#WTH has happened to our resolve on Ukraine?
The WSJ's Yaroslav Trofimov joins us to talk what will likely be a long war
Three things from this week’s pod:
Western dithering has given Moscow a chance to recalibrate.
All of the hysteria about “armageddon” was wrong. Totally wrong.
There’s an ammunition crisis coming for Ukraine.
Trofimov’s WSJ piece, The War in Ukraine will be long. Is the West ready?, prompted this week’s pod for the simple reason that it was a story that hadn’t thus far been written. He says he wrote the article in, “a moment where people were still living in the world where Ukraine is winning, the afterglow of the tremendous victories that Ukraine has achieved in September, October, even going to early November. But that period has ended.” Further to the day late/dollar short foreign policy that has characterized the United States for the last decade-plus, had NATO been willing to supply needed weaponry to Ukraine at the outset, had the Ukrainians not committed to avoid targeting sites inside Russia, had the world been ready to help Ukraine exploit Moscow’s manifest disarray, perhaps we would now be in a different place.
While Washington, London, Paris and Berlin slowly come to the realization that weapons and material once denied to Kyiv are ok, the larger question is, will our leaders ever get ahead of the game? In every instance, Joe Biden has denied Zelenskyy’s requests only to change his mind weeks later. The latest is a request for aircraft. Will the president change his mind about that too? Who knows. The White House seems utterly uninterested in doing anything but lagging — not simply leading from behind, but being just plain behind.
Perhaps at some point, there will be an awakening to the implications of a stalemate, or, unlikely as it appears, a Russian victory of sorts. What do our enemies look for? Weakness. Lack of resolve. Fear. Check, check, check. Perhaps next week’s State of the Union will bring a much needed clarion call for the United States to stand forthrightly for people defending their own freedoms. Don’t hold your breath.
HIGHLIGHTS
Is the West ready for a long war in Ukraine?
YT: I don't think so. There is maybe a recognition now on the political level that yes, this is not something that's going to end anytime soon, but it hasn't quite translated into action that is necessary to sustain this effort. Obviously, the Russian economy is a very small economy in the global scheme of things, about the size of Spain. But President Putin has moved to transfer to wartime footing, making sure there is ammunition being produced, tanks and equipment. Whereas in the West, things are picking up, but very, very slowly.
When the piece came out, it was a moment where people were still living in the world where Ukraine is winning, the afterglow of the tremendous victories that Ukraine has achieved in September, October, even going to early November. But that period has ended, and now the realization is sinking in that the mobilization that President Putin has carried out, as disastrous as it could have been politically, did help the Russian military to stabilize the front lines.
And more importantly, this whole struggle for who's going to be able to ensure the adequate supply of ammunition and armor is not necessarily being won by the West, because of the bottlenecks in military production in the West. And so that was really the nerve that [the piece] touched.
Has the mood been yo-yoing in Ukraine?
YT: When Putin invaded Ukraine, he only did it using the professional military. Whereas Ukraine mobilized its reservists and civilians since the get-go. And the biggest flaw of the Russia strategy was the lack of manpower. So the mobilization that Putin ordered in September rectified that. So the Russians now no longer have a manpower problem. They have an artillery, ammunition and equipment problem, but the Ukrainians also have that. So there we are now, and I think the question going forward is who's going to get the better gear to win this war?
So shouldn’t we be throwing everything we have to Kyiv?
YT: Well, that's certainly half the opinion in Kyiv. And it's not just this, look at the Patriots. So now Patriots are okay, but the Ukrainians were asking for the Patriots before the war. They were asking for the Patriots in the first month of the war. Now how many thousands of lives could have been spared by supplying them the air defenses early on? And it's hard to tell. And obviously, the part of the reasoning in administration is that they don't want to provoke Putin and cross the red lines.
And so they're adopting what people describe as the boiling the frog strategy. If you throw it in at once, that could be aggressive. But you do it drip drip, drip, the red lines get blurry and blurrier. But the other argument is that probably many people are thinking that the long war is to Russia's disadvantage, and that time plays against Russia. I'm not sure that's actually true. And I think the big debate now is that many people are realizing that, wait a minute, well, maybe time is on Russia's side. And that's why we're seeing even countries like France, let alone Germany, there are actually starting to get serious with the heavy weapons for Ukraine.
