The Russian winter offensive flagged here a fortnight ago appears to be under way, according to the Institute for the Study of War, which has noted operations in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts resulting in small Russian gains of territory. Ukrainian intelligence reports that the aim is to push towards Kharkiv while occupying the whole administrative areas of Donetsk and Luhansk.
But the feeling is that Russia is unlikely to be able to fulfil this ambition. Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, or GUR, said he expected Russian forces would be “completely exhausted” by spring. As ever, the key will be whether Ukraine can obtain enough ammunition to survive until then. According to a recent report by Bloomberg, the EU is expected to deliver only just over half the 1 million shells it has promised Ukraine by March 1.
Meanwhile, both the EU and US have been struggling to get their aid packages agreed – although it has been reported that Hungarian president Viktor Orbán has bowed to pressure from other EU members and agreed not to obstruct their €50 billion (£42.7 billion) military aid package. But this leaves the US president, Joe Biden, trying to find ways to convince recalcitrant Republican senators to fall into line over his plans to provide Ukraine with US$60 billion (£47.3 billion) of military aid.
It has been reported that Biden has managed to circumvent the senate by giving Greece a large cache of older surplus weapons, with the understanding that Greece then passes on its own surplus weaponry to Ukraine – a variation of what is known as Germany’s Ringtausch (ring transfer) programme, by which it supplied tanks to Ukraine via Slovakia, circumventing its own security policy.
But it’s widely hoped that Biden will be able to bring the senate round to his way of thinking. One possible snag is the military corruption scandal that has broken round Volodymyr Zelensky’s ears in recent days.
The Ukrainian president came to power in 2019 on a platform of rooting out corruption and fraud in one of Europe’s most corrupt countries. That this latest episode concerns senior defence officials and managers of an arms supplier allegedly colluding to pocket £31 million that was meant to buy artillery shells will not make it any easier for Biden to persuade sceptical senators to fall into line, write Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko.
Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham, and Malyarenko, from the University of Odesa, also highlight a rift between Zelensky and his military commander, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, which has developed since November when Zaluzhny said publicly the war was in a stalemate. None of this will give Kyiv’s western allies a great deal of confidence about the future of their investment.
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Ukrainians remain committed to beating Russia, although polling taken in November 2023 revealed that an increasing number would be willing to accept a negotiated deal to end the fighting, which would inevitably involve the loss of territory to Russia.
Gerard Toal, professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech, believes this resolve may be tested once the next round of recruitment, which aims to add as many as 500,000 fresh troops to Ukraine’s armed forces in the field, gets under way.
Meanwhile Elis Vilasi, who lectures in national security and foreign affairs at the University of Tennessee, warns against any peace deal which would involve Russia gaining territory. He points to Serbia, which – more than two decades on from the settlement of hostilities in the Balkans – continues to attempt to destabilise the region.
Beating the drum for war
Increasingly common media coverage in the UK pointing to the likelihood of a major war in Europe has encouraged some commentators and military types to consider the precipitous decline in the UK’s troop numbers, which are forecast to fall below 70,000 within two years.
Mark Lacy, a philosopher at Lancaster University, notes a new recruitment video for the British army which uses a Fortnite-style computer game to target more tech-savvy young people. The nature of war is changing, Lacy believes, so strong tech skills will inevitably be part of most future soldiers’ armoury.
All this talk of a major impending European – even world – war bears comparison to the years in the lead-up to the second world war. History tells us that most people in Britain realised by the late 1930s that a fresh conflict with Germany was inevitable.
Tim Luckhurst, who researches newspaper history at Durham University, has had a trawl through some of the coverage from 1938 when the then-prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to Munich for talks with Adolf Hitler and came back with a “piece of paper” promising “peace in our time”. Liberal and left-leaning papers such as the Daily Mirror and The Guardian decried Chamberlain’s deal for abandoning Czechoslovakia (and of course, with hindsight, we know how disastrous a decision it turned out to be).
The more conservative press, including the Times and the Daily Mail, were four-square behind Chamberlain. The Mail, which in its chequered past featured headlines such as “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” in praise of homegrown fascist Oswald Mosley, appeared to be particularly convinced of Hitler’s bona fides.
Read more: UK press warns of Nato war with Russia – newspapers are clearly keen to avoid mistakes of WWII
Meanwhile in Russia …
In his quest to ensure he retains control over the hearts and minds of as many Russian people as possible, Vladimir Putin has mandated a rewriting of school history textbooks. Among other things, the new books extol the memory of Comrade Joseph Stalin – who we know as a murderous tyrant, but who a new generation of Russians (and Ukrainians in occupied territories) now know to be a kindly old gentleman who did a good deal to make Russia the great nation that Putin aims to restore.
Anya Free, a scholar of Russian and Soviet history at Arizona State University, writes that this is part of a wider move to control memory in Russia, which also involves the creation of a network of “historical memory” centres across Russia and occupied Ukraine. Ukrainian students will, for example, get to read a collection of documents on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” – where they will find out that Comrade Putin was right all along about Ukraine being part of Russia.
Of course, a new generation of patriotic young Russians will want to explore the wonders of their country, so Putin also plans to turn his country’s untamed and isolated far east into a new tourism hotspot.
Natasha Kuhrt, a Russia expert at King’s College London, says the region – which has hitherto been a massive centre for the production of energy and raw materials, much of which have been exported to China – will depend on domestic visitors and tourists from China. And there’s no disputing its natural beauty, including 23 national parks.
The problem, as Kuhrt notes, is that many Chinese visitors to Russia’s “wild east” in the past have engaged in large-scale hunting and poaching of wildlife. This would seem at odds with Putin’s plan to encourage development of the region as a centre for ecotourism.
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