It's perhaps wise to ignore that depressing NY Times article - "stay calm and carry on" - but I can't easily let go of the shocking superficiality. The New York Times doesn't have a single editorial writer, or even guest writer in my memory, who disagreed with Biden's half-hearted effort to arm Ukraine. Still, it was quite something to see the entire editorial board sign on to the "Ukraine was always doomed" narrative: "Once Western European nations and the United States decided not to send their citizens to fight for Ukraine — an understandable choice — Russia was guaranteed to make gains against its much smaller neighbor."
When I first read the line "the West could commit to military and economic support if Russia attacks again" I thought it must be an awkward use of language. They can't really be thinking that the West can delay a military buildup in Ukraine (as part of a credible peace plan) until Russia launches the next invasion. But they are serious! They reenforce that statement when they next say economic development can come "more immediately."
This editorial looks like it was written by generally smart people who aren't paying attention to the details of the war in Ukraine or the Trump team's negotiating gambit. I am sometimes critical of the unwillingness of the Brits to face certain hard realities, but I have never seen anything so shallow and stupid from Brit/Euro press or experts.
What hard realities are my compatriots not facing? That our entire armed forces are sufficient in number to man about 3% of the front line in Ukraine right now? That our tanks are too heavy and unreliable to be used there? That our aircraft's stealth capabilities are effectively useless? That we've already given (and had destroyed) virtually all of our artillery infrastructure to Ukraine? That the Russians have clocked the signatures of our Storm Shadows and we've got very few of them left now? That we don't have anywhere near enough engineers, plant or materials to make the weapons we'd need to fight this kind of war and that the designs, training regimes and doctrines we employ right now aren't suited to it anyway? That we're already stretched defending a bunch of genocidal fanatics in West Asia? That we are pretty casualty averse and public support will crumble when 'our boys' start coming back under flags? There's a lot of hard realities the British need to face - but we never will because we've a massively unrealistic view of our capacity and abilities.
All 'we' can do is 'our' best to get the US into this war - that's all we're 'good' for nowadays.
Sounds like you have fallen into a deep pit of helplessness. If I were in your spot I would be pressing to reintegrate into the EU. Demand that your leaders release all of the RU frozen assets to hypercharge the arms industry in Ukraine. Accelerate your own path to 3% defense spending. Above all, accept that the U.S. leadership is content to have its RU frenemy dominate a divided and weak Europe.
There is another option at this fork in the road that aligns comfortably with your resignation and fatalism: Petition Donald Trump to accept UK as the 51st American State.
Re integrate into an anti-democratic irreformable neoliberal corporate kleptocratic mess? No thanks. Itr's because of the EU that our industrial base is so hollow and our training so pisspoor. We don't need a hypercharged arms industry, we need a competent one, and that's not possible when ours is run by the likes of Raytheon, General Dynamics Boeing, BAe, Lockheed Martin et al, none of whom have produced a decent system for a decade and probably two.
I remember the 1970s and early 80s when college students formed a spiritual alliance with China out of anger at the “neoliberals” of the time (they used different slurs, but same deal.) I remember the chic Mao caps and shirts.
Mao's cultural revolution in the 60s was of a piece with Putin's brutal genocide in Ukraine.
You've formed a tactical alliance with an evil movement to poke a stick in the eye of your ideological enemies. I doubt there is a government on the face of the earth that is pure enough for you to embrace. Cuba?
I don't have a problem with your opinions or ideology. I respected the Mao-capped socialist too, they had a point. It's the nihilism that offends.
Even if that were true - just who is it that YOU are allying with now? You're demanding weapons from the US and the tooling up of the UK & Germans, the three primary providers of weapons and ISR support to an ongoing genocide. Your tactical alliance is slaughtering women and kids in their tens of thousands.
And even if they were actually nice, rather than atrocious murderers, that wouldn't make their financialised and captured service-oriented economies any more able to be transformed into something that could support a war effort against the Russians who have been preparing for this from at least 2008. It wouldn't supply them with the cheap energy they're used to either.
The NY Times has consistently had dangerously poor reporting on Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
Sadly, I believe that they have already decided that Putin will prevail, so the Ukrainians should just take some rotten deal and be grateful. We know that Trump is a Putin puppet, so there is no reason to expect anything of value from him. And, in the meantime, Trump plans to make the US the next East Germany, with a Palantir database with information on every American. Putin knew East Germany. So here we are. Our democracy, and the democracy of Ukraine, are being sold very cheaply.
