Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners


Traveling back from Korea. WIll return to my normal posting schedule in a day or so.


Quotes of the Day:


“Can you define "plan" as "a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision, and ignorance"? If so, it was a very good plan.”
- Jonathan Stroud, The Ring of Solomon

“Always leave a way out, unless you really want to find out how hard a man can fight when he’s nothing to lose.”
- Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven

“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”
- Kris Kristofferson 



1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 16 (Putin's War)

2. Ukraine has telegraphed its big counteroffensive for months. So where is it?

3. Ukraine aiming to create chaos within Russian forces, Zelenskiy adviser says

4. Air Force Special Operations Command grounds CV-22 Osprey aircraft over safety concerns: report

5. U.S. Veterans Race to Train Ukrainians as Marines; ‘Time Is Not on Their Side’

6. Was the Fall of Afghanistan Inevitable? We Asked 9 National Security Experts

7. Chinese troops will travel to Russia for huge joint military exercises with India

8. Paratroopers ‘get down and dirty’ on multinational airborne mission from Guam to Borneo

9. An interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

10. 175 Days of Battle: Putin Has No Way to Win the War in Ukraine

11. Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe’

12. High-profile attacks behind Russian lines hint at how Ukrainian special forces may be using their US training




1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 16 (Putin's War)



Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-16

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 16

Aug 16, 2022 - Press ISW


understandingwar.org

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Angela Howard, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 16, 9 pm ET

Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Russian and Ukrainian sources reported explosions at an airfield and a critical Russian supply nexus in Crimea on August 16. Local reports and videos show a series of explosions at a Russian ammunition depot and a transformer substation in Dzhankoiskyi District and an airfield near Hvardiiske, Crimea.[1] These explosions both caused significant damage to Russian resources and seriously disrupted Russian logistics. Russian forces have used Dzhankoi as a railway hub for transporting troops and equipment to occupied settlements in southern Zaporizhia Oblast, including Melitopol.[2] Russian authorities temporarily suspended passenger rail service from Russia into Crimea following the attack.[3]

Ukrainian forces have not officially claimed responsibility for these explosions. The New York Times reported that an anonymous senior Ukrainian official attributed the explosions in Dzhankoiskyi District to “an elite Ukrainian military unit operating behind enemy lines,” but no Ukrainian official has publicly come forward to claim responsibility.[4] The Russian Ministry of Defense released a statement calling the explosions “a result of sabotage.”[5]

A Ukrainian strike on logistical targets in Crimea, which is the sovereign territory of Ukraine, would not violate Ukrainian commitments to Western partners regarding Ukraine’s use of Western-supplied weapons within Ukrainian territory or stated US policy regarding Ukraine’s right to use force to regain control of all its territory including areas seized by Russia in 2014.[6] There are no indications that Ukrainian forces used US-supplied weapons in recent strikes on Crimea, and it is unlikely that they did since the targets are well beyond the range of the US-provided systems.

Attacks on Russian positions in and around Crimea are likely part of a coherent Ukrainian counter-offensive to regain control of the west bank of the Dnipro River. Russian supply lines from Crimea directly support Russian forces in mainland Ukraine including those in western Kherson Oblast. Ukraine’s targeting of Russian ground lines of communication and logistic and support assets in Crimea is consistent with the Ukrainian counteroffensive effort that has also targeted bridges over the Dnipro River and Russian logistical support elements in occupied Kherson Oblast.[7] The net effects of this campaign will likely be to disrupt the ability of Russian forces to sustain mechanized forces on the west bank of the Dnipro River and to defend them with air and artillery assets on the east bank from Ukrainian counterattacks.

The Kremlin continues efforts to misrepresent its likely maximalist goals in Ukraine. ISW assesses that Russian strategic objectives remain unchanged: changing the regime change in Kyiv and securing territorial control over most of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin omitted mention of territory outside of Donbas while describing the goals of Russia’s war in Ukraine on August 15. Putin closed his preliminary remarks to the Army-2022 forum on August 15 with the claim that Russian and Donbas forces are “doing their duty” to fight for Russia and “liberate” Donbas.[8] Such a limited statement of Russian goals sharply contrasts with previously articulated Russian war goals to “denazify” and “demilitarize” all of Ukraine. Putin‘s relatively limited statement additionally is incompatible with Russian actions to integrate occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts into the Russian Federation.

Key Takeaways

  • Russian forces conducted ground attacks across the Eastern Axis but failed to advance northwest of Slovyansk and east of Siversk.
  • Russian forces are launching offensive operations around Bakhmut, southwest of Avdiivka, and southwest of Donetsk City.
  • Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations in northern and northwestern Kherson Oblast.
  • The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Ukrainian forces in Nikopol are preparing to conduct provocations at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant, possibly setting information conditions for further shelling of Nikopol or provocations of its own.
  • Chechen units are reportedly relocating to Kherson Oblast to police Russian military deserters.
  • Russian forces struggle to recruit soldiers even for safe, prestigious jobs.


We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

  • Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
  • Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
  • Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
  • Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
  • Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
  • Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks on the Izyum-Slovyansk line on August 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported for the second consecutive day that Russian forces retreated following an unsuccessful ground assault near Mazanivka (24km northwest of Slovyansk).[9] Russian milblogger Starshe Edy claimed that Russian forces chose to withdraw from Mazanivka into the forest south of the settlement.[10] Starshe Edy noted that Ukrainian and Russian forces are engaged in heavy artillery battles in the Mazanivka area.

Starshe Edy also claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces are engaged in “heavy battles” in the forests of the Sviati Hory National Nature Park.[11] Donetsk People‘s Republic (DNR) Deputy Information Minister Daniiil Bezsonov reposted Starshe Edy’s report before promptly deleting it. The Ukrainian General Staff had previously stated that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults in the area of the Sviati Hory National Nature Park (about 20km northeast of Slovyansk) on July 26.[12] The Sviati Hory park is bounded by the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River, and ISW previously assessed that fighting could only occur in the area if Russian or Ukrainian forces crossed the Siverskyi Donets River into the territory of the park or from it or if the fighting took place in the general area. [13] If the report by Starshe Edy is true, then it would suggest that Ukrainian forces entered the territory of the Sviati Hory park and are operating on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River. Another Russian milblogger also released a map showing Pryshyb (about 20km northeast of Slovyansk and northwest of the Sviati Hory park) within areas marked as seeing ongoing combat operations, reversing a prior claim of Russian territorial control of the settlement.[14] ISW also reported on footage showing Ukrainian forces freely raising a Ukrainian flag on the right bank of the Siverskyi Donets River in Sviatohirsk, which could indicate that Russian positions might have shifted further east from the area.[15] ISW will continue to monitor the situation around Pryshyb, Sviatohirsk, and the Sviati Hory park as more information becomes available in the open source.

Russian forces continued to shell settlements along the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border and targeted areas near Nova Dmytrivka and Dibrovne (both within 28km southwest of Izyum) with incendiary ammunition on August 16.[16] Russian forces also shelled civilian infrastructure in Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.[17] Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) on the Kharkiv City-Izyum line. Footage posted to social media on August 16 shows a destroyed railway bridge near Hrushivka just west of Russian GLOCs in Kupyansk.[18]

Russian forces attempted an assault near Siversk on August 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted an offensive operation in the direction of Ivano-Darivka (15km southeast of Siversk) from the Lysychansk Oil Refinery but retreated after suffering heavy losses.[19] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai described the offensive as "massive."[20] The Luhansk People’s Republic’s (LNR) Ambassador to Russia Rodion Miroshnik claimed that Russian-led forces surrounded Siversk on three sides but provided no evidence for this claim.[21] Miroshnik could hope that such a major claim will raise the morale of LNR soldiers reportedly unwilling to continue fighting in Donetsk Oblast.[22] Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted a precision strike and destroyed a Russian ammunition depot in Rodakove, Luhansk Oblast on August 15, but did not officially confirm the strike as of the time of this publication.[23] Russian forces continued shelling along the line of contact.[24]


Russian forces continued to launch offensive operations south, southeast, and northeast of Bakhmut on August 16.[25] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted failed assaults towards Soledar and Bakhmutske, (northeast of Bakhmut) and Mayorsk and Zaitseve (south of Bakhmut). Ukrainian artillery repelled a Russian reconnaissance-in-force attempt near Vershyna (12km southeast of Bakhmut).[26] Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Ambassador to Russia Rodion Miroshnik claimed that Russian and proxy forces control most of Soledar’s industrial zone and that fighting is ongoing in Soledar, but there is no evidence that Russian or proxy forces have advanced beyond the Knauf Gips Donbas gypsum factory (southeast of Soledar).[27] Russian forces conducted airstrikes on Soledar and Yakolivka (6km northeast of Soledar). Russian forces heavily shelled Bakhmut and settlements to the north, south, and southeast.[28]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations southwest of Avdiivka on August 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched a ground assault from Staromykhailivka towards Nevelske (approximately 15km southwest of Avdiivka) where hostilities continue as of the time of this publication.[29] The Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Militia claimed that the DNR 1st Slavic Brigade had made unspecified advances west of Avdiivka.[30] Russian forces conducted an airstrike near Mariinka (approximately 27km southwest of Avdiivka) and continued shelling Avdiivka and settlements in its vicinity.[31]

Russian forces made marginal territorial gains southwest of Donetsk City on August 16. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted “partially successful” ground assaults towards Novomykhailivka (30km southwest of Donetsk City) where fighting is ongoing as of the time of this publication.[32] Russian forces also conducted airstrikes on Pavlivka, on the T0524 highway to Donetsk City.[33] Donetsk Oblast Military Administration Head Pavlo Kyrylenko stated that Russian forces conducted a missile strike on energy infrastructure and local businesses in Kurakhove, about 40km west of Donetsk City.[34]

Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed attacks on the Kharkiv City axis on August 16 but continued heavy shelling. A Russian milblogger published a map expanding claimed Russian territorial control to Odnorobivka (8km from the Russian border, 45km northeast of Kharkiv City) but provided no evidence for this claim.[35] Kharkiv Oblast officials reported Russian missile strikes on five of the nine Kharkiv City districts overnight between August 15 and 16.[36] Kharkiv Oblast Administration Head Oleg Synegubov referred to these strikes as one of the largest Russian shelling efforts against Kharkiv City recently.[37] Russian forces also conducted airstrikes on settlements northeast of Kharkiv City, dropped phosphorous munitions on Ruska Lozova, and continued to target settlements near Kharkiv City with missile, artillery, and tank fire.[38]


Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)

Russian forces conducted several unsuccessful offensive operations in northern and northwestern Kherson Oblast on August 15 and August 16. Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces attempted to advance to Novohryhorivka (approximately 36km northwest of Kherson City) but retreated after failing to improve their tactical positions in the area.[39] Russian forces also unsuccessfully attempted to improve their tactical positions around Bilohirka (near the Ukrainian bridgehead over the Inhulets River) and conduct a reconnaissance-in-force operation in Osokorkivka near the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border.[40] Russian forces also reportedly launched 14 airstrikes along the line of contact in Kherson Oblast, with most focusing on Ukrainian positions around the Inhulets River bridgehead and northwest of Kherson City.[41] Russian forces continued firing rockets from Uragan and Smerch MLRS systems on settlements in Kryvyi Rih district and Mykolaiv City, respectively.[42]

Russian forces continued to fire on settlements situated on the right bank of Dnipro River from positions in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces struck Nikopol with 40 Grad rockets and the neighboring settlement of Marhanets with fire from a Pion self-propelled heavy artillery system.[43] ISW previously reported on geolocated footage of a Russian Pion operating roughly 11km from the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).[44] The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Ukrainian forces in Nikopol are preparing for large-scale provocations at the ZNPP but provided no evidence.[45] The Russian Defense Ministry could be setting information conditions for further shelling of Nikopol or a provocation of its own.


