What Is Musk Actually Up To With Twitter?

As I've already said here, my take on Elon Musk is related to what I've gleaned about earlier American industrialists like Rockefeller Sr, Edward Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould. They didn't get that rich without knowing something, and that included knowing how to make a buck. I'm starting with the assumption that Musk knows more than most people about how to make a buck, and making a buck is his main interest.

It's worth noting that his best-known early investment was with the predecessor to PayPal, which revolutionized checking by eliminating the float, the extra balance everyone could carry by waiting days for checks to clear the bank. Musk knew something and figured out how to make a buck from it. And oh by the way, along with the web, it transformed mail order.

As a result, his takeover bid for Twitter must not be just a quixotic gadfly gesture. He was able to get financing for his bid, which he wouldn't be able to do if Wall Street thought he was just playing games. He thinks he can make a buck out of Twitter, and not just a couple of token percentage points, either. As with making electric cars a high-end consumer good, he's going to transform an industry, or maybe even create a new one from scratch.

My own view from a career in tech is that every tech business or IT department is hugely inefficient. Tech has prospered mostly because it's less inefficient than what it replaced, i.e. paper processing, manual calculation, and multiple procedural steps to get things done. On the other hand, its innovation has reached a plateau. Tech organizations have an interest in maintaining or increasing their levels of inefficiency. This is the first insight Musk has expressed, warning Twitter of new expectations:

Elon Musk has warned Twitter staff they face 'extreme' workloads when he takes over - but insists he'll still graft even harder than them to make the firm a success.

The tycoon replied to an earlier tweet he shared about his plans for the social media network Saturday, and wrote: 'Also, work ethic expectations would be extreme, but much less than I demand of myself.'

His original tweet had outlined Musk's tech-focused approach to running the firm, and said: 'If Twitter acquisition completes, company will be super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware.'

A week ago, I noted his telegraphed intent to fire the company's chief censor and general counsel. My guess is that he wants to get Twitter entirely out of the censorship business, and I would say this is less because he supports free speech than that he can't see why Twitter is giving a valuable product away for free. But if Twitter drops its for-free censorship model, it will force Google, YouTube, and other platforms to review their own losing business models and transform an industry just like PayPal transformed mail order.

Consider the immediate move of the Biden administration to create a "Disinformation Governance Board" following Twitter's acceptance of Musk's takeover offer. In other words, the Biden administration, which we may presume is aligned with the deep state, sees "disinformation governance", i.e. censorship, to be a highly valuable service, one that Twitter had been performing up to now for free, and for which the deep state is clearly now willing to budget serious money if Twitter will no longer provide it.

Musk, as an entrepreneur at the Rockefeller-Harriman level, could even suggest he could provide a for-profit censorship service at a reconstituted Twitter for less than the government would spend itself and still make a buck -- and we can't completely rule that out as a future move. But there can be no question that Twitter's current censorship operation is running at a loss, because the company isn't billing anyone for it now, and the whole project may just not be an efficient use of tech anyhow.

But beyond that, Musk not only tweeted that there would be greater expectations of work ethic and that the company would be "super focused on hardcore software engineering, design, infosec & server hardware". If you think about it, that would put it much more on a traditional Silicon Valley path like Hewlett-Packard or even the traditional IBM, which in its days of greatness offered a full hardware-software architecture, as well as pioneering information security. This is beyond Microsoft, which is software only, or Apple, which offers a limited spectrum of product focused on the consumer and entertainment.

I spent the first part of my tech career working with "IBM classic", the comprehensive "360" architecture when the business rule of thumb was that you couldn't be criticized for going with an IBM product. But as a contrarian, I always resisted that mindset (and was sometimes written up for it). Once PC desktop architecture, Unix, and networking gained ground, IBM stumbled and stagnated. To my mind, though, in its day, it made a lot of money with that formula, and if Musk can come up with a new 360-type architecture that covers the field, more power to him.

If he was behind PayPal, I wouldn't put it past him, but he's clearly transforming the space industry with Space X, turning the stodgy and underperforming NASA on its head, but expanding into communications as well. Not for nothing does Russia see him as a threat:

The head of Russia’s space agency is threatening Elon Musk with consequences for supplying satellite internet to Ukraine with SpaceX’s Starlink system.

On Saturday, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, posted a message to his Telegram channel, condemning Musk for expanding Starlink’s service to Ukraine, which is facing an ongoing invasion from Russia.

In the message, Rogozin accused Musk of supplying the Starlink dishes to the Ukrainian military, which he described as “Nazis.”

Ukraine, or at least Space X's involvement there, is the least of it. Russia has been forced to scale down its own involvement in space, creating a vacuum Musk will fill. Remarkable and highly underrated guy, an Edison more than a Jobs.

