On the menu today: Over in Ukraine, the long and bloody battle for the city of Bakhmut might be shifting in favor of the Russians and their Wagner Group mercenaries. You notice we don’t hear much about Ukraine’s total military casualties, and yet that’s the key to how long the country can resist and repel the Russian invaders. Meanwhile, as the one-year anniversary of the invasion gets further away in the rear-view mirror, the president’s attention is shifting back to his domestic agenda. Last week, Biden addressed the House Democratic caucus at a retreat in Baltimore, and he didn’t mention Ukraine or Russia at all. On any given day, Ukraine can be the preeminent priority of the administration or it can be an afterthought — and then the administration wonders why public support for helping Ukraine isn’t as high as it was last year.
Ominous Reports out of Ukraine
This morning brings the news that after a long, bloody slog, the Russian military — or, more specifically, the Russian forces under the command of the mercenary Wagner Group — are grinding away at the Ukrainians and might be on the verge of something akin to a victory in the city of Bakhmut. The New York Times’ Carlotta Gall reports:
After months of epic struggle, the fight over the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut had seemed in recent days to be reaching a climax, with Russian forces close to encircling the city and some Ukrainian units pulling out.
Then, early Saturday, Ukrainian assault brigades went on the attack. Over the weekend, hundreds of troops joined the counteroffensive, mounting assaults from the ground and pounding Russian positions with artillery from the surrounding hills.
Ukrainian commanders acknowledged that their forces in Bakhmut still faced the risk of encirclement, but the fighting over the weekend showed that a military that has surprised the world with its doggedness was not yet ready to give up on Bakhmut. How holding the city might fit in with its broader plans was less clear.
The Pentagon sounds like it’s preparing to explain away a Ukrainian defeat:
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said that Russia taking control of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut would not mean that Ukraine was losing in the broader conflict.
Austin said the city was of more emblematic than practical value to Russia when it came to winning the war.
“I think it is more of a symbolic value than it is strategic and operational value,” Austin told reporters while visiting Jordan.
“The fall of Bakhmut won’t necessarily mean that the Russians have changed the tide of this fight,” Austin added.
The Institute for the Study of War concludes that:
Ukrainian forces may be conducting a limited fighting withdrawal in eastern Bakhmut and are continuing to inflict high casualties against the advancing mixed Russian forces. Russian milbloggers have also lowered their expectations of Russian forces’ ability to launch additional offensives, which would likely culminate whether or not Russian forces actually capture Bakhmut.
Maybe this would be just a symbolic victory for Russia, and maybe the Ukrainians are indeed conducting a limited withdrawal. But in a war of attrition, Ukraine loses. Hard numbers about Ukrainian casualties are difficult to come by, but in a long, protracted battle like Bakhmut, the Ukrainian military must be suffering some casualties.
The Kyiv Independent, quoting Ukrainian soldiers, offered a grim report:
Mortarmen spoke of extreme ammunition scarcity and having to use weapons dating back to World War II. Drones that are supposed to provide critical reconnaissance information are also scarce and are being lost at very high rates in some parts of the battlefield.
All this leads to terrifying casualties of both dead and wounded. “The battalion came in in the middle of December . . . between all the different platoons, there were 500 of us,” says Borys, a combat medic from Odesa Oblast fighting around Bakhmut. “A month ago, there were literally 150 of us.”
“When you go out to the position, it’s not even a 50/50 chance that you’ll come out of there (alive),” says the older Serhiy. “It’s more like 30/70.”
The Office of the President of Ukraine has claimed that Russia may have lost tens of thousands of men during the Battle of Bakhmut as of mid-January. Fighting has since only intensified, with Ukraine repeatedly claiming close to a thousand Russians dead in its daily updates. As Bakhmut is seeing the heaviest fighting, most of these casualties are likely in that area. Authorities haven’t revealed any information on Ukrainian losses in the Battle of Bakhmut.
Based on the soldiers’ testimonies, Ukrainian losses appear to be high as well.
Late last month, unnamed Western officials told the Associated Press that Russia had suffered an estimated 200,000 casualties and the Ukrainians had suffered an estimated 100,000. That sounds like a good ratio for the Ukrainians, until you realize that as of July 2022, Ukraine’s military consisted of up to 700,000 active-duty personnel.
In December, the Russian government announced plans to expand the size of its armed forces from 1 million to 1.5 million, but did not provide a timeline. Russia is also estimated to have as many as 50,000 private military contractors fighting in Ukraine as of early this year. Russia can pay the price for prolonged bloodbaths in a way that the Ukrainians can’t.
This newsletter’s headline on February 20 was “Zelensky Really Needs Ammunition, Not a Visit.” That Kyiv Independent article offers anecdotes that back up the assessment:
Illia, a mortarman with the 3017th unit of Ukraine’s National Guard offers a simple explanation for the lack of indirect support fire.
“When we get ammo, we get 10 shells per day, 120 millimeter shells,” Illia says. “That’s enough for one minute of work.”
