I’ve spent the last week and a half glued to news feeds of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is, in a sense, something I have spent half my life preparing for: the formal training of tactical, operational and strategic analysis from my degree, the informal source-analysis training of a life bullshitter-spotting on forums and social media, and the tragic fact that I find it fun to chat about post-Soviet weapons systems with a lot of people for whom GRAU codes and NATO reporting names are a third language. I’ve found myself making observations and predictions on how the war is going to be shaping up and it turns out I’m very good at it, though not enough that I want to do so publicly and add to the – to steal a phrase – already densely betwatted military-speculative complex. So I’m going to share some good explanatory articles and some trusted ongoing sources, people who know a lot about this and whose actual job it is to talk about the war all day (some are even getting paid).

Also, not to be all “DON’T TRUST THE MSM” but I have found even relatively trustworthy news outlets on other topics are hopelessly behind the tactical reality and full of pointless opinion pieces from self-evident wingnuts screeching about vacuum bombs, no-fly zones and nuclear war. I get this is Just How Modern Meeja Be, but it’s an unbelievably tiresome waste of time when dealing with fast-paced events that require specialist knowledge to understand.

Sources

Here’s a Twitter feed of trusted sources, put together by my friend Árpád who is even more terminally Into this stuff than me. It’s a mix of exceptionally clued-up, reliably correct academics and experts, and people actually on the ground. There’s a lot there, it updates fast and there are lots of pics of blown up tanks, so let me draw out some particular users worth following:
Michael Kofman. Kofman is the premier online expert on Russia’s military aims and capabilities and has so far called basically everything right. The only thing his eve-of-the-war map got substantially wrong was missing the Mariupol corridor.
Mark Galeotti. Galeotti is a trusted Russia-watcher and expert on the politics and history of this all. He’s not super active on Twitter (to his credit) but he does post links to articles and interviews hosted elsewhere, which are always worth a read/listen (use 12ft.io to get around paywalls, they’re often on trash sites like the Telegraph.)
Oryx. Oryx is an open source intel aggregator working up a list of confirmed casualties (equipment, mainly) on both sides in this war. They did it previously with the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Caveat: they’re only as good as the intel being posted publicly, and there are much fewer pictures of Ukrainian casualties being shared, so Ukrainian losses are probably higher than Oryc can report. However, this is an excellent source for the astounding amount of equipment the Russians are currently losing.
Nathan Ruser’s maps. Almost all maps I see elsewhere look at the furthest extent of Russian advance and assume everything behind it is under Russian control. This is wrong and stupid. These are OSINT-based, regularly updated projections of the actual areas of Russian control in the country.
(added 07/03) Overt Defense produce excellent liveblogs and regular summaries of what’s going on day today. If you want to keep close to the action but don’t have the time to follow in real-time, it’s worth following them.
(added 07/03) Meduza.io is one of the last vestiges of a free Russian press. For general content on Russia in both English and Russian they are hard to beat.

(added 07/03)  Interesting people I watch but have reservations about: Christo Grozev at Bellingcat mostly produces some sound OSINT and analysis of OSINT, but also posts dumb alarmist nonsense about nuclear war. Trent Telenko has got a lot of attention for threads about tyres and makes some good points about logistics, but overall doesn’t seem to be a particularly deep or informed thinker. Illia Ponomarenko at the Kyiv Independent posts good stuff earlier than anyone but his enthusiasm sometimes verges on Ukrainian propaganda. UK MOD’s Defence HQ channel gets things factually right and is faster than most “mainstream” sources, which still makes it slower than OSINT, and it is also, obviously, an organ of the British government.

Articles and Writers

Bret Devereaux is the single best public explainer of military history currently operating on the internet. Everything he writes is worth a read but I’d start with his highly accessible understanding of the historical, political and strategic context for the war. He’s also written an intro to protracted war which is entirely correct, but which I pray is going to be less relevant than he thinks it is.

Lawrence Freedman has produced several astute reads on the situation and made accurate predictions. I’d recommend some very lucid articles here, here and here.

Mark Galeotti is the Russia-watcher I most trust. It’s worth reading some of his actual books, but for something more up to the minute I’d recommend his article on why this is the end for Putin and his interview on the current Russian political context (30m audio).

This War on the Rocks article on Russian logistics is prescient and very helpful for understanding why the picture for Russia on the ground is generally worse than is understood.

