So much doubling down by Putin with a firehose of farcical events. Annexing Novorossiya under duress only means more Russian deaths. Russia's war in Ukraine will cause $2.8 trillion in global economic losses.
Poland has drawn a red line on the need for a conventional military response to a Russian tactical nuclear strike on Ukraine. A report about such a non-nuclear retaliation, however massive, for a Russian nuclear strike violating NATO’s article 5 could mean that the real price for the first tactical nuclear weapon attack since WWII will transcend infamy.
The State of the War
- The Kremlin continues to violate its stated “partial mobilization” procedures and contradict its own messaging even while recognizing the systematic failures within the Russian bureaucracy just eight days after the declaration of mobilization.
- Belarus may be preparing to accommodate newly-mobilized Russian servicemen but remains unlikely to enter the war in Ukraine on Russia’s behalf.
- Ukrainian troops have likely nearly completed the encirclement of the Russian grouping in Lyman and cut critical ground lines of communication (GLOCS) that support Russian troops in the Drobysheve-Lyman area.
- Ukrainian military officials maintained operational silence regarding Ukrainian ground maneuvers in Kherson Oblast but stated that Russian forces are deploying newly-mobilized troops to reinforce the Kherson Oblast frontline.
- Ukrainian troops continued to target Russian logistics, transportation, and military assets in Kherson Oblast.
- Russian troops continued ground attacks in Donetsk Oblast.
- Russian forces have likely increased the use of Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones in southern Ukraine.
- An independent Russian polling organization, the Levada Center, found that almost half of polled Russians are anxious about mobilization, but that support for Russian military actions declined only slightly to 44%.
- Ukrainian officials reiterated their concerns that the Kremlin will mobilize Ukrainian citizens in occupied oblasts following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation announcement.
www.understandingwar.org/...
The would-be referendums in Russian-controlled parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – precursors to a planned formal annexation this week – were hurried and ugly, held at gunpoint and with shells exploding in the distance. They lacked the Potemkin pageantry of similar so-called ballots in Crimea in 2014, which were at least accompanied by efforts to entice voters with promises of higher pensions and Russian investment.
This time, in its urgency, the Kremlin appears to have dropped all but the barest attempts to make the referendums look convincing, opting instead for brutality. So why bother at all?
There was a domestic and an international agenda to the mock vote.
Putin’s main audience is at home. The day after news of the referendums, he ordered a military mobilisation – a deeply unpopular move that Russia has long avoided despite lacking manpower on the front. Russian disinformation has not always had to be sophisticated to find purchase, but people being asked to kill or die – or send their loved ones to do so – are more apt to ask why.
Internationally, the other objective is to up the ante in the confrontation with Ukraine and its western backers. Putin’s announcement of the mobilisation was accompanied by the threat of nuclear strikes if Ukraine continued to retake its own lands. Putin – who attaches great importance to the Soviet-style patina of legality he apparently believes the referendums afford, however Kafkaesque – is aiming to make such threats credible and thus coerce capitulation. They also serve to stoke the false war narrative Russia is spreading via social media and digital diplomacy abroad, where it has had some traction.
All of this amounts to a dangerous new phase of the war.
www.theguardian.com/...
But by annexing the parts of Ukraine his troops still occupy and then framing his efforts as an existential fight for the survival of the Russian state, Mr. Putin can try to shift the focus of the war from his army’s frontline losses to a plane where he seems to feel most confident: a battle of wills with the West.
“He thinks he can win,” Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “He is provoking an escalation of the war, transferring it to some new status.”
Responding to rising popular discontent over the draft he ordered last week, Mr. Putin personally and publicly directed senior security officials to send home people who had been wrongly drafted — a rare implicit admission that his government had stumbled badly.
[...]
The Kremlin announced the annexation plans on Thursday, saying Mr. Putin would sign documents on the entry of new territories into the Russian Federation and give “a voluminous speech.”
The ceremony will be accompanied by a festive celebration. Just outside the Kremlin walls, workers were putting up billboards and a giant video screen on Thursday for what state media described as an open-air rally and concert on Friday “in support” of the “referendums” on joining Russia — fraudulent votes that were held in Russian-occupied Ukraine in recent days.
The planned pomp appeared to be aimed at winning public approval and support for the annexation.