It is shocking to see how much the Overton Window has shifted on that bad deal for Ukraine. Early in the war, even RU-friendly Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin (who criticized NATO expansion) was saying NATO membership was necessary to secure a peace. JD Vance of all people said that Ukraine must be "armed to the teeth" as part of a deal.
Today the NY Times says military guarantees are not needed after all. Pinky promises of future support will do.
The NYT has consistently had dangerously poor reporting of Russian genocide of Ukrainians. Have you heard of Walter Duranty? He actually received a Pulitzer for his Holodomor denial in NYT as it was happening (and he was privately talking about it with Western diplomats).
Trump's regime is sending billions of dollars worth of munitions to the israelis to continue a genocide amply enabled by his disgusting predecessors and he's trampling all over the Constitution to restrict the rights of anyone even vaguely supportive of the Palestinians and he's a puppet of who?
Big news just breaking in the last hour. Ukraine has damaged over 40 Russian bombers at four different Russian airfields. The drones were launched from inside Russia!
So Trump is protecting Putin, the Ukrainians can’t protect their cities, because the patriots are running out. So Trump is hoping to force Ukraine into a very bad ceasefire arrangement, by allowing the Russians to terrorise Ukrainian civilians.
That may be the idea, but I think WW II shows that indiscriminate, civilian bombing does not work. The Blitz only strengthened British resolve. Bomber Harris’ campaign against German cities was not decisive and only galvanized German resistance. Ukraine is showing this yet again. It seems to have strengthened their resolve and determination to resist.
It's not even at sufficient scale to terrorize the population. Killing a dozen people once in a few days with a handful of missiles is not the same as the bombing of Hamburg or even London. Not even close.
The press will never learn because their paycheck depends on them not learning. We must sanewash the orange narcissist to keep selling papers and not get in his crosshairs. Press has no backbone or principles. If anything, somebody needs to point out TACO is how orange Cesar interacts with Putin.
As for the “offensive” let Russia destroy more material and waste more men in gaining a few millimeters here and there. It is all performative for the western press to clutch their pearls and fear the “big bad Russian juggernaut”…on motorcycles.
Big question is how and when does Ukraine strike back once this “offensive” culminates?
Dispersing forces in not mutually supporting offensives is a long Russian tradition. Zhukov famously did that in November 1942 when he launched simultaneous offensives at Stalingrad (which actually made sense both geographically and in terms of weaker forces from Italy and Romania being prime targets) and 1000 km away at Rzhev, which did not really make much strategic sense. The latter was a costly failure, the former almost failed due to insufficient reserves and perhaps would have failed had the Germans not transferred a lot of aircraft in the area to the Med in response to Operation Torch.
Yes, it was an important breakthrough, although German materiel losses were light (on the order of 1% of their entire WWII production). The Germans withdrew from the oil regions of North Caucasus and lost any chance of ever getting to the even more important oil region on the other side of the Caucasus. And it became dramatically easier for the USSR to bring oil from Baku to the rest of the country (before Uranus the Soviets did not have a land connection to Baku and the boats from Baku could not go up the Volga either). Soviet/Russian propaganda dramatically exaggerated the importance of Stalingrad, but that does not mean it was a complete nothinburger.
It's mind boggling that Zhukov did not allocate EVERYTHING to Uranus. Not only so much was at stake, but there was potential for breakthrough and exploitation in a number of directions. There were huge areas with very few German troops. And the Germans indeed ended up abandoning many of them.
Sad little consolation, but I cancelled my New York Times subscription because of their bullshit coverage of Ukraine, and of Trump. I'm not throwing away good money to pay for chickenshit propaganda. I'd rather support the Phillip Obriens, Paul Krugmans, and Jen Rubins of the world in venues like this.
The timing of the airbase attacks is so based (pun). I mean, Ukraine also just announced they will participate in Istanbul talks tomorrow, and bring their own list of pre-ceasefire demands.
The fact that they could pull of this operation says a whole lot of SBU opsec.
