Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[Sheilbh]

Ukraine being formally neutral, with American and Russian (and EU?) guarantees, would be a win win really. All the benefits of NATO without feeding the paranoia of NATO plotting against Russia.
But yeah. Can't see America wanting to touch that.

The had security guarantees from the US (and the UK) and Russia - they didn't matter in 2014 and they don't matter now. I don't think they will in the future. I don't think security guarantees are seen as credible in the way NATO (and maybe EU) membership is - in part, perhaps, because you give them to countries you're not willing to give the full-fat Article 5 protection.

[Syt]

The had security guarantees from the US (and the UK) and Russia - they didn't matter in 2014 and they don't matter now. I don't think they will in the future. I don't think security guarantees are seen as credible in the way NATO (and maybe EU) membership is - in part, perhaps, because you give them to countries you're not willing to give the full-fat Article 5 protection.

I think the Budapest Memorandum didn't have a component that would require the guarantors to use military action to enforce it?

[celedhring]

Oh FFS.

https://twitter.com/KevinRothrock/status/1501623178514374664

Vlad to break out the chemical weapons?

[Malthus]

The had security guarantees from the US (and the UK) and Russia - they didn't matter in 2014 and they don't matter now. I don't think they will in the future. I don't think security guarantees are seen as credible in the way NATO (and maybe EU) membership is - in part, perhaps, because you give them to countries you're not willing to give the full-fat Article 5 protection.

I think the Budapest Memorandum didn't have a component that would require the guarantors to use military action to enforce it?

Here's the text:

https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/Part/volume-3007-I-52241.pdf

It contains guarantees from the parties that they will not use force against Ukraine (obviously, Russia has ignored this); the only actual action to be taken is in the event Ukraine is attacked with nukes, in which case that action would be to consult the UN Security Council to seek action - a fairly worthless gesture, as Russia has a veto there.

The other action is a requirement for consultation.

It is nothing like an actual requirement to come to the aid of Ukraine if it is invaded.

The best view is that it acts as a legitimate cause for conflict if one of the guarantors breaks its commitments, but doesn't bind a guarantor to military action (except with UN approval in the event of a nuclear attack).

[crazy canuck]

Yeah I agree - and just on this, it's worth noting again that it Kherson. A regional capital of about 300,000 people - it's not even in the top 10 biggest Ukrainian cities. Right now, even aside from Kyiv, from what I can see Russia are trying to take a number of cities that are even bigger - Chernihiv, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and potentially an assault on Odessa.

I guess that's Putin's potetnial off ramp - if Russians manage to take some key cities and negotiates something along the lines they've proposed but otherwise leave Ukraine intact - before the city-fighting becomes too intense - that could potentially be declared a victory?

I think he needs at the very least Ukraine to cede Crimea and the two breakaway regions plus promise not to join NATO. Anything less than this is a defeat. But I can't see Ukraine yielding those now. Any Ukrainian leader signing that equals signing their own death warrants.

Agreed, Putin might try to declare victory, but Ukraine is not going to agree to those terms.

[Sheilbh]

I think the Budapest Memorandum didn't have a component that would require the guarantors to use military action to enforce it?

No - that's fair the actual obligations - aside from the guarantees - are mainly to raise it at the Security Council. Again that reflects the expectation that it wouldn't be one of those three countries taking aggressive action and they'd be the parties in effect guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty.

But guarantees, however tightly drafted, only matter if they're credible and believed to have the weight of US force behind them - in particular to Russia as a deterrent. That's why Article 5 matters. I'm still not sold on the idea these would be especially given the (correct) approach the US has taken in this crisis. A guarantee to a country has less weight than the core defence part of the American order in Europe.

[Berkut]

Any potential "deal" with Russia will be one of two things:

1. It will include some kind of credible, military threat that actually guarantee's Ukrainian sovereignty, or
2. It will not include a credible guarantee of Ukrainian sovereignty.

#2 is worthless to anyone but Russia, and that include Ukraine. If they accept #2, they might as well have not fought to begin with.

#1 is worthless to Russia. If Russia was ok with that, Russia would never have invaded to begin with, since that was the only credible thing that Russia had a problem with to start with.

