West We Forget
Kakhovka dam sabotaged, Russian tactical and operational improvements, global rebellion against the United States, China-Central Asia Summit overshadows G7 summit in Hiroshima
UPDATE: Blasts at a Soviet-era dam in the Russian controlled part of southern Ukraine on Tuesday unleashed floodwaters across the war zone. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday said that Ukraine sabotaged the Kakhovka dam to distract attention from its faltering counteroffensive, and rejected Kyiv’s claim that Moscow had blown up the dam.
Recent evidence indicates the Russian side has made tactical and operational improvements that are having an impact on the ground in Ukraine. There has been no shortage of legitimate evidence to support the contention that throughout 2022 the Russian side performed much worse than most expected and that Ukraine performed better than anticipated.
In the current geopolitical arena, the war is now effectively a proxy for a rebellion by Russia and the “Rest” against the United States. The war in Ukraine is perhaps the event that makes the passing of pax Americana apparent to everyone.
The China-Central Asia Summit, which took place recently in Xi’an on May 18-19 was every bit a geopolitical event as much as the G7 summit in Hiroshima that it overlapped. The symbolism was profound, but the Xi’an summit distinguished itself as an inclusive affair, whereas, the G7 event was an exclusive gathering of the western world dripping with cold war-era animosities.
Kakhovka Dam Destruction a Distraction
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday said that Ukraine sabotaged the Kakhovka dam to distract attention from its faltering counteroffensive, and rejected Kyiv’s claim that Moscow had blown up the dam. Blasts at a Soviet-era dam in the Russian controlled part of southern Ukraine on Tuesday unleashed floodwaters across the war zone.
The dam, 30 meters tall and 3.2 km long and which holds water equal to the Great Salt Lake in the US state of Utah, was built in 1956 on the Dnipro River as part of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. It also supplies water to the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014, and to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which is also under Russian control.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russian forces of blowing up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station from inside the facility, and said Russia must be held to account for a “terrorist attack.” A Ukrainian military spokesperson said Russia’s aim was to prevent Ukrainian troops crossing the Dnipro River to attack Russian occupying forces.
Russian-installed officials gave conflicting accounts, some blaming Ukrainian shelling, others saying the dam on the Dnipro had burst on its own. “Tonight at 02:50, Russian terrorists carried out an internal detonation of the structures of the Kakhovskaya HPP. About 80 settlements are in the zone of flooding,” Zelenskyy said after an emergency meeting of senior officials.
“We are doing everything to save people,” he said on the Telegram messaging app, adding that at the meeting “a set of international and security measures was agreed upon to hold Russia accountable for this terrorist attack.” Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on Twitter the move amounted to “a fundamentally new stage of Russian aggression.”
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba warned of an environmental threat which he said could result in “regional ecocide.” Natalia Humeniuk, spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern military command, described the destruction of the dam as “a hysterical reaction” to prevent Ukrainian troops attacking Russian forces on the opposite side of the Dnipro River.
Serhiy Naev, commander of the joint forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, was quoted by state news agency Ukrinform as saying flooding caused by the dam’s destruction “should not prevent our advance in those directions where there may be spillage of water.”
Read more here.
Ukraine Is Going Russia’s Way
By Daniel Davis (edited)
Recent evidence indicates the Russian side has made tactical and operational improvements that are having an impact on the ground in Ukraine. Washington policymakers need to update their understanding of the current trajectory of the war to ensure the U.S. is not caught off guard by battlefield events – and that our interests don’t suffer as a result. There has been no shortage of legitimate evidence to support the contention that throughout 2022 the Russian side performed much worse than most expected and that Ukraine performed better than anticipated.
Russia’s initial battle plan was flawed at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Moscow allocated an invasion force that was too small for the task, dispersed across four axes of advance (ensuring that none would be strong enough to succeed on its own), and was not equipped with supplies to sustain a long war.
In contrast to Russian blunders, Zelensky’s troops initially performed well at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels such that Russia was forced into a major withdrawal of the bulk of its armored forces from Kyiv and Kharkiv barely a month into the war. It was a logical and rational strategic decision for Russia to redeploy its forces to strengthen the Donbas front in April 2022.
After repositioning its forces, Russia Captured Mariupol, Lyman, Popasna, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk. But exposing Russia’s ongoing operational weaknesses, Ukrainian forces launched two offensives, one of which caught Russia completely by surprise, resulting in the recapture of Lyman. The first was in the Kherson province, which started off badly for Ukraine. But while all Moscow’s attention was on Kherson, Ukraine unleashed a major drive north near Kharkiv.
