Francis Fukuyama On The War

One of the independent aggregators pointed me to a brief essay by Francis Fukuyama Preparing for Defeat, which is his take on the Russo-Ukraine war. I never quite understood why there is a Francis Fukuyama, and indeed, along the line of Elon Musk's remark about Sen Sanders, I maybe thought he was deceased if I thought about him at all. The basic problem is that in 1992, he published The End of History and the Last Man in response to the Soviet Union's collapse, "which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government".

To which I have two responses. The first is, "So you're gonna quit your job and retire, right, if there's nothing more to be said?" The second is, "Tell that to Osama bin Laden." To the first, he's occupied academic sinecure after sinecure at foundations, councils, institutes, and centers-for in the three decades after he announced there was nothing more to say, and as far as I can see, he's at least made some kind of living continuing to say it. To the second, there have clearly been continuing versions of one kind or another for Soviet-era communisim, and in particular, China continues new permutations of big-power centralized authoritarianism. As to Fukuyama's continuing career, the first line of his essay says a lot:

I’m writing this from Skopje, North Macedonia, where I’ve been for the last week teaching one of our Leadership Academy for Development courses.

Which means that as a talking head, he's a C-lister. But his essay is at least a provocative example of cognitive dissonance. He begins with a few fairly perceptive points, although they're neither special nor unique:

Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. . . . Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.

. . . The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize.

. . . There is no diplomatic solution to the war possible prior to this happening. There is no conceivable compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine given the losses they have taken at this point.

But here's where the cognitive dissonance kicks in:

The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings.

I can speak only to Trump, as my knowledge of the others has been minimal. How has Trump ever expressed anything like "sympathy" for Putin? Most recently he's been criticized for having in the past called Putin "smart" and "a genius", but the general assessment of Putin's current state of mind is that, for instance as former Secretary of State Rice has said, he isn't the person she knew when she worked with him. As of now, Trump's position is,

“The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night. “It’s an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.

“We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine. God bless them all. As everyone understands, this horrific disaster would never have happened if our election was not rigged and if I was the president.”

And indeed, even leftist Hollywood spokespeople like Trevor Noah understand this:

"No one was ever ignoring Donald Trump’s calls. ‘Cause if you ignored Donald Trump’s calls, you didn’t know how he would respond. Maybe he’d send an angry tweet, or maybe he’d just, like, ban your country from everything. You don’t know.

"That’s why I bet, in these situations, Biden actually wishes that he could hire Trump to step in as ‘President Wild Card.’ You know, just keep everyone on their toes. ‘Cause if Trump was calling, you best believe the UAE, they’d be racing to pick up the phone."

The fact is that Trump, however you assess him, has already played in an entirely different league from Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, or Marine Le Pen, and in fact he played effectively. Putin was smart enough in fact to wait until Trump was out of office to invade Ukraine, and on one hand there's an emerging consensus that this is the case, and on the other even an emerging buyer's remorse. Trump's version of populism worked, and its replacement is failing terrribly.

What I think Fukuyama misses is that Ukraine is just one theater of an ongoing war that started around the time of the Wuhan lab leak: I would call it the Plebe War, or the Great Plebe War, which pits established and corrupt elites against the broad working class, which includes the bourgeois middle, but not the gentry. Ottawa and Kyiv have both been the sites of recent battles; Kenosha and Portland farther in the past. Fukuyama, even if he's a faded member, is nevertheless of the gentry.

It's worth noting that Biden's policy was effectively to look the other way at Putin's intent at first, while when forced to impose sanctions, to make lemonade out of lemons by using them as an excuse to impose massive fuel price increases on the working class, which was always his policy objective irrespective of Putin. Fukuyama seems blissfully unaware of this. History is still happening.

