Notes

Ukraine-Russia war latest: Hungary signals 'major shift' in Ukraine funding stance; Russia claims it has taken control of Kharkiv village
They are problematic for Putin because if taken seriously they would demand far more of Russia than Ukraine (as Zelensky was quick to notice). This is because they have stuck with the UN Charter which precludes the sort of territorial annexations expected by Putin. The most recent reports suggests that a deal is getting closer in the Senate but it will not be finalised until later in January, assuming that there are not further delays. Even with these new packages some of the shortages – particularly in artillery shells – will continue. This is already starting to be felt in front-line operations so that commanders are having to ration allocations, making awkward priorities about operational needs. As a guide to what was to come this was, I’m afraid to say, pretty poor, not least because of the starting assumption that Ukrainian commanders would be aware that frontal assaults normally end badly and so would avoid.

The election is so obviously rigged that it is hard for outsider observers to take it seriously as a landmark date. Army’s maneuver warfare school at Fort Benning, Georgia, said Western upgrades offer Ukraine the chance to dominate the close fight with Russian adversaries and conclude the tactical fighting to its advantage. The Pentagon declined to say whether the GLSDB will be used to attack Russian targets in Crimea. Here again, the United States has failed to form effective grand strategies for achieving successful outcomes for its recent wars. This does not mean that anyone can dismiss the possibility that Ukraine can score serious gains on the battlefield this winter or spring. It might well revive reliance on active theater nuclear forces at the same time.
"But even if Putin dies, I think there's only a miniscule chance that Russia would back off from the war, because it has already invested so much of its national image in winning." There was, for example, a thread of continuity between the first and second world wars. To be sure, a lot happened in the intervening years that could have changed the direction of what followed. But, said Macmillan, “the first world war laid the groundwork that made the second possible”. The danger lay in a humiliating peace treaty imposed on defeated Germany.

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Chancellor Olaf Scholz also recently authorized supplying infantry fighting vehicles to help push Russian forces out of occupied Ukraine. I recently spoke to a number of war-termination theorists, including Goemans, to see what the theoretical perspective could tell us about the war in Ukraine. The theorists turned out to be an engaged and lively group, most of them glued to Twitter and Telegram, in multiple languages, as they tried to follow the war in real time.


This includes overwhelming domestic support for joining NATO and the European Union, despite both blocs expressing hesitation to Ukraine's membership for decades preceding the war. In his TV address, Mr Zelensky said the conflict "will be bloody, there will be fighting, but it will only definitively end through diplomacy". Writing on the messaging app Telegram, he said Ukrainian troops had repelled 11 attacks on the frontline - with eight tanks among the Russian vehicles destroyed.

Long war
Ukrainian forces, once equipped and trained for combined arms warfare and tank tactics, will be “designed to punch a hole through a defensive network,” Donahoe predicted. Army’s maneuver warfare school at Fort Benning, Georgia, said Western upgrades offer Ukraine the chance to dominate the close fight with Russian adversaries and conclude the tactical fighting to its advantage. In Jensen’s view, even the collapse of Russia’s conventional force or a traditional Ukrainian victory may not mean the war is over; either could lead to nuclear escalation by Russia.

The current outlook for a negotiated deal would likely involve Ukraine ceding some territory to Russia, analysts say. "We want peace around the world," 70-year-old Kyiv resident Nina Albul recently told my colleague Hanna Palamarenko, "but we also want the world to know that it's okay for enslaved people to fight back." Both sides seem resigned to a long conflict, with the high numbers of casualties, equipment losses and economic damage since it started on February 24, 2022 set to escalate.
As things stand, Putin, despite crushing setbacks on the battlefield, appears to be prepared for a long fight and believes Russia will win. Russia’s allies like China – which has been a lukewarm friend to Putin in his war against Ukraine – have also been unable, or unwilling, to force him to the negotiating table. While the West could warn Kyiv that it would stop supplies of weapons or financial support if Ukraine were to insist on defying the US or Europe, “this kind of threat is not credible”, Slantchev told Al Jazeera.

Production cuts on the cards at WA's biggest lithium mine as critical minerals slump continues
The effectiveness of the drone and missile attacks on Ukraine can be judged. He will have been able to see whether or not the EU and the US have sorted out their funding packages. So while in principle looking at a map creates new options for the next stage of the Russian offensive in practice losses of this sort reduces the ability of Russian forces to build on any gains. Ukraine’s Commander in Chief General Valery Zaluzhnyi has stressed the importance of inflicting heavy casualties on Russia, “until the enemy gives up fighting against our country,” while acknowledging that its hard to know in the Russian case when this point would be reached. In https://telegra.ph/Opinion-Here-Are-3-Ways-to-End-the-War-in-Ukraine-One-Might-Actually-Work-02-10 by Sergei Karaganov, an established ultra-nationalist analyst, which I discussed in October, most interest was in his urging Putin to take more nuclear risks (advice rejected by Putin).


