There's a lot of guessing about those ammo depot strikes and their effects. I'm not seeing a direct impact on Russian operations so far; those already slowed down considerably two weeks ago, after the Ukrainians launched their relief attack in the back of the Russian counteroffensive at Kursk, and moved a brigade up from Vuhledar to stop the advance onto Pokrovsk, at the expense of weakening defenses in the former area. Realistically, it may cause a temporary dip in supplies; but even if the most hopeful estimates of several 10,000 tons of ammunition blowing up (allegedly when trains were loading at two of the three sites) are true, national production will probably have made up for it by next spring. So at best we may have a particularly quiet mud season later this year, and not much in the way of the usual slow-burn Russian winter offensive.

Like similar strikes at strategic targets deep inside Russia - the strategic bomber base at Engels in late 2022, Moscow and the Kremlin itself in 2023, various oil refineries and those nuclear early warning radars more recently - I suspect the intended and actual effect is mostly political, to show it can be done despite the increasingly hollow-sounding Russian bluster about blowing up the world if anyone fights back against them (you should read some of the hardcore fanboys on German-language pro-Russian propaganda sites, they're really pissed off at Putin for not having nuked their Western useful idiot asses two years ago already like they were promised). While the train thing points to a considerable intelligence contribution if true, it's probably not a coincidence it happened on the eve of Zelenskyy's US trip where he'll communicate his alleged "victory plan" to assembled current, ex- and/or hopeful future presidents Biden, Harris and Trump.

Supposedly that still entails clearance for deep precision strikes into Russia with Western-supplied weapons, which remains fraught with American concerns in particular. And of course "victory" at this point essentially means the war ending with Ukraine surviving as a sovereign country and minimally no further territorial losses, ideally with some regained in a trade of occupied areas. Which might not be a square mile for a square mile but rather a variation of "okay, let's both withdraw behind pre-2022 lines, give or take". I don't think that by now many in Ukraine believe it realistic, or even sensible, to get back Crimea and the parts of the Donbas which have effectively been under Russian occupation since 2014. Though given that Putin's demands are still the entirety of the four districts officially annexed, but never fully controlled, by Russia in 2022, just both sides withdrawing behind late 2023 lines would constitute a victory for Ukraine.

I think there's some chance for negotiations, maybe an armistice, if not a finished settlement next year. After the Ukrainian offensive into Kursk, Putin was all like "that's it, negotiations are off the table", but has since quietly returned to "we were always ready to talk on the basis of Kiev accepting reality". Let's see what Zelenskyy's US trip yields; some (really all) of the parties involved are always good for forgetting everything they said yesterday, and adopting the opposite position with utter conviction.

quote:

Originally posted by BansheeOne:
After looking around for some time, by pure coincidence I finally got back into my real field of interest and competence and landed pretty much my dream job I always thought I could eventually end my professional career in; this month I’m gonna sign with the leading German-language publisher in security and defense for a double-hatted post, deputy editor-in-chief for one magazine geared towards deciders in security politics, and managing editor of another more technically orientated one for a broader audience. Everything’s done but the numbers, which can however only improve from my current gig.

That in turn means I’ll have a professional full-time outlet for my interests, so my private web presence isn’t exactly going to increase.

I guess this is the point where real life makes itself heard. For the first half of this year, I could still find a couple of days twice a month or so to participate in my last place of private internet discssion. In the second half, it was usually once a month already. Now I see I can't even keep that up; even on weekends a mix of private and professional life tends to intrude (in fact I started this post yesterday, but didn’t get to finish). Which is good, but with things in my line of work going as they are, that's only going to accelerate further. So I thought I'd wrap up the threads I regularly post in as best possible, not knowing when I might drop in again.

