Tag: Unpacked

Netanyahu’s coalition bickers over Gaza

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brittle governing coalition isn’t anywhere near resolving its internal splits over how the Gaza Strip should be governed once Hamas has been crushed, and the situation is testing the patience of the country’s Western allies — including an increasingly exasperated United States.

Judging by an ill-tempered security Cabinet meeting last week, which was an exceptionally rowdy affair even by the rambunctious standards of Israel’s politics, Netanyahu’s coalition — widely judged as the most right-wing in the country’s history — is fraying. And the sharp differences over Gaza’s fate aren’t helping.

More of a no-holds-barred verbal brawl than a sober meeting at a moment of great national peril, last week’s security Cabinet had been summoned to agree on outlines for a “day-after” plan for Gaza, which the U.S. is ever more urgently demanding. But according to local media reports, as well as background briefings by officials, stark differences between the governing parties over a Gaza plan are exposing deeper underlying divides that are both ideological and personal.

This, in turn, raises questions about just how much longer the country’s wartime unity government can hang together, especially as a protest movement calling for Netanyahu to quit is starting to flex its muscles.

Ministers rounded on each other for much of the acrimonious meeting, with religious nationalists and hard-right leaders excoriating the Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Herzi Halevi, and taking potshots at a proposal offered by Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.

Coming on the eve of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s arrival in Israel, where he’ll be pressing Netanyahu to start winding down military operations in Gaza and conform to U.S. expectations on the enclave’s postwar future, the brawl was especially poorly timed. It also augurs badly for any meeting of the minds on postwar Gaza governance between Israel and Washington — let alone with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

The sharp-tongued bickering was initially sparked by Halevi disclosing he’d set up an internal army inquiry headed by former defense officials, probing the failings of Israel’s security services before the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

Led by ministers Miri Regev, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition partners complained that holding an internal inquiry while fighting rages in Gaza is inappropriate and would distract from what should be the real focus — winning the war.

But their anger was largely concentrated on the inclusion of former Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz — who oversaw the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza — in the inquiry team. They see Israel’s Gaza disengagement as the original sin that allowed Hamas to grow and become the force it has, able to launch attacks as devastating as the ones on October 7. They want the 2005 withdrawal reversed and Israel to annex part, or all, of Gaza, even discussing the possibility of Gazans “voluntarily” being resettled elsewhere — including the DR Congo.

This clash, which saw some defense officials walk out in protest, merely added fuel to the fire over Gallant’s proposal that Palestinians unaffiliated with Hamas administer the enclave after the war. Under Gallant’s plan, there would be no Israeli resettlement of Gaza — which infuriated religious nationalists like Smotrich — however, the IDF would retain military control on the borders, and have the right to mount military operations inside Gaza when deemed necessary.

“Gaza residents are Palestinian. Therefore, Palestinian bodies will be in charge, with the condition that there will be no hostile actions or threats against the State of Israel,” Gallant said last week. But for Smotrich, “Gallant’s ‘day after’ plan is a re-run of the ‘day before’ October 7.”

Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich walks with soldiers during a visit to Kibbutz Kfar Aza near the border with the Gaza Strip | Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images

Scorned by the government’s hard right, the defense minister’s proposal is unlikely to cut it with the U.S. or with Israel’s Arab and Gulf neighbors either, as there would be no role for the Palestinian Authority (PA), which oversees the West Bank. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration wants Gaza to be handed over to what it calls a “revitalized” PA, although it hasn’t detailed exactly what that means or the necessary steps for such a revamp.

Netanyahu eventually broke up the Cabinet meeting after three hours of confrontational exchanges, insults and ministers swearing at each other, once again leaving Gaza’s postwar future unresolved in Israeli minds. And all this, just as the Biden administration redoubles its insistence on a serious and credible postwar plan that Arab nations can accept.

The disastrous meeting also prompted three key centrists in the wartime government — Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot and Yechiel Tropper of the National Unity government’s Blue and White faction — to skip a full meeting on Sunday, highlighting the growing tensions and coalition rifts.

Tropper linked his boycott to the right-wing ministers assailing Halevi. He told national broadcaster Kan that he didn’t know “how long we will be in the government; I only know that we entered for the good of the country and our exit will also be related to the good of the country.”

Gantz, a former defense minister and onetime chief of the General Staff, had led his centrists into Netanyahu’s government after October 7 for the sake of national unity. “There is a time for peace and a time for war. Now is a time for war,” he had said when accepting Netanyahu’s offer to join the war Cabinet.

But Gantz’s popularity has risen dramatically since then, and he’s now seen as Netanyahu’s most likely challenger. So, if he chose to bolt from the government, it would increase the likelihood of an early election — and that’s something anti-Netanyahu activists are starting to demand once more. Until very recently, there was little appetite for demonstrations, with small turnouts of around just a few dozen to a few hundred people. However, rallies over the weekend saw several thousand participating, with protesters taking to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, calling for the prime minister’s removal.

So far, Netanyahu has been circumspect in outlining a postwar Gaza plan, mainly restricting himself to dismissing a role for the PA. And this has partly been due to his worry that disputes over Gaza’s postwar governance could prove fatal for his coalition. It looks like that may well turn out to be true.

Jamie Dettmer

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January 8, 2024
Samsung’s Galaxy S24 lineup set for January 17 debut | TechCrunch

Samsung’s mobile division ditched the big show unveils a while back. Gone, too, it seems are the days when the company would save its first big phone news of the year for the weeks leading up to Mobile World Congress.

The latest Unpacked event is set for January 17 — a week and change after the close of CES. If past is precedent (as it almost invariably is), we’ll be getting our first official look at Samsung’s new mobile flagship, the Galaxy S24.

Last year’s event, held at the beginning of February, ushered in three key versions of the S23, along with a handful of Galaxy Book laptops. This being Samsung, the handset leaks have been ongoing for a couple of months now.

Renders of the S24, S24+and the S24 Ultra don’t stray too far from their predecessors. Those devices are expected to sport 6.2-, 6.7- and 6.8-inch displays, respectively. The S24 and S24+ look to be sporting a trio of rear-facing cameras, while the Ultra bumps it up to a quartet, including the 200-megapixel sensor.

The Ultra also maintains much of the DNA the device inherited from the Galaxy Note line, including square edges and S Pen functionality. The ultra-premium model is also believed to be getting a titanium option, much like the iPhone 15 Pro Max before it.

In spite of apparently being among the first to be powered by Qualcomm’s more powerful and power-efficient Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, leaked price sheets point at a lower price point in Europe, which could be good news for potential buyers everywhere.

This time out, the event is being held in the South Bay. It kicks off at 10 a.m. PT and will be available to stream here. If you want to reserve the device sight unseen up to January 16, Samsung will toss in a $50 “reserve credit” on preorders.

Brian Heater

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January 2, 2024
How did Israel miss what Hamas was planning?

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

The massive assault on Israel by Iran-backed Hamas militants is as bad an intelligence fiasco for the country as 1973’s Yom Kippur War, when Egypt and Syria launched a joint offensive unforeseen by Israel’s vaunted intelligence services.

No doubt Hamas commanders chose to launch their astonishing breakout from Gaza — the 140-square-mile coastal enclave Israel closely monitors with multiple layers of surveillance — on the war’s 50th anniversary for theatrical effect.

