Trajectory: This Week in Ukraine
Trajectory: This Week in Ukraine
Massive air attacks, sham poobahs, satellites for the people, and more.
1. A Coordinated Effort
Over several days this week, Russia launched massive, coordinated airstrikes across Ukraine using ballistic and cruise missiles, and Shahed drones. This was one of the largest single-week missile and drone attacks since the beginning of the war, and the strikes seemed to focus on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including Ukraine’s largest hydroelectric facility, the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station in the city of Zaporizhzhia. As of this writing, over a million Ukrainians are without power.
These attacks are indicative of Russia’s strategic posturing. First, the Kremlin seems to have robust strategic logistics, including indigenous production and imports of missiles and drones from Iran and North Korea. Second, Russia is signaling a renewed focus on Ukrainian energy infrastructure in response to Ukraine’s similar recent attacks inside Russia. Third, Russia understands the inherent unsustainability of strategic air defense and is attempting to deplete the already low level of Western air defense ammunition. These recent bombardments are an extension of Putin’s war of attrition, and I expect they will continue until Ukraine and the West sufficiently interdict Russia’s supply of these strategic air assets.
These attacks come on the heels of an article in the Financial Times that claims the US government urged Ukraine to stop attacking Russian energy infrastructure. Bad timing. Apparently, the Biden Administration is afraid of escalation, although some experts conjecture that they would like to keep gas prices low during an election year. Regardless, most Europeans have suffered through two winters of doubled energy bills as Ukrainians huddle in subways, basements, and bathrooms. I think the Administration and the US citizenry can live through a 50-cent-per-gallon increase in gas.
2. Hail to the Chief Mудак
This week, Vladimir Putin won his fifth Russian presidential election in a surprise landslide victory. Unbelievably, the election was marred by both protesting and tampering. I don’t know why Putin needs to go to all the trouble of rigging the election. Can’t he just call someone and ask them to “find” enough votes? What kind of democracy is Putin running?
What does this mean for the war in Ukraine? Now that Putin has once again publicly solidified his power as the Grand Poobah of Dipshitvania, he is likely going to continue pressing the war. Immediately after the election, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the creation of two new army-sized elements (16 divisions) by 2024. Although it will take a plethora of mobile crematoriums to properly dispose of that many orcs, this announcement doesn’t bode well for Ukraine. Marked by a shortage of trained personnel, Ukraine has slowly been trading dead Ukrainian soldiers for many dead Russian soldiers since before the fall of Bakhmut in May of 2023.
As of late, casualties have become a centerpiece in this war of attrition. Formerly, the main issue on body count was how long Russia could sustain absurd casualty numbers (according to British MoD, almost 1,000 per day last month). Now, with Russia continuing to push on the battlefield despite these losses, the question becomes how long can Ukraine hold out slowly trading lives or land for Russian corpses? This week in the WSJ, Isabel Coles, Ievgeniia Sivorka, and Matthew Luxmoore look at this conundrum through the lives of Ukrainians lost in Avdiivka in Ukraine’s Impossible Choice: Conceding Territory or Lives. One day, this war is going to end, and history is going to examine the choices made by the Armed Forces of Ukraine leadership regarding trading Ukrainians for Russians in places like Bakhmut and Avdiivka. I hope it was the right decision.
3. Czech, Please
With Ukraine running out of artillery and losing ground to the Russians in Avdiivka, it took the “small ex-Soviet satellite state” of Czechia to plug the breach. A month ago, the Czech President, Petr Pavel, said his country had found 800k artillery shells for Ukraine. It took until this week for the EU to finally pony up the $1.5 billion (at $1,900/shell). You have to applaud the efforts of Czechia to actually go out and make things happen. The Czechs know better than anyone the price of inaction, having experienced the United States and Europe sitting back and watching the Soviet Union deploy tanks to quash the anti-communism uprising of the Prague Spring in 1968. Western inaction in 1968 reinforced the delineation of “spheres of influence” in Europe as much as contemporary Western support for Ukraine has dispelled the idea. My Czech grandmother would be proud.
4. Shutter Control
This week, the Atlantic reported that Russia might be targeting Ukraine using satellite imagery from US companies. Of course they are! And so are the Ukrainians. And probably so are Hamas, the Sudanese rebels, Al-Shabaab, America First Action, and ISIS. And why wouldn’t they? For years, all sorts of unsavory characters have had access to near-real-time overhead imagery. US commercial satellite imagery is another data point in the changing character of modern warfare.
The usefulness of a large, nepotistic, bureaucratic system for acquiring military equipment and intelligence is outdated. The physical world has moved beyond. Many of the things a military requires—speed, power, intelligence, computing, communications—is better developed in the civilian world (and it has been for a while). Additionally, the cost to manufacture capabilities has followed suit. The Russo-Ukrainian war is simply showcasing how commercial technology is now surpassing traditional military industrial processes and platforms.
5. [Video] You’re Not Alone, Black Sea Fleet
This week’s video is of a sad little orc who’s lost his toy BTR in a pond. Here’s another view.