OPINION: Faith-Based Peacemaking, Cult of Mothers, Boom Boom Boom

This week saw plenty of Ukraine-related news. Overall, the superficial way it looks is that this was one of those weeks when Decisive Important Things happened. But I think perspective and time will show us, there was more noise than real change.

That being said, it is reasonable to state that if you are watching the Russo-Ukrainian War, then the theme “Peace Talks and Ceasefires” is now formally something that will deliver news and that it probably makes sense to pay attention to. So I’ll start off with that.

“Fixing” Ukraine and Gen. Kellogg

Most of you will have seen that the Trump administration has picked a lead envoy for the US ceasefire negotiations by the name of Keith Kellogg. He’s a retired Lt. General, Army, Vietnam service, mix of conventional units and special operations. Kellogg is a long-time Beltway player and historically his positions on Ukraine are standard mainstream Republican – i.e., not right-wing/MAGA. He was national security advisor for VP Pence in the last Trump administration. Which is all well and good, but, I doubt that’s what got him the job. I think what got him the job was that he’s one of the Fox experts who has been telling viewers about Ukraine for the last few years.

Other Topics of Interest

Ukraine Dismisses Reports of Orders to Secure Kursk Until Trump Takes Office

The US president-elect pledged to promptly resolve the Ukraine war, claiming he would efficiently negotiate a ceasefire agreement between Zelensky and Putin.

Back in April Kellogg wrote a position paper on how to end the war and advance American strategic interests. Kyiv Post wrote an article about that, so if you want the Reader’s Digest version of the Kellogg Weltanschauung here’s the link to the article, inside which is a link to the position paper Kellogg wrote, in April, on how to “fix” Ukraine.

On the face of it the Kellogg plan seems tough and hard-nosed, but maybe reasonable and realistic. Cessation of fires, freeze forces in place, no NATO for Ukraine, Russia pays for reparations with energy sales, Europe deploys peacekeepers to the disengagement zone, the US commits to arming Ukraine to deter Russia from invading again. The KP article points to some issues.

What I’d like to do here is take advantage of the blog format and first person to, shall I say, expand on those issues. I get sarcastic so if you’re just wanting basic information about the Kellogg peace plan, please skip to the next section.

But if you want a textbook, and I do mean “classic-for-the-ages, Neville-Chamberlain-level-of-foreign-policy-incompetence-and-naivete” example of a superficially reasonable proposition being riddled with disaster and fictional assumption, then look no further than the Trump administration template for ending the Russia-Ukraine War “in 24 hours.” Going forward, remember, I’m only slamming the most obvious stupidities.

Ukrainian NATO Membership – Ukrainian NATO membership is off the table and, in Kellogg’s thinking, that’s a critical precondition for making the ceasefire talks work.

First, the Ukrainians and indeed everyone else knows NATO support to Ukraine isn’t iffy; it’s a ghost, it’s a joke. Hungary and Slovakia are NATO members, both are in the Kremlin orbit, NATO decisions require unanimous support. The present US position that NATO does not contribute to US national security is loud and clear.

So, even if Ukraine were to be a member of NATO and Russia were to attack again, real world, what are the chances NATO would agree that was an Article 5 violation and NATO was now at war with Russia?

What is the likelihood no NATO member wouldn’t weasel? You know, this Russia-Ukraine thing is an internal dispute. We don’t have all the facts. Ukraine really isn’t democratic. We could really use cheap Russian energy. We’d love to help fight the Russians, but our army doesn’t have enough tanks. Until the Germans pay their fair share we aren’t going to do anything. The Serbs, or Croats, or Bosnians, or Macedonians, or Montenegrins, or Albanians are the real threat – we need to be ready to fight them.

Only a fool of a Ukrainian leader would risk Ukrainian national security and sovereignty pinning Ukraine’s safety from Russia on NATO and Article 5. Heck, that calculation wouldn’t even be the metaphysical survival of Ukraine as a nation. Anyone in charge in Ukraine knows down to the marrow of his bones that if the Russians take over, then the FSB will be coming for them, their families and their property personally.

