We are five months into the more dramatic phase of a war that’s been going on since 2014. The war has slowed to the point that new maps aren’t necessary each week, let alone each day. Since my first post about this I’ve been keeping Hot Takes mostly to close friends on Facebook but am pleased that my degree has turned out to be not entirely worthless. Here are some updates on useful sources, some particularly interesting articles I’ve read recently, and some thoughts on what comes next.

Sources

I continue to refer you to my friend Árpád‘s list of trusted Twitter sources, slightly edited but largely unchanged since February. All these people have so far proven valuable, informed, and reliable. To add to the specific sources I flagged last time (here’s that link again), I’ll add:

The Institute for the Study of War maintain both a constant feed of detailed text updates on the situation and a Twitter feed of maps and highlights.

Dmitri Masinski’s “War Translated” project translates phone intercepts and various Russian and Ukrainian language sources that would otherwise be inaccessible to an English audience. This should be seen through a very strong pro-Ukrainian bias (one of their regular posts is a translation of the daily broadcasts from Zelenskyy advisor and Ukrainian propagandist Aleksey Arestovych) but adds fascinating texture and is an unmatched source on the experience of the miserable Russian soldier at the front in their own words. Translations of people like Igor Girkin (a fantastically opinionated and singular loony – imagine if Dominic Cummings had a career killing people in the FSB) are an interesting window into what the Russian ultranationalist fringe are thinking.

Konrad Muzyka’s Rochan Consulting usually charge for their high quality intelligence updates but post the odd free piece – here’s the latest (24/07/22).  If I had unlimited money I would absolutely subscribe to them.

A few more thinkers who aren’t on The List but are worth a look at or follow:

• Shashank Joshi is the Economist’s defence editor and the best informed commentator I’ve encountered in the mainstream British press.
• Jack Watling of RUSI, Britain’s premier defence think tank (of which more below). Posts most of the important things you’d get from The List and has done significant in-theatre research.
• Phillips O’Brien is an involved and interested historian. He wrote a widely panned piece about the death of the tank but is otherwise pretty sound and covers sources others don’t (fire data, for instance).
• Kamil Galeev posts some fascinating (although frequently quite… “out there”) takes about Russian culture and politics which are interesting to think about even if you dismiss them afterwards, eg 1 2.

Trent Telenko has turned out to be the windbag charlatan he always sounded like, and Oryx has become universally acknowledged as the best open source lost equipment tracker and is also tracking commitments and deliveries of Western aid.

Individual Articles

A report by Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of RUSI, based on in-theatre research, examines some of the newest and most technical aspects (UAVs in high-intensity warfare in particular) of the war and what should be done next. It follows on from another excellent piece in April, here. (I’ll say I don’t think Watling calls the war 100% right but he has insights nobody else does.)
Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk has written an absolutely fascinating piece on the vigorous wartime civil society in Ukraine: fighting an intolerant, autocratic, militaristic Russia, hostile to any form of activity it doesn’t control, Ukrainians are setting out to be everything it is not.
Michael Kofman and Rob Lee, two analysts who’ve got almost everything right so far, on Russian force design.
The New York Times produced an accessible – by which I mean overproduced and slightly human-interest-sensationalised but otherwise excellent – account of the Azovstal siege here.
Lawrence Freedman is reliably fantastic on his Substack; recent articles here and here.
Bruno Tertrais has written a cogent and necessary argument undermining the increasingly tedious Russia-nuclear-threat hysteria cycle.*
A Foreign Policy article about the practical impacts of Western sanctions on Russia.
And some interesting, specific threads (many by random and unvetted thinkers who might be more Telenkos, but through people I trust) on: tanks, Black Sea grain ports, grain politics, attrition, actual weapons deliveries, and AI target recognition.

Bad Takes

On a few sources which really aren’t worth paying attention to: obviously nothing emanating from a Russian state source is to be trusted; their entire policy is to tell five random contradictory lies in order to obscure the truth. Individual Russian non-state actors like Girkin are much more interesting but remember they’re usually going from their own fanfiction idea of what the Russian armed forces are capable of. Various big names of last century’s political science like Chomsky and Kissinger are occasionally weighing in with morally and intellectually supine fatalism pretending to be realpolitik, blended with a bizarre willingness to believe Russian lies: I have written them off as weird deluded has-beens and you should too. Finally, the Guardian, although it has a powerful “default” quality as the principal free online quality British newspaper, is comprehensively hopeless on war and should, with the odd exception, be ignored.

Thoughts

1. Russian victory. In terms of their February war objectives Russia has already failed many times over. But the outcome of a bisected Ukraine and an endless, miserable, semi-frozen war is not disastrous to Putin and co if they think their enemies will fold (or lose interest) first. Remember that they have been pursuing exactly this strategy, in Ukraine, for eight years. Russia doesn’t need to “win” in normal terms; their approach – in statecraft and in war – is to make everyone lose, drag everyone down into the same lying, bullying, brutal, cynical hell they exist in and pretend no alternative exists.  They will pretend, in bad faith, to negotiate the moment the military calculus turns against them. The temptation of a bad peace needs to be resisted: Russia must be defeated, removed, humiliated, and prevented from doing this again.

