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Ukraine: What’s Happening, What Might Be Next
This post is intended to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive, as for instance BDB’s poll on support for weapons/troops for Ukraine.
What’s Happened
The MSM has been saturated with news of a hurricane that might be blamed on Republicans somehow, and a pipeline explosion that might be blamed on anyone, or sheer incompetence, depending on your favorite theory. So the operational details of what’s been happening in Ukraine after the big breakthrough East of Kharkiv may have disappeared unless you’ve been specifically tracking them (I have). So, a quick recap of the last couple of weeks:
Ukraine went into a short operational pause in the Kharkiv / north Luhansk area, presumably to resupply and reorganize.
Russia kept banging away on the Donetsk front, making little progress and continuing to lose troops and equipment.
Ukraine kept banging away in the Kherson area west of Dnipro, also making little apparent progress and expending a lot of HIMARS and other ammo blowing up bridges and Russian supply dumps and headquarters.
Things started moving quickly again last week. In the northeast, the Ukrainians managed to surround the town of Lyman, a rail and road hub. There were between 500 and 5,000 Russians and proxy troops trapped there, depending on who you believe. Some or most of the Russians may have made it out, losing a lot of equipment. The final retreat, mostly by LPR proxy troops, apparently became a slaughter by Ukrainian artillery, mines, and light recon forces. There’s plenty of video evidence of the latter out there, don’t go looking unless you’re ready for it. I’ll drop a link to a text-only report by an American volunteer in one of the recon teams, but you still don’t want to read it near meal or bedtime.
After the Lyman episode, the Russian front north of there is being pushed back daily. Some of this may be planned/controlled withdrawal, some seems to be a collapse. The Ukrainians now appear to control the important road between the towns of Svatove and Kreminna in Luhansk oblast.
Over the weekend, the Kherson front suddenly erupted. The Ukrainians punched in between several towns in the northeast of the oblast, west of a large reservoir on Dnipro, and have pushed the Russians back some tens of kilometers. The advance appears to be continuing. As of today, the Russians abandoned another portion of that front (Davydiv Brid) to avoid a possible envelopment. Again, this appears to be some combination of collapse and planned withdrawal.
Both of these fronts are moving daily, best followed in real time. A sampling of reporting sites: Most speculative, kinda conservative, really conservative. These are all more-or-less the Ukrainian view. For Russian side reports, try here.
Some of the ‘mobiks’ from the chaotic Russian mobilization have appeared at the front. Mobik prisoners have been taken, and the dead recovered. There are video reports and call intercepts reporting mobiks being dropped off along the front with little or no supplies or communications.
What Might Happen
A pattern of Ukrainian operations is emerging. They are pushing recon/sabotage teams in between Russian-occupied towns and strongpoints, followed by light mechanized forces heavily armed with anti-armor weapons and backed with artillery and rocket fire. These threaten to envelop a major position, leading the Russians to fall back to protect their flanks, or potentially become surrounded. For what it looks like from the POV of the scouts, this series of reports from the same volunteer I linked above gives a sample.
The UA is managing this because the Russians can no longer man a continuous line at the front. This implies that the larger numbers of casualty reports for Russia are credible. It’s also visible that some of Russia’s most elite formations have been shredded (‘heavily degraded’ is apparently the term of art) in the process. It also makes some ‘sense’ of the reports of untrained mobiks being dropped off with little support along the front. These poor [CoC] are being used as human trip wires to slow down the penetration by Ukrainian scouts and light forces.
The Russians left the mobilization too late to assemble a credible, trained, and equipped reserve force. They are being used as cannon fodder to delay Ukraine. Local Russian reserves have apparently been committed and defeated in Kharkiv/Luhansk and Kherson. This suggests Ukraine can continue to advance.
On the other hand, the fall mud season (rasputitsa) is beginning, which will slow everything down. Recent videos have shown muddy but still firm secondary roads in the north (Kharkiv/Luhansk), but there’s been enough rain that it’s likely armor would now bog down off-road. Roads in the south (Kherson) appear to be dry still.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Ukrainian attempt to punch much deeper into Luhansk, probably towards the key logistics center of Starobilsk, before the mud really sets in.
There are recurrent rumors of Ukraine preparing a third offensive, this one to punch South towards Melitopol and then Crimea. I haven’t seen any actual evidence of such, including from those who are buying up satellite photos. And it’s just what I’d spread around if I were the Ukrainians, to convince the Russians to keep reserves there while the other fronts collapse. But I could be wrong…
Published in Foreign Policy
Yeah, that was my immediate reaction as well. But then I decided to explore the thought process behind such a stupendous statement through further dialogue. It has been … interesting.
For interest’s sake, where do you source your Ukraine/Russia news?
Good grief, what a sophomoric caricature of a complex geopolitical situation that is just a couple of miscalculations on the part of the major players from turning into a situation fraught with global peril.
PS: The Klan hoods are an especially grotesque touch, I must say.
Don’t you think sophomoric is just a little too complimentary?
Insofar as Elon musk’s statement goes it’s an accurate portrayal of the situation. For a complete historical analysis. no.
A more accurate meme:
There used to be Poles, especially in Silesia, who didn’t care very much whether they were ruled by Germans and had to use their language in schools, etc. They went along with whatever would lead to a better life for their children. Polish nationalists found this to be a frustrating situation. Harsh German rule during wartime tended to clarify the situation and remove these ambiguities.
No one factor is ever a sufficient explanation in political affairs.
Very good question.
Maybe she’ll stay there.
I suspect she would be more at-home in Russia.