Ukraine’s Southern Military Command did not note any changes in Russian troop composition. Press Officer for the Mykolaiv Oblast Military Administration Dmytro Pletenchuk stated that Russian forces are increasingly moving Chechen units to Kherson Oblast as a police force aimed at stopping Russian forces from deserting.[46] ISW cannot independently verify Pletenchuk’s statement, but it is consistent with previous Ukrainian intelligence reports that Russian forces are deploying Rosgvardia and Chechen units to the left bank of Dnipro River to block Russian personnel from retreating from northern Kherson Oblast.[47]

Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian ammunition depots and strongholds on the Southern Axis. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian aviation struck two Russian strongholds and a pair of ammunition and military equipment warehouses in Novopetrivka and Maksymivka, both 53km and 40km west of Mykolaiv City.[48] Ukrainian missile and artillery units also destroyed a Russian supply point in Sukhyi Stavok, near the Ukrainian bridgehead in northwestern Kherson Oblast.[49]

Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian forces continue to face recruitment challenges, likely even when recruiting reservists and volunteers for the most prestigious military units. Novgorod Oblast local outlets reported that Russian forces are recruiting residents with no prior military experience to serve on the submarine Veliky Novgorod.[50] Commander of the Veliky Novgorod Sergey Mikhailov stated that the submarine has eight vacancies (of a crew of 60) and asserted that recruits do not need to have prior special training or to have served in Russian forces ”at all.”[51] The ”Veliky Novgorod” submarine is currently supporting the Russian invasion in Ukraine operating in the Black Sea. This recruiting effort suggests that Russian forces are struggling to generate interest even for positions not directly on the frontline.[52]


Novgorod Oblast officials also announced that recruitment has begun for a Novgorod Rocket Battalion that will form in Luga, Leningrad Oblast.[53] Luga hosts a large artillery training ground and the base of the 9th Guards Artillery Brigade of the 6th Combined Arms Army. ISW has previously reported that St. Petersburg City and Vologda Oblast are also forming volunteer units in Luga.[54] The officials are also offering a one-time enlistment payment of 250,000 rubles (about $4,000).[55] Novgorod Oblast residents have previously reported receiving letters advertising contract service in Ukraine for men currently in the reserve in early March with the same daily combat pay of 8,000 rubles (about $53) and a monthly salary of 200,000 rubles ($3,250).[56] The March advertisement did not offer a one-time enlistment bonus.

Russian federal subjects (regions) continued to announce the formation of new volunteer units but are unlikely to meet their quotas. Bryansk Oblast is forming a new unnamed volunteer unit of 350 servicemen that reportedly has enlisted 77 men so far.[57] Bryansk Oblast officials are offering a one-time enlistment payment of 210,000 rubles (about $3,400) split over three months. Bryansk Oblast officials specified that recruitment will last until December 31. Ukraine’s Strategic Communications Center reported that Nizhny Novgorod Oblast-based ”Kuzma Minin” Volunteer Tank Battalion only generated 30 recruits of the desired 160, which if true further suggests that Russian federal subjects are unable to create fully-staffed volunteer units.[58] Russian forces at the same time are less interested in recruiting women for combat, only offering some medical positions despite shortages in recruits.[59]

Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)

Russian occupation authorities are struggling to provide basic services to occupied territories. Head of the Zaporizhia Oblast occupation administration Yevheniy Balitskiy reported on August 16 that local occupation authorities have concentrated all social services - including receiving pensions and Russian passports - in Berdyansk, making these services difficult to access for civilians outside of the city.[60] Advisor to Mariupol‘s Mayor Petro Andryushchenko reported on August 16 that Russian occupation authorities have not fixed the Mariupol sewage and filtration system but have established ad hoc, gravity-powered filtration systems that produce visibly clean water but release sewage into the soil.[61] The Mariupol City Council reported that stores in Mariupol either lack provisions or are selling provisions at a high markup, likely due to Russian occupation authorities providing limited amounts of humanitarian aid to select vulnerable Mariupol populations.[62] Footage of Mariupol reconstruction efforts reportedly shows the construction of cheap and speedily built apartment buildings that the occupation authorities may use as propaganda to claim they are rebuilding the entire city.[63]

Ukrainian partisans reportedly continue conducting attacks on Russian infrastructure in occupied southern Ukraine. Ukrainian Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov reported two explosions near a substation in Melitopol on August 16 and implied that partisans were responsible.[64] Fedorov reported that local broadcasting of Russian television stopped after the explosions.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

[5] https://www.interfax dot ru/russia/856847; https://ria dot ru/20220816/vzryv-1809971243.html; https://www.themoscowtimes dot com/2022/08/16/russia-says-blasts-at-military-site-in-crimea-sabotage-a78581

[45] https://t.me/mod_russia/18642; https://telegra dot ph/Zayavlenie-Mezhvedomstvennogo-koordinacionnogo-shtaba-Rossijskoj-Federacii-po-gumanitarnomu-reagirovaniyu-ot-15-avgusta-2022-g-08-15

[47] https://lb dot ua/society/2022/08/04/525295_vorog_prodovzhuie_pidgotovku.htm; https://ua dot interfax.com.ua/news/general/850517.htmlhttps://www dot ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3543522-na-hersonsini-vijskovih-rf-lakaut-zagorodzuvalnimi-zagonami-cecenciv.html

[50] http://novgorod-news dot net/other/2022/08/05/73644.html

[51] http://novgorod-news dot net/other/2022/08/05/73644.html

[53] https://novvedomosti dot ru/news/society/82256/; http://www dot adm.nov.ru/page/46693

[55] https://vnru dot ru/news/65811-zhitelej-novgorodchiny-zamanivayut-v-armiyu-gubernatorskoj-vyplatoj-v-250-tysyach.html?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.comhttps://vk.com/wall624238400_231

[56] https://vnru dot ru/news/63358-novgorodtsam-predlagayut-stat-kontraktnikami-i-prinyat-uchastie-v-spetsoperatsii.html

[57] https://www dot bragazeta.ru/news/2022/08/16/v-bryanskoj-oblasti-sformiruyut-imennoe-podrazdelenie-dlya-uchastiya-v-specoperacii/ ; https://newsbryansk dot ru/fn_1123355.html

[58] https://gordonua dot com/news/war/v-rossii-sorvalos-formirovanie-tankovogo-batalona-ne-nashlos-zhelayushchih-1621660.html

[59] https://47news dot ru/articles/217028/

understandingwar.org

2. Ukraine has telegraphed its big counteroffensive for months. So where is it?



All warfare is based on deception or so said Sun Tzu.


Excerpts:

That may not add up to the big counteroffensive that Kyiv has been indicating. But Bielieskov says the sheer number of guns and troops on the frontline isn’t necessarily instructive.
He points to the underdog Ukrainian army’s successful defense of Kyiv, which obliterated Russia’s offensive plans and forced Moscow to retreat to safer ground in the east.
“The best strategists are those who fight not by textbook but find a way to do your work even with limited means,” he said.




Ukraine has telegraphed its big counteroffensive for months. So where is it?

By CHRISTOPHER MILLER and PAUL MCLEARY

08/16/2022 08:01 PM EDT

Politico

As Kyiv’s artillery starts to hit Russian forces in the south, analysts are left wondering whether there’s more to come.


A Russian soldier stands guard in the Kherson region. | AP Photo

08/16/2022 08:01 PM EDT

KYIV — For two months, Ukraine has been signaling its intent to recapture the southern city of Kherson in what has been billed as a major counteroffensive and the moment that Kyiv turns the tide against Russia.

What that push will look like is still a mystery, however. Ukrainian artillery and rockets provided by the U.S. and allies have smashed bridges and Russian ammunition depots close to the city, but the larger movement of infantry has yet to happen. Meanwhile, the Russians are reinforcing and digging in.


Ukrainian officials have long said the fate of the war could be decided in the south and claimed that a series of suspicious attacks on Russian military installations far beyond the frontline — including two massive explosions at a Russian airbase in Crimea on Tuesday — indicated the counteroffensive had begun.


But even with billions of dollars worth of weapons from across Europe and North America now in Ukrainian hands, real questions remain over whether it’s enough, and what enough might look like.

Some of those weapons, such as the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, have allowed Ukraine to batter Russian positions around the occupied city of Kherson. But the Russians are firing back in kind, leading to a brutal stalemate that continues to leave the southern region up for grabs, with infantry on both sides scrambling for their foxholes instead of pushing forward.

The city of Kherson, which sits on the northern banks of the Dnipro River, is a gateway for Russian forces to push west toward the critical port city of Odesa. It has been occupied since early in the war, but Russian forces have been unable to push west due to Ukrainian resistance.

That holding action has been key to keeping Odesa and other Black Sea ports in Ukrainian hands, a lifeline that has allowed some shipments of grain to leave port, giving Kyiv a desperately needed economic boost.

But Ukraine’s telegraphing of its much-anticipated counteroffensive, the slow pace of it, and some puzzling decisions have even the most observant Russia-Ukraine analysts wondering where the push has gone.

Is it a feint from Kyiv to scramble and confuse Russian forces? Or an indication that Ukraine currently lacks the firepower to unseat Moscow’s hold on key territory — and that a grinding war of back-and-forth gains is inevitable?

“Why the public messaging around Kherson? I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know, but this is something that is driving me crazy,” said Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst and director of Rochan Consulting, which tracks the war.

“Frankly, from a military point of view, absolutely it does not make sense, because if you are a Ukrainian military commander you would much rather fight, let’s say, the seven Russian battalion tactical groups that were in northern Kherson a month ago, not the 15 or 20 there now,” Muzyka added, while noting that Russian losses have weakened the fighting strength of some of these battalions.

As the disastrous Russian push toward Kyiv in February and March showed, however, pushing thousands of troops toward an objective without softening the enemy’s defenses is a losing proposition — a lesson the Ukrainians have learned.

Recent strikes against three bridges spanning the Dnipro River have rendered them “inoperable” and seriously disrupted Russia’s ability to reinforce troops in Kherson city, Nataliya Humenyuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command, said Monday.

“The blows inflicted on them currently do not allow the use of these bridges for the movement of heavy equipment,” she added.

Her comments came after Ukrainian forces again hit the Antonovsky Bridge, the last and biggest artery connecting the southern part of the region with the northern side. Video footage of the strikes shared online showed Russian air defense systems trying to take out the HIMARS targeting the bridge.

But the successful strikes have not been followed by significant forward advancement on the ground. Indeed, there has been little movement of Ukrainian land forces around the Kherson region, with some reports saying troops remained pinned down in the trenches by Russian shelling.

Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command has claimed to have liberated dozens of small towns and villages in the northern Kherson region. But they met little Russian resistance in those areas. Taking the rest of the territory will be much harder, analysts say.

That friction is being felt on both sides. While Ukraine might not be able to push as hard as needed at the moment, the blows it has struck to the Russian logistics effort is also strangling the Kremlin’s ambitions. “Even if Russia manages to make significant repairs to the bridges, they will remain a key vulnerability,” for the Kremlin, a British intelligence assessment stated on Aug. 13.

Thousands of Russian troops may now be forced to rely on resupply via just two pontoon ferry crossing points. “With their supply chain constrained, the size of any stockpiles Russia has managed to establish on the west bank is likely to be a key factor in the force’s endurance,” the assessment said.

Dislodging even small numbers of troops from defensive positions has been one of the trickier aspects of land warfare in Ukraine. Moscow’s forces have demonstrated a willingness to bleed over each foot of the Donbas they have gained in six months of fighting.

It won’t be any easier for the Ukrainians, and there are questions over whether they have the troops and enough artillery shells to do it.

The U.K. has taken the lead in training thousands of Ukrainian infantry soldiers in recent weeks in southeast England, and a handful of countries — including Canada, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand — have said they’ll soon join the effort.

But that pipeline provides only about three weeks’ worth of basic infantry training on movements and tactics, just enough for recruits to have some cursory knowledge of the harrowing realities they’ll face, but not much more.

An Aug. 11 meeting in Copenhagen saw 26 Western nations and the European Union pledge another $1.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine, money mostly aimed at providing more artillery and munitions.

Meanwhile, Russia has in recent weeks moved forces from the southern Kharkiv region near the city of Izyum and from the Donetsk region in the east, to the south to bolster its defenses around Kherson, increasing what was already a mathematical advantage in troops and equipment.

Russian forces were met with little resistance in the first days of the invasion when they seized almost all of the agriculture-rich region of Kherson, a strategically important city that sits just north of Crimea. Since then, they have reinforced their lines there and in recent weeks have built up defenses in anticipation of a Ukrainian attack.

But it has also been an uncomfortable occupation for the invaders, as they faced deep resentment from Ukrainian residents and strong resistance from special forces operating covertly in the area.

Nevertheless, Russia plans to hold a referendum in Kherson in mid-September to forcibly take the region into its fold. So if Kyiv hopes to stop the illegal vote, it needs to move fast.

Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, doesn’t believe any Ukrainian offensive will happen quickly, considering “Ukraine lacks the heavy weaponry” to carry out such a maneuver. “That’s a huge mistake,” he said.

He said Kyiv is likely to “slowly and methodically” pound Russian forces and “show Moscow that its position in the south is untenable.”

Bielieskov also suggests that Russia redeploying forces to Kherson could be a strategic error. “I would even say that Russia made the situation even more precarious as more troops would need more supplies, which are vulnerable to strikes,” he said.

