Not Just Yet a Third World War

Belgorod Attacks

On the battlefields, Ukraine continues to be repulsed by Russian forces reacting to attempts of Ukrainian forces (Ukraine and western media, almost certainly wrongly, like to describe them as anti-Putin Russian militia) to land Mi-8 helicopters to seize a village, Kozinka, in the Belgorod region close to the Russian border.

The operation was the responsibility of intelligence chief Bodanov. This failure may prove his undoing.

Ukraine’s complete failure was followed up by Ukrainian missile and drone attacks on the city of Belgorod. Putin claims that 95% of these were shot down.

In total fighting so far in this area of Belgorod over the past few days, Ukraine is reported by the Russian MOD to have lost over 1,000 men and 18 tanks and 23 armored fighting vehicles. 2,500 troops were involved altogether, and 35 tanks. Russian shelling and missile strikes, bombers, and remote minelayers eradicated the Ukrainian saboteurs, and turned back relief forces (which Russia attacked using a Tornado multiple launch rocket system). This indicated a high state of Russian preparedness.

Zelenskiy and his staff, according to Dima this morning, is attributing the failure to “treachery” within Ukrainian ranks - a reminder that pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine may be more potent than pro-Ukrainian sentiment in Russia. The launch of a Ukrainian hunt for whoever was culpable may, as these things tend to do, sow a counterproductive level of anxiety and disrust.

Bear in mind that this is in an area that Russia recently said it intended to prepare as a buffer zone, and whose major city, Kharkiv, has been the subject of multiple Russian artillery and bombing assaults. The ultimate target of the failed Ukrainian operation is believed to have been a nuclear facility in the Belgorod region.

Dima speculates that the Ukrainian attacks may force Putin to expeditew the buffer zone plan, perhaps as far down as Kharkiv, but notes that given that the city of Kharkiv has a population of 1 million, Russia might need 100,000 soldiers to accomplish this.

This does not seem to me to be highly likely in the immediate future.

Other Battlefield

In other parts of the battlefield, there are indications of further Russian progress on its advance to the southwest of Ivanivske, and their forces have arrived at the Siverski-Donetsk canal, isolating Ukrainian forces in Chasiv Yar.

But Dima anticipates that the next major new focus of Russian attention will be Siversk and its region (including Zvanivka to the south and Novoselivka to the northwest).

Macron and Putin

Vladimir Putin, in an interview two days ago, reacting to French President Macron’s threat to send “non-combatant” French troops to Ukraine, not only retorts that for Russia these “invaders” will be regarded as combatants, but makes the point that whereas for the collective West, the conflict with Russia over Ukraine is simply a game, an opportunity for the West to secure greater geopolitical advantage, financial gain or some other such outcome, for Russia it is a matter of survival.

At a news conference yesterday Macron did not announce, as had been anticipated, the deployment of French troops to Ukraine, merely saying that this remained an option (whether or not it would happen would depend, he said, on Russian actions) that should not be ruled out although it would not be something that France would take the lead on. If Russia prevailed in the conflict over Ukraine, Macron noted, then European, including French, security, would be undermined. This would be an outcome that could not be permitted to happen.

Perhaps the Macron news conference was a reaction to Putin’s earlier warnings. Through these warnings, it seems, Putin called Macron’s bluff. There are of course many NATO operators (advisers) in Ukraine, but Macron was talking about the presence of an overt, organized detachment of military troops.

Dima today speculates that Macron, rather than risk sending French troops to Ukraine, will send them, instead, to Romania and Moldova, possibly with a view to jumping to the rescue of Odessa in the event of a Ukrainian collapse.

Scholz, Macron and Tusk

German Chancellor Scholz had previously drawn a line around the question of permitting German Taurus missiles being sent to Ukraine, seeming to undermine Macron’s escalatory rhetoric and suggesting the possibility of a Franco-German split that could be fatal for the NATO alliance. Scholz has made it clear that there will be no German soldiers sent to Ukraine. The lower house of the German parliament has three times voted down the supply of Taurus missiles, not least because these would require German technicians in Ukraine to prepare and use them. Germany’s Defense Minister Pistorius has also ruled out the idea of sending troops to Ukraine. The Polish foreign minister has said that Poland might at some point be open to the idea of sending Polish troops to Ukraine, but prime minister Donald Tusk has ruled it out in the context of continuing hostility of Polish farmers to imports of Ukrainian foodstuffs into Poland.

Both Macron and Tusk have been invited to meet with Scholz in Berlin. We can breathe a temporary sigh of relief. So long as the USA stays away, the Europeans are incapable of matching Russian air power. Nor military. German (62,000 total), French (118,000 total) and British (76,000 total) armies are relatively small and unimpressive even less so in coordination. These countries would not, of course, be sending their entire armies, but merely expeditionary forces: perhaps a total of 50,000, not much more than the number of volunteers that Russia says it recruits each month. European weapons have been depleted by aid packages over the past two years of war and their battlefield performance has been surprisingly weak. A country like France is in no position to sustain a weapons production capability that would significantly help Ukraine.

Even if the US was participating on the ground, the odds would likely still be in favor of Russia, but the chances of a slide into deployment of nuclear weapons would be far higher. The collective West cannot easily sustain the costs of the war: Ukraine has a deficit of $37 billion, has a very poor credit rating, and cannot contribute money sufficient to acquire more weapons or to pay the West for sending more. If the US House of Representatives does call Biden’s $61 billion to the floor for a vote, then the question arises as to whether half of that money would have to be spent to enable Ukraine to pay off its debt. Most European countries and, above all, the US, have debt problems of their own.