Thoughts

(written 06/03, so we’ll see how badly this all dates)

1. This is not the third world war. NATO has already given the clearest possible signals that it will let Ukraine burn to the ground rather than risk a confrontation with Russia which could go nuclear (which is a horrible call but probably the right one). Proxy wars between nuclear powers are not new and while it suits the headline-driven panic-cycle media (and the individual human need to get people’s attention with dire pronouncements) to talk up the chances of Putin going bonkers and planting mushrooms on European capitals, it’s not at all helpful. (I’m not going to waste time debunking it, calm down, but I’ll add a good debunking if I find one.)
2. There is nothing particularly “new” or unprecedented about this war (so far). We have already seen the use of drones, the militarisation of social media, war videoblogged in real time, media-narrative-driven fascism, large-scale conventional combat with tanks and modern jets, the deliberate/indiscriminate use of unguided weapons on civilians, and Russian invasions of sovereign states, all over the place in the last twenty years. There are some rancid takes out there from journalists who should know better about this being the “first social media war” or “unprecedented brutality”. Nothing is happening here which didn’t happen in Syria/Armenia/Georgia/Iraq/Afghanistan/Chechnya. The chief difference here is it is happening to a white Christian European country which you can walk to from the EU in a day.
3. Russia cannot win. There is already no possible win state that Putin can sell to his people. They have already lost too many people, too much credit, and taken too much economic and cultural damage for this to be a positive. This doesn’t mean that Ukraine will win. It just means that this was a disastrous waste of time even for Putin. Personally, I have no doubt Russia is going to lose, and lose quicker and more badly than most people expect. Russia’s ongoing collapse into a parody of fascist militarism is terrifying, and I can only hope it collapses still further and the entire state crumbles – although last time that happened it didn’t go great for the human race either.
4. There is no good argument for this war. There is a certain category of whataboutists and useful idiots in the Western political space who see (or want to see) no difference between the voluntary NATO and the at-gunpoint Warsaw Pact, between Ukraine’s (sometimes troubled, sometimes struggling) democracy and Russia’s violent, kleptocratic autocracy, and between a Peter the Great-era world where regime changed required you to march a hundred thousand bayonets to the enemy capital and our modern age where economies can be gutted, governments undermined and cities vitrified without anyone having to leave their office. They advance the view that by trying to choose a life other than that of a sclerotic, Russia-dominated buffer state, Ukraine is threatening Russia’s rightful imperial entitlement (they use the phrase ‘sphere of influence’ but it’s the same thing) to do what they want to their neighbours. This is a point of view, and is one that Putin’s siloviki actually believe. But they are wrong, and beyond seeing where they’re coming from we are no more obliged to accept their psychotic view of the world than we are to accept any of Hitler’s arguments that he was entitled to murder everyone between him and the Urals. The Russian regime is a cabal of paranoid thugs too mentally ossified to realise that the Cold War is over, they lost, and the game has changed. It is a monstrous throwback which needs to be killed. I don’t know if that will happen this year, but I think it can be beaten and shamed.
5. If any one of the following four things collapse this war will end. a) Ukrainian will and ability to fight, b) Russian will and ability to fight, c) the Putin regime, and d) the entire Russian economy. The only one of those which is definitely not happening in the next week is the first.
6. Russia still thinks Kyiv is the strategic centre of gravity, yet never had a realistic plan for taking it. Kyiv is a dense megacity with Soviet-capital levels of fortified bunkers and air defences, straddling one of the greatest rivers in Europe, and full of highly motivated and well-armed people. I don’t think Russia can even manage a plausible encirclement, let alone either the sustained siege or urban assault needed to capture the city. None of the potential moves available to Russia – try and to flatten the city with dumb bombs, have forces east of the Dnieper smash pointlessly into the eastern districts of the un-encircled city, or have the Crimean forces abandon their objectives to try for an improvised encirclement from the south – will work, and all will only play into the Ukrainians’ hands. So I hope they do all of them.
7. The most important known unknown is what state the Ukrainian military is in. I have no idea how much they’ve lost, and that more than anything else will shape the war to come.

Finally – yes, I went back into my Chernoblogs and changed the spelling of “Kiev” to “Kyiv”. It didn’t matter to me then; it does now.