But despite such intense digital and satellite monitoring, as well as the use of predictive and facial-recognition technologies, Hamas caught Israel’s security services as off-guard as Egypt and Syria did half a century ago.

Back then, Western intelligence services seem to have been wrong-footed just as they are now — perhaps because they’re so focused on Ukraine and Russia.

But the Yom Kippur War left a legacy of recrimination surrounding Israel’s intelligence services, with the country’s defense forces and government all eager to pass the buck. Israel’s leadership had ignored clear signs of a coming attack, erroneously believing then Egyptian leader Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat wouldn’t elect to strike because he didn’t have control of the skies.

On the eve of the offensive, the head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate Eli Zeira had even written a memo to then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, stating, “I think they aren’t about to attack; we have no proof. Technically, they are able to act. I assume that if they are about to attack, we will get better indications.”

In the years to come, we will no doubt get a better understanding of what went wrong this weekend, when Hamas militants broke through the border fence demarcating Gaza and southern Israel, allowing Iran-aligned militants to overrun Israeli military positions, abducting and slaughtering civilians as they went.

The images of Israel’s Iron Dome being overwhelmed by thousands of Hamas-fired rockets, as well as the scenes of Hamas assault teams swarming Kibbutzim and wracking passing cars with gunfire, will leave a traumatic legacy likely to shape Israeli politics for decades to come.

“This will shake Israel to its core,” said author Jonathan Schanzer. “The majority of the defenses that Israel has relied upon for the last 20 years appear to have been penetrated. So, this obviously raises significant questions about Israeli military intelligence and Mossad, ” he told POLITICO.

For now, the country’s opposition parties are all on side, calling for unity in the face of attack. “In days like these, there is no opposition and no coalition in Israel,” their leaders said in a joint statement. We “are united in the face of terrorism” and the need to strike with “a strong and determined fist,” they added, calling for retribution.

“The State of Israel is at a difficult moment. I am wishing much strength to the IDF, its commanders and fighters and the entirety of the security and rescue forces,” President Isaac Herzog wrote on social media, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “Together we will triumph over those who wish to harm us.”

But as Israel fights back, questions are already snowballing.

IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters that over 2,200 rockets were fired into Israel during the first few hours of the assault. Hamas infiltrated from land, sea and air, with clashes between the militant group and Israeli soldiers in over half-a-dozen areas.

So, how was none of the preparation for this assault picked up on? Hamas would have used its vast network of tunnels that link the enclave to Egypt, but how did it smuggle in the materials needed for such a huge attack without Israel catching wind of the traffic? And how did Israeli intelligence fail to notice Hamas was making and assembling thousands of home-grown Qassam rockets?

“The last time Israel was blindsided this badly was the ’73 war,” noted miliary analyst Patrick Fox. “The scope of this infiltration attack indicates a huge level of planning and preparation spanning months or years,” he added.

In some ways, it seems Israel was looking in the wrong direction. According to Jacob Dallal, an Israeli reserve officer and former IDF spokesperson, this kind of attack was expected to be mounted from Lebanon by Iran-backed Hezbollah.

“The military scenario envisioned Hezbollah attacking from the north, not Hamas from Gaza. No one thought Hamas had such capacity, especially with the intelligence coverage by Israel’s Shabak and IDF Intelligence,” he wrote in the Times of Israel newspaper.

However, some now fear an attack by Hezbollah might still come, and that Israel might be facing a wider war.

Historically, most of the wars Israel has had to fight have involved battles on several fronts at once. But if Hezbollah were to launch cross-border raids from southern Lebanon while Hamas presses from Gaza, according to Schanzer and others, this would mark a far more ambitious strategic endeavor by Iranian proxies, likely orchestrated by Tehran.

And if that were to happen, “the potential death and destruction may top anything we’ve seen in decades,” warned former U.S. national intelligence official Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council.

Along these lines, Hamas military commander Mohammad Deif has since called on the “Islamic resistance in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria” to coordinate and “start marching towards Palestine now.”

So far, Hezbollah hasn’t heeded the call, with the group’s leaders saying they’re monitoring the situation. Yet on Sunday, Hezbollah launched a strike, using artillery and guided missiles on Israeli positions in a disputed area along the border with Syria’s Golan Heights — and Israel’s military responded. Senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine, a cousin of the secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, said the artillery attack was a warning. “We tell the Israelis and the U.S. to stop this ‘stupidity’ or the whole region will be involved in the war,” he said.

However, as Israel battles Hamas and keeps a wary eye on Hezbollah, queries about how this came to pass and how Israeli intelligence got it wrong will continue to niggle away. And as in 1973, there’s likely to be a political and intelligence reckoning once the guns fall silent.

The Yom Kippur War shook Israeli’s faith in their leaders, sparking a protest movement accusing Meir’s Labor government of mismanagement. And it ultimately led to her departure from politics when her coalition lost seats and was unable to form a majority.

Will this now be the fate awaiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu too?

Jamie Dettmer

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October 9, 2023
As Ukraine counteroffensive gets bogged down, it’s back to the drawing board

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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Expectations for Ukraine’s counteroffensive were too high from the start.

And as it now closes in on its third month, with no sign of a truly significant dynamic-changing breakthrough, it feels as though we’re back in a slog, a war of attrition that risks stretching the patience of impatient allies — something the Kremlin is no doubt hoping for.

Or, as American military strategist Edward Luttwak noted this week, “The Ukraine war has entered its ‘grin & bear it’ period as it fights a Great Power that tried & failed to conquer it in a week last February, and which is now organized for protracted war.”

Ukrainian officials blame their counterparts in allied governments for much of the overoptimism surrounding the counteroffensive — as well as an overenthusiastic Western media that mistakes wishful thinking for clear-eyed analysis all too often, conjuring up the idea of demoralized, badly led Russian soldiers quickly turning tail. The optimists’ view was that the counteroffensive would simply repeat the success of last fall, when Ukraine pulled off a stunning and rapid success around Kharkiv, as Russian defenses collapsed.

But Kyiv also bears some responsibility for of the optimistic prognosis of a quick breakthrough.

For much of the spring ahead of the counteroffensive, Chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence Kyrylo Budanov, among others, all too confidently pronounced the prospect, talking about the coming “decisive battle.” And Budanov even shrugged off pleas from Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to soften predictions of success.

But in defense of such overblown forecasts, what were Ukrainians supposed to say?

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried his best to pull off a tricky balancing act, holding out the possibility of delivering a decisive blow in order to shore up Western confidence and keep equipment and weapons flowing, while also tempering expectations. However, he dialed up the latter prospect too late — as did Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who became worried in late spring that hopes were “definitely overheated.”

Their efforts weren’t helped by retired American generals letting their thoughts run away with them either, talking up how Ukraine would soon be able to target annexed Crimea. “The problem is that we believe our own military propaganda,” complained Andrey Illarionov, a former senior Kremlin policy adviser who broke with Putin in 2005. A fierce critic of Moscow, Illarionov now fears a long war unless the West gets considerably more muscular.