Kyiv appears to have recognized this, and has attacked key rail and vehicle bridges crossing the Dnipro River, denying Russian troops free movement in the region.

Forcing Moscow to shift its focus and soldiers should be considered “quite an achievement,” Bielieskov said. “It’s the first time in the big war when Russia corrects its plans after Ukraine’s actions,” he said. “Before, the initiative was strictly in Russian hands.”

That may not add up to the big counteroffensive that Kyiv has been indicating. But Bielieskov says the sheer number of guns and troops on the frontline isn’t necessarily instructive.

He points to the underdog Ukrainian army’s successful defense of Kyiv, which obliterated Russia’s offensive plans and forced Moscow to retreat to safer ground in the east.

“The best strategists are those who fight not by textbook but find a way to do your work even with limited means,” he said.


POLITICO



Politico


3.  Ukraine aiming to create chaos within Russian forces, Zelenskiy adviser says



Sometimes journalists write these articles as if these are some great revelations. Every PSYOP professional would tell you this is one of their recommended lines of effort for cognitive effects and every fires officer and targeteer would recommend these as major targets on their target list.


Ukraine aiming to create chaos within Russian forces, Zelenskiy adviser says

Exclusive: Mykhailo Podolyak says Russian supply lines will be targeted and predicts similar attacks to last week’s explosion at Crimean airbase

The Guardian · by Dan Sabbagh · August 16, 2022

Ukraine is engaged in a counteroffensive aimed at creating “chaos within Russian forces” by striking at the invaders’ supply lines deep into occupied territories, according to a key adviser to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Mykhailo Podolyak told the Guardian there could be more attacks in the “next two or three months” similar to Tuesday’s mysterious strikes on a railway junction and an airbase in Crimea, as well as last week’s hit on Russian warplanes at the peninsula’s Saky aerodrome.

Russia said a fire on Tuesday had set off explosions at a munitions depot in the Dzhankoi district of Crimea – an incident that Podolyak said was a reminder that “Crimea occupied by Russians is about warehouse explosions and high risk of death for invaders and thieves”.

Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attacks. They have prompted Russian tourists to flee Crimea in panic. There were queues on Tuesday outside the railway station at the regional capital, Simferopol.

The defence ministry in Moscow said it was dealing with cases of sabotage and taking “necessary measures” to prevent further episodes.

Footage purports to show explosion at ammunition depot in Crimea – video

Speaking from the presidential offices in Kyiv, Podolyak said: “Our strategy is to destroy the logistics, the supply lines and the ammunition depots and other objects of military infrastructure. It’s creating a chaos within their own forces.”

The adviser, often described as the country’s third most powerful figure, said Kyiv’s approach ran counter to Moscow’s use of blunt artillery power to gain territory in the Donbas region to the east, which has seen Russian troops destroy cities such as Mariupol and Sievierodonetsk in order to gain territory.

“So Russia has kind of taught everybody that a counteroffensive requires huge amounts of manpower like a giant fist and just go in one direction,” he said, but “a Ukrainian counteroffensive looks very different. We don’t use the tactics of the 60s and 70s, of the last century.”


An infrared overview of Saky airbase after the attack. Photograph: Maxar Technologies/Reuters

However, the remarks could also be interpreted as an acknowledgment that Ukraine is struggling to amass the amount of men and military material required to sustain a full counteroffensive in the south of the country, which typically requires a superiority of three or more soldiers to one.

Instead, Ukraine has tried to cut off Kherson, the one city held by Russia on the west bank of the Dnieper River, by damaging road and rail bridges using newly supplied western rocket artillery to the point where it is no longer possible for Russia to resupply its forces effectively.

Podolyak asked for “50, 60, 80 more” MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) on top of an existing arsenal of about 20, 16 of which are truck-mounted Himars supplied by the US. Three – the track-wheeled M270 – have come from the UK, with three more promised, which the adviser described as “very good”.

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British soldiers with an M270 system during a military exercise in Germany last month. Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images

Helped by the long-range missiles supplied by the west, Podolyak added that Ukraine hoped to degrade the invaders’ strength through “lack of supplies and lack of ammunition” that “will make Russians fight like they did on the first months of the war”.

In the early phase of the conflict a disorganised Russian military failed to capture Kyiv after the invading forces became clogged up in a series of traffic jams on roads leading into the city, making them vulnerable to Ukrainian infantry and anti-tank weapons.

The presidential aide suggested that last week’s airbase attack could have been the work of partisans, but playfully dismissed any suggestion it could have been an accident, as had been suggested by Moscow in its immediate aftermath.

Podolyak said Russians had “a different physics” if they believed the blasts the result of discarded cigarettes causing munitions dumps to explode, before going on to anticipate a repeat of such attacks behind the lines in the future.

“I certainly agree with the Russian ministry for defence, which is predicting more incidents of this kind in the next two, three months. I think we might see more of those happening,” Podolyak said.


Rising smoke can be seen from the beach at Saky after the airbase attack. Photograph: AP

He also signalled that Ukraine regards the Crimean Bridge linking the occupied peninsula with the Russian mainland as a legitimate military target. “It’s an illegal construction and the main gateway to supply the Russian army in Crimea. Such objects should be destroyed,” he said.

Although Ukraine has refused to take public responsibility for the attack on the Saky airbase, it has done so in private, and the incident has come at time when a string of Russian strategic targets have been hit deep behind the frontline.

On Monday there was speculation that Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman reportedly tied to the Wagner private military company, could have been wounded or killed in a Ukrainian rocket strike in the Donbas.

Photos published by a Russian journalist of the man’s meeting with Wagner mercenaries in east Ukraine made the location of the base easy to identify. And on Sunday, the building at Mironivska was hit by a Ukrainian artillery strike, probably from a Himars system.

Podolyak, who was a peace talks negotiator in the early phases of the conflict, said there was no prospect of Russia negotiating seriously until it experienced a defeat on the battlefield. He said some unnamed European countries were “under the illusion” that the Kremlin may seek talks in good faith.

“Russian ears only open up when there is a giant military bat hitting the Russian head,” he said.

He praised Britain’s role in supporting Ukraine so far, which in some respects had exceeded that of the US, and said he expected strong support to continue after Boris Johnson steps down as prime minister. “You became a giant – it’s hard to go back to being a midget,” he said.

Johnson had offered “personal and emotional backing” to Zelenskiy in the “darkest day of Ukrainian history”, Podolyak said. The UK’s contribution would be remembered for centuries, he suggested.

The Guardian · by Dan Sabbagh · August 16, 2022

4. Air Force Special Operations Command grounds CV-22 Osprey aircraft over safety concerns: report



Oh no. This is a workhorse. 


A slipping clutch is probably more dangerous in a CV-22 than in our car.


Excerpt:


The AFSOC told the website that the clutch inside a gearbox connecting one of the aircraft’s two engines to its rotors is slipping, causing power to shift over to the other as part of a design feature to keep the aircraft flying in the event of a partial engine failure.


Air Force Special Operations Command grounds CV-22 Osprey aircraft over safety concerns: report

foxnews.com · by Greg Norman | Fox News

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The Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) has grounded all 52 of its CV-22 Ospreys until further notice because of an "increased number of safety incidents" involving a mishap with the aircraft’s clutch, a report says.

The decision impacting the CV-22 Osprey — a cutting-edge tiltrotor aircraft that can take off vertically — comes after two safety incidents in the last six weeks and four in total since 2017, AFSOC spokeswoman Lt. Col. Becky Heyse told Breaking Defense.

"The safety of our Airmen is of the utmost importance, therefore no AFSOC CV-22s will fly until we will determine the cause of the hard clutch engagements and risk control measures are put in place," she told the digital magazine.

MARINE CORPS INVESTIGATION FINDS PILOT ERROR KILLED FOUR MARINES IN NORWAY


A U.S. Air Force Bell Boeing CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor military aircraft takes off for an evening training flight from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, England, in July 2020. (Jon Hobley/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The AFSOC told the website that the clutch inside a gearbox connecting one of the aircraft’s two engines to its rotors is slipping, causing power to shift over to the other as part of a design feature to keep the aircraft flying in the event of a partial engine failure.

US CARRIES OUT ICBM TEST AFTER DELAYING OVER TENSIONS WITH CHINA

In most cases, according to Breaking Defense, the initial clutch re-engages and the power shifts back to the first engine, but Heyse said "if the aircrew were unable to control the aircraft when the incident occurs, it could result in loss of control and uncontrolled landing of the aircraft."


A U.S. Air Force CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor military aircraft is seen in Portland, England, in March. (Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images)

But so far, she says, the incidents have not caused any injuries or deaths "due in large part to the skill and professionalism of our Air Commandos who operate the CV-22."

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"In coordination with the Joint Program Office, AFSOC has been unable to gather enough engineering data analysis to accurately identify root cause, so it’s unknown if it’s mechanical, design, software or some combination of any of those," Heyse also told Breaking Defense.


Two CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor military aircraft of the U.S. Air Force fly over Kyiv, Ukraine, during air drills in March 2020. (Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The website reports that after the incidents occur, in many cases, the gearboxes and engines require replacements — damage that costs in excess of $2.5 million to repair.

foxnews.com · by Greg Norman | Fox News



5. U.S. Veterans Race to Train Ukrainians as Marines; ‘Time Is Not on Their Side’


Extensive photos at the link.


U.S. Veterans Race to Train Ukrainians as Marines; ‘Time Is Not on Their Side’

Foreign volunteers pay their own way to help prepare civilians for next phase of battle with Russia; ‘many have never held a weapon’


https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-ukraine-war-american-veterans-volunteers-training-11660743714?utm_source=pocket_mylist


By Yaroslav TrofimovFollow / Photographs by Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal

Aug. 17, 2022 10:40 am ET


the grass, cocking their assault rifles and aiming at targets. Then, to the surprise of their American instructors, one by one they started squeezing the trigger.

“Cease fire!” yelled Steven Tomberlin, 62, a retired police officer from Colorado overseeing this part of the training. “Until I give the command. You. Do. Not. Do. Anything.” When the firing resumed, bullets hit the dirt berm, often far off the mark.

“Most of these people have just been mobilized. They were electricians or tractor drivers yesterday, and many have never held a weapon in their hands,” said Sr. Lt. Anton Solohub, a deputy commander of this Ukrainian Marine battalion, as he watched the first day of a crash course provided by a group of mostly American veterans.

“These instructors have promised that they will turn my men into some kind of special force in 10 days,” Lt. Solohub mused. “Let’s see.”

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Europe’s bloodiest war since 1945 has chewed through tens of thousands of troops on both sides, annihilating entire brigades. While Ukraine has mobilized several hundred thousand men to replenish the ranks, the biggest problem it faces today is how to train these erstwhile civilians for the brutal combat against a better-armed and more numerous foe—especially as Kyiv seeks to regain occupied land.

Ukraine’s military suffers from a severe shortage of qualified trainers, because experienced combat troops are needed on the front lines. The active-duty soldiers from the U.K., U.S. and Canada who used to conduct training missions here were pulled out in February, and a new training program on British soil can take up only some of the slack.

Ukrainian servicemen listen as their instructor prepares a night combat exercise in the area of Mykolaiv.

The final exercise showed how far the trainees had come, said an instructor.

That’s where volunteers like Mr. Tomberlin, who used to train Afghan commandos, come in.

The trainers are among the thousands of Westerners who flocked to Ukraine after President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in the first days of the war that the country would welcome anyone willing to fight for its independence. Many joined the new International Legion, which has since suffered significant casualties in combat. Several of these Western fighters have been captured by Russia and several others killed.

Older, more experienced volunteers like Mr. Tomberlin felt that they would be far more useful imparting their knowledge to Ukrainian recruits than sitting in a trench—an assessment shared by senior Ukrainian commanders. “Here, there is such a hunger for what we are offering,” said Mr. Tomberlin, who has already trained some 270 Ukrainian troops. “These guys will be better prepared than 75% of the Ukrainian army.”

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The unit Mr. Tomberlin joined calls itself the Mobile Assault Training Group, or MATG. It includes around a dozen Americans, plus a few Britons, Canadians and Israelis, assisted by Ukrainian translators and support staff.

The group’s members flew to Ukraine on their own dime, drawn by televised images of destruction, and banded together through informal connections here in Mykolaiv, a southern Ukrainian city that the Russian military failed to capture in March. Mykolaiv remains a dangerous place, subject to daily shelling and rocket barrages.

While the U.S. government advises all American citizens to leave Ukraine, it doesn’t impose penalties on those who travel here to help the Ukrainian military.