So, from the Russian point of view, Gen. Kellogg’s “necessary concession to Russia” that Ukraine won’t be allowed to join NATO, is no concession at all. Of course Ukraine isn’t joining NATO, because Hungary, Slovakia and Gen. Kellogg’s boss are in NATO. Kellogg telling Putin that Russia must make concessions because America agrees Ukraine should not be in NATO is like, I don’t know, a New York real estate developer telling a prospective buyer he’s cutting the price on a Manhattan skyscraper, when both the developer and the buyer both know the skyscraper is condemned.

It is of course sort of laughable that a senior US security policy official is putting a non-concession forward as a concession, and one wonders if Kellogg can possibly be serious. But in any case he’ll find out exactly how viable this negotiating point is, once the Russians stop laughing.

Meanwhile, pretty much on schedule like a Swiss commuter train, Zelensky kicked in on Friday evening on NATO as well. He told Sky News Ukraine would agree to a ceasefire now, as well as Russian control of all stolen territory provided it wasn’t legitimized legally, but Ukraine must be offered NATO membership. Remember, Zelensky, just like Putin, knows Ukraine can’t join NATO because for sure Hungary and Slovakia wouldn’t allow it, and because Kellogg’s position paper lays out clearly that’s not what America wants.

So why tell British viewers the opposite? (Channeling the Kellogg flunky who was ordered to watch Zelensky talking to Sky) What’s the point? Won’t that just make Team Trump mad? Isn’t this just another case of the loudmouth Ukrainians undermining DC’s brilliant plans? Why can’t Zelensky just stay quiet? Can’t he see he’s not helping?!

The point is, of course, not helping Washington is not the same as not helping Kyiv. Think about it. Those terms, as Zelensky described to Sky News, are outside Putin’s control. Every one of them. But, by the ideological rules of the party in power in the US, America can dictate its future and terms to foreigners, because America is America. It’s just a matter of applying the power of a superpower. And if America fails, then it was just that the power wasn’t applied correctly.

This is of course a mindset quite detached from the real world, and considering Kellogg served in Vietnam, and a goodly percentage of the Trumpian team served in Iraq and Afghanistan, not a little ironic.

And from the Ukrainian point of view, a discussion of what it might take to deter Russia, besides just the word of America, is an absolutely useful discussion to have, as publicly as possible. He’s putting the Americans on the spot, he’s making crystal clear, in public, that one thing Ukraine won’t negotiate on, is real, actual, effective deterrence of Russia.

Zelensky and the Ukrainians know the Americans will say: “Weren’t you listening? We told you, Ukraine can’t be in NATO.” And then the Ukrainians will say: “OK, America, fine, no NATO membership. We aren’t confident NATO members would go to war for other NATO members, even without us. But Kyiv and DC agree Ukraine needs security. One route is fighting the Russians and killing them. If you don’t think that’s the way to go forward, what is? You’re the superpower. You tell us.”

The clock is ticking. I figure in about four, five months we’re going to see the Americans all upset and angry because no one is buying their song and dance about a faith-based peace plan, and meanwhile the Ukrainians (and the Europeans, they can see this just as well) are going to be saying: “We told you so.” Seriously. This is European national security Realpolitik. You can’t just pretend and that will change the rules. Bismarck image so we can remember this is a game that doesn’t have to be played stupidly.

– The US and the West won’t recognize Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine, and until they do major sanctions relief for Russia is off the table.

This sounds nice but I’d love for someone to explain to me why Putin would agree to that. Why not just keep attacking Ukraine?

– The US will guarantee Ukrainian security by pumping Ukraine full of weapons.

This sounds nice. But first thing, Trump was elected, in part, on ending or drastically reducing US support to Ukraine. He wasn’t quiet about it. Big parts of his electorate are rabidly anti-Ukrainian. So I don’t see how arming Ukraine big-time squares with Trump’s election platform.