Wartime Truth And The Bodyguard Of Lies

Winston Churchill said, "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." We've had a couple of stories lately that are hinky enough that I keep thinking of Churchill. Let's take the unfortunate Russian frigate Admiral Makarov, which last Friday was briefly reported to have been hit and disabled by a Ukrainian missile. Then there were new posts asserting that the video being circulated of the burning ship was maybe sorta kinda almost certainly fake, the product of a video war game simulation. However, in response to questions about just which war game could have produced this video, the answer was it doesn't matter, they've all gotten real, real good.

For whatever reason, nobody then went to Ultra Real Super War Game Blaster 7.0 and recreated the video in question to prove it could be done just that way. We're just hearing it's "almost certainly fake", case closed.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby added to the skepticism, saying on Friday, “We’ve seen the reports [about the Admiral Makarov]. . . we’ve been looking at this all day and we have no information to corroborate on these reports.” But isn't this a little along the line of "the golden mountain does not exist?" What golden mountain? What were they looking at all day? I would assume that the US has real-time coordinates for every Russian ship in its navy, updated 24/7. Gosh, where could the Admiral Makarov possibly be? We've been looking for it all day, can't confirm a thing!

If anyone wanted to pooh-pooh the story, they could just point to some open-source unclassified photo of the Makarov intact and in port over the weekend. But then the story disappeared with no further confirmation or denial.

In fact, we have no information on exactly when the attack on the Makarov did or didn't take place. Now, I'm a skeptical guy, but I'm a skeptical contrarian. If everyone agrees on something, they're probably wrong. Nevertheless, let's go to Wikipedia's account of Snake Island's brief history on the world stage, interleaving this with other news on the Russian Navy in the area. On April 14, Ukraine sank the Russian Cruiser Moskva, its lead asset in the Black Sea. After that, attacks on Snake Island intensified:

From 26 to 30 April OC South claimed strikes on the Russian forces on the island left a control post hit and two anti-aircraft missile complex Strela-10 destroyed as well as 42 Russian soldiers killed.

On 1 May, Ukrainian Air Force Command South claims to have launched an attack on Snake Island that destroyed Russian equipment stationed there.

On May 2 at dawn near the Snake Island in the Black Sea two Russian Raptor patrol and landing boats were sunk by a Bayraktar TB2 drone. A video footage was released showing Russian Raptor multi-purpose boats being struck by guided bombs followed by explosions and fires on them.

On Friday, May 6, a Ukrainian missile is claimed not to have damaged the Russian frigate Admiral Makarov, which maybe wasn't even in the area, because why on earth would it be? And we don't know exactly when this didn't take place anyhow, since it didn't happen. Nevertheless,

On 7 May, Ukraine officials reported and displayed footage of a Russian Serna-class landing craft located in the Black Sea being destroyed near Snake Island by a Ukrainian drone. The same day, a pair of Ukrainian Su-27s conducted a high-speed, low level bombing run on Russian-occupied Snake Island; the attack was captured on film by a Baykar Bayraktar TB2 drone. Later, footage of a Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian helicopter on Snake Island was released.

As of late yesterday, the Institute for the Study of War authoritatively reported that "the US has no confirmation that Ukrainian forces recaptured Snake Island, off the coast of Odesa Oblast". There's just a whole bunch of stuff that ain't happening in the Black Sea. But I've got to think for it not to happen, a lot of things would have had not to happen to the Russian navy in that area, huh?

Let's go to the recent kerfuffle over whether US intelligence is helping Ukraine kill Russian generals:

The United States has provided intelligence that has helped Ukrainian forces kill several Russian generals since Vladimir Putin's troops invaded the country, senior US officials said.

The US officials said that of the approximately 12 Russian generals killed by Ukrainian forces, 'many' had been targeted with the help of US intelligence, reports the New York Times.

Or whether US intelligence helped Ukraine sink the Moskva:

Unnamed officials said Ukraine had asked the US about a ship sailing to the south of Odesa.

The US said it was the Moskva and helped confirm its location. Ukraine then struck it with two missiles.

But then, there came pushback from the Big Guy:

President Joe Biden was furious about leaks that said US intelligence helped Ukraine kill Russian generals and sink its warship, report says, The New York Times reported on Monday.

A senior administration official told The Times that after the reports of US involvement in the attacks emerged, Biden reprimanded several top defense officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the Director of National Intelligence Avril D. Haines, and CIA director William J. Burns.

Biden was concerned that the reports would further provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin, The Times reported.