“I’ve had a lot of Ukrainian soldiers tell me that this is the most meaningful thing they have done in their lives, and I tell them the same,” said one of the MATG trainers, Brian Bentley, 29, a former U.S. Marine who was planning to take a police academy course in Detroit but decided to come to Ukraine instead.

A former U.S. Marine demonstrates a shooting position at a firing range.

Early on, recruits had a hard time hitting their targets.

For Russia, these trainers represent a priority target. MATG’s leader, Bradley Crawford, who retired from the U.S. Army infantry as a sergeant first class, says his details were found in the phone of a Russian hit-squad member recently captured in Mykolaiv. A Russian missile hit near the house where he was staying last month, causing him some burns and other minor injuries.

“The Russians, they sure don’t like us being here,” said the 39-year-old Mr. Crawford, an Iraq war veteran from Ohio who has been here since April and who wears a uniform with Ukrainian and American flag patches.

The fierce nature of the war turns his Ukrainian students into quick learners, he adds. “They have no choice and time is not on their side,” said Mr. Crawford. “In Afghanistan and Iraq, we did have dangers, but here we are sending these guys to full kinetic warfare, not some kind of counterinsurgency.”

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Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, to which the recruits here belong, was deployed in the Azov Sea city of Mariupol when the war began, and was quickly encircled. It has essentially ceased to exist, with roughly a thousand Marines killed, wounded or captured, according to officials in Kyiv, after months of some of the most intense urban combat in recent military history. Created anew, this battalion of several hundred troops and the rest of the 36th brigade are training for a new mission: to reclaim the nearby city of Kherson, the only Ukrainian regional capital that Russia managed to seize since the Feb. 24 invasion.

The new battalion commander, Capt. Oleksandr Buntov, and many of his men are originally from Kherson. The captain has managed to smuggle out his family, but some other Marines still have spouses, children or parents living under Russian occupation.

“My motivation is ironclad: to liberate my home,” Capt. Buntov said. “I know it will be hard, and this is why we are getting prepared—and why we need these instructors to teach here. Urban close-quarters combat is the hardest kind of combat, no matter how long you train, and offense is much harder than defense.”

Capt. Buntov and the battalion’s other senior leaders are battle-hardened officers, but most of their junior commanders are as fresh to the military as the bulk of the recruits. On a recent day, retired U.S. Army Capt. Jim Lee schooled some of the unit’s lieutenants in how to plan an urban mission in a city like Kherson, with printouts of maps and assault plans.

Ukrainian servicemen grab lunch at a temporary military base during training.

Urban warfare is one of the subjects Ukrainian troops need to learn before Kyiv begins a possible offensive in the south.

“We are starting with the fundamentals here,” said Mr. Lee, who was studying for a master’s degree in Poland and got involved in efforts to help Ukrainian refugees when the war began.

One of the newly baked platoon leaders, Lt. Vitaly, who like most Ukrainian soldiers isn’t allowed to disclose his full name, is a 42-year-old prosecutor who, back in college, enrolled in Ukraine’s equivalent of ROTC. He went through a 40-day Ukrainian officer training course after the war began. “I am learning the military science from scratch. Everything is new,” he admitted, taking a cigarette break from Mr. Lee’s instruction. “The Russian plan is to push ahead without care for casualties. In our army, the main value is the life and health of a soldier. That is why we need to learn how to outsmart the enemy.”

An important part of the training is to teach American infantry tactics to surprise and befuddle the Russians, who expect the Ukrainians to follow the same Soviet doctrine as they do, American instructors say.

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In a typical course here in the countryside near Mykolaiv, the foreign instructors train two separate 32-man platoons, pitting them against each other in a final exercise. The first platoon’s leader, Lt. Maksym, 38, was an accountant in the Ukrainian-controlled Donbas until June. “I am not a military man, actually quite far from it, and I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” he said as he furrowed his brows, trying to absorb the trainers’ instructions.

One trainee covers himself in branches during an ambush exercise.

The exercise had Ukrainian trainees practicing ambushes on their instructors.

The other leader, Lt. Ihor, 32, a broad-shouldered Odessa merchant marine engineer with a shaved head, seemed more comfortable in his new role. “It’s not that different from the ship. It’s hot, there’s close quarters, you work all the time and there is no time for rest,” he joked. Neither man had seen battle.

By day four of the training, the Marines in the two platoons had learned how to handle their weapons and administer first aid. Now they were on to more complicated tasks. Lt. Maksym’s men plucked branches and leaves from nearby fields, with one of them constructing an impressive wreath of flowers on his head, and concealed themselves in the bushes to practice an ambush on their instructors. One of the trainers, American-born former Israeli paratrooper Taylor Bridges, dutifully fell on the ground once the Ukrainian Marines shouted “pam, pam, pam” to imitate gunfire. He winced as the men turned him over and searched his body for documents and weapons.

On the walk back, tensions within the platoon appeared. Mitya, a veteran Marine who wore a Soviet-style blue-and-white striped shirt and refused to don a helmet, came up to Mr. Crawford to complain about being bossed around by a newbie lieutenant. Most of Mitya’s comrades died in combat on the Mykolaiv front in the past five months, he said, and he had been sent to the battalion after falling out with his previous commander. “All these people giving me orders, where have they been all this time?” he said. Mr. Crawford listened politely.

Lt. Ihor’s platoon, meanwhile, practiced operations to seize a building—in this case the battalion’s temporary headquarters in a village in the Mykolaiv region. Fearful of the Russian missiles that often strike such facilities, many Marines pitched tents under trees nearby, refusing to overnight in the building.

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The Marines picked an avenue of approach and raced up the staircase, with the last man of the team swinging his rifle to protect the rear. At lunch afterward, the lieutenant was happy. “These are guys who have never held weapons in their hands, and by now they’ve learned how to clear buildings,” he said. The battalion commander, Capt. Buntov, was also satisfied. “Sweat now spares blood later,” he said.

After learning the basics of shooting and first aid, the recruits took on the more complicated task of clearing a building.

Steven Tomberlin, a retired police officer from Colorado, left, discusses an exercise with a Ukrainian platoon leader named Ihor.

For the final exercise on day 10, the two platoons gathered in a forest of pines and wild acacia trees, and set up two field headquarters at opposite ends of the area. One platoon wore green armbands, another blue, and the instructors yellow. The mission of Lt. Maksym’s platoon was to prepare an ambush along the dirt road fringed by the forest on one side and a field of chest-high sunflowers on the other. Since not every trooper had been issued a helmet, the two teams agreed not to wear them, to maintain fair play.

“The nature of the war here is that the enemy will have superior firepower and as many or more men than you, but you will nevertheless be tasked to attack them,” Mr. Tomberlin prepped the men.

Unwilling to wait for his lieutenant’s instructions, Mitya rapidly climbed a tree and announced he would be on the lookout for the enemy. “Macaw, there are no bananas up that tree,” another Marine jeered. “Come down, monkey.” Once Lt. Maksym finally set up an ambush, the first two members of the enemy patrol—including Lt. Ihor—were quickly eliminated. It was a major success.

Still, Lt. Maksym didn’t move or give orders. “Lieutenant, you’ve killed two of their men, what next?” an impatient Mr. Crawford urged him. An interpreter mistranslated it as the other platoon killing two of Lt. Maksym’s scouts.

“Well, I guess that’s it, we’ve lost,” he sighed resigned. As Lt. Maksym vacillated, the remainder of the other platoon rallied its forces and counterattacked. “This lieutenant’s indecision has just cost the lives of an entire squad,” Mr. Crawford muttered.

When the roles changed, Lt. Ihor asked Mr. Tomberlin how creative his men could be. One of his Marines, a bare-chested native of Kherson who had smuggled himself from Russian-occupied territories so that he could join the Ukrainian military, proposed using dummies with uniforms, helmets and a couple of guns to distract the enemy’s attention—while hiding the actual ambush inside the sunflower field. “That’s a great idea,” Mr. Tomberlin nodded. As they walked through bushes to pick the perfect ambush site, a couple of other Marines, both named Vova, seemed more interested in examining the maturing sunflower pods, picking out and tasting the seeds.

Mr. Tomberlin calls for his platoon during the final exercise.

A Ukrainian serviceman lies on the ground after being eliminated during the ambush exercise.

“It’s going to be a great harvest this year,” one of them said. Both men had come from the countryside of Ukraine’s central Khmelnytskyi region. “Only the farm boys get drafted. Have you seen anyone from the big cities here,” the younger Vova complained. So far, the highlights of his military career consisted of surviving a Russian missile attack on his barracks near Lviv in western Ukraine, and another on his barracks in Mykolaiv. “We’re farmers, we’re not really warriors,” he said.

Noticing the disturbed sunflower pods, Mr. Tomberlin didn’t hide his anger. “What is this, who has done this? Something like this will give away your position.”

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All throughout the day, distant thuds of Russian shelling could be heard from Mykolaiv. Then, at dusk, one of the instructors yelled into the radio that he could see two rockets heading in his direction. “Switch off your phones, turn off your lights,” Mr. Tomberlin shouted. A concentration of cellphones could be spotted by Russian electronic warfare systems and used for targeting. A Ukrainian air defense battery several miles away fired off three missiles that blasted into the starry sky.

Lt. Ihor had planned a complex maneuver with three sections that were meant to communicate by phone messages. Without the phones, he had to revise the plan. The entire platoon set off on a long hike through the fields, aiming to seize Lt. Maksym’s headquarters from an unexpected direction.

As the final exercise took place, Russian shelling could be heard in the distance.

In the darkness, American instructors strained their eyes, warily scanning the sky for potential Russian drones. “There is this one, it’s definitely moving and shaking from the wind,” said one. “No, no, I think it’s a satellite,” said another.

Then, they noticed a bright light just above the tree line. “It’s definitely not a star. I can see it moving toward us, slowly,” one said. Five minutes later, it wasn’t clear whether it had moved. Capt. Lee switched on his smartphone and pointed at the unidentified celestial object with an app.

“It’s Saturn!” he exclaimed.

Shortly after midnight, Lt. Ihor’s platoon maneuvered around a strip of forest and sneaked up on the base of the rival platoon from the rear. Even from the distance of a few dozen yards, his men could be spotted only with night-vision goggles.

“Bang bang bang,” the Marines shouted as they threw imaginary grenades into their rivals’ command post. “You’re dead, you’re dead, and you’re dead too,” Mr. Tomberlin told the surprised victims.

“They’ve done pretty well, huh,” he said, clicking his tongue as the Ukrainian Marines turned in for the night in the forest. While the tactics could be improved, he added, the men now formed an actual fighting unit.

The final exercise bonded the recruits as a fighting unit.

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 18, 2022, print edition as 'U.S. Veterans Race to Train Ukrainians as Marines'.


6.  Was the Fall of Afghanistan Inevitable? We Asked 9 National Security Experts


Was the Fall of Afghanistan Inevitable? We Asked 9 National Security Experts

19fortyfive.com · by Harry Kazianis · August 17, 2022

Did Afghanistan have to collapse in the way it did just one year ago?

Did Joe Biden have to pull out so quickly and without what I would argue was no strategy at all?

I have a lot of mixed emotions on this issue as it is something that has impacted me personally. I know many members of the U.S. military who were deployed to Afghanistan and had their lives changed forever – some friends never came home. Many are dealing with injuries – both mental and physical – that will never truly heal.

There is also the financial cost. America spent trillions of dollars to defeat the Taliban, keep the Taliban at bay, and try to rebuild Afghan society after the 9/11 attacks.

And yet, it all fell apart in what seemed like just a matter of weeks last summer.

Keeping all of this in mind, 19FortyFive asked nine top experts a simple question: Was the fall of Afghanistan inevitable? Here is what they told us with an expert biography and their answer below it:

A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, James Antle III is the Washington Examiner’s politics editor. He was previously managing editor of the Daily Caller, associate editor of the American Spectator, and senior writer for the American Conservative. He is the author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?

The collapse of the Western-backed government of Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal was inevitable, as Joe Biden himself warned apparently until the moment he was sworn in as president.

The necessary and achievable war aims were killing and capturing as many people involved in the 9/11 attacks, degrading their capabilities, and punishing the Taliban for sheltering them.

Nation-building, as opposed to terrorist-breaking, was always going to fail, especially in a place like Afghanistsan. And fail it did. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. The only real questions were whether we could have done anything to mitigate the chaos slightly and better position ourselves to project force into Afghanistan post-withdrawal.

