Monday, March 28, 2022

March 28: Ukraine (2)

Kremlin says Biden's remark on the end of Putin is 'alarming'
Zelenskyy sets ground rules for peace agreement, Russia censors him Zelenskyy said Russia was afraid of a short conversation with journalists ........ Zelenskyy spoke with Russian media outlets, saying that his country is open to guaranteeing Ukraine's neutrality and its nuclear-free status, but its representatives will not sign any agreement until Russian troops withdraw from the country. The Ukrainian president also said that the entire process hinges on him personally meeting with Putin and the Ukrainian people agreeing to a referendum to change the Constitution – a referendum that cannot take place while Russian troops remain in Ukraine. ........ Zelenskyy spoke with Russian media outlets, saying that his country is open to guaranteeing Ukraine's neutrality and its nuclear-free status, but its representatives will not sign any agreement until Russian troops withdraw from the country. The Ukrainian president also said that the entire process hinges on him personally meeting with Putin and the Ukrainian people agreeing to a referendum to change the Constitution – a referendum that cannot take place while Russian troops remain in Ukraine. ....... Ukrainian officials have compared Russia's bombing of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, to the Nazi assault on the city in 1941. ....... Yet Zelenskyy said his diplomats and Russian representatives did discuss key issues such as guarantees of security, neutrality, and Ukraine's nuclear-free status, because "Russia calls NATO enlargement of the reasons for invading Ukraine." .......

"We have more than 100 nationalities in the country.

....... Zelenskyy responded by saying Moscow was afraid of a relatively short conversation with journalists. "It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic," he said, according to the Ukrainian news agency RBK Ukraina.

Housing Market Crash: 1 Thing That Shouldn't Scare You . Not only are home prices quite inflated, but inventory is extremely low, which means you may have to duke it out with other buyers to get an offer accepted. ...... The state of the housing market might also lead you to worry whether a crash is coming -- especially in light of rising mortgage rates. But should you hold off on buying for fear that home values are about to tank? ...... Home values will likely start to decline in the not-so-distant future simply because today's prices aren't sustainable. ....... mortgage rates will continue to climb in 2022. ....... Now last year, buyers had the benefit of lower mortgage rates to help offset sky-high home prices. Right now, those record-low rates are off the table, and we shouldn't expect to see them return anytime soon. Because of that, buyer demand is likely to wane. And once that happens, home prices should start to come down. ....... if we go back to February 2019, the average 30-year mortgage rate was 4.37%. And 10 years earlier, in February 2009, it was 5.13% ........ While home values might drop, we're more likely to see a gradual decline than a drastic one. ....... There's a good chance home prices will drop in the course of 2022, so if you're not in a rush to buy, waiting could mean spending less on a home. ........ Will waiting mean facing higher borrowing rates? Potentially. But home prices could drop enough to more than make up for that.

Stimulus checks for inflation: Here are the states planning to send money to residents
Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the U.S. Biden is making a colossal mistake in thinking he can bleed Russia dry, topple Putin and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan. ....... “The language people speak in the corridors of power,” former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter once observed, “is not economics or politics. It is history.” ........ the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation … CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted Ukrainian military units .......... I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going. The administration will continue to supply the Ukrainians with anti-aircraft Stingers, antitank Javelins and explosive Switchblade drones. ........ (The latest U.S. proposal is for Turkey to provide Ukraine with the sophisticated S-400 anti-aircraft system, which Ankara purchased from Moscow just a few years ago. I expect it to go the way of the scuttled plan for Polish MiG fighters.) ........ “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.” ....... “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” ..... the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal. ........

Francis Fukuyama’s optimism that “Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine.”

