Tag: ukraine

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Tuesday that the US would face “much harsher” consequences for backing Ukraine’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk Oblast.

“The impression is that our colleagues [in Washington] have discarded the remnants of common sense and believe that they can do anything,” Ryabkov said, according to TASS.

“The consequences [for the United States] could be much harsher than those they are already experiencing, they know where and in what areas we are reacting in practical terms,” Ryabkov added.

The US claims it was not involved in the planning of the Kursk offensive, but it has allowed Ukraine to use US-provided armored vehicles, missiles, and bombs in the attack on Russian territory.

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As Kiev attempts to bask in triumph over its territorial gains inside of Russia, its forces are losing territory along the Eastern front lines in Ukraine. Ukrainian military commanders say the reason for the losses is poorly trained soldiers; many are even afraid to fire their weapons. 

Speaking with the Associated Press, a battalion commander in Ukraine’s 47th Brigade said, “Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing position in trenches but don’t open fire. … That is why our men are dying. When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.”

After pushing Kiev to forego a diplomatic settlement with Moscow in April 2022, Western leaders pledged that they would arm, equip, and train Ukrainian soldiers to fight off the Russian invaders.

However, two and a half years into the conflict, it has turned into a war of attrition, and Kiev’s backers are struggling to sustain Ukraine’s military amid massive losses. 

While Kiev has not made an official statement regarding its casualties, they are estimated to be well into the hundreds of thousands. Support for the war has also been dipped in Ukraine, leading Kiev to draft more Ukrainians, including increasingly younger citizens, into the military. 

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Bear with me while I engage in a bit of speculation.

Since the NATO/Ukraine invasion of Russia, in the Kursk direction, began the hot question has been: Why? None of the usual suspects can make this move make sense. The Ukrainians are stripping their main defense lines in Donbass and sending their best trained and equipped reserves to die in a futile adventure of some sort—even as the Russians appear to be rolling up the Donbass frontline. Most agree that these invading forces in Kursk are doomed—Macgregor: ‘I don’t think they’ll make it [out of the meat grinder]’. The Ukrainian losses are already horrific, since they are operating without air cover and are increasingly cut off from support and resupply. Larry Johnson paints a grim picture:

The Russian Ministry of Defense claims that it has killed more than 4,400 Ukrainian and mercenary troops, destroyed 65 tanks and more than 400 armored and infantry fighting vehicles. It appears that some of the Russian forces in the area are using this as a training exercise — i.e., a live fire event for untested troops where they get to put their training into practice. The new units are fighting alongside and under the guidance of experienced forces, with the Chechens playing their typical gnarly role.

Big Serge has written a lengthy substack trying to figure this out: Back to the Bloodlands. He presents four theories of what’s behind this, but ultimately finds none of them persuasive: 1) The Atomic Hostage; 2) Diversionary Front; 3) Bargaining Chip; 4) Pure Spectacle. As I type I’m listening to Ray McGovern admitting that no one seems able to make sense of this. And yet …

Listening the other day to John Mearsheimer and Danny Davis, Davis cited several usually reliable sources to the effect that Ukraine is reported to have moved 1/3 of their entire army to the northern border for use in a full scale offensive into Russia. The latest claim is that this is to force Putin to negotiate from a position of weakness—an utterly implausible notion. But Ukraine is about to double down. Is this pure madness?

Here’s the one thing that all these commentators appear to agree on: NATO—which means the US—is behind this. Does that fact help us to understand what’s going on? Why would the US do this—push Ukraine to commit its best remaining forces to a suicidal venture that will only hasten the end? Will the US somehow derive some benefit from this deepening Ukraine tragedy?

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The highest stakes in the Ukrainian offensive into Russian territory in Kursk may turn out not to be how far they advance nor whether they can hold it. The advance seems already to be running out of gas and few in the U.S. or NATO have any expectation that Ukraine can hold onto the territory they so quickly took.

The highest stakes in the Ukraine offensive may turn out to be the moral that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is spinning that he says should be learned from the incursion.

Zelensky says that two things should be learned from the Ukrainian armed forces incursion into Russia. The first is that the West must remove its restrictions on the use of long-range weapons into Russian territory. Had Ukraine been able to fire into Russia, Ukraine would not need to have marched into Russia: “If our partners lifted all the current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we would not need to physically enter… the Kursk region.”

The second is that there is no longer a need for the West to maintain those restrictions. The purpose of the restrictions is to avoid direct western confrontation with Russia by not crossing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s red lines. But “just a few months ago,” Zelensky said, people would have said that invading Russia “would cross the strictest of all the red lines that Russia has.” Now “the whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled.”

The Ukrainian invasion into Russia is being presented by Zelensky as the final argument that the West should dismiss all Russian red lines, remove all weapons restrictions and allow Ukraine to fire long range missiles into Russia. The highest stakes in the Kursk offensive may be whether the U.S. is persuaded by the argument.

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The Washington Post cited unnamed administration sources to report that “U.S. debates support for Ukraine’s surprise offensive into Russia”, which suggests that some policymakers doubt that Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk advances American interests. To be sure, the US knew about this move ahead of time (if not actively participated in its planning) but didn’t thwart it, thus tacitly approving it. Nevertheless, five arguments exist for why this actually harms American interests, and they are as follows:

1. Russia Might More Easily Gain Ground In Donbass

One of the reasons why Ukraine invaded Kursk was to force Russia to divert some of its forces from Donbass to this new front, yet that hasn’t happened. Instead, Ukraine diverted some of its own highly trained forces from there to Kursk, which could make it easier for Russia to gain ground in Donbass. The optics of Russia continuing to advance are already bad enough for the US’ soft power interests, but they might also adversely affect the Democrats’ electoral plans if this trend accelerates before November.  

2. A Diplomatic Solution Is Now Much More Difficult

Whatever faint hopes might have previously existed of diplomatically resolving this conflict were shattered by Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk since it prompted Putin to rule out the resumption of peace talks. Some American policymakers want to “Pivot (back) to Asia” sooner rather than later in order to more muscularly contain China, ergo their interest in some sort of compromise with Russia, but that’s not possible as long as Ukraine continues occupying Russia’s universally recognized territory.

3. Ukraine Might Feel Emboldened To Expand The Conflict

Regardless of the degree to which the US might have helped plan Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk, the very fact that nothing was done to stop this despite the US obviously knowing about it in advance could embolden Kiev to further expand the conflict into Belarus, Moldova, and/or other Russian regions. It now knows that the US will go along with whatever it does regardless of some policymakers’ fear of tensions with Russia spiraling out of control, and therein lies the supreme danger.

4. Russian-US Tensions Risk Spiraling Out Of Control

Putin won’t radically respond to Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk since it hasn’t yet crossed any of his non-negotiable red lines, but in the event that it does (such as if Kiev captures more territory or expands the conflict), then Russian-US tensions could spiral out of control depending upon what he does. That scenario will remain as long as the invasion lasts, plus it raises the chances that Putin might start listening to “hardliners” and consider a radical response without any of the aforesaid lines being crossed.

5. Other US Client States Could Follow Ukraine’s Lead

The last way in which Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk actually harms American interests is that other client states might follow Ukraine’s lead by striking or invading their neighbors with whom they’re feuding in order to create a fait accompli in the expectation that the US will then feel pressured to back them up. The US doesn’t want conflicts breaking out unless it’s able to control the dynamics to a large degree, which it would struggle to do if a client state like Somalia suddenly sparked one.

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