Russia in Ukraine

off topic, but a brain dump.

Well I must admit to having been completely distracted by recent events in Ukraine. So hopefully I can expunge some of that by writing about it.

The text below includes a number of discrete lumps of thinking, with a few connecting lines and signposts, but probably not enough. I’ve tried to articulate a number of things that I think are missing from the press coverage. I often find writing about these things help me order my own thinking. I don’t know how many other people find expansive writing to be a crutch for profound thinking?

But I tend to find I can reach a more profound understanding of things after writing and discussing the matter. If anyone wants to comment I will respond, I’m pretty open minded on all of this and still very open to alternative views.

If you read this article these pieces of information might lodge somewhere in your brain and hopefully during your sleep tonight, during your second or third REM cycle they will add to your constellation of knowledge about this Ukrainian thing (if you don’t sleep long enough for a third REM it’s much harder to crystallise knowledge, so read this and get an early night! ).

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On the precursors to war, for me even though I’ve been saying “I don’t think he’s bluffing” and have been one of those people on internet forums that basically predicted Putin really would push into Ukraine it’s still a huge shock to actually see it unfold.

I thought it was more like that he would invade than not, maybe about 4:1 or 5:1 more likely that he engages. Packing up and going home would look silly and would severely weaken Russia’s future diplomatic hand (people underestimate Lavrov’s voice he’s been at the top table in Russia even longer than Putin, imagine doing his job if no invasion had materialised) plus Putin has invaded Ukraine before!

Personally I thought Russia would focus on the East and the Southern part of Ukraine, taking all of the Black Sea coastline, landlocking the remainder of Ukraine, gaining customs control over the port of Odessa and blocking any future pipeline routes from Qatar that avoid the Transylvanian Alps. That would have been my cold headed cost/benefit strategy for this next act of the Kremlin’s Ukrainian venture.

Here is a linguistic map of Ukraine.

On the shape and objectives of the invasion, I was very surprised to see a big push towards Kyiv. Obviously there were troops stationed in Belarus and the Western extent of the Russian border but the invasion as it is unfolding is much broader and more ambitious than I expected. I didn’t think the Kremlin really cared too much about cities and people. All of the Oligarchs and Russian kleptocrats got rich from natural resources and commodity exports and not consumer goods / services.

I have wondered if the Kyiv drive was a distraction (I think much of the first 48 hours of the invasion was a decoy to flush out Ukrainian jets), but by day 14 Russia does seem to have committed significant efforts to Kyiv.

On reflection I don’t think this is a hot headed emotional move, but rather a sign of a much more expanded ambition. Taking the South and the coast would secure Crimea and the Black Sea, would block Middle Eastern pipelines and achieve lots of cold strategic gains with minimal cost / losses. But by charging at the capital Putin has made an existential threat to Ukraine, he has accelerated 30 years of political pressure of trying to capture Ukraine and compressed it into a military campaign. The Kremlin maybe felt something irreversible was close to happening like Ukraine joining a Western bloc and this much more expanded campaign (expanded beyond optimal cost/benefit) really gets ahead of that and cuts it off.

So from a strategic assessment the objectives of the invasion seem much more of a gambit than the kind of invasion I had expected. So whilst I was right on the Go / No go, I was wrong on the sort of invasion that we are seeing. To me, the drive for Kyiv adds a lot of weight to the Western intelligence community warnings that “Putin has ambitions beyond Ukraine”. Previously I thought this was propaganda for fearmongering. But now I am 90% subscribed to this sentiment. The Kremlin are seeing all of this through an enlarged frame of reference, which is a bad thing.

Therefore, everything is in play. Putin himself is all in, if he backs down or makes any kind of U turn at this point then Lavrov’s diplomatic job is impossibly weakened and Russia’s military wings are clipped. Therefore this really does have the potential of escalating into a much wider conflict.

