Ukraine war diary

The frontline waits for the world to move right

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.

Jim and I also run a podcast ‘The Other Hand’. Check it out here

Monday September 29th

‘Oblast’, loosely interpreted to mean region or area, is a word with roots in the old Russian empire and is still widely used in ex-Soviet states such as Ukraine. Zaporizhia (sometimes Zaporizhizhia) oblast is in southeastern Ukraine and is named after the region’s main city. A year ago, Russia annexed  the entire oblast, including the bits that it was not occupying. The UN General Assembly subsequently passed a resolution that declared the annexation illegal. The oblast is named after its main city which has not fallen to the Russians.

The war’s frontline runs through the region and has become the main focus of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. When we hear about the ‘incremental gains measured in metres’, this is where, for the most part, they are taking place. There is fighting, further north, around Bakhmut, but that is to keep Russian forces away from defending Zaporizhia. When the counteroffensive kicked off in early June, Zaporizhia oblast was where around 20% of Western-supplied heavy armour was lost to Russian artillery and minefields. The aim of the counteroffensive is simple: split the Russian occupying forces in two.

It would be a mistake to say there has been a sudden upsurge in fighting in Zaporizhia. Combat is a daily occurrence. But something unusual may have happened over the last few days. The Institute for the Study of War reckons that elements of at least three Russian divisions are currently engaged in defending Ukrainian assaults in a salient in the Orikhiv area of the oblast. The ISW suggests that the Russians are fighting hard to maintain their current positions rather than the ‘operationally sound course of action’ of falling back to prepared defensive positions further south. Just why Russia is taking such a risk is unclear. One possibility is Putin’s micromanagement of the campaign 

The ISW is always conservative with its analysis and conclusions. But it suggests that a Ukrainian ‘operationally significant breakthrough’ is currently possible - but by no means certain. ‘The counteroffensive is currently in an extremely dynamic phase’. That really is big news, curiously not receiving much attention in many media outlets.   

Tuesday September 26th

Russia claimed just one casualty resulted from the recent Ukraine missile strike on its Black Sea headquarters in Sevastopol, Crimea. Kyiv, by contrast, says that the Admiral in charge of that fleet, Viktor Soklov, died alongside 33 other officers. As Ukraine was detailing the deaths, the Governor of Sevastopol, said on social media that Russian air defences downed at least one missile near the Belbek military airfield. Ukraine also said that its earlier attacks were aimed at a meeting of Russia’s Navy leadership and that a further 105 military personnel were wounded. The building in which they were meeting was also destroyed. Al Jazeera asked Russia’s defence ministry for comment on all this but, as yet, has received no reply.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence this morning confirmed that the attacks on Sevastopol took place and were ‘more damaging and more coordinated than thus far in the war’. The MoD thinks that while Russia’s Navy’s core mission won’t be affected, its broader abilities will be circumscribed. It will still be able to fire cruise missiles but won’t be able to patrol as freely as before. ‘A dynamic, deep strike battle is underway in the Black Sea’.

Aid for Ukraine is figuring prominently in budget negotiations aimed at preventing a US government shutdown as early as this weekend. The situation in Washington DC could be described as chaotic but that wouldn’t be accurate. Liz Truss’s period in office stands as an exemplar of good, calm governance compared to the way fiscal policy is currently conducted in the US.

Just in case anyone was under the impression that oil and gas imports from Russia into Europe are subject to sanctions, Gazprom announced that it will export 42.4 million cubic metres  of gas to Europe, via Ukraine, today. Yesterday’s figure was 41.8 million cubic metres.

Neither side has said very much in about recent activity on the frontline. Fighting continues but not much seems to have changed over the past 24 hours. After the upsurge in combat over the weekend, a pause is not surprising

Wednesday September 27th

One of the many reasons why Putin thinks he can outlast the West is the sheer cost of supporting Ukraine. A German think tank, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, has tallied the various contributions made for military, humanitarian and financial reasons, reckoning the total is now over $250 billion - and counting. Although the US seems to get much of the credit for aid, the total supplied by Europe (including the U.K.) is running at twice America’s level. 