Putin Purge Maybe

With Russia clamping down on information inside the country, it's hard to evaluate what's leaking out about internal developments. But moving from most reliable to least:

• In the wake of Putin's acknowledgement that conscipts had been sent to fight in Ukraine against his explicit orders (and apparently against Russian law), "materials have been sent to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office to verify and legally assess the actions and punish officials responsible for failure to comply with this order," according to the Kremlin's military spokesman. The claim has been made that these conscripts have already been withdrawn, and the search for scapegoats is now under way.
• There are multiple versions of a story that the heads of the Fifth Service of the OSB, the section of the FSB ex-KGB that oversees foreign intelligence, have been placed under house arrest, ostensibly for misuse of funds.
• There may have been a larger-scale raid of multiple FSB offices by "both FSO, Federal Protective Service of the Russian Federation [and] ФСО – Putin’s own security service". The sketchy understanding I have is that the ФСО, "Federal Guard Service of the Russian Federation, is a federal government agency concerned with the tasks related to the protection of several high-ranking state officials, mandated by the relevant law, including the President of Russia, as well as certain federal properties." It seems to serve as an oversight agency over the FSB with the specific duty of protecting Putin from coup attempts from within the FSB.
• Least reliable is a rumor that "Putin is said to have sacked eight top generals in anger over the slow pace of the Ukraine invasion."

The most detailed speculation is over the house arrest of the two key intelligence officials:

The Fifth Service of the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service, has been targeted and the leadership placed under house arrest, according to the authors’ sources.

Its head, Colonel-General Sergei Beseda, and his deputy were being held after allegations of misusing operational funds earmarked for subversive activities and for providing poor intelligence ahead of Russia’s now-stuttering invasion. The operation has hit serious obstacles, not least fierce resistance by the Ukrainian armed forces and the unity of the population, including most Russian-speakers, behind President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government.

The Fifth Service was responsible for providing Putin with intelligence on political developments in Ukraine on the eve of the invasion. And it looks like two weeks into the war, it finally dawned on Putin that he was completely misled. The department, fearful of his responses, seems to have told Putin what he wanted to hear.

However, the problem may have gone beyond the issue of just telling Putin what he wanted to hear. According to a series of Ukraine government tweets (Budanov is Brigadier General Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine's defense intelligence chief):

Intelligence knows almost all the plans of the invader. "As soon as ideas are born in high offices, we immediately know about them," Budanov said.

31 enemy battalion-tactical group lost combat capability in two weeks. "These are terrible, unprecedented losses for the Russians," Budanov said.

The loss of personnel and equipment amid economic problems due to sanctions has led to the fact that only Vladimir Putin and the Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu are in favor of continuing the war.

“Even the generals are overwhelmingly opposed to the war, the whole environment is trying to stop it one way or another - someone is even sabotaging the orders of the top military leadership” Budanov said.

According to a post at the Reddit Ukraine war thread,

It's been confirmed that the West has high level agents in both the Russian FSB and military version the GRU. I mean very high, like Cabinet level.

Nobody knows who it is though for obvious reasons, but certain leaks could only be known by Putin's inner circle... Such the exact locations of the Chechen Battalion in Ukraine and all the assassination attempts they were ordered to carry out to kill Zelensky, including precise details and timing of the operations, which all ended in failure and the entire Chechen Battalion being wiped out within a day.

A lot of the FSB dislike Putin so it isn't particularly surprising... There was a purge in one of the five major "FSB towers" literally just yesterday but the leaks continue.

I make no representation as to the accuracy of these reports, except to say that they do appear to be consistent with what a reaaonable person can conclude from general battlefield news.

I've observed from history generally that despots tolerate corruption among their subordinates, since it's a handy tool for eliminating them when they've worn out their usefulness. If a dragnet of the FSB finds reasons to purge key people, "misuse of funds" can be a handy charge that avoids raising too many embarrassing questions about what really happened.

