Update on the war in Ukraine

Russia has been retaking the territory in eastern Ukraine that it gave to Ukraine a century ago. The territory is made up mostly of ethnic Russians who speak the Russian language. Russia’s first goal was to secure a land route from Russia to Crimea, where it has a large naval base and which it annexed in 2014 after the US-led coup in Kiev.

This first goal has now been completed fully, with roads and railroads now fully operational and secure from attack. Russia has already taken the Russian-speaking Kherson region northwest of Crimea that is on the way to Odessa. This also allows supply lines to continue flowing in the expected siege of Odessa, the last major Ukrainian port on the Black Sea. Alexander Mercouris (in London) reports on this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmwCs70o9K4&t=585s

Yesterday, a Ukrainian commander defected to Kherson and applied for Russian citizenship. News reporter Patrick Lancaster was there to put his application on video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il6jeRyDtIA

The commander was actually from Kherson and had family there. He did not want to be part of a war that would affect his own family. In addition, the Ukrainian forces had attempted to retake Kherson in a major offensive, but they were turned back by the Russian forces.

It seems that the main Ukrainian stronghold has been at Donetsk. Russian forces have been slowly surrounding Donetsk in a “cauldron” maneuver. To complete this cauldron has been a problem for the Russians, largely because they had to cross a river whose name I cannot begin to pronounce. The Ukrainian army was in a highly defensible position on hills overlooking the river (and in the city on both sides of the river).

The situation changed, however, when the Ukrainian forces bombed the bridge, apparently to make sure their troops in the city would have to stand and fight the Russians to the death. However, this had the opposite effect. Ukrainian troops felt betrayed, threw down their weapons, and waded across the river. It is summer now, and the water level is low in most of the rivers.

The bottom line is that Russian troops were able to take the city and the hills in just one day, whereas they had thought it would take a week, suffering significant losses. You can get the full story here on Military Summary, reporting from Belarus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saw41I2J76k

The point is that it is now only a matter of time before Russian forces move south to complete the cauldron around Donetsk. Then the Ukrainian army will have to choose between fighting to the death and surrender—or, as western newspapers would put it, “evacuating into Russian territory.” (Recall, that is what the media called the surrender at Mariupol last month.)

Donetsk is in the region of the Donbass and is now claimed as the capital of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic. A Russian victory in Donetsk would establish their claim, but it is widely believed that the ethnic Russians in this Republic would vote overwhelmingly to be part of the Russian Federation, as also happened in Crimea in 2014.

If Ukraine had kept the Minsk Agreements in 2014 and 2015 (guaranteed by Germany and France), they could have retained all of their territory with the exception of Crimea, which Russia was never going to give up on account of its military base there. Then last March, when negotiators came to an agreement in Turkey, they might have ended the war with most of its territory intact, but Britain and the US government pressured Zelensky into repudiating that agreement.

It seems, then, that Henry Kissinger’s stunning announcement at the recent Davos conference was quite accurate—that Ukraine has only about a two-month window of opportunity to negotiate a peace settlement. Right now, President Zelensky is still taking a hardline stance, insisting that Russia must give up all the territory that it has taken, including Crimea, as a condition for peace. That is totally unrealistic, and so the war continues.

So now Ukraine will be left with a much smaller amount of territory. Russia no longer trusts any Ukrainian negotiations, knowing that Ukraine itself is not the real power broker. Putin has said publicly that he will only negotiate with the sources of power.

Hence, the anti-Russian policies of the West (known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine and the Brzezinski Doctrine) have served to destroy Ukraine. Russia is taking back the eastern parts of Ukraine, which have been Ukraine’s main industrial and agricultural regions. The Donetsk region is known as the Donets Coal Basin. The east also had most of the oil and gas in Ukraine.

Without the production from the eastern regions, Ukraine will never again be a strong country. If Poland, Hungary, and Romania take chunks of Ukraine in the western part, Ukraine will again be a small landlocked nation of little importance, as it was in the 1600’s.