(NYTimes) By David Leonhardt Good morning. As a new phase of the war begins, we look at Russia’s advantages — and Ukraine’s. A bombing in Kharkiv yesterday.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Can Ukraine keep winning? Ukraine has defeated Russia in the first phase of their war, and a second phase has begun. Having failed to topple Ukraine’s government, Russia has narrowed its ambitions and is concentrating on the eastern part of Ukraine known as the Donbas region. Vladimir Putin’s new goal appears to be severing Donbas from the rest of Ukraine and creating puppet republics there. The New York Times This new phase brings some big advantages that Russia did not have when it was attempting to conquer all of Ukraine. But Putin and his military also face some of the same challenges — including low morale — as before. The outcome remains highly uncertain. (Here’s a Times overview of the coming battle.) Today’s newsletter explains the battle for Donbas, with help from Times reporters around the world. We will start by looking at Russia’s new advantages and then consider Ukraine’s continuing advantages. Russia’s edge … When I was talking with Eric Schmitt — a Times senior writer who has been covering military issues for most of the past three decades — he offered a useful analogy for thinking about the war’s new phase. Until now, much of the fighting has occurred in parts of Ukraine that roughly resemble an American suburb, Eric explained. There are houses, office buildings and side streets where Ukrainian forces can hide and then attack Russian soldiers. This physical geography leaves civilians vulnerable — but benefits troops that are using guerrilla warfare to defend territory against an advancing army. A ravaged suburb of Kyiv.David Guttenfelder for The New York Times Much of the Donbas region is different. Its geography more closely resembles the plains of Kansas than a New York City suburb. “It’s much more wide open,” Eric said. “There are fewer places for Ukrainians to pop out from.” Today, there are actual trench lines in Donbas, stretching over hundreds of miles and sometimes separating areas controlled by Ukraine from those controlled by Russia. This terrain will allow Russia to use its many tanks, large missile systems and other heavy weapons systems; Ukraine’s military has far fewer of these. The shoulder-fired missiles that Ukraine has been receiving from the West, and using to great effect over the past two months, will probably be less helpful in Donbas. The newly focused battlefield has other tactical advantages for Russia, too: It can concentrate its troops in Donbas, and a direct conflict between the countries’ armies seems to favor Russia. When the war began, it had more than twice as many troops as Ukraine, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The Donbas region borders Russia, allowing Putin’s generals to build shorter and less exposed supply lines than they needed elsewhere in Ukraine. Russia is familiar with the territory. It began fighting sporadic battles in Donbas in 2014 and has since been supporting separatist rebels there. The new head of the war effort, General Aleksandr Dvornikov, has overseen Russian operations in Donbas since 2016, after commanding Russian troops in Syria. In addition to military tactics, public opinion in Donbas also appears to be more favorable to Russia than it is elsewhere in Ukraine. Shortly before the war, about 30 percent of the region’s residents wanted it to become part of Russia, while about another 10 percent favored independence, according to a poll by academic researchers. In areas currently controlled by Russian-backed separatists — which make up more than one-third of Donbas — a slight majority favored leaving Ukraine. That’s very different from the situation in the rest of the country, where Ukrainian patriotism is widely shared. … and Ukraine’s edge Together, Russia’s advantages offer reason to believe that it may fare better in the next phase of the war than during its humiliating defeat and withdrawal in the initial phase. But before you assume that’s inevitable, it is worth remembering something: On paper, Russia also seemed likely to win the first phase of the war. Military planners in Moscow expected that they would be able to topple Ukraine’s government within days or weeks. Many experts in the U.S. and Western Europe — and many westerners in Ukraine when the war began — assumed the same. It didn’t happen. Russia’s military proved far less effective than most observers expected. Its air force was not able to dominate the skies over Ukraine. Its military units rarely communicated over encrypted lines, allowing Ukraine to intercept its messages. Many Russian troops did not expect to invade Ukraine and were not happy their superiors ordered them to do so. “The vehicles are still poorly maintained, troop morale will remain low,” Michael Repass, an American major general who has worked with Ukraine for years, told The Times. Even if winning control of Donbas is an easier task than overwhelming all of Ukraine, it is not easy. Ukraine has highly motivated troops, more of whom can now shift to Donbas. And the West is racing to supply Ukraine with tanks and heavy, longer-range artillery, as well as the shoulder-fired missiles that proved so effective around Kyiv. “How this logistical race goes could well shape the outcome of the war,” this Times story explains. A body in the street in Kharkiv after a Russian artillery strike.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Public opinion in Donbas may also be shifting away from Russia, because of the invasion. “If a bomb falls on your house, latent sympathies change into hard antipathies,” Michael Schwirtz, a Times reporter in Ukraine, said. At the start of the war, he was reporting from Kharkiv, an eastern Ukrainian city where — as in parts of Donbas — the primary language is Russian. Yet the invasion nonetheless made many Kharkiv residents “viciously, viciously angry,” Michael said. The Institute for the Study of War, a military research group in Washington, offered this summary: Russian forces may be able to gain ground through the heavy concentration of artillery and numbers. However, Russian operations are unlikely to be dramatically more successful than previous major offensives around Kyiv. The Russian military is unlikely to have addressed the root causes — poor coordination, the inability to conduct cross-country operations, and low morale — that impeded prior offensives. The bottom line: A quick victory — by either side — seems unlikely. Then again, war is often very difficult to predict.
