September 1 — Day 921 — Russian punch, Ukrainian counterpunch, DC Wisdom, More Eyes in the Sky
Hi All!
It’s been a fairly eventful week and most of you no doubt are already flooded with reports and comment, so I’ll try and keep my take within reason and avoid repeating what’s already been reported all over elsewhere:
Big Russian missile and drone strikes over the first three days of the week
The exact numbers (i.e., officially-sanctioned/generally-agreed on which pretty much always isn’t actually real historical figure) are easy enough to find. The simple version is on Monday the Russians sent about 100 missile and 100 drones of all types, on Tuesday it was about 10 missiles and 70–80 kamikaze drones, and on Wednesday it was about the same as Tuesday.
The target, basically, was pieces of the Ukrainian power grid. Although there were strikes all over the country I get the impression that the Russian strategy is to try and kill electricity distribution in especially the center of the country, because in the west it’s possible to draw power from adjacent countries, and in the east and the north industrial activity is limited, so there’s more excess capacity there.
There is a lot of speculation that the Kremlin is “showing” the Ukrainians how mad Russia is that the UAF had the temerity to invade Kursk Oblast’. Last I saw four people were killed in the strikes, but that’s not counting individual short-range missiles and aerial bombs the Russians launch at civilian housing from time to time. Yesterday one of those glider bombs hit an apartment building in Kharkiv, eight dead, close to one hundred injured. The worst story about that is a woman who lost her husband to a Russian strike earlier in the war; the Saturday attack killed her 14-year-old daughter.
In Kyiv, the bombardment has translated to a new round of planned and unplanned blackouts providing most people about 12–14 hours every 24 hours. Usually it’s 2–5 hours on and then a similar amount off. On cloudy and cooler days sometimes there is more because less air conditioning. It’s a pain and not condusive to calm and happiness, people are sick of it, but the city is to the point now where I’m starting to ask what it would take for them not to take these strikes and power cuts in stride. Public transport is running, cafes have generators and customers, the sidewalk crowds look just like a normal summer except that it’s mostly women and children and old men, stuff is in the stores, Nova Poshta is just as ridiculously fast and efficient as always, people are polite entering and exiting public buildings, and so on. Everyone is mad the F-16 got shot down and Moonfish died, but, pretty much everyone knows people personally who were killed in the war before him.
It’s pretty much obvious that the Russian Federation can kill civilians and degrade Ukrainian quality of life, but there is also the Thursday, Friday and Saturday following the strikes: No more missiles, just a covey or two of drones to update where the Ukrainian air defenses might be, and lots of propaganda about how mighty Russia is going to beat the Ukrainian people into submission. But it’s obvious they are orders of magnitude away from the kind of firepower they would need to achieve that.
Some of you reading this will remember the US national leadership’s decision in the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s to “bomb them back into the stone age” so that Washington’s policy might prevail against a Vietnamese nation fighting for, as it saw it, independence from foreign rule, and how that played out.
How do you say “That’s all you got?” in Ukrainian?
Some of you may recall that last review I made the case that the narrative of defenseless Ukraine getting smacked around by Russia like a Canadian fur seal pup is not really accurate, and that if you look at the actual strikes and explosions, it’s indisputable that Russia is the target of an effective bombardment, with the energy infrastructure and particularly oil refineries and the immovable pipes and pumps and supports and power hook-ups — all of it visible from space — solidly in the cross hairs of the Ukrainian target planners.
Over the same past week when Russian missile strikes grabbed headlines and triggered a new round of chest-beating and talk of superpower status on Russian state TV, hundreds — I say again hundreds — of Ukrainian drones have winged their way deep into Russia and a significant portion of them have blown up in painful ways for the Kremlin.
Most recently, to wit last night, the supposedly cowed and defeated Ukrainians appear to have launched drone raids totalling in excess, probably, of 150 weapons over a couple of hours. The Russian army is formally announcing it shot 158 down so at a guess the Ukrainians put 200–250 aircraft in the air, and if that’s accurate then there is this fact: Five days after Russia launched its biggest-ever missile/drone attack on Ukraine, of the entire war, the Ukrainians hit back with their biggest-ever drone attack on Russia.
So not exactly the actions of a country and a people that think they’re outmatched and defeated.
As I write this, it looks like, at least two hydroelectric stations (Tverskaya Oblast’ and Moscow Oblast’) and one oil refinery (Moscow Oblast’). Drones hit/”were shot down” in thirteen other Russian regions, with the most falling drones reported in the Kursk, Bryansk, and Voronezh Oblasts.