The New York Times Audio app includes podcasts, narrated articles from the newsroom and other publishers, as well as exclusive new shows — including this one — which we’re making available to readers for a limited time. "They understand the wider strategic point, which is that this is a confrontation between the West and Russia and at stake is not just the future territorial integrity of Ukraine but the security construct for Europe and the West with Russia," he noted. Russia was not present at the discussions, however, and U.S. national security spokesperson John Kirby stated ahead of the talks that the White House did not expect any "tangible deliverables."

While defense spending in the United States and Europe is trending upward, in large part because of Russia’s attack, industrial capacity to crank out weapons and ammunition has emerged as a bottleneck. We now know the Russian leader is willing to break long-standing international norms. Ukrainians troops have also broken through Russian defenses on the Dnipro River. Tying Ukrainian NATO membership to such conditions would give Putin another incentive never to meet them.
One year after full-scale war returned to Europe for the first time since World War II, the invasion of Ukraine grinds on with no end in sight. Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s). The United States has already done much in working with its partners to support Ukraine and check Putin.

Throughout the war, Ukraine has had to petition the West for weapons and support to stave off losing their country to the invading Russian forces. "But I think Joe Biden will manage this relatively well. The current struggle in Congress over foreign aid, I think, will be settled but perhaps not super soon. This is more about domestic politics and electoral pressures." Indeed, Putin was quite explicit about this in his press conference of 14 December. Our European allies, including some that still maintain ties to Russia, will judge their own security, U.S. leadership, and value of the United States as a strategic partner, to at least some extent by how well America works with them to secure Ukraine and help it recover.
But others have responded by "prepping for war" - stocking food and fuel. There is a sense in the upper echelons of the British military that many politicians and most of the public have not grasped the threat they see. It is the duty of the military to analyse that threat, and they still might be proved wrong. But European nations closer to Russian borders appear to be taking it more seriously. Mark Temnycky, a Ukrainian-American journalist and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center said that delays in 2023 allowed Russia to fortify positions in the south and east of Ukraine, regroup and re-strategize.

As for Ukraine's offensive, Mr Podolyak said the Wagner mutiny did not last long enough to influence the fighting along a front of 1,800 kilometres, the longest - he said - in any war since 1945. Russia is keeping those fighter jets grounded for now and is attacking with cruise and ballistic missiles, as well as drones. After Russia first invaded in 2014, the U.S. military stepped up training for the Ukrainian military in western Ukraine. U.S. trainers continued working in Ukraine right up until the full-scale Russian invasion a year ago. The bill, which will funnel support to Ukraine for about the next five months, includes some $6bn budgeted for armoured vehicles and air defences. With no end in sight to the fighting, the US is sending more military, economic and humanitarian aid.

Maybe it takes longer for Russian forces to secure cities like Kyiv whose defenders fight from street to street. Putin seems to have assumed that Ukraine had only made limited progress in improving its forces since 2014, and that Russia could repeat its success in occupying Crimea. No grand strategy for the Ukraine war can have meaning unless Ukraine can win its near-term battles at the military level, and this is only part of the story. Its attacks to date on Ukraine’s civil facilities have had a serious impact but have not yet had the character of systematic efforts to cripple key civil systems and functions and do so on a nationwide level. "Russia's current strategy does appear to be one that will avoid nuclear escalation, which likely reflects pressure from China not to use tactical nuclear weapons."
Although Putin attempted to build up a financial bulwark that would allow him to protect the interests of the oligarchs, the sanctions imposed by the west have undercut most of his efforts. Other strategic partners in Asia, the MENA region, and the rest of the world will see Ukraine as a test of U.S. capability beyond military terms. They will see the war as a test of U.S. capability to compete at a diplomatic and economic level. At least some will also see the war as a test of just how much the United States is focusing on China to the point where its commitments outside Taiwan and dealing with China have far less importance. This strategy also allows the United States to fully examine peace options, work with its allies to meet their concerns, and wait to push options forward when the time is right. It is also clear that even compromised real peace will be better for all sides than a bad war.

The most common cause of the breakdown, according to war theorists (and again borrowing from economics), was some form of informational asymmetry. Simply put, one or both sides overestimated their own strength relative to their opponent’s. There were many reasons for this sort of informational asymmetry, not least of which was that the war-fighting capacity of individual nations was almost always a closely guarded secret. In any case, the best way to find out who was stronger was to actually start fighting. Many wars ended in just this way, with the sides reëvaluating their relative strengths and opting to make a deal.

My Website: https://telegra.ph/Opinion-Here-Are-3-Ways-to-End-the-War-in-Ukraine-One-Might-Actually-Work-02-10