Getting Everything Wrong

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I was only mildly disaappointed to see absoutely no insightful commentary or update on the Ukraine war from either corporate or independent media this morning, to the point that between simple nonfeasence and eager groupthink, they're managing to get just about everything wrong. I've learned to look for more reliable and insightful open-source intelligence sources, including

• The Oryx tally of verified equipment losses on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides. As of this morning, close to 1100 tanks, armored vehicles, missile launchers, trucks, and so forth have been destroyed abandoned, and captured on the Russian side. This number is increasing on an hourly basis, with the reminder that captured equipment is refurbished and its ammunition is taken over by the Ukrainian army.
• The updates on the Ukrainian conflict on the Institute for the Study of War site. These tend to run a day or two behind, but they're at least far more accurate than media reports and assessments, including those of their US retired general talking heads. (My late father in law retired as an insurance company CEO, at which point he simply refused to talk about the insurance business. I wonder if the retired generals are the same way but still collect the network fees. Just asking.)
• I'm still trying to navigate my way through reddit threads like this one that carry far more current news than media.
• The YouTuber in the link above, an Estonian army reservist who uses his first-hand military experience to give informed analysis of developments in the war. I'll discuss this in more detail below.
• Accurate maps like this one below that make the actual military situation much clearer, showing that Russia largely occupies very narow lines of advance that depend on unreliable logistical supply that are vulnerable to Ukrainian attack.
  

Here's the latest estimate from the Institute for the Study of War site as of yesterday afternoon:

The likelihood is increasing that Ukrainian forces could fight to a standstill the Russian ground forces attempting to encircle and take Kyiv. Russian forces also appear to be largely stalemated around Kharkiv and distracted from efforts to seize that city. Russian advances in the south around Mykolayiv and toward Zaporizhya and in the east around Donetsk and Luhansk made little progress as well in the last 24 hours. Russia likely retains much greater combat power in the south and east and will probably renew more effective offensive operations in the coming days, but the effective reach and speed of such operations is questionable given the general performance of the Russian military to date. There are as yet no indications that the Russian military is reorganizing, reforming, learning lessons, or taking other measures that would lead to a sudden change in the pace or success of its operations[.]

. . . Russian forces around Kyiv did not attempt to renew offensive operations on a multi-battalion scale on March 10 following the failure of limited efforts on March 8-9. Ukrainian forces badly damaged a Russian armored column in the Brovary area east of Kyiv, likely further disrupting Russian efforts to set conditions for offensive operations on the east bank of the Dnipro. Ukrainian resistance all along the Russian lines of communication from eastern Kyiv to the Russian border near Sumy continues to disrupt Russian efforts to bring more combat power to bear near the capital. The episodic, limited, and largely unsuccessful Russian offensive operations around Kyiv increasingly support the Ukrainian General Staff’s repeated assessments that Russia lacks the combat power near the capital to launch successful offensive operations on a large scale.

On the other hand, US media across the board -- and indeed, the BBC, Sky News Australia, and pretty much everyone else -- has taken up the uniform narrative that "Russian forces are closing in on Kyiv". By the same token, the ones that claim to be on the leading edge like CNN are claiming that the 40-mile column north of Kyiv has "dispersed" and has been "redeployed".

The Estonian YouTuber above makes the same point I've noted from other sources over the past two weeks: the 40-mile column, made up largely of supply trucks carrying fuel, ammunition, and food, has long since run out of gas, and its batteries are dead. There is no more fuel to deliver; what was there was siphoned out to keep the trucks' motors running and warm the stranded troops. The food has all been eaten, and at this point, the troops who are still there are starving. As the YouTuber suggests, those who haven't slipped away and deserted are either sick or dead from hypothermia.

A problem just as big is the fact that with the Russian encrypted radio system unusable, not only are they forced to communicate in the clear, but when they use cell phones, their specific locations are given within a couple of meters. Think about it: when you call up Google Maps, the satellite will direct you to the closest Burger King because your phone is telling the satellite exactly where you are. By the same token, when a Russian is forced to use his cell phone to call his lieutenant because the radio is no good, the satellite tells the world where both he and the lieutenant are, and the Ukrainians use the GPS coordinates to call in the artillery.

It's worth noting that estimates of Russian dead in the two weeks of the war so far run from 3,000 on the very low US military side, to about 6,000 from other NATO sources, to the Ukrainian claim of 12,000. In comparison, the most dead in any month of the Viet Nam war was 6,000 in May 1968 -- but that was for a month, not two weeks. In other words, Russian casualties now are at least comparable to the worst month of the Viet Nam War for the US.