2. Ukrainian victory. Ukraine has successfully fought Russia to a standstill and will spend the next phase of the war further eroding Russian capacity before counterattacking. At some point – and it may take years – this process will end and a line will be drawn somewhere east of the Dnieper, either because Ukraine has run out of men, arms and willpower or because they have reached their old borders. There is currently no appetite whatsoever to cede anything to Russia and the slaughtered Ukrainian civilians in every reclaimed town show what Russian occupation means. Nothing is certain, but nothing suggests victory is impossible.

3. It’s increasingly clear that Russia is reaching the limits of its (politically deployable) manpower reserves and its weapons manufacturing. It also doesn’t currently seem to have a good plan for overcoming this, and in both men and equipment is robbing Peter to pay Paul. I don’t want to underestimate Russia’s willingness to feed men into the grinder or the power of the state machinery that compels these men to go. But I think and hope their forces will only dwindle over time.

4. Arms for Ukraine. Jack Watling’s report goes into this in more detail but NATO needs to consider sustainable long-term support, ramp up defence production for a long war rather than handing over Cold War leftovers, and allocate production among Ukraine’s supporting nations. This sounds a big ask but the indicators so far are positive. Supplies of artillery shells and rockets are massive and consistent. The most interesting headlines I’ve read recently are Poland’s plan to wholesale replace their armoured vehicle inventory with new Korean hardware, which would essentially provide Ukraine with an entire country’s worth of tanks and APCs, and America training Ukrainian pilots on F-16s. The long term auguries are good.

5. HIMARS. It’s just one system and Russia will – eventually, glacially – adapt to it. But in the short term it has made a massive difference, annihilating Russian ammo dumps and command posts and hugely reducing their principal advantage in massed artillery, without which the Russian army is a bunch of poorly motivated hooligans with bad infantry-armour coordination. ATACMS soon, I hope, and unlimited M31 missiles in the meantime.

6. The “grain deal” and immediate subsequent strikes on Odesa were somewhat predictable. Anyone expecting Russia to take any action but the most cynical and dishonest available is taking the first step on a short road to disappointment. Hopefully this will backfire and undermine Russia’s influence in the Middle East and Africa, and hopefully at least something will result from it in terms of getting Ukrainian grain out into the world. But Russia can and will strike at fields and granaries; famine and mass human suffering is a feature of their war, not a bug.

7. What happens next? Kofman confidently predicted (rare for him) a massive set-piece assault battle near Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, but that was before HIMARS deleted fifty ammo dumps and started hitting the southern Dnieper bridges. Everyone has got very excited about the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson oblast, which is hotting up. I got excited about the prospect of one back in April, but I think (and hope) the big push won’t start for a while yet and Ukraine are continuing to erode Russian forces before attacking with as much power as possible. Ukraine’s first real counteroffensive will be enormously symbolically significant and it needs to be successful. I think the Ukrainians, who have shown good strategic sense so far, recognise that getting it right matters more than doing it soon.

8. The big worry is that Ukraine is now entirely reliant on NATO arms and various domestic factors erode Western political support for the war. Popular support is obviously unpredictable, but I think we worry a bit too much about this for two reasons. Firstly, our understanding of war-weariness comes from a recent experience of endless, distant, morally dubious sandpit insurgencies with no plausible victory, not a war on our doorstep with clear right and wrong and a clear and achievable positive end state. People like supporting winners and just causes. The crisis is already here and popular support is showing little sign of waning. Secondly, the governments most likely to fold are those which are already of doubtful value as allies (Germany, which seems structurally unable to think about anything but how it’s going to go back to its profitable existence selling Russia weapon-making machine tools for cheap gas; Italy, defined by hysterical daytime-TV politics and as comically irrelevant in this war as in every other war since Lepanto***). The allies that actually matter – Poland, Britain, the rest of EE, and the US – are in their different ways more resolute. Even completely discounting the idea that Western electorates can value a Ukrainian victory and will continue to support it – which I don’t think we should do – I cannot see any circumstances in which Poland and the Baltics stop backing Ukraine to the hilt, or where it’s not worth the US and UK spending what is honestly pocket change to continue the destruction of Russian military power with other people’s blood.

9. The first part of this war was an aberration caused by Russian strategic hubris, and the lessons learned from it have very little value. There are a lot of breathless thinkpieces from that time predicting things like the death of the tank, which have already dated incredibly badly.

 

 

* It goes like this:
1. A Western actor proposes to do A Thing;**
2. Russia, via its diplomatic corps or frothing daytime television presenters (legitimately hard to tell apart sometimes) issues a pronouncement to the effect “hey remember we have nuclear weapons”;
3. Useful idiots and talking heads who first discovered deterrence theory in March freak out and say (amplified by irresponsible clickthirsty media parrots) that doing The Thing is the line that must not be crossed, Russia is serious this time and we are gambling with terrible stakes, why die for Danzig?!;
4. The Thing happens anyway;
5. There are literally no consequences because Russia has already shot their bolt, has no way of escalating, and isn’t going to burn down the planet over The Thing;
6. Repeat.

** e.g., ATGMs, jets, tanks, anti-shipping missiles, artillery, Sweden and Finland joining NATO, HIMARS, or dozens of other examples, it keeps happening. Everyone has now realised this except possibly the German government.

*** And that’s being generous by counting Venice as Italy.