Sevastopol
As of the strike of an ATACMS missile on a beach near Sevastopol last Sunday - Pentecostal Sunday in the Russian Orthodox calendar - and the subsequent call on Monday to the Russian Foreign Ministry of the US ambassador to Moscow - Russia and the USA are, if not exactly at war, then in a formal state of conflict. The US has been accused of a “well-targeted” missile carrying cluster warheads, on a civilian population, something which, UN authorities say, is a war crime. The formal Russian position, therefore, is that this was not an accident, it was not the result (as I suggested on Sunday) of a Russian defense missile hitting an incoming ATACMS missile to tragic effect, but a deliberate act which killed at least four people, including two children, hospitalized many others and overall injured 150 people. Russia has said that retaliatory measures are sure to follow. As already indicated by Vladimir Putin the Russian response to Western greenlighting of American-directed “Ukrainian” long-range missile attacks deep inside the heart of Russia, may well take the form of handing Russia’s advanced Russian missiles (e.g. the nuclear-capable Iskander, which Ukraine has said it cannot shoot down) to Russian allies such as North Korea (with which Russia now has a military, mutual defense alliance) and Iran (with which it has something very close, perhaps soon to be formalized) and to anti-US militia throughout the Middle East that, like the Houthis in Yemen, are well positioned to inflict punishment on the US “empire of bases,” which is both its strength and now, increasingly, its Achilles Heel.
I dont know whether the Sevastopol attack was or was not intentional. An attack on civilians at a beach, when it is obvious that the missile is being navigated by Amercians using data from US Golden Hawk surveillance circulating over the Black Sea at that time (later shot down by Russia, according to some reports, but uncertain) seems a very big and dangerous escalatory step. For the most part Ukrainian activity over Russia itself has been concentrating on oil and gas refining facilities, although Ukraine’s hammering of Belgorod and the Donbass since 2014 has been no great respecter of civilian lives.
Against this one can point to the most recent I.C.C. charges against Russia’s military leaders Valery Gerasimov and Sergei Shoigu for their part in ordering the launching strikes on infrastructural targets in Ukraine, causing harm to civilians in excess of anticipated military advantage. There is a fuzziness to these calculations that would give any court a headache (although given that Russia, like the US, has never signed the agreement that set up the I.C.C., it is improbable that there will be any court hearing), and I am surprised that the I.C.C. is prepared to entertain them, but I have always thought it obvious that these kinds of attack on infrastructure that is, almost by definition, “hybrid” in the sense that it is essential for both military operations and civilian life, are highly questionable from a human rights standpoint. And now Ukraine will play the same cards against mainland Russia. Russia is said by Ukrainian sources to have inflicted $56.5 billion in damage against Ukrainian energy facilities.
Hitting Russian Oil Refineries
A few weeks ago, Foreign Affairs was making the case that Ukraine’s pinprick attacks against Russian refineries across Russia were worth the effort in terms of their damage to Russian oil and gas production and to fossil fuel exports. Today, Sergey Vakulenko, Michael Liebreich, Lauri Myllyvirta, and Sam Winter-Levy make the opposite case. The original article cited declines in Russia’s refined oil exports and export revenues, high wholesale gasoline and diesel prices in Russia, and Russia’s move to import 3,000 tons of fuel from Belarus to illustrate that the attacks have had a dramatic impact. The latest article comes to a different conclusion. The data shows that the attacks have had a limited effect on Russia’s fuel production and export volumes and that their impacts did not last long. Russian oil companies have indeed likely lost about $15 per barrel in revenue from the oil they have had to export in crude rather than refined form. But this is a drop in the bucket compared with Russia’s total earnings in oil revenue.
“In April 2024, for instance, Russia may have lost up to $135 million because of a switch from refined oil to crude oil exports. But that same month, it earned more than $16 billion for its overall exports of oil and oil products. And because the Russian government pays domestic companies a subsidy of $10 per barrel on all the refined oil products they export, the state may even be benefiting financially from a shift toward crude oil exports, which reduces the subsidies it must pay.