On the invasion progress, it’s clearly a propaganda tsunami there are scant actual details even among the tsunami, very little substantive video from the front in stark contrast to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even during the Gulf Storm operation all the way back in 1991 we had daily two hour media briefings from US General Schwarzkopf from his CENTCOM tent in Riyad where he presented to the world press daily clips of battlefield footage and those black and white bomber cam videos.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?16102-1/us-centcom-military-news-briefing

There is nothing like an official account of this war. I find that odd. Both sides like the fact it’s opaque, I find this a bit concerning as it might suggest that both Russia and the West want to move their respective public opinion to some new place. Again, this suggests preparation for a wider conflict.

Maybe it’s really naive to think that we are entitled to some kind of official account so that we can clearly see what is happening and who is winning. But this war is very opaque given the technology that exists in 2022. I don’t think that is a positive sign for us. I expected almost endless drone footage betraying troop positions and near real time operations. But we have seen very little. People think they have seen a lot but there are over half a million professional soldiers in the theatre and you haven’t seen many military engagements, fire fights, contacts. Almost nothing. It feels off. The video we see online is almost exclusively road traffic, abandoned Russian vehicles and aftermaths of civilian casualties.

Maybe this is due to the nature of the war itself? We are very used to seeing American wars that are dominated with air power. Fast jets streaking the sky and constantly providing holistic visual pictures, troops seizing airfields and quickly fortifying them into military bases with daily operations being conducted by very low flying helicopters moving troops around in the theatre in a tactical way. US wars are very much airborne.

On the Russian military toolbox, Russia has a very different military toolbox to USA. Knowing these differences will help you understand how the war is unfolding.

The Russian military in contrast seems to be all wheels and tracks. Airfields seemingly not really the focus we are used to. So what do the Russians actually have? Outside of partisan lines the long standing consensus is that Russian air defence systems are excellent. This is the S300, S400 and S500 systems. It’s basically a truck with a powerful radar and some very fast surface to air missiles with very good guidance computers. The West never really flies into areas with Russian air defence, even when it is operated by 3rd countries like Iran. Trump launched a huge missile attack on Syria one time and I seem to remember that only 19 out of 80 or so Tomahawks made it though the air defence. I’m not sure what the exact numbers were but I think it’s the only time Russian air defence has really been tested by the West and five years later we still don’t fly into it. I think the conclusion was that 80 tomahawks was enough to exhaust all the air defence missiles but the air defence missiles had a near 100% intercept rate. Whatever the details, it seems to be a sufficient deterrent for those who decide where our warplanes will fly.

And so the skies over Ukraine are fairly empty in comparison to American wars. The air defence is maybe the reason for the opaqueness of the war?

Russia also has a lot of big artillery, what I mean is their artillery has a very long range and fires very big shells. In the West we don’t really use artillery much because it’s indiscriminate and has appalling consequences for the target. We haven’t invested too much in artillery. Russia however has a history of using it fairly recently, they shelled Grozny for years and they shelled Aleppo too. Horrific stuff. But they have modernised it as it’s got the job done for them in the past and they will use it again here. Their latest iteration has a range of 80km and is capable of firing 16 rounds per minute. Not sure if that version is fielded in Ukraine, but their focus areas of military R&D are very different to the West. The Russian war machine is a different beast to ours, it’s worth remembering how it differs because it’s the reason Russia is doing unfamiliar things.

Russian artillery has a very long range. Artillery shelling tends to displace a lot of civilians over time as nobody likes being shelled, it’s extremely unpleasant and dangerous, which is an important consideration that I’ll try and come back to.

Russians also made an effort to modernise their tanks, but this hasn’t really happened. They probably have the best tank design in the Armata T-14 and T-15, but they haven’t really built any of these and the program was reduced quite a lot because of manufacturing issues. Again will come back to this point later.

There is a whole generation of Russian weapons that are due to be delivered to their military over the next 2-3 years. Maybe part of the calculation for this whole Ukrainian adventure was “might as well scrap this old stuff in battle”?

Their other big weapons technology strength is missiles, all kinds of missiles. Russia has a long history of rocket science and missile development. Until recently all visits to ISS relied on Russian rockets (Off topic: Elon Musk has personal beef with Russia after they laughed at him when he went to buy some of their rockets).