For the umphteenth time: Ukraine does not have to agree with any "ceasefire" or "Peace" agreement that conflicts with her basic interests and stated positions. Furthermore, by now it should be obvious to even the most obtuse European leader that Trump's bloviating should no longer be taken seriously...he has nothing of importance (that one can depend on) to offer. He is a Putin shill. Additionally, the American MSM lost its credibility back in 2016...especially the NYTimes. They are owned...mostly...by Republicans and billionaires. The "Free Press", in the US, is fast becoming an illusion and the idea of the "Fourth Estate" envisioned by the Founding Fathers (should they really be "capitalized" anymore?), whose role was to act as a "check" to government overreach and a means of educating the general public has fallen woefully short for some time now. Finally, despite the bleatings of the pro Putin factions in government and media outlets, Ukraine is holding the line on the battle front, is far stronger today than at any time in the past (while Russia is stretched to the limits, both economically and militarily) and...dare I say it...can win this war without further US assistance (or interferrence by a Putin admirer in the White House...or should we start calling it the Red House these days?).
well written and sadly it appears that Putin continues to control the narrative. Why does it appear that Trump is willing to give in to Putin's demands and is not willing to take aggressive action to "punish" Putin as he appears to flip-flop while days later. Is there a "pot of gold" in Trumps future business dealings? And yes, I said it...
Where does Trump get his 5,000 figure of people being killed weekly? As high as the Russian casualties are, they are not even half that number. Does Putin tell Trump that a few thousand Ukrainians get killed each week?!
We're seeing the modern equivalent of the ribbentrop/molotov pact, perhaps Europe remembers that little betrayal. That the least-patriotic US president won't even SELL the Patriot missiles to Ukraine should end the pearl-clutching -- where are the Asters, the NASAMs, the IRIS-Ts, the CAMMs?
It's perhaps wise to ignore that depressing NY Times article - "stay calm and carry on" - but I can't easily let go of the shocking superficiality. The New York Times doesn't have a single editorial writer, or even guest writer in my memory, who disagreed with Biden's half-hearted effort to arm Ukraine. Still, it was quite something to see the entire editorial board sign on to the "Ukraine was always doomed" narrative: "Once Western European nations and the United States decided not to send their citizens to fight for Ukraine — an understandable choice — Russia was guaranteed to make gains against its much smaller neighbor."
When I first read the line "the West could commit to military and economic support if Russia attacks again" I thought it must be an awkward use of language. They can't really be thinking that the West can delay a military buildup in Ukraine (as part of a credible peace plan) until Russia launches the next invasion. But they are serious! They reenforce that statement when they next say economic development can come "more immediately."
This editorial looks like it was written by generally smart people who aren't paying attention to the details of the war in Ukraine or the Trump team's negotiating gambit. I am sometimes critical of the unwillingness of the Brits to face certain hard realities, but I have never seen anything so shallow and stupid from Brit/Euro press or experts.
Richard, I am in violent agreement! As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “…And so it goes.”
What hard realities are my compatriots not facing? That our entire armed forces are sufficient in number to man about 3% of the front line in Ukraine right now? That our tanks are too heavy and unreliable to be used there? That our aircraft's stealth capabilities are effectively useless? That we've already given (and had destroyed) virtually all of our artillery infrastructure to Ukraine? That the Russians have clocked the signatures of our Storm Shadows and we've got very few of them left now? That we don't have anywhere near enough engineers, plant or materials to make the weapons we'd need to fight this kind of war and that the designs, training regimes and doctrines we employ right now aren't suited to it anyway? That we're already stretched defending a bunch of genocidal fanatics in West Asia? That we are pretty casualty averse and public support will crumble when 'our boys' start coming back under flags? There's a lot of hard realities the British need to face - but we never will because we've a massively unrealistic view of our capacity and abilities.
All 'we' can do is 'our' best to get the US into this war - that's all we're 'good' for nowadays.
Sounds like you have fallen into a deep pit of helplessness. If I were in your spot I would be pressing to reintegrate into the EU. Demand that your leaders release all of the RU frozen assets to hypercharge the arms industry in Ukraine. Accelerate your own path to 3% defense spending. Above all, accept that the U.S. leadership is content to have its RU frenemy dominate a divided and weak Europe.
There is another option at this fork in the road that aligns comfortably with your resignation and fatalism: Petition Donald Trump to accept UK as the 51st American State.
Re integrate into an anti-democratic irreformable neoliberal corporate kleptocratic mess? No thanks. Itr's because of the EU that our industrial base is so hollow and our training so pisspoor. We don't need a hypercharged arms industry, we need a competent one, and that's not possible when ours is run by the likes of Raytheon, General Dynamics Boeing, BAe, Lockheed Martin et al, none of whom have produced a decent system for a decade and probably two.