On this one there's really not so much change of the situation as consolidation of the outlook. With the impending onset of mud season in Ukraine, the predicted arrival of up to 12,000 North Korean troops in the Kursk area under the Treaty on a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership signed with Russia only this June, and next week's US elections, there's a perfect storm brewing where both sides will try to get as much of an advantage as they can before it locks down things for the next quarter year or so. Russia has resumed its counter-offensive in Kursk, trying to bottle up the invading Ukrainians in multiple places and all but pushing out their additional cross-border relief attack in the West, but has so far not suceeded to decisively displace them.

The alleged North Korean reinforcements may give them an extra leg up without using more of their own conscripts, still a sensitive political issue. However, the deployment - and possible Russian compensation - is also taken by South Korea as a threat to their own security, and will likely make them change their stance on direct support for Ukraine. So far they have mostly delivered things like artillery ammunition to the US in replacement for stocks sent to Ukraine. If they chose to aid Ukraine directly, their considerable arms production capacity may make a definite difference for the strained Ukrainian supplies. With European production still ramping up, including through joint ventures in Ukraine itself, that might just stabilize them.

Russia also continues to advance in the Donbas, but two months after I thought they would take the strategic city of Pokrovsk, they still haven't. Some alarmist sources are still talking of the Ukrainian front collapsing, but if it is, like most other things in this war it's a slow-motion collapse. Conversely, there are also mutterings among Russian milbloggers about a "difficult situation" in a natural reserve south of Kreminna at the center of the Eastern front. Plus there are rumors about new offensives on both sides - that Ukraine will launch another thrust into the Kursk region, and that Russia is massing 20,000 troops down south at Zaporizhzhia - but it's hard to see where either would take the warm bodies and kit from.

As of next week, severe rain and snowstorms are predicted for Kursk, which will eventually turn the local black soil throughout the region into the usual sticky mud that pretty much locks everything down outside paved roads. Which brings us back to the hope that at the start of fighting season next year, both sides will come to the conclusion that they stand to keep more of what they have through negotiations than continued fighting, maybe leading to resolution by 2026. The Ukrainians seem to be getting there, the Russians not so much; probably because Putin’s political, and possibly physical, survival is tied much closer to a face-saving outcome, and he has more human and material resources to burn towards that end.

It’s actually kinda hard to find postable maps which combine depiction of the current fronts and administrative lines likely to inform an eventual settlement in sufficient detail. I’m trying these, though they’re not ideal either. The Wiki map really needs to be viewed in full resolution to be useful, but shows you the entire course of the war at one glance; light blue being the territory retaken by Ukraine, plus their Kursk incursion. It doesn’t represent the Russian advances of this year evenly though; in Donetsk and the mutual cross-border incursions up north, it’s basically the entire depth of the red arrows, sometimes a little more, while in other places it’s at best the arrowheads alone or less.





What does Russia want? Overall, it currently occupies about 18 percent of Ukraine’s territory. Additionally, Putin has stated he wants the entirety of the four oblasts they officially annexed in 2022, though they never controlled all of their territory and got pushed out of some since. From north to south: Luhansk, which they actually mostly control except for four little patches; and Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, of which they control about two thirds each. In Donetsk they have made their best advances lately, while in Kherson they got pushed back from near-complete occupation beyond the River Dnipro in 2022.

There are people in Russia who want at a minimum the Mykolaiv and Odesa Oblasts in the southwest, too, to complete the land bridge towards the Moldovan breakaway region of Transnistria, which for all practical purposes is also under Russian control, but isolated; and if possible, additionally Kharkiv in the northeast and Dnipro in the center, which would complete the historical Novorossija settled by Russians in the 18th century. More radical voices demand everything east of the Dnipro River including the capital of Kiev; and of course the most extreme want the entire Ukraine, thus restoring the southwestern border of the Soviet Union. Putin though would probably be content with the four officially annexed oblasts for now, while also weakening Ukraine enough in a settlement that Russia could come back for more later.

