How's the War in Ukraine Going?

Meanwhile, back in Ukraine…. 

You have not been hearing too much about the war in Ukraine lately. The heroic Ukrainians, having received the moral support of Western elites, are currently losing their war.

Sanctions notwithstanding, Russia seems clearly to be winning. Those who imagined that another outcome was possible have now been exposed for blowing smoke.

Admittedly, Russia is an enemy and Ukraine is a friend. So, Western governments and elites have been cheerleading the Ukrainians. We are willing to fight Russia, to the last Ukrainian.

Those who propose a negotiated settlement have been widely attacked. That includes Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky, Emmanuel Macron and even Donald Trump. Your humble blogger has never believed that the Ukrainians had a prayer against Russia, and that the result of the tough Ukrainian talk would be that the Russian military would destroy large parts of that country. 

Surely, the Biden administration imagined that the war would be a political benefit. They could fight the good fight for worldwide democracy and could bloody an autocratic authoritarian regime. The Biden people also decided to impose severe sanctions on Russia. Along with the sanctions it chose, as we have reported, to weaponize the American dollar. And then it has proposed, through its flunkies, that we confiscate Russian government funds and the property of Russian oligarchs.

That this is a very dangerous game, financially speaking, does not seem to have crossed too many minds. It seems now to be a pure folly.

We recall certain serious commentators thrilling to the fact that the Biden administration, run by a ship of fools, had rallied the world to the Ukrainian cause, and of course to democracy. In truth, and as honest reporting exposed, most of the world was not with us. From China to India to Indonesia to Brazil to the Middle East, the world’s nations were either refusing to back the Biden policy or were remaining neutral.

Generally speaking, David Goldman has been more right than others, even though his pessimistic appraisal of the Ukrainian chances was met with gales of derision.

So, he is taking something of a victory lap, especially against the propaganda that has been telling us that Ukraine can win a war against Russia. For the record the propagandists come from the right and the left.

Goldman wrote:

The lid blew off the Ukraine echo chamber this week as Russian artillery pulverized Ukrainian forces in Donbas. Ukraine has lost 10,000 dead, 40,000 to 50,000 wounded, and 8,000 captured. It is running out of Soviet-era ammunition for its limited artillery.

A month ago the whole American body politic, from progressive left to neo-conservatives, drank the victory Kool-Aid. Remember when Russia’s incompetent, corrupt army was about to be swept from the field? As is their wont, the Russians blundered around and took losses for a few weeks before figuring out how to wage an old-fashioned, World War II-style artillery campaign. “It’s been so long since anyone fought a conventional war that they had to remember how to do it,” said a European military observer.

You can tell how badly it’s going by listening to the Biden administration. It has, as of a few days ago, been starting to blame the Ukrainians, and especially Zelensky. And it is not alone:

Now Biden (who tweeted April 4 that he had “reduced the ruble to rubble” and shrunk the Russian economy by half) is blaming Zelensky. NATO Secretary Stoltenberg admits that Ukraine will have to give up territory for peace, echoing Henry Kissinger’s comments in Davos. The CIA is telling the New York Times that we had better consider the possibility that Russia might win to avoid another “intelligence failure” (have we had anything else in the past half-century?). That’s a crock, of course; the U.S. has satellites that can tell what Ukrainian soldiers have for lunch as well as large numbers of military advisers on the ground.

So, Zelensky is crying out for more weapons. After all, he chose not to surrender Western Ukrainian cities, only to see them reduced to rubble. As for the new weapons, the Deus ex machina that will save democracy in Ukraine, Goldman suggests that it is not realistic:

We hear obligatory calls for more heavy weapons for Ukraine, but the Russians now can interdict, destroy, or capture most of what we try to send in. Switchblades and Stingers and Javelins are clever weapons but they don’t compensate for a Russian artillery advantage of between 15:1 and 40:1.

At the onset of the conflict, Russia seemed to be bumbling and fumbling. Commentators looked at what was happening and decided that democracy would inevitably win out over autocracy. Besides, we had the dollar and economic might on our side.

Russia’s initial muddle prompted a few weeks of intoxicated triumphalism.

That’s turned into a collective hangover and an orgy of ass-covering. The supposed renaissance of Western unity dissolves into bickering and recrimination. Putin sells oil to China and India at a $30 per barrel discount, while Americans pay more than $5 for gas at the pump.

Goldman offers a harsh conclusion:

We got our heads handed to us, boys and girls. All of our influencers and opinion-makers and politicians, and all our high-tech weapons can’t dislodge a second-rate power like Russia. We turned NATO into a social-welfare organization with nothing larger than a battalion to oppose Russia. The French Army has about a week’s worth of ammunition. The Germans barely have 100 operational tanks. And we have nothing to deploy.

For your edification, I am adding some notes from a New York Times news report, written by Eric Schmidt and Thomas Gibbons-Neff. It corresponds well to Goldman’s point of view, and I consider it trustworthy:

The last bridge to the last city standing between the Russian army and control of easternmost Ukraine has collapsed, as soldiers engaged in pitched street battles for what little is left of the city and scores of civilians remained stranded under unrelenting bombardment.

Almost four months after the forces of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, attacked, Ukraine has been largely reduced to harrying the better-equipped invader, making each patch of ground as bloody for it to win as possible, but failing in recent weeks to secure any decisive victories, and losing many of its own soldiers and citizens in the process.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, insists that his country may yet prevail if it is given more powerful weaponry, but as Western military leaders prepared to meet in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday, some officials sounded dubious, with talk again turning to what an end to the war might look like — and how to bring it about.

How is the Russian assault going? Better than expected, we see:

The fall of Sievierodonetsk would put Mr. Putin an important step closer to seizing Ukraine’s industrial heartland, the eastern Donbas region, where he has directed Russia’s assault after failing early in the war to take the largest Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv.

In one Donbas province, Luhansk, Russian troops and their separatist allies now hold all but a small pocket containing Sievierodonetsk and, across the Siversky Donets River, the city of Lysychansk. And they control more than half of a neighboring province, Donetsk.

Western officials are less than optimistic:

Some Western officials say Mr. Zelensky may not have a viable strategy to win the war. The Ukrainians have had some success fighting at relatively close ranges, and the Russians have countered by relying on their immense advantage in longer-range artillery and missiles, pounding cities and towns to rubble before sending in troops.

But a war of attrition — Ukraine has been losing as many as 200 soldiers a day in the fighting — favors Russia for the simple reason that it has more soldiers to lose. And, Mr. Zelensky has said, Mr. Putin has shown he is willing to treat his own troops as “cannon fodder.”

And, the Times reports, the initial alliance cobbled together by our demented president has been breaking apart. 

The profession of support notwithstanding, the remarkable initial unity in response to Russia’s invasion seems to be fraying among the Western allies who have shipped weapons to Ukraine and imposed a broad array of financial sanctions on Russia.

But France, Italy and Germany, among the continent’s biggest and richest countries, are anxious about the prospect of a prolonged, stalemated war that raises the risk of drawing NATO into the fighting and would further damage their economies as they grapple with rising inflation and fuel prices.

That’s the news for today, from the front. If you were wondering why you have not been hearing very much about Ukraine recently, now you know.