A sideways look at Ukraine war news

Chris Johns

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.

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Monday 6th Feb

Russia’s imminent offensive will attract lots of adjectives and epithets but ‘surprise’ will not be one of them. Ukrainian and Western officials offer press briefings on a daily basis, the most recent of which differ only in terms of the date of Russia’s next major assault. Opinion is split between the anniversary of the invasion, February 24th, or ‘in 10 days’ according to Ukrainian intelligence media briefings over the weekend. 

Putin is said to have ordered the complete capture of Donetsk and Luhansk ‘by March’. Expert opinion is agreed that he might like a renewed assault on Kyiv itself but doesn’t have the necessary resources. There is also broad agreement that there is no end to the war in sight and that Putin’s main strategy is aimed at achieving Western exhaustion, something that will take another year or two.

Having weaponised energy prices, it is often said that Putin has lost that particular battle. Oil prices have stabilised well below OPEC’s target of $100 per barrel and European natural gas prices are today trading 84% below their peak reached last summer. Nevertheless, UK gas consumers are being told that their bills will probably rise by another 40% in April. The vagaries of the UK’s energy markets are such that anybody can sound like an expert but most of what is said is nonsense, from pricing to pre-payment metering. The salient fact is that it is a highly regulated market suffering from a high degree of regulatory capture. And it isn’t the consumer who has done the capturing. That ‘another 40% rise is coming’ could provide the U.K. Chancellor with the only positive surprise of his upcoming budget, should he choose, contrary to expectations, to renew some or all of the government’s support for beleaguered households.

Zelensky said over the weekend that he has written to companies that support the Olympics, protesting about Russian involvement in next year’s games. It’s a smart tactic: hitting sponsorship and advertising revenues might just lead to the IOC discovering it does, after all, have an ethical backbone. 

Tuesday 7th Feb

The European Union’s ban on Russian diesel and other refined products came into force over the weekend. Sanctions of many kinds have been gradually ratcheted up since the war started with scant evidence that they are having significant effects. The New York Times today reports that Russian oil output volumes rose 2% in 2022 while oil export revenues were up 20% to $218 billion. Output held up because of a shift in shipments from the West to Asia. Russian oil exports to India, for example, are up sixteen fold over the past year. There are hints that sanctions might just be biting a touch harder over the last few weeks with analysts divided over just how big are the discounts that Russia has to offer to keep the oil flowing. Some suggest that the discounts recorded in oil sales to China, Turkey and India are illusory, with a lot of the revenues being pocketed by middlemen - who share their cash with Putin. At the end of the day the biggest impact on Russian revenues will remain the global oil price.

Al Jazeera today tries to analyse the puzzle that is Eastern Europe. Many of those countries have strong memories of Soviet occupation and are big supporters of sanctions against Russia. But not all. An opinion poll in Slovakia suggests a majority of Slovaks would welcome a Russian victory. Hungarians and Bulgarians, like Slovakia, are members of the EU and NATO and also have large pockets of supporters of Russia. A previous Bulgarian government had to hide from its citizens shipments of arms to Ukraine. Slovakia, notwithstanding Russia’s popularity, has been one of the biggest shipper of arms and other aid to Ukraine. But it has sided with Hungary in opposing sanctions on Russia.

These apparent contradictions are the result of failed economic development policies. Adoption of Western economic policies and EU membership have not led to widespread prosperity. Exploiting this disappointment,  Russian mischief and misinformation campaigns haven’t helped. It’s a new East-West rift with potentially profound consequences, not least for the EU. 

Wednesday 8th Feb

Today’s visit to the U.K. by Ukraine’s President Zelensky was announced a short while ago and, for obvious reasons, was shrouded in secrecy until the last minute. Zelensky’s meeting with Rishi Sunak and this afternoon’s address to Parliament will be part of a first visit to the U.K. since the war started. Guests on Russia’s nightly prime time current affairs show regularly call for London (along with Berlin and Washington D.C) to be attacked with nuclear weapons. Tonight’s show, transcribed as always by Julia Davis of Buzzfeed news, will not be for the faint-hearted.   

Zelensky will no doubt renew his calls for more arms, including fighter planes, as Russia continues to make incremental, but costly, progress in Eastern Ukraine. He will also probably repeat his request for Russian athletes to be banned from next year’s Paris Olympic Games. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hildago, yesterday reversed her previous stance on the issue and has now asked for no Russian delegation to take part. It’s not her call of course - that rests with the International Olympic Committee. The U.K. is trying to prod the IOC into a Russian ban and is lobbying around 30 other countries, hosting a virtual summit on the issue this coming Friday. 