[Sheilbh]

We heard the US assessment - which I think was public. This from a journalist speaking to European intelligence agencies:

Michael Weiss
@michaeldweiss
I spoke this afternoon to a senior European intelligence official. The picture shared about what's happening in Ukraine differs from U.S. government assessments, especially on Russian losses. So let me present (without commentary) what this source said:
"From our estimate, the KIA figure on the Russian side was anywhere from 7,000 to 9,000 a few days ago."
"Bad morale, lack of manpower" is a huge issue on the Russian side. "They're calling in reservists, offering money and contracts to people to go fight and, as you've seen, relying on conscripts."
"It's not a popular war in the Russian military from what we've seen. People are terrorized, threatened with lawsuits if they decline to fight."
Anti-armor missiles are "the superstars right now."
Ukraine still has "decent air defenses, especially short- to mid- range."
One reason why Russian fixed-wing aircraft are being shot down is that "cloudy weather is forcing them to fly at lower altitudes."
"Russia doesn't have the power to keep going like this for very long. Time isn't on their side, nor do they have a recipe for winning. They can't win hearts and minds, that's for sure."
In two weeks, Russia has used up "a lot of their precision-guided missiles, a valuable commodity in their arsenal."
"As long as the Western resupply channels remain open and Ukraine still fields a decent number of fighters, then they're OK."

[Berkut]

That lines up with my views.

This is not a conventional battle where you fight for a while and "win".

This is trying to control another country. All you need to do to prevent the agressor from winning is maintain a viable and credible military force. Ukraine needs a George Washington, not a George Patton.

As long as Ukraine has people willing to fight, the West can provide the material to do so, and there is no winning formula for Russia under that scenario.

They are fucked. Their only way to "win" was to break the will of Ukraine to fight, and they failed to do that.

They are not going to encircle multiple major cities. They don't have the troops to do so, nowhere near enough. They are as hell are not going to succeed at taking those cities. They don't have enough troops to do so, and their troops have nowhere near the morale necessary to do so even if they had more troops.

This isn't really good news though. It actually worries me greatly. Because desperate men do desperate things, and these men have access to chemical and nuclear weapons. When it sinks in that they cannot win conventionally, and Ukraine figures that out as well and refuses to offer them a face saving out, what will they do?

[PDH]

As I said in the "how will it end" thread, I believe there could be a military collapse on the part of the Russians.  Akin to 1918 with soldiers voting with their feet as it were.  Again, I wouldn't bet on it, but Russian soldiers have had enough before and done this - now they are more in touch with a version of events than other times. 

If it did happen, then all hell might break loose.

[Jacob]

I don't think nuclear weapons are all that likely for a variety of reasons. I do think massive artillery / rocket barrages to terrorize and level a city are potential options if Russia is able to get in position to do that... my question there is whether they're able to line that up.

[Barrister]

I don't think nuclear weapons are all that likely for a variety of reasons. I do think massive artillery / rocket barrages to terrorize and level a city are potential options if Russia is able to get in position to do that... my question there is whether they're able to line that up.

Putin is a creature of the USSR and KGB.  I think he knows the immense risks of going nuclear, so I doubt we see that happening.  Better question is chemical or biological weapons.  Soviets did use them in Afghanistan, and seemed to support Assad's use of them in Syria.

As for levelling cities... we're pretty much there now.  Some of the pics out of Kharkiv and Mariupol have been heartbreaking.

[viper37]

This isn't really good news though. It actually worries me greatly. Because desperate men do desperate things, and these men have access to chemical and nuclear weapons. When it sinks in that they cannot win conventionally, and Ukraine figures that out as well and refuses to offer them a face saving out, what will they do?

Someone above posted a link about the Russians declaring Ukraine was preparing a false flag operation with chemical weapons.

I think this is a real possibility, more so than nukes.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I can kind of understand all the back and forth about casualty counts. On one hand, one wants to assume if casualty counts are X, and the Russian military is Y, then enough weeks of X will reduce Y to some unsustainable level. That hasn't typically been the recipe for most wars. Most wars usually have points where a fighting force for whatever reason basically stops being an effective participant in the war. It could be a morale collapse; it could be they have been driven out of strategic points and have no easy means of continuing to fight because they no longer have logistical supply etc etc.