........ The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. … Putin will not survive the defeat of his army … A Russian defeat will make possible a “new birth of freedom,” and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians. ........... Incredibly, Komsomolskaya Pravda, a pro-Kremlin Russian newspaper, just published Russian Ministry of Defense numbers indicating 9,861 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine and 16,153 wounded. ......... there is ample evidence that their logistics is a mess, exemplified by the many supply trucks that have simply been abandoned because their tires or engines gave out. By these measures, Ukraine does seem to be winning the war ......... History also provides numerous cases of authoritarian regimes that fell apart quite rapidly in the face of military reverses — think of the fates of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Al Qaddafi, or the Argentine junta that invaded the Falklands almost exactly 40 years ago. ......... Prolonging the war runs the risk not just of leaving tens of thousands of Ukrainians dead and millions homeless, but also of handing Putin something that he can plausibly present at home as victory. Betting on a Russian revolution is betting on an exceedingly rare event, even if the war continues to go badly for Putin; if the war turns in his favor, there will be no palace coup............ the fall of Mariupol may be just days away. That in turn will free up Russian forces to complete the envelopment of the Donbas front. ......... Also on Friday, the Russians claim, they used a hypersonic weapon in combat for the first time: a Kinzhal air-launched missile which was used to take out an underground munitions depot at Deliatyn in western Ukraine. They could have achieved the same result with a conventional cruise missile. The point was presumably to remind Ukraine’s backers of the vastly superior firepower Russia has at its disposal. Thus far, around 1,100 missiles have struck Ukraine. There are plenty more where they came from. ............. And, of course, Putin has the power — unlike Saddam or Qaddafi — to threaten to use nuclear weapons, though I don’t believe he needs to do more than make threats, given that the conventional war is likely to turn in his favor. The next blow will be when Belarusian forces invade western Ukraine from the north, which the Ukrainian general staff expects to happen in the coming days, and which could pose a threat to the supply of arms from Poland. ..............

I fail to see in current Western strategizing any real recognition of how badly this war could go for Ukraine in the coming weeks.

The incentive for Putin is obviously to create for himself a stronger bargaining position than he currently has before entering into serious negotiations. The Ukrainians have shown their cards. They are ready to drop the idea of NATO membership; to accept neutrality; to seek security guarantees from third parties; to accept limits on their own military capability. ........... What is less clear is where they stand on the future status of Crimea and the supposedly independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. ........ Meanwhile, the mainly financial sanctions imposed on Russia are doing their intended work, in causing something like a nationwide bank run and consumer goods shortages. Estimates vary as to the scale of the economic contraction — perhaps as much as a third, recalling the depression conditions that followed the Soviet collapse in 1991. .............. effectively telling one country after another: “Our history is your history. We are you.” He gave the Brits Churchill, the Germans the Berlin Wall, the Yanks Martin Luther King Jr., and the Israelis the Holocaust. ....... “The president has completely lost interest in the present,” the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar argued in a recent New York Times piece. “The economy, social issues, the coronavirus pandemic, these all annoy him. Instead, he and [his adviser Yuri] Kovalchuk obsess over the past.” ..............

for Putin and his cronies, “the cold war never stopped.”

......... Putin “expressed outrage that the annexation of the Crimea had been compared with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. ......... The hypocrisy of the West has become an obsession of his, and it is reflected in everything the Russian government does. Did you know that in parts of his declaration on the annexation of Crimea, he took passages almost verbatim from the Kosovo declaration of independence, which was supported by the West? Or that the attack on Kyiv began with the destruction of the television tower just as NATO attacked the television tower in Belgrade in 1999? ........... Fresh evidence that Putin’s project is not the resurrection of the Soviet Union, but looks back to tsarist imperialism and Orthodoxy, was provided by his speech at the fascistic rally held on Friday at Moscow’s main football stadium. Its concluding allusion to the tsarist admiral Fyodor Ushakov, who made his reputation by winning victories in the Black Sea, struck me as ominous for Odesa. .......... Biden reiterated that the US does not seek a new Cold War with China; it does not aim to change China’s system; the revitalization of its alliances is not targeted at China; the US does not support “Taiwan independence”; and it has no intention to seek a conflict with China. .......... To judge by Xi’s response, he believes not one word of Biden’s assurances. ......... The invasion of Ukraine in many ways resembles the invasion of South Korea by North Korea in 1950. ........ In the First Cold War, the senior partner was Russia, the junior partner was China — now the roles are reversed. In Cold War I, the first hot war was in Asia (Korea) — now it’s in Europe (Ukraine). In Cold War I, Korea was just the first of many confrontations with aggressive Soviet-backed proxies — today the crisis in Ukraine will likely be followed by crises in the Middle East (Iran) and Far East (Taiwan). ......... the Biden administration is making a colossal mistake in thinking that it can protract the war in Ukraine, bleed Russia dry, topple Putin and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan. ...........

this war isn’t going to last 10 years — more like 10 weeks.

....... Allowing Ukraine to be bombed to rubble by Putin is not smart; it creates the chance for him to achieve his goal of rendering Ukrainian independence unviable. Putin, like most Russian leaders in history, will most likely die of natural causes.



