Russia-Ukraine War, differences among Ukraine's allies, peace talks in 2022, and that mysterious Nord Stream pipeline sabotage

It has been common the last few months to reference the static war in the early months of the First World War on the Western front, when lots of soldiers on both sides were killed and wounded but not much advantage gained by either side, as one that resembles the current Russia-Ukraine War.

There has been a notable uptick in triumphalism on the Western side at the moment, understated perhaps after the political breakthrough on more advanced weapons deliveries to Ukraine. But if we’re looking at an early-WWI Western front situation, it’s important to remember that industrial resources and numbers of soldiers are big advantages in that situation. Russia clearly more of both than Ukraine does.

Ukraine and Russia are not equally matched foes

The Institute for the Study of War has the following “key takeaways” on the situation as of February 8:

• Russian forces have regained the initiative in Ukraine and have begun their next major offensive in Luhansk Oblast.
• The commitment of significant elements of at least three major Russian divisions to offensive operations in this sector indicates the Russian offensive has begun, even if Ukrainian forces are so far preventing Russian forces from securing significant gains.
• Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) People’s Militia command reportedly assumed control over a Russian artillery battalion, likely in support of an effort to strengthen degraded DNR forces ahead of an imminent Russian offensive.
• The reported subordination of Russian mobilized personnel to DNR formations could also suggest that Russian military command may be continuing efforts to integrate ad hoc DNR and Luhansk People‘s Republic (LNR) formations into the Russian Armed Forces, but will likely face significant difficulties.
• Russian officials continue to propose measures to prepare Russia’s military industry for a protracted war in Ukraine while also likely setting further conditions for sanctions evasion
• Russian forces conducted ground attacks around Bakhmut and continued making tactical advances. Russian forces continued offensive actions northwest of Svatove and intensified offensive operations near Kreminna.
• Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area and western Donetsk Oblast. Russian and Ukrainian forces reportedly continue small-scale skirmishes and reconnaissance activity in the Dnipro River delta and on the Kinburn Spit.
• The Wagner Group [mercenary group operating under tight Kremlin direction] is reportedly resorting to more coercive tactics in its prison recruitment campaign, possibly in response to the campaign’s declining effectiveness. [my emphasis]

It appears that the generally-expected new Russian offensive is now under way.

NATO credibility and Ukraine

This war involves Russia fighting Ukraine, a smaller and weaker country with no nuclear arms, a country that is being actively aided by NATO and the EU but is not a member of either. The NATO countries are not formally committed by treaty to defend Ukraine. That’s a very relevant fact in this situation, which of course does not in any way diminish the illegality of the Russian invasion.

That’s not a trivial point. The hawks in all times and in all wars always raise the argument of “credibility” to justify military escalation. And they are often right. But here it’s important to remember that the credibility of formal military alliances is a qualitatively different matter than providing support for a country that is not part of such an alliance. In Ukraine’s case, it is not a NATO member, which means it has not been integrated into the NATO command and operations and intelligence structures as all the other allies are with requirements to maintain minimum standards of military and intelligence readiness. And even if Russia ended the war tomorrow and withdrew from all Ukrainian territory, it would be years before Ukraine could qualify to be a NATO member.

And when the greatest zombie of all foreign policy credibility analogies - the Munich Analogy - comes up next, as it always does, those of us who don’t want to indulge in magical mantras would do well to keep in mind that in 1938, France had a specific mutual defense treaty with Czechoslovakia, and Brtain had one with France. Alliances don’t last forever (NATO’s decades-long record notwithstanding). But in the “Munich” case, it was a matter of France with Britain’s backing breaking a treaty with a formal ally that was under immediate military threat from an enemy (Germany) that was considerably weaker than it would quickly become once it seized control of the major arms manufacturing facilities in Czechoslovakia.

State of the war and the rhetoric around it

This Midday Summary (02/06/2023) from The Guardian gives some examples of some questionable verbal triumphalism on the part of leaders from the Western side (emphasis in original):

Volodymyr Zelenskiy addressed the European parliament on Thursday morning, proclaiming Ukraine “will join the European Union” and thanking the bloc’s members for their support during Russia’s invasion.

French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Paris would “continue the efforts” to deliver arms to Kyiv, adding that France was determined to help Ukraine towards “victory, peace and Europe”. “Russia cannot and must not win,” he said, adding that “the future of Europe” was at stake in Ukraine. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said it was clear that Moscow would not win, and assured Ukraine its future was in the EU, saying Ukraine was part of the “European family”. “Putin will not achieve his goals – not on the battlefield and not through a dictated peace.”

Zelenskiy also made an emotional appeal to the UK to supply Ukraine with fighter jets on a surprise visit to the UK on Wednesday. “I appeal to you and the world with simple and yet most important words: combat aircrafts – for Ukraine! Wings – for freedom!” he said. ...