Gosh, darn, this could all Start World War III! Cut it out! Oddly, though, Biden's profile on Ukraine hasn't been high, especially since he vetoed Poland's transfer of Migs to Ukraine, which it then seems to have taken Secretary Blinken some weeks to work past. His signature issues in recent weeks have been protecting the rights of minor children to have gender-affirming surgery and preserving Roe v Wade. I'm not sure if the issue is so much concern about provoking Putin as it is about doing what had to be done in World War II -- Allied intelligence had to conceal from the Germans that they were reading Enigma code. There were limits to what they could do if suspicious attacks gave away the source of the information. So what are we to make of this?

Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, visited the Donbas front in the Ukraine war last week, a Pentagon official said, but reports that he was injured in a Ukrainian attack could not be confirmed.

“What we can confirm is that we know that for several days last week he was in the Donbas,” a senior US defence official told journalists on Monday.

“We don’t believe that he’s still there – that he has left and he’s back in Russia,” the official said.

“We cannot confirm reports that he was injured.”

Nevertheless,

On Monday, there was a notable absence from Russia’s ‘Victory Day’ parade in Moscow: Valery Gerasimov, the Russian military’s chief of general staff, was nowhere to be seen.

. . . A senior military figure like Gerasimov would normally be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin in such an event.

Gosh darn, what's not going on here?

Not "Never Again"; Just "Again"

I continue to be both fascinated and inspired by the performance of Ukraine President Zelensky as a wartime leader. But since the reemergence of Israel as a nation-state after World War II, we've had a succession of Jewish wartime leaders comparable to Joshua, King David, and the Maccabees. Now we have a Jewish politician in Ukraine who's performing comparably, and he's going so far as to assert Jewish identity as a full component of Ukraine's emerging national identity.

This is a major theme in his May 8 address (or addresses) commemorating V-E day, of which a YouTube version with English subtitles is linked above. An English version is available in text here. However, he says things in the YouTube version that aren't in the official text, and they may in fact be entirely separate addresses. Near the start of the YouTube at 1:05 but not in the text is this important statement:

[W]e had no idea that our generation would witness the desecration of the words, which, as it turned out, are not the truth for everyone. This year we say "Never again" differently. We hear "Never again" differently. It sounds painful, cruel. Without an exclamation, but with a question mark. You say: Never again? Tell Ulkraine about it.

"Never again" is the Jewish motto referring to the Holocaust, but Zelensky is making the point that Ukrainian history can't be separated from the Holocaust. He certainly isn't unique; the Ukraine historian and YouTuber Rabbi Henry Abramson makes the continuing point that Jews generally fared better in Ukraine than in other parts of the Russian empire, and when much of Ukraine was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Jews and the dominant Polish Catholics in Ukraine got along especially well. In the text versioin, he says,

Today we celebrate the Day of Victory over Nazism. And we will not give anyone a single piece of our history. We are proud of our ancestors who, together with other nations in the anti-Hitler coalition, defeated Nazism. And we will not allow anyone to annex this victory, we will not allow it to be appropriated.

Our enemy dreamed that we would refuse to celebrate May 9 and the victory over Nazism. So that the word "denazification" gets a chance. Millions of Ukrainians fought Nazism and went through a difficult and long journey. The Nazis were expelled from Luhansk, the Nazis were expelled from Donetsk, and Kherson, Melitopol and Berdyansk were liberated from the occupiers.

The Nazis were expelled from Yalta, Simferopol, Kerch and the entire Crimea. Mariupol was liberated from the Nazis. They expelled the Nazis from all over Ukraine, but the cities I named are especially inspiring us today. They give us faith that we will drive the occupiers out of our own land for sure.

At 11:09 in the YouTube version, after enumerating Nazi atrocities in Poland, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and then-Chechoslovakia that parallel Russian atrocities in Ukraine, he draws another parallel:

And together, we are going through new, no less difficult battles. This is remembered by all Holocaust survivors -- how one nation can hate another. Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Danes, Georgians, Armenians, Belgians, Norwegians, and many others have not forgotten this -- all those who suffered from Nazism on their land and all those who defeated it in the anti-Hitler coalition. Unfortunately, there are those who, having survived all these crimes, having lost millions of people who fought for victory and gained it, have desecrated the memory of them and their feat today. The one who allowed the shelling of the cities of Ukraine from his land.

. . . Today, on the day of Remembrance and Reconciliation, we pay homage to all those who defended their homeland and the world from Nazism. We note the feat of the Ukrainian people and their contribution to the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition. Explosions, shots, trenches, wounds, famine, bombing, blockades, mass executions, punitive operations, occupation, concentration camps, gas chambers, yellow stars, ghettos, Babyn Yar, Katyn, captivity, forced labor.

He's incorporating the Holocaust in the overall Ukrainian and European experience of Nazism and making the point that, espcially as they apply to Ukraine, the experiences of Jews and Gentiles were not fully distinguishable. But he's also making the point that current Russian actions represent a full resuscitation of Nazism insofar as certain countries again are regarded as subhuman, without a right to separate existence.