What many analysts failed to recognize, however, is that Russia has vastly more capacity to make war, both in terms of material and personnel, and therefore has the capacity to absorb enormous losses and still remain viable. Further, Russian history is replete with examples of starting out poorly in wars, suffering large casualties, and then recovering to turn the tide. Ukraine, on the other hand, has significantly fewer resources or troops and therefore has less room for error.
Over the now 15 months of war, Ukraine has fought and lost four major urban battles against Russia, suffering progressively worse levels of casualties in each: Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Soledar, and most recently Bakhmut. When Russia was faced with city battles – Kyiv, Kharkiv City, and Kherson City – they chose to abandon each while establishing more defensible defensive positions elsewhere. Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to fight for their major cities. The results are telling.
By withdrawing from Kyiv and Kharkiv in the first month of war and from Kherson City last fall, Russia was able to relocate its force into more defensible positions, preserving its personnel from the crucible of a grueling defensive fight in urban terrain. Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to contest major cities and has now lost staggering numbers of troops – but they also lost the city itself in the end. The decision of the Ukrainian general staff to defend Bakhmut until the end may have grave implications for the rest of the war.
As far back as December, it was clear that Ukraine would not be able to keep Bakhmut. Once Russian troops advanced around the flanks of the city and took all the roads supporting the garrison under fire control, the chances of holding the city fell to almost zero. What Ukraine could and should have done is follow the Russian example at Kherson and withdraw to the next prepared defensive position in the vicinity of Kramatorsk or Slavyansk.
As a result, Ukraine has lost literally tens of thousands of killed and wounded, along with enormous quantities of equipment and ammunition, in those four city fights. Based on a likely fire superiority of 10-to-1 on the Russian side, Ukraine no doubt suffered considerably more casualties in those fights than the Russians. But even if the cost were equal, Russia has millions more men from whom to draw more fighters and a major domestic industrial capacity to produce all the ammunition they may require.
Put simply, Ukraine doesn’t have the personnel or industrial capacity to replace their lost men and equipment in comparison to the Russians. Moreover, Russia has been learning from its many tactical mistakes and evidence suggests they are improving tactically while simultaneously expanding their industrial capacity. Even bigger than the dearth of ammunition and equipment for Ukraine, however, is the number of trained and experienced personnel they’ve lost. Many of those skilled troops and leaders simply cannot be replaced in the span of mere months.
Ukraine is now faced with a world-class dilemma: should they use their last offensive capacity in a last gasp of hoping they inflict a grave wound on the Russians defending in the occupied territories or preserve them in case Russia launches a summer offensive of their own? There are serious risks with either course of action. I assess there is currently no likely path for Ukraine to achieve a military victory. Continuing to fight in that hope may perversely result in them losing even more territory.
The trend of war is shifting toward Moscow, regardless of how upset that may make many in the West. It is the observable reality. What Washington must do is avoid the temptation to “double-down” on supporting a losing proposition and do whatever we need to bring this conflict to a rapid conclusion, preserving our future security to the maximum extent. Ignoring these realities could set up Ukraine for even greater losses – and could put our own security at unacceptable future risk.
Read full article here.
Ukraine in the New World Disorder
The Rest’s Rebellion Against the United States
By Fiona Hill (edited)
In the current geopolitical arena, the war is now effectively a proxy for a rebellion by Russia and the “Rest” against the United States. The war in Ukraine is perhaps the event that makes the passing of pax Americana apparent to everyone.
It is not just Russia that seeks to push the United States to the sidelines in Europe, and China that wants to minimize and contain U.S. military and economic presence in Asia so both can secure their respective spheres of influence. Other countries that have traditionally been considered “middle powers” or “swing states”—the so-called “Rest” of the world—seek to cut the U.S. down to a different size in their neighborhoods and exert more influence in global affairs. They want to decide, not be told what’s in their interest. In short, in 2023, we hear a resounding no to U.S. domination and see a marked appetite for a world without a hegemon.
In this context, the next iteration of the global security, political and economic system will not be framed by the United States alone. The reality is alreadysomething else. It is not an “order,” which inherently points to a hierarchy, and perhaps not even a “disorder.” A range of countries are pushing and pulling in line with their own priorities to produce new arrangements. We in the transatlantic community may need to develop some new terminology as well as adapt our foreign policy approaches to deal with horizontal networks of overlapping and sometimes competing structures. We have entered what Samir Saran, President of India’s Observer Research Foundation, has dubbed the age of “limited liability partnerships.” The regionalization of security, trade and political alliances complicates our national security strategies and policy planning, but it may also intersect with our priorities in useful ways if we can be flexible and creative—rather than simply resisting and responding when things go in directions we don’t like. As British security expert Neil Melvin has suggested, we should embrace the idea of “mini-lateralism.”