Already there’s a flood of credible evidence (video recorded by Russian civilians and stuck on social media) that the hydro-electric station in Tverskaya Oblast’ was set on fire, and the oil refinery on Moscow was set alight as well.
(If you want “incredible” evidence, there’s plenty of that as well, for instance the Moscow Oblast’ administration announced just a couple of hours ago that all the drones were shot down and there were only a couple of local fires that are now fully under control, and power and fuel production was unaffected.)
Looking at the video I’m not sure I believe that after explosions like that in an oil refinery, even if damage was minor — and judging from the size of the fireball that looks low probability to me — the people running the plant would turn it back on for weeks. But of course Russian state media may know better than people like me, they certainly say they do.
I think the thing no one can speculate about, even inside the Kremlin, is that the Ukrainians are showing zero sign of letting up.
Remember the oil refinery strikes from last week and that huge fire down by Rostov? OK, make a note of that date, that was right before the Russians kicked off their big strikes in the first half of this week.
On Monday, so the same day the Russians rained missiles and drones all over Ukraine and forced people like me to take the stairs and use gas stoves more often, somehow, an oil refinery in Omsk, so well into west Siberia and far out of the range of any drone we know about, exploded and caught fire. This is one of the biggest petroleum products processing centers in all Russia. Official reports said the plant had to shut down, unofficial reports said it could be for weeks. So maybe it was a safety violation or maybe, it was Ukrainian secret agents. In any case, for Russian fuel futures, not good news. They blame the Ukrainians.
Also on Monday the Ukrainians sent small numbers of drones to Murmansk region and Saratov region, probably in an attempt to hit the strategic bombers based at airfields nearby. The only damage reported open sources was a hit to an upper floor of an apartment building in Saratov. Still, from the Russian point of view, and I’m projecting, psychologically it must have been something like a Vietnamese drones hitting B-52 base in Iowa during the Vietnam War. Even if there is no damage, it’s a pretty clear message that actually, even if your side has strategic bombers and the other side is just, well, inferior, there might be payback.
On Tuesday, the Ukrainians went after the hydroelectric stations, and there were robot planes reported (and “shot down” in droves according to official accounts, from air space above Tula, Belgorod, Lipetsk, Vonezh, Kursk and Bryansk Oblasts. This is basically the same attack routes the Ukrainians used early this morning. From my notes that time the Ukrainians also went after a Tver’ region gas pumping station as well.
On Wednesday the Ukrainian drones hit a different oil refinery in Rostov Oblast’, and then just for good measure, hit the one that was burning again. This was on Wednesday, the last day of the most recent round of Russian attacks.
On Friday, Ukrainian drones appeared in the Kaluga Oblast’, so exactly inbetween the border Oblasts like Belgorod and Kursk, and places deep in Russia like Moscow and Tver’ Oblasts. The target for that attack…wait for it…was apparently air defense installations parked around a Kaluga military airfield.
(Also hit apparently was an auto factory that until recently belonged to Volkswagen, but had recently been acquired by a Russian oligarch. Not sure if that was an accident or Ukrainian messaging of some kind.)
And then on Sunday, another big wave of Ukrainian drones and some pretty impactful results, pretty much all of it Russian energy infrastructure.
On one level, this is just more of the pattern I pointed to last week. The Ukrainians send drones, they knock a gap in the Russian air defenses, and then 24–72 hours later they launch a big strike that tries to thread its way to targets deep inside Russia.
But the point I am trying to make is, this time, the Ukrainians executed those tactics and strikes against the background of the biggest, most punishing, most powerful missile/drone strike the Russian Federation has managed against Ukraine, in the entire war.
An an aside, a foreshadowing, a critical feature of this Ukrainian intent and capacity, the Ukrainians are doing what they are doing, on their own. These are Ukraine-built drones. Zelensky, the SBU and GUR is deciding what and how to attack. No one but the Ukrainians get to say what gets launched, at what, or when.
How much damage are the Ukrainians really doing?
I don’t know that either, but of course we all know (because you could see it from space) that for instance the refinery to the east of Rostov was still burning a week after it got hit.