Biden’s chief failures were not preparing the country for the disturbing images they were always going to see and not recognizing there was little point in observing the polite fiction that the government in Kabul had any meaningful capacity to survive our departure. The withdrawal was a victory for opponents of forever wars, but was executed in a manner that almost seemed designed to discredit them in the future.

Biden’s job approval ratings have never recovered.

Steve Balestrieri is a 19FortyFive National Security Columnist. He served as a US Army Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer, mainly in the 7th SFG.

While the Afghan government’s collapse seemed inevitable to those who spent so many years there, there were several very avoidable mistakes made by the US and our allies that could have possibly made a difference.

Many believed that a government so corrupt as theirs was bound to fail. After the debacle of withdrawing troops there in August of last year, President Biden said as much in a statement. “It’s been the graveyard of empires for a solid reason: It is not susceptible to unity,” the president said.

However, H.R. McMaster, a national security adviser in the Trump administration and a retired LTG, scoffed at that. “What you’re saying is this is inevitable because Afghanistan’s always been a ‘graveyard of empires? It doesn’t even frame the issue properly. We’re fighting with Afghans for Afghans against this heinous group of terrorists called the Taliban,” he said.

Trying to build a vast over-centralized government was a huge mistake, as Washington tried to build the country in our own image rather than allowing self-governance in the provinces. The US gave President Ghani nearly unrivaled control while only having the support of a narrow base of the population. It was an authoritarian system wrapped around a veneer of being democratic.

The US negotiations with the Taliban in Doha put the handwriting on the wall. Any hope of building a cohesive army was dashed there. The Afghans felt abandoned. Perhaps they would have never gotten to the level where they could defeat the Taliban militarily. But the US has spent more than 70 years in South Korea.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire. Bandow is also a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive as well.

After four decades of civil war, something like Afghanistan’s collapse last year was likely, if not quite inevitable.

Americans were tired of a war that did not serve their interests. Afghans tired of war in which they were the primary casualties.

In late 2001 the US wrecked al-Qaeda and drove the Taliban from power. However, creating a liberal society and Western-style democracy in Central Asia was not achievable at a reasonable cost and in a reasonable time.

Washington failed to understand the terrible impact of its war on Afghans. Observed interpreter Baktash Ahadi: “U.S. forces turned villages into battlegrounds, pulverizing mud homes and destroying livelihoods. One could almost hear the Taliban laughing as any sympathy for the West evaporated in bursts of gunfire.” This made America, along with the corrupt, incompetent, and distant Kabul government, an enemy, and the Taliban, added Ahadi, “the lesser of two evils.”

US officials refused to admit the truth.

The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock detailed how “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

All three successive administrations created a dependent Potemkin state that could not survive America’s withdrawal.

Staying, not leaving, was Washington’s mistake.

President Joe Biden meets with advisers before a phone call to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to discuss the debt ceiling, Tuesday, November 16, 2021, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Dr. Anna Borshchevskaya is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on Russia’s policy toward the Middle East. In addition, she is a contributor to Oxford Analytica and a fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy. She was previously with the Atlantic Council and the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Over the years, commentators and government officials routinely decried American failure in Afghanistan. But after the intervention, the United States did not experience a single 9/11-scale terrorist attack on its soil. And consider the costs of both involvement and inaction. On a single day on September 11, 2001, the US lost more innocent civilians than the US military lost in combatants during two decades of US-led efforts in Afghanistan. No terrorist organization established a safe haven in Afghanistan, while millions of Afghans –especially women, who suffered disproportionally under the Taliban—lived free from the Taliban’s tyranny.

But American leadership focused on the fact that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were not –and perhaps could not – be defeated entirely. A commitment to articulating a long-term vision for the American public of what it takes to keep them safe in a post-World War II world had proven too difficult. Instead, a consensus was formed to end so-called “endless” wars.

Thus, it all ended just as it began—with a failure of imagination, highlighted by the famous 9/11 Commission report.

After winning, the US chose to lose by walking away from a fight. To be sure, keeping a 2,500 troop contingent as part of a counter-terrorism mission would have gone a long way at holding the Taliban at bay. Afghanistan did not have to fall as it did. Yet in the absence of a vision articulated by American leadership, the fall, in a manner of speaking, was perhaps only a matter of time.

Ted Galen Carpenter is a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor and a Senior Fellow at CATO

On the one-year anniversary of the chaotic final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, it is crucial to learn the sobering lessons of Washington’s ill-fated crusade. The original intervention in late 2001 was a justifiable response to 9-11 and the Taliban’s role in sheltering the Al Qaeda terrorists. However, the mission quickly expanded far beyond a limited punitive expedition that could have been completed in a year or 2. Instead, U.S. policymakers embraced an open-ended, nation-building effort designed to transform Afghanistan into a modern, secular, Western-style democracy.

It was at that point that failure became inevitable. Arrogant U.S. officials and their cheerleaders in the news media mistakenly assumed that they could bring Afghanistan, an alien society in which loyalty to tribe and religion eclipsed any sense of national identity or democratic values, into the twenty-first century. With such lack of realism, only the timing of the ultimate debacle remained uncertain.

Nevertheless, officials in three administrations plugged on doggedly for nearly two decades, despite the rising cost in blood and treasure. In the process, military and civilian officials repeatedly misled Congress and the public, insisting that progress on the political, economic, and security fronts was taking place. They gave assurances that Washington’s puppet government in Kabul enjoyed the allegiance of most Afghans, and that the Taliban’s bid to regain power would fail. The abrupt collapse of that government in the summer of 2021 showed otherwise.

U.S. leaders who pursued the nation-building mission in Afghanistan made Don Quixote look like a realist. Such an impractical crusade was always hopeless. U.S. policymakers need to learn the appropriate lesson and keep America out of the nation-building business elsewhere in the world.

Victoria Coates serves now as Senior Fellow in International Relations and National Security at the Heritage Foundation. In the Trump administration, she served as Deputy National Security Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy.

The fall of Afghanistan was in no way inevitable.

Image: Creative Commons.

It was precipitated by President Biden’s determination to execute a full withdrawal by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which was driven entirely by domestic political concerns, not by the facts on the ground.

Recent statements by former CENTCOM Commander General Frank McKenzie, among others, that their best military advice was to leave a residual force of about 2,500 troops primarily at Bagram Airbase to retain intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities bear this out.

The President compounded the problem by refusing to adjust course when the withdrawal began to go sideways, which only led to confusion, chaos, and sadly the loss of more heroic US servicemen and women.

While all Americans should be glad that Ayman al Zawahiri has met the justice he so richly deserves, his open presence in Kabul is also a grim reminder that Afghanistan is once again a hospitable environment for the world’s worst terrorists—circumstances brought about by President Biden’s myopic insistence on a full withdrawal on his timeline, not by inevitable circumstances beyond his control.

Now a Contributing Editor for 19FortyFive, Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Could things have gone differently in Afghanistan?

Maybe, maybe not.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama embrace Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden moments after the television networks called the election in their favor, while watching election returns at the Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park in Chicago, Ill., Nov. 6, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).

But the United States certainly could have undertaken wiser policies that would have increased the chance of establishing a stable, democratic Afghan government.

In the months following the successful invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, elements of the Taliban reached out to the United States and to the interim Afghan government seeking reconciliation with and integration into the new regime. Co-optation of defeated opponents is a time-honored governance strategy in many places and was regarded as a tradition in Afghanistan. The United States rejected these overtures, maintaining an antagonistic posture that prevented the development of a durable peace.

This failure was compounded by the US decision to invade Iraq. The invasion of Iraq drew US attention away from Afghanistan at a critical time during the formation of Afghan state institutions. Resources allocated to reconstruction were diverted to the newer, shinier war. Perhaps more importantly, the war in Iraq undercut US legitimacy around the world, making it easier for the Taliban to find shelter in Pakistan and to build up strength for a counter-offensive.

Reversing these policies might not have saved Afghanistan from the Taliban, but it couldn’t have hurt.

Sébastien Roblin writes on the technical, historical, and political aspects of international security and conflict for publications including The National InterestNBC NewsForbes.comWar is Boring, and 19FortyFive, where he is Defense-in-Depth editor. He holds a Master’s degree from Georgetown University and served with the Peace Corps in China. You can follow his articles on Twitter.

Kabul’s rapid collapse in 2021 made clear it lacked broad legitimacy and popular support outside of the cities. Yes, there were officials, civil society members, and elite military units that did their duty as best they could, but in rural areas Kabul’s credibility proved founded solely on American military power.

That was entirely deflated when Trump/Khalilzad threw the admittedly ineffectual Ghani administration under the bus with a peace deal guaranteeing American withdrawal regardless of Taliban conduct towards Kabul. Wavering rural Afghans quickly sensed where the wind was blowing and accordingly struck deals with the Taliban even before the U.S. had left.

Thus, a permanent U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was required to avoid the evaporation of 2021. And any peace deals struck with the Taliban needed to include Kabul and to have the U.S. remain as a guarantor.

A paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team pulls security during a combat operation June 2, 2012, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan. His fellow paratroopers and Afghan soldiers inserted into the rugged mountain terrain via helicopter. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod.

The U.S. presence had become efficient enough to hold the line with a few thousand personnel—advisors, trainers, special forces, and air support. As a permanent foreign policy project, this was no longer indefensibly expensive, but there was little appetite in U.S. domestic politics to openly argue for keeping Kabul indefinitely on life support, especially as other priorities loomed. Trump set this course with his deal with the Taliban, and Biden stuck to it.

Admittedly, if the U.S. stayed the course, persistent Taliban encroachment would have periodically required surges of military pressure to roll back. After all, U.S. casualties in the last few years were so low precisely because of the deal struck with the Taliban. And all the while, a permanent U.S. presence wouldn’t solve the Afghan government’s endemic weakness and lack of legitimacy, nor destabilizing pressure from Pakistan. Maybe a more effective Afghan leader would have come along to unite the country where Ghani and Karzai couldn’t. But there’s no guarantee of that.

Now a 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. Michael Rubin is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Dr. Rubin is the author, coauthor, and coeditor of several books exploring diplomacy, Iranian history, Arab culture, Kurdish studies, and Shi’ite politics, including “Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East?” (AEI Press, 2019); “Kurdistan Rising” (AEI Press, 2016); “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes” (Encounter Books, 2014); and “Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos” (Palgrave, 2005).

President Joe Biden chose defeat in Afghanistan.

He chose the collapse of a country in which the United States had invested hundreds of billions of dollars. He confused strawman arguments about escalation and the rhetoric of ending “forever wars” with a basic understanding about traditional deterrence.

Sure, the nation-building escapade in Afghanistan may have been unwise, but that had largely ended a decade ago. Instead, the U.S. mission in Afghanistan had morphed into something similar to what the United States carried out in Germany and Japan after World War II, and in Korea to the present day. Indeed, when Biden pulled out, the U.S. annual investment in Afghanistan was akin to that which the Pentagon spent annually in its Japan and Korea missions. With a relatively small number of troops and without great risk of casualty, those deployments managed to hold off much larger adversaries, be they the People’s Republic of China or North Korea.

Soldiers from across the 25th Infantry Division and U.S. Army Hawaii test their proficiency in basic infantry and Soldier tasks in the hopes of earning the Expert Infantryman Badge or the Expert Soldier Badge.

Biden wanted to end the war, but how wars end matters. Biden sought to exit before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. That was an artificial, political deadline. Had he waited until winter, he could have enabled the U.S.-trained Afghan forces to dig in and prepare for several months until snows melted and the beginning of the next fighting season. This would have also allowed a more orderly withdrawal. Instead, he presided over a collapse whose ramifications have already been felt in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s pressure on Taiwan. Weakness and confusion are not good looks. They do not ensure peace, only the perpetuation of conflict.

Biden may have wanted to end a “forever war” but his team’s incompetence ensured new ones across the globe.

Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) serves as President and CEO of Rogue States Project, a bipartisan national security think tank. He has held senior positions at the Center for the National Interest, the Heritage Foundation, the Potomac Foundation, and many other think tanks and academic institutions focused on defense issues. His ideas have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, CNN, CNBC, and many other outlets across the political spectrum. He holds a graduate degree focusing on International Relations from Harvard University and is the author of the book The Tao of A2/AD, a study of Chinese military modernization.

This piece has been updated several times to include more expert analysis on the issue.

19fortyfive.com · by Harry Kazianis · August 17, 2022



7. Chinese troops will travel to Russia for huge joint military exercises with India


Excerpts:


Chinese troops will travel to Russia to take part in joint military exercises led by the host and including IndiaBelarus, Mongolia, Tajikistan and other countries, China's defence ministry said on Wednesday.
China's participation in the joint exercises was 'unrelated to the current international and regional situation', the ministry said in a statement.