The war in Ukraine is a world or system changing war. It has stripped away the surface detail and exposed the flaws and fault lines in the international order. It is not a 21st century conflict. It is a retrograde war—what we hope will be the terminal spasm of the European convulsions that shook the rest of the world in the 20th century because of Europe’s previous mercantilist dominance and imperial conquests. Putin and Moscow are fighting in Ukraine to regain control over former colonial territory relinquished at the end of the 20th century.
Russia is the last continental empire in Europe. Over the course of the 20th century, the First World War brought down the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires along with the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar. The Bolsheviks reconstituted Russia as the Soviet Union and they forcibly held onto many of Moscow’s contiguous territorial possessions. The Second World War marked the end of European colonialism and spurred the disintegration of the overseas British Empire, but the Soviet Union expanded again. Indeed, the USSR retook Estonia and the other Baltic States, and tried to retake Finland. The Soviets also exerted new dominion over Eastern Europe after World War II. The USSR’s expansionary zeal then brought it into almost a half century of confrontation with the United States, a former British colony. The Soviet Union, the Russian empire, finally collapsed at the end of this period, the Cold War, but not in the minds of Vladimir Putin and his cohort.
Since 1991, the U.S. has seemingly stood alone as the global superpower. But today, after a fraught two-decade period shaped by American-led military interventions and direct engagement in regional wars, the Ukraine war highlights the decline of the United States itself. This decline is relative economically and militarily, but serious in terms of U.S. moral authority. Unfortunately, just as Osama bin Laden intended, the U.S.’s own reactions and actions have eroded its position since the devastating terrorist attacks of 9/11. “America fatigue” and disillusionment with its role as the global hegemon is widespread. This includes in the United States itself—a fact that is frequently on display in Congress, news outlets and think tank debates. For some, the U.S. is a flawed international actor with its own domestic problems to attend to. For others, the U.S. is a new form of imperial state that ignores the concerns of others and throws its military weight around.
In the near term, this is particularly detrimental for Ukraine. Globally, the war in Ukraine is viewed as one in a long series of dramatic events since 2001 driven by the United States. America’s heavy-handed conduct of the “War on Terror” alienated the vast swathe of the Muslim world. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, hot on the heels of Afghanistan, revived the horrors of U.S. Cold War interventions in Korea and Vietnam. U.S. inaction in conflicts like Yemen, and selective interventions in Libya and Syria, underscored U.S. foreign policy inconsistency. The 2008-2010 financial crisis and Great Recession, followed by America’s domestic upheaval and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 dimmed the power of America’s democratic example. Trump’s contempt for international agreements and his flagrant mishandling of the global pandemic, as well as, more recently, the Biden Administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, cast further doubt on the U.S. capacity for global leadership.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq universally undercut U.S. credibility and continues to do so. For many critics of the United States, Iraq was the most recent in a series of American sins stretching back to Vietnam and the precursor of current events. Even though a tiny handful of states have sided with Russia in successive UN resolutions in the General Assembly, significant abstentions, including by China and India, signal displeasure with the United States. As a result, the vital twin tasks of restoring the prohibition against war and the use of force as the critical cornerstone of the United Nations and international system, and of defending Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, get lost in a morass of skepticism and suspicions about the United States.
In the so-called “Global South,” and what I am loosely referring to as the “Rest” (of the world), there is no sense of the U.S. as a virtuous state. Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are widespread. Trust in the international system(s) that the U.S. helped invent and has presided over since World War II is long gone. Elites and populations in many of these countries believe that the system was imposed on them at a time of weakness when they were only just securing their independence. Even if elites and populations have generally benefitted from pax Americana, they believe the United States and its bloc of countries in the collective West have benefitted far more. For them, this war is about protecting the West’s benefits and hegemony, not defending Ukraine.
Non-Western elites share the same belief as some Western analysts that Russia was provoked or pushed into war by the United States and NATO expansion. They resent the power of the U.S. dollar and Washington’s frequent punitive use of financial sanctions. They were not consulted by the U.S. on this round of sanctions against Russia. They see Western sanctions constraining their energy and food supplies and pushing up prices. They blame Russia’s Black Sea blockade and deliberate disruption of global grain exports on the United States. They point out that no-one pushed to sanction the United States when it invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, even though they were opposed to U.S. intervention, so why should they step up now?