I remember the 1970s and early 80s when college students formed a spiritual alliance with China out of anger at the “neoliberals” of the time (they used different slurs, but same deal.) I remember the chic Mao caps and shirts.
Mao's cultural revolution in the 60s was of a piece with Putin's brutal genocide in Ukraine.
You've formed a tactical alliance with an evil movement to poke a stick in the eye of your ideological enemies. I doubt there is a government on the face of the earth that is pure enough for you to embrace. Cuba?
I don't have a problem with your opinions or ideology. I respected the Mao-capped socialist too, they had a point. It's the nihilism that offends.
Even if that were true - just who is it that YOU are allying with now? You're demanding weapons from the US and the tooling up of the UK & Germans, the three primary providers of weapons and ISR support to an ongoing genocide. Your tactical alliance is slaughtering women and kids in their tens of thousands.
And even if they were actually nice, rather than atrocious murderers, that wouldn't make their financialised and captured service-oriented economies any more able to be transformed into something that could support a war effort against the Russians who have been preparing for this from at least 2008. It wouldn't supply them with the cheap energy they're used to either.
The NY Times has consistently had dangerously poor reporting on Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
Sadly, I believe that they have already decided that Putin will prevail, so the Ukrainians should just take some rotten deal and be grateful. We know that Trump is a Putin puppet, so there is no reason to expect anything of value from him. And, in the meantime, Trump plans to make the US the next East Germany, with a Palantir database with information on every American. Putin knew East Germany. So here we are. Our democracy, and the democracy of Ukraine, are being sold very cheaply.
It is shocking to see how much the Overton Window has shifted on that bad deal for Ukraine. Early in the war, even RU-friendly Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin (who criticized NATO expansion) was saying NATO membership was necessary to secure a peace. JD Vance of all people said that Ukraine must be "armed to the teeth" as part of a deal.
Today the NY Times says military guarantees are not needed after all. Pinky promises of future support will do.
The NYT has consistently had dangerously poor reporting of Russian genocide of Ukrainians. Have you heard of Walter Duranty? He actually received a Pulitzer for his Holodomor denial in NYT as it was happening (and he was privately talking about it with Western diplomats).
Trump's regime is sending billions of dollars worth of munitions to the israelis to continue a genocide amply enabled by his disgusting predecessors and he's trampling all over the Constitution to restrict the rights of anyone even vaguely supportive of the Palestinians and he's a puppet of who?
Big news just breaking in the last hour. Ukraine has damaged over 40 Russian bombers at four different Russian airfields. The drones were launched from inside Russia!
President Zelensky has some cards after all!
Quite, see e.g. https://kyivindependent.com/enemy-bombers-are-burning-en-masse-ukraines-sbu-drones-hit-more-than-40-russian-aircraft/ for some detail. Incredible patience, ingenuity, bravery and efficiency!
What seems important to me today is that 40 bombers are said to be burning all the way over in Irkutsk Oblast.
MACA: Make America Chicken Again.
my favorite TACO!
https://substack.com/@kathleenweber/note/c-121712957
So Trump is protecting Putin, the Ukrainians can’t protect their cities, because the patriots are running out. So Trump is hoping to force Ukraine into a very bad ceasefire arrangement, by allowing the Russians to terrorise Ukrainian civilians.
That may be the idea, but I think WW II shows that indiscriminate, civilian bombing does not work. The Blitz only strengthened British resolve. Bomber Harris’ campaign against German cities was not decisive and only galvanized German resistance. Ukraine is showing this yet again. It seems to have strengthened their resolve and determination to resist.
It's not even at sufficient scale to terrorize the population. Killing a dozen people once in a few days with a handful of missiles is not the same as the bombing of Hamburg or even London. Not even close.
Totally agree.
The press will never learn because their paycheck depends on them not learning. We must sanewash the orange narcissist to keep selling papers and not get in his crosshairs. Press has no backbone or principles. If anything, somebody needs to point out TACO is how orange Cesar interacts with Putin.
As for the “offensive” let Russia destroy more material and waste more men in gaining a few millimeters here and there. It is all performative for the western press to clutch their pearls and fear the “big bad Russian juggernaut”…on motorcycles.
Big question is how and when does Ukraine strike back once this “offensive” culminates?
