Why the Friedman article as to the Ukraine war, is wrong. i.e. was not about NATO, it is not about not able to stop fighting and it is not a proxy war
I got into an argument 2 days ago with a person who insisted that NATO created the Ukraine war, not Putin. Needless to state my contact with that person has been destroyed, but this is the aftermath of that discussion. FTR that person also thinks Trump was a semi acceptable/ passable POTUS: This article is a direct response to him as well as George Friedman whose article I will critique
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The American-Russian war was in certain ways distinct from the Russian-Ukrainian war. I have written before on this. Russia’s fear was that an American force on the Ukrainian border could attack Moscow, some 300 miles (480 kilometers) away. The Americans feared that the fall of Ukraine would bring Russian forces to the eastern line of NATO nations, restarting the Cold War. In this sense, the war has little to do with Ukraine, save that it has savaged the country, and is sliding toward a painful and dangerous cold war.
Looked at this way, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a move against the Americans. The American response was intended not only to block the move but also to open the possibility that Russia’s greatest fear may be realized: Ukrainian forces, backed by U.S. equipment, pushing right up to the most sensitive border in Russia. It may well be that neither side intended these actions, but neither could dismiss the other.
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Raving insanity. And I denounce this, as whole cloth fiction.
A. Putin single handedly reanimated NATO, at a time when the head of France denounced NATO as "brain dead", and the alliance was deemed not only by France and Germany as a walking corpse, but also RUSSIA never took it seriously either. Want proof ?
RUSSIA has stripped its military defenses via FINLAND, AFTER FINLAND JOINED NATO. I am sorry, but ....
B. Quote
Looked at this way, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a move against the Americans.
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NO, MR. Friedman, the Russian war was not against America. It was to recreate the Soviet buffer zone which existed in Europe through the 1980s
C. Mr. Friedman thinks of the entire war as a set of zero sum games
Why this is insane: Bucha was not done as a war against America. Kidnapping of Ukrainian children was done for racist reasons to eliminate Ukrainian identity, NOT as a war against America
D. quote
In December 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood in the middle of the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, delivering his annual address to the country’s Federal Assembly. Nine months removed from his formal annexation of Crimea, the Russian president unspooled a historical overview of Crimea’s supposed importance to the Russian body politic.
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UM, if that is true why is the Russian black sea fleet leaving Stevapovol ? In Crimea ?
The red line never existed. Russian fleet is leaving as well as countless Russian civilians
This is a fiction breaking down in real time
E. Mr. Friedman conveniently overlooks the massive Russian espionage apparatus in the USA, influencing the Freedom Caucus, and others. I.e. as in the sake of the Ukrainian NAZI meme largely created since 2014. I.e. the aggression in Ukraine and against American governance has been as one sided as it can get, and that is a fact: I remember Odessa before 2014 in a visit I made there as a guest of Dr. Michael Werby whom was pro Russian as well as the citizens of Odessa who often though themselves as almost Russian. I doubt that feeling exists today after months of missile attacks and worse
F. quote
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference has adopted a resolution on the immediate return of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant under Ukraine's full control, the Energy Ministry reported on Sept. 29.
The document calls on Russia to immediately withdraw all military and other unauthorized personnel from the plant's territory to ensure its safe and secure operation, according to the report.
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Again, in Friedmans narrative, this all is a sinister plot orchestrated by outsiders . Mr. Friedman can you at least ADMIT that the IAEA did what it did solely due to the nuclear power plant occupation and abuse as a threat against EUROPE ? NOT AMERICA or NATO in particular ?
This war is not a zero sum game. The heart of the Friedman narrative is a despicable tautology which implicitly absolves Russia of Genocide and of whole sale murder
The war is not OVER to the Kremlin as constituted NOW, ceases to exist.