Countries in the Global South’s resistance to U.S. and European appeals for solidarity on Ukraine are an open rebellion. This is a mutiny against what they see as the collective West dominating the international discourse and foisting its problems on everyone else, while brushing aside their priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and debt relief. The Rest feel constantly marginalized in world affairs. Why in fact are they labeled (as I am reflecting here in this speech) the “Global South,” having previously been called the Third World or the Developing World? Why are they even the “Rest” of the world? They are the world, representing 6.5 billion people. Our terminology reeks of colonialism.
Read full transcript here.
China In Central Asia
by M. K. Bhadrakumar (edited)
The China-Central Asia Summit, which took place recently in Xi’an on May 18-19 was every bit a geopolitical event as much as the G7 summit in Hiroshima that it overlapped. The symbolism was profound. China and Russia were the elephants in the room for both summits but the Xi’an summit distinguished itself as an inclusive affair, whereas, the G7 event was, regrettably, an exclusive gathering of wealthy countries of the western world dripping with cold war-era animosities, and it didn’t hide its intentions even in its choice of “special invitees” — one ASEAN country; two BRICS countries; one tiny African state; a Pacific island etc. — borne out of the old colonial mindset of “divide and rule.”
The biggest difference was that the Xi’an summit was substantive and focused on a positive agenda that is quantifiable, while the Hiroshima summit was largely prescriptive and partly declarative and only marginally tangible. This was because the China-Central Asia summit took place on native soil while the G7 has no habitation and name in Asia except that one of the seven member countries is of Asian origin and the summit itself was a thinly-veiled attempt to insert the alien Western agenda into the Asian setting. In fact, the criterion for selecting the special invitees was itself based on the credentials of those chosen few to perform potentially as a fifth column for western interests in an Asian Century.
The China-Central Asia Summit was motivated by the growing realisation that the countries of the Eurasian region must play a proactive role in the common task of pushing back the United States, the driving force of the G7, which they perceive to be attempting to destabilise the common neighbourhood of Russia and China in Central Asia. Simply put, the Xi’an summit tacitly signalled that Russia and China are unitedly circling the wagons for a common purpose — to borrow an idiom which was employed by the Americans in the 19th century to describe a defensive manoeuvre.
From a historical perspective, it is for the first time ever that Russia and China are explicitly joining hands to stabilise the Central Asian region — a momentous happening by itself — with Beijing assuming a leadership role, given Russia’s preoccupations in Ukraine. This paradigm shift belies the western propaganda that Russian and Chinese interests collide in the Central Asian region. There is a strategic convergence between Moscow and Beijing that stability in Central Asian region, which is vital for both capitals in their own interests, is best achieved through ensuring security, boosting economic development or international political backing.
Equally, there is a consensus among the five Central Asian states to work together in a “5+1” format, which means that all crucial decisions and initiatives will be coordinated with all Central Asian states at the same time. On their part, the Central Asian partners recognise that the overall economic development of their region could get better if they strengthen their cooperation with China. Russia has played a key role here to encourage the Central Asian states to move in such a direction and play a proactive role. This itself is a marked departure as the five “Stans” have not always been able to work together, opting instead to engage with the biggest global players individually.
What emerges is that Beijing’s interest lies primarily in security considerations against the backdrop of the activities of extremist groups such as the Islamic State (which continues to get covert support from the US) that are operating out of Afghanistan. China’s thesis is that security is best strengthened through economic development and for that reason, therefore, the region is important from the point of view of economic cooperation and regional development — although in aggregate terms, Central Asian economic resources are nowhere near sufficient for meeting China’s needs.
In the context of the Ukraine crisis, Central Asia has emerged as a frontline for the US strategy to contain and weaken Russia. However, although Central Asian countries have adopted a neutral stance on the Ukraine situation, Russia’s influence in the region remains strong and is unlikely to be largely disrupted. Three key factors are at work here. First, Russia is seen as the provider of security and Russia’s defence capabilities continue to play a crucial role in maintaining stability in the region. Second, Central Asian states heavily depend on Russia in regard of labor migration, market access, transportation, and energy resources, and no other outside power foots the bill. Third, do not underestimate that the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union continues to systematically build up regional economic integration.
Read full article here.