But Russian missiles are very good, for two reasons i). really efficient guidance algorithms that correct very fast and accurately ii). engine control, efficient algorithms that corrects chamber pressure very fast. (Off topic: SpaceX has completely blown this tech out of the water with their AI, but there is no military version [that we know of! <wink> Elon’s generous .gov funding])…

Russia has lots of land based Multi Rocket Launch systems (MRLS), these include the scary thermobaric weapons which have a double bang the first bang creates a massive cloud of explosive gas, the second bang explodes the gas. Thermobaric weapons are very different to conventional warheads that use plastic explosive charges. Conventional warheads create small, dense, very intense and very fast moving shockwaves that can destroy a concrete building or an armoured vehicle (hardened military targets). Thermobaric explosions create very large, very high amplitude but slower moving shockwaves. Thermobarics boooom instead of bang and thermobarics can destroy entire neighbourhoods of soft residential buildings, they also burn all of the oxygen in a large area and can kill blast survivors with asphyxiation. They are sometimes called vacuum bombs because they create an atmospheric void. They are much less precise and much more indiscriminate than the kind of precision high intensity weapons used by the West.

On the consequences of the Russian military toolbox, the Russian war machine is built without a care for collateral damage. This means it displaces civilian populations at scale and creates huge waves of migration. This is an important point that I will try and come back to. But so far 2.2 million people have already fled Ukraine after just 2 weeks of war. That’s 5% of the population and it’s predominantly the anti-Russian Ukrainian language speakers who are fleeing. This enormous exodus of just the past 14 days has already tilted future Ukrainian elections towards East Ukrainian politicians. Nobody talks about this. Why? Putin does not need to occupy Ukraine, he is redrawing the borders yes, but also and more importantly he is recasting the demographics of Ukraine.

2.2 million people displaced from their home country in the space of two weeks, is a much larger scale than anything we saw during WWII. Pause for a moment and consider that fact. A bigger migration pulse than anything during WWII.

The exodus from Ukraine is a larger scale than any WWII migration wave. The speed of this Ukrainian exodus is an entire order of magnitude faster than anything ever seen ever. At this rate, by Easter (mid April) there might be 10 million refugees displaced from Ukraine alone. This is where you start to realise Putin is not messing around, this time it’s for keeps, this time he is all in. It’s not reversible for Russia. They have crossed the Rubicon.

Using these weapons in Europe rips up the social fabric of the entire European continent. It will impact all European elections in the future.

With the Russian convoy underperforming (subjective) and losing a lot of threat credibility (objectively true), Putin will likely seek to reclaim the threat credibility of his ground forces by encircling and shelling Kyiv. They will grant these regular “humanitarian corridors” for people to flee West because this helps Russia by tilting the demographic and political table of Ukraine towards the East.

What happens with militarily outcomes here is very difficult to guess. But Russia has the larger force, the deeper pockets, it’s just a much bigger country by every measure. Ukraine is emptying out. If Kyiv is functionally destroyed then the administrative capital could be moved to some other place and this will legitimise some replacement government structure. This is all very speculative and its very difficult to determine what the plans are for Kyiv because it depends on the wider ambitions of the Kremlin.

On the Russian economy, Russia gets most of it’s money from oil and gas exports. They export 5.5 million barrels of oil per day this equates to $700m per day at current prices or $260 billion a year. Russia also exports 170 billion m3 of gas per year to EU, the gas price in Europe is currently $4 per cubic meter equating to $700 billion a year for gas.

At current prices Europe will pay $1 trillion this year to Russia for oil and gas.
This figure last year was $260 billion. Last year Russia’s military budget was $62 billion and their entire government budget was $300 billion.

This war pays for itself. It is trillion dollar profitable. Let that sink in for a moment.
Huge motivation for the Kremlin to continue with this military adventure.

Even in the face of all the sanctions, only USA has so far banned Russian oil and USA doesn’t even buy much oil from Russia. Europe is completely beholden to these energy supplies. Finding an alternative on this scale is an extremely costly and difficult thing to do. It’s not something that can be done quickly, or even in the space of several years.

On Saudi Arabia and UAE, these are the #2 and #6 oil exporting nations in the world they hold sway over OPEC. Joe Biden called them both for help replacing Russian oil on international markets and both Saudi Arabia and UAE rejected to even speak to Joe Biden. Didn’t even want to hear what Biden had to say on the matter.