Another reason behind Ukraine’s mistaken optimism was also a failure to understand that the Russian army was quickly learning from its own mistakes and correcting course. Just weeks ahead of the counteroffensive’s launch, Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds — two of this war’s most thoughtful military analysts from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) — issued a warning about likely hiccups, detailing evidence of Russia’s learning curve, noting altered basic infantry tactics and improved artillery targeting, allowing guns to strike Ukrainian targets within minutes of detection.

They also highlighted other changes, including the “speed with which Russian infantry dig, and the scale at which they improve their fighting positions.” Russia’s armor tactics were altering as well, as they began using tanks to offer supporting firepower for infantry units from safe distances, rather than amassing them for bungled shock-and-awe attacks, and utilizing thermal camouflage to mask them.

Another common tactic, the authors wrote, “is for the Russians to withdraw from a position that is being assaulted and then saturate it with fire once Ukrainian troops attempt to occupy it.” This tactic, along with a phalanx of dense and imposing defensive lines that Russia emplaced in the south — the counteroffensive’s area of focus — is what’s now stalling Ukraine.

Another reason behind Ukraine’s mistaken optimism was also a failure to understand that the Russian army was quickly learning from its own mistakes and correcting course | Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images

Ukrainian forces are now having to contend with layers upon layers of varied anti-personnel and anti-armor mines in Zaporizhzia and Donetsk, including PFM-1 high-explosives — which can be scattered in their thousands by mortars, helicopters and aeroplanes without exploding upon hitting the ground. These minefields can be up to 16 kilometers deep and easily replenished when Ukrainian sappers make inroads, and by some estimates, Ukrainian territory that’s twice the size of Portugal has been heavily mined, sometimes with up to half a dozen mines per square-meter.

Ukraine now has little time to engineer a break through Russian defensive lines — which in some places are 30 kilometers deep — and then fully capitalize on any major breach before the weather turns again in a couple months. But so far, after weeks of fighting, they have only made inroads of around a few kilometers in key places. The first phase of the counteroffensive saw substantial losses in terms of Western-supplied armor, and the second phase of using infantry to try and find ways through hasn’t met with significant success either.

All Ukraine has been able to do is inch forward.

Still, according to frontline soldiers, morale remains high, mainly among the recently fully deployed — and Western-trained — 10th corps. The initial plan had been to only deploy the 10th once the main defensive lines had been reached, but they had to be thrown in sooner — testament to the awful, time-consuming slog facing Ukraine’s soldiers.

Unsurprisingly, many of them bristle at Western griping about their slow progress, such as the criticism contained in last month’s leaked battlefield assessment by Germany’s Bundeswehr, which faulted the Ukrainian military for not fully implementing its NATO training.

The counter to much of the Bundeswehr’s criticism, of course, is that Ukraine had little option but to move away from standard Western instruction on combined warfare tactics, as crucial elements of the armory needed to pull it off hadn’t been supplied by the West — namely F-16 warplanes and long-range missiles.

The pilots currently being trained on F-16s won’t be ready until next spring, and by then the Americans may have overcome their reluctance to supply longer-range missiles | Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR

In short, the West hobbled the Ukrainians before the starting gun had been fired, teaching them how to fight NATO-style but withholding the weapons systems needed to perform. On top of that, the West was always eager for Zelenskyy to get going, and allies became frustrated when he delayed the counteroffensive from spring to summer, as he lobbied to get more Western supplies.

So, with no apparent signs of a breakthrough, it appears it’s now time to return to the drawing board for the next fighting season in spring, in case success doesn’t come soon. After all, the pilots currently being trained on F-16s won’t be ready until next spring, and by then the Americans may have overcome their reluctance to supply longer-range missiles.

But if political calculations were difficult this year, with a U.S. presidential election looming, it’s important to remember that they’ll be even more taxing next year, with an exceptionally torrid and combustible White House election season in full swing, possibly distracting the administration’s attention and making it harder to get Congress to agree on the security and economic assistance Ukraine will need.

As Luttwak noted, “Ukraine need not win a great victory to exit the war an independent nation, only persistence.” And the question has never been about Ukrainian tenacity — by next year, though, the risks will increase whether the West has the stamina and will to win.

Jamie Dettmer

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August 11, 2023
Ukraine’s long war and the importance of patience

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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Wars don’t run according to political timetables. And in the lead-up to Ukraine’s counteroffensive, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his top aides strove to explain this reality to both nervous allies, impatient for military progress, and their own people, eager for the big counterattack to kick off and hear good news from the front lines.

In the run-up to the long-awaited counteroffensive, which started to unfold last week — later than most anticipated — Ukrainian Minister of Defense Oleksii Reznikov was worried that expectations were “definitely overheated.” “Everyone wants another win,” he said, cautioning allies to temper their hopes, so as to avoid subsequent disappointment.

The worry here is that falling short of expectations might lead to a reduction in international military assistance and renewed, often oblique, pressure to engage with Moscow in negotiations. “They want the next victory. It’s normal, these are emotions,” Reznikov added.

But impatience for a decisive blow against Russia stems not just from emotion but from political calculations too.

A long war risks Western fatigue, the depletion of arsenals and an erosion of unity — especially with China, Brazil and South Africa touting dubious “peace” plans. And despite public promises to back Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” earlier this year Washington officials warned counterparts in Kyiv that they needed to make major battlefield gains soon, while weapons and aid from the U.S. and European allies are still surging.

With the U.S. heading into what’s likely to be an exceptionally torrid and combustible presidential election season — to say the very least — the high level of security and economic assistance from Congress might be hard to maintain, they warned. And according to Ukrainian lawmakers, in recent talks with U.S. State Department and National Security Council officials, queries regarding future commitments and asks were batted away, with the response often being, “let’s see how the counteroffensive goes.”

Former Deputy Prime Minister Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze told POLITICO these talks left her feeling anxious about the “continuation of the same level of U.S. support to Ukraine after this financial year” — which, for the U.S. federal budget, is September.

Likewise, there are also signs of war-weariness and wariness in Europe, both among politicians and the public, with Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser in Zelenskyy’s office, complaining this week: “I understand that sitting thousands of kilometers away from Ukraine you can talk about ‘geopolitics,’ ‘settlement’ and the undesirability of escalation for months. And allow the rampage of the ‘Russian world.’”

Tellingly, even in Poland — one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies — the attitude toward Ukrainian war refugees is deteriorating. According to a survey by researchers from the University of Warsaw and the Academy of Economics and Humanities, in the past five months, the percentage of those who strongly support helping refugees dropped from 49 percent to 28 percent.

So, the political clock is ticking — and not necessarily matching the tempo of war.

Zelenskyy has had to pull off a difficult balancing act in recent weeks, holding out the prospect of delivering a decisive blow against Russia to shore up Western confidence and optimism and keep equipment and weapons flowing, while also underscoring that the counteroffensive most likely won’t be able to achieve the stunning quick success of last autumn’s push in Kharkiv.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
| Alexey Furman/Getty Images

Triggering a cascading collapse of Russia’s defenses and a pell-mell rout, the success in Kharkiv helped keep Western allies on side, but it also unhelpfully colored expectations, adding to the hype surrounding the current counteroffensive, which Kyiv has been keen to calm. However, Ukrainian officials are acutely aware of Western fears about a long-drawn out war of attrition.