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The War Is Over, but No One Knows How to Stop Fighting
By
-
October 3, 2023
It has been more than one and a half years since Russia launched its attack on Ukraine. The war has not gone as the Russians expected, unless they had planned for more than a year of taking casualties without being in a position to crush the Ukrainians. The Russians had to expect a short war in which they crushed the Ukrainian army and its will to resist. If they fell short, they knew that the Americans after a short time would surge weapons into Ukraine, risking a protracted conflict.
Ukraine has been defending its homeland, so morale is high. The Ukrainian mission was to force a Russian retreat across the border. Its first strategy relied on agility, employing relatively small units to strike at slow-moving Russian forces. But as the Russians drew into prepared defensive positions with heavy weapons, the Ukrainian strategy became less effective. The surge of U.S. and NATO weapons increased casualties on defensive positions as well as offensive ones.
The American-Russian war was in certain ways distinct from the Russian-Ukrainian war. I have written before on this. Russia’s fear was that an American force on the Ukrainian border could attack Moscow, some 300 miles (480 kilometers) away. The Americans feared that the fall of Ukraine would bring Russian forces to the eastern line of NATO nations, restarting the Cold War. In this sense, the war has little to do with Ukraine, save that it has savaged the country, and is sliding toward a painful and dangerous cold war.
Looked at this way, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a move against the Americans. The American response was intended not only to block the move but also to open the possibility that Russia’s greatest fear may be realized: Ukrainian forces, backed by U.S. equipment, pushing right up to the most sensitive border in Russia. It may well be that neither side intended these actions, but neither could dismiss the other.
As a result, the Russians moved into formidable defensive positions. They continued to launch offensive operations, but these lacked the power to achieve their ends. The true end became defensive. The Ukrainians attempted offensive operations, always holding back troops in the event of an unexpected Russian offensive. Both spoke of offenses and launched them, but held back power sufficient to maintain their own defenses. So, we have seen a sort of frozen war, in which the need to hold positions makes it impossible to commit enough force to achieve the initial goals. These types of wars become primarily political morasses, where both sides fear that any movement would have political consequences for the opening of peace talks.
Zelenskyy believed that if American intervention did not cause the Russians to abort, then it would at least allow Ukraine to counterattack on a vast scale. But the United States is engaged in a different conflict: keeping Russia away from NATO. It would provide sufficient force to keep the Russians at a distance but not enough to crush them.
Russia has kept the U.S. away from its border but little else. Ukraine has retained sovereignty over a good deal of the country. And the U.S. has made a Russian penetration beyond Ukraine highly unlikely.
The U.S. reached its goal, while Russia and Ukraine have not and will not. However, neither have they been crushed. Ukraine is now a divided country but enough of it is intact to claim victory, and Russia has pushed past its old border enough to claim a small victory. Both could claim humanitarian reasons for ending the war.
But now the dead creep. They gave their lives for nothing but the pretense of victory, as no rational person will think of the outcome as contempt for the dead. So having fought and defended for coming on two years, how the war ends is reasonably clear. How long will it take for the leaders to admit what is obvious? Everyone lost this war, and in due course so will the leaders. And that is what will delay the inevitable peace.
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Also
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Recommended by LinkedIn
Russia’s Crimean Red Line Has Been Erased
Claims about the territory’s spiritual status have been revealed to be fiction.
By Casey Michel, head of the Human Rights Foundation's Combating Kleptocracy Program and author of American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.
OCTOBER 4, 2023, 4:46 AM
In December 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood in the middle of the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, delivering his annual address to the country’s Federal Assembly. Nine months removed from his formal annexation of Crimea, the Russian president unspooled a historical overview of Crimea’s supposed importance to the Russian body politic.
