I was led to believe that only Putin protected its elite capital city citizens while sending Buryats.
GOP holds up Ukraine aid, asking painful questions
I was led to believe that only Putin protected its elite capital city citizens while sending Buryats.
US shadow commander heads to Ukraine with staff, reviving memories of the fateful dispatch of Vietnam ‘advisers’
By
STEPHEN BRYENDECEMBER 14, 2023
Without the money Ukraine will lose the war, Zelensky says. Photo: New Voice of Ukraine
Republicans are complaining that neither US President Joe Biden’s administration nor Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could tell them how Ukraine might win the war with Russia or what plan the administration had for Ukraine going forward.
Nor were the Republicans happy that no progress was made with the administration on their demand for strong Mexican border security. So far the result is that
the measure in question is stalled in both houses of Congress. Legislation won’t be taken up again until after the Christmas and New Year’s break, if then.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (left) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on December 12, 2023. Photo: Saudi Gazette / Euronews
The Biden administration’s Ukraine problem, however, goes deeper than just funding. Legislators now understand that the war cannot be won and are wondering whether the administration hasn’t gotten itself in a trap by supporting Zelensky.
In a nutshell, supporting Zelensky in a no-win scenario seems a bad idea to many.
No serious military leader has advanced the thesis that Ukraine can win against Russia, despite assurances given for months by Kiev and the administration that it could. Lawmakers who listened to these arguments for the past two years now realize that the administration duped them.
The defining moment happened over this past summer when the Ukrainian offensive, heavily supported with US arms and US and NATO training not to mention massive intelligence support, yielded huge losses and only a few tiny, reversible victories.
Zelensky was still running around in the US claiming that Ukraine had won many victories in the offensive and had broken through the Surovikin defense line put up by the Russians. These days that argument is no longer credible, if it ever was.
There is big turbulence ahead. The Pentagon has dispatched
Lieutenant-General Antonio Aguto Jr to Ukraine. His job will be shadow commander of Ukraine’s army, basically replacing the current commander. That will put Aguto over land army commander
Oleksandr Syrskyi.
His instructions are contradictory. On the one hand, he is supposed to direct the Ukrainians on a “hold and build” strategy. On the other he is to tell Zelensky to freeze the conflict, at the latest by this coming spring.
Lieutenant-General Antonio Aguto. Photo: US Army
“Hold” means not to try to advance but to hold on to territories under Ukraine’s control. This idea is already undermined by the fact that the Russians are advancing across most of the line of contact.
They have already entered Marinka, a small city in Donetsk that was under Ukrainian control. The Russians are also progressing around Avdiivka, and control parts of the city, with more to follow.
Around Bakhmut, the Russians are in the process of taking back some villages that the Ukrainians grabbed during the big battles over Bakhmut. It looks as if they will soon get them back and threaten Chasiv Yar, a key Ukrainian logistics hub.
Similarly in the Zaphorize front the Russians are now pressuring Robotyne, a small village in the so-called Bradley Square area that the Ukrainians actually took in their offensive when they tried to push toward the actual Surovikin defenses. Whether Russia will be successful here depends on how many lives the Ukrainians want to spend holding on to a small village of no strategic significance.
The idea of “hold” therefore is not really a coherent strategy. Ukrainian General Valery Zaluzhny, the current commander of Ukraine’s armed forces and a key competitor to Zelensky, proposed pulling back Ukraine’s army and forming a real defensive line.
But where would that line be? And how would it stop a Russian advance? Zelensky himself seems to endorse the idea while insisting on keeping up the battles around Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
“Build” is a US idea to rebuild Ukraine’s army, which has been very badly mauled by the ongoing fighting. Build means bringing in new manpower, on the one hand, while emphasizing rearmament and training.
Ukraine has a severe manpower problem, and to find recruits it has to use clumsy and draconian tactics. Some of the untapped manpower is in the bigger cities, the sons and daughters of what in Russia is called the nomenklatura, mostly protected so far by the regime in Kiev.
Just because communism is gone does not mean that there isn’t a highly pampered elite in Ukraine, any more than there isn’t in Russia. When you put pressure on this class of people you cause serious internal political problems.