It’s never been possible to provide verified numbers of war causalities. Both sides make claims that are inconsistent with each other. Valiant attempts at checks are performed, often using social media images, drone photos and other techniques. In another unverified, but notable, claim, Ukrainian authorities said that yesterday was the deadliest day of the war so far for Russian casualties. 1030 Russian soldiers were killed over the past 24 hours. It would be uncontroversial to say that Russia has lost more soldiers, perhaps as many as ten times, in a year in Ukraine than it did in its (failed) decade long war in Afghanistan. And perhaps 2-3 times the number of American soldiers killed in Vietnam.

Thursday 9th Feb

David Allen Green is a lawyer who also writes for the FT and other leading media outlets. Unusually for one of m’learned friends he also has quite a following as a legal blogger. It is always a cracking read. Yesterday in a quite brilliant piece on the three different types of advocacy (Green has been called to the bar and and is a qualified solicitor) he deconstructed Zelensky’s Westminster Hall speech. 

One type of persuasion is to simply tell your audience what they want hear. Make a positive case for what they were leaning towards doing anyway. Another type involves little positivity and merely warns of the consequences of not doing something. The third type of advocacy is the hardest: make your audience intellectually and emotionally uncomfortable with deciding against you. ‘The mark of a great advocate is not so much to get a person to agree, but to make it hard for them to disagree’. Green suggests Zelensky’s speech was a brilliant example of this third type of advocacy and, as a result, there is a good chance he will get his fighter planes.

Sam Coates of Sky News takes a similar view. “[Zelensy’s speech] was a cleverly constructive emotive peroration at the conclusion of one of the best pieces of oration that this generation of politicians will ever hear - reaching deep into the British psyche to mount an appeal for practical support, empathy and engagement.” Coates couldn’t resist a dig at Rishi Sunak, suggesting that the PM’s lack of communication skills were on visible display. Standing next to the ‘best orator on the planet’ I guess most of us would be shown in a similar light.

Another Sky correspondent, Deborah Haynes, pours a little cold water on the idea that soaring rhetoric will mean Britain soon supplies Ukraine with fighter jets. Ukraine needs multi-role planes - aircraft that can fight in the air, take out missiles, attack enemy aircraft and bomb ground targets. The RAF had exactly the plane for such a task and had enough in stock to be able to offer some away to a friendly nation in need - the Tornado GR4. Haynes deadpans: “all of those aircraft were retired from service four years ago to save money.”

Friday 10th Feb

Only two economies in the G20 have yet to recover their pre-pandemic levels of output, Russia and the U.K. Only one of those economies is expected to grow in 2023, Russia. Even Vladimir Putin is playing the forecasting game, stating yesterday that the Russian economy has survived sanctions and will grow this year. That’s a forecast the IMF would agree with, along with many other crystal ball gazers. Indeed, Putin made an oblique reference to the IMF in televised remarks: “International institutions have to acknowledge that not only has Russia coped with the shocks that were expected ... slight growth is expected in the Russian economy this year.”

Russia’s central bank meets today and is reported by Bloomberg to be under pressure to be more upbeat about the economic outlook. Governor Elvira Nabiullina is being lent on by the Kremlin to produce forecasts of easing inflation pressures consistent with a decision to lower interest rates later in 2023. The central bank is said to be reluctant to suggest any imminent easing of monetary policy but is open to a fudge that hints at the possibility of lower interest rates. In her last economic assesment, the Governor said Russian rates would stay in the range 6.5% - 8.5% which was wide enough to allow for the possibility of either lower or higher interest rates in the future.

Air raid sirens are sounding all over Ukraine today, with reports of missile attacks coming in from many regions and cities. Social media is carrying multiple photos of missile vapour trails over Kyiv and elsewhere. Troop movements - attacks - on the frontline are steadily increasing. Little mention is made of any Ukrainian offensive. Whereas Russia’s plans appear to be wholly transparent, nobody has the faintest idea about Ukraine’s intentions. Expect the unexpected. 

Oil prices moved up this morning in response to Russia’s announcement that it will cut oil output by 500,000 barrels a day from March. That appears to be a response to the West’s oil price cap.