Weekly megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - October 20

This is an interesting article. The Russians left a lot of documents behind in one of the towns Ukraine recently recaptured. They provide a lot of insight into the Russian state of mind, casualty rates, equipment losses, etc.

Finland's main parties back plans to build Russia border fence

Finland’s main political parties have backed building a fence along parts of the country’s border with Russia, with work on a short pilot section expected to start as soon as funds have been allocated, Finnish media have reported.

Neighbouring Norway, which also shares a border with Russia in the far north, on Wednesday said it had arrested a seventh Russian national suspected of illegally flying drones or taking photographs in restricted areas in recent days.

The Guardian – Jon Henley & Patrick Wintour – 19th October 2022

Russia threatens not to extend grain deal if UN investigates Iran's sale of drones to Russia
https://en.socportal.info/en/news/russia-threatens-not-to-extend-grain-deal-if-un-investigates-irans-sale-of-drones-to-russia/

Background: Both Russia and Iran are denying that the suicide drones recently hitting Ukrainian cities and infrastructure were supplied by Iran, despite apparently incontrovertible evidence that they are Iranian. Although this article doesn't mention it, others have gone further to claim that Iran has sent personnel to Russia (and probably into Ukraine) to provide instruction on how to use the drones and even to operate the drones directly.

Russian representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky began to threaten the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, that Russia would reconsider cooperation on the grain issue if the organization sent experts to Ukraine to check Iranian drones. The agreements signed in July in Istanbul expire on November 19.

Earlier, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced plans to send a team of specialists to Ukraine to determine the identity of the drones.

Russia Changes Goal of Invasion from Denazification to Desatanisation
https://news.yahoo.com/russias-security-council-claims-hundreds-144610842.html

Pavlov claims that Ukraine has turned into a "totalitarian hypersect" where citizens have abandoned Orthodox values, and therefore "desatanisation" is becoming an urgent issue. Pavlov admits that the exact number of sects in Ukraine is unknown, but "the number is in the hundreds."

Ukraine scrambles to keep internet up amid blackouts (Politico)

On a flickering video call, Anatoliy Fedoruk, mayor of the city of Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv, said he is seeking out generators to help keep internet service up, even with all the other demands for power. “The fact that people were able to record the atrocities happening in our city” by posting documentation online makes those connections essential, Fedoruk said.

“This is an online war,” he said. “Connection should be there always.”

On Wednesday, Russian missiles once again hit Ukrainian energy plants. With roughly 40 percent of energy infrastructure damaged and more than 1000 towns and villages facing widespread electrical blackouts, Fedoruk is one of numerous city officials across Ukraine who have emphasized the need to keep civilian network connectivity alive through those kinds of widespread cuts.

[…]

Many service providers are pre-installing battery packs on signal receiver equipment — hardware like routers and satellite dishes — to ensure subscribers have network connection even during power cuts. But ISPs can no longer guarantee whether they can provide a network to connect to in the coming months. “They are purchasing generators and solar panels as sources of alternative energy,” Glushchenko said.

Starlink satellites and receiver units from Elon Musk’s SpaceX play a significant role in these makeshift infrastructure plans. In the newly liberated territories, where ground fighting has destroyed optical backbone cables and server rooms have been looted, internet service providers depend almost solely on satellite connections, Glushchenko said, to restore their own service.

Those units also require electricity of course, and they’re only enough to provide a smattering of service in Bucha even with the lights on.

Civilian internet access via Starlink is particularly limited because the military requisitions so many of the units. Of the 15 Starlink units provided to Bucha upon the city’s liberation, the city has retained only five of them, Fedoruk said, while the rest has gone back to the military.

Oleksii Zinevich, the owner and operator of “Best,” one of the biggest internet service provider companies in the Kyiv region, notes that Starlink units can only serve a small number of users. “One Starlink receiver can provide services for a maximum of 50 to 100 people,” Zinevich said. Any more, and the connection quality suffers drastically.

[…]

Glushchenko said those in smaller towns may be better off because the energy demands of network architecture there are lower. In case of a mass power outage, a subscriber may “not have internet in Kyiv, but 100 km away from the capital in a village, he will have it,” he wrote in a text message.

Strategic Airpower 101 (acoup.blog)

Starts with a historical introduction to strategic airpower, which is the attempt to achieve strategic objectives (like winning a war) though airpower alone, typically though bombing. He argues that this has never worked, with the exception of the Berlin airlift (not a bombing campaign), and exactly what caused Japan to surrender is complicated. By contrast, supporting ground troops is quite effective.

What about nuclear weapons?

