Russia’s asymmetric response

Russia’s asymmetric response to latest announced plans of U.S. and NATO for sending more devastating military hardware to Ukraine

Each time over the past 18 months that it appeared the Ukraine war was approaching a finale amounting to Kiev’s defeat and capitulation we have been surprised by yet another U.S. initiated escalation that changes the nature of the conflict and promises a new and drawn-out stage of fighting.

Did the Ukrainian counter-offensive which began on 4 June fail?  An increasing number of Western mainstream media including CNN have published reports acknowledging it is a failure. In Washington, the finger pointing game over who ‘lost Ukraine’ has begun among the country’s most determined backers. 

Europe is a backwater in more than one dimension. Not everyone here has gotten the word about Ukraine’s losses in two months of desperate attacks on Russian defensive positions across the entire 1,000 km front. Last night I watched a round-table discussion of the war on French television in which not a single panelist had been told that the game is up in Ukraine. These smirky amateurs, mostly garden variety journalists, were discussing the fighting around one or another Ukrainian town on the front line whose name they could barely pronounce, all convinced that the Ukrainian forces had the upper hand and were on their way to breaching the Russian defenses, about to reach the less awesome second line of defense, and were surely to make it through to the Sea of Azov, thereby achieving the basic objective of the entire operation – cutting the Russian supply lines and breaking the back of Russian resistance.  The whole time these commentators smiled broadly as if the war were just a video game.

But to hell with the French propagandists. In the German media, mainstream journalists have been seeding the discussion of the war with news about Ukraine’s setbacks and the improbability of their accomplishing anything other than self-destruction as the fighting continues.  Simultaneously with the announcement that Germany is about to supply long range reconnaissance drones to Kiev, Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for “continuation” of peace negotiations.  It is curious that no one told him there are no peace negotiations going on today. But the main point is that victory on the battlefield seems to have vanished from the Berlin discourse.

Nonetheless, the United States and Britain announce day after day new appropriations for delivery of military hardware of the most devastating sort to Ukraine. Abrams tanks are on the way. Longer range strike missiles with a range up to 500 km may soon be shipped. Biden in the past week inserted authorization for another 14 billion dollars in military supplies into a bill for provision of aid to victims of natural disasters, meaning the present disaster in Hawaii and elsewhere in the States. The tactic was meant to overcome rising Republican opposition to giving Ukraine one more cent of aid should the aid have been in a separate bill dedicated to the war effort.  The drumbeats for provision of F16s to Ukraine continue and there is talk of preparing new Ukrainian troops for a renewed counter-offensive in 2024.

So what are the Russians doing about the new arms on the way to Ukraine?

An article posted in Russian social media and carried by the number one news portal, Dzen, formerly a subsidiary of Yandex, gives us a good insight into Russian countermeasures that otherwise are buried in general daily Western reporting on the war. We hear about air raid alerts across Ukraine which took place a day ago but there is no explanation. We hear about a Russian missile strike that killed a young Ukrainian family but are told it is just part of the Russian attacks on civilians.

The article posted on “Интересная жизнь с Vera Star” makes sense of it all.

See https://dzen.ru/a/ZNjKGWUcVjdoVNmI

First, those air raid sirens across the whole of Ukraine were related to the systematic Russian bombardment of all still functional Ukrainian airports from which their air force’s SU-24 and SU-27 can operate. These are the aircraft that are capable of carrying and firing the Storm Shadow and other long range missiles that have been supplied by Britain and France, and which may carry German missiles, if Berlin decides to proceed with its previous offer of such materiel.

Second, we are told that the Russians have just used Kinzhal hypersonic missiles to destroy the railway tunnels passing under the Carpathians which have been the main supply route of Western military hardware arriving from Poland and Romania. For a long time, there was discussion in the Russian senior military command over whether it was permissible to attack this ostensibly civilian infrastructure.  However, the decision was taken to do so in light of the latest U.S. and NATO plans to raise the bar in what attack equipment they are providing to Ukraine. As the Russians argue, civilian infrastructure that is being used to serve military objectives automatically becomes a legal target for them.

By Russian calculations, they have now nullified the latest Western plans to prolong the war.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023