The actual narrative is anything but what the media portrays, if it chooses to cover any of the war at all.

Piecing Together Bits Of Information

The video above was viral on YouTube and elsewhere this morning, although the version here carries subtitles with an English translation of the Russian radio communications. It's been known for at least a week that the Russian radio encryption system isn't working in Ukraine, so that the Russians must communicate in the clear, a major intelligence exposure that probably led to the Ukrainian ambush of this column in the first place, which I assume took place yesterday, March 9.

The commander of the regiment who was killed, referred to in the radio chatter, was Col Andrei Zakharov, who had been awarded the Order of Courage by Vladimir Putin in 2016.

The map below is from the Institute for the Study of War site and provides a context for the attack's location. (It's worth pointing out that, as with all such maps of the Ukraine invasion, the areas colored pink overstate the territory under Russian control; as the video above makes clear, their control basically extends as far as the sides of the roads their columns occupy at a particular time, and the Ukrainian army is able to operate freely within those areas.)

The attack took place in Brovary, which is shown on the inset map of the Kyiv area, at the western tip of a narrow "assessed Russian advance". The ISW summary of action in the area does not make a reference to this battle, but it says generally,

Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, east.

Russian forces have likely begun renewed offensive operations that ISW has been forecasting, but at a lower level of intensity and a smaller scale than we had anticipated. Individual Russian attacks at roughly regiment size reported on March 8 and March 9 may represent the scale of offensive operations Russian forces can likely conduct on this axis at any one time. [The radio chatter in the video says this was a regiment size atack.]

. . . The Ukrainian General Staff reported fighting all along the Russian line of communication from near Sumy to Nizhyn and even further north toward Hlukhiv, which is nearly at the Russian border. This continued fighting likely indicates that the Russians are struggling to consolidate control over this lengthy line of communication and that Ukrainian forces are actively contesting it. That phenomenon may partially explain the relative paucity of Russian activity reported in Kyiv’s eastern outskirts in the past 24 hours.

That the fairly major encounter east of Kyiv in the video isn't mentioned in this summary suggests it may have taken place after the summary was written. However, we may conclude that this does represent "the scale of offensive operations Russian forces can likely conduct on this axis", and it suggests Ukrainian forces are capable of routing a force of that size.

However, my impression from videos in recent days has been that the Ukrainans have been attacking much smaller Russian forces, which represent more usual Russian activity as suggested in the assessment above. The video below shows Ukrainian soldiers driving one captured tank away, along with footage of cleanup in another armored vehicle following the ambush. We may assume the kitchen detergent has been used to clean blood from the interior, as the vehicle will now be reused by Ukraine against the Russians.

I noticed a help-wanted ad in English on Facebook yesterday from a Ukrainian company advertising for people to come work on its contract with the Ukrainian army to refurbish captured Russian equipment for Ukrainian use. It promised lots of overtime. I assume this will be the destination for the equipment in this and other videos.

Götterdämmerung Lite

When I started this blog, I began to tease out a theory of the post-2020 agenda as a Götterdämmerung strategy a lot like people who expected the world to end on December 21, 2012, but took this as a sign that they could run up their credit cards until that date and never have to repay them. What we saw over the course of 2021 was instead the gradual repudiation of the 2020 agenda, the legislative failure of Build Back Better, the marginalization of BLM, the Squad, and Defund the Police, and even more recently the functionial disappearance of many 2020-era COVID restrictions.

With Putin's invasion of Ukraine resetting Western security priorities, you'd think the 2020 agenda would continue to fade. Instead, for now, I'm beginning to think the elites are cooking up a way to reconstitute key parts of the 2020 agenda as Götterdämmerung Lite. The main problem with this approach is that events are coming so quickly that they're getting inside the lizard people's OODA loop:

The OODA loop is the cycle observe–orient–decide–act, developed by military strategist and United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Boyd applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is now also often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents. It is especially applicable to cyber security and cyberwarfare.