While there will not be any elections in Ukraine, there is dissatisfaction. In the past week David Arakhamia, Zelensky’s party leader, has spoken of a revolt in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, which is largely a mouthpiece for Zelensky. Many of the lawmakers have signaled they want to get out of Ukraine, as soon as possible. Some of them already are gone.
David Arakhamia.
This is a sign of a sinking ship and a loss of confidence in the maximum leader, even if those who want to leave find it difficult to do so. (Ukrainians are not leaving the country now because they are not allowed to leave. Even former president Petro Poroshenko, who got a valid exit permit from the Rada, was stopped at the border and turned around because Zelensky did not want him talking to Western leaders.)
It is hard to see how Aguto can fix the manpower problem or repair the loss of confidence internally in the Ukrainian government.
If the Biden administration really wants to freeze the conflict it should explain how that can be done. Without negotiations and some sort of settlement, the war will continue if the Russians determine they want to stay in the fight.
Meanwhile the presence of Aguto, looking over the shoulder of Ukraine’s military commanders and telling them what to do, is bound to cause problems.
There is, too, another problem with Aguto sitting in Kiev. Not only is this highly embarrassing for Ukraine’s military leaders, but it also changes the war into an American war. Aguto is not by himself – he brings a team of US Army guys with him. That small team is bound to grow. It bears a resemblance to the dispatch of US “advisers” to Vietnam, which soon morphed into a war that, in the end, the US lost.
There is no evidence that the Aguto plan, if one can call it that, is convincing or will accomplish either of its objectives (hold and build). It will bring the possibility of war in Europe even closer to reality, because the Russians may decide that they can’t pretend the war can be confined only to Ukraine’s borders.
It is quite true that the Russians have their own problems, including multiple attempts by Ukraine, the UK and the United States to kill President Vladimir Putin. Biden’s decision to use Zelensky in his latest bid to get money also risks sticking Biden with a guy unwilling to negotiate until the Russians leave and Putin is replaced. That is not a recipe for bringing an end to the ongoing conflict.
Stephen Bryen, who served as staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a deputy undersecretary of defense
for policy, currently is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute.
apnews.com
could definitely afford to send a squadron of its Tornado ground attack aircraft to Ukraine, but the problem is training Ukrainian pilots to fly them and technicians to maintain them. The first batch of Ukrainian pilots that are being trained to fly the F-16 (50'ish in total) are mostly comprised of experienced Mig-29 and SU-27 pilots that are being retrained to fly the American made fighter. Ukraine has to balance keeping their existing aircraft flying with a skeleton staff of pilots, while sending many of their best surviving pilots to learn how to fly their new frontline fighter. As a result, Ukraine would have to scrape up a mix of remaining SU-25 pilots and brand new pilots to send to Germany to learn how to fly the Tornados. I suspect that the earliest this could be accomplished by is late late 2024 / early 2025, so it wouldn't be a short term solution. 
has over 200 Leopard 2's that they are phasing out in favour of the K2 Black Panther and M1A2 Abrams, both of which they've purchased recently. America could agree to send 200 additional Abrams to Poland from storage, in exchange for them sending their Leopard 2's to Ukraine. Alternatively, a 3rd party country could purchase 200 Abrams from USA's stocks and transfer them to Poalnd under the same agreement. Note this could not happen all at once. Poland would jump at the opportunity, but it take them time to retrain crews on the news Abrams tanks, before they'd be comfortable parting with their Leopard 2s en masse. For this reason you could probably get the Poles to agree to provided 10 additional Leopard 2s to Ukraine each month, for 20 months, keeping them flowing into Ukraine, while receiving the same number of Abrams from USA each month to replace them. 
, Sweden 
and Ukraine 
have come to an agreement on the purchase and delivery of additional CV90 infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine. Denmark is funding the purchase, Sweden will build the units in Sweden and deliver them to Ukraine, to add to the 50'ish exisiting units Ukraine already has. The value of the deal has been released, but the number of CV90's has not. However, if we look at deals recently signed by other European countries for the CV90, it appears that Denmark plans to purchase 30-35 additional units for Ukraine. Deliveries are expected to start later this year.