Leon Aron wrote a piece in the Washington Post suggesting Putin has now “Stalinized” the war… Do you see that?
YT: Russia's not the Soviet Union. If you look at the demographic structure of Russia, it doesn't have that many young men. So population-wise, Russia has about three and a half times the population of Ukraine. So if every able-bodied man goes to fight, they will have an advantage. And it's also true that this mobilization, despite all the problems, despite horror stories here, despite some of this mobilized soldiers being killed by the hundreds in HIMARS strikes, went off. And if there is another without significant disruptions, serious protests, and if there is another wave, he could draft another half a million people, probably. But once Stalin won the war, he won the war thanks to American lend-lease. Without American oil, without American weapons, it's hard to imagine how the Soviet Union would've resisted the Germans.
The Chinese so far are not supplying Russia with military equipment, weapons, ammunition, despite Putin's desires. And they're trying really hard to maintain neutrality of this military there. And so there's no one else who can really bail him out. So his position is much weaker. But you do see the absolute disregard for human life, the massive frontal attacks without rhyme or reason. You also see this really interesting phenomena of Wagner, where they basically decided to resolve their social problem by sending much of the prison population to death in Ukraine, for the promise of amnesty if you survive six months, and only very few do. And so they are certainly not mourning the tens of thousands of rapists and murderers that are getting killed in Ukraine, and they've killed some of Ukraine's best. And when I went to Bakhmut a couple months ago, on one side there were the criminals of Wagner. On the other side, there were tennis players and musicians, and engineers fighting in volunteer units.
Supply chain issues are a real problem from the West, correct?
YT: I think there is a very serious risk that the current levels of supplies of 155-millimeter artillery shells, which is the basic artillery caliber that Western supply, how it's reduced in Ukraine, will not be sustainable beyond the summer. So if you look at the fire rate, Ukraine fires about 90,000 of the shells a month. And I remember that in the early days of the war, the Russians were firing 90,000 a day when they had what they thought was unlimited supplies. And the US makes about fifteen to twenty maybe thousand by the end of this year. So you can see that the consumption is three times the production. And obviously, there are plans to increase the production in other places, the Germans, the Norwegians, but none of that will catch up to consumption levels of current rates for the next two or three years. So there is this looming crisis of ammunition for the Ukrainians.
Once we started supplying advanced weapons to Kyiv, Ukraine really had the edge. Does it still?
YT: What really happened with the HIMARS, is that when the Russians invaded, and then the frontline stabilized around April, the Russians were operating on the principle that the Ukrainian range is about 20 miles, which is the maximum range of Howitzers and artillery. They put all their command paths ammunition depots logistics outside this 20 mile, 25 mile range. Then all of a sudden when the HIMARS appeared in the battlefield in July, this entire network was within range and was obliterated spectacularly just in a few weeks.
So now, after learning these bitter lessons, the Russians have repositioned all their nodes outside HIMARS' range, which is about 50 miles from the frontline. The Ukrainians don't really have a way of striking there, so if they get, I don't know, ATACMS or other tactical solutions, there is extended range GMLRS or HIMARS, then they could really strike the entirety of this logistical network that is on the coast of the Black and Azov Sea, and disrupt this land corridor between Crimea and Russia.
But we modified the HIMARS to reduce their range, didn't we? Was that a mistake?
YT: Well, I mean it's not just that. It's not just technical modifications, there was also a commitment extracted from Ukraine at the time that it will not use the HIMARS or other Western artillery systems against targets in Russia proper, against targets in Russia proper, which meant that in a city like Kharkiv, which is 20 miles over the border, was being shelled day and night from across the border, and the Ukrainians could not use American weapons to suppress this fire. The fear about ATACMS was the fear that Ukraine would use the weapons on Russia, and they would cross one of these redlines. Of course, after that, the Ukrainians used their own modified drones to fly missions very, very far away, in Russia, striking the main base of Russian nuclear strategic bomber fleet in Engels, hundreds of miles east of the border, and Russia did nothing about that. So all of the fears about Russia's redlines have actually been mistaken-
Are the Ukrainians losing their resolve?