And of course, especially in the YouTube address, he's wearing a T-shirt that says in English, "I'm Ukrainian", which stresses the global audience he's actually addressing.

Once again, I have to express my admiration for a masterful rhetorician who's operating at a Winston Churchill level of world leadership.

Let's start with that strange word. I don't believe it was commnon in the language before the 1980s. and certainly by the time I reached aduldhood in the late 1960s, more Freudian terms like "neurotic" were in use. I don't recall the word appearing in Jules Feiffer cartoons of that time, for instance, and his characters were typically riddled with uncertainty and self-doubt (or should have been), anything but the conventional image of a "narcissist". On the other hand, narcissists are at least identifiable in modern literature, maybe most recognizably as Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. though Austen doesn't use the term, which didn't exist.

On the other hand, if you search YouTube for "narcissists" now, it's certainly possible to conclude "narcissists" are the dominant problem of our time. Typical subjects are "Understanding the Narcissist: Wny Do They Treat You This Way?"; "10 Signs You're Dating A Narcissist"; "How do you Get Beyond the Hurt a Narcissist Inflicts?"; and "8 Questions a Narcissist Simply Cannot Answer". But there's also "Everything you Need to Know About the 7 Types of Narcissists", because there are indeed grandiose ones, vulnerable ones, covert ones, antagonistic ones, communal ones, oblivious ones, and more -- lists of seven actually differ widely.

Our Roman Catholic pastor occasionally refers to an "epidemic of narcissism", but that implies a certain medical quality to the term, which isn't all that precise. The demotic term "narcissist" covers a range of intensely self-absorbed behavior that includes dishonesty, manipulation, hidden agendas, and betrayal, often accompanied by grandiose projection. But a problem arises when using the term connotes a medical or scientific sense of precision. Let's face it, if you call someone a "narcissist", you haven't actually accomplished anything, but you think you have.

But this brings me to the puzzle of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial. Vox sums up the conundrum:

This is a murky, perplexing trial. While it’s technically a defamation trial over a newspaper article — with Depp suing Heard — at its center is one big conflict. Amber Heard says Johnny Depp abused her. Depp says Heard abused him. So what’s the truth?

Strikingly for our post-Me Too world, it looks as though the loudest voices on the internet have overwhelmingly sided with Depp. While there’s compelling evidence that there was violence on both sides of this marriage, it’s not quite so clear that the evidence supports Depp’s story, or that he has much of a shot at winning this case.

So it's a trial in a court of law, which is prohibitively expensive, even for faded Hollywood celebrities. Depp is the plaintiff, and he's suing Heard for $50 million, which Heard doesn't have and never will. He's spending multimillions of his own on a case that he could well lose. Why is he doing this? For that matter, Heard could likely have headed this off years ago at minimal cost, at least in dollars, though retractions and apologies don't seem to be in her nature.

And neither Depp nor Heard is an attractive public person. What puzzles trial observers is that the whole narrative is a he said-she said covering useless lives wasted in a sink of depravity -- but somehow, one of the protagonists, Depp, has overwhelmingly achieved public support. This may well be what Depp intended with his investment in the trial, but in some ways it's as big an upset as Ukraine's victories against the Russians, or maybe Trump's defeat of Clinton in 2016, or maybe even Rich Strike's 80-1 win at the Kentucky Derby.

Here's what I think is going on. Both Depp and Heard are actors, acutely conscious of their public personas. Their presentations of themselves in the trial, not just to the judge and jury but to a national TV audience, are carefully managed -- Heard, for instance, maintains a minimalist, understated, WASPY, upscale, ice princess image, utterly controlled and tightly held together, buttoned up to the chin -- except when it suits her to get weepy and hysterical, which it always does. The public knows a narcissist when it sees one.

Depp is a stranger case. His long hair is pulled tightly back in a severe pony tail. Not only is he in a suit, but it's a three-piece suit with a display handkerchief matched to his tie, which isn't normal courtroom attire -- attorneys don't wear vests, and their suits are often loose and rumpled so they can wave their arms and ruffle through papers. But the sleeves of Depp's suit can't conceal the tattoos on his hands and fingers. Like the pony tail, they're always peeping out. But Depp's facial expressions are masterful. He normally conveys a furrowed gravity, but now and then, in reponse to one or another gaffe by Heard or one of her witnesses, he glances at his counsel with a genteel chuckle.

The odd combination of Depp's image, controlled and respectful of the forum even if the tattoos and pony tail peek out, against his prior reputation as an out-of-control hellion, reinforces the narrative he and his attorneys are telling, a changed man who doesn't deny the sins of his youth and earlier adulthood, but who now insists that Heard's allegations are over the top and false.