Also, just a matter of record, on Wednesday the Russian state agency for publishing (sometimes very imaginative) statistics on economic activity in the country, an organization called Rosstat, announced that until further notice the following manufacturing data on the following Russian energy products is now a state secret: diesel fuel, fuel oil, liquefied propane and butane, coke, and semi-coke from coal, and gas condensate.
A suspicious journalist would absolutely suspect the reason for that decision is the numbers are so bad, and deteriorating so worryingly, that the Russian state has calculated is safer to classify energy production figures rather than attempt to fake them. But of course maybe it was brilliantly intelligent Kremlin OPSEC, throwing sand into the eyes of the weak and effeminate West, and the likes of Bloomberg and Wall Street.
But what is abundantly clear can be put in layman’s language: In the first half of the week the Russian Federation took its biggest swing possible at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and the most important outcome of those strikes was Ukraine responding with “That’s all you got?”, and then counter-punching the Russians several good ones on their own. That’s what’s happened.
DC Navel-Gazing, or how to be dumb about escalation management
Although it’s not really big news here in Ukraine, or even in Europe, a lot of the US media that deigns to report on Ukraine at all this week has been feverishly discussing a visit by the Ukrainian Defense Minister Umerov to Washington, where among other things he supposedly handed over a draft target list of 150, or 250, or types, or range envelopes or other information to the White House, so hopefully the US government will change its policy about letting Ukraine use US medium range missiles to attack targets deep inside Russia.
Right now the American short string on the Ukrainians is that they can only shoot at Russian border regions and only when the Ukrainians can convincingly demonstrate that the strike would hit something that was about to attack Ukraine, like a Russian missile battery or bomber airfield, and the threat was pretty imminent, and the target is about 150 km. from the Ukrainian borders or less.
The White House through spokesmen have told us this is a wise policy because it prevents escalation of the Russo-Ukraine war into a direct confrontation between the Kremlin and the US, and so policy-makers in DC are really smart because they are preventing a step being taken towards World War Three. They don’t say but still make absolutely clear that all the dead and wounded Ukrainian civilians, all the blown up buildings, all the Russian drones flying in and out of NATO air space without NATO doing anything — that’s acceptable to Washington.
The Ukrainians unsurprisingly think this is all really dumb policy because all the Russians have to do to get around the US range restrictions it is move their airfields and missile batteries outside the 150 km. envelope, and then they can bombard and kill Ukrainians with impunity. And laugh at the stupid policy-makers in DC. (As I understand it, this is primarily Secretary Blinken and Security Council boss Sullivan, but that’s just what I read in WP.)
Anyway, supposedly, now the Big Decision that will get debated all over the Washington elite and calculated for the upcoming election will be whether to expand the target list, or not, how the decision whatever it is would play out in votes in places like Georgia and Pennsylvania, what do the think tanks think and how can a policy-maker find a think tank to validate policy about a place the policy-maker would prefer not think about, and thinking about it the Ukrainians have a terrible sense of timing because this is happening the same time Israel and Hamas are going at it. For the poor DC policy-maker, summer vacation is under threat or maybe even ruined because the Europeans won’t step up, because the Ukrainians are never satisfied, and because the Russians won’t just accept that they aren’t a superpower and so like an non-superpower they should just understand what’s good for America and do that. So all in all ATACMS and Ukraine most of all for the DC elite isn’t a decision that might drive events, it’s just a huge headache everyone “normal” (you know, Georgetown and Embassy Row and those places), who are way too busy to have time to deal with stupid Russia and stupid Europe and stupid Ukraine.
I perhaps exaggerate, but with less snark, I don’t think anyone would argue the US political elite has overreacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or that those policy-makers are trying too hard to shape events.
Nor am I alone. There was this excellent sound bite from Friday from Lithuanian FM Landsbergis who, when asked what he thought about the US ban on Ukrainian long-range strikes with US weapons into Russia, which for instance means Russian bombers get to launch missiles into Ukrainian apartment buildings with impunity, responded: “Russian planes are better protected by the Western guarantees than Ukrainians.”
Or there is this factoid no one is really mentioning, to wit, even if the Americans clear release of the long-range strikes, it’s pretty obvious the Americans even if they wanted to don’t have enough missiles to give the Ukrainians to end the war overnight.
