huge rate of expenditure by the Ukrainian army, it is hard to see how the 155mm will help very much in the planned offensive (assuming these artillery pieces survive Russian airstrikes, a big assumption).

The Federalist, aligned with opposition to the war from the right, draws similar conclusions from the Teixeira leaks:

What the documents also suggest, as if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is that the war has not been an unbroken chain of brilliant underdog battlefield victories for Ukraine and crushing defeats for Russia, as the corporate media and the Washington political establishment have led us to believe.

. . . One of the results of this slow, grinding warfare has been the rapid expenditure of munitions, at least on the Ukrainian side. U.S. weapons stockpiles are now badly depleted, and our defense industrial base is taxed to the point that we have been unable to deliver some $20 billion in promised military supplies to Taiwan. This of course raises the question of China, which the Biden administration, along with Republican leaders in Congress, refuse to talk about candidly in the context of the Ukraine war.

. . . From where the situation stands now, it seems like the U.S. taxpayer has unwittingly bought nothing more than a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, one that increasingly runs a very real risk of ending in a nuclear showdown. Absent a hard push from Washington for peace negotiations — the one thing our leaders seem unwilling even to consider — we’re left with bad options all around: escalation and inevitable U.S. involvement on the one hand, or total abandonment of Ukraine on the other.

Let's recall that Zelensky's argument a year ago for Western support in a war against Russia was that it would be a bargain -- Ukraine would do all the fighting with maybe just leftover Warsaw Pact weapons, and the Russian empire would quickly collapse. Up to last fall, that was a sustainable argument, burt after partial success in the Donbas, the string of underdog battlefield victories stopped, the winter counteroffensive never happened, and the attritional battle in Bakhmut appears to have depleted Western weapons to the point that there may no longer be aa credible deterrent to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

And last year I noted that Zelensky himself looked like a wartime leader at the Lincoln or Churchill level -- but Lincoln and Churchill were able to make their cases over periods of years, until battlefield success supported their calls for resoluteness and sacrifice. Zelensky, again after last fall, has been much more quiet, while the prospect of quick Ukrainian success, for instance in recapturing Crimea, appears less and less likely.

And of course, Joe Biden seems more and more detached from his job, willing to let his various surrogates push for their own programs as long as he doesn't have to work very hard. There will need to be stronger leadership than this over the next year to avoid an endless and hugely expensive stalemate, which is what Zelensky in particular promised we wouldn't have.