In the event of an actual conflict, the public’s desire not to be nuked – which would be the key target in a Douhet-style morale bombing campaign – appears to factor very little into actual decision-making. No one checks the polls before intentionally embarking on nuclear war or in the minutes a leader might have to deliberate on ordering a second-strike.

Getting to Ukraine:

Finally – and this is where I think we come back to the War in Ukraine – strategic bombing is emotionally satisfying even as it doesn’t work. It is a human instinct, when another human is doing something you don’t like – like refusing to lose on the battlefield – to retaliate, to punish that person. Strikes on civilian centers are perhaps the purest expression of this instinct, inflicting maximum pain (because civilian centers, unlike actual military targets, are not hardened against attack) at a minimum of risk and cost. We’ve discussed this ‘strategic sin’ before, terming it emotive strategy, but humans are emotional beings and so the temptation to ‘punish’ rather than pursue interests in a rational way will always exist.

Russian forces in Ukraine appear to follow this pattern of ‘behavior emotive strategy’ quite clearly, responding to setbacks with intensified long-range attacks on civilian centers. After the Kharkiv offensive stalled out, Russian forces began pounding the city with artillery in strikes that did more damage to civilians than the defenders of the city. Likewise, Russian airstrikes against explicitly humanitarian or civilian buildings escalated in Mariupol as the difficulty of taking the city escalated. Most recently, Russian forces have responded to setbacks the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Kherson oblasts, as well as a Ukrainian strike on the Kerch Bridge with strikes into Ukrainian civilian centers like Kyiv, increasingly using Iranian-manufactured loitering munitions (also called ‘suicide drones’ or in the case of the Shahed, I suppose we’d say a ‘martyr’ drone as that’s what ‘Shahed’ means) like the Shahed 136. This may in part be a response by Putin to domestic political conditions, a way of assuring his own hardliner supporters that he is ‘striking back’ in an emotionally satisfying, if strategically useless way (a fairly good example of ‘emotional choice theory‘ we discussed a few weeks back!).

At the same time, industrial bombing – which also has, at best, a somewhat mixed track record – isn’t an option for Russia for the same reasons it wasn’t an option for the United States in Vietnam or Korea: the industrial production which sustains the Ukrainian war effort is largely happening outside of Ukraine.

[...]

The Shahed 136 is a lot cheaper than other long-range precision munitions, but one has to imagine that Russian troops would prefer Russian loitering munitions to try to target Ukrainian ground forces; longer-range precision platforms are very expensive. As with much ’emotive strategy,’ the things that make Putin ‘feel better’ push victory further away – or in this case, hasten defeat.

Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine (The New Yorker)

In July, military officials from Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom converged at a base in Europe to plot out possible scenarios. The Ukrainians’ starting point was a broad campaign across the southern front, a push to liberate not only the occupied city of Kherson but hundreds of square miles in the nearby Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. The military planners met in three rooms, divided by country, where experts ran the same tabletop exercises. They often worked twenty hours a day, with American and British military officials helping to hone the Ukrainians’ strategy. “We have algorithms and methodologies that are more sophisticated when it comes to things like mapping out logistics and calculating munitions rates,” a senior official at the Defense Department said. “The idea was not to tell them what to do but, rather, to give them different runs to test their plans.”

The initial tabletop exercises showed that a unified push across the southern front would come at a high cost to Ukrainian equipment and manpower. It looked ill advised. “They ran this version of the offensive many times and just couldn’t get the model to work,” the Defense official said.

In the south, Ukraine had been battering Russian positions with American-provided precision rocket systems. In response, Russia’s generals had moved a considerable number of units out of the Kharkiv region, in the northeast, to back up forces near Kherson. The assembled planners settled on an idea that would take advantage of this vulnerability: a two-front offensive. Shortly afterward, Reznikov was informed of the plans. “It wasn’t the first time I was struck by our military’s ability to come up with unexpected solutions,” he said. “I understood it was up to me to get them the necessary weapons.”

Before the invasion started:

Ultimately, Zaluzhnyi’s strategy was to prevent the capture of Kyiv at all costs, while, in other areas, letting Russian forces run ahead of their logistics and supply lines. The idea was to trade territory in the short term in order to pick off Russian units once they were overextended. “We trusted no one back then,” a senior Ukrainian military official said. “Our plan was our one tiny chance for success, and we did not want anyone at all to know it.”

More recently:

When the U.S. military carries out operations with a partner force, such as a fellow nato member state, it coördinates battle movements on a common operational picture, or cop, a single digitized display showing the location and composition of forces. “We don’t quite have that with Ukraine,” the military official said. “But it’s close.” Ukrainian commanders feed information to the U.S. military, which allows for an almost real-time picture of its weaponry in Ukraine. “These days we know similar information about what we have given to Ukraine as we know about equipment in our own military,” the official said. “How many artillery tubes are functioning, what’s down for maintenance, where the necessary part is.”