Mohammed Bin Salman the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia come out today saying Russia has his full support. Take a moment to let that fact sink in, as our governments promise to us that they will replace Russian oil and gas.

On sanctions in general, I don’t think this strategy is going to work. At all. China has not and will not sanction Russia, they came out this week and said Russia is their #1 strategic ally. It’s important to realise that the same people who manufactured virtually all of the goods in your house see Russia as their top strategic ally. Think about that fact as we cheer on ever more Russian sanctions. The people who made virtually all of your possessions like Russia more than they like you.

Trade between China and Russia will continue. It’s impossible to stop. They can freight huge volumes of goods and materials between the two countries and do so thousands of miles from the reach of Western ships or missiles.

No matter what sanctions the West places on Russia, Putin can buy anything he needs from China. Just like we do. China likes them more than they like us. All of the Western companies doing business in Russia, what are they doing? It’s mostly junk food, apparel, handbags, software apps, a long list of consumer decadences. Not much that makes a dent on Russia’s ability to wage a never ending war. Western oil companies operated in Russia, but it’s not like they can take the oil reserves or the wells with them when they exit the country! When BP quit Russia it just means more money is staying in Russia.

Silicon chips and high tech electronics? These are all made in China and China’s top strategic ally is Russia. Even if China agreed to stop selling this stuff to Russia, which they won’t, who would believe they would actually stop? Nobody is so stupid. I hope.

So Russia and China are together in quite a strong position and I think it should be obvious that they both recognise this and have gamed out many many scenarios for how this situation might pan out.

Meanwhile in the West we are guessing, we have no idea where this is heading. We are merely reacting to last weeks developments and applying retrospective punishments for things we didn’t like. We aren’t out ahead of events, we aren’t doing anything kinetic.

Russia will push West into Europe exacerbating a huge energy crisis which will primarily benefit the Russian treasury. The West will seek to isolate Russia but Russia has red carpet access to China which is the manufacturing engine room of the world economy. Russia can use their inflated energy revenue to buy whatever they desire from Chinese subcontractors. Probably soon to include a lot of beleaguered Russian weapons programs like the T-14 and hypersonic gliders. The West has no real way to police the relationship between China and Russia.

Western society has been largely blindsided. Yes our intelligence communities seemed to know well in advance and that is a very good sign. But very few people actually gave this stuff much serious thought until the kinetic phase was well underway.

Europe is going to try and replace it’s dependence on Russian oil and gas? I suggest there is a very high chance of failure for that initiative. Mainly because i). Europe has a political obsession with environmentalism that is in direct tension with the solution to this existential threat. ii). There is no real alternative to Russian oil for Europe in the short term, because all the other big exporting nations support Russia.

On options for Europe, the only real option that can scale quickly is fracking but it would need to be scaled up like a war effort, because it is a war effort. It would involve bringing in the big US shale oil companies like Pioneer and Chesapeake over to Europe. Once again American industry bailing out European folly.

The global oil and gas industry typically spends $400 to 800 billion dollars per year on capex, this investment replaces about the declining output of existing oilfields. Oilfields decline at about 6% per year and the world consumes about 100 million barrels per day…

Fag packet maths… Europe would need to spend around $800 billion on fracking to replace 5 million barrels of Russian oil imports. Europe would probably have to spend a further $800 billion on fracking to replace Russian gas imports.
Assuming losses for scaling up an industry from nothing…
Europe needs to spend >$2 trillion on oil and gas projects in order to break Russia and win this war. Does anyone think that kind of endeavour is possible in the largely green political climate of Europe? Not me. I think Putin can come a long way into Europe in current circumstances.

Today Europe is demilitarised and largely stripped of natural resources, the resources we have are self-banned. Europe is soft, weak and rich. It must look very ripe.
But Europeans are very well educated, have the worlds most robust institutions and have a long history of military adventure and global conquest.

Europe is the only place on Earth where it is very easy to weaponise identity politics ion such a way as to raise world dominating armies. It’s so easy in fact that it almost happens naturally on a regular basis.