What might be next:
Failure to support the War might get your accounts locked and your assets confiscated.
Remember when dissent was patriotic? I remember.
She’s just heading to Ukraine to get her share of the freshly laundered billions.
Silesia doesn’t lend itself to your point in the least. Its multi-ethnic inhabitants found themselves “belonging” to a bewildering number of “masters” with a frequency that puts to shame that of Sicily’s. A Silesian village/town would find itself within the borders of whatever qualified as “Poland” at the time one year, then part of Prussia, or perhaps Czechia, or Austria, then back to “Poland”, then Germany, etc.. Asking a Silesian what nation he formally belonged to would yield a different answer depending on when you chose to freeze-frame the march of the region’s history. It’s therefore no wonder that lots of Silesians wouldn’t have cared much about who ruled them, just as long as they and their family could go about their daily lives and such.
To counter the “Nationalism is a sufficient explanation”, you actually need an example involving people to whom the concept of Nationalism matters. Silesia isn’t such an example.
GPentelie (View Comment):
The fate of Silesia was settled by Stalin’s greed-after he completely looted it, he gave it to Poland (after ethnically cleansing out all the Germans). Putin has similar plans for much of the Ukraine- loot it & give it to a satellite state under his boot.
I think you got mixed up and are arguing my point. What you’re telling us is that nationalism is a sufficient explanation except where and when it isn’t a sufficient explanation, which is pretty much the same as saying nationalism is not a sufficient explanation.
The fact that villages of one nationality didn’t find themselves within a national state to match their nationality was a commonplace in central and eastern Europe. Its origin goes back to a time when the nobility didn’t see itself as having anything in common with villagers, so you could have German nobles who had Polish peasants working their land, as well as Polish nobles having German peasants working their land, or Polish nobles with Ukrainian peasants, and on and on. Wars and conquests would change borders, and perhaps change the composition and/or identity of nobles, but left the villagers and their identities untouched. It was during the 19th century nationalism that you see the various classes consciously and deliberately trying to
forgetforge a common nationalist identity that crosses class boundaries.Silesia is a more extreme case and a good one to illustrate the points of how nationalism developed (or had trouble developing, which helps clarify what nationalism is in comparison to other factors involving national identity and state formation).
Polish Silesian immigrants to Texas in the 1850s had no trouble knowing they were Polish and not German. Some of them came on the same boat with German Silesian immigrants. There was apparently no great animosity among them. They went their separate ways in America, and to this day are well aware of their separate heritages. However, the way the story came to be told is that the Poles came to get away from oppressive German landlords. There is probably some truth to that, but the story is now told in nationalistic conceptual terms that weren’t so well developed at the time their ancestors came.
Nationalism is not a pre-existing thing; it develops in response to other forces that make a common national identity within a national state desirable. Some of those forces include the type of government that may be seen as a protector or a threat.
Some of this goes way back before the days of nationalism, but it’s commonly stated that in ancient times, the Greeks who settled in places in the Mediterranean other than Greece were more Greek than the Greeks back home. For different reasons some of the early English who came to rule Ireland in a few generations became more Irish than the Irish.
The development of a separate Ukrainian national identity has been an on-again, off-again process over the last few centuries. By the end of the days of the Soviet Union the process had been somewhat unwound — the Soviets did have some success in promoting a Soviet national identity, though they couldn’t always help themselves in mooshing together the concepts of a Russian identity and a Soviet identity. (Serhii Plokhy has done some good writing on this topic.) But by the end of the Soviet period the Ukrainians still had a much more developed national identity than Belarusians ever had. Still, it wasn’t as strong as, say, Polish identity. Putin, with his style and form of government, has done a lot to clarify for Ukrainians who were still ambiguous about it that they are Ukrainians and not Russians.
Late edit: “forge,” not “forget.” Each time I type that word I have to go back and erase the “t” that my fingers insist on typing.
No, I’m saying that nationalism is a sufficient explanation in cases where the concept of nationalism has currency among the population in question. Silesia, for obvious reasons related to its history, isn’t one of them.
And yet nationalism has been an important issue in Silesia. What currency has to do with it, in any sense of the word, I don’t know.
Synonyms for currency: relevance, importance, influence, import…
If the people in a region never thought of themselves as any particular nationality, why would you expect them to have any expectations or other strong feelings about it?
Thank you, “kedavis”. That’s exactly the meaning involved.
I have no idea.
Well, then lack of currency doesn’t apply to Silesia. Nationalism has played out differently in Silesia than elsewhere, but that’s the point.
Except lack of nationalism would not seem to be, itself, a form of nationalism.
No, it wouldn’t. But there has been no lack of nationalism in Silesia. Just because it has played out differently doesn’t mean it has been unimportant. Less important, probably, but that is the point.
Nationalism often becomes more important when factors other than nationalism are also in play. As in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Ukrainian nationalism wouldn’t be so strong except for Russian aggression and Russian corruption interfering with Ukrainian self-government. If Russia was an example of good government and prosperity, Ukrainian nationalism would be weaker.
Was there German and Polish nationalism in Silesia, based on language? Or at least those were the nationalisms that were pushed – don’t know how enthusiastic the locals were initially?
I don’t know if it’s correct to say “based on language.” The identities are a little more complicated than just language, but language is part of it. Polish nationalists were definitely protective of the use of the Polish language in education, and wanted all other Poles in Silesia to be equally militant about it.
Now that Silesia is a part of Poland, there are Silesians who want their version of Polish (which I think has more of a German influence in it) to be recognized as as language of its own.