This is a problem for Heard, because even the teary testimony she gives is a tacit acknowledgement that she was in some way a willing participant in those years of depravity, despite the buttoned-up image she now tries to convey. The overwhelming impression is that she's a phony and a liar, everyone's nightmare of an ex they've all had at some point in their lives.

In contrast, the impression Depp puts out is that he isn't pretending to be other than what he is. In fact, his courtroom demeanor is something like an example of Samuel Johnson's dictum that a man's duty is to bear and to forbear -- and indeed, that applies even in the midst of testimony about him, addled with drugs, writing on the walls with blood from his own severed fingertip.

On one hand, it's an indication, with figures like Zelensky, that a certain type of manliness is in style this year, and maybe it's not a coincidence that this is in the wake of the 2020 COVID-and-BLM moral panic. And just maybe it'sd also not coincidental that narcissists and phonies, at least this year, are overwhelmingly out of style.

It doesn't hurt Depp that win or lose in the courtroom, the current public mood could support a resuscitation of his career, which I think is the basis for what could be a shrewd investment.

Out Of Momentum

Over the past few days, a consensus has begun to emerge that the Russian attempt to encircle the Ukrainian army in Donbas has stalled. For whatever reason, nobody is using the Clausewitzian term they'd been using around Kyiv, "culimination", but it seems pretty clear from the discussion that Clausewitz would say the Russian attack has culminated without reaching its objective. For instance, the BBC reports,

Russian forces are not making "the sort of strategic breakthrough" they have been looking for in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, Justin Bronk - a research fellow from UK security think tank Rusi - tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

He says Russia continues to gain a few kilometres in some areas but their forces are taking "very heavy losses" and "may be out of momentum".

The 1945 site, which I'd linked just the other day for its pessimistic appraisal of Ukraine's chances in Donbas, has changed its tune:

When Russia redeployed tens of thousands of armored troops from the environs north of Kyiv and Sumy last month to the northern shoulder of the Donbas front, there was concern that the added manpower would produce an armored breakthrough of Ukraine’s lines. However, after almost three weeks of fighting, the Ukrainian troops have held the line.

Russia’s failure to affect [sic] a breakthrough represents a noteworthy accomplishment for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF). Whether that initial success can carry Ukraine to an ultimate victory will depend on how several key factors play out in the coming weeks and months.

. . . Russian military authorities likely expected to achieve a breakthrough in the northern shoulder of Ukraine’s defenses in the Donbas by this point – and failed. The reason is that Ukrainian troops continue to exceed expectations on the ground and Russian troops underperform (from inadequate/poor tactical pre-war training). In practical terms, however, the UAF’s successful defense results from the elaborate defenses Kyiv had ordered in the years since 2014.

The defenses in the Donbas include concrete bunkers, mutually-reinforcing positions, interlocking fields of fire, anti-tank mines, and pre-sited artillery targets on likely Russian avenues of approach. These defensive works and schemes have inflicted significant harm to attacking Russian troops and have been primarily responsible for preventing any penetrations thus far.

By far the best observer of the Ukraine war is Col Markus Reisner, who holds a PhD and is on the faculty of the Austrian military academy. I've linked another of his YouTube presentations here already. This one is on the current, Donbas phase of the war. My German is pretty good, but his is fast and technical, and I had to rely on both German and English subtitles to keep up with his full meaning.

A full English translation is available here, although it doesn't really carry the clarity of the German version. A few highlights:

The decisive phase then began just about mid-April and that was the attempt by the Russian side to encircle Ukraine's forces along the line of contact. There were two options: An encirclement in depth, following the Dnieper, or a short encirclement. In the last few days we have been seeing this short encirclement, where they are trying to encircle these Ukrainian forces with a northern pincer grip and force deployment and a southern pincer as well as force deployment.

Now, at the beginning of May, this Russian attack is obviously not taking the course that was expected. . . . The first factor is the terrain itself. . . . Looking at the terrain, we can see that, firstly, the Ukrainian side has set itself up in several defense lines staggered in depth. . . . The next terrain factor that limits the Russian side concerns vegetation and terrain structure. You can see it very well here: it took the Russians a while to be able to move out of this area, which is forested and also has a river flowing through it, in order to then develop the northern pincer grip [.]

As a second factor, let's now look at the forces and compare them. . If we look at the situation in the possible encirclement, we see a ratio of 48 to 68 battalions. This means that the ratio the attacker needs - namely 1:4 - is not met by the Russian side. This is because on closer examination one finds that the forces are roughly equal and the Ukrainian side also has the advantage that its forces are massively entrenched.