It seems to me that in the not too distant future Europe could face a choice. In many ways Europe is already subjugated, we just haven’t quite woken up to the fact yet. When we do choose the options will be A). Resist, cope, muddle through.. or B). Remilitarise and adventure East. If Germany feels existentially threatened by Putin, all bets are off. I think the Kremlin and Beijing are smart enough to know this, both show evidence of long term strategic thinking. If Germany doesn’t want to carry that torch, as there’s a very good chance this feels like a three-strikes-and-you’re-out trap, then it doesn’t look great for Europe.

On Zelensky, since the invasion Zelensky has been excellent. He has stayed in Ukraine when many would have fled (Tredeau fled his capital when truckers were beeping horns). Zelensky messaging and communications since invasion have been consistent and on point. He has made a string of decisions that have really made things more difficult for Russia. This is surprising because prior to the invasion Zelensky made a long string of terrible blunders. He repeatedly played down the threat of invasion, he slapped down US intelligence, complained about a hysterical and breathless Biden. He did absolutely nothing whatsoever to prepare for an invasion, or to harden Ukraine, or to deter Putin in any way. Zelensky left the door wide open and unmanned. Even as the world’s premier intelligence powers closed their embassies and pulled out all their diplomats , Zelensky said it was premature. It was not.

As an outsider I feel like Zelensky has completely different people advising him now than he did two weeks ago. Looking at his sudden explosive gain in competence I think he is probably being advised by an entire team of analysts at Langley. His messaging is also massively amplified across the Western world and I think this is a major part of the support package he is getting from US intel community.

There were a couple of old Zelensky things we saw the day of the invasion, such as asking civilians to make Molotov cocktails and handing out light arms to any random person on the street. These were clearly symptoms of pure panic. Fortunately the panic has passed and it’s been replaced with a much more organised if frugal defence of Ukraine. It should be clear that the US is supporting Zelensky on the condition he follows their precise instructions. This is a good thing and since whatever has been agreed, has been agreed, Zelensky has been doing an excellent job as the personification of Putin’s victims. We don’t know where this all ends for Zelensky, Putin will certainly want him dead and that does limit his options. We need to maintain Zelensky.

On the US support for Ukraine, it seems to me that America is trying to slow the Russian advance down as much as possible. As obviously unpleasant this is to read, I’m not convinced the US want to squarely defeat Russia militarily in Ukraine as this would create nightmare levels of uncertainty around Putin. Maybe the gloves would come off? Keeping Putin’s focus on Ukraine is not a bad thing for US interests. Whilst Putin is openly aggressive, the US will find the geopolitical landscape vastly more compliant to US requests. So the war in Ukraine will go slow, whilst the US uses this time to restructure all of their allies into optimal posture. Once the West is re-organised, I predict Ukraine will slip. Yes this is not nice to read and I’m sure some people will baulk, but my entire Substack is about being objective and that’s my central principle here. I could be wrong, but this is how it looks to my eye.

Other stuff I learnt this past two weeks, countries that fight wars often are not prone to making silly mistakes in the battlefield. Countries that do not fight often are super prone to massive catastrophic blunders. Driving a huge convoy of vehicles that probably costs over $20 billion deep into enemy territory with no good plan B is fantastically stupid. A lot of credibility has been lost, and the threat projection of the Russian military has been diminished as a result.

Of course you will encounter endless problems in the field, it is a war. Millions of people are extremely determined to make problems for you.

This is why wars always take much longer than people expect and cost much more than anyone considered. The Russian advance came to a grinding halt perhaps because Xi requested the invasion be delayed by the Olympics, during that time a lot of snow melted. Ukraine right now is a meltwater swamp. This limits Russians to paved roads and vehicle breakdowns will block those roads. Roads are what Sun Tzu would call “a narrow pass” and he had much to say about using them.

The seasonal weather of Eastern Europe is going to set the tempo for geopolitical events to come. There are times when the ground is firm (winter, summer) when events will be kinetic and times when the ground is soft (spring, autumn) and events will stall. If this does drag on and on events will develop into 6 month cycles, in spring and autumn politicians will talk, in summer and winter people will fight and die.

I hope you found this provoking?