Celebrating an incomplete annexation is symptomatic of a worsening situation that includes more setbacks in eastern Ukraine for the occupiers. Ukraine’s counter is to move closer to NATO, making its potential commitment more credible. This updates the last night at midnight story with the aftermath of the latest Putin speech and today’s subsequent announcement of Zelensky about NATO membership.
Russia is still concentrating its efforts on attempting to fully occupy the Donetsk oblast and retain the lands it has taken, as well as to obstruct the Ukrainian Defense Forces’ liberating operations in certain directions. The Russian army is performing illegal aerial surveillance while firing on Ukrainian soldiers’ positions along the contact line. The Russian Federation’s attacks on calm residential areas and the infrastructure used by civilians are all prohibited by international humanitarian law. The possibility of airstrikes and missile attacks on the entire area of Ukraine still exists.
uaposition.com/…
Zelensky: Ukraine Is Making ‘Accelerated’ Application to Join NATO
Putin Declares ‘Anti-Colonial’ War After Annexing Ukraine Oblasts
In an extensive speech, Putin railed against what he considered the West’s growing influence and called for “a liberation anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony.”
“The West is ready to step over everything to preserve the neo-colonial system that allows it to parasitize, in fact, to plunder the world at the expense of the power of the dollar and technological dictate,” Putin said, according to a translation of his remarks.
[...]
Western leaders immediately condemned Putin’s latest actions. The U.S. almost instantly imposed new sanctions on more than 1,000 top Russian officials and businesses, following through on threats President Joe Biden has made since Moscow first signaled its intent to annex more parts of Ukraine.
Russia is showing “contempt for peaceful nations everywhere,” Biden said shortly after Putin’s remarks, describing Russia’s supposed annexation of Ukraine as “phony.”
The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Fontelles, wrote on Twitter, “The announced annexation of Ukrainian territories by Russia is a major breach of international law & violation of UN Charter. No sham referendum can justify it. Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty is non-negotiable. The EU’s support to #Ukraine remains unwavering.”
www.usnews.com/...
The Kremlin’s contradictory statements and procedures demonstrate the fundamental nature of the systemic weakness of the Russian military establishment that have characterized the entire invasion. Russian officials continue to execute a supposed reservist call-up as a confused undertaking somewhere between a conscription drive and the declaration of general mobilization, likely issuing conflicting orders to already flawed bureaucratic institutions. CIA Director Williams Burns noted that even if the Kremlin manages to mobilize 300,000 men it will not be able to ensure logistic support or provide sufficient training and equipment to the newly-mobilized men.[6] Ukrainian military officials noted that Russian forces have already committed mobilized men to Kharkiv Oblast who have since told the Ukrainian forces that they did not receive any training prior to their deployment around September 15.[7]
The bureaucratic failures in the Russian partial mobilization may indicate that Putin has again bypassed the Russian higher military command or the Russian MoD. The deployment of mobilized men to centers of hostilities on the Kharkiv or Kherson frontlines may suggest that Putin is directly working with axis commanders on the ground who are likely clamoring for reinforcements, rather than following standard military practices (that are also required by Russian law) such as providing training to the mobilized prior to their deployment to the frontlines. ISW has previously reported that Putin bypassed the Russian chain of command on numerous occasions when making decisions regarding the progress of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine, likely because he had lost confidence in the Russian MoD.[8] The contradictory and inconsistent narratives used by Kremlin officials and the Russian MoD about mobilization procedures could indicate that Putin, as the supreme commander, issued divergent or contradictory orders.
www.understandingwar.org/…
This Sep. 29 Russian map (t.me/rybar/39542) is about right, if one reads the striped area meant to be contested land as mostly Ukraine-controlled. In a nutshell, two Ukrainian forces broke through Russian lines north and east of Lyman, and by today they had nearly met.
The offensive went straight for the area's supply arteries: two roads from the north and one from the east (rail supply was cut earlier). By 9-27 the road from the north via Nove (map: Новое) was taken. Today the other road from the north via Nevske (map: Невское) was cut.
rybar doesn't show the capture of the road via Nevske but mentions it in text:
"North of Lyman"
"- UAF units occupied Kolodyazi, Zelena Dolina and cut the road Svatovo - Makiyivka - Terny - Lyman."
Probably Ukraine holds a part between Nevske and Terny.
