Russia-Ukraine War Update. By Jim Dunnigan.
Russian GDP will shrink at least 15 percent in 2022. It’s worse in Ukraine, where deliberate Russian missile and artillery attacks on economic targets are causing long-term economic damage. In Russian occupied Ukraine there is no effort to repair economic damage and useful economic assets are shipped back to Russia. Russia is following the ancient strategy of “creating a desert and calling it peace”.
Russia is also trying to mobilize its economy for wartime production despite senior government economic officials pointing out that Western sanctions emphasize crippling weapons production. Russian supreme leader Putin insists Russia will find a solution, as it did during World War II. This assessment ignores how Russia lost the Cold War and its empire literally fell apart because of economic mismanagement. The last war Russia won was World War II or the “Great Patriotic War”. That victory was made possible by massive economic aid from the United States and a few other countries not occupied by the Germans. …
The occupation was supposed to emphasize winning over the locals without resorting to mass murder and similar atrocious behavior that Russians endured under Nazi occupation. The main occupation zone is north of Crimea and centered around the city of Kherson, which is the capital of Kherson province. Kherson City was captured during the first week of the invasion and Russia has held onto most of the province ever since. The city is a major port because it is located near the mouth of the Dnieper River and the Black Sea. …
Ukraine has been trying to recapture Kherson City and province ever since March, and is making progress, aided by a growing partisan movement inside Kherson province and passive resistance to Russian occupation by most Ukrainians there. … The Russians now believe that many of their Ukrainian administrators were working with the resistance from the beginning. …
The Russians sought to Russify the province as quickly as possible. That meant replacing the Ukrainian cell phone service with a Russian one. Ukrainian TV and radio transmissions are blocked. Russian ID documents became mandatory and use of any currency but the Russian ruble was forbidden. Russia controlled utilities (especially water and electricity) and every effort was made to link Kherson to the Russian economy.
The initial reason for pacifying the population was to make life safe for Russian troops in Kherson. That was never fully achieved and now Russian troops have to worry about roadside bombs or anti-vehicle mines as well as sniper fire and assassination via pistol or a bomb planted in a vehicle. …
The Russian goal in the newly occupied territories was to hold elections that could be depicted as honest and show a majority of Kherson residents supporting annexation by Russia. The Ukrainians are not cooperating and doing so in clever ways that Russian Information War specialists could recognize but struggle to counteract. …
Russian wreckers:
In 2014 Donbas comprised about nine percent of Ukrainian territory, 13 percent of the population and 15 percent of the GDP, and was about 38 percent ethnic Russian. The two provinces comprise the Donets Basin (or “Donbas”) which was originally an economic powerhouse for Soviet Russia. …
Between 2014 and 2016 over two million people fled rebel-controlled parts of the Donbas, most heading for Ukraine and only about three million remain in rebel-controlled areas by 2022. About half of those people are ethnic Russian pensioners who lose their pensions if they leave. …
Russian sponsored violence in Donbas has reduced economic activity to less than a third of what it was in 2013. Many businesses moved to Russia … Russian-occupied Donbas was and is sustained by money and supplies trucked in from Russia. This was costing Russia several billion dollars a year.
Where Russian occupation forces controlled the Ukraine/Russia border, the border ceased to exist. The Russians controlled only about half of Donbas from 2014 to 2022 and that area gradually became part of Russia. … Until the 2022 Russian invasion, the Russians offered peace in Donbas if Ukraine recognized the loss of the Russian-occupied Donbas, which would then be free to become part of Russia. …
Zelensky judged the new reality of Russian power better:
Since taking power in 2019 Zelensky quickly replaced notoriously corrupt or incompetent government and military officials. Zelensky tried to get negotiations going between himself and Russian leader Putin. The Russians did not want that, and their response was an “invasion threat” that became real in February 2022. Zelensky didn’t flinch because he could do the math. Ukraine could win if it obtained enough military support from nations also threatened by Russia, especially new NATO members who had joined since the 1990s and shared Zelensky’s assessment of Russian goals and the relatively poor state of the Russian economy and military forces. …
Russia justified its 2022 invasion by claiming NATO was conspiring to attack Russia and that part of that conspiracy was NATO installing anti-Russian politicians in Ukraine so that Ukraine would become an involuntary NATO member. This was quickly revealed to be a lie as the invading Russian troops were being defeated by better armed and motivated Ukrainians who wanted nothing to do with Russia. That reality slowly got back to Russia despite Russian efforts to deny it and describe such information as another clever NATO lie. …
After Russia announced a pause in offensive military operations in early July, one of these mil-blogers, a former general who had served in occupied Donbas before the invasion, … insisted that Russia had suffered higher losses in Luhansk than the Ukrainians, who were conducting a classic attrition defense. The Russians had suffered far more losses in men and equipment than the Ukrainians, who were not driven out of Luhansk but withdrew deliberately to encourage Russia to keep attacking and losing troops and combat vehicles that could not be replaced. …
All this was nothing new. When the most modern and effective Russian forces were assembled to invade Ukraine in 2022, they quickly discovered they were not facing an inept, poorly trained and armed foe but one that was far more effective. The main offensive in the north against the Ukrainian capital took heavy losses and within weeks was forced to retreat. Russian troops were told by their government that they had encountered NATO troops who were in Ukraine preparing to invade Russia. The surviving Russian troops knew better because all they encountered were Ukrainians, usually armed with weapons similar to what Russia used as well as more effective ones they had received from NATO. The Ukrainians used more effective tactics and some new weapons that were based on Western models but Ukrainian-made. The Russian state-controlled media was ordered to ignore reports like this and stick with the official story that this was all a secret NATO operation to attack Russia via Ukraine.
While this information war played on, the Russian military ordered everything Russia had, short of nuclear weapons, into use in an effort to salvage the situation. Russia was at war with a near-peer opponent and losing. …
You think censorship is bad in the West?
In Moscow Alexei Gorinov, a Russian lawyer, who is also an elected member of the Moscow City Council, was convicted of calling the Russian war in Ukraine a war and sentenced to seven years in prison for that. Calling this war, a war was outlawed soon after the war began and Gorinov criticized that law as well as the continued fighting in Ukraine, which he kept calling a war. During his trial Gorinov was, as is customary, in a glass box to restrict unauthorized outbursts. Gorinov had brought with him a folded-up sign saying “Do you still need this war” and displayed it to the dozens of people attending the trial. The sign was greeted by applause from the people in the courtroom. The judge ordered the sign seized and the courtroom cleared.
Probably about right, though both sides are skilled propagandists so you can never be too sure.
Russia cannot mobilize, because everyone knows this isn’t an emergency for Russia, and the population will not tolerate mass conscription. But if it doesn’t step up its war effort dramatically in the next six months, Russia will lose.
Russia could crush Ukraine, but there is not sufficient political will among the Russian people.