Second place, short of mobilizing for war, let me be clear, the US has nowhere near the material resources or industrial capacity to arm Ukraine to the degree that, by US assistance alone, without NATO, without bilateral security treaties, another Russian invasion of Ukraine can credibly be deterred.

The world has already seen this, it’s pretty obvious, the Russian army is not deterred by words. The AFU could shoot off the entire US monthly 155mm shell output in about two or three days. The entire US Army HIMARS rocket stock, which would take Raytheon 8-10 years to replace, the AFU could shoot off in about a day. Russia is not the Taliban. You won’t destroy their fighting capacity with a SEAL team and some air strikes. Saying that you can do something you obviously can’t, doesn’t help your credibility.

– The US has sufficient economic leverage to bring the Russian economy to its knees, and so Putin to the negotiating table.

There is all manner of talk that the plan is to torpedo the price of oil, which, if it worked, would cut prices at US filling stations. I’m positive that’s the Trump administration thinking. The problem with that is, of course, that it assumes the Saudis won’t cut output to keep prices stable, which for them is a matter of national security. Can Trump talk Riyadh into cutting its own economic throat? Yeah right. I read the oil and gas news feeds like everyone else. What is the industry saying they’ll do, if the Trump administration makes it easier to frack and export product? News flash, it isn’t flood the market with gas and oil and pull the bottom out of prices. It is to figure out how to maximize profit, and do exactly that, which could easily be done by shutting down expensive wells.

This is not even taking into account that lower US engagement abroad, inherently, facilitates illicit Russian oil and gas exports and earnings. So if I am asked to have faith that America can credibly threaten Russia with an oil price collapse, all I can say is the Kremlin seems to think they have enough oil and customers to bypass the Americans. Image of the incoming US President and Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Maybe those smiles are genuine.

– The ceasefire will be maintained by a demilitarized area patrolled or watched or something, by forces that are not the US, that will be between the Ukrainians and the Russians.

I am really struggling to communicate how continentally moronic this is. Is there anyone, anywhere, who is aware that Ukraine and Russia are at war, that wouldn’t suspect this is just a joke?

This is not the Golan Heights or neighborhoods of Belfast. Not the single city of Fallujah or 10 to 20 compounds scattered around Afghanistan that can be hit or ignored at leisure. This is a combat front, in a conventional war, somewhat more than 1,000 kilometers long. On either side, there are about 250,000 to 300,000 soldiers, armed and ready for war.

For reference, that would be a continuous combat front running from Washington DC to St. Louis. Or, if you like, the classic Cold War fighting front of the 1970s-80s, NATO vs. The Red Army, Copenhagen to Trieste. Seriously?

Since the Americans tell us they’re not going to help with this, first question, exactly where are the troops to man a demilitarized zone that size going to come from? The ENTIRE British army, ground forces, is 30,000 men. The ENTIRE French army is about 110,000 men. NATO commitments haven’t gone anywhere. Right now Germany is struggling to field a single 3,000 man brigade in the Baltic region.

It’s like that apocryphal Napoleon quote to Marshal Michel Ney when Prussia’s Marshal von Blücher showed up at Waterloo: “You want troops? Where am I going to get troops? You want me to make you some?” Obviously this is sufficient for an image of Ney, Waterloo and some troops.

It’s just mental. Where are the troops going to come from? Turkey? Brazil? Bangladesh? Even if there were just a token force – which the Ukrainians could not accept because if it’s a token force then Russia can still attack any time it wants, so what’s the point? – name me, please, a country in the world that would choose to place its army in the no-man’s-land between the Russian army and the AFU. Is Kellogg hoping the People’s Republic will volunteer? Inspiring image of Chinese/UN peacekeepers.

Obviously, unless the demilitarized zone were to be about 100-kilometers wide, both the Russians and the Ukrainians could chuck missiles and drones at each other any time they wanted, even if the Pakistani and Indian armies made friends and suddenly decided to go to the Donbas as peacekeepers. And that’s just the ground. Exactly how would this international force prevent military activities in the air? With a no-fly zone? Without America?

– Russia will just agree to this.

