Jeremy Fleming: Russia is running short of friends in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s military campaign in Ukraine (heart of Ukraine), and what the Russian public wants to see
According to Jeremy Fleming, the director of Government Communications Headquarters, Russia is running short of friends.
When asked if the Kremlin is desperate amid President Vladimir Putin’s faltering military campaign in Ukraine, Fleming added: “We can see that desperation at many levels inside Russian society and inside the Russian military machine.”
At least 19 people were killed and critical infrastructure was damaged when Russia launched a series of deadly strikes on Ukrainian cities Monday.
The violent strikes are in relation to Putin’s announcement of an immediate military increase in September.
“I think any talk of nuclear weapons is very dangerous and we need to be very careful about how we’re talking about that,” Fleming said when asked about Putin’s nuclear threats.
I hope we see some indicators if that were to happen. If they are considering that, it would be a catastrophe in the way people have talked about it.
In a speech later Tuesday, Fleming will also say Russians are increasingly counting the cost of the invasion of Ukraine and are seeing “how badly” Putin “has misjudged the situation.”
His decision-making was flawed with little effective internal challenge. It is a high stakes strategy and it leads to mistakes in judgement. The gains that were made are being reversed, according to the speech Fleming will give in London.
They are aware that their access to modern technologies and influences will be restricted. And they are feeling the extent of the dreadful human cost of his war of choice,” he will say.
The Donetsk Vocational School Strikes Back: A Tale of Two Fireballs, Two Guns, and Three Lemurs
The Ukrainian military claimed that around 400 Russian soldiers were killed and wounded, without directly acknowledging a role. CNN can’t independently confirm those numbers or the weapons used in the strike. Some pro-Russian military bloggers have also estimated that the number of dead and wounded could run in the hundreds.
According to both Ukrainian and pro-Russian accounts, the strike took place just after midnight on Sunday, New Year’s Day, on a vocational school housing Russian conscripts in Makiivka, in the Donetsk region.
Russian officials said that four Ukrainian-launched HIMARS rockets hit the vocational school where its forces were housed, apparently adjacent to a large arms depot. (Another two HIMARS rockets were shot down by Russian air defenses).
Video reportedly from the scene of the attack is circulating widely on Telegram, including on an official Ukrainian military channel. The picture shows a pile of rubble that appears to be nothing more than an old building that has been demolished.
Daniil Bezsonov, a former official in the Russia-backed Donetsk administration, said on Telegram that “apparently, the high command is still unaware of the capabilities of this weapon.”
A Russian propagandist who blogs about the war effort on Telegram, Igor Girkin, claimed that the building was almost completely destroyed by the secondary detonation of ammunition stores.
He has long decried Russian generals, who he claims direct the war effort far from the frontline. The former defense minister of the self-proclaimed Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic was found guilty of mass murder in the Netherlands for his involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine.
Boris Rozhin, who also blogs about the war effort under the nickname Colonelcassad, said that “incompetence and an inability to grasp the experience of war continue to be a serious problem.”
David Andelman, a contributor to CNN, has won the Deadline Club Award two times and is the author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen.” He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. His own views are reflected in this commentary. View more opinion at CNN.
The war in Ukraine entered 2023 with its deadliest attack yet on Russian troops – and an attempt by Moscow to shift the bulk of blame onto its own dead soldiers.
If the Russian account is accurate, it was the cell phones that the novice troops were using in violation of regulations that allowed Ukrainian forces to target them most accurately. The attack was executed by Ukraine. The implications are more significant for how Russia is conducting its war now.
It is telling that days after the deadliest known attack on Russian servicemen, President Vladimir Putin called for a temporary ceasefire, citing the Orthodox Christmas holiday. The move was rightly dismissed by Ukraine and the US as a cynical attempt to seek breathing space amid a very bad start to the year for Russian forces.
The satellite-guided HIMAPS have a range of 80 kilometers. A longer-range 300-kilometer HIMARS has not yet been authorized, despite repeated Ukrainian pleas. The longer-range system could be a factor in the war in Ukraine, according to the Biden administration.
Compounding the problem, Britain’s Ministry of Defense said after the recent Makiivka strikes that “the Russian military has a record of unsafe ammunition storage from well before the current war, but this incident highlights how unprofessional practices contribute to Russia’s high casualty rate.”
Chris Dougherty, a senior fellow for the Defense Program and co-head of the Gaming Lab at the Center for New American Security in Washington, has told me that Russia’s failure to break up or move large arms depots is largely a function of the reality that their forces cannot communicate adequately.
It’s a view shared by other experts. “Bad communications security seems to be standard practice in the Russian Army,” James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told me in an e-mail exchange.
There is more than one Russian war commentator casting doubt. “As expected, the blame for what happened in Makiivka began to be placed on the soldiers themselves,” said a post on the Telegram channel known as “Grey Zone,” linked to longtime Kremlin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group of mercenaries. “In this case, it is to 99% a lie and an attempt to throw off the blame.”
A number of prisoners from Russian prisons are being freed and transferred to the Ukrainian side of the war. One can only imagine how appealing the use of cell phones would be to prisoners accustomed to years of isolation with little or no contact with the outside world.
War Gonzo and the Defense Ministry: When Vladimir Putin ends his war of choice? The question of blame for Russia when the military leaves the battlefield
The question is when the military will begin to blame Putin himself, since he has seemed ill-prepared to change the leadership at the top. The last change was the appointment of Sergei Surovikin as the first person to be placed in overall command of all Russian forces on the Ukraine front — an army general formerly in charge of the brutal Russian bombardment of Aleppo in Syria.