Another factor is time. In order to be able to develop an operation quickly and purposefully, it is quite crucial to act quickly. It was here where the problem of the Russians was, if you think back to the terrain: that they needed time at the beginning to be able to move out of the difficult terrain, to get ready for the attack, which was planned to take place southwards. . . . The first attack by the Russians was repelled. So it took some time before the Russian side was able to conduct an envelopment through this forested area, which is actually not suitable for the deployment of mechanised forces[.]

Let's recall that the retired US general talking heads kept insisting weeks ago that the terrain in Donbas was not like around Kyiv, it was instead open country, like Kansas, good for tanks and maneuver! But just looking at the YouTube videos of Ukrainian ambushes in Donbas made it plain this wasn't the case. Col Reisner continues,

The next factor that is decisive is information. The Russian side is constantly trying to create a common operational picture regarding the deployment of the Ukrainian forces. UAVs, in particular, are being used for this purpose. Time and again, the Ukrainian forces manage to shoot down these UAVs, such as the "Orlan-10" system, which makes it difficult for the Russians to actually create a common operational picture and, above all, to use their own combat support - i.e. artillery - effectively. . . . Only after . . . preparatory artillery fire they try to advance slowly with mechanised forces, supported by infantry. Of course, this brings the challenge that the surviving Ukrainian forces can attack the Russians again and again with anti-tank weapons.

Finally, he explains the actual historical parallel with the Battle of Kursk, which unintentionally refutes the retired US generals in their assessment that the terrain and the tactical situaiton benefited the Russians:

. . . . After this description of the situation, I would like to take a brief look at the past and try to use a historical example to draw conclusions about how this situation may develop in the coming days and weeks. The fact is that in the same area in 1943 there was already a battle of encirclement, namely the famous Battle of Kursk - the German "Citadel" operation that took place north of Kharkiv. Here, the Soviet side held a bulge towards the west and the German side tried to encircle the Soviet forces in a pincer movement from the north and from the south.

The situation today is very similar: south of Kharkiv we also have a bulge, this time formed by the Ukrainian side, towards the east and the Russian side is trying to encircle the Ukrainian forces in two pincer movements from the north and from the south. If we look at the outcome of the Battle of Kursk in 1943, historians agree that there were essentially three factors that decided this battle for the Soviet side. The first factor was that the Soviet side knew exactly where and at what time the German attacks would take place – due to the decoding of a German cipher machine of the type "Enigma", it is assumed.

The second factor was that the Soviet side prepared very precisely for this attack for months and set up defensive positions in the depth, especially along the flanks, to defend against the German attack. The third factor was the doggedness of the Soviet soldiers in fighting and defending against these German attacks, and in the end the German side had to stop both of these pincer movements and the Soviet side was able to decide the battle in its favour.

If we transpose this situation to the Donbass, we see that these three factors also apply here. The first factor is that the Ukrainian side obviously knows very much about the methods of the Russian attacks. The second factor is that the Ukrainian side has been preparing for years and has set up defence positions in the depth in anticipation of a Russian attack. The third factor is undoubtedly the doggedness of the Ukrainian soldiers who are defending virtually every metre of ground with the intention to attrit the Russian side so that this attack will finally fail and does not bring the success expected by the Russian side.

It's gonna be like Kursk. Right. Everyhone forgets that the outcome of Kursk was that the Germans failed to break through the Russian salient.

Finally, the Institute for the Study of War is also changing its assessments. In yesterday's report, it concludes,

Ukrainian forces captured several settlements north and east of Kharkiv in the last 24 hours, reducing the ability of Russian forces to threaten Ukraine’s second-largest city. This Ukrainian operation is developing into a successful, broader counteroffensive—as opposed to the more localized counterattacks that Ukrainian forces have conducted throughout the war to secure key terrain and disrupt Russian offensive operations. Ukrainian forces are notably retaking territory along a broad arc around Kharkiv rather than focusing on a narrow thrust, indicating an ability to launch larger-scale offensive operations than we have observed so far in the war (as Ukrainian forces predominantly retook the outskirts of Kyiv following Russian withdrawals rather than in a major counteroffensive).

The Ukrainians are consistently outperforming expectations, but in large part, that's because expectations have been unrealistically low. s

Sinko De Mayo!

Via the UK Independent,

Russia’s Admiral Makarov warship has been hit by Ukrainian missiles and burst into flames, according to Ukrainian officials.

The frigate would be Russia’s latest high-profile naval loss in a troubled campaign, coming after reports that US intelligence helped Ukraine locate and sink the Russian warship Moskva weeks ago.

The Makarov was said to have been sailing close to Snake Island in the Black Sea south of Odesa.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Anton Gerashchenko reported on his Telegram page that the Admiral Makarov was hit by a Ukrainian “Neptune” anti-ship missile. He cited Russian sources.