The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said there was no sign of Russia preparing for peace. “On the contrary, Moscow is preparing for new military offensives,” he said during a joint press conference with the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken. [emphasis in original] 

For outside observers and regular citizens, it’s always difficult to guess what public statements reflect real differences between countries and which are staged according to prior agreement. But these are some relevant considerations on these particular developments:

1. It’s understandable that Volodymyr Zelenskiy as President of a country under attack by a much more powerful foe would demand more weapons and even use shaming language in public in the process toward potential suppliers.
2. One doesn’t have to be a hardcore “realist” to realize that the US, Germany, and France are not going to make their military decisions in the current war based only on what Zelenskiy demands.
3. On the other hand, the public who is paying attention may wonder if Zelenskiy may sometimes be in loose-cannon mode in his public statements. He is getting Churchillian staging at the moment. But even Churchill and Britain had policy clashes with their Allies during the Second World War and after. (See: Israeli independence, Indian independence. Not to mention that whole Cold War thing between former wartime allies of a few years before.)
4. After its own national interests, the US is committed to the security interests of its NATO allies as a matter of practical interest and formal commitment above the security interests of Ukraine. Neither diplomats nor most of the press will want to state that quite so bluntly. But that means that NATO is unlikely in the extreme to be willing to go to direct war against Russian forces in order to stop Russia from seizing the country.

And now that the new Russian offensive seems to be underway, it’s worth recalling once again how US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin publicly defined the US goals in this war back in April 2022: “We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.” (my emphasis)

Ukraine surely puts protecting its independence and sovereignty as the higher priority among those two. I’m not at all sure that is the case for the Biden Administration. But that second priority of weakening Russia is not exactly fully compatible with the first.

I don’t know exactly how to evaluate the significance of the recent interview by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and the Seymour Hersh report on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. Branko Marcetic summarizes the Bennett claims this way:

This past weekend saw the publication of a bombshell interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who over the course of a nearly five-hour interview dropped an unusual amount of detail about his efforts to mediate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine early in the war last year. The headline-grabbing news is Bennett’s claim that negotiations that were yielding fruit and that could have ended the now nearly year-long war after a little more than a month were ultimately blocked by the NATO governments underwriting Ukraine’s war effort.

Marcetic places that report in the context of events being reported publicly during 2022. And he notes:

Meanwhile, Fiona Hill — a high-ranking national security official in both the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations and far from a dove on Russia— reported late last year that “multiple former senior US officials” had disclosed to her that “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement” by last April. That outline would have seen Russia withdraw to its pre–February 24 lines, controlling Crimea and parts of the Donbas, while Ukraine would have renounced NATO membership. This framework broadly matches the negotiating timeline and concessions laid out by Bennett in the interview.

And he describes the military situation at the moment for Ukraine:

A few months after peace talks were scuttled [after news in April broke of the Bucha massacre by Russian forces], Zelensky admitted Ukraine was losing between sixty and a hundred soldiers everyday on the battlefield, while German intelligence recently revealed their estimate that Ukrainian casualties are currently in the three figures daily, as the Zelensky government resorts to controversially drafting soldiers in public places and ramps up penalties for deserters. Western estimates are that Ukraine, which had roughly a third of Russia’s population before the war, has suffered more than 100,000 casualties, while its economy is in tatters, and a Russian bombing campaign that started in October has destroyed at least half of its energy infrastructure - something a RAND Corporation report recently declared came at a bigger economic cost to the country than the territory it’s lost to Russia. All indications are the “Marshall Plan” being cooked up by Ukraine’s Western backers, meanwhile, will be a suite of damaging neoliberal reforms.

The Nord Stream pipelines and internal NATO differences over them

Seymour Hersh’s long report appears on his Substack site, claiming that the US used the BALTOPS 22 exercise by NATO in summer of 2022 to plant “the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines.” For the particular claims, he cites “a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.“

Hersh has been one of the best in the investigative reporting business for decades. Which, of course, is not to say his reports are the final word on a topic. He dutifully reports:

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

But he also provides some good background on why the Nord Stream pipelines became a point of controversy between the US and Germany in particular, an informative reminder that interests and perspectives among NATO allies can and do diverge considerably at times.

And he puts it in its key strategic context, which is that the US wants to severely limit the European Union’s ability to act militarily independently of the US and the NATO structure.

In geopolitical terms, it is arguably (unquestionably?) very much in the EU’s interest to develop such a capability. A need emphasized by the Donald Trump Presidency, which gave the EU nations a dramatic signal that they can’t assume that the US is not as, uh, credible in its NATO commitments as it was prior to Trump’s inauguration in 2017. It takes place mostly behind the scenes, but that is a major theme in Western views on the Russia-Ukraine War. It peeped out a bit into more public view in the posturing between Germany and the US over providing the Leopard 2 (German) and Abrams (US) tanks to Ukraine.

Hersh notes, “after the fall of Afghanistan, [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague - clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.“

Hersh also provides some important information on the more general military cooperation between the US and fellow NATO country Norway, which is not an EU member state and which also made a separate, new military agreement with the US in 2022):

Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway [to assist in the sabotage operation]. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.) [my emphasis]

Hersh’s article is a long, fascinating read. As he himself noted, the US government flat-out denies the sabotage claim. But I’ve learned to always take anything that Hersh writes (as long as it doesn’t involve cheesy gossip about John Kennedy’s private life) both seriously and critically. Karolina Hird et al (2023): Russian