But Ukraine also doesn’t want to be pushed into any hasty moves that could result in serious and costly mishaps, which might then undermine military morale or knock Western hopes and have major geopolitical repercussions, a senior Ukrainian military official told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. “This is not like Kharkiv,” he said. “We must be cautious. The Russians have been learning and preparing, and their defensive lines are formidable — we don’t have men to waste, nor equipment. Progress will have to be incremental.”

And incrementalism is the new watchword.

In his nightly address, Zelenskyy noted on Monday that “the battles are fierce, but we are moving forward, and this is very important. The enemy’s losses are exactly what we need.”

Similarly, according to Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. army in Europe, this “offensive is incredibly important for Ukraine’s future.” “Kyiv’s top military leadership has, to date, followed the conservative strategy of eroding Russian formations over time, gaining ground incrementally, avoiding major risks and limiting Ukrainian casualties as much as possible,” he wrote for the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“The offensive has clearly started, but not I think the main attack. When we see large, armored formations join the assault, then I think we’ll know the main attack has really begun,” he added.

Even though the main action is still to come, however, as Zelenskyy highlighted, the going is clearly tough.

And his Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Maliar made this even clearer, saying on Telegram: “The enemy is doing everything to keep the positions captured by him. Actively uses assault and army aviation, conducts intense artillery fire. During the offensive, our troops encounter continuous minefields, which are combined with anti-tank ditches. All this is combined with constant counterattacks by enemy units on armored vehicles and the massive use of anti-tank guided missile and kamikaze drones.”

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Ukrainians believe they can, and will, deliver a powerful blow with the brigades trained by NATO militaries and supplied by Western allies. And officials in Kyiv believe they can do better than the “moderate territorial gains” forecast by the Pentagon, according to leaked classified U.S. intelligence documents.

But, , they need patience from their allies too.

Jamie Dettmer

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June 14, 2023
This is Ukraine’s D-Day

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Ukraine is on the cusp of what may well prove to be one of the two key battles of the war that was unleashed on it by Russia.

The first was Ukraine’s successful defense of Kyiv over a year ago. Russia had a plan, but it was badly executed — Ukraine didn’t have much of one and, greatly assisted by Western-supplied Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles, winged it. Eventually, Russia’s overly cocky and poorly commanded forces were outmaneuvered by the agility, bravery and improvisational skills of Ukraine’s forces.

We are now likely in the opening gambits of the second crucial battle, as Ukraine’s much anticipated counteroffensive in the east of the country appears imminent — if not already underway. However, officials in Kyiv still worry about whether they’ve enough of all they need to strike hard and deep.

We are now on the brink of the second crucial battle, as Ukraine’s much anticipated counteroffensive in the east of the country appears imminent. However, officials in Kyiv still worry about whether they’ve enough of all they need to strike hard and deep.

Speaking at the weekend, the deputy head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office Ihor Zhovkva told the Sunday Times, “if you want to start a successful counter-offensive you need everything at your disposal, including artillery, armoured vehicles and tanks, so probably we don’t have enough.”

Nonetheless, Zelenskyy himself said Friday that he was now ready to launch the counteroffensive, but he also sought to temper expectations, saying the battlefield struggle ahead would take some time and come at heavy cost. And to some eyes, the opening moves appeared to be starting as this article was written.

The Ukrainian leader must feel akin to former United States President Dwight Eisenhower on the eve of D-Day. “The eyes of the world are upon you,” Eisenhower wrote in a famous letter sent to troops before the assault. “We will accept nothing less than full victory! Good Luck!” But he also drafted another in case of failure, preemptively writing, “The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” The letter never had to be sent.

Today, on the eve of battle, 79 years on from when Eisenhower drafted his D-Day messages, Ukraine and Russia are both still doing all they can to disrupt and deceive each other, with drone and missile strikes on both military and civilian targets.

Russia’s relentless aerial attacks on Kyiv over the last four weeks — involving 400 Iranian Shahed drones and 114 cruise missiles — have been aimed at trying to psych Ukrainians out. Shifting away from targeting the country’s energy grid, Russia’s been focused on Ukrainian command, as well as their decision-making centers and logistical hubs, and on Sunday, Russian missiles struck an air force base in central Ukraine.

“Their primary goal is to stop our counteroffensive,” Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Volodymyr Havrylov told a security conference in Singapore.

The eyes of the world are on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

Likewise, Ukraine has been doing its utmost to cause disorder and to disturb its foes not only with drones and shelling but also with increasingly audacious sabotage missions — both behind enemy lines in occupied Ukraine and inside Russia — deploying apparently covert agents and Russian rebels grouped together in the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps.

These incursions in the Belgorod region on the border with Ukraine are showing just how vulnerable Russia’s borders are. But along with the cross-border shelling that’s seen Shebekino and Volokonovksky hit with hundreds of artillery rounds in recent days, they also have a dual function: Bringing the war home to the Russians — much as the recent drone attacks on Moscow have been doing — while potentially also cajoling Russia into moving some troops deployed along the front lines in order to contain the long-awaited counteroffensive.

The fighting in Belgorod is aggravating the political infighting in Russia as well, with Yevgeny Prigozhin — the murderous leader of the Wagner paramilitary group — announcing Saturday he was ready to send his mercenaries to defend the border region. “If the Ministry of Defense does not stop what is happening in the Belgorod region […] where Russian territory is, in fact, being captured, then obviously we will arrive,” he said in an audio message. Prigozhin added that he wouldn’t wait for official authorization, stating, “the only thing we’ll be asking for is ammunition, so that we don’t arrive, as we say back home, bare arsed in the cold.”

These incursions, which Kyiv denies having any hand in, are a mocking echo of Russia’s supposedly deniable “little green men,” deployed in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 to spearhead annexation and land grab. But, ultimately, much like the drone attacks, missile strikes and artillery bombardments conducted by both sides, they are mere sideshows — albeit important ones if they manage to trick Russia into looking the wrong way and misjudging where the counteroffensive’s main thrust will come from.

And that’s a question Ukraine’s doing its best to avoid answering ahead of the guns roaring.

On Sunday, Ukraine’s military doubled down on its plea for operational silence regarding the counteroffensive, urging the public not to speculate about the assault or share any images that could give the game away. “Plans love silence,” the defense ministry said in a video posted to its social media channels, featuring masked troops holding their fingers against their lips. However, officials themselves have stoked speculation with their recent efforts to taunt Russia, posting a video showing troops preparing for battle and chanting a blessing and a promise just last week.

Still, there’s little secret to the broad options — as Russians can read maps too.

Undoubtedly, the biggest possible surprise would come if Ukraine were to launch its major thrust in the northeastern oblast of Kharkiv, where Russian defenses collapsed last fall, in the face of an unexpected attack that even Ukrainian ground commanders weren’t informed of until the eve of assault. The aim of such a strike here would be to drive deep into Luhansk, force Russia out of Severodonetsk and threaten Bakhmut.

Pushing into Donetsk would also be an option for Ukraine, but the attack with the biggest potential payoff would be through Zaporizhia and Kherson, pushing toward Mariupol, Berdiansk, Melitopol and Tokmak, with the aim of severing the so-called land bridge connecting mainland Russia and the southern Ukrainian territories that Russia occupies via the Crimean isthmus.