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It was also not about Crimea, FTR
Also
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Mass still matters: What the US military should learn from Ukraine
Russia’s war against Ukraine is a system-transforming conflict that is reconfiguring the geostrategic picture in Europe and in Asia. It is also fueling a debate in the US defense policy community about how to structure and posture US forces. For the United States and its NATO allies, there are big lessons from this war that are already circulating through the policy bloodstream, but those lessons are encountering serious headwinds generated by what has been establishment thinking over the past three decades. Recent years of “scheduled wars,” fought on the US timeline with cross-domain control and unchallenged logistics, have changed expectations of what the US military would need when it comes to readiness levels and equipment to fight current and future wars.
The overarching lesson from the unfolding war in Ukraine is simply the scale of what’s required to fight a modern state-on-state war. No Western military has prepared for such levels of weapons and munitions consumption and force attrition. No NATO ally today—save for the United States—has the armor or munitions stocks that could last longer than a few weeks or months at best on Ukraine-like battlefields. This war has brought front and center the enduring centrality of mass in modern conventional warfare with a near-peer adversary. It should also put paid to the obsession with precision strikes that has dominated the US defense acquisition culture in recent years.
This war has brought into focus an enduring truth in warfare: In a state-on-state conflict, mass trumps precision. The impact of mass is immediate and registers at the point of contact, while precision strikes on enemy forces concentrated in the rear, on ammo depots, or on logistical chains will only register over time, perhaps after the decision on the battlefield has already been reached. True, space can compensate for mass to an extent, but none of NATO’s flank countries has the advantage of geography to plan accordingly in the event of a Russian invasion, nor would the Indo-Pacific region offer favorable space in terms of terrain should China decide to invade Taiwan.
When it comes to numbers, you need to match or, better still, outmatch what your enemy can field.
The United States needs to embrace the old principles of mass and redundancies that paved the way to victory in World War II and allowed it to successfully deter and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The war in Ukraine continues to show that one’s military needs mass to counter the adversary’s mass—a reality that has been all but absent from US thinking about the nature of warfare since the end of the Cold War. Since the early 1990s, a fundamental structural change took place in US military thinking about its force structure, especially the US Army. The Army acquired an “Air Force mindset,” whereby ever-greater technological sophistication sought to compensate for reductions in numbers, in effect altering what used to be the bread and butter of the American way of war.
The war in Ukraine has shown that one needs mass to counter mass. When it comes to numbers, you need to match or, better still, outmatch what your enemy can field. During World War II, for example, Germany had tanks that were in many ways superior to US tanks in design, but in the end those Tigers and Panthers were outmatched by the sheer number of the Shermans the United States could field.
There is, then, something to be said for old-fashioned systems in a future conventional combat against a near-peer adversary. While technology gives Western forces an edge, that edge will only go so far when confronted with sheer numbers. If NATO ends up at war with Russia or if the United States and its allies in Asia end up in a war with China, then the decisive factor may be manpower and production elasticity when it comes to weapons and munitions. In a protracted conflict, the decisive factor could be the capacity to reconstitute forces—both personnel and equipment—to compensate for those that have been attritted on the battlefield. And here an excessive fascination with ever more complex systems could play against the United States. It will need to replenish losses faster than its adversary, which is likely to be producing simpler and cheaper systems.
While technology gives Western forces an edge, that edge will only go so far when confronted with sheer numbers.
The principle of mass applies to personnel, too. The United States and its allies also should question if the current model is well suited to generating large standing armies of the kind needed should they be pulled into a major conventional war with Russia or China, or both.
There is also a larger geostrategic dimension that ought to factor how to structure and posture US and NATO forces in Europe, especially along the eastern flank. The entry of Finland and (soon) Sweden into NATO has redefined the geostrategic environment in Europe, shifting the center of gravity in NATO into Central and Northeastern Europe. Still, when it comes to fielding large forces, only two countries along the Nordic-Baltic-Black Sea “intermarium” corridor command the requisite populations to do so. One of them—Poland—is a NATO ally, while the other—Ukraine—aspires to become one. Other countries along this corridor lack the populations needed to field large armies. While Finland, with its system of territorial defense and military training, can field a force of some 280,000 in an emergency, its small population of 5.5 million doesn’t augur well for long-term sustainment.