Chinese troops will travel to Russia for huge joint military exercises with India to 'enhance strategic collaboration' amid heightened global tensions over Taiwan and Ukraine

  • India, Belarus and Tajikistan will take part in the exercises, China has announced 
  • The military drills simulate the repulsion of an invading force, centred in Russia
  • China said the joint exercises are 'unrelated' to the current 'regional situation' 

By WIRES and TOM BROWN FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 08:31 EDT, 17 August 2022 | UPDATED: 09:22 EDT, 17 August 2022


Daily Mail · by Wires · August 17, 2022

Chinese troops will travel to Russia to take part in joint military exercises led by the host and including IndiaBelarus, Mongolia, Tajikistan and other countries, China's defence ministry said on Wednesday.

China's participation in the joint exercises was 'unrelated to the current international and regional situation', the ministry said in a statement.

Last month, Moscow announced plans to hold 'Vostok' (East) exercises from Aug. 30 to Sept. 5, even as it wages a costly war in Ukraine.

It said at the time that some foreign forces would participate, without naming them.


File photo: Soldiers of People's Liberation Army (PLA) are seen before a giant screen as Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks at a military parade


File photo: Putin is pictured during the military exercises Vostok 2018 with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (left) and First Deputy Defense Minister Valery Gerasimov

Its last such exercises took place in 2018, when China took part for the first time.

China's defence ministry said its participation in the exercises was part of an ongoing bilateral annual cooperation agreement with Russia.

'The aim is to deepen practical and friendly cooperation with the armies of participating countries, enhance the level of strategic collaboration among the participating parties, and strengthen the ability to respond to various security threats,' the statement said.

Russia's eastern military district includes part of Siberia and has its headquarters in Khabarovsk, near the Chinese border.

They appear intended to send a message that Russia, despite the costly five-month war in Ukraine, remains focused on the defence of its entire territory and capable in military terms of sustaining 'business as usual'.

But that may be a challenge given Moscow's heavy losses in men and equipment in Ukraine - including troops and hardware sent there from the eastern military district where the war games will take place.

'A lot of troops and gear from the eastern MD (military district) have already been deployed, rotated, lost and killed in Ukraine since February, so this will be interesting to see what they can salvage,' said Mathieu Boulegue, a military specialist at London's Chatham House think-tank.


Russian, Chinese and Mongolian national flags set on armored vehicles develop in the wind during the military exercises Vostok 2018 in Eastern Siberia

In a statement, the defence ministry emphasised that its capacity to stage such drills was unaffected by what it calls its 'special military operation' in Ukraine.

It said Russia had not cancelled any training activities or international cooperation, and the exercises would be supplied with all necessary personnel, weapons and equipment.

The two superpowers of China and Russia have regularly taken part in joint military exercises as they turn away from the West.

The military cooperation has aroused suspicion but the two nations claim they have no intention to target a third country.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is staging military exercises to show its ability to resist Chinese pressure to accept Beijing´s political control over the self-governing island, following new rounds of threatening drills from China.

The exercises Wednesday off the southeastern county of Hualien follow days of Chinese missile firings and incursions into Taiwan's sea and airspace by ships and planes from the People´s Liberation Army, the military wing of China´s ruling Communist Party.



Servicemen of the Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China take part in the Scout Trail obstacle course race in 2020


Chinese soldiers carry the flags of (L to R) the Communist Party, the state, and the People's Liberation Army during a military parade



The People's Liberation Army is sending the delegation to Moscow, with personnel, tanks and military vehicles recently leaving Manzhouli in Inner Mongolia, China (pictured in 2016)

'Communist China´s military operations just provide us with the opportunity for combat-readiness training,' said .

Taiwan's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Joanne Ou said China was using recent visits by US Congress members including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a pretext for escalating its attempts to intimidate Taiwan into accepting what it calls its terms for 'peaceful reunification.'

'China launched military provocations on these grounds. This is absurd and a barbaric act, which also undermines regional stability and interferes with shipping and commercial activities in the Indo-Pacific region,' Ou said.

China growing assertiveness towards the island it claims as its own, combined with Russia's invasion, have renewed debate about how to boost defence and prompted NATO to step up preparations in the event of a Chinese attack.

Beijing considers Taiwan to be part of its territory and has never renounced using force to bring the island under its control.

Taiwan rejects Beijing's sovereignty claims and vows to defend its freedom and democracy.


Military personnel stand next to Harpoon A-84, anti-ship missiles and AIM-120 and AIM-9 air-to-air missiles prepared for a weapon loading drills in front of a F16V fighter jet at the Hualien Airbase in Taiwan's southeastern Hualien county on Wednesday, August 17

Daily Mail · by Wires · August 17, 2022



8. Paratroopers ‘get down and dirty’ on multinational airborne mission from Guam to Borneo


And SOF as well:


The Super Hercules was parked Wednesday next to the MC-130J Commando II at Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II International Airport in the Sumatran city of Palembang.
The Commando II pilot, Maj. Jacob McCauley, 33, of Mechanicsville, Va., said that day that 25 members of the 353rd Special Operations Wing out of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, traveled to Indonesia for the exercise.
“We did HALO (high altitude, low opening) and HAHO (high altitude, high opening) training with Special Forces from the U.S. and Indonesia” on the island of Java, he said. “We’ve been working with their pilots and JTACs.”




Paratroopers ‘get down and dirty’ on multinational airborne mission from Guam to Borneo

Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson · August 16, 2022

Paratroopers from the United States, Indonesia and Japan team with the 36th Airlift Squadron to practice multinational airborne operations during the Super Garuda Shield exercise in Baturaja, Indonesia, Aug. 3, 2022. (Matthew Crane/U.S. Army)


PALENMBANG, Indonesia — U.S. airlifters from Japan for the first time dropped airborne troops of three armies into drop zones during an exercise this month in Indonesia.

Five C-130J Super Hercules and an MC-130J Commando II flew missions in support of regular Army and Special Forces troops from the United States, Indonesia and Japan during Super Garuda Shield.

The largest installment yet of an exercise held annually for 16 years involved 2,000 U.S. and 2,000 Indonesian troops and a handful from other nations and ran from Aug. 1 until Sunday.

Four of the C-130Js, from Yokota Air Base’s 36th Airlift Squadron, were involved in an airborne operation at the start of the drills, the squadron chief of tactics, Capt. Zebulon Kimball, 30, of Denver, said Tuesday after returning to Japan.

The planes collected 200 paratroopers from the U.S. Army, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force and Indonesian army on Guam and flew them to Borneo to stage for the Aug. 3 mission, Kimball told Stars and Stripes by phone.

The paratroopers, including members of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, jumped into Baturaja Training Area on the island of Sumatra. The training area is covered in dense jungle inhabited by snakes and tigers. However, the paratroopers landed in a designated drop zone, Kimball said.

An Indonesian tactical vehicle passes a C-130J Super Hercules assigned to the 36th Airlift Squadron at Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II International Airport, Palembang, Indonesia, Aug. 10, 2022. (Seth Robson/Stars and Stripes)

Buy Photo

U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Charles Flynn observed the jump from the ground, according to an Aug. 3 Army news release.

“It’s the first time I’ve been involved in a jump with troops from three countries,” Kimball said.

The 36th Airlift Squadron works regularly with U.S. and Japanese troops but rarely interacts with Indonesian counterparts, he said.

The Indonesians approached the airborne mission with “enthusiastic aggression,” Kimball said.

“Garuda Shield was an excellent opportunity for us to get down and dirty and work together,” he said.

Four of the Yokota C-130Js returned to Japan after the jump while the fifth stayed behind in Indonesia, Kimball said.

The Super Hercules was parked Wednesday next to the MC-130J Commando II at Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II International Airport in the Sumatran city of Palembang.

The Commando II pilot, Maj. Jacob McCauley, 33, of Mechanicsville, Va., said that day that 25 members of the 353rd Special Operations Wing out of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, traveled to Indonesia for the exercise.

“We did HALO (high altitude, low opening) and HAHO (high altitude, high opening) training with Special Forces from the U.S. and Indonesia” on the island of Java, he said. “We’ve been working with their pilots and JTACs.”

A JTAC, or joint terminal attack controller, directs aircraft providing close support to ground troops from a forward position.

At Palembang, the special operations airmen practiced transporting an Army High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, inside the aircraft.

“We are demonstrating agile combat employment,” McCauley said.

Agile combat employment focuses on the ability to move aircraft rapidly to a network of smaller airfields in the Western Pacific to avoid being targeted by Chinese missiles in the event of war.

Another member of the special operations squadron at Palembang, Senior Master Sgt. Michael Hoffmaster, 43, of Port Charlotte, Fla., said the 37,000-pound HIMARS is one of the heaviest objects a C-130J can carry.

Only the 21,600-pound GBU-43B Massive Ordnance Air Blast munition, or MOAB, also known as the “mother of all bombs,” may be heavier, he said.

The MOAB, which was dropped on a network of Islamic State caves in eastern Afghanistan in April 2017, may be the most powerful conventional weapon ever used in combat.

Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson · August 16, 2022



9. An interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky


An interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · August 16, 2022

By

August 16, 2022 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

KYIV, Ukraine — Over the past six months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has become an inspiring wartime leader and champion of his country. During an hour-long, wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post at the presidential office, where hallways are kept dark and are lined with sandbags to protect against Russian attack, Zelensky discussed U.S. warnings about Russia preparing to launch a full-scale invasion — and if he believed them.

The following is a translated and lightly edited transcript of excerpts from the interview. The full transcript will be published at a later date.

Q: When CIA Director William J. Burns met with you here in Kyiv in January, one of the things he told you was that the Russians would attempt a landing at the airport in Hostomel. What was your reaction when that actually happened on Feb. 24? Should there have been more Ukrainian forces already there?

A: Regarding the airport, some six months prior to all of this, and perhaps even earlier, if you remember, there was a gathering of troops on the territory of Belarus and so on. We appealed to all our partners, telling them that we believed this is how they would act. They were training there — and it was well known — to capture or bomb key infrastructure points. They had been training, they had plans to capture Boryspil airport and so on. I don’t know how old these plans are.

They used maps, and the way they were capturing things, some of their paths were the same as those of the Nazis during World War II. So to say they had something unique planned here, it is impossible. Everything we had, it was there.

I’m not ready to talk about everything Burns talked about, but his main signals were about threats to my life. And those were not the first signals — they came from everywhere, from our intelligence services, from foreign colleagues and so on.

Look, as soon as the full-scale invasion began, from that moment on, our economy was losing $5 billion to $7 billion a month. This is wages. And you know the money our partners give us, we cannot spend the money on military salaries. There is some kind of global paradox in all this. I need money so I don’t lose my country. But I can’t spend this money on military salaries. Therefore, simultaneously with the explosions and the shelling, I had a very problematic story. I have to pay salaries to people who go there and die. And you’re hopeless. I don’t have time for reasoning, warnings, commitments — I just have a task to do. I must not allow them to occupy our land, and I have to pay people who die. That’s exactly what it sounds like. There are no sentiments. You have to do this every month.

When it comes to all warnings or signals from certain partners, here is what I explained to them: If we don’t have enough weapons, it will be difficult for us to fight. We will fight them, that’s for sure. And they don’t want to talk. [Russian President Vladimir Putin] hasn’t been willing to communicate for three years. So I don’t want to listen to this nonsense that Russians are ready to talk, this is nonsense. I clearly explained that. Everything we need is weapons, and if you have the opportunity, force him to sit down at the negotiating table with me. I’d been talking about this specifically, because we believed there will be an invasion.

You can’t simply say to me, “Listen, you should start to prepare people now and tell them they need to put away money, they need to store up food.” If we had communicated that — and that is what some people wanted, who I will not name — then I would have been losing $7 billion a month since last October, and at the moment when the Russians did attack, they would have taken us in three days. I’m not saying whose idea it was, but generally, our inner sense was right: If we sow chaos among people before the invasion, the Russians will devour us. Because during chaos, people flee the country.

And that’s what happened when the invasion started — we were as strong as we could be. Some of our people left, but most of them stayed here, they fought for their homes. And as cynical as it may sound, those are the people who stopped everything. If that were to happen, in October — God forbid, during the heating season — there would be nothing left. Our government wouldn’t exist, that’s 100 percent sure. Well, forget about us. There would be a political war inside the country, because we would not have held on to $5 billion to $7 billion per month. We did not have serious financial programs. There was a shortage of energy resources in the market created by the Russians. We did not have enough energy resources. We would not have been able to get out of this situation and there would be chaos in the country.