Truly modern war is highly mechanized. When something like say, the U.S. invasion of Iraq occurs--no one is marching in on foot, every single boot is mechanized. I actually remember narratives about the war at the time--things seemed to be going slow the first three weeks, no flashy victories, casualties were also fairly low. We were moving around the same amount of people in country as Russia is in Ukraine (we had like 500,000 in theater, but only a portion of that were part of the invasion.) However, what was happening in those three weeks was the U.S. military was making it so that Iraq could not function in a war as a modern military--the complete destruction of their entire logistical system, virtually every key strategic point other than the very large cities fell, within the first 7 hours the entire Iraqi anti-air and radar network was gone forever, and its air force essentially left the country.

What this did was rendered Iraqi units largely unable to maneuver against us. They could certainly defend wherever they were, but they couldn't mobilize to different areas--that is a serious strategic disadvantage. And the reason they couldn't mobilize to different areas isn't just because "marching is hard"--people marched armies around for thousands of years, it is because you physically can't march large military formations in a modern battlefield like that without mechanized support. You just become a hilariously easy to kill target of opportunity, without logistical support to sustain a mechanized advance, troop formations on foot would literally be a shooting gallery for attack helicopters and etc.

Then came the Battle of Baghdad. The simple reality is this battle could have taken months and resulted in high casualties for Americans. It didn't for basically one reason as I'll explain. Initial movements into Baghdad took the form of "Thunder Runs" where a brigade of infantry would literally roll through a section of the city, and find out just how much fight was there, a U.S. brigade is a pretty serious movement of firepower, and they encountered only light resistance. On one of the thunder runs the locals had fortified some things and it was thought resistance would be serious, but it wasn't, and that run actually ended up occupying all the government buildings in the area that would be the "Green Zone." Eventually resistance was light enough a force of U.S. troops declared that they would not be exiting the city, but would hold the central areas they had taken. We controlled major roads in and out of the center of the city. There were a few flare-ups of real battle--the battle to take control of the Jamhuriya Bridge was fiercely contested by Republican Guard, and they pushed the U.S. back briefly before eventually losing. If the ~45,000 Iraqi forces in the city had all fought that way, the Battle of Baghdad would be much more memorable in American history today because it would have been a relatively large loss of life and a long, brutal battle. Instead what ended happening is much of the Iraqi military started a process of "melting away" when the Americans took the center of the city, instead of forcing us to fight a brutal street by street clearing operation, they left. That was for morale reasons. It was not for any other reason.

That was largely the story of the collapse of the entirety of Saddam's military--low morale. The Iraqi Army had around 45,000 men defending Baghdad and it had around 2,000 killed.

Most modern wars have proceeded somewhat along this script, or they have devolved into brutal guerrilla wars or brutal urban sieges. There is no pretty answer for the latter two scenarios.

[Berkut]

I don't think nuclear weapons are all that likely for a variety of reasons. I do think massive artillery / rocket barrages to terrorize and level a city are potential options if Russia is able to get in position to do that... my question there is whether they're able to line that up.

Putin is a creature of the USSR and KGB.  I think he knows the immense risks of going nuclear, so I doubt we see that happening.  Better question is chemical or biological weapons.  Soviets did use them in Afghanistan, and seemed to support Assad's use of them in Syria.

As for levelling cities... we're pretty much there now.  Some of the pics out of Kharkiv and Mariupol have been heartbreaking.

I "doubt" it as well.

But my doubt is founded on a rational assessment of the pros and cons of taking such action.

If I am relying on the rational assessment of the pros and cons of taking actions, Russia would not have attached Ukraine in the first place. That was, from the start, a rationally dumb move.

It's like saying that Japan attacking the USA was not rational. OK. Yeah, it was not in the context of "Should Japan go to war with the United States over control over the Pacific Asian sphere?". The rational answer is obviously "Well, no. There is no way that is going to work".

But while that is true overall, each step that Japan took in the path that ended with them at war with the US *was* a rational, if sometimes risky, choice in deciding to go just a step further rather then give up their goals.

I don't think there is a rational "yes" answer to the question of "Should Putin use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine"?

But I suspect there are a bunch of rational, but risky steps from "Lets invade Ukraine! That seems like a good idea!" to "Lets resolve this by using this nuke...." that look a lot more rational in each particular step for a desperate authoritarian like Putin.

If it goes that way, btw, those "steps" will not be seen as a path that started after today, but rather before. We would be seen today as being on the middle of that path to nuclear exchange right now.