The second breakthrough was a pontoon crossing north over the Donets near Serebryanka, taking advantage of Russia's light defense of the riparian forest that covers the valley floor on the river's north bank. By Sep. 27 this UAF force was attacking Torske and Kreminna.
The rybar map shows Russia holding the road east into Lyman from Kreminna. But the accompany text said the two UAF forces were attacking the two villages at the center of this route - Zarichne and Torske - from both north and south.
At around 1 am local time Sep. 30, rybar gave the following update (
t.me/rybar/39555):
"By midnight, the UAF had succeeded in truly kettling Lyman. To the north Stavky is occupied, there's fighting in Zarichne, the Lyman-Torske road is under constant Ukrainian fire. (...)
Рыбарь
"Unless Russian command takes decisive measures within a day, Lyman will face the fate of Balakliya. [Russians in Lyman] will be completely cut off from the main group. If they are destroyed in the city, (...)
"the entire defensive potential of the RF Armed Forces in this sector of the front will be reduced to nothing."
"The capture of Lyman will open the doors for the UAF to Svatove, and then to Kreminna and Rubizhe. It is not yet clear where the new front would settle."
Perhaps rybar has personal relationships with some of the Russians in Lyman, and he is being led by his desperation to convince Moscow to rescue his friends into making his assessments of the Lyman situation sound as urgent as possible. But my sense is his account is accurate.
If the UAF is in Zarichne, the road to Kreminna is under too much fire to be used as an escape route, and the road to Nevske is cut, all that might be left is to try and escape via a dirt road NE from Torske. But that way is more dirt roads for c. 20km before the next paved road.
...
“This is what made World War One so big, this is what made World War Two so big,” Hein Goemans said. “It’s not just ‘I want a piece of territory because my ethnic brethren are there.’ It’s—all this shit.”
Traditionally, Hein Goemans writes, wars were thought to end because one side surrendered. “Until the vanquished quits, the war goes on,” as one author put it, in 1944. But the empirical record showed this to be at best an incomplete account. It usually took two sides to start a war, even if they had different culpability, and it usually took two sides to end it; the vanquished may accept the terms that were proposed last week, but what was to keep the winner from inventing new terms? The classic example from the First World War was the Bolsheviks’ refusal, in the wake of their seizure of power in Russia, to continue the fight against Germany; proclaiming “neither war nor peace,” they simply left the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. “Literally the vanquished quit,” Goemans writes. But the Germans, instead of accepting this, kept advancing into Russia. Only after the Bolsheviks agreed to even harsher terms than had been proposed just three weeks earlier did the Germans agree to their exit from the war.
More recent theoretical literature had acknowledged the two-sidedness of war, Goemans writes, but here, too, important aspects had been missed. War theory imported from economics the concept of “bargaining,” and wars were thought to begin when the bargaining process—over a piece of territory, usually—broke down. The most common cause of the breakdown, according to war theorists (and again borrowing from economics), was some form of informational asymmetry. Simply put, one or both sides overestimated their own strength relative to their opponent’s. There were many reasons for this sort of informational asymmetry, not least of which was that the war-fighting capacity of individual nations was almost always a closely guarded secret. In any case, the best way to find out who was stronger was to actually start fighting. Then things became clear quite quickly. Many wars ended in just this way, with the sides reëvaluating their relative strengths and opting to make a deal.
But there were other kinds of wars, in which factors besides information predominated. These factors, in part because they did not play prominent roles in economics, were less well understood. One was the fact that contracts in the international system—in this case, peace deals—had little or no enforcement mechanism. If a country really wanted to break a deal, there was no court of arbitration to which the other party could appeal. (In theory, the United Nations could be this court; in practice, it is not.) This gave rise to the problem known as “credible commitment”: one reason wars might not end quickly is that one or both sides simply could not trust the other to honor any peace deal they reached. In his 2009 book “How Wars End,” Goemans’s colleague Dan Reiter used the example of Great Britain in the late spring of 1940, after the fall of France. Britain was losing the war and had no certainty that the United States would enter in time to save it. But the British fought on, because they knew that no deal with Nazi Germany could be trusted. As Winston Churchill put it to his Cabinet, in his inimitable way: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
“For a war to end,” Goemans said, “the minimum demands of at least one of the sides must change.” This is the first rule of war termination. And we have not yet reached a point where war aims have changed enough for a peace deal to be possible.
www.newyorker.com/...