Festivities aside, Mr. Putin’s declaration will signal a new and more dangerous phase of the war. Once he declares Ukrainian territory to be an inextricable part of Russia — a declaration that Russia’s rubber-stamp Parliament and constitutional court are expected to approve by next week — he will rule out any negotiations over that area’s future status, analysts said.
And after going through with the annexation, Mr. Putin may also declare that any future Ukrainian military action there threatens Russian territorial integrity — a threat, he said last week, to which Russia’s nuclear-armed military may respond with “all the means at our disposal.”
“This is not a bluff,” he added.
[...]
But this time, the context is far more volatile and grave. While Russia captured Crimea without large-scale fighting, Mr. Putin’s annexation will signal an escalation of a war that has already killed tens of thousands. While most Russians cheered the annexation of Crimea, seeing it as a genuine part of Russia, there is little evidence that the broader public is convinced that the four Ukrainian regions now being annexed hold similar significance.
And while Russia had already taken over Crimea when the Kremlin decreed the annexation, Ukraine still holds much of two of the regions being annexed on Friday, Donetsk and Zaporizka. That raises a key question ahead of Mr. Putin’s Friday speech: Will he threaten to use devastating force to compel Ukraine to withdraw from what the Kremlin will characterize as Russian territory?
Ukraine gave no sign that threats by Mr. Putin would cause it to back down. In a speech late on Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine reiterated his denunciation of the referendums and said he was working with foreign leaders to coordinate a strong international response.
“Our key task now is to coordinate actions with partners in response to sham referendums organized by Russia and all related threats,” Mr. Zelensky said.
In Russia, Friday’s fanfare will take place against the backdrop of Mr. Putin’s chaotic “partial mobilization” — the large-scale military draft that he announced on Sept. 21 and that has led to demonstrations, attacks on enlistment offices and tens of thousands of men trying to flee the country. Western experts are skeptical that the mobilization of conscripts will quickly be able to reverse Russia’s battlefield losses.
A
poll published by the independent Levada Center on Thursday showed rising anxiety over the war among Russians — a conflict that much of the public had largely tuned out until Mr. Putin’s draft order last week. The poll found 56 percent of Russians saying they were “very alarmed” by events in Ukraine, up from 37 percent in August. Asked what they felt upon hearing of Mr. Putin’s draft order, 47 percent described “anxiety, fear, horror,” while only 27 percent said they felt pride.
www.nytimes.com/…
Which brings us back to how Putin’s 300,000 “reservists” will fare against Ukraine’s NATO-trained army. It is likely those recruits will join units that have recently been traumatized after seven months of combat and already suffer from poor morale. It won’t help that those units have recently been reinforced with prison parolees, ragtag militias from false “peoples’ republics,” and recruited guns from private armies.
The results will be predictable. Putin might continue to send unwilling Russian men to an ill-conceived and illegal invasion for which they are not trained or prepared. But it’s not warfare. It’s just more murder — this time of his own citizens.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
Russian milbloggers discussed Ukrainian gains around Lyman with increased concern on September 28, suggesting that Russian forces in this area may face imminent defeat.[1] Several Russian milbloggers and prominent military correspondents claimed that Ukrainian troops advanced west, north, and northeast of Lyman and are working to complete the envelopment of Russian troops in Lyman and along the northern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River in this area.[2] Russian mibloggers stated that Ukrainian troops are threatening Russian positions and lines of communication that support the Lyman grouping. The collapse of the Lyman pocket will likely be highly consequential to the Russian grouping in northern Donetsk and western Luhansk oblasts and may allow Ukrainian troops to threaten Russian positions along the western Luhansk Oblast border and in the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area.
Russian military leadership has failed to set information conditions for potentially imminent Russian defeat in Lyman. The Russian Ministry of Defense has not addressed current Russian losses around Lyman or prepared for the collapse of this sector of the frontline, which will likely further reduce already-low Russian morale. Russian military authorities previously failed to set sufficient information conditions for Russian losses following the first stages of the Ukrainian counteroffensives in Kharkiv Oblast, devastating morale and leading to panic among Russian forces across the Eastern axis. The subsequent ire of the Russian nationalist information space likely played a role in driving the Kremlin to order partial mobilization in the days following Ukraine’s initial sweeping counteroffensive in a haphazard attempt to reinforce Russian lines. Future Ukrainian gains around critical areas in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast may drive additional wedges between Russian nationalists and military leadership, and between Russian forces and their superiors.
understandingwar.org/...
