Mark Sumner has a good Ukraine update here.
In an address to his people after fending off Russia’s invading hordes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threw some understated shade at Moscow:
“The second most powerful army in the world” likely threw Russian dictator Vladimir Putin into fits. Indeed, his core rationale, after you strip away all the bullshit, is about Russian “humiliation.” Indeed, he’s called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Keep in mind, that century included two world wars, the Holocaust, mass murders by Stalin and Pol Pot, and countless other tragedies that rank higher than “a bunch of nations got their independence.”
Well, if that was bad, Russia’s surprisingly slow going in the early days of this Russian war will only compound that perceived humiliation. There’s always a chance the stuff I’m about to quote is propaganda bullshit, so let’s just admit that possibility upfront. That said, I believe them, given Putin’s public declarations that Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.
First up, the U.K. Ministry of Defence, yesterday:
And then just a short while ago:
“It is unlikely that Russia has achieved its planned Day 1 military objectives,” followed by Russia having to find a new route to Kyiv after failing to capture a town literally on the Belarus border.
There were two columns north of Kyiv during the initial invasion; the left flank was Chernobyl, which we know Russia took yesterday. But their path southward has been blocked by the destruction of key bridges.
The right flank runs through Chernihiv. But as the Brits note, Russia failed in capturing it, despite throwing everything at it. That’s devastating. While yesterday, Western sources fretted that Kyiv might fall “in hours,” today, as I write this, fighting remains restricted to its northern suburbs, with major avenues of approach other destroyed or obstructed. Amazing. And while Russian troops will be marching in the streets of the capital at some point soon, they’re facing the prospects of brutal street-by-street hand-to-hand combat.
The Americans are piling on with their own subtle, understated shade:
Russian forces have lost momentum in the invasion of Ukraine and are not advancing as quickly as U.S. intelligence had estimated they would, based on their assessment of how fast Moscow believed its troops would move, a senior Defense Department official said Friday.
During a carefully worded briefing at the Pentagon, the official said that the Russians’ “momentum in terms of progress to Kyiv has slowed,” adding that “they are not moving on Kyiv as fast as they anticipated it going.” He declined to say how American intelligence officials knew what Russia expected, but pointed to the fighting underway in and around a number of cities where Ukrainian forces have mounted a defense.
Again, maybe it’s all bullshit, a way of saying, “Russia, you actually kinda suck!” But Ukraine’s equipment is mostly outdated surplus Soviet-era stock, has limited (though still operational) airpower, and stands alone as the world remains fearful of engaging a nuclear-armed Russia with a clearly unstable leader. If Russia is the global superpower it claims to be, shouldn’t this have been a cakewalk?
And yes, superpowers get bogged down in guerrilla conflicts. The U.S. in Iraq, of course, and both the Soviet Union and the United States’ disasters in Afghanistan, remind us of that. But the conventional American invasion of Iraq was a three-day affair. The Taliban didn’t last long as a government when the U.S. originally invaded. It was widely expected that Russia would roll over Ukraine, and the conflict would quickly become a counter-insurgency. In fact, Ukraine’s army has trained to split itself into five-man partisan units once conventional resistance collapses.
Yet here we are, with key border towns still flying the Ukrainian flag, and with Ukrainian fighter jets still in the air providing support. Ukraine even got frisky, and lobbed some missiles into Russia itself.
More from The New York Times link above:
Russia has not taken any population centers, the official said, nor has it yet managed to achieve air superiority over Ukraine. The Ukrainian air defense and missile defense systems, he said, have been degraded, but Ukraine’s air force “still have aircraft in the air that continue to engage and deny air access to Russia.”
There is some wisdom to bypassing population centers. Looking at maps of Ukraine, I see Ukrainian towns commonly have bypass-style highways that loop around the cities themselves to keep traffic out of towns. Why get bogged down taking on urban entrenched positions when you can simply cordon off the city and keep going?