According to the UK Daily Mail,

Ukraine may have shot another Russian warship overnight with an MP saying one of Putin's state-of-the-art frigates is 'in trouble' in the Black Sea.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, head of the council of Odesa which houses Ukraine's largest naval base, identified the vessel on his Telegram channel this morning as the Admiral Makarov - a $500million frigate that was only commissioned five years ago.

He said the vessel ran into difficulties overnight, before reposting a report from a local news outlet suggesting it had been shot with a Ukrainian missile near Snake Island - whose defenders memorably told another warship to 'go f*** yourself' .

Unconfirmed reports suggest rescue vessels and aircraft have set off from Russia's largest Black Sea port of Sevastopol towards the site, while flight tracking data shows an American drone circling nearby.

. . . Nobody from the Ukrainian military has so-far commented on the attack, and there has been no acknowledgement from the Kremlin either.

However, the Ukrainian armed forces did add one boat to its tally of destroyed Russian equipment published today without giving further details.

The Makarov is an Admiral Grigorovich-class frigate, one of the Russian navy's newest vessels and the most state-of-the-art frigate operating in the Black Sea.

A commenter at reddit /r ukraine conflict said, "Looks like the Ukrainians celebrated Sinko de Mayo in a big way!" and that was too good for me to pass up. But the US Right continues to get this sort of thing wrong: yesterday Allahpundit at the Hot Air blog wrung his hands that if US intelligence was involved in sinking the Moskva last month, this could start World War III:

Is there some strategic benefit I’m missing to turning this into a hot war between the U.S. and Russia? Like, “the war will end much faster and with fewer casualties if we let the U.S. Air Force bomb Russian troops in the Donbas for a week”?

Between this and the leak last night about U.S. intelligence targeting Russian generals, we’re like a day away from Biden calling Putin a pussy and daring him to try something.

. . . Lately I’ve been trying to soothe my nerves about the provocations we’re engaged in by telling myself that maybe there’s something important the intel community knows about Russian capabilities that’s left them confident there’ll be no reprisal for leaving our fingerprints all over their failures. What if their nukes don’t work anymore? Or what if we’ve figured out a way to disable them remotely? There’s nothing they can do to hurt us!

It seems to me that Ukrainian performance in the first weeks of the war, whether or not US intelligence was actually pulling the strings (every indication is that it has been, but leave that aside), Ukrainian performance combined with Russia's manifold ineptitude emboldened the EU, NATO, and even the former neutrals Sweden and Finland suddenly to stand up to Putin, nuclear threats or not. The calculation appears to be that if Russia proved so incompetent in attacking a third-rate power like Ukraine, think how they'd do against even a second-rate power like Poland.

It's quite clearly become a proxy war. Another US conservative, Victor Davis Hanson, who has always struck me as overrated, recently wrung his hands over how Ukraine reminds him of the Spanish Civil War:

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

. . . Small, skilled Ukrainian teams with Javelin and Stinger missiles destroyed multimillion-dollar helicopters and armored vehicles. Cheap, armed drones are now ubiquitous on both sides. Do these relatively inexpensive arsenals presage a more decentralized brand of warfare, where handheld weapons take out relatively sophisticated tanks and helicopters? Are we back to the superiority of quantity over quality in weapons of war?

Perhaps, but whether armor and artillery prove vestigial weapons and tactics remains to be seen as the theater is now shifting to the rolling wide-open plains of Eastern Ukraine.

. . . Before Ukraine, few, if any, recent leaders of a major nuclear nation had ever seriously threatened to use nuclear weapons against either his enemies on the battlefield or those who sent help to them—not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in the wider Middle East. Now Vladimir Putin not only brags about his nuclear arsenal and tests long-range missiles but boasts about his right to use any weapon he chooses to defeat Ukraine and its suppliers.

Ukraine, like Spain, has awoken us from our false sense of security that has grown since the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, soldiers in war sometimes do deliberately flatten apartment buildings and shoot civilians en masse—whether in 1936 or 2022. And some leaders apparently now view nuclear bombs as more or less deadlier conventional weapons.

Again, Hanson's theme is the risks of "starting World War III" amid concerns of nuclear winter, and that Russia and the West are morally equivalent in this sort of war -- and he goes beyond that to repeat the conventionial wisdom that Ukraine may seem to have been winning around Kyiv, but Donbas will be a different kettle of fish. But the weeks following such dire predictions have proved it hasn't.

It's hard not to reply that, Allahpundit and Victor Davis Hanson aside, we're in fact in a proxy World War III as we speak. The one certainty is that our previous assumptions are being upended on a daily basis, and so far, the presumed US intelligence assessments are proving remarkably correct. This is oddly reassuring.

Remember Kursk?