Russia’s importation of fuel from Belarus—a single trainload consisting of less than half a percent of Russia’s weekly gasoline consumption—does not indicate that Russia is experiencing a nationwide fuel shortage. The Kremlin’s much-noticed six-month ban on gasoline imports was enacted before the main wave of Ukraine’s refinery attacks as a preventive measure following Russia’s 2023 fuel crisis; that crisis was created by the Russian government’s own attempt to pass the costs of price controls on to oil companies. And the gasoline import ban was lifted in mid-May after the Kremlin determined that Russia had plenty of extra gasoline in storage. The changes in Russian domestic wholesale prices can be explained by broader international price shifts, rather than effects of the attacks. Of the 12 major refineries Ukraine has damaged between January and May, half were returned to full operation within three weeks and the rest within three months”.
Dagestan
It is certainly curious that President Andrzej Duda of Poland was telling the Swiss “Peace” Conference a few days ago that it was time to “decolonize” (i.e. fragment) the Russian Federation, mere days before, in addition to the ATACMS attack on Sevastopol, there were two terrorist attacks whose purpose was likely just that, however much in vain. The two attacks, attributed to ISIS-K, took place in Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan, and Derbent on the Black Sea. Twenty people, including security personnel and priests, were killed. Dagestan has a majority Muslim population of three million.
Ukrainian Mobilization
Ukrainian sources claim that Ukraine’s recent mobilization effort is recruiting 5,000 men a day. It is difficult to know where these men are being found, and for how long this rate of recruitment is sustainable, given that eight million Ukrainians have fled the country and another five million are internally displaced, and upwards of a million have lost their lives or have been seriously injured. Indeed, Russian sources claim that yesterday Ukraine lost 2,345 men, dead or seriously wounded, the highest rate since the beginning of the SMO. President Zelenskiy, meanwhile, is purging the National Guard of people inclined to want to assassinate him, and has dismissed Yurii Sodol from his position of Commander of Joint Forces of the Armed Forces who has been accused of being too reckless with the lives of young, Ukrainian troops.
Negotiation
Donald Trump’s team has said that if Trump returns to power next January, he will push Ukraine to negotiate with Russia if it wishes to continue to receive more US weapons. He would postpone the issue of whether membership of NATO is on the cards for Ukraine. If Russia did not agree to negotiate, the US would continue to send an endless stream of weapons to Ukraine. This negotiating position from the Trump team makes the usual, feckless Washington presumption to rule the world and to boss people about, subject to sanctions, and that somehow the US and the collective West have nothing directly to do with the conflict. There is no chance that Russia would agree to this at any time, or that Ukraine would agree to this currently.
Historian Geoffrey Roberts suggests today that it is very much in Ukraine’s interest to negotiate. He cites ten reasons: the window to a compromise peace with Russia is fast closing as Ukraine loses on the battlefield and Russia has less incentive to negotiate; to avert Armageddon; to save Odessa; to de-rail Ukraine’s demographic decline; to reclaim sovereignty from Western overlordship; to beat Trump; to get rid of Zelenskiy; to get Russia to pay some of the costs of reconstruction; joining the EU; “Ukrainianisation” - a form of ‘Finlandisation’.
The NATO summit meeting of July 9-11, far from being a forum for consideration of peace options (it is being accompanied by noise from Brussels in favor of the extension of EU membership to both Ukraine and Moldova), is more likely to reinforce NATO’s most recent escalatory measures. It will come after the British election on July 4th., and the French elections on June 30th and July 7th, which may very well reveal growing disquiet about Ukraine in the European electorate. Not to mention the Iranian election on June 28. Interestingly, President Modi of India will be visiting Moscow on the first day of the NATO summit, July 9th., possibly to discuss improved trading relations between Russia and India in the wake of the formation by Russia of north-south trading corridors between Russia and Iran, and between Russia, India and Afghanistan. In other words, as NATO meets to discuss how best it can preserve the old order of Western hegemony, two leading members of the BRICS will be talking about how best to usher in the new order of multipolarity. This takes place in the immediate wake of Russia’s stronger ties with North Korea, Vietnam and Iran.