The nuclear planner and two other senior officers who spoke to Newsweek say that President Biden favors non-nuclear options over nuclear ones, should Russia cross the nuclear threshold. The officials don't disagree with that view, and none of them advocate any use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike. But to deter Putin from using nuclear weapons in the first place, the officers say, the United States needs to talk the nuclear talk—and not be held back by the fear of having to walk the walk.
"We're in uncharted territory," says a senior intelligence officer. "Threatening to respond forcefully and creating catastrophic consequences for Russia [without] suggesting nuclear war: Is that strong enough to deter Putin? And is it really clear? I'm not so sure."
Because Biden and his top national security advisers can't conceive of pressing the nuclear button short of a full-scale attack on the United States, the White House is focusing too much—in its planning and its messaging—on what it considers to be "usable" capabilities, the military officers say. The non-nuclear options include military and non-military measures, including the total economic isolation of Russia.
"We have to ponder whether other [non-nuclear] threats are powerful enough to deter Putin," says a former bomber pilot who is now a Washington-based Pentagon officer.
The officials and the STRATCOM civilian, all with experience in nuclear planning, were granted anonymity to speak about highly sensitive matters.
www.newsweek.com/...
Perhaps after absorbing all of this information—about the impact of sanctions, the resistance to the “partial mobilization,” the criticisms from erstwhile allies—Putin will reconsider his aims in Ukraine. Indeed, in a speech released on September 21, he said nothing about the “denazification” and “demilitarization” of all of Ukraine and focused more narrowly on the Donbas region. But judging by his insistence on holding the line at Kherson and the continued bombardment of cities far from the front lines like Odesa, Putin still wants to control as much of Ukraine’s southern coast as possible, to further connect Crimea to Russia by land and to box Ukraine in by sea.
Can Putin be persuaded—or forced—to abandon these larger ambitions? Again, he is not operating according to an entirely rational game plan. The Russian leader has become intoxicated by the idea that he will restore Russia to its nineteenth-century grandeur as a regional hegemon, a counterforce to European powers, and a respected (and feared) global actor. Victory in Ukraine is central to this plan, for if Russia cannot recover territories that it held until the 1917 revolution—and under the auspices of the Soviet Union for another 75 years—then it can make no such grandiose claims. If nuclear weapons are necessary to secure such a legacy, Putin will not likely hesitate to use them.
That’s where China and India come in. Putin doesn’t care what Joe Biden has to say, and he doesn’t seem to pay much heed to NATO either. But China in particular is furious that it is suddenly caught between two unpredictable nuclear powers—Russia and North Korea—and there’s nothing like a thermonuclear blast to mess up one’s plan for global economic expansion. The Biden administration needs to work much more closely with Beijing to thwart Putin’s nuclear brinksmanship. If that requires an economic and diplomatic rapprochement between the United States and China, so much the better.
The other lingering question is Putin’s own political position. He faces no serious opposition either from individual politicians or institutional forces. The citizens that most oppose his policies have been jailed or have left the country. The economy hasn’t tanked completely, the population has been largely bought off with handouts and force-fed with pro-war propaganda, and the anti-mobilization protests don’t yet show the potential of becoming part of a larger anti-war effort much less an anti-Putin movement.
Putin has made himself into the indispensable leader. A military coup is conceivable, along the lines of the Decembrist revolt of 1825, but that will only happen if the war, the economy, and the president’s political acumen all simultaneously go south. Even if Putin himself were to suddenly die, an imperial nationalist of similar pedigree like former president/prime minister Dmitry Medvedev would likely take the reins and stay the course. Russia needs another revolution—peaceful, democratic—not just another leader.
Whether he’s out in front or backed into a corner, Putin is dangerous: for Ukraine, for the world, even for a lot of Russian citizens. The challenge is to force the Russian leader into the kind of middle position where he can preserve Russia’s regional power without the occupation of Ukraine and its superpower status without the use of nuclear weapons. That’s not the Russia that Putin wants. But, as long as Russian citizens continue to protest, Ukraine hangs tough, and China and India clip Putin’s wings, that’s the Russia he will get.
www.juancole.com/…