But it is one thing when chaos is controlled and it is during a military time — you run the state in a different way. You can open the border, close the border, attack, retreat, defend. You can take control of your infrastructure. And it’s another situation when you do not have a military situation or emergency regime in place, and you have a state that is ruled by a huge number of different officials and institutions. And minus $7 billion a month, even without weapons, is already a big war for our country.

Q: So did you personally believe full-scale war was coming?

A: Look, how can you believe this? That they will torture people and that this is their goal? No one believed it would be like this. And no one knew it. And now everyone says we warned you, but you warned through general phrases. When we said give us specifics — where will they come from, how many people and so on — they all had as much information as we did. And when I said, “Okay, if they’re coming from here and it’s going to be heavy fighting here, can we get weapons to stop them?” We didn’t get it. Why do I need all these warnings? Why do I need to make our society go crazy? Since February, even from January as there was a lot going on in the media, Ukrainians transferred out more money than Ukrainians abroad received in assistance. Tens of billions of dollars in deposits have been withdrawn, so Ukrainians spent much more money in Europe compared with the amount Ukrainians had been given there, with all due respect.

Therefore, you must understand that this is a hybrid war against our state. There was an energy blow, there was a political blow — they stirred the pot here, they wanted a change of power from inside the country, thanks to this party. The third blow was during autumn and a financial one. They needed the exchange rate of our currency to be a wartime one so that we did not have gasoline. So they did all this: There was no fuel, we did not have gas, they were cutting us out to ensure that the heating season would lead to destabilization within the country, and for the people to know there are the risks of currency devaluation so they would withdraw money. In general, they did this so we would stop being a country, and by the time of their invasion, we would have been a rag, not a country. That’s what they were betting on. We did not go for it. Let people discuss in the future whether it was right or not right. But I definitely know and intuitively — we discussed this every day at the National Security and Defense Council, et cetera — I had the feeling that [the Russians] wanted to prepare us for a soft surrender of the country. And that’s scary.

Q: I understand concerns about sowing panic and tanking the economy, but what would you say to those Ukrainians who now say, “I would’ve wanted to evacuate my family or just be better prepared”?

A: For all of December, January and February, Ukrainians were withdrawing money out of our economy. We could have been strict about that, but we weren’t letting either the National Bank or anyone else limit the people’s ability to take their money. Although we knew perfectly well that this will affect the country’s economy. The freedom people have in a democratic country is the freedom our people had. They had access to all the information that was available. Sorry, the fact that I wasn’t telling them about the Russians’ plot to do something to me and everything the intelligence services had been reporting to me: “You have to take your family away.” I told them, “How do you imagine that? I’ll be taking my family away, I’ll be doing something, and people will be just staying here? I can’t do that.” Our land is the only thing we have; we’ll stay here together. And then what happened, happened.

Q: If the United States knew for sure that a full-scale invasion was coming, did it give you enough weapons to defend yourself before Feb. 24?

A: Today, I can only be grateful to the U.S. for what we’ve got. But we need to have a clear understanding of the fact that we have always had weapons from the Soviet times. We never had the NATO weapons. The minimum we had from 2014 was, in my view, insufficient. The serious forces we needed, like the HIMARS we can all see now, or, let’s say, the 155-millimeter artillery — I’m not even mentioning tanks and aircraft — we had none of that and we didn’t have a possibility to buy it. The only thing we had agreed on was military drones, Bayraktars, et cetera. But with all due respect, one can’t wage war with drones.

And so, as you probably remember, since the full-scale invasion started and until now, all I’ve been asking is to close the sky, because if the sky was closed, we wouldn’t have all these deaths. And we were offering an alternative to the closed sky: a number of aircraft.

And there was no problem or shortage with that, I think, because we supplied addresses where all those aircraft were. But we never got that opportunity to close the sky. Even now, we are talking about what had been before the war, what had been in 2014, but what’s the point if even today, when this war is on, we haven’t got a chance to close and secure the sky.

Q: Did you ever get an explanation for why you weren’t supplied with more weaponry before Feb. 24 if Washington knew what was coming?

A: I have no complaints — up to the point when someone starts telling me, “But we were sending you signals.” Up to that point, I have no complaints. But when one is claiming they were sending us some signals, I tell them, “Send us weapons.” I was absolutely right, and I’m sure about it even now.

So as soon as we received serious weapons — I had told them, “Our country is not going to run anywhere, we are ready to fight, give us weapons.” And as soon as we got them, we would fight.

Everyone was afraid of the war. No one wants to wage war with Russia. Look, no one wants to wage war with Russia. Everyone wants Ukraine to win, but no one wants to wage war with Russia. And that’s it. That’s a full stop. And that’s why we had to decide how to stay strong. If no one wants to wage war with them, everyone is scared to fight them — excuse me, then we’ll be deciding how to do that, whether it’s right or wrong. But the war will go farther, deeper into Europe, so please send us weapons, because we are also defending you. And they started sending it.

But is it possible to close the sky now? Just wondering. It’s a rhetorical question.

Q: Regarding Kherson, what can be done to prevent Russia from holding a referendum there? What are you asking from your Western partners right now to help you stop it?

A: They can only take strong and specific steps using sanctions. Because the illegal referendum and the annexation of Kherson, what the Russians are planning to do, is a violation of any — well, I don’t want to talk about international law, they violated it a long time ago. It makes no sense. But countries can do the same thing because it’s a violation of borders. That is, they can definitely impose restricting sanctions. For example, a ban on the entry of all citizens of the Russian Federation to the European Union countries. Good sanctions. I think they are very good and peaceful.

There is nothing in these sanctions that takes away property or human life. I said from the very beginning that I believe that the most important sanctions are to close the borders, because they are taking away someone else’s territory. Well, let them live in their own world until they change their philosophy. So, countries close the borders and put an embargo on energy resources. My personal opinion is that everything else is weaker. There is no complete embargo on the energy supplies, and the borders are not shut.

It’s very simple: Whatever the citizens of the Russian Federation may be — there are those who support and do not support it — their children are there, studying abroad, in schools, universities and so on. Let them go to Russia. There’s nothing scary about that, let them go there. Not forever, please, let them come back. They’ll just understand then. They say, “Oh, we have nothing to do with this and all people can’t bear the responsibility.” They can. They elected these people and now they are not fighting them, they do not argue with them and don’t shout at them. The Russians who publicly oppose the war are just isolated cases and these people are in prisons. But let Russians go home, let everyone go to Russia. You want this isolation, don’t you? You’re telling the whole world that the whole world will live by your rules. Okay, then go there and live there.

What does this give us? This is the only way to influence Putin. Because this person has no other fear but the fear for his life. And his life depends on whether he is threatened by his internal population or not. Nothing else is threatening to him. That’s the way it is. Therefore, when its population puts pressure on his decisions, then there will be results. And the war will end. These are very understandable sanctions, they are very simple. It’s not about money, it’s not about gas or pipes, or that Germans won’t have heat in the winter. Just close the borders for a year and you’ll see the result.

David L. Stern in Kyiv and Mary Ilyushina in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · August 16, 2022




10. 175 Days of Battle: Putin Has No Way to Win the War in Ukraine


But what will a desperate Putin do if he is going to lose?



175 Days of Battle: Putin Has No Way to Win the War in Ukraine

19fortyfive.com · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · August 17, 2022

Another day in the war in Ukraine has passed (the 175th since the start of the invasion), and the Russian military continues to flounder.

The Russian Casualties

Despite Moscow’s claims about a war that is going according to plan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is suffering from many ailments, and heavy casualties is probably the most important. Simply put, the Russian military is losing more men than it can put on the frontlines, growing more ineffective with every passing day.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claimed that as of Wednesday, Ukrainian forces have killed approximately 44,100 Russian troops (and wounded approximately thrice that number), destroyed 233 fighter, attack, and transport jets, 196 attack and transport helicopters, 1,886 tanks, 993 artillery pieces, 4,162 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, 263 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 15 boats and cutters, 3,054 vehicles and fuel tanks, 136 anti-aircraft batteries, 792 tactical unmanned aerial systems, 93 special equipment platforms, such as bridging vehicles, and four mobile Iskander ballistic missile systems, and 190 cruise missiles shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses.

Attacks on Crimea

The Ukrainian forces are upping the pressure on the Russian military by taking out key logistical features that are essential for Moscow’s ability to wage effective combat operations in Ukraine.

To be sure, this is nothing new as the Ukrainian forces have been using long-range fires, most notably the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) and M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS), targeting Russian ammunition dumps, logistical depots, command and control hubs, and communication facilities throughout the Donbas and southern Ukraine for almost a month now.

But now, the Ukrainians are extending the scope of their attacks to strike Russian targets within Crimea too.

“On 16 August 2022, both Russian and Ukrainian officials acknowledged that an ammunition dump had exploded near Dzhankoi in northern Crimea, where a nearby railway and electricity sub-station were also likely damaged,” the British Military Intelligence assessed in its daily estimate of the war.

M270 MLRS. Image: ROK Military handout.

“Russian media also reported that smoke was rising from near Gvardeyskoye Airbase in the centre of the Crimea. Dzhankoi and Gvardeyskoye are home to two of the most important Russian military airfields in Crimea. Dzhankoi is also a key road and rail junction that plays an important role in supplying Russia’s operations in southern Ukraine,” the British Ministry of Defense stated.

The Crimean Peninsula was invaded and illegally annexed by the Kremlin back in 2014, and since then, Moscow has tried hard to Russianize the strategic peninsula by creating military bases and importing Russians to live there.

“The cause of these incidents and the extent of the damage is not yet clear but Russian commanders will highly likely be increasingly concerned with the apparent deterioration in security across Crimea, which functions as rear base area for the occupation,” the British Military Intelligence assessed.

Russian Military MLRS. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

1945’s New Defense and National Security Columnist, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. His work has been featured in Business InsiderSandboxx, and SOFREP.

19fortyfive.com · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · August 17, 2022



11. Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe’



The OSS legacy lives on in Ukraine. The ability to operate behind enemy lines is a force multiplier. 


Note we provided translated copies of the OSS SImple Sabotage Manual back in March: "For the Glorious Ukrainian Resistance"

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/glorious-ukrainian-resistance


And most important the SOCEUR Resistance Operating Concept is being validated. https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=838149


Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe’

The New York Times · by Andrew E. Kramer · August 17, 2022

Clandestine resistance cells are spotting targets, sabotaging rail lines and killing those deemed collaborators as they seek to unnerve Russian forces.

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Code-named Svarog, a member of the Ukrainian underground resistance, was made available for an interview by the Ukrainian military.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times


By

Aug. 17, 2022Updated 5:32 p.m. ET

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — They sneak down darkened alleys to set explosives. They identify Russian targets for Ukrainian artillery and long-range rockets provided by the United States. They blow up rail lines and assassinate officials they consider collaborators with the Russians.

Slipping back and forth across the front lines, the guerrilla fighters are known in Ukraine as partisans, and in recent weeks they have taken an ever more prominent role in the war, rattling Russian forces by helping deliver humiliating blows in occupied areas they thought were safe.

Increasingly, Ukraine is taking the fight against Russian forces into Russian-controlled areas, whether with elite military units, like the one credited on Tuesday with a huge explosion at a Russian ammunition depot in the occupied Crimean Peninsula, or an underground network of the guerrillas.

Last week, Ukrainian officials said, the partisans had a hand in a successful strike on a Russian air base, also in Crimea, which Moscow annexed eight years ago. It destroyed eight fighter jets.

“The goal is to show the occupiers that they are not at home, that they should not settle in, that they should not sleep comfortably,” said one guerrilla fighter, who spoke on condition that, for security reasons, he only be identified by his code name, Svarog, after a pagan Slavic god of fire.

In recent days the Ukrainian military made Svarog and several other of the operatives available for interviews in person or online, hoping to highlight the partisans’ widening threat to Russian forces and signal to Western donors that Ukraine is successfully rallying local resources in the war, now nearly six months old. A senior Ukrainian military official familiar with the program also described the workings of the resistance.

A Ukrainian combat engineer training civilians in weaponry and potential roles as guerrilla fighters last December, as Russia massed troops on the border. Credit...Oksana Parafeniuk for The New York Times

Their accounts of attacks could not be verified completely but aligned with reports in the Ukrainian media and with descriptions from Ukrainians who had recently fled Russian-occupied areas.

Svarog and I met over lemonade and cheese pastries at a Georgian restaurant in Zaporizhzhia, a city under Ukrainian control about 65 miles north of the occupied town of Melitopol.

