A sideways look at Ukraine war news
Chris Johns
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I write a (short) daily post for Powerscourt, a Strategic Communications company, based in London and Dublin. The idea is to summarise the news flow around the war in Ukraine - not so much the news that makes the front pages but more the stuff that we find interesting/relevant. News that may have not attracted the attention it deserves. Anyone interested in receiving the short email on a daily basis is welcome to contact Powerscourt here: insights@powerscourt-group.com.
Tuesday May 2nd
The Wagner mercenary group is widely thought to be active in Sudan, as well as leading the months long assault on Bakhmut. Its boss, Yevgeny Prighozin, has once again exposed tensions between his ‘Private Military Company’ and with the regular Russian Army. Unless he gets more supplies of ammunition from the Kremlin, Prighozin hinted over the weekend that he could withdraw from the Ukrainian front line to focus on easier conflicts in Africa and elsewhere. Bloomberg quotes Prigozhin saying Wagner units will stay in Bakhmut until the last bullet, “but these bullets are left not for weeks, but for days”. The focus on ammunition shortages begs the obvious question: how many men does he have left? Recent recruitment campaigns by Wagner have mentioned employment opportunities in both Ukraine and Africa.
American sources say 20,000 Russians have died and 80,000 injured in just the last five months. Most of those casualties occurred in Bakhmut and at least half of them were members of Wagner. Prigozhin has claimed 94 casualties. The White House security official John Kirby stated the Russian casualty rate in Bakhmut is higher than the one experienced by the US in the World War 2 battle for Guadalcanal, the first of America’s war in the Pacific. Military historians are comparing the losses of life with Waterloo, the Battle of the Bulge and Ypres. Ukraine still seems to be in control of a small part of Bakhmut.
One of the reasons why Ukraine is able to shoot down a high proportion of incoming Russian cruise missiles is the reporting of open-source military bloggers. In the most recent wave of attacks, as soon as the planes carrying the missiles were in the air, monitors were posting on various websites the precise location of the aircraft and their likely payloads and targets. Those posts appeared six hours before air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv. This from someone going by the name Olga Honcharenko is but one example: “Morse frequencies been comms checked with V tuning… 3 Tu-95Ms Bear-H took off from Olenya airbase. Possibly another combat mission with cruise missiles launching tonight”.
Wednesday May 3rd
An upcoming BRICS summit in S. Africa raises the intriguing possibility that Vladimir Putin could travel abroad. However, the authorities in Pretoria have acknowledged that they would be obliged to arrest Putin under the terms of the arrest warrant issued last March by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The S. Africans are said to have suggested to Putin that a zoom call might be the better option for the August summit.
Yet another US arms package for Ukraine is to be announced as soon as today, reports Al Jazeera. The munitions, worth $300 million, will for the first time include short-range, air-launched rockets.
The UK’s Ministry of Defence reckons that Russia has abandoned its attempts to destroy Ukraine’s civilian power infrastructure. Russia’s recent use of air launched cruise missiles was the first such attack in 50 days. Fewer missiles than usual were fired, consistent with suggestions that Russia is running out of ALCMs. Also different were the targets: Russia is now going after military logistics rather than Ukraine’s power grid.The MoD notes reports that Russia’s Deputy Defence Minister has been sacked, a reflection of the supply issues facing the Kremlin. Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev was in charge of logistics and had been in post for eight months.
The BBC and others claim to have found evidence of Russian navy ships that were near to the sites of underwater gas pipeline explosions that took place last summer. Two Nordstream pipelines carrying Russian gas to Europe were knocked out. The Russian ships had their usual transponders shut down but intercepts have been made of their radio signals back to their Russian bases. Various Scandinavian news agencies have previously reported Russian ships mapping out wind farms in the North Sea. In more recent reports, those agencies have identified ships operating near the gas pipelines in the run up to the explosions.
Thursday May 4th
Russia’s Ambassador to the US reacted angrily to suggestions that a drone attack on the Kremlin was a ‘false flag’ operation, designed to give Moscow an excuse to escalate the war. He almost sounded hurt when he compared US silence over the attack to Putin’s expressions of solidarity with the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Plenty of analysts have suggested that a false flag would be pointless, given that Russia doesn’t need an excuse to go to war in Ukraine and the only spare military capacity it has would involve deployment of nuclear weapons. Your correspondent does not find this chain of reasoning reassuring.
By contrast, the Institute for the Study of War says definitively it was a false flag operation. Moscow’s air defences have been significantly tightened in recent months such that any drones that get near the Kremlin must have been launched from within the city. The drones would have had to penetrate ‘multiple air defence layers’ before providing the perfect photo opportunity as they were shot down. The ISW notes Moscow’s immediate, coherent and well-coordinated response, consistent with it being a planned operation. Russia needs to up its military resources devoted to the war which, says the ISW, was the point of the false flag. Russia’s population is being softened up for a mass mobilisation. As we approach the all-important May 9th Victory Day celebrations, Putin will reframe the ‘special military operation’ as an existential struggle. Viewers of Moscow’s nightly news programs will not be surprised.
The head of the Wagner mercenary group says Ukraine’s counter offensive has begun, while President Zelenskiy said it will begin ‘soon’. Residents of Kherson, close to the front line, have been informed of a 58-hour weekend curfew, leading many of them to speculate that something big is being planned.
Friday May 5th
One of the most notable military developments during the war has been an acceleration of drone technology. Ukraine has a lot of home produced drones as well as access to specialist kit from countries like Turkey. Russia also produces its own missiles but has increasingly come to rely on the Iranian manufactured ‘kamikaze’ Shahed-136, first used last September, also called Geranium 2 by Moscow. The US is reported to have supplied 700 of its own kamikaze drones, the Switchblade, although details are sketchy about how many have been used by Ukraine.
Ukraine says it shot down 18 out of 24 Russian drones earlier today, repeating a pattern seen over the past week, after a prolonged lull in such attacks. Ukraine also had to shoot down one of its own drones, the reason being ground operatives had lost control of the missile. Just what a Ukrainian drone was doing flying over Kyiv was left unexplained.
The US Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, yesterday stated that Russian military capacity has been degraded to the point where they cannot now mount a serious or effective offensive. That, of course, could change with time. And the Director added that Putin’s strategy is to buy time, particularly until the West begins to get bored with supporting Ukraine. Conviction levels about the decadence of the West run high in the Kremlin.
Ms Haines also touched on a topic currently causing much consternation in financial markets: the possibility of a U.S. government debt default. The Federal government has been in ‘special measures’ since January, essentially searching for money down the back of a sofa. The Treasury Secretary said this week that those measures could reach their end on June 1st, at which time the US may have to stop servicing its debts. This would have unknown, but almost certainly huge, consequences. Avril Haines said both Russia and China are developing strategies designed to take maximum advantage of such an outcome.