Premature victory laps over the current Ukrainian counteroffensive?

I'm sort of grimly fascinated though not really surprised by how quickly some people are to embrace any sort of good news for Ukraine in the Russiao-Ukraine war like soccer fans going wild over a goal in the first part of a match. For the West, i.e., the NATO countries, of course, Ukraine is part of Our Side in whatever name we settle on for the new Cold War with Russia.

Frank Schaeffer, for instance, who is known and respected as a critical analyst of the Christian Right - his father Francis Schaeffer was an important leader of that movement in the 1970s - has been ready to declare Mission Accomplished since the war began.

Ukraine is showing it can beat the Russians in battle, not just contain them as Russians flee the front. Imagine if the fool Putin were to face battle with a united NATO? Russia is a weak sick foe. The word 'decadent' hardly covers in. May all rapists and murderers perish thus!

— Frank-STOP-Christian-Nationalists-Schaeffer (@Frank_Schaeffer) September 10, 2022

My own initial reaction was a bit grumpy:

There's no sign this war is anywhere close to being over. And that supposed "weak sick foe" Russia has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, whose risks Frank doesn't seem to have begun to understand. https://t.co/JsDVMv0GZb

— brucemillerca (@brucemillerca) September 10, 2022

Film clips like the following may very well be real:

No book can explain what it is like to live 6 months under the Russian occupation. People are kissing and hugging Ukrainian defenders in recently liberated Balaklyia pic.twitter.com/P6Mi5TI2Hv

— Giorgi Revishvili (@revishvilig) September 9, 2022

But this is why we need capable media with good war reporters to evaluate them. I have no reason to think this particular one is somehow faked. But that's my point. Most of us have no way of evaluating the accuracy or significance of such material without competent media sources to screen it. The current Ukrainian government, backed massively with arms and training and intelligence support by NATO, is very good at its "information operations". Those are known as "war propaganda" when its not Our Side doing it.

And it's not as though professional media coverage is always right. Some "independent" reporters and their editors are only too happy to play along with propaganda events. Remember that glorious scene where Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled? (Alex von Tunzelmann, The toppling of Saddam’s statue: how the US military made a myth Guardian 07/08/2021)

Bringing down Saddam’s statue was a greater feat of hyperreality. It would be presented to the world as a climax: the triumph of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The coalition forces were cast as liberators, allowing the Iraqi people to rise up at last and tear down the most powerful symbol of the dictator who had oppressed them. But the reality was not so simple.

Bob McElvaine in his new history The Times They Were A-Changin' (2022), relates the moment in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson sent the first official batch of "combat" troops to South Vietnam; the many American troops there already were officially "advisers". In February 1965, the US began its Rolling Thunder bombing campaign:

On March 8, two battalions - 3,500 United States Marines - came ashore on a beach at Da Nang. Filming made it appear to be like a World War II landing on a Japanese-held South Pacific island. The reality was that, behind the cameras, there were beautiful Vietnamese women awaiting the Americans with leis.

Since the start of the current war, I've tried to keep in mind some guidelines of my own in digesting news coverage. One of them is the famous observation by I.F. Stone, "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."

Despite slick propaganda, Neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War turned out all that well for the US.

The reports on the current Ukrainian offensive

The Ukrainian counteroffensive that began just over a week ago is going well by seemingly all indications. Ukraine counteroffensive: Troops liberate dozens of communities DW News 09/10/2022:

The Deutsche Welle reporter Nick Connolly notes of the situation of the moment in the Ukrainian counteroffensive:

The details are all very, very light right now. The Ukrainian Army has basically put a kind of media embargo out. So this is all based on social media from the front lines, from people who live there, and from Russian bloggers. But it does seem that this is going better than anyone here in Kiev really could have expected.

The Zaporizhzhia power plant seems to be in a touch-and-go situation at the moment. (IAEA warns blackout threatens safety at Ukraine nuclear plant Aljazeera 09/09/2022) As Connolly reports in the DW News video, this is the largest nuclear plant in Europe.

Unless there is some kind of catastrophic military or political collapse on the Russian side, it seems highly improbable that anything like a clear defeat for Russia is on the horizon until at least a year from now. As foreign policy analysts have been pointing out since February 24, a general ceasefire and substantive peace talks can only be expected to begin when both sides, Russia and Ukraine, decide they have more to lose than to gain from continuing fighting.

As a general rule, the sooner the war ends, the better. But short of a clear-cut military defeat of the Russian forces or a de facto surrender by Moscow, there seems to be no real reason that point is going to be reached this year. Russia still holds more Ukrainian territory than it did on February 24. And Russia formally if illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, and that has particular strategic importance for the Russian navy.

This is a report from CBS News, CIA chief: Russia will pay "a heavy price" for Ukraine invasion 09/10/2022:



It mentions that CIA director Bill Burns on Friday called the Russian invasion a "failure" on Friday. He was saying something very similar in July at the Aspen Security Forum. (Trevor Filseth, CIA Director: Russian Invasion of Ukraine a ‘Strategic Failure’ The National Interest 07/21/2022). For some perspective, that was roughly six weeks ago when the current way had been going on for about 20 weeks. So, the war has continued for an additional 30% longer than it had been going at the time of Burns' July statement.

Triumphalist statements about from government official about wars in progress are worth taking with a dose of skepticism.

That applies several times over for triumphalist venting by New Cold War fanboys on Twitter.

I'll close by mentioning this expert panel discussion in German, phoenix runde: Putins Krieg gegen die Ukraine - Mehr Waffen oder mehr Diplomatie? 09/08/2022. The panelists have different perspectives, but there's no superficial triumphalism to be heard. One of the intriguing points made is that when it comes to any kind of actual peace agreement will have to be agreed to by the US, even if the US isn't a formal party to the agreement. It includes an intriguing suggestion from Ute Finckh-Krämer of the Plattform Zivile Konfliktbearbeitung: one possible solution (that certainly won't be coming tomorrow!) might be the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty over all its territory including Crimea in exchange for the adoption of a new nuclear disarmament agreement. That way the Russian government could sell the outcome as some kind of significant success.