[…]

The Biden Administration has also announced a military-aid package worth more than a billion dollars, bringing the total amount the U.S. has spent on arming Ukraine over the past year to sixteen billion. Among the key items in this package were an additional eighteen himars systems, more than doubling the number in Ukraine’s arsenal. Ukrainian officials are now eying a number of items that, they argue, would allow even more aggressive counter-offensives: modern nato-standard battle tanks, fighter jets such as F-16s, and the long-range atacms for striking logistics and ammunition hubs in Crimea.

Reznikov is certain that such deliveries are inevitable. “When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible,” he said. “Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimetre guns, the answer was no. himars, no. harm, no. Now all of that is a yes.” He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and atacms and F-16s.”

Identical joint statements issued by France, the UK, and the US:

We, the Foreign Ministers of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, reiterate our steadfast support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression. We remain committed to continue supporting Ukraine’s efforts to defend its territory for as long as it takes.

Earlier today, the defence ministers of each of our countries spoke to Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu at his request. Our countries made clear that we all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory. The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation. We further reject any pretext for escalation by Russia.

The Foreign Ministers also discussed their shared determination to continue supporting Ukraine and the Ukrainian people with security, economic, and humanitarian assistance in the face of President Putin’s brutal war of aggression.

https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files/ukraine/news/article/ukraine-joint-statement-by-foreign-ministers-of-france-the-united-kingdom-and
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/russian-war-in-ukraine-p3-statement
https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-on-ukraine-2/

This is quite possibly the most powerful "strongly worded letter" I have ever seen issued by three major governments. Hopefully it's enough to make Russia seriously rethink whatever idiotic plans they had in mind regarding this dirty bomb false flag idea of theirs.

Nuclear Deterrence 101 (acoup.blog)

This blog post is from March, but I found it interesting as it explains many things that happen in the war in Ukraine:

Neither country wants a nuclear exchange, so they have to avoid crossing their opponent’s red lines which would trigger that. But below that threshold, you have a window of ‘freedom of action’ – a sort of ‘space’ (really a set of options) – where either power can engage in all sorts of activity, including military activity (typically against third parties, as directly attacking a nuclear power is almost always over the red line). Beaufre’s term for the things you do inside the window of freedom of action to gain direct advantages is ‘interior maneuvers.’ For instance supplying weapons to the Afghan mujaheddin in order to degrade Soviet control of Afghanistan – that’s an interior maneuver. Intervening militarily to topple a government that is aligned with your competitor but who they have no formal obligation to protect – that’s also an interior maneuver.

But those two powers can also engage in activity designed to alter the window itself, to give themselves more freedom of action or their opponents less. Remember that deterrence is all about perception, not hard and fast rules. If you can convince the world (and your opponent) that a third-country regime isn’t worth defending (because it is evil or a pariah state, etc.), you can potentially do more or more extensive interior maneuvers against it without nearing that red line. Alternately – especially in a democracy – if you can convince your own people that a third-country regime is noble and just, you can generate the political will to harden your red line, thus closing down some of the freedom of action of your opponent. This sort of thing is what Beaufre terms the ‘exterior maneuver’ – efforts made not to manipulate the direct theater of competition, but the freedom of action each side has to act in that theater. A broad range of activities fit here, as Beaufre notes – appeals to international law, propaganda with moral and humanitarian bent, threatened indirect intervention, economic retaliation (sanctions), and of course ultimately the threat of direct intervention.

With respect to Ukraine, there is of course a lot of activity to present the cause as "noble and just" on both sides. For Ukraine this seems largely effective (though conservatives resist) and in Russia's case it seems mostly ineffective. Russia's actions to declare some regions "part of Russia" might be considered a way to try to "harden the red line," although it's also a way to make sending conscripts to fight in Ukraine legal.

One such method that Beaufre discusses is what he calls the ‘piecemeal maneuver,’ but is often in English referred to as ‘salami tactics’ – including in this absolutely hilarious bit from Yes, Prime Minister, which is also a surprisingly good explanation of the method. The idea is that to make gains while avoiding escalation, a state can break up the gains they would make into a series of smaller actions, each with its own exterior maneuver ‘cover,’ so that it doesn’t rise to the level of triggering nuclear escalation. Putting together several such maneuvers could allow a state to make those gains which had they all been attempted at once, certainly would have triggered such an escalation.

[...]

Avoiding this problem is why NATO is structured the way it is: promising a maximum response for any violation, however slight, of the territory of any member.

[...]