That’s only the cost to the West. Ukraine’s human and financial sacrifices are impossible to measure. The world also has to cope with the inflation consequences of higher oil and gas prices. Both of these have been moving in the wrong direction in recent weeks. Winter is approaching and while Europe’s natural gas storage tanks are 95% full, this won’t be enough if the weather turns colder than last year. A lot of imports, particularly for liquid natural gas, will still be needed. Gas wholesale markets are volatile and nervous - obscure news from Australian gas producers, who don’t export to Europe, cause big swings in EU prices. 

Oil prices look like they are heading to $100 a barrel, mostly because of an extremely worrying alliance between Russia and Saudi Arabia, both of whom have cut output in recent weeks. 

Rising energy prices will complicate the task of central bankers. Headline inflation rates could go the wrong way while economies slow down. Europe is already teetering on the edge of recession. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J P Morgan, this week speculated that official US interest rates could hit 7%, up from around 5.25% currently. That would almost certainly expose problems, perhaps even cause another financial accident, similar to the one that took down a number of regional US banks earlier in the year.

Thursday September 28th

One of the many reasons why Putin thinks he can outlast the West is the sheer cost of supporting Ukraine. A German think tank, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, has tallied the various contributions made for military, humanitarian and financial reasons, reckoning the total is now over $250 billion - and counting. Although the US seems to get much of the credit for aid, the total supplied by Europe (including the U.K.) is running at twice America’s level. 

That’s only the cost to the West. Ukraine’s human and financial sacrifices are impossible to measure. The world also has to cope with the inflation consequences of higher oil and gas prices. Both of these have been moving in the wrong direction in recent weeks. Winter is approaching and while Europe’s natural gas storage tanks are 95% full, this won’t be enough if the weather turns colder than last year. A lot of imports, particularly for liquid natural gas, will still be needed. Gas wholesale markets are volatile and nervous - obscure news from Australian gas producers, who don’t export to Europe, cause big swings in EU prices. 

Oil prices look like they are heading to $100 a barrel, mostly because of an extremely worrying alliance between Russia and Saudi Arabia, both of whom have cut output in recent weeks. 

Rising energy prices will complicate the task of central bankers. Headline inflation rates could go the wrong way while economies slow down. Europe is already teetering on the edge of recession. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J P Morgan, this week speculated that official US interest rates could hit 7%, up from around 5.25% currently. That would almost certainly expose problems, perhaps even cause another financial accident, similar to the one that took down a number of regional US banks earlier in the year.

Friday September 29th

Data journalism is one of the very few growth areas left for mainstream media. Interpreting and presenting data to a mass audience has become a key focus for publishing giants such as The Economist and the Financial Times. Just as the war in Ukraine has itself seen many innovations, particularly with respect to drone and other types of electronic warfare, the unprecedented supply of data from the frontline (and elsewhere) has transformed war reporting. 

War data comes from many sources, both official and unofficial. Satellite imagery is plentiful, as are YouTube-style video releases from individual soldiers on social media. Military bloggers are active on both sides, often acting as proxy press officers for individual regiments on the front line. Collecting, filtering, interpreting and presenting this data has changed - improved - radically since the start of war. On-line versions of traditional newspapers can do infinitely more than their tree-based parents. Arguably, the leaps made in visual, screen-based, representations of numbers has accelerated the decline of physical, paper publications. 

The New York Times has been a leading exponent of the new presentation technology. Yesterday, the NYT carried a graphics heavy investigation into how the war’s frontline has shifted since the start of the conflict. Data journalism at its best tells a complicated story in the simplest (but not simplified) possible way. Economists usually lose their audience as soon as the first graph is presented. Today’s best data journalists don’t fall into the same trap. The NYT piece is an excellent case in point. Uncluttered maps of the whole of Ukraine, with a focus on the front line, reveal just how little has changed over the course of 2023. Each sides movements are clearly illustrated. The phrase ‘incremental gains’ is given the context it deserves. 

The brutal truth is that tens of thousands have died in 2023 but the frontline has barely shifted. August saw the least amount of territory change hands since the war started. In the profit & loss statement of those minimal changes, Russia has actually gained more ground than Ukraine.