And this is where most seasoned military observers expect an attack to be focused — as do map-reading Russians, apparently. According to open-source satellite imagery and Ukrainian field commanders who spoke with POLITICO, in recent weeks, Russian forces have been fortifying Zaporizhzhia oblast and building up a series of defense lines — they’ve also been shoring up defenses in northern Crimea for months.

But as Britain’s Royal United Services Institute noted in a recent report, this could cause problems for Ukraine: “Engineering has proven to be one of the strongest branches of the Russian military,” the report said. “The defenses now constructed, consisting of complex obstacles and field fortifications, will pose a major tactical challenge to Ukrainian offensive operations.”

Thus, Ukraine’s now pinning some of its hopes on signs that Russia’s running low on artillery shells; and it also believes it can exploit Russia’s low morale and poor command coordination.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s asking questions of itself too: Will it be able to pull off a truly coordinated combined arms warfare and avoid being too sequential or plodding as it sometimes has in the past? When facing stout resistance, can it continue to push on and not hesitate? And, above all, have Ukrainian forces trained enough with the new Western-supplied tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment they only recently got?

In his message, hours before D-Day, Eisenhower noted: “The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!” And this, now, is Ukraine’s D-Day.

Jamie Dettmer

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June 5, 2023
Targeted killings spark debate within Russian opposition

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

KYIV — “She’ll say whatever the FSB [Federal Security Service] wants her to say,” said Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker-turned-dissident who now lives in Kyiv.

Discussing who was behind the bombing of a St. Petersburg café earlier this month — which left 40 injured and warmongering military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky dead — the “she” in question was 26-year-old Darya Trepova who, until recently, was an assistant at a vintage clothing store and a feminist activist, and has been accused of being the bomber.

And the St. Petersburg bombing — as well as another carried out against commentator Darya Dugina — has now sharpened a debate within the deeply fractured, often argumentative and diverse Russian opposition, regarding the most effective tactics to oppose President Vladimir Putin and collapse his regime — raising the question of whether violence should play a role, and if so, when and how?

Russian authorities arrested Trepova within hours of the blast, and in an interrogation video they released, she can be seen admitting to taking a plaster figurine packed with explosives into a café that is likely owned by the paramilitary Wagner group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin. On CCTV footage, she can be seen leaving the wrecked café, apparently as shocked and dazed as others caught in the blast.

But Ponomarev says she wasn’t the perpetrator, instead insisting that it was the National Republican Army (NRA) — a shadowy group that also claimed responsibility for the August car bombing that killed Dugina, daughter of ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. Yet, many security experts are skeptical of the NRA’s claims, as the group has offered no concrete evidence to the outside world.

Still, Ponomarev insists they shouldn’t be doubtful and says the group does indeed exist.

“I do understand why people are skeptical. The NRA must be cautious, and for them, the result is more important than PR about who they are. That’s why they asked me to help them with getting the word out, and whatever evidence they show me cannot be disclosed because that would jeopardize their security.”

But who, exactly, are they? According to Ponomarev, the group is comprised of 24 “young radical activists, who I would say are a bit more inclined to the left, but there are different views inside the group, judging from what I have heard during our discussions” — which have only been conducted remotely.

When asked if any of them had serious military training, he said he didn’t think so. “What they pulled off in St. Petersburg wouldn’t require any, and what was done with Dugin’s daughter? We don’t know the technical details but, in general, I can see how that could have been done by a person without any specific training.”

Yet, security experts say they aren’t convinced that either of the apparently remotely triggered bombings could have been accomplished by individuals without some expertise in building bombs and triggering them remotely — especially when it comes to the attack on Dugina, who was killed at the wheel of her car.

Regardless, the bombings are intensifying discussions within the country’s fragmented opposition.

On the one hand, key liberal figures, including Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza — who was found guilty of treason just last week and handed a 25-year jail term — Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Garry Kasparov and Dmitry Gudkov, are all critical of violence. Although they don’t oppose acts of sabotage.

Alexei Navalny is among those who are critical of violence, though aren’t opposed to sabotage | Kiril Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty images

“The Russian opposition needs to agree on nonaggression because conflicts and scandals in its ranks weaken us all,” Gudkov, a former lawmaker, said. “We need to stop calling each other ‘agents of the Kremlin’ and find the points according to which we can work together toward the common goal of the collapse of the Kremlin regime,” he added in recent public comments.

Gudkov, along with his father Gennady — a former KGB officer — and Ponomarev became leading names in the 2012 protests opposing Putin’s reelection, and they joined forces to mount an act of parliamentary defiance that same year, filibustering a bill allowing large fines for anti-government protesters.

On the issue of mounting violent attacks and targeting civilians, however, they aren’t on the same page. “There are many people inside the Russian liberal opposition who are against violent methods, and I don’t see much of a reason to debate with them,” Ponomarev told POLITICO. There are times when nonviolent methods can work — but not now, he argues.

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Vesna — the youth democratic movement founded in 2013 by former members of the country’s liberal Yabloko party — led many of the initial anti-war street protests observing the principle of nonviolence, though that didn’t prevent the Kremlin from adding it to its list of proscribed “terrorist” and extremist organizations. Nonviolence is likewise observed by the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR), which was launched by activists Daria Serenko and Ella Rossman hours after Russia invaded Ukraine.

“We are the resistance to the war, to patriarchy, to authoritarianism and militarism. We are the future and we will win,” reads FAR’s manifesto. The organization has used an array of creative micro-methods to try and get its anti-Putin message across, including writing anti-war slogans on banknotes, installing anti-war art in public spaces, and handing out bouquets of flowers on the streets.

Interestingly, scrawling on bank notes is reminiscent of Otto and Elise Hampel in Nazi Germany during the 1940s — a working-class German couple who handwrote over 287 postcards, dropping them in mailboxes and leaving them in stairwells, urging people to overthrow the Nazis. It took the Gestapo two years to identify them, and they were guillotined in April 1943.

But such methods don’t satisfy Ponomarev, the lone lawmaker to vote against Putin’s annexation of Crimea in the Russian Duma in 2014. He says he’s in touch with other partisan groups inside Russia, and at a conference of exiled opposition figures sponsored by the Free Russia Forum in Vilnius last year, he called on participants to support direct action within Russia. However, he was largely met with indifference and has subsequently been blackballed by the liberal opposition due to his calls for armed resistance.

Meanwhile, opposition journalist Roman Popkov — who was jailed for two years for taking part in anti-Putin protests and is now in exile — is even more dismissive of nonviolence, saying he talks with direct-action groups inside Russia like Stop the Wagons, who claim to have sabotaged and derailed more than 80 freight trains.

On Telegram, Popkov mocked liberal opposition figures for their caution and doubts about the St. Petersburg bombing. “The Russian liberal establishment is groaning in fear of a possible ‘toughening of state terror’ after the destruction of the war criminal Tatarsky,” he wrote. Adding, “It is difficult to understand what other toughening of state terror you are afraid of.”

According to Popkov, who is also a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies — a group of exiled former Russian lawmakers — the opposition doesn’t have a plan because it is too fragmented, but “there is the need for an armed uprising.”

However, several of Putin’s liberal opponents, including Khodorkovsky, approach the issue from a more cautious angle, saying that people should prepare for armed resistance but that the time is nowhere near right for launching it — the result would almost certainly be ineffective and end up in a bloodbath.

Jamie Dettmer

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April 24, 2023
The strengths and weaknesses of Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion, senior Ukraine opposition politicians and former ministers were brimming with frustration. They’d been imploring President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet with them — something he’d not done since his landslide election nearly two years before.

They’d also been urging him to boost funding for the country’s armed forces for months, clamoring for Ukraine’s reservists to be called up as America’s warnings of an invasion intensified — an invasion Zelenskyy still thought unlikely. They wanted intensive war-planning, including the drafting and publication of civil defense orders, so people would know what to do when the guns roared.

“Ukraine is trapped with a national leader who does not think strategically,” Lesia Vasylenko, a lawmaker and member of the liberal and pro-European political Holos party, had told me five days before the invasion.

“I think that’s the thing he will be blamed for later. It’s not about knowing everything. It’s about refusing to have in your entourage experts who know what questions to ask, and having advisers who can contradict and challenge you, and we may pay a price for that,” she’d fumed.

Of course, Zelenskyy’s missteps — as Vasylenko and many other opposition lawmakers see them — have since been forgiven, but they have not been forgotten. And these missteps form the basis of their worries for post-war Ukraine. They see a pattern that will become even more troubling when the guns fall silent, arguing that the president’s strengths as a lionhearted wartime leader are ill-suited for peacetime.

War hasn’t done anything to temper Zelenskyy’s impatience with governing complexities or with institutions that don’t move as fast as he would like or fall in line fast enough. He prefers the big picture, ignores details and likes to rely on an inner circle of trusted friends.

But while the comedian-turned-president is being lauded now — even hero-worshipped — by a starstruck West for his inspirational wartime rhetoric, spellbinding oratory and skill at capturing the hearts of audiences from Washington to London and Brussels to Warsaw, Zelenskyy floundered as president before Russia invaded. Few gave him much chance of being reelected in 2024, as his poll numbers were plummeting — his favorability rating was at 31 percent by the end of 2021.

He had promised a lot — probably too much — but achieved little.

“Ukraine has two main problems: the war in the Donbas and the fear of people investing in the country,” Zelenskyy had said shortly after his election win. But his anti-corruption efforts stalled and were unhurried, while his promise to solve the problem of the Donbas went nowhere. And in his early eagerness to clinch a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who declined a sit-down, some criticized Zelenskyy for thinking too much of his powers of persuasion and charisma.

“He thought peace would be easy to establish because all you needed to do was to ‘look into Putin’s eyes’ and talk to him sincerely,” said lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi.

“He became president without any political experience, or any experience in managing state structures. He thought running a state is actually quite simple. You make decisions and they have to be implemented,” Kniazhytskyi told me. And when things went wrong, his reaction was always, it’s “the fault of predecessors, who need to be imprisoned,” Kniazhytskyi said.

But while the comedian-turned-president is being lauded now, he floundered as president before Russia invaded | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Yet, Zelenskyy’s transformation from disappointing peacetime leader to, in the hyperbolic words of French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, “a new, young and magnificent founding father” of the free world, has been startling.

Even his domestic critics doff their caps to him for his strengths as a superb communicator: His daily addresses to Ukrainians have steadied them, given direction and boosted morale, even when spirits understandably flag. And they acknowledge he likely saved the country by declining U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s offer for “a ride” out of Kyiv.

“He has become a compelling leader,” said Adrian Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the upcoming “Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the Russian War.” According to Karatnycky, Zelenskyy’s strengths as a communicator match the times. “He’s good at channeling public opinion, but he’s more effective now because the country is much more united and surer about its identity, interests and objectives. He’s still the same guy he was — an actor and performer — but that makes him an ideal war leader because he’s able to embody the public impulse,” he added.

But when normal politics are in play and the public isn’t united, Zelenskyy’s an inconsistent leader who switches the script and recasts the story to chase the vagaries and whims of public opinion. “When the public purpose is clear, he has great strength, and in wartime, he has behind him the absolute power of the state. But when the carriage turns into a pumpkin again, he’s going to have to cope with a very different world,” Karatnycky concluded.

And that world hasn’t really gone away.

Domestic political criticism is mounting — though little noted by an international media still enraptured by Zelenskyy’s charismatic appeal and enthralled by the simple story of David versus Goliath.

Meanwhile, in the Verkhovna Rada — the country’s parliament — frustration is building, with lawmakers complaining they’re being overlooked by a government that was already impatient of oversight before the war and now shuns it almost entirely. Zelenskyy has only met with top opposition leaders once since Russia invaded — and that was nearly a year ago.

“The routine of ministers being questioned by the Rada has been abandoned,” said opposition lawmaker Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a member of the European Solidarity party and former deputy prime minister in the previous government of former President Petro Poroshenko.

“Wartime does call for urgent decisions to be taken quickly, and it calls for shortened procedures. And so that’s kind of understandable,” she said. “But we are seeing decisions being increasingly centralized and concentrated in fewer hands, and this is having an impact on the balance of political power, and [it’s] damaging to the system of governance we are trying to develop and the strengthening of our democratic institutions in line with the criteria laid out by the EU for convergence.”

Klympush-Tsintsadze is worried the recent wave of anti-corruption arrests was more an exercise in smoke and mirrors in the run-up to February’s EU-Ukraine summit — and one that might be used as an opportunity to centralize power even further. “If someone thinks that centralization of power is the answer to our challenges, that someone is wrong,” she added. “I think it is important to watch very closely how anti-corruption cases develop, and whether there will be transparent investigations, and whether the rule of law will be closely observed.”

According to Kniazhytskyi, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Zelenskyy is a populist politician and shares the personality-focused flaws of this breed. However, what cheers the opposition lawmaker is how Ukrainian civil society has bloomed during the war, how local self-government has been strengthened because of wartime volunteering and mutual assistance and how some state bodies have performed — notably, the railways and the energy sector.

It is this — along with a strong sense of national belonging forged by the conflict — that will form the foundation of a strong post-war Ukraine, he said.

Jamie Dettmer

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February 21, 2023
Manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

It appears it’s only a matter of time before the Kremlin orders another draft to replenish its depleted ranks and make up for the battlefield failings of its command.

This week, Norway’s army chief said Russia has already suffered staggering losses, estimating 180,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since February — a figure much higher than American estimates, as General Mark Milley, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, had suggested in November that the toll was around 100,000.

But whatever the exact tally, few military analysts doubt Russian forces are suffering catastrophic casualties. In a video posted this week, Russian human rights activist Olga Romanova, who heads the Russia Behind Bars charity, said that of the 50,000 conscripts recruited from jails by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitary mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group, 40,000 are now dead, missing or deserted.

In some ways, the high Wagner toll isn’t surprising, with increasing reports from both sides of the front lines that Prigozhin has been using his recruits with little regard for their longevity. One American volunteer, who asked to remain unnamed, recently told POLITICO that he was amazed how Wagner commanders were just hurling their men at Ukrainian positions, only to have them gunned down for little gain.

Andrey Medvedev, a Wagner defector who recently fled to Norway, has also told reporters that in the months-long Russian offensive against the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, former prisoners were thrown into battle as cannon fodder, as meat. “In my platoon, only three out of 30 men survived. We were then given more prisoners, and many of those died too,” he said.

Of course, Wagner is at the extreme end when it comes to carelessness with lives — but as Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day missile strike demonstrated, regular Russian armed forces are also knee-deep in blood. Russia says 89 soldiers were killed at Makiivka — the highest single battlefield loss Moscow has acknowledged since the invasion began — while Ukraine estimates the death toll was nearer 400.

Many of those killed there came from Samara, a city located at the confluence of the Volga and Samara rivers, where Communist dictator Joseph Stalin had an underground complex built for Russian leaders in case of a possible evacuation from Moscow. The bunker was built in just as much secrecy as the funerals that have been taking place over the past few weeks for the conscripts killed at Makiivka. “Lists [of the dead] will not be published,” Samara’s military commissar announced earlier this month.

To make up for these losses, Russia’s military bloggers, who have grown increasingly critical, have been urging a bigger partial mobilization, this time of 500,000 reservists to add to the 300,000 already called up in September. President Vladimir Putin has denied this, and Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also dismissed the possibility, saying that the “topic is constantly artificially activated both from abroad and from within the country.”

Yet, last month, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called for Russia’s army to be boosted from its current 1.1 million to 1.5 million, and he announced new commands in regions around Moscow, St. Petersburg and Karelia, on the border with Finland.

Meanwhile, circumstantial evidence that another draft will be called is also accumulating — though whether it will be done openly or by stealth is unclear.

Along these lines, both the Kremlin and Russia’s political-military establishment have been redoubling propaganda efforts, attempting to shape a narrative that this war isn’t one of choice but of necessity, and that it amounts to an existential clash for the country.

General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” | Ruslan Braun/Creative commons via Flickr

In a recent interview, General Valery Gerasimov — the former chief of the defense staff and now the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine — said that Russia is battling “almost the entire collective West” and that course corrections are needed when it comes to mobilization. He talked about threats arising from Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

Similarly, in his Epiphany address this month, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church said, “the desire to defeat Russia today has taken very dangerous forms. We pray to the Lord that he will bring the madmen to reason and help them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world.” And the increasingly unhinged Dmitry Medvedev, now the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, has warned that the war in Ukraine isn’t going as planned, so it might be necessary to use nuclear weapons to avoid failure.

As Russia’s leaders strive to sell their war as an existential crisis, they are mining ever deeper for tropes to heighten nationalist fervor too, citing the Great Patriotic War at every turn. At the Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, which commemorates the breaking of the German siege of the city in 1944, a new exhibition dedicated to “The Lessons of Fascism Yet to Be Learned” is due to be unveiled, and it is set to feature captured Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles. “It’s only logical that a museum dedicated to the struggle against Nazism would support the special operation directed against neo-Nazism in Ukraine,” a press release helpfully suggests.

In line with Putin’s insistence that the war is being waged to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Kremlin propagandists have also been endeavoring to popularize the slogan, “We can do it again.”

At the same time, there are signs that local recruitment centers are gearing up for another surge of draftees as well.

Rumors of a fresh partial mobilization have prompted some dual-citizen Central Asian workers — those holding Russian passports and who would be eligible to be drafted — to leave the country, and some say they’ve been prevented from exiting. A Kyrgyz man told Radio Free Europe he was stopped by Russian border guards when he tried to cross into Kazakhstan en route to Kyrgyzstan. “Russian border guards explained to me quite politely that ‘you are included in a mobilization list, this is the law, and you have no right to go,’” he said.

In order to prevent another surge of refuseniks, Moscow also seems determined to put up further restrictions on crossing Russia’s borders, including possibly making it obligatory for Russians to book a specific time and place in advance, so that they can exit. Amendments to a transport law introduced in the Duma on Monday would require “vehicles belonging to Russian transport companies, foreign transport companies, citizens of the Russian Federation, foreign citizens, stateless persons and other road users” to reserve a date and time “in order to cross the state border of the Russian Federation.”

Transport officials say this would only affect haulers and would help ease congestion near border checkpoints. But if so, then why are “citizens of the Russian Federation” included in the language?

All in all, manpower will be crucial for Russia to mount a spring offensive in the coming months. And Western military analysts suspect that Ukraine and Russia are currently fielding about the same number of combat soldiers on the battlefield. This means General Gerasimov will need many more if he’s to achieve the three-to-one ratio military doctrines suggest are necessary for an attacking force.

Jamie Dettmer

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January 24, 2023
Russia digs in for a long war

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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Visiting newly liberated Kherson back in November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced, “this is the beginning of the end of the war.”

However, only in hindsight will it become clear whether the Russian retreat did indeed mark the beginning of the end, or whether it will be seen as a false dawn in a much longer war — particularly since all signs indicate Russia is readying for a lengthy fight.

For the past month, neither Ukrainian nor Russian forces have had much to show in terms of territorial gains made in the ferocious fight on the front lines of Donetsk and Luhansk — only high tallies of dead and wounded and the depletion of weapons, especially artillery shells and rockets.

Despite the modern additions of drones and electronic warfare, much of the fighting has been reminiscent of World War I. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,” is how poet Wilfred Owen had depicted the stark realities of trench warfare. And soldiers in the Donbas are living those words today.

Once the ground freezes, Ukraine will seemingly have two tactical options: to launch an offensive in the south, aimed at severing Russia’s land bridge with Crimea, or to focus on Luhansk in the northeast. To be able to do either, however, will require a massive resupply from Western powers.

On a visit to Washington this week — Zelenskyy’s first trip outside Ukraine since Russia invaded — he pressed the case hard for more and better. Supplies are getting low in Western arsenals too, but urgency for Ukraine is mounting: Ordnance and materiel will be needed not only for Ukraine to launch offensives but likely for defense as well.

Meanwhile, there’s growing alarm that Russian forces in Ukraine under the command of General Sergei Surovikin — a commander who, as POLITICO predicted, has proven more tactically astute than his predecessors — are preparing a counteroffensive that will be boosted by more than 200,000 newly mobilized draftees.

In recent months, Russia hasn’t had the manpower to secure any breakthroughs. And while the new conscripts may not be the best trained or motivated, throwing such a number into battle could nonetheless have significant impact — particularly as Russian President Vladimir Putin is just as callous as Stalin in terms of overlooking the number of casualties among his forces. That’s the Russian way of war — seek to overwhelm with numbers, regardless of the human cost.

By contrast, Ukraine will only be feeding in 30,000 newly trained troops this winter, and the discrepancy is worrying military officials in Kyiv. “The enemy shouldn’t be discounted. They are not weak . . . and they have great potential,” General Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said this week.

Russia is also in the throes of what Andrew Monaghan, an associate fellow at the NATO Defense College, has dubbed “a rethink” of strategy, as calls of “all for the front, all for victory” mount in Moscow. In comments to his military chiefs midweek, Putin seemingly responded to those calls, vowing not only to continue the so-called special military operation into 2023 but to ramp up, saying there was no limit to the amount of money Russia was willing to spend.

In other words, having already ordered its industry to retool to boost military supplies, the Kremlin is digging in for a long war. Yet, how Russia will escalate, what tactical goals it will pursue with its new troops and what lessons it’s learned from the conflict so far remain unclear. Also unclear is how it will amass the ordnance it needs.