On April 12, I commented on the conventional wisdom of the time that there would be an upcoming battle in Donbas that would be, in one opinion, the "biggest tank battle in Europe since 1943 Battle of Kursk". It would be a "knife fight", a grand contest of maneuver in which the Russians would try to cut off the Ukrainian army in pockets.

. . . After their recent defeat in the north, Russia has made some significant changes. . . . . the Russians will have a single command staff to co-ordinate and attempt to achieve a single focused and ostensibly realistic operational objective[.]

. . . the force the Russians will amass will be formidable, and with shorter and better established supply lines into Russia they may be able to avoid some of the appalling foul ups which have characterised their war so far.

As of mid-April, this decisive battle of maneuver was going to take place "within the next two weeks". It didn't happen. Instead, the daily assessments at the Institute for the Study of War basically continued along the line of the one from yesterday, May 4:

Ukrainian defenses have largely stalled Russian advances in Eastern Ukraine. Russian troops conducted a number of unsuccessful attacks in Eastern Ukraine on May 4 and were unable to make any confirmed advances. Russian forces attacking south of Izyum appear increasingly unlikely to successfully encircle Ukrainian forces in the Rubizhne area. Ukrainian forces have so far prevented Russian forces from merging their offensives to the southeast of Izyum and the west of Lyman, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk, as Russian forces likely intended.

It appears that the "unsuccessful attacks" by the Russians were met yet again with the Ukrainian rope-a-dope strategy, wiping out enough tanks and infantry from individual BTGs to take them out of action in detail.

This utterly contradicts predictions elsewhere from mid-April of what the fighting in Donbas would be like:

It should be said right upfront, however, that the task for Kyiv isn’t wholly impossible, but it is exceedingly difficult. There is a chance that the Ukrainian troops and civilian defenders could exact such a high price in blood and iron on Russia’s Donbas attack that after some extended amount of time, Russian troops withdraw on their own.

To support that path, however, requires Ukraine to understand two key realities: 1) for that strategy to successfully result in an eventual Russian withdrawal, it would take a year or more of fighting that will leave tens of thousands of additional Ukrainians dead – possibly more – and 2) there is a much greater probability that UAF troops won’t win the Battle of Donbas and will be forced to submit to a negotiated settlement on worse terms than are presently available.

. . . The primary reasons Russia’s advance into Kyiv failed are that, first, they had too few troops devoted to that axis, their logistics were spread out over hundreds of kilometers from bases in Russia, and the Ukrainian defenders were able to make expert use of the urban terrain. Ukrainians could approach Russia’s armored vehicles undetected from around buildings and often attack at point-blank range.

. . . For the Kyiv axis in February, Russia’s supply lines were dangerously stretched, requiring trips of hundreds of kilometers to keep the frontline troops supplied with sufficient food, fuel, and ammunition. For the Donbas fight, Russia has very short logistics lines, as nearly all the resupply comes directly from Russia and through friendly territory.

But it's increasingly plain that the outcome for Russia has been precisely the same in Donbas as it was around Kyiv. The normative battle has continued to be a skirmish, a Ukrainian ambush on a Russian column in generally open territory:

This continues to be a strategy of defeat in detail. For every such ambush I see each day on YouTube, I shake my head and ask how long Russia can sustain such losses, and I have to keep reminding myselt that with defeat in detail, that's the whole point. The strategy is a series of individual ambushes. What the Russians woulda-coulda-shoulda done to avoid them is beside the point, they happened.

It's beginning to look like what happened around Kyiv is repeating itself around Kharkiv and Izyum: in the end stage around Kyiv, the talking heads were speaking of "culmination", with the Russian advances stalled and tentative Ukrainian counterattacks beginning -- but within days, the Russians retreated completely. At this stage in Donbas, the same conditions exist, although nobody seems to mention "culmination", even though it's just as accurate there. I think there will be an equivalent retreat from Kharkiv and Izyum.

As of yesterday, President Zelensky's appraisal of the war was reported below:

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has named three stages of the war with Russia.

The statement came in a video address to the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

The first of them is to stop Russia's advance, which, according to the president, Ukrainians have already done. The second phase is to push Russia out of Ukrainian territory. Work to this end is now ongoing. And the third is to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine as much as possible.

Now the priority for Ukraine is to push Russian troops back to the positions they were in as of February 24 and to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Zelensky has in other words stated that Ukraine has completely stopped the Russian advances on all axes, with which commentators like the ISW are in general agreement. The statements on restoring Ukraine's territorial inmtegrity have also been interpreted as an abandonment of any negotiating strategy short of that to end the war.

All this contravenes the defeatist conventional wisdom we'd been hearing just weeks ago suggesting, as above, that a fight in Donbas would represent "a much greater probability that UAF troops won’t win the Battle of Donbas and will be forced to submit to a negotiated settlement on worse terms than are presently available."

Overtaken by events.