At the same time, Russia attempted to orchestrate a number of false-flag attacks and other fake ‘provocations’ in order to justify their intervention. What is also fairly obvious is that those exterior maneuvers failed, in particular because they lacked any kind of credibility. The smokescreen only works if a meaningful proportion of people believe it. The strategy NATO intelligence agencies took, of ‘calling’ Russia’s shots in advance robbed the strategy of much of its power. Again, the exterior maneuver is all about perception: Russia needed to create a ‘grey-zone’ of acceptability for what it was doing and largely failed.

This strategy of "calling Russia's shots" has been used many times since, particular by the US and by Zelensky. Current "shots called" include preparations to blow up Kakhovka dam and the possibility of false-flag attack involving a dirty bomb. Previously there was the invasion itself (which Zelensky didn't want to call in advance, but the US did). Sometimes "shots called" don't happen, (such as the possibility of attack from Transnistria), and too many false alarms probably reduces credibility somewhat, but not enough not to do it.

NATO's gradual escalation of weapons sent to Ukraine might also be considered a form of "salami tactics," though it seems there's some doubt now about whether it was really necessary to do this gradually.

At the same time basically everything that NATO is doing in Ukraine can be understood as having a dual purpose: both attempting to degrade Russian military capabilities (by sinking the Russian economy and arming Ukraine) but also as an exterior maneuver designed to alter the freedom of action of other players in the system. Unable to directly act against Russia due to the concerns of deterrence and escalation, NATO is seeking to close the window of freedom of action tight enough that wars of conquest sit outside of it. It is doing this by rallying world opinion to the imposition of massive economic costs, in an effort to signal that wars of conquest will have such tremendous negative repercussions (even if they don’t trigger direct intervention) as to never be worth the cost. The obvious audience for this flurry of exterior maneuvers is China; only time will tell if the performance was a success – though given that the scale of the response has shocked not only Russia but also NATO itself, one assumes it is likely to have surprised leaders in the People’s Republic of China as well.

Ukraine Live Briefing (Washington Post)

• Occupying Russian authorities ordered residents to leave Kherson and urged them to take “documents, money, valuables and clothes” with them. Photos showed people boarding ferries and buses in Kherson, pets and luggage in tow. Officials are promising government payments of 100,000 rubles (about $1,600) and housing certificates to purchase an apartment for those who comply. Ukrainian officials called Russia’s order illegal.

• Russian authorities are reducing the volume of water in the reservoir behind the Nova Kakhovka dam to minimize damage if it is destroyed, a Russian-installed regional official said, per Russian news reports. Vladimir Leontyev also claimed that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that would seek to destroy it. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of laying explosive mines at the dam in an effort to create “a large-scale disaster” in an area it is on the verge of losing control over. The Washington Post could not verify the claims. If the dam were damaged, it could flood the banks of the Dnieper River and compromise the water supply in Crimea.

Here's a Twitter thread by a researcher (Kamil Galeev) who says that Russia no longer has a machine tools industry and instead imports them:

There's much less continuity between the Soviet and Russian military production than many tend to think. In the 1990s the Russian military industrial complex went through a catastrophe. Russia inherited most of the Soviet army, but only a fraction of the Soviet economic potential

Economic decline -> Government military expenditures drop -> Military plants are in crisis -> They stop paying to workers and buy almost no new machine tools -> Machine tools industry dies

[...]

Old workers grew old on the factories. New workers didn't come and if they did they didn't stay for long. The entire vocational schools system deteriorated both for the lack of funds and the lack of motivated applicants. There was no financial incentive to become a worker anymore

[...]

What could the Kremlin do? While making all those ritual talks about the import substitution, it would just buy Western tools. NB:

1. Almost all Russian tools are imported
2. They are mostly imported from Germany
3. The Russian military industry consumes 85% of the machine tools

[...]

There is a massive evidence of the Russian military industry, including the cruise and ballistic missiles industry using the foreign tools:

1. German (mostly)
2. But also other European, Japanese, American or even Australian/Turkish

But I never saw them using anything Chinese

(Followed by speculation about why Chinese imports don't happen.)

Anyone taking bets on the next major move of Ukraine? Here's one: Melitopol (or other azov coast location) before Kherson or quickly thereafter. Why? Because if you need leverage, that's one hell of a big wrench. In one fell swoop, you can threaten the Kerch strait much more credibly, you open a second angle of attack on crimea, you open up the troops in Kherson to encirclement, and you completely jam the supply situation in the southern front. Take Kherson and you've taken Kherson. Take Melitopol and you've taken Kherson and Melitopol and you threaten Mariupol and Sevastopol.

This concludes tonight's meeting of the General Staff of the Armchair.