Dispersing forces in not mutually supporting offensives is a long Russian tradition. Zhukov famously did that in November 1942 when he launched simultaneous offensives at Stalingrad (which actually made sense both geographically and in terms of weaker forces from Italy and Romania being prime targets) and 1000 km away at Rzhev, which did not really make much strategic sense. The latter was a costly failure, the former almost failed due to insufficient reserves and perhaps would have failed had the Germans not transferred a lot of aircraft in the area to the Med in response to Operation Torch.
Wow! Thanks for taking the footnote out of the history and bringing it to narrative form!
TIL about Operation Uranus (yes). Thanks Andrew for your relentless Soviet/ Russian historical anchor lessons.
EDIT: That operation was an important breakthrough though? A million Soviet troops pincing 250k German troops?
Yes, it was an important breakthrough, although German materiel losses were light (on the order of 1% of their entire WWII production). The Germans withdrew from the oil regions of North Caucasus and lost any chance of ever getting to the even more important oil region on the other side of the Caucasus. And it became dramatically easier for the USSR to bring oil from Baku to the rest of the country (before Uranus the Soviets did not have a land connection to Baku and the boats from Baku could not go up the Volga either). Soviet/Russian propaganda dramatically exaggerated the importance of Stalingrad, but that does not mean it was a complete nothinburger.
It's mind boggling that Zhukov did not allocate EVERYTHING to Uranus. Not only so much was at stake, but there was potential for breakthrough and exploitation in a number of directions. There were huge areas with very few German troops. And the Germans indeed ended up abandoning many of them.
Sad little consolation, but I cancelled my New York Times subscription because of their bullshit coverage of Ukraine, and of Trump. I'm not throwing away good money to pay for chickenshit propaganda. I'd rather support the Phillip Obriens, Paul Krugmans, and Jen Rubins of the world in venues like this.
The timing of the airbase attacks is so based (pun). I mean, Ukraine also just announced they will participate in Istanbul talks tomorrow, and bring their own list of pre-ceasefire demands.
The fact that they could pull of this operation says a whole lot of SBU opsec.
For the umphteenth time: Ukraine does not have to agree with any "ceasefire" or "Peace" agreement that conflicts with her basic interests and stated positions. Furthermore, by now it should be obvious to even the most obtuse European leader that Trump's bloviating should no longer be taken seriously...he has nothing of importance (that one can depend on) to offer. He is a Putin shill. Additionally, the American MSM lost its credibility back in 2016...especially the NYTimes. They are owned...mostly...by Republicans and billionaires. The "Free Press", in the US, is fast becoming an illusion and the idea of the "Fourth Estate" envisioned by the Founding Fathers (should they really be "capitalized" anymore?), whose role was to act as a "check" to government overreach and a means of educating the general public has fallen woefully short for some time now. Finally, despite the bleatings of the pro Putin factions in government and media outlets, Ukraine is holding the line on the battle front, is far stronger today than at any time in the past (while Russia is stretched to the limits, both economically and militarily) and...dare I say it...can win this war without further US assistance (or interferrence by a Putin admirer in the White House...or should we start calling it the Red House these days?).
Sorry Phillips but I think this won’t be the last time you will have to point out that 🤣 keep up the good work.
well written and sadly it appears that Putin continues to control the narrative. Why does it appear that Trump is willing to give in to Putin's demands and is not willing to take aggressive action to "punish" Putin as he appears to flip-flop while days later. Is there a "pot of gold" in Trumps future business dealings? And yes, I said it...
Where does Trump get his 5,000 figure of people being killed weekly? As high as the Russian casualties are, they are not even half that number. Does Putin tell Trump that a few thousand Ukrainians get killed each week?!
a thousand russian fallen each day comes to seven thousand in a week
Most of them are wounded. At least 70%, probably closer to 80%.
Trump often just mouths Russian talking points. I’m certain he gets this direct from his good friend vlad
Joseph G Vance at Munich Security Conference: "In the United Kingdom and throughout Europe, freedom of speech, I fear, is in retreat"
ha ha, it is not in retreat in europe, in america yes
Excellent overview and analysis, thank you!
We're seeing the modern equivalent of the ribbentrop/molotov pact, perhaps Europe remembers that little betrayal. That the least-patriotic US president won't even SELL the Patriot missiles to Ukraine should end the pearl-clutching -- where are the Asters, the NASAMs, the IRIS-Ts, the CAMMs?