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Weekly megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - November 2
This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.
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Grim assessment from Ukraine commander
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/world/europe/ukraine-zaluzhny-war.html
Hard to know if the numbers are true, but this was also a kinda interesting point made
Such numbers are difficult to imagine. That number also doesn't include the physically injured and mentally traumatised, who must be manyfold more. I do suspect that denuclearisation was a strategic mistake by the Ukrainian Government. I cannot see Russia, at least in its current form under Putin and cronies, ceding back any of its recent gains. Russia is already a pariah to certain countries, it has been steadily moving that way since 2014-ish, and is clearly quite happy existing in that space. The world is much more multi-polar than it used to be.
The fact that the West and its allies failed to push back hard on Russia for so long has sent a signal that has undoubtedly been received and understood around the world. Taiwan is a juicier treasure than Ukraine ever was, but the Taiwanese Government must be questioning their own future in the light of Ukraine's fate.
A conversation needs to be seriously had about the prospect of negotiations and how to prepare for them to maximize Ukraine's position. Is there reason to believe that Ukraine's negotiating position won't get worse with time? Putting aside the question of if the West is prepared to continue paying for the war, I'm highly doubtful that Russia won't close the technological gap in the long term. My understanding is that the general trend of warfare over the last 150 years is that wars are won increasingly over materiel and logistical advantage not strategy.
Yes. Russia has been slowly running out of modern arms and materiel, since they're struggling to produce more due to the sanctions. So they've been gradually relying on older and older stock as time goes on, and making up for that by using more manpower and relying on ever growing entrenchments. Whereas Ukraine has been gradually getting more modern stock and the training necessary to use it all. E.g. They should be receiving the F16s from the Netherlands and US some time in the next few weeks, and a bunch more NASAMS air defense systems arrived a few days ago. So if you want to be coldly calculating about this and ignore the human cost, the longer this war goes on the better Ukraine's position is likely to get come negotiation time.
If the collective West hadn't waffled for so long about sending Ukraine modern equipment, this whole thing might have ended before Russia could get entrenched, but that also might have pushed Russia into taking more drastic measures... so it is what it is. It's not a pleasant situation to be in for the Ukranians though, especially since I think a lot of Western politicians are happy to continue using them to slowly bleed Russia dry of manpower and materiel.
My sense then is that there will be a window of opportunity in the medium term where Russian materiel will be sufficiently degraded to initiate negotiations. In the long-long term Russia will always be able to recover and that reality must be acknowledged (short of internal collapse or regime change, which is dangerous wishful thinking). I'm also convinced that NATO revoking its statement promising Ukraine and Georgia eventual membership would genuinely go a long way in reducing Russian aggression in the region. (NATO requires unanimous consent to accept new members, so the notion that the body can ever make an official statement like that is truly non-sensical and seriously undermines the legal structure of the organization--especially considering that both France and Germany were vocally opposed. The US can still hold that Ukraine has a right to its own strategic alliances, but the NATO statement absolutely needs to be corrected.)
I personally don't believe there is any indication that Russia will be able to recover anytime soon, at least not within the next few decades. But I'm no expert, and so what you suggest is certainly a possibility that I don't entirely discount.
I wholeheartedly disagree about backpeddling on the NATO promises though. And IMO thinking that appeasement with Putin and Russia in that regard will work to anyone's favor is incredibly naive. Revoking those promises will merely embolden them, potentially embolden China and Iran, and completely undermine other nation's faith in NATO, and trust in the NATO/US leadership. And by taking that offer off the table, it will also greatly weaken Ukraine's negotiating position as well, if/when the time finally does comes for that (which should be for Ukraine to decide, and not anyone else).
Russian capabilities have consistently been underestimated in this war after the initial surprise of Ukraine not completely capitulating, and Russia's per-capita combat deaths are still lower than Ukraine's.
NATO cannot make promises that all its members don't agree with at the time of the promise. On objective grounds, it seriously brings into question whether NATO is truly a multilateral organization or an American proxy. It's an issue of basic housekeeping that NATO correct its statement to preserve the integrity of its legal structure. It would not weaken NATO, it would strengthen its legitimacy. America, though, can choose to unilaterally to say that it will do whatever it legally can to secure NATO membership for Ukraine if it chooses to pursue membership.
US sanctions UAE, Turkish, and Chinese entities aiding Russian 'war machine' (Le Monde)
Ukraine Confirms Destruction of Major Russian Warship (Kyiv Post)
Does a Corvette classify as a "major Russian warship"?
Fwiw, the Wikipedia article on Corvette starts out as
(Obviously not putting any blame with that on you for just forwarding the source, just for the record).
My hunch was that the Russian navy has a tendency to understate the size of their ships in classifications, kind of like the German navy, which has frigates the size of a big destroyer/small cruiser. Doesn't seem to be the case here, this class is pretty middle-of-the-road for a corvette in international comparison. Swedes have much smaller corvettes, Germans have ones twice as big for example.
So no, a corvette doesn't strike me as a major warship. You'd of course want to distinguish it from patrol boats and the likes, but that's kinda already done by the term "warship". "Major warship" to me implies a class or two bigger. 2000t or thereabouts, maybe 4000. Not 900. But hey, I don't make the rules. In fact, no one does.
Perhaps they consider it to be major in terms of its significance to the Black Sea Fleet, and the fact that it is essentially brand new, and will probably difficult for Russia to replace.
Yeah, I think that's it. And it's also worth remembering that Turkey has been preventing Russian naval access to the Black Sea from the Mediterranean since the war began. So any losses to Russia's current Black Sea fleet (which isn't very big), even a Corvette, is a major win for Ukraine, since they cannot be replenished. And these successful strikes are also forcing Russia to keep moving their fleet berths, which disrupts and delays their ability to support their land troops.
The Unique Hind-G1 Helicopter Scouted For Nuclear Fallout Over Chernobyl. 37 Years Later, It Has Joined The Ukrainian War Effort. (Forbes)