YT: Well, I've been in Ukraine most of the past 11 months. I think that the political resolve is unwavering, in terms of the goals that are Ukraine's war goals, to liberate all of Ukraine's territory, including Crimea, and its internationally recognized borders. There is no one in Ukraine, sort of political and public sphere, who doesn't agree with that goal. If Zelenskyy were to compromise on this under Western pressure, it's very likely that he would be ousted by an uprising.
Will the tanks or better munitions be the silver bullet?
YT: Obviously, there is no magic bullet there. There's no one, single weapon systems that would enable that. What the Ukrainians need is to train soldiers and combine elements of warfare so they could combine all these pieces that they are getting from the US and allies, the HIMARs, the tanks, the artillery, the drones, the air defenses, into a system that outsmarts the more numerous enemy, which well-trained armies like Israel's know how to do.
The training is also a critical piece, and there is a lot of Ukrainian soldiers now being trained all over Europe and in the US. That's something that the United Kingdom pioneered several months ago and turned out to be quite a smart idea from Boris Johnson. Now, the tanks, if they come in sufficient numbers, altogether, they integrate with the Bradleys and the Strykers, into combined arms, armor brigades, that also could be very useful. But again, war is unpredictable. It's really hard to be able to say now also what Russia will do and what Russia plans are. They have deployed half of their 300,000 mobilized soldiers to the front. They have half who are not at the front yet, so they are also preparing for something.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
West to deliver 321 tanks to Ukraine, says diplomat, as North Korea accuses US of ‘crossing the red line’ (CNN, January 29, 2023)
Pentagon Send U.S. Arms Stored in Israel to Ukraine (January 17, 2023)
Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder briefing:
· “So, as you've heard Secretary Austin say before, we will not go below our readiness requirements as we take into consideration what Ukraine's security assistance needs are.”
· “We are confident that we can continue on that glide path working very closely with. Industry and working with our international allies and partners. I would say it's one of our great strategic strengths as a coalition is the fact that we do have such a large defense in number of defense industrial bases to draw upon, as well as a motivated defense industrial base that wants to help us in that regard. So, we are confident that will continue to be able to support Ukraine for as long as it takes. And we're confident that we'll be able to continue to maintain the readiness levels that are vital to defending our nation.”
How the Battle for Donbas Shaped Ukraine’s Success (Foreign Policy Research Institute, December 23, 2022)
US Altered Himars Rocket Launchers to Keep Ukraine From Firing Missiles Into Russia (WSJ, December 5, 2022)
The Future of American Warfare Is Unfolding in Ukraine (The Atlantic, November 25, 2022)
Ukraine’s Appetite for Weapons is Straining Western Stockpiles (Foreign Policy, November 16, 2022)
Lucas Tomlinson tweet on Raytheon CEO to Jennifer Griffin on US weapon shortages, 12/3/22:
Raytheon CEO to @JenGriffinFNC on U.S. weapon shortages after 9 months of war in Ukraine: "We've essentially used up 13 years worth of Stinger production and 5 years worth of Javelin production. So the question is, how are we going to resupply, restock the inventories?"
Four steps the Pentagon can take to fix the munitions industrial base (John Ferrari, The Hill, October 17, 2022)
US is running low on some weapons and ammunition to transfer to Ukraine (CNN, November 17, 2022)● Biden has asked Congress for an additional $21.7 billion to address weapons shortages for Ukraine
The War in Ukraine will be long. Is the West ready? (WSJ, January 13 2023)
US Effort to Arm Taiwan Faces New Challenge with Ukraine Conflict (WSJ, November 27, 2022)
The Real Reasons for Taiwan’s Arms Backlog – And How To Help Fill It (War on the Rocks, January 13, 2023)
Biden can help Zelensky, and Ukraine, by pushing for peace (WaPo, December 2 2022)
Viktor Orban: West is ‘In a War with Russia’ (The American Conservative, January 26, 2023)
The Sanctions on Russia are Working (Foreign Affairs, January 18, 2023)
The West is testing out a lot of shiny new military tech in Ukraine (Vox, September 21, 2022)
New military tech is the surprise twist in Ukraine’s gutsy defense (Financial Times, November 17, 2022)
Across Drones, AI, and Space, Commercial Tech is Flexing Military Muscle in Ukraine (CSIS, May 13, 2022)
For Western Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test (NYT, November 15, 2022)