He spoke with intimate knowledge of partisan activities, providing a rare glimpse into one of the most hidden aspects of the war.

Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine War

The Ukrainian military began training partisans in the months before the invasion, as Russia massed troops near the borders. The effort has paid off in recent weeks as Ukrainian forces are pressing a counteroffensive in the south, although Russian forces, with far greater advantages in heavy weapons, still surround Ukraine from the east and north.

Ukrainian officials warned on Tuesday of the threat of a potential Russian attack from Belarus, noting a buildup of missile systems there, and said Russian forces were expending tens of thousands of rounds a day as they shelled hundreds of defensive positions in eastern and southern Ukraine.

With little movement of the front lines, insurgent activity is now intensifying, as the fighters strike stealthily in environs they know intimately, using car bombs, booby traps and targeted killings with pistols — and then blending into the local population.

Before the war, Svarog occasionally joined weekend training with Right Sector and National Corps, a branch of the Azov movement, both of which are aligned with paramilitary units in Ukraine. They were just two of dozens of organizations running military training for civilians throughout Ukraine during the eight-year war with Russian-backed separatists.

Flames rising from a Russian air base in Crimea last week. Ukrainian officials said that local partisans had a hand in the strike, which destroyed eight fighter jets.Credit...Reuters

Svarog said he was among the trainees in these public programs. Behind the scenes, Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces were forming a more structured, and secret, program that included instruction on sabotage, explosives and stashing weapon caches in anticipation of Russia’s attack.

After the invasion, Svarog said, he was directed to a storage shed outside Melitopol, where he found slabs of high explosives, detonators, Kalashnikov rifles, a grenade launcher and two pistols equipped with silencers.

Melitopol, the southern Ukrainian town where Svarog operates, has since emerged as a center of the resistance. He recounted the careful casing of targets, followed by attacks.

By Saturday, partisans had struck with explosives seven days in a row, according to the town’s exiled mayor, Ivan Fedorov, who boasted of the achievement to Ukrainian media as part of the more public embrace of partisan operations by officials.

The attacks have been going on for several months. This spring, Svarog said, he and several members of the cell in Melitopol sneaked through the town at night to booby-trap a car in the parking lot of a Russian-controlled police station.

Carrying wire cutters, tape and fishing line, the fighters moved through courtyards and back alleys to avoid Russian checkpoints.

What we consider before using anonymous sources. How do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.

Learn more about our process.

They first cut an electrical wire, blacking out a streetlight, then dashed quickly into the darkness where they planted a bomb, wrapped in tape with the sticky side facing outward, into a wheel well. The fishing line was taped both to the inside of the wheel and to a detonator, rigging the bomb to explode when the wheel turned.

Residents in Melitopol wait for food aid administered by the United Russia party. Ukrainians who join this Russian-controlled party have been targets of the partisans.

“Anybody who would drive that car would be a traitor,” Svarog said. “Nobody there is keeping public order.” The bomb killed one police officer and wounded another.

In a strike last week, he said, his cell booby-trapped the car of Oleg Shostak, a Ukrainian who had joined the Russian political party United Russia in Melitopol. The insurgents targeted him because they suspected him of tailoring propaganda to appeal to local residents.

Svarog, who said he did not take part in this particular mission, said his team placed a bomb under the driver’s seat, rigged to explode when the engine started.

Mr. Shostak was wounded in the explosion but survived, said Mr. Fedorov, the exiled mayor. The attack was separately reported by Ukrainian authorities and described by displaced people leaving Melitopol through a checkpoint to Ukrainian territory on Sunday.

Whether targeted people survive or die in the attacks, partisans say, is less important than the signal sent with each strike: You are never safe.

Under a Ukrainian law passed by Parliament last year, the military’s Special Operations Forces are authorized to train, arm and pay secret combatants fighting on Ukrainian territory in time of war. In the law, they are called “community volunteers.”

The partisans say they are civilians and the legal basis for their activity is therefore regulated under the Ukrainian law, not the laws of war that prohibit, for example, a soldier from targeting a civilian official.

But under international law civilians become combatants when they start taking part in hostilities. The partisans work for the government, even the military, and whether the murky area they inhabit does in fact fall under international law — and whether their activities violate those rules — is a matter for debate.

Not all their activities are violent. Separately, two partisans operating in occupied southeastern Ukraine described a branch of the underground called Yellow Ribbon, which posts leaflets and spray paints graffiti.

Three girls and their grandmother wait in a convoy leaving Russian-occupied territory last week. Ukrainian forces are pressing a counteroffensive in the south. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

The bases on Ukrainian territory where operatives are trained are moved constantly to avoid discovery, according to a senior Ukrainian military official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.

Each operative has a different a role to play, the official said: scouting a target, gathering intelligence on a target’s movements, and carrying out an attack. Individual cells are kept separate and do not know one another, lest a detained partisan reveal identities under interrogation.

Two entities within the military are responsible for overseeing operations behind enemy lines, the official said: the military intelligence service, known as HUR, and Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces. An interagency task force oversees operations of both the intelligence agency and Special Operations Forces branches of the underground, what is known as the Resistance Movement, or Rukh Oporu in Ukrainian.

The official described a poisoning in the Zaporizhzhia region that killed around 15 Russian soldiers and the sabotage of a grain elevator, in the Kherson region, that prevented Russian forces from stealing 60,000 tons of grain. Neither operation could be independently verified.

Partisans were also behind an explosion on Saturday that disabled a railroad bridge connecting Melitopol to Crimea, halting the supply of military equipment coming into the Zaporizhzhia region.

The partisans are searching for those they consider traitors, too.

The Ukrainian underground in occupied territory considers police officers, municipal and regional government employees and teachers who agree to work under the Russian educational curriculum as collaborators, according to Svarog and another partisan using the nickname Viking. They said they did not see doctors, firefighters and employees of utility companies as traitors.

Ukrainian men removed debris on Monday from a building recently hit by a Russian rocket in the town of Nikopol in southern Ukraine. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Teachers are a focus now, with schools scheduled to open in September.

“The Russians want to teach by their program, not the truth,” Viking said. “A child is vulnerable to propaganda and if raised in this program, will become an idiot like the Russians,” he said. “A teacher who agrees to teach by the Russian program is a collaborator.”

Partisans will not attack teachers, he said, but have sought to humiliate them through leaflets they often post on utility poles with dark warnings for collaborators, as part of their psychological operations.

One went up recently, he said, with the names and photographs of principals planning to open schools in September.

It said: “For collaborating with the Russians, there will be payback.”

Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, and Michael Schwirtz from Odesa.

The New York Times · by Andrew E. Kramer · August 17, 2022



12. High-profile attacks behind Russian lines hint at how Ukrainian special forces may be using their US training


A force multiplier on a number of levels.



High-profile attacks behind Russian lines hint at how Ukrainian special forces may be using their US training

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou


Smoke rises after explosions at a Russian air base near Novofedorivka in Crimea on August 9.Reuters


  • Recent explosions in Crimea have damaged Russian military hardware and other infrastructure.
  • Russia hasn't blamed Ukraine specifically, but Ukrainian officials have said they are behind the blasts.
  • The attacks may be the work of Ukrainians who have trained closely with US special operators since 2014.

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This month, the Ukrainian military has again showed Russia and the world its commitment to winning the war, carrying out attacks far behind Russia's frontlines.

On August 9, Ukrainian forces struck a military target in Crimea, the first Ukrainian attack there since Moscow invaded and illegally annexed the peninsula in 2014. At least six blasts rocked Russia's Saki air base, which is home to the 43rd Independent Naval Attack Aviation Regiment, but the source of the attack remains unclear.

On Tuesday, there more explosions at an ammunition dump in northern Crimea. Russia's Defense Ministry said a fire at "a temporary ammunition storage site" caused the blast, calling it "an act of sabotage."

In both cases, Ukrainian officials have said or suggested that their forces were involved, which hints at how Ukrainian forces might be using the training they've been getting from Western special-operations forces since 2014.

Special operators or ballistic missiles?


Saki air base in Crimea on August 10.Planet Labs PBC/Handout via REUTERS

The explosions at Saki Air Base on August 9 destroyed at least eight aircraft — Ukraine has said nine — including Su-30SM fighter jets and Su-24M fighter-bomber, in addition to ammunition, fuel supplies, and aircraft storage facilities.

Russia has said the blasts were caused by accidental detonations of munitions and blamed the destruction on fire-safety violations.

US officials have not determined what caused the blasts but have said they weren't caused by a US-supplied weapon — ruling out the powerful M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. (The US-made MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System could reach the base if fired from Ukrainian-held territory but the US hasn't provided that weapon, despite requests from Kyiv.)

Some Ukrainian officials denied responsibility but others said their forces were involved in the explosions at the base. Ukraine could have used a domestically developed long-range missile but it's not clear if it has such a weapon in service, though Kyiv has been working on one.

One Ukrainian official told The Washington Post that the attack was a result of a special-operations raid. Whether that claim was made to hide the actual cause of the attack is still uncertain.


Smoke rises from an electrical substation that caught fire after a blast in northern Crimea on August 16.Still image from video obtained by Reuters

The explosions on Tuesday also hit an electrical plant and power lines, rail lines, and residential buildings, Russia's Defense Ministry said. Another blast, reportedly caused by a drone, hit a military airfield in central Crimea.

Following those explosions, a former senior Ukrainian official told The Guardian that Ukraine had "intelligence assets" operating in Crimea. A current Ukrainian official told The New York Times that an "elite" military unit "behind enemy lines" was responsible for the blasts in northern Crimea.

Special-operations raids could be plausible considering the training that Ukrainian commandos have received from special operators with the US and other NATO militaries and the capabilities those commandos have already displayed during the war.

Since 2014, the US special-operations community — primarily Green Berets from the Army's 10th Special Forces Group — has led a multinational effort to train Ukrainians, which has had a pivotal role in moving them away from their Soviet-era mindset and tactics and into the 21st century.


Ukrainian, Romanian, and US Army Special Forces soldiers train together in May 2021.Romanian army/Capt. Roxana Davidovits

Insider understands that during those years of training, US special operators placed particular emphasis on operational and contingency planning and on updating the tactics, techniques, and procedures of Ukrainian commandos.

Throughout the war, Ukrainian special operators — whose ranks also doubled during that period of Western training — have repeatedly struck behind Russian lines, taking out resupply convoys and other vulnerable targets.

The attack at the Saki Air Base, moreover, has the indications of a special-operations raid. The explosions started in the morning, when all the aircraft were on the ground prior to launching the day's sorties — the Russian air force's nighttime combat capability is questionable at best.

Special operators naturally train and fight in the darkness, allowing them to surprise and out-maneuver larger conventional forces, and Ukrainian operators may have used the cover of night to approach the base. Those operators may have then triggered the blasts in the daytime with time-delayed or remotely detonated explosives.

Small drones have also been used to attack Russian installations in Crimea, though that method would likely require the drone operators to remain closer to the target for longer.

The start of a counteroffensive?


A woman and child walks by a Russian soldier on an embankment by the Black Sea in Kherson on May 20.AP Photo

The attacks come as the Ukrainian military appears to be gaining the strategic initiative, dictating major moves on the battlefield with Moscow scrambling to respond.

Ukrainian officials told Politico that the attack on the air base could be considered the start of a counteroffensive toward the southeastern city of Kherson, which is north of Crimea.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his military advisers gambled when they launched a counteroffensive toward the south just a few days after Russian forces launched a renewed offensive in the Donbas region in mid-May.

That gamble seems to be paying off, as Russian forces have failed to make meaningful advances in Donbas and are now urgently relocating to meet the Ukrainian threat to Kherson.


Ukrainian troops near the frontline in Kherson on July 15.Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Ukraine now has "a unique chance and window of opportunity," as an advance on Kherson and across the Dnieper River could limit Russia's ability to maneuver and bring more of Crimea into range of Ukrainian weapons, Sergii Grabskyi, a Ukrainian army reserve colonel, said on a recent podcast.

A number of factors will influence events in the months ahead. Ukraine and Russia have both sustained heavy losses among experienced troops, and the onset of autumn may make operations more challenging.

Both sides struggle with combined-arms warfare — that was evident for Russia early in the war, and Ukraine may now face similar difficulties.

"Since 1992, in our field exercises, we did not study offensive actions. We always planned defensive actions," Grabskyi said. "After eight years of war, Ukrainian forces are brilliant in defensive actions, but they have a very limited or almost zero experience to conduct large-scale offensive actions."

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.


Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou



13.










De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

VIDEO "WHEREBY" Link: https://whereby.com/david-maxwell

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com


V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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