This is one more reason why bringing Ukraine into NATO is not just about reaffirming the core values the Alliance is built on; rather, it is first and foremost about the fundamentals of power and mass that will be needed to build an effective deterrent posture against future Russian aggression. Simply put, Poland and Ukraine—once the latter has been brought into the Alliance—will be the core of NATO’s restructured deterrent and defense posture along the eastern flank. The United States should start by permanently stationing at a minimum three Brigade Combat Teams—two in Poland, another in the Baltic States—while continuing to provide the nuclear umbrella and high-end enablers. The Scandinavians, Finns, Balts, and Romanians could then complete the wall of steel, while allies further west, especially Germany, could provide the requisite depth and sustainment. Reconfiguring NATO’s eastern flank in this way would make any effort by Russia to invade further into Europe an impossible proposition.
The West is facing a revanchist Russian state intent on relitigating the outcome of the Cold War and restoring its imperial sphere of influence. Russia has already effectively reabsorbed Belarus and has its sights firmly set on Ukraine—and possibly beyond. Hence, the conflict in Ukraine carries with it a high risk of horizontal escalation that could spark a wider war in Europe. If the United States and NATO go back to the basics of permanent forward basing and mass, Russia will be deterred. And if Russian President Vladimir Putin or his successor dares to cross the line, such an incursion by Russia would be decisively defeated.
Andrew A. Michta is the director of the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
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Also
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Energy Ministry: IAEA demands Russia immediately leave Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant
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by Dinara Khalilova andThe Kyiv Independent news deskSeptember 29, 2023 11:59 AM2 min read
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The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference has adopted a resolution on the immediate return of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant under Ukraine's full control, the Energy Ministry reported on Sept. 29.
The document calls on Russia to immediately withdraw all military and other unauthorized personnel from the plant's territory to ensure its safe and secure operation, according to the report.
Sixty-nine countries supported the resolution, proposed by Canada, Finland, and Costa Rica, during the Conference's 67th session, the ministry wrote.
The IAEA hasn't yet reported on the resolution's adoption.
"We are grateful to each country for their vote in support of compliance with the guarantees of nuclear and radiation safety. Acceptance of Ukraine to the IAEA's Board of Governors, as well as the adoption of a resolution calling for the return of the Zaporizhzhia plant to the control of Ukraine, is proof that the civilized world is with us," said Ukraine's Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko.
A day before, the UN nuclear watchdog said that Ukraine has been elected to serve on its Board of Governors — one of the two policy-making bodies of the IAEA, along with the annual General Conference of IAEA Member States.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, located in Enerhodar, has been under Russian control since the initial phase of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March last year.
Russian forces have been using the nuclear power plant as a military base to launch attacks against Ukrainian-controlled territory.
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Andrew Beckwith,. PhD
Experienced Technology Executive.
1yTotally agree. Here is a point for our Congressional leaders to consider as some Republicans and others want to cease funding the war in Ukraine. The U.S. spends over $12 Billion dollars supporting the UN. This is a waste of monies for an organization that has no teeth or guts to condemn Russia and it's illegal invasion of Ukraine Also since the security council with Russia and China on it will never support western sanctions, or positions etc. nothing will ever be done by the UN. Hey Congress, take the $12 billion and use it to fund the support for Ukraine. These folks don't seem to understand re-allocation of funds.
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1yA very fine read. Well said. (That moment when they start using your memes in articles!)
Helping translation companies to automate business and project management | ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕥𝕖𝕞𝕠𝕤 𝕋𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕤𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝔹𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕟𝕖𝕤𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕟𝕒𝕘𝕖𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥 𝕊𝕪𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕞
1yWell, tell him that if someone robs him next time tell him that it's because the police were getting too close and provoked the robber, he felt insecure. Or maybe that person is just a troll and his purpose was just to start the discussion and legalise it.