Remember, that’s just the international community and geography. There’s still the Russians.

I don’t normally repost myself, but I think this little graf says fairly well the Putin aspect of the diplomatic challenge Kellogg and the Trump administration are up against, even if they’re not admitting it:

”Moscow, for its part, has repeatedly stated its war objectives [as a minimum] are total control of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea regions, ongoing Ukrainian neutrality and no security alliances with any state, a Ukrainian military cut to roughly one quarter its present size, along with no reparations or war crimes prosecutions. Putin’s position is that anyone unhappy with those terms can just sit back and watch the Russian army take the territory it wants by force.”

Final note: My pretty superficial research showed me that Kellogg in spring 2023 was all “Rah, rah! Go Ukraine! Ukraine can win!” and by fall 2024 he was “We gotta get this settled and we have the tools to do that, it’s just that the Biden administration is stupid.”

To some of you, this may look like a man with evolving views. Maybe. But also could be a man who adapts his views to the political winds of the moment. As a reporter, that means I don’t have to take anything a guy like that says, at any particular point in time, absolutely seriously. He’s already reversed positions once.

And in any case, he works for a president with a history of not listening to his advisors.

Syrsky sort of out – Drapaty sort of in

This was definitely the big news Friday. Zelensky said the change came following a meeting of the Stavka and decision-making on strategies for the front. The background to that is that the Kursk salient is under pressure, but holding, but under pressure; while the Pokrovsk-Kurakhove sector has been teetering if not on collapse then major loss of ground quickly, and the Chasiv Yar and Kupyansk sectors are under substantial pressure as well.

What happened was that Zelensky switched out Syrky’s most important subordinate, transferring an older general named Oleksandr Pavliuk (made his name in charge of the defense of Kyiv), and replacing him with Mykhailo Drapaty, whose is a brigadier who has shown a lot of promise and most recently put together the generally successful defense of Kharkiv.

I can’t say I’m seeing cheering and flags waving among the Ukrainian troops and milbloggers, that Pavliuk, who is old Ukrainian army and a Syrsky man is out. Overall in the AFU, Syrsky is not disrespected, he was never overly popular but everyone though, big-picture, he was competent. Syrsky was known as a Soviet-era hard guy, definitely professional, who mostly thought firepower-firepower-firepower, and troops are there to support the artillery. He has, I think, an unfair reputation as a guy who splits up units. My feeling is he can’t enjoy doing it but sees he has no choice, there are too many holes that need plugging too often.

But, there is this criticism of Syrsky’s command style which has been bouncing around the AFU for some time now: “You can’t beat a big Soviet army with a little Soviet army.”

In that context, there’s a lot of positive comment, among the troops, about Drapaty. He has a strong reputation as new generation leader, a guy who knows what works in modern war inside the AFU, and how best to get results with the tools the AFU actually has, as opposed to the ones it might like to have. He is the guy who engineered the first proper conventional defeat using combined arms against a major Russian armored assault, at Vuhledar back in February 2023. He commanded 72nd Brigade at the time. He’s also the guy, back in April 2014, who led what little combat-ready units the AFU had at the time, basically a weak company of paratroopers, and confronted the pro-Russia “separatists” with the threat of force. This was in Mariupol. That took some huge bravery at the time because there was little to back him up and no one, up or down the chain of command, had been willing to challenge directly the anti-government mobs the Kremlin had whipped up.

From what I saw of Drapaty’s next big command, basically the defense of Kharkiv region earlier this year, the Drapaty approach is about thorough planning, coordinating combined arms, not asking troops to do what isn’t possible, and especially treating attack drone units like mobile artillery and jamming threatened sectors with geek operators and FPVs, and as the pace of the Russian assault falls off, building conventional defenses, bringing in artillery etc.

I get the impression Drapaty is a lot more comfortable than Syrsky/Pavliuk are about a local commander risking a tank or a couple of APCs to put the hurt on the enemy, but that might be just me guessing.