What could Ukraine offer? First of all naturally, withdrawing from Russian territory in the Kursk Oblast. This is a pretty big bargaining chip, which theoretically could be used to say “okay, let’s just both withdraw behind 2023/2022/2014 lines”. The latter two are pretty illusory, as Ukraine’s position is still too weak overall. Reverting to the end of 2023 would actually be a pretty good outcome for them, as it would let them keep all their gains from last year’s summer offensive, and negate Russia’s advances of this year. But there are indications they might settle for much less, like getting an initial agreement about stopping to attack each other’s energy infrastructure, as Zelenskyy proposed recently.

There are some smaller chips, too, though. They could actually yield the little patches of the Luhansk Oblast they still control; it doesn’t really matter much territory-wise, but would hand Russia a pretty big political win. There’s also a narrow strip south of the Dnipro they hold at Kherson, which isn’t much use to them and could be partially or completely yielded to Russia. A rather significant point I keep thinking of is use of the waters around Crimea, which Ukraine has pretty much denied to Russia through missile and drone attacks at this point. So they could ask what it would be worth to them being actually granted some degree of rights to ship in those waters.

What might Russia yield? In return to being given back their territory at Kursk and handed all of Luhansk Oblast, they could withdraw from the Kharkiv Oblast where they crossed into it from Luhansk, and from their own territory at Belgorod. The biggie would be settling on the line in the currently most active sector of the front in Donetsk. Depending on the other chips Ukraine plays, the then-current or 2023 positions, (semi-)natural obstacles like rivers and/or administrative divisions below the oblast level could be used for detailed demarcation. In the south, the rather static contact line and the Dnipro or its parallel rivers serve this purpose pretty well.

If Putin gets one of the four oblasts he demands in full, and two thirds of each of the three others, he could probably say “well, mathematically speaking, three out of four ain’t bad”. Any less would probably need some rather heavy arguments to make it sell as a success to his domestic audience. It’s quite possible he will insist on all of the territory taken by Russia in Donetsk, even if it means the eventual agreement bans Russian warships from the original Ukrainian territorial waters around Crimea and in the Sea of Azov. Which would be pretty ironic given that control of the port of Sevastopol was a major reason for annexation of Crimea in 2014, but then it would be a matter of playing up “Russian lands!” and clamping down on “but, Russian waters …”

How to guarantee any agreement? This is the most important point. After all, Russia recognized Ukrainian independence (twice in fact), and was a party to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing their sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving up the former Soviet nuclear weapons on its territory. That and all the principles of international law didn’t keep them from invading in 2014, and again in 2022. Peace negotiations early in the present war failed mostly because from the Ukrainian view, the Russian proposals for guarantees were even worse than Budapest: The guarantor nations, including Russia itself, would have had to agree unanimously on any action against violations, thus giving the likely attacker a veto.

Ukraine cannot agree to any settlement that opens itself up to Russia coming back for more a couple years down the road. The possible models have been well-mentioned before: The “German” solution with Ukraine joining NATO while foreswearing to regain its lost territories by force; probably the most stable, but least likely due to opposition both on the Russian and Western side. “The Korean” one with a heavily secured DMZ and some Western troops still based in the country is a watered-down variant still bound to cause some headaches. The most likely currently looks to be the “Israeli” model where the West provides diplomatic top cover and continues to prop up Ukraine with military and economic aid.

Make no mistake: going “Israel” might be the least risky variant in terms of Western involvement, but also the most expensive. For example, in both their current wars, Israel is getting twice the US aid per capita as Ukraine; and that’s not with most of it being stuff from long-term storage where the actual (as opposed to the “book”) cost is just refurbishment and shipping, minus disposal cost. Of course the US also accounts for 90 percent of such aid to Israel, while for Ukraine it’s just about 30 (again, in book value). All of which means that a working settlement will be complicated, and I’m still holding we won’t see any before 2026. Though I’ll be pleasantly surprised otherwise.

Thank you for the post BansheeOne.