Here's a healthy dose of two two familiar tweeters to tide us over until the lockout is lifted.
For my good friend,
@Right_in_Virginia . Just want you to know that I love you and sincerely care about you. Enjoy.
CLINT EHRLICH & RWA: THE WAR DIALOGUES
By Clint Ehrlich and Russians With Attitude — 6 hours agoANALYSTS CLINT EHRLICH AND RUSSIANS WITH ATTITUDE DISCUSS THE WAR IN UKRAINE, PART IClint Ehrlich: When Russia invaded, I notoriously predicted a “Sputnik moment”. I was confident that Russia’s modernized military would win a Gulf War-style victory against Ukraine. I’ve caught a lot of deserved flak for that, but my belief was mirrored by the U.S. intelligence community, which projected that Kiev could fall within the first 72 hours of a Russian invasion, as the Ukrainian military surrendered en masse. Whether the Kremlin itself also planned for a swift victory in Ukraine is of more than academic interest. It may have a significant effect on the course of the war, since if Russia did not anticipate prolonged combat, it may have underestimated the strategic consequences of Western sanctions.
Do you believe that the Kremlin itself was caught off guard by the tenacity of Ukrainian resistance? Or was that an error more characteristic of Western analysts like myself, who arguably overlooked that military courage against invaders is a shared trait among the Ukrainian and Russian people?
RWA: The idea that Ukraine would fall within a week was based on two misconceptions. The first one is mistaking the Armed Forces of Ukraine of 2022 for those of 2014. In 2014, Ukrainian forces in Crimea either changed sides or laid down their arms with no resistance, and even before the (extremely limited) Russian intervention the Donbass militias, who at that point were made up mostly of middle-aged veterans and volunteers, managed to rout vastly superior Ukrainian army units. The Ukrainian government admitted that at that point they had no more than ~5000 combat-ready soldiers in the standing army. The AFU of 2022, however, are a huge force (the largest in Europe, aside from Russia) in a militarized society, juiced up on eight years of NATO supplies and training, and, of course, their own efforts. The regular army is supported by a vast network of paramilitary structures in every city in the east of the country, including the formal integration of highly motivated ideological formations made up of political extremists. The reasons why people would assume that the Ukrainian army hasn’t changed are either ignorance or general slavophobia, assuming they can’t build a formidable army. A lot of people in the West believed this, and, to a smaller degree, in Russia, too.
The second reason why so many people seemed to expect a swift Russian victory is that they judged the possible Russian performance based on the experiences of the last Western-led wars. I still maintain that if Russia had unleashed a hellish Shock & Awe campaign in Ukraine, the AFU would have disintegrated on impact, which is also exactly what it looked like in the first 12 hours of the war. Later we learned that the Armed Forces of Russia executed fewer missile and airstrikes in a month than the US did in a few days in Iraq. In living memory, no Western nation has fought a war “on its own soil”, or at least in a location where the lives of the local population mattered to them. They do not understand why Russia wouldn’t just flatten every city in Eastern Ukraine. The official (and unofficial) Russian position is that the Russian-Ukrainian population of these territories is held hostage by an irrational nationalist regime in Kiev. Of course, within such a paradigm it doesn’t make much sense to reduce population centers to rubble. Still, the Ukrainian Navy ceased to exist as a strategic force on day 1 of the war and most of the Ukrainian air force capabilities were also, if not destroyed, then severely limited.
I do, however, believe that there were also mistakes in the Russian General Staff regarding the expectation of mass surrenders. Either these were based on the outdated Crimean experience, or on bad intelligence. I tend to think it was the latter, as Russian intelligence seems to have suffered several huge failures, certainly more than the military. In Russian culture, Ukrainians, or Malorussians, are traditionally viewed as extremely stubborn. This is a known quantity, so to speak. You know, back in 2015 there was a joke about the war: Donbass Militiaman Ivan shouts at Ukrainian soldier Taras, “Give up, you’re surrounded!”, and Taras answers “Russians don’t surrender!”. Fighting Slavs is hard.
Clint Ehrlich: I had argued pre-invasion that the most likely scenario was a limited Russian offensive to seize the Donbas and create a land bridge to Crimea. That now seems to be Russia’s primary goal, but in the early days of the war it appeared that the Russian military was attempting to surround Kiev. There are now commentators, such as Scott Ritter and Niccolò Soldo, who insist that the forces deployed around Kiev were simply a feint to tie down the Ukrainian military while Russian and DNR/LNR forces made progress in the East. They herald this as a brilliant example of “maneuver warfare.” . . .
https://im1776.com/2022/05/03/the-war-dialogues/