Preparing for Defeat . there is more support for Putin in the Balkans than in other parts of Europe. A lot of the latter is due to Serbia, and Serbia's hosting of Sputnik. ....... Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks. ............ The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. ......... There is no conceivable compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine given the losses they have taken at this point. ......... It is much better to have the Ukrainians defeat the Russians on their own, depriving Moscow of the excuse that NATO attacked them, as well as avoiding all the obvious escalatory possibilities. ....... Much more important is a continuing supply of Javelins, Stingers, TB2s, medical supplies, comms equipment, and intel sharing. I assume that Ukrainian forces are already being vectored by NATO intelligence operating from outside Ukraine. ........ The cost that Ukraine is paying is enormous, of course. But the greatest damage is being done by rockets and artillery, which neither MiGs nor a no-fly zone can do much about.

The only thing that will stop the slaughter is defeat of the Russian army on the ground....... Putin will not survive the defeat of his army.

.......... The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings. ........ Like Russia, China has built up seemingly high-tech military forces in the past decade, but they have no combat experience. The miserable performance of the Russian air force would likely be replicated by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, which similarly has no experience managing complex air operations. We may hope that the Chinese leadership will not delude itself as to its own capabilities the way the Russians did when contemplating a future move against Taiwan. ....... A Russian defeat will make possible a “new birth of freedom,” and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.

Francis Fukuyama: Democracy IRL



Putin Is Finding War Is Hell, and Expensive A decade-long effort to increase professionalism seems to have failed, but Russian troops are adapting in Ukraine and still have brute force on their side. ........ Many in the West had a mistaken belief that the Russian war machine was a rough match for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and they are surprised at how much trouble the massive force is having subduing a much smaller and less-equipped neighbor, Ukraine. ......... The Russians present not as a sophisticated 21st-century army, but rather a blunt force in the style of World War II’s militaries. ........ today’s battles in Ukraine are showing the fissures in the Russian approach to training, equipping and organizing ........ The first is obvious: logistical failures. In the military, we often say that amateurs study strategy but professionals study logistics. ....... The image of the 40-mile stalled tank and transport convoy outside of Kyiv is a good example of incompetence — any modern Western military would have developed the detailed plans to ensure that such a massive offensive weapon wouldn’t sit on highly exposed terrain for days. ............. A significant number of the troops invading Ukraine are conscripts or reservists. They are not a professional, volunteer force led by career senior enlisted cadres. There have been anecdotal examples of Russian soldiers who are literally unaware of the importance of their mission — some surprised to discover they are not on an exercise in Russia when captured by Ukrainians. .......... The third key misstep is

the bad generalship on vivid display

. The Russian plan encompassed attacking Ukraine from six different vectors, dividing their forces significantly. A battle plan that spreads forces over six axes is inherently flawed. This no doubt can be attributed to flawed assumptions and intelligence: The Russian generals must have expected the Ukrainians to welcome them with flowers and vodka, not bullets and Molotov cocktails. ......... In 20 years of hard fighting in Afghanistan, the U.S. suffered roughly 2,000 troops killed in combat. The Russians, in just over two weeks, have lost at least 4,000 and possibly twice that. ......... In addition to blood, Russia is bleeding treasure. War is an expensive proposition, especially when your sources of hard currency are drying up due to Western sanctions. And much of the war chest that Putin counted on — more than $600 billion in reserves — has been locked down in Western institutions under sanctions. ............ Russia is reportedly sending its jets on 200 sorties a day, using a tremendous amount of fuel and spare parts that will be increasingly hard to come by given sanctions. Ukraine claims to have shot down more than 50 aircraft at $20 million to $50 million a pop. One recent estimate put the cost of the war at billions of dollars per day, and at that rate

Putin will run out of money even before he runs out of public support

. ........... It took the U.S. First Marine Division — the most elite combat troops in the world — nearly two months to conquer Fallujah, an Iraqi city about a tenth the size of Kyiv. ........ As of now, time is on the Russians’ side if they choose to simply grind down the Ukrainians and reduce the cities to rubble. But over a longer period, dissatisfaction at home, the coming of the spring mud and military failures will compound for Putin. ........ I do not detect an ounce of quit in the Ukrainians, particularly in their Churchillian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. ......... Barring a peace agreement, this war is likely to be a long haul.

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