. . . According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe–orient–decide–act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby "get inside" the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage.

Remarks by the US national intelligence director suggest this is happening:

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said ‘Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling’ has put the West on notice.

‘We assess Putin feels aggrieved the West does not give him proper deference, and perceives this as a war he cannot afford to lose,’ Haines told the panel. ‘But what he might be willing to accept as a victory may change over time.’

Putin’s invasion has produced ‘a shock to the geopolitical order with implications for the future that we are only beginning to understand, but are sure to be consequential’, it was heard.

The problem for US intelligence is that, although deep-state spokespeople and groupies have been congratulating themselves for correctly predicting Putin's initial invasion, they've gotten everything else wrong. The certainty was so great of a quick and successful initial invasion that the US issued an invitation to President Zelensky to hop aboard a C-130 and scoot, presumably with a tacit offer of seats for his girlfriends and cronies and pallets to carry stacks of ill-gotten cash along. That he didn't immediately accept this was a surprise, from which the administration as well as key Republicans have been slow to recover.

The second big thing US intelligence got wrong was the strength and coherence of the Ukrainian resistance, as well as the incompetence of the Russian invasion force. I think the military and intelligence mindset has yet fully to understand the problem. In the words of talking head retired Col Douglas Macgregor,

“Well, the end of this phase is still a few days away. The first five days, Russian forces I think, frankly, were too gentle. They’ve now corrected that. So I would say another 10 days, this should be completely over. . ."

That was as of March 6. There's still a week to go on "another 10 days", but there's no indication the Russians are getting any closer to surrounding Kyiv. And what appears to be genuine captured intelligence suggests the Russians expected a 15 day war start to finish, which isn't all that far from the initial estimates of US intelligence.

It looks very much to me as though the Washington military-intelligence establishment is still operating outside a decision cycle it ought to have. How does this affect daily life in the US?

Clearly the initial establishment plan envisioned a quick and successful invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky and his clique flown out at dawn on the day of the invasion, Putin consolidating his reconquest within a couple of weeks, mildly hampered by slap-on-the-wrist sanctions, the whole thing over and forgotten in no time. Intead, Zelensky marshaled world opinion and drove much more severe sanctions to the point that most of the world, including the US under pressure, stopped buying Russian oil.

While a successful takeover of Ukraine would be mildly annoying, the silver lining would be an inevitable world oil price increase, given sanctions on Russian oil, assuming Biden administration restrictions on domestic US oil production remained in place. For the green agenda, not a bug but a feature, Götterdämmerung Lite.

That's not how events are working out. Biden's handlers were hoping for US fuel price increases that would be small enough that they could be passed off as temporary, while they could make a show of trying real hard to replace the Russian oil from, say, Iran and Venezuela. Meanwhile, people would get used to $6 a gallon gas while the Ukraine business went away, and their overall objective of forcing the working class to buy electric cars would come to fruition.

Just yesterday, the price of gas in our area rose by more than 50 cents a gallon, not far from $6 as we speak, and it isn't going to stop at six. The inflation this drives will be unprecedented. The Ukraine war is lasting much longer, with much less predictable effects, than anyone in Washington expected-- in short, events have gotten inside their OODA loop.

The collapse of Götterdämmerung Lite will be more consequential than Götterdämmerung 2020. I think the US DNI is predicting this without even understanding it.

Ukraine Red Pill!

A puzzling factor in the generally flaccid US national debate on Ukraine is what advocates self-characterize as the Red Pill view. In general, it says that Zelensky is a tool of the globalists; we should not be risking World War III to defend Ukraine; Putin is after all reasonable in wanting Ukraine to stay out of NATO and the EU. There are numerous variations on this view. One of the more justifiable is from Don Surber:

NATO was formed to stop the Soviet Union from taking over Europe.

The Scandinavians stood on the sideline.

Now they want in?

No thanks. We already have too many countries to defend because NATO doubled its size since the USSR dissolved on December 25, 1991, collapsing under the weight of its own economic and social failure.