Russians were hoping that the Chinese UnionPay will replace Visa and Mastercard for them. UnionPay announced that it will not work with any Russian banks that were sanctioned by the West.
The head of the Russian Union of Oil and Gas Equipment Manufacturers stated during Russian Duma Committee hearings that 90% of the Russian oil refineries equipment is Western, and anything that breaks today will stay broken and cannot be replaced. Also, he stated that any shelf oil and gas exploration is frozen for the same reason, and shelf gas/oil production will continue only until things break down and the equipment cannot be fixed/replaced because of the sanctions. Good.
Russia’s central bank says that the economy will plummet in the second quarter and Putin is ignoring the warning The institution’s president is concerned about high inflation rates and the impact of international sanctions https://english.elpais.com/economy-...mester-and-putin-is-ignoring-the-warning.html The Russian economy has made it through the first blow caused by the sanctions imposed by the war in Ukraine, according to the president of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina. But she warned representatives at the Duma this Monday that the country’s reserves are near their end, and the real crisis will hit between the second and third quarter this year. Hours after Nabiullina sounded the alert, Vladimir Putin himself rejected her warning. “Russia has resisted unprecedented pressure. The situation is stabilizing,” the head of state said in a press conference about the country’s economic situation. Nabullina emphasized that the economy is far from returning to normal. “The period when the economy has been able to live on the reserves is over. In the second quarter or at the beginning of the third, we will enter a phase of structural transformation,” said the economist, whose tenure leading the financial organism was set to end this year and was renewed for five years at Putin’s decision. In her opinion, sanctions “affected financial markets at first, but now they will start to affect sectors of the real economy more and more.” The head of the Russian Central Bank noted that the problem is not the financial system, but the lack of materials that factories and companies will receive in the near future. “The main problems are not with the sanctions on financial institutions, but with restrictions on imports and, in the future, exports of Russian products,” she added. Additionally, Russians will have to accept their loss of purchasing power. For the time being, the Central Bank will not attempt to compensate for inflation. “We will not attempt to reduce it in any way, because that would stop companies from adapting. Restoring the supply of imported components is more difficult and expensive, and it will inevitably affect the price of the final product,” she explained. Many companies find themselves scrambling to solve the problem. Some airlines have announced that they will leave part of their fleet grounded and use the parts to repair other airplanes. The telecommunications sector calculates that its stock of replacement parts will last until the summer before system failures will begin. The year-on-year inflation rate reached 20% in March, the first month of the war, and many companies have suspended exports to Russia until the ruble’s value stabilizes. Before the war, Russian authorities estimated that 80% of critical sectors had replaced imported goods for nationally produced products. Nabiullina also played down the country’s holdings in foreign currencies. Half of the fund of $620 billion (€592 billion) was frozen by the west, and the rest has been used to protect the ruble. According to the bank, it is not enough. “It consists of gold and yuan, which does not allow us to manage our currency in the eternal market,” she emphasized. Hypothetical buyers of the precious metal would face sanctions, and because of Beijing’s controls, the Chinese currency has less liquidity in the international market than that of the US or Europe. Nabiullina’s pessimism contrasts with the victorious declarations that Putin gave shortly afterwards. “We can say with confidence that the policies against Russia have failed, and the economic blitzkrieg has not succeeded,” he said. The leader declared that the West “tried to quickly break the economy and provoke panic in the stock exchanges, collapse the financial system and provoke a major shortage of products in supermarkets.” According to his version, the central bank’s initiative helped the country avoid that fate. “The ruble’s exchange rate has returned to its levels from early February,” he said, before insisting that foreign currencies “are returning to the country’s banking system and individual deposits are growing.” When the sanctions began, a few days after the war started, the Russian government and the organism led by Nabiullina imposed a limit on capital movement and increased interest rates from 9.5% to 20%. Among other restrictions, it forced companies to exchange 80% of their holdings in dollars and euros for rubles, prohibited banks and exchange houses from selling those currencies to civilians and banned foreigners from divesting from stocks in the Moscow Exchange. The central bank now faces the delicate task of ending those measures and returning to a market economy. The exchange rate of the Russian currency, which has previously reached 160 rubles per euro, closed this Monday at 83, after the organism allowed banks to sell the few dollars and euros that they had received since April 9.
Because the Germans have comported as weasels in some recent instances, I would watch them very carefully. Having said that, all senior German officials have a responsibility to get their people fully through the winter and make sure that they do not fully traumatize their own people such that they end out suffering worse than the Russians. If they say such things as " We need three-six months to turn our nuclear reactors back on, to import more coal, to import electricity, or gas from XYZ and they have a plan and they are actually implementing it, then I don't judge them. But the minute they don't pass the straight face test, then I am prepared to call a weasel a weasel. If they allege that they are doing certain things, there needs to be actual confirmed activities to go with it- actually happening, not planning talk.
Scholz has been lying about sending weapons to Ukraine for 2 months now. The latest: Scholz claimed that Germany doesn't have any Marder armored vehicles to send to Ukraine. Then he said that they do but they don't work. Then he said that all the Marders that they have and don't work are in the service of the German army. And then he offered to sell them to Greece. But refused to sell them to Ukraine.
Yeh, there are weasels around and about. Angela would have been a problem too but for different reasons.
Chill, man. Everything is fine, ask @Tsing Tao. For the record, I called for June-July until the Russians start really feeling it a while ago.