A compound used by the Russian military as a barracks and local headquarters in Kupiansk, Kharkiv | Carl Court/Getty Images

Rumors of a shake-up in the higher echelons of Russia’s armed forces have been teeming in Moscow for weeks, with talk that Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov is likely to be replaced. Will Putin once again turn to younger men to get the results he wants, as he did when he broke with the pattern of seniority in October and appointed 44-year-old Colonel Oleg Gorshenin to command the powerful National Defense Management Center?

If a reshuffle does come, it “will provide some clarity, perhaps, on how Moscow understands the scale of the war going into 2023 and what any further escalation might look like, including intensified campaigning — or even a major offensive — later in the winter or in the spring,” according to Monaghan.

But no one in Kyiv doubts a renewed Russian offensive is coming. Although Putin avoided predicting any imminent successes or goals in his remarks this week, he made clear he expects results. “The country and government is giving everything that the army asks for — everything. I trust that there will be an appropriate response and the results will be achieved,” he said.

And the results Putin will likely want to see are in the regions he formally annexed earlier this year, only to see chunks of them subsequently liberated by Ukraine. But Western military analysts don’t expect Russia to mount a push along the whole snaking, elongated front — more likely a multi-pronged assault focusing on some key villages and towns around Donetsk, on towns between Kharkiv and Luhansk and in Zaporizhzhia, where there have been reports of increased movements of troops and equipment across the border in Russia.

Russia could throw in a wildcard too — like another attack from Belarus toward Kyiv and also west of the capital toward Vinnytsia, imperiling rail lines running from the West and the E40 highway linking Lviv with Kyiv.

There’s been a steady buildup of Russian forces in Belarus in recent weeks, with Ukrainian sources telling POLITICO that Russian warplanes have seemingly been testing Ukraine’s air defenses along the border. And the Institute for the Study of War said it was continuing to observe signs consistent with “a renewed Russian invasion of northern Ukraine from Belarus.”

It also said that independent Belarusian sources continue to report growing Russian mechanized forces in the country, with about 30 Russian T-80 tanks reportedly deployed around December 20. However, no strike groups appear to be forming as yet, suggesting an attack from Belarus “is not very likely imminent.”

Imminent or not, though, American military strategist Edward Luttwak has warned of “a scythe maneuver from Belarus down to Vinnytsia to cut off Kyiv from its westward supply lines.” And as Ukrainian General Valerii Zaluzhnyi said this week, he has “no doubt [Russia] will have another go at Kyiv.”

Jamie Dettmer

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December 19, 2022
The UK is starting to get real about Europe

Paul Taylor is a contributing editor at POLITICO.

After six years of chaos and recrimination since Britons voted to leave the European Union, there are signs the country is showing an unexpected outbreak of common sense in its approach to the bloc.

In his first weeks in office, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — a Brexiteer himself — has sent clear signals that he wants a more constructive relationship with Brussels and Paris, and to avoid a trade war with Britain’s biggest economic partner.

Gone are the nationalist bombast of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the sheer havoc wrought by his successor Liz Truss crashing the economy in pursuit of a Brexit dividend. Instead, they have both given way to a sudden burst of pragmatism, as Sunak is seeking practical solutions to festering problems.

This change in outlook may be partly due to the realization that Europe needs to stand united in the face of a threat to its common security from Russian President Vladimir Putin — although that hadn’t stopped Johnson from bragging about how leaving the EU had supposedly freed the United Kingdom to be more supportive of Ukraine than France or Germany.

It may also be due to the dire economic straits Britain is in after the collapse of Truss’ short-lived experiment for a deregulated, low-tax Singapore-on-the-Thames. Or, perhaps, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hard line on any EU deal with the U.K. has had a sobering effect. As may have the shift in British public opinion, which now thinks leaving the bloc was a mistake by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent.

For whatever reason, it is a welcome start.

In just three weeks, Sunak has signed up to an EU defense initiative to make it easier to move armed forces around the Continent, he’s acted to improve Britain’s relations with Ireland, and he’s created political space for a possible compromise on the vexed issue of trade with Northern Ireland, which has bedeviled relations with Brussels since the U.K.’s exit from the EU.

At their first meeting, Sunak told United States President Joe Biden that he wants to have a negotiated settlement on the Northern Ireland Protocol in place by next April — the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday peace agreement. So, sustained pressure from Washington is starting to pay off as well.

The prime minister has also sought to thaw frosty relations with France, clinching an agreement with Paris to clamp down on migrants crossing the Channel from northern France in small boats. Europe’s only two nuclear powers have now agreed to hold their first bilateral summit since 2018 early next year, focusing on strengthening defense cooperation.

To be fair, after saying “the jury is still out” on whether Macron was a friend or foe of the U.K., Truss had already taken a symbolic first step toward reconciliation by agreeing to attend the first meeting of the European Political Community last month. The geopolitical grouping was dreamed up by Macron to bring the entire European family together — except Russia and Belarus.

What’s more, the torrent of Europe-bashing rhetoric from Conservative ministers has almost dried up — at least for now. Suddenly, making nice with the neighbors is back in fashion, if only to ensure they don’t turn the lights off on the U.K. by cutting energy exports when supplies get tight this winter.

The tone of contrition adopted by Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, once the hardest of Brexit hardliners, was one of the most striking signals of this new humility. “I recognize in my own determination and struggle to get the U.K. out of the European Union that I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he told Ireland’s RTÉ radio recently. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. And I want to put that right.”

Meanwhile, encouragingly, Sunak is reportedly considering deprioritizing a bill by ousted Brexit ideologue Jacob Rees-Mogg to review, reform or automatically scrap some 2,400 retained EU laws, standards and regulations by the end of 2023 — a massive bureaucratic exercise that has rattled business confidence and angered almost everyone. The prime minister now seems receptive to pleas from business to give the review much more time and avoid a regulatory vacuum.

A bonfire of EU rules would inevitably provoke new trade tensions with Brussels — and at a time when the Office of Budget Responsibility, Britain’s independent fiscal watchdog, has just confirmed the growth-shredding damage inflicted by Brexit.

This isn’t the end of Britain’s traumatic rupture with the bloc. Just how neuralgic the issue remains was highlighted when earlier this week, Sunak had to deny reports that senior government figures were considering a Swiss-style relationship with the EU to ensure frictionless trade. He vowed there would be no alignment with EU rules on his watch.

To paraphrase Churchill, it may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Puncturing the illusion of a deregulated fiscal paradise fueled by borrowing without new revenue has had a sobering effect on the U.K. — offering Sunak a political window of opportunity to start fixing EU ties. After all, the Conservative Party can’t afford to defenestrate yet another prime minister after Theresa May, Johnson and Truss, can it?

But beyond the conciliatory tone, the real test still lies ahead.

Sunak will have to confront the hard-line Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to push through any compromise with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

As the province remains part of the EU single market under the withdrawal treaty, any such deal is bound to involve some customs checks in Northern Ireland on goods arriving from Great Britain — even if they are scaled down from the original plan. It’s also bound to involve a role for the Court of Justice of the European Union as the ultimate arbiter of EU law. Both are anathema to the DUP.

But securing such an agreement would at least open the door to a calmer, more cooperative and sustainable relationship between London and Brussels.

That could be Sunak’s legacy.

Paul Taylor

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November 24, 2022