The United States should firmly tell Finland and Sweden to take a hike. In the face of evil, they stood on the sidelines while the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Poles and others trapped in the clutches of the USSR fought bravely from within.

We should have dissolved NATO by now. Presidents Bush and Clinton failed us. Bush kept it. Clinton expanded it. I want to discard it.

But elsewhere, less justifiably, he says:

Readers may wonder why I am not accepting the NATO narrative on the Russo-Ukraine War.

Let us review, shall we?

If you dare question global warming (recently renamed climate change), they say you are for pollution and corporate greed.

If you dare question Obamacare, they say you must want people to die.

If you dare question how Biden got so many mail-in votes, they say you are an insurrectionist.

. . . The pattern is clear. Any time you question them, they call you names instead of answering the question.

. . . Now if you dare question the West's sudden support for Ukraine, they say you are a puppet for Putin.

I don't call the red-pillers puppets for Putin. I do say that I'm puzzled. The first issue is that the collapse of the Soviet Union didn't stop Russian expansionism, which is what Europe and the US are both worried about, which of course was and continues to be the reason for the alliance, and for which we now have ample continuing evidence in Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The expansion of NATO wouldn't have happened if the former Warsaw Pact didn't realistically see the need to provide for their defense from potential Russian revanchism. The same applies now to former Russian republics like Ukraine, and indeed to neighboring neutrals like Sweden and Finland. Surber's prescription seems to say too bad, you had your chance. Enjoy your new overlords. This is inadequate.

Putin's action simply confirms Europeans in their views. Indeed, Surber points out that countries like Germany have been unwilling to pay the full cost of NATO membership, but it appears that Germany has now reversed this in the face of Putin's invasion. This is the sort of issue that Trump was addressing as president; given the opprtunity to continue, we might imagine that he could have resolved it. Eliminating NATO would only have encouraged Putin to act earlier and would have been harder to correct. And just because some people use name-calling to further their arguments doesn't mean that even a stopped clock isn't right twice a day.

The problem as well is that I think even Surber would agree that Ukraine is now a sovereign country, and Putin's invasion is a violation of international law. I may be entirely reasonable in wanting a new car, but that doesn't justify me stealing one. How does Surber expect to address this, except to say Zelensky is a fool to resist Putin; he should simply take the US offer and decamp with his family and putative boodle? Would Surber say the UN will fix the problem instead of NATO? Or would he advocate eliminating both NATO and the UN and just hope for the best in such a vacuum?

I think one cause of Ukraine red-pillism is the overall poor quality of reporting on the war in the US, combined with the US policy communication that led up to it. Zelensky himself has said that Biden's weakness prior to the invasion allowed it to take place. The current outcome suggests that on one hand, US intelligence was completely correct in predicting the invasion, while it certainly has failed to predict the Russian failure to achieve its objectives on the schedule US intelligence also predicted.

It also failed in its estimates of Zelensky or the character of Ukrainian resistance. I have the impression that Biden is being dragged slowly, kicking and screaming, into positions of supporting Ukraine via progressively more severe sanctions on Russia and incressing the level of indirect military assistance to Ukraine. None of this was Biden's choice, and it was not in his original scenario. Every indication is that what he wanted and expected was a quick Russian seizure of Kiev, a US sponsored bugout for the Zelensky clique, and a quiet acceptance of the new reality on the ground following brief token complaint from the usual suspects.

As far as I can see, the red-pill faction is the one that's been allied with a tacit Biden agenda that's simply been overtaken by events.

TheTea Leaves Nobody Is Reading

US coverage of the Ukraine war continues to be inexcusably bad, and this is across the board, from big corporate media including Fox all the way over to smaller independent outlets like Salem Media and Breitbart. Look at this below-the-fold piece at Salem Media's Red State:

Analysts I’ve discussed Russian military activity patterns with note that, until this weekend, their use of force has been remarkably constrained and surgical. They’ve made little attempt to engage the Ukrainian military in a full-force, armored mobile front battle, even though they clearly have the mass and firepower to do so. As of today, they are playing cat and mouse games with the mayors of the cities they’ve surrounded, engaging in combinations of harassing bombardments and offers of refugee corridors. It’s not hard to see that they have orders to absorb some casualties, while bearing in mind that, when the war ends, their country will have to rebuild everything they blow up. Forget about the so-called Paper Tiger narrative. The numbers just don’t add up this way. This is a lion toying with its prey, because the leader of the pride has told it not to eat yet.

