Category Archives: defense policy

Putin’s Coming Invasion

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USAF General and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (NATO) from 2013-2016 Philip Breedlove, along with “former officials and analysts,” have posited a scenario for a partial invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The image below Breedlove’s supposition also is supplied by the WSJ. I’m disregarding Putin’s naval maneuvering in the Black Sea in this post.

The northern portion of Russian forces arrayed against Ukraine could easily drive due west through Belarus and arrive very close to Kyiv relatively unopposed. Ukraine’s best forces are tied down on the line of contact on the border of Donbas. So this northern thrust would bypass the most capable Ukrainian forces.
Such a thrust could be used by the Kremlin to put pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and attempt to force concessions or perhaps try to bring about its collapse, former officials and analysts said.
A separate group of Russian forces in the east, General Breedlove said, could push into Donbas to support the Russian garrison there and Russian-backed separatists.
Still a third group of Russian forces in Crimea and southwest Russia could seize terrain along the coast and encircle the port city of Mariupol to cut it off from the rest of Ukraine.

I think Breedlove understates the case. If Putin is going to take that northern route, he won’t stop with merely threatening the government in Kiev; he’ll take all of Ukraine—which is what he wants, anyway.

Beyond that, a thrust up from occupied Crimea won’t be used merely to isolate Mariupol; it will form the other side of the pincer to be used in seizing all of the nation. The attack into the Donbas will serve only to keep the bulk of the Ukrainian military occupied there.

If this is the invasion plan, look, too, for the attack into the Donbas to proceed for a couple of days before the attacks through Belarus and up from Crimea go in; Putin will be looking to get those best forces fully involved and their destruction well in progress first.

In the end, too, the whole invasion and conquering affair will take just four to six days—far too fast for Biden-Harris’ “we’ll sanction the hell out of you if you invade” nonsense even to begin to do anything. Fast enough, even, to be well inside Biden-Harris’ decision loop of beginning recognize the invasion in progress, then beginning to think about applying those “devastating sanctions.”

What Does Putin Want?

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It’s not as complicated as some…pundits…want us to believe. One such, James Marson in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal piece, offered the following claim from a Vladimir Putin spokesman. Marson didn’t question it; he simply commented on other politicians’ responses to the claim as though it were accurate.

A Kremlin spokesman said President Vladimir Putin wasn’t presenting ultimatums, but was worried about threats to Russia’s security.

This is a truckload of bravo sierra. Putin knows full well that no one in the West is interested in threatening Russian security, no one in the West is interested in invading Russia. Putin knows full well that Russia has absolutely nothing at all of value to the West that isn’t gotten far more cheaply—and mutually beneficially—through free and honest trade.

Putin wants Ukraine. He wants Georgia and the Baltics and, later, Poland. He’s even cynically trotted out his effort to redress his mythical 20th century tragedy as his rationale for his empire-building.

It’s also entirely possible that Xi is egging Putin on, since a Putin seizure of Ukraine would give the Republic of China to Xi.

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons

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With the pseudo-negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program going the way they are, President Joe Biden, of the Biden-Harris Presidency, is rapidly coming to the first of two moments of truth.

The first is whether Biden-Harris will fold in the talks—he is, after all, consigned by the Ayatollah to the kiddie table where he’s to be seen and not heard by the adults in the room—and give Khamenei everything he wants just so Biden-Harris can come home claiming a deal, however disastrous.

That, though, is a moment of lesser truth. The greater truth moment will come after. As Dubowitz and Kroenig put it in their op-ed at the link,

A nuclear-armed Iran would cause further proliferation as regional powers like Saudi Arabia build their own bombs.

But that’s a lesser truth, also, for all that it’s a greater one than the first. Dubowitz and Kroenig also have this:

It might take a year or two to fashion a functioning nuclear warhead that is deliverable on a missile, but once the clerical regime has enough weapons-grade material, the game is over.

The nuclear warhead doesn’t have to be delivered via missile, though. There are a variety of ways to…truck…such device into Israel.

In the event, too, Iran is likely to wait until it has four or five nuclear warheads, since that is what it will take—and all it will take—to destroy Israel as a polity and as a people. And Iran will strike the moment that fourth or fifth weapon becomes operational.

Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former President of Iran and then-Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, on World Al-Qods Day in 2001, as cited by the Middle East Media Research Institute:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

And here is the greatest moment of truth for Biden-Harris. Will he, can he, make

the fateful choice between allowing the clerical regime to become a nuclear-weapons power and using military force to stop it.

Will he make the military strike that Dubowitz and Kroenig suggest will be necessary to prevent Iran’s getting nuclear weapons?

Sadly, Biden-Harris doesn’t have it in him to make the strike. The most we can hope for, and it’s a very thin reed given his and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s open hostility toward Israel, is that Biden-Harris will stay out of the way and let Israel and Saudi Arabia (the latter very sub rosa) conduct the strike.

Brinkmanship

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ME Sarotte thinks Putin has bought into the concept of a 30-year-old betrayal of a commitment by a past US President to a past Russian President to not expand NATO east to include nations that used to be under Soviet domination. Sarotte says that’s the basis for Putin’s current brinkmanship; he’s merely trying to redress that betrayal, as NATO has, indeed, accepted erstwhile Soviet-dominated (even occupied) nations into NATO.

I think it’s hard to take seriously Sarotte’s view. More likely, it seems to me, is that Putin merely is putting that out as a public rationale. The most likely case for his seeming brinkmanship is that Putin doesn’t see his behavior as brinkmanship at all. On the contrary, he’s convinced—rightly or wrongly—that Biden-Harris will fold in the moment of truth.

Widening Gyre of Hostages

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In response to Lithuania’s effrontery in contradicting the People’s Republic of China by letting the Republic of China open a “representative office” in the capital city of Vilnius, the PRC not only is banning import into the PRC of Lithuanian products, it’s banning import of all products that contain Lithuanian components. As The Wall Street Journal dryly put it,

The effects are rippling across Europe.

And already Germany is intimating its desire for surrender, which should come as no surprise from a nation already openly obsequious before Russia:

The German-Baltic Chamber of Commerce has warned Vilnius that German subsidiaries are at risk.

The widening gyre may well spread across the pond.

In the US, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would bar goods made with forced labor in Xinjiang region from entering America, passed the House last month. If it becomes law, US companies should brace themselves.

It’s an open question whether the Progressive-Democrat running the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), and the President, Biden-Harris, will permit the bill to become law, or whether one of the other will join Germany as hostage and bar the law.

Elisabeth Braw concluded this in her op-ed at the link:

China’s punishment of Lithuania is a wake-up call for companies and countries alike.

Indeed.

It’s time for Europe and the US to stop doing business with the PRC altogether.

The transition will be deucedly expensive, but Europe and the US will be orders of magnitude better off not being as dependent on the PRC as the PRC’s actions are demonstrating us both to be.

That cost, and the reduction in our economic and political freedom of action, which the PRC will continue to inflict will only get far worse, the longer we delay in carrying out that transition.

In the meantime, it would do us and Lithuania, and all other nations wishing to reduce their dependency on the PRC, a world of good for us to increase our trade with Lithuania.