In any case, the response from the milbloggers and soldiers I follow, and the ones I talk to, is universally positive. Everyone seems to think Drapaty will improve things. They however all caveat that with the rider that absent sufficient hardware and the firepower it provides, Drapaty’s an excellent commander but he’s not Houdini. Image of Drapaty when he was a skinny brigade commander.

I personally would be cautious; just because a guy is an outstanding field commander, it doesn’t mean he’s got the bureaucratic skills and strategic thinking to run an army. But sometimes people rise to the occasion. Some men just aren’t suitable for service above regiment. I’ll spare you the old saw about the four types of Prussian officers, but it still applies.

Ukraine decides to train men 18-25 (finally)

The link to the official announcement is here:

This was the other big Friday news but it was overshadowed by shake-ups at the top of the AFU. Perhaps that was the idea, the Zelensky people wanted some distraction from this socially unpleasant decision, and I doubt very much it was a coincidence it became public on Friday afternoon.

To be clear, this is not drafting young men and sending them to the front. Rather, it’s making every one of them (absent deferments, and not women either) go through some not-yet-clear-to-me basic military training. Not years, about four months. Supposedly the first notices will go out right after Jan. 1.

From what I read there are about 11 million draft-age men in Ukraine total but that’s to age 60, so probably, the 18-25 cohort is about 10-20 percent of that, so once we deduct for 17-year-olds who will go live in Spain and sons whose Mamas figure out a way to make their babies medically unfit for service, ballpark, maybe a million men are affected by the law.

Remember the part about finding neutral forces in the disengagement area? Already, right now, we can see it, the Ukrainian state struggles to train more than 20,000 men every quarter or so, and that’s with a lot of allied help. So what now that the military training system is going to process and train close to ten times that? Where are these guys going to be housed? How are they going to be fed? What about uniforms, weapons and training areas? There aren’t enough NCOs and officers for the front. And now somehow Ukraine is going to create a national military training infrastructure about four times bigger – that’s not an exaggeration – than that of the United States? So just because there’s a law, doesn’t mean the problem is going to be fixed.

The law came out a few days after the US, I think it was Jake Sullivan, said that actually America has handed over enough weapons and ammo and so forth to the Ukrainians, really now the problem is the Ukrainians are just short people and they just need to start drafting 18-year-olds and all will be well.

And Friday, no less than AP came out with a big report about Ukrainian desertion and manpower shortages. So it’s pretty clear what the outgoing Biden administration feels, they’re sick of Ukraine and they’re washing their hands.

A basic problem of this war is that the Americans seem to be continually making decisions inside an isolation booth, which is of course their right, but then because of the isolation booth they then go on to make more decisions pretty poorly uninformed. The Ukrainian manpower issue is a case in point. The day after AP story came out, Zelensky was telling Sky News, “The Americans keep saying we Ukrainians need to mobilize more troops, but the Americans have promised us equipment to arm 10 combat brigades, and right now there is equipment for 2.5 brigades. So what, we should draft 18-year-olds and send them to the front with just rifles, no tanks, no artillery, no artillery shells?”

Reading the news this morning [Saturday], that fairly solid Zelensky rejoinder – after all, no military in the world, ever, in history, has insisted overwhelming quantities of equipment and material aren’t just a key to victory but the birthright of every American man or woman in uniform – is nowhere to be seen in my US news feeds. So the narrative about Ukrainians being very well armed by America and unwilling to fight for their country will perpetuate, while guys like Drapaty are on the line as an armed nation fights for its freedom and democracy, just like in 1776.

I would add, that each country has its own traditions, and in Ukraine family is at least Balkan-level important and layered upon that is a matriarchal tradition that the Mother is the center of the family and that the children are what the Mother lives and dies for, that’s how she’s judged, that’s how most Ukrainian women calculate success and failure, happiness or sadness in life. Stock image of a Ukrainian Mother and two kids. The point I’m trying to make is that, broad strokes, this is the image Ukrainians have in their heads when one discusses mobilization, they think of it in terms of family and the images are as powerful as a bald eagle is for most Americans.