Semyan Pegov, who is also known as WarGonzo, was awarded the Order of Courage by President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin two weeks ago, but he was very critical of the Ministry of Defense in suggesting it was the troops’ own use of cell phones.
He wondered if the location of soldiers in a school building could have been determined with the help of drones or a local person.
A month earlier, the defense ministry underwent a shakeup when Col. Gen. Mikhail Y. Mizintsev, known to Western officials as the “butcher of Mariupol,” was named deputy defense minister for overseeing logistics, replacing four-star Gen. Dmitri V. Bulgakov, who had held the post since 2008. The location of the arms depot, adjacent to the Makiivka recruits, would likely have been on Mizintsev’s watch.
Still, Putin-favorite Sergei Shoigu remains defense minister — as recently as Saturday, before the Makiivka attack, telling his forces in a celebratory video: “Our victory, like the New Year, is inevitable.”
America’s top general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley echoed the same sentiment in a press conference on Tuesday, saying the international community “will continue to support Ukraine” until Russian President Vladimir Putin “ends his war of choice.”
This week the US was considering sending Bradley armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron also announced he would be sending light tanks, though Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was urging the dispatch of heavier battle tanks. All of which puts German Chancellor Olaf Scholz under increased pressure to add its powerful Leopard 2 tanks.
It’s hard to get exact numbers on exactly what weapons individual nations currently hold in their arsenals due to the sensitivity of the information. Multiple European defense and security sources told CNN that there is a serious concern of how much Europe’s ammunition has been used on the battlefield and not replaced. It was reported by CNN late last year that the US is not able to keep up with the demand for its weapons for Ukraine and the world.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters ahead of a meeting that the current rate of Ukraine’s expenditure is much higher than our current rate of production, which puts our defense industries under strain.
Nick Witney, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that the combination of no immediate threat and the financial pressure on European governments in the past couple of decades led to a conspiracy.
Policymakers make decisions based on expectations of the best-case scenario, despite the looming ammunition crisis. After all, taking no action, in the short-term at least, is often cheaper than taking action.
Military munitions for the U.S. and the next seven years: How the Scranton plant is going through a critical stage
The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant makes 11,000 shells a month, and it’s running full tilt. The Ukrainian military can often fire many shells over a short period of time.
The plant is getting a huge expansion because of new defense spending from the Pentagon. The company is investing in new machinery, hiring a few dozen additional employees and will eventually shift to a constant schedule of production.
It has definitely increased over the last year. Todd Smith is the senior director of General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, the company which operates the plant.
The Pentagon has allocated roughly $3 billion alone to buy munitions overseas from allies and to ramp up production at home. Some of that money will go toward producing what has become a staple of the war – 155 millimeter artillery shells.
Bush mentioned that the Army would double the production of Javelin anti-tank missiles, increase the production of GMRLS surface to surface medium range missiles, and produce 60 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles every month.
Stinger and Javelin missiles are some of the most critical and relied-upon munitions by Ukraine to thwart Russian ground advances and aerial assaults, who previously told the US that it needs 500 of each every day.
“For Ukraine, the challenges are more immediate and medium term, while much of the added US production capacity appears to be two years in the future,” said Kofman.
On top of that, the US has a lot of work to do in rebuilding its own stockpiles, which the war in Ukraine has left dangerously low in the eyes of some experts.
If our whole strategy is deterrence, we want to deter conflict so we have the weapon systems and bases in key locations so that no one would consider the aggressive use of force. We are not at that point right now.
Bush said the Defense Department is looking at longer-term contracts, which he agreed would provide “a more efficient supplier base.” A seven-year contract, for example, allows industry to plan its workforce and production long-term instead of working year to year, he said. And building out that workforce will be critical as more plants and more shifts could ultimately mean more jobs
“No defense company in their right mind is going to start producing munitions if by the end of every fiscal year, the Marine Corps, the Navy, the Air Force takes what it had allotted in budget and moves it to a different pet platform or program,” said Jones of CSIS.
Lloyd Austin, Defense Secretary said that they will deliver the support that they promised to Ukraine. “We will put capabilities into the hands of trained Ukrainian forces so that they can be integrated together on the battlefield.”
There are questions about the sustainable US commitment to Ukraine, back home. There were concerns that the Republican congress could lead to a drop in material support for Ukraine at a time when the rate of weapons production would make the difference on the battlefield, according to a survey conducted in December.
Kevin McCarthy, then House Minority Leader suggested that the Republicans could slow funding for Ukraine if they took majority control, but he has since retreated to assure the senior defense hawks in the House.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/17/politics/us-weapons-factories-ukraine-ammunition/index.html
The U.S. Military Predictions for the Next Century: Prigozhin, Surovikin, Gerasimov, and the Russian Operation in Ukraine
Bush believes that in a year production rates in the US will be higher than they are now. And while the hope is that the conflict in Ukraine is over long before then, Bush is confident the US military and industrial base would be ready for whatever comes next.
More background: According to Prigozhin, Wagner did not experience such problems with ammunition when Gen. Sergei Surovikin commanded Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Gen. Valery Gerasimov took over in January.
Prigozhin claimed he has been told he needs to “go and apologize” to someone “high up” who he has a “difficult relationship with” to resolve the issue, but added he does not know who that is.
Russia’s Defense Ministry had to make another shuffle of commanders in charge of the war in Ukraine in January due to the criticism it was facing over its handling of the military operations in Ukraine.
Prigozhin has praised Gen. Surovikin for managing an orderly withdrawal of Russian forces in the southern Kherson region last year but has been critical of the larger handling by the Ministry of Defense and other top Russian generals of what Russia calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.