That’s what Russia is now doing, failing to bombard and assault many of these towns into submission. But it does present a key problem: Their supply lines are now in danger of sniping. Remember, an army isn’t a tank and some infantry carriers. It’s fuel trucks. It’s food trucks. It’s mechanics and trucks full of parts, since that equipment frequently breaks down. An American M-1 Abrams tank gets 0.6 miles per gallon. I doubt Russian tanks get better mileage, and I’d suspect likely worse. In fact, my biggest challenge managing the logistics of an MLRS missile artillery battery while in the U.S. Army was exactly that—fuel. We were always running out of fuel. And we had one fuel tanker assigned to our battery. If that vehicle was destroyed, we’d literally be sitting ducks.
By bypassing those cities and towns along the road to Kyiv, Russia risks saboteurs and ambushes to emerge from those towns, taking a toll on its supply lines, and potentially leaving its forward-deployed troops starved of fuel, food, and supplies.
The official said that Russia has begun an amphibious assault from the Sea of Azov, near Mariupol, in the south. Thousands of Russian naval infantry are coming ashore there, with defense officials assessing that the plan is to move toward the city of Mariupol.
I wrote previously how curious it was that Mariupol had been left so far alone, given it’s a stone throw’s away from Russia itself, and adjacent to the separatist Donbas region, which supposedly was Russia’s excuse for invading. Well, no longer left alone.
Pentagon officials warned that as of Friday morning Russia had sent into Ukraine only 30% of the 150,000 to 190,000 troops it had massed at the border, so Moscow could intensify its attack at any time.
Here’s the thing: Can Russia intensity its attack?
If Russia could send those troops across, it would’ve done so already. The fact that it hasn’t suggests that it can’t. Why? Supply lines. You send all your tanks across, but without the infrastructure to fuel and maintain them, and they end up dead in the water, sitting uselessly at the side of the road (or even worse for Russia, captured, and pressed into service by the Ukrainian side).
There is clearly a limit to Russia’s military capabilities. In that briefing, American officials said they had counted around 200 missile strikes. In comparison, here’s the tally from the American “shock and awe” campaign that supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq: 1,700 air sorties, including 504 cruise missiles. Russia couldn’t muster anywhere near that kind of firepower. Putin’s desperate scheme to be taken seriously as a military superpower is really fizzling out.
Ukraine is still seriously overmatched, in manpower and equipment, but it’s starting to look like a much fairer fight than anyone dared hope. As I’ve written about, morale can be a great equalizer, and Russia’s early difficulties are doing more to buck up Ukraine’s national fighting spirit than just about anything else possible (absent the entrance of allied armies into the fight).
Meanwhile, Putin’s goals of rolling back NATO are backfiring in the most spectacular way. I previously wrote how Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine had already spurred Finland and Sweden to consider NATO membership, even before the war started. The war has now accelerated those discussions, and Russia is losing its mind over it.
Meanwhile, just one day after Russia officially launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Moscow is considering military action against Finland and Sweden.
Maria Zakharova has warned both Finland and Sweden that they will face “severe military and political consequences” if they attempt to join NATO.
She said: “Finland and Sweden should not base their security on damaging the security of other countries and their accession to NATO can have detrimental consequences and face some military and political consequences.
Finland has already fought Russia to a standstill in 1939-1940, though the resulting peace treaty cost it territory. Still, their strong performance against the vastly larger Red Army convinced Hitler that he could take on Stalin. Finland remained neutral during the Cold War, but has spent heavily on its highly regarded security forces. It would present a much larger challenge than Ukraine. And remember, Russia’s entire combat capacity is in or around Ukraine right now. China could waltz in on the other side and grab some disputed territory if it wanted, and there’s little Russia could do about it (other than wave nukes around). Sweden is also no slouch and is already heavily engaged in the current NATO mission, both by providing reconnaissance aircraft keeping tabs on Russia and Belarus, and also sending weapons and supplies to Ukraine.
By literally threatening the two Scandinavian nations with military reprisal if they join NATO, Russia has likely just guaranteed that they will.
So what happens to Putin as his forces end up humiliated by Ukraine? Hopefully this:
