Mitt Romney named the elephant in the room in Ukraine

 Mitt Romney in an interview with ABC4's Brian McElhatten:

"Brian McElhatten: I want to ask you about foreign policy. That’s our first topic today. You were recently at the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum. You were moderating a discussion with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and I want to play a clip to tee up my first question for you so our audience can hear. Let’s roll that tape if we could.

Romney (CLIP): … I got to be honest, I do not understand how anyone can argue that we shouldn’t provide weapons to Ukraine. I can’t. They’ve changed their argument over time from one, you know, “The Europeans should do more!” Well, the Europeans are doing more. “Oh, well, we don’t have enough [resources].” They go from argument to argument, but more recently it is that there’s no way for Ukraine to win.

McElhatten: Okay, so to your point there, Senator Romney, we know there’s been a lot of pushback from some in your party, your colleague, Senator Mike Lee, particularly on aid to Ukraine. What do you make of that opposition?

Romney: Well, I respect other people’s points of view. That’s the nature of our political system. I find it hard to understand an argument that suggests that we would not stand with a sovereign nation that we have committed to help support their sovereignty. We agreed to do that back in the 1990s when they gave up their nuclear weapons. For us to walk away from that and to walk away from the defense of freedom strikes me as being a very bad miscalculation on the part of our nation if we were to do that, in part because we do well in a world where there is freedom and democracy and where people can buy our goods and services. We’ve done well, as a nation over the last 25, 30, 40 years, and walking away from like-minded people would be a mistake.

McElhatten: Well, you’re on the Foreign Relations Committee. You watch these international events happening all the time. You’re briefed by experts. I’m curious about your opinion here. There’s an expected Russian offensive this summer. Are you concerned about how Ukraine might perform then?

Romney: Well, there’s no question but that Ukraine is going up against a massive superpower and as an underdog—there’s no question about that. I think a lot of people, even in our own government, felt that Ukraine would collapse in the first few days of the Russian invasion, but they have performed extraordinarily well. Their leadership was strong. Their people were determined and courageous. And all they’re asking for from us is the weaponry, that in many respects, we promised we’d provide. And it’s in America’s interest to see Vladimir Putin get the message: “You can’t invade your neighbors. And if you do invade, there will be consequence.” I can’t tell you that the battlefield will be won by Ukraine. But I can tell you that if we were to shrink from providing support to a nation that wants to defend itself, then no nation in the world would believe us anymore. And Russia would invade their neighbor, another neighbor, Poland—a NATO nation. We’d be committed at that point to send in troops to help defend Poland and other NATO nations that Putin might invade. So, keeping our own troops out of harm’s way is a high priority." 

ISW: The West enabled the current Russian offensive by tying Ukraine's hands

 From the Institute for the Study of War:

"Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 12, 2024

Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Christina Harward, Kateryna Stepanenko, and George Barros

...Vovchansk's proximity to the international border affords Russian forces "many opportunities," including allowing Russian forces to conduct operations with limited forces and means to achieve a specific result; provides Russian forces with a "small shoulder of delivery" to allow stable control and fire support without moving their artillery; and allows for quick fuel and weapons deliveries to the frontline. 

Russian forces are reaping the benefits of the West's long-term restriction on Ukraine using Western-provided weapons to strike legitimate military targets on Russian territory — territory that Russian forces now depend on to sustain their offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast. Western officials have prohibited Ukraine from using Western-supplied weapons to strike targets on Russian territory, and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly stated their adherence to this condition.[30] UK Foreign Minister David Cameron only recently greenlit Ukrainian forces to use UK-provided weapons to strike targets in Russian territory, but this is insufficient for Ukraine's interdiction needs in Russian territory and came too late to allow Ukrainian forces to inhibit Russia's ability to concentrate forces along the international border.[31] Ukrainian forces have previously used US-provided HIMARS to devastating effect, particularly in forcing Russian forces to withdraw from the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast in November 2022 and continue to use HIMARS and other US- and Western-provided weapons to strike Russian force concentrations in rear and deep rear areas in occupied Ukraine.[32] Ukrainian forces regularly conduct drone strikes against infrastructure and airfields in Russia, but these lack the same interdiction effects that Ukrainian forces now need to generate to undermine the Russian offensive operations.[33]   Ukrainian forces would greatly benefit from being able to use advanced long-range weapons systems to disrupt Russian logistics nodes and routes that are currently supplying the Kharkiv offensive but must instead rely on their limited and depleted stock of indigenous weapons.

Kremlin information operations encouraging Western self-deterrence likely aimed to allow Russian forces to build up and launch offensive operations without the threat of Ukrainian strikes against military and logistics assets. Russian President Vladimir Putin, senior Kremlin officials, and pro-Kremlin mouthpieces have regularly threatened Western states and accused them of "provocations" for continuing to provide military assistance to Ukraine.[34] Kremlin mouthpieces have maintained this rhetorical line even after the passage of a $61 billion dollar US military assistance package to Ukraine in late April, likely in support of an effort to prevent Ukrainian forces from using these weapons to degrade Russia's various ongoing offensive efforts.[35] The Kremlin will likely continue to leverage this information operation as part of its ongoing reflexive control campaign to inhibit Ukraine's ability to use all its available weapons to defend against the current Russian offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast, forcing Ukraine to allocate other resources to a less effective defense and creating opportunities for Russian forces on other sectors of the front to exploit.[36]

[30] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63882955 ; https://www.telegraph.co dot uk/us/comment/2024/04/10/russia-ukraine-war-putin-sanctions-mike-johnson-us-aid/

[31] https://isw.pub/UkrWar050324

[32] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Feb%203%20Russian%2...; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[33] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/May%2011%20Russian%...; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/March%209%20Russian...; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...:

[34] https://isw.pub/UkrWar050324; https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/denying-russia%E2%80%99s-o...; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/April%2020%20Russia...; https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-ass...; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Offensive...

[35] https://isw.pub/UkrWar042424; https://isw.pub/UkrWar050624; https://isw.pub/UkrWar050324; https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/April%2020%20Russia...

[36] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...; https://isw.pub/UkrWar050624"

 

 

Timothy Snyder: Russia can lose this war

 CNN / Yahoo!News from May 8:

On Thursday Russia will celebrate Victory Day, its commemoration of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Domestically, this is nostalgia. In the 1970s, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev created a cult of victory. Russia under Putin has continued the tradition.

Abroad, this is intimidation. We are meant to think that Russia cannot lose.

And far too many of us, during Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, have believed that. In February 2022, when Russia undertook its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the consensus was that Ukraine would fall within days.

Even today, when Ukraine has held its own for more than two years, the prevailing view among Russia’s friends in Congress and in the Senate is that Russia must eventually win. Moscow’s success is not on the battlefield, but in our minds.

Russia can lose. And it should lose, for the sake of the world — and for its own sake.

The notion of an invincible Red Army is propaganda. The Red Army was formidable, but it was also beatable. Of its three most consequential foreign wars, the Red Army lost two.

It was defeated by Poland in 1920. It defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, after nearly collapsing in 1941. (Its win in that instance was part of a larger coalition and with decisive American economic assistance.) Soviet forces were in trouble in Afghanistan immediately after their 1979 invasion and had to withdraw a decade later.

And the Russian army of today is not the Red Army. Russia is not the USSR. Soviet Ukraine was a source of resources and soldiers for the Red Army. In that victory of 1945, Ukrainian soldiers in the Red Army took huge losses — greater than American, British and French losses combined. It was disproportionately Ukrainians who fought their war to Berlin in the uniform of the Red Army.

Today, Russia is fighting not together with Ukraine but against Ukraine. It is fighting a war of aggression on the territory of another state. And it lacks the American economic support — Lend-Lease — that the Red Army needed to defeat Nazi Germany. In this constellation, there is no particular reason to expect Russia to win. One would expect, instead, that Russia’s only chance is to prevent the West from helping Ukraine — by persuading us that its victory is inevitable, so that we don’t apply our decisive economic power.

The last six months bear this out: Russia’s minor battlefield victories came at a time when the United States was delaying Ukraine aid, rather than supplying it.

Today’s Russia is a new state. It has existed since 1991. Like Brezhnev before him, Russian President Vladimir Putin rules through nostalgia. He refers to the Soviet and also the Russian imperial past. But the Russian Empire also lost wars. It lost the Crimean War in 1856. It lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. It lost the First World War in 1917. In none of those three cases was Russia able to keep forces in the field for more than about three years.

In the United States there is great nervousness about a Russian defeat. If something seems impossible, we cannot imagine what could happen next. And so there is a tendency, even among supporters of Ukraine, to think that the best resolution is a tie.

Such thinking is unrealistic. And it reveals, behind the nerves, a strange American conceit.

No one can guide a war in such a way. And nothing in our prior attempts to influence Russia suggests that we can exercise that kind of influence. Russia and Ukraine are both fighting to win. The questions are: who will win, and with what consequences?

If Russia wins, the consequences are horrifying: a risk of a larger war in Europe, more likelihood of a Chinese adventure in the Pacific, the weakening of international legal order generally, the likely spread of nuclear weapons, the loss of faith in democracy.

It is normal for Russia to lose wars. And, in general, this led Russians to reflect and reform. Defeat in Crimea forced an autocracy to end serfdom. Russia’s loss to Japan led to an experiment with elections. The Soviet failure in Afghanistan led to Gorbachev’s reforms and thus the end of the cold war.

Beneath the Russian particularities, history offers a more general and still more reassuring lesson about empires. Russia is fighting today an imperial war. It denies the existence of the Ukrainian state and nation, and it carries out atrocities that recall the worst of the European imperial past.

The peaceful Europe of today consists of powers that lost their last imperial wars and then chose democracy. It is not only possible to lose your last imperial war: it is also good, not only for the world, but for you.

Russia can lose this war, and should, for the sake of Russians themselves. A defeated Russia means not only the end of senseless losses of young life in Ukraine. It is also Russia’s one chance to become a post-imperial country, one where reform is possible, one where Russians themselves might be protected by law and able to cast meaningful votes.

Defeat in Ukraine is Russia’s historical chance for normality — as Russians who want democracy and the rule of law will say.

Like the United States and Europe, Ukraine celebrates the victory of 1945 on May 8th rather than May 9th. Ukrainians have every right to remember and interpret that victory: they suffered more than Russians from German occupation and died in huge numbers on the battlefield.

And Ukrainians are right to think that Russia today, like Nazi Germany in 1945, is a fascist imperialist regime that can and must be defeated. Fascism was defeated last time because a coalition held firm and applied its superior economic power. The same holds true now.

 

Kasparov and Hodges appeal for urgent help for Ukraine

 From CNN / Yahoo!News:

"Opinion: A strategy is needed now before it’s too late for Ukraine

Opinion by Garry Kasparov and Ben Hodges

 

Editor’s note: Garry Kasparov is a Russian opposition leader who founded and chairs the Renew Democracy Initiative, or RDI. Gen. Ben Hodges served as the commanding general of US Army Europe and is a member of RDI’s board of directors. The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion on CNN.

“Better late than never” is probably a poor operating principle for the US government. But it was in this spirit that Congress finally passed essential aid to frontline US allies in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan after months of delay. The fight to get the nearly $61 billion aid package for Ukraine illustrates the ad hoc nature of US support for Kyiv — tactics without strategy. For all of the resources that President Joe Biden and Congress have put forward, Washington has never sincerely tried to piece them together into a cohesive plan for Ukraine.

Now that the House of Representatives has gotten its act together, we need to make up for lost time. Partisan procrastination cost the Ukrainians ground they must now recoup.

We need to ensure that the funds Washington has laid out for Ukraine are translated into the right tools —delivered to the right places at the right time. And we need to shore up flagging domestic support for Ukraine among key Republican constituencies so that this aid package isn’t the last.

Above all, the president must distill the case for Ukraine into a digestible endgame. Many Americans have been understandably skeptical given the prospect of open-ended war, and the Biden administration’s well-intentioned but clumsy framing of aiding Ukraine “for as long as it takes” hasn’t helped. Instead, Biden should outline specific US goals: Ukrainian victory — and, with it, Russian defeat.

The president should not waver on this point. He must repeatedly and consistently remind Americans why both Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat are in our strategic interest and how we are going to do everything needed to achieve these strategic outcomes. Our combined political and military experience gives us unique insight into what this game plan should look like.

While lawmakers haggled over Biden’s foreign aid bill, Ukraine suffered setbacks. The Russians are closing in around Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, while making modest gains past the town of Avdiivka near the front lines in the east.

Ukraine’s position is grave, but if Kyiv and its American and European allies act decisively now, Ukraine can still win — and this means besting Russia on the battlefield.

In practice, it means providing Ukraine the ability to not only defend itself but also to proactively deny Russia the ability to attack. The United States and its allies must hasten the delivery of F-16s and other fixed-wing aircraft while ramping up training for Ukrainian pilots. These planes can help defend the skies over eastern and southern cities such as Kharkiv and Odesa while taking the fight to the missile launch sites in Russia and the Black Sea from which Moscow is terrorizing civilians.

Crimea remains an important base for Russian aviation and sea power. In advance of the ultimate objective of reclaiming the peninsula, Kyiv must make it untenable for Russia to continue using it as a springboard for harassing Ukraine. MQ-9A Reaper drones provide a nimble option that can play both offense and defense, while long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), Storm Shadow, SCALP or Taurus ballistic and cruise missiles will place Crimea and every other inch of Russian-occupied Ukraine under the gun. Ukraine can then target and destroy Russian headquarters, logistics and artillery. Meanwhile, additional Patriot missile batteries will be necessary to replicate the robust shield Ukrainians have erected over their capital in an effort to protect other cities.

As important as each of these weapons systems is, they will be worth little if they are not tied to a strategy. The United States, Ukraine and our other allies in Europe must understand the timeline for dispatching this material and how it fits into Ukrainian victory.

Different weapons systems may reach the battlefield at different times: Some equipment is pre-positioned in Germany and Poland. If approved, drones could be dispatched fairly quickly — within days or weeks. Patriot missiles might follow over several weeks. F-16s are important but may not see action until midsummer at earliest. These tools will allow Ukraine to threaten Crimea in a matter of months while continuing to strike Russian energy infrastructure.

But the front line may not change much. Rather, 2024 will be a year of industrial competition. The recently approved aid package will carry Ukraine through the next several months, while Kyiv refills and enhances its arsenal, grows its forces and refines its logistics — essential preparation for the fight still to come.

It is equally important to understand that this aid package cannot be the last. Ukraine will need more support from its democratic allies to repel Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

The strategy we propose is not only military — it’s political as well. Narrative warfare in America makes the kinetic warfare being waged in Ukraine possible.

Kremlin-fueled conspiracy theories have taken root in the modern-day Republican Party. There are certainly those who will never change their tune. Yet Ukraine’s circumstances demand that we knock on every door to refute lies and probe every potential audience for support. We have discovered that many will move if given the right evidence and a message to which they can relate.

That’s why our organization, the Renew Democracy Initiative, brought a delegation of British Conservatives to meet with their Republican counterparts and encourage support for Ukraine. We may not agree with our Tory colleagues on everything, but they are well-positioned to champion Kyiv’s cause from the right. We urge Ukraine’s champions of all political stripes to coordinate and find allies who can open up unexpected reservoirs of support. It will pay dividends: Thirteen of the 22 Republican representatives with whom the British mission met ultimately voted for the national security supplemental.

Fabrications about Ukrainian persecution of Christians are among the most pernicious Russian lies about the war. These claims are outrageous, but the salience of religion for many American voters means it is critical ground that we cannot afford to cede. Working with the Free Russia Forum, a Russian pro-democracy group cofounded by one of the authors, we shared an important memo with lawmakers demonstrating how, in reality, it is Russia persecuting non-Orthodox Christians while using the Orthodox Church as an instrument of espionage and other sacrilegious behavior. More must be done to explain the conflict’s religious context and the lengths Ukraine takes to defend the faithful.

America’s strategy for Ukraine is missing in action. On the front lines, we must determine what pieces in the US arsenal will help Ukraine win and make Russia lose. In the political sphere, we need a persuasive message that guarantees domestic support for consistent legislated aid to Ukraine.

The national security supplemental’s passage provides the United States with the tools to support Kyiv. Now we need a plan to put them into service."

***

To me, the problem is that at least since 1994 (the year of the Budapest Memorandum), the USA has been becoming increasingly pro-Russian. It keeps disarming freedom-loving neighbours of Russia with promises of protection that are in reality just sweet lies, and then bullying them to accept Russian land grabs. By now, both major US parties will be happiest if Russia just takes all land it wants and slaughters all people it doesn't like so that there is finally no risk of "escalation".