This prose is a reader's equivalent of stepping on a blob of used bubblegum and trying to scrape it off your shoe without having to bend over. Beyond that, I think that as an analysis of the situation, it gets everything wrong, at least insofar as you can figure out what he's saying.

Exhibit A is the short video link above. There's no sound, but none is needed. It starts off with an increasingly common scene: Ukrainian farmers towing armored vehicles away with tractors. Last week, there was an announcement from the Ukrainian government:

"Have you captured a Russian tank or armored personnel carrier and are worried about how to declare it? Keep calm and continue to defend the Motherland!" a statement from the Ukrainian National Agency on Corruption Prevention seen by Interfax-Ukraine said.

"There is no need to declare the captured Russian tanks and other equipment, because the cost of this ... does not exceed 100 living wages," or 248,100 Ukrainian hryvnia, the agency said, according to Interfax-Ukraine. The sum equates to about $8,300.

On the agency's website, a document in Ukrainian dated Monday said the seizure of tanks or equipment would be considered a "manifestation of the unity and cohesion of the Ukrainian people in the fight against invaders" and would not be taxable.

When I first saw it, I thought it was a delicious piece of screw-you irony in the face of likely overwhelming defeat, but it turns out that they weren't joking, and doggone if Ukrainians didn't take it as a joke. They're driving their tractors over to the battlefield and towing the Russian armored vehicles away. I assume there's enough to salvage in an armored car to fix a tractor, and when they're done with that, they'll get a good deal on the scrap metal.

But the scenes go beyond farmers towing tractors away. Other Ukrainian civilians are hopping onto abandoned tanks and taking them for joyrides:

Now, my military experience extends to less than a year in Army ROTC before they threw me out as, shall we say, not officer material. The courses I had were worthless anyhow. But let's apply some common sense to these scenes. That tank is, according to the caption, a Russian T-80, as best I can gather a gas turbine driven main battle tank roughly equivalent to the US Abrams. That the Ukrainians could take it for a joyride says it didn't run out of gas. Apparently it was just left out on the battlefield undamaged, gas in the tank, radios and other electronic gear with codes intact.

I simply can't imagine US troops doing anything like this; at minimum, if they had to abandon it, they'd try to blow the thing up. As far as anyone can tell, the Russians just skedaddled. But also, if Ukrainian civilians encountered a tank in those circumstances, it would indicate the fighting around it is well over, and the Russians haven't come back for it. Indeed, I would assume Ukrainian intelligence has finished whatever it needed to collect from the tank as well and no longer needs it. So hey, let's party! But these scenes aren't unique.

As far as anyone can tell, this is happening in multiple places, and it's an indication that the Ukrainians aren't just slowing the Russians down, they're beating them back. Common sense says there have been battlefields where Russians occupied territory that they no longer occupy, they've left perfecly good equipment in place during a retreat, and they've been gone long enough for civilian scavengers to move in. Lion toying with its prey indeeed. For Salem Media to imply Putin is telling them to do this is absurd.

I think the UK press is more on the ball. From this morning's Daily Mail,

US intelligence believes Russia has committed 95 per cent of the invasion force it had assembled on Ukraine's border to the fight, meaning significant reinforcements to push its attacks forward are unlikely to come soon - and could simply run into many of the same logistical problems that plagued the early assault.

That has prompted some - including UK general Admiral Sir Tony Radakin - to predict that Russia could actually lose the war. Asked by the BBC on Sunday whether victory for Putin's men was 'inevitable', as many had predicted before the fighting started, he responded: 'No.'

This isn't what we're hearing from the retired US general talking heads. As I said yesterday, I don't think losing is the Ukrainian strategy.