The mortars themselves date back to the years 1938-1943 and hitting something with them “takes a miracle.” But Ukrainian mortars still manage to hit their targets despite all these challenges, he says.”We need ammo, ammo, ammo,” Illia adds. “If we keep getting 10 shells, Bakhmut will quickly be surrounded.”
Bakhmut proves that the course of the war is unpredictable, and that even if the Ukrainians have the advantage of better weapons, better technology, better intelligence, and a righteous cause, the Russians can just keep dumping more and more men into the battle and wear the Ukrainians down.
Last week, Biden addressed the House Democratic caucus at a retreat in Baltimore, and he didn’t mention Ukraine or Russia. This comes after Ukraine received only a cursory mention in the State of the Union address.
Yes, Biden traveled to Ukraine and also gave an extensive speech about the importance of helping the Ukrainians — in Krakow, Poland. The Polish don’t really need to be persuaded to support Ukraine; a December poll found that more than 77 percent of Poles support continuing sending weapons and armaments to Ukraine, while only 18 percent oppose the transfers. Biden keeps making the sales pitch to audiences who have already bought the product.
Over in the print edition of NR, Noah Rothman, a wholehearted supporter of the effort to help Ukraine, examined President Biden’s speech in Poland and rapped him on the knuckles for striking “a note of triumphalism that neither he nor the West had yet earned”:
The president ran through a litany of objectives that Vladimir Putin had tried and failed to achieve, and he took no small measure of credit for the Russian president’s misfortune. “President Putin is confronted with something today that he didn’t think was possible a year ago,” Biden declared. “The democracies of the world have grown stronger. Not weaker. But the autocrats in the world have gotten weaker, not stronger.” Biden added that the NATO alliance “will not waver” or “tire” in defending its cause, and Putin’s “craven lust for land and power will fail.”
Biden’s victory lap is premature. Maintaining the integrity of the Atlantic alliance and the resolve of its disparate polities to meet the Russian threat may be the foremost challenge of his administration. Moreover, the West’s resolve was and remains a by-product of Ukraine’s commitment to its own defense, not the other way around.
And as Matthew Continetti observed, Biden keeps doing this two-step where he insists we’ll do whatever it takes to help Ukraine, and then moments later insists the country doesn’t need the particular weapons that it’s repeatedly requested:
“No, he doesn’t need F-16s now,” President Joe Biden told David Muir of ABC News last week. Biden was talking about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest request for advanced U.S. weaponry as his countrymen hold the line against Russia’s invasion. It was the latest tone-deaf comment from a commander in chief whose current strategy risks disaster.
About a month ago, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi made the argument here at NR that Biden keeps making the wrong argument if he’s genuinely trying to shore up support among the American people: “The argument needs to be based on more than vague appeals to the rules-based international order, which persuade few outside the Beltway.” (Then again, Biden may not mind if support for Ukraine turns into a partisan issue; it’s just one more way to run against “MAGA Republicans” in 2024.)
Way back before the invasion, I noticed that Joe Biden and his foreign-policy team kept describing their vision as a “rules-based international order” — and despite their affection for that term, either no “rules-based international order” had ever really existed, or it had disappeared many years ago. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Syria, among others, had run roughshod over international law in myriad ways for years and rarely paid much of a price.
The old habits haven’t been broken. Last month, Jake Sullivan issued a statement boasting that, “By overwhelmingly voting in favor of the United Nations General Assembly resolution today, these nations stood firmly in support of the rules-based international order, and spoke with one voice to demand Russia’s full, immediate, and unconditional withdrawal from all of Ukraine’s territory.” Indeed, the vote was overwhelming; 141 member states voted for the resolution, seven of the usual-suspect global malcontents voted against — and 32 states abstained, including nuclear powers China, India, and Pakistan.
Yes, the U.N. passed that resolution by an overwhelming margin . . . and absolutely nothing changed on the battlefield. Almost everybody’s willing to stand firmly in support of a rules-based international order, but that’s distinct from actually enforcing those rules and punishing rule-breakers.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell grasps that if you want to shore up American support for assisting Ukraine, you have to speak to Americans about how this effort helps American interests:
Republican leaders are committed to a strong trans-Atlantic alliance. We are committed to helping Ukraine. Not because of vague moral arguments or abstractions like the so-called ‘rules-based international order.’ But rather because America’s own core national interests are at stake. Because our security is interlinked, and our economies are intertwined.
ADDENDUM: Over in the Corner, I wrote on Saturday that “candidates with no chance of winning rarely see themselves as candidates with no chance of winning.”
In a pleasant surprise, former Maryland governor Larry Hogan announced Sunday that he would not run for president in 2024. Not every accomplished governor has to end his career with a doomed campaign for president! It’s okay to just be a good governor, or senator, or some other job in government, or to go into the private sector or nonprofits and find other ways to help make the country a better place!
Our Jeff Blehar calls Hogan’s statement “a dignified bowing-out that focuses on the best reasons for his not running — unnecessarily crowding the field and thus allowing Trump to triumph again in a divided race — and tactfully omits other very good but more personal reasons for not running, such as (1) he would not win, and (2) would suffer the indignity of getting thrashed in his home state’s own primary provided he survived in the race until that long.”