The numbers are there in the open sources. The weapon being discussed is a medium-range missile called an ATACMS, of which about 3,200 have been produced and 600 fired in the US’ various wars over the past two decades, and something like 100 are being manufactured annually right now. According to the Ukrainians they know of 250+ targets within the ATACMS target envelope that they want to hit, and that they’re running past the White House and Pentagon hopefully to be allowed to hit. But the point is, each target requires more than one missile, more targets will get spotted, and the Russian know how to build airfields, repair damage, and build dummy targets. According to open sources the US has given Ukraine, max, 50 missiles, and the real number may be half that.
How many more can the US part with, before it’s depleting its own stocks in case Afghanistan or Iraq need to be invaded again, or Taiwan or South Korea defended, or “some damn thing (guess the reference)” happens in Africa? Bottom line, whatever the result of the ATACMS talks and all the debating and angst in DC about it, the bottom line is, even the most generous/positive decision won’t end the war, it won’t even stop Russian strikes. It could do Russian fighting capacity some serious damage and besides the desired goal of ending Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, from the US point of view, it’s in American interest for Russian military capacity to be degraded. But it’s the political debte de jour so that’s what they’re wrangling about when it comes to Ukraine in DC.
The funny bit, in a way, is exactly the same thing is going on in Russia. The Ukraine war can’t be fixed with a single sweeping move by a supposed superpower, therefore, the elites running the supposed superpower are focusing on policy choices that won’t be decisive, but foster the feeling that it’s still superpower decision-making. In DC it’s whether or not to widen the ATACMS strike envelope for Ukraine. In Moscow it’s keeping the faith that Ukraine can and will be bombarded into submission. Neither policy discussion will change Ukrainian behavior substantially, but both allow the people in the big country capital to tell each other their decisions control events.
As to what big country decision might actually affect events, macro-level, here’s an article I did on the latest blips in the shells-for-Ukraine saga, it’s basically all secondary source but it’s decent reference:
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/38210
The takeaways here, for the DC crowd, is that after 2 1/2 years of war the big debate viz. Ukraine is ATACMS yes/no/maybe. However, also after 2 1/2 years of war:
- The US still has one factory making critical 155mm shells
- US shell production won’t even come close to meeting the US share of Ukrainian need until 2027/28
- The DC elite may say they are leading and that America is the superpower that leads, but, when it comes to shell production there is pretty much zero cooperation between US and European manufacturers
- As a result of that, but also leadership failure particularly in Berlin and Paris, European shell manufacturers aren’t producing a bullet without hard orders and those right now are promises
- Even if the promises do turn out to be real orders, European shell production will, roughly speaking, only manage its reasonable share of Ukrainian need by 2027/28
- Nowhere is there even a peep, by any of these smart DC people, about what the Ukrainians are going to do, if they are so short artillery ammunition the Russians are able to advance pretty much wherever the Russians choose to accept the casualties to do.
- There are a few outlier military officers and elected officials, but, in DC, there is zero discussion about how the war could or will probably go when the Ukrainians need firepower in industrial quantities to defend their people and country, and the Washington policy is to deliver designer boutique volumes military support, and hope the problem will disappear.
I’ll tell you what I think going to happen. While the smart DC people are having kittens about ATACMS legal launch ranges, and the Europeans are calculating how to maximize profits from shell production two or three years from now, the Ukrainians are going to make more and better drones, faster, and their skill at striking targets in Russia is going to improve. They are going to degrade Russian air defenses, and the volume and destructiveness strikes against Russian energy infrastructure are going to increase. I see no way anyone can stop this from happening, and that particularly includes the Russians.
You do not have to be Bismarck to look at European security and the escalation ladder and see how that might end badly.
PS-type point about the E-3 Sentry AWACS “Eye in De Sky”
Without a lot of words, I think it’s worth noting that in the past month open source flight trackers have spotted AWACS planes flying over SE Romania about once every ten days, when before it was maybe every couple of months. The job of these planes, in that place, is to spot and track everything Russian and capable of flight, from the lower Danube to roughly the Volga. I’m not clear yet what this means for the Ukrainians but NATO-wise this is an serious increase in surveillance eastward.
Just emailed the Council of Foreign Relations’ Max Boot to try and get Stefan’s substack to Harris & Walz advisors. A Nudge from Gen. Ryan might do it.
Hi Stefan, thanks for this article, I find them very enlightening, the US MSM is pretty much worthless in reporting on this war its like they do no investigating they consult some Colonel that's been retired for 20+ years and knows little to nothing. X has tons of videos of the same thing from different angles, couple of blogger do a very good job but there is no information as to what the Ukrainian folks are really feeling and I get that from you thanks Slava Ukraini