If you want an explanation on why so many Ukrainian soldiers are middle-aged, that’s part of it. The older men are on the line so the young men won’t have to go and the family can be preserved.

Now, that being said, the harder core Ukrainian soldiers have been complaining that there are thousands of young men who seem to have little to do these days except go to the gym, and if they can’t see their way clear to inconvenience themselves and help stop the Russians, then society has every right to push them. So this non-mobilization law is very, very popular with those guys. (But of course, if a young man is on the line in this war, it is close to a given he is there in defiance of his Mama’s wishes.)

Bombardment, bombardment, bombardment

It’s really a comment on well, something, that the most intense week of long-range strikes of the entire war is being overshadowed by other developments.

On the Russian side, on Wednesday, it was another one of these big John Wayne roundhouse swings with distractor drones, clever ingress routes, sneaky cruise missiles and bunch of strikes that appear to be concentrating on the biggest industrial centers the Russians can find, where they think the Ukrainian air defenses are thin enough to punch through them. Dnipro, Rivne and Lviv got the brunt of it. So Russia’s campaign to turn off the lights in Ukraine is now officially open.

It’s clear that they want to take out the distribution points that carry power from the nuclear power stations, because about 60 percent of Ukraine’s electricity is from nuclear power stations. The Russian strategy is to target the grid that carries the juice from the stations across the country, rather than trying to hit the reactors themselves, because of course Europe might actually get mad enough about that. The Americans could care less, obviously.

I would say that so far what seems different is that the Ukrainians appear to be turning the power off in places that weren’t hit badly more quickly and more often to balance power loads nationwide. It also allows for more flexibility in fixing stuff that’s broken. You can take this for what it’s worth but when they hit Kyiv it seemed like there were severe power cuts for about 48 hours, lights on about half the time, then the lights were off less and after about three days there weren’t any blackouts. Tomorrow where I live, latest update, power is supposed to be off for three hours.

Based on that purely anecdotal impression, I’m suspecting that Ukraine’s buddies – and probably here the Americans participated – have brought in generators, transformer parts, cables, etc. for some time and now there’s enough pre-positioned so that when the Russians do damage to the grid it’s getting repaired fairly efficiently. Again, to be clear, aside from being an electricity consumer myself I have no proof of this, and if one asks the officials the standard answer is: “Situation difficult, we’re working hard, don’t give up!”

On the Ukrainian side, they’ve been quite busy (some of this was cribbed from Tom Cooper).

Nov. 23– ATACMS a 92N6E radar and two S-400 launchers near Velyke Zhyrovo, Kursk region.

Nov. 25 – ATACMS hit Khalino airfield and nearby sites, Kursk region, S-400 hit, electronics factory hit. Also vicinity Kaluga drones, likely exploiting the new gap in S-400 coverage, set an oil refinery on fire.

Nov. 26 – Drones hit air defenses near Rostov, then more drones hit an oil-and-gas refinery in Bashkortostan.

Nov. 27 – Drones, converted S-200 missiles, and Storm Shadow missiles pummel Belbek airfield.

Nov. 28 – Drones, probably recon, appear over Krasnodar, Bryansk, Crimea and Rostov regions.

Nov. 29 – Something demolishes an S-400 near Yevpatoria, Crimea. Here the Russians said “No, that was just our engineers blowing up some old ammunition, and besides, it was nowhere near any air defense units. The group CyberBroshono did some open-source research and social media was awash with content contradicting that, image attached. Sure looks like big missiles cooking off to me.

It’s worth noting: that preceding laundry list is a continuation, last week the Ukrainians were focusing on the Kursk region and the North Korean soldiers. Same SOP: find the air defense, put it out of commission, then send in a strike and think overkill rather than efficient munitions distribution. I’m not sure the Americans themselves have every fired six ATACMS in a single target salvo.

It would be nice if the people in the White House were paying attention. But right now it seems like they think they know everything about Ukraine and the Ukrainians don’t.

Reprinted from https://stefankorshak.substack.com/ with the author’s permission. You can find the original article here.

The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.