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Associated Press

14 years later, NATO is set to renew its vow to Ukraine

Lorne Cook and Stephen McGrath – November 28, 2022

BUCHAREST (AP) — NATO returns on Tuesday to the scene of one of its most controversial decisions, intent on repeating its vow that Ukraine — now suffering through the 10th month of a war against Russia — will join the world’s biggest military alliance one day.

NATO foreign ministers will gather for two days at the Palace of the Parliament in the Romanian capital Bucharest. It was there in April 2008 that U.S. President George W. Bush persuaded his allies to open NATO’s door to Ukraine and Georgia, over vehement Russian objections.

“NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” the leaders said in a statement. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was at the summit, described this as “a direct threat” to Russia’s security.

About four months later, Russian forces invaded Georgia.

Some experts describe the decision in Bucharest as a massive error that left Russia feeling cornered by a seemingly ever-expanding NATO. NATO counters that it doesn’t pressgang countries into joining, and that some requested membership to seek protection from Russia — as Finland and Sweden are doing now.

More than 14 years on, NATO will pledge this week to support Ukraine long-term as it defends itself against Russian aerial, missile and ground attacks — many of which have struck power grids and other civilian infrastructure, depriving millions of people of electricity and heating.

In a press conference Monday in Bucharest after a meeting with Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg highlighted the importance of investing in defense “as we face our greatest security crisis in a generation.”

“We cannot let Putin win,” he said. “This would show authoritarian leaders around the world that they can achieve their goals by using military force — and make the world a more dangerous place for all of us. It is in our own security interests to support Ukraine.”

Stoltenberg noted Russia’s recent bombardment of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, saying Putin “is trying to use winter as a weapon of war against Ukraine” and that “we need to be prepared for more attacks.”

North Macedonia and Montenegro have joined the U.S.-led alliance in recent years. With this, Stoltenberg said last week before travelling to Bucharest, “we have demonstrated that NATO’s door is open and that it is for NATO allies and aspirant countries to decide on membership. This is also the message to Ukraine.”

This gathering in Bucharest is likely to see NATO make fresh pledges of non-lethal support to Ukraine: fuel, electricity generators, medical supplies, winter equipment and drone jamming devices.

Individual allies are also likely to announce fresh supplies of military equipment for Ukraine — chiefly the air defense systems that Kyiv so desperately seeks to protect its skies. NATO as an organization will not offer such supplies, to avoid being dragged into a wider war with nuclear-armed Russia.

But the ministers, along with their Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba, will also look further afield.

“Over the longer term we will help Ukraine transition from Soviet-era equipment to modern NATO standards, doctrine and training,” Stoltenberg said last week. This will not only improve Ukraine’s armed forces and help them to better integrate, it will also meet some of the conditions for membership.

That said, Ukraine will not join NATO anytime soon. With the Crimean Peninsula annexed, and Russian troops and pro-Moscow separatists holding parts of the south and east, it’s not clear what Ukraine’s borders would even look like.

Many of the 30 allies believe the focus now must be uniquely on defeating Russia.

“What we have seen in the last months is that President Putin made a big strategic mistake,” Stoltenberg said. “He underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian armed forces, and the Ukrainian political leadership.”

But even as economic pressure — high electricity and gas prices, plus inflation, all exacerbated by the war — mounts on many allies, Stoltenberg would not press Ukraine to enter into peace talks, and indeed NATO and European diplomats say that Putin does not appear willing to come to the table.

“The war will end at some stage at the negotiating table,” Stoltenberg said Monday. “But the outcome of those negotiations are totally dependent on the situation on the battlefield,” adding “it would be a tragedy for (the) Ukrainian people if President Putin wins.”

The foreign ministers of Bosnia, Georgia and Moldova — three partners that NATO says are under increasing Russian pressure — will also be in Bucharest. Stoltenberg said NATO would “take further steps to help them protect their independence, and strengthen their ability to defend themselves.

Cook reported from Brussels.

Daily Beast

This Is How the U.S. Totally Misjudged the War in Ukraine

Sascha Brodsky – November 28, 2022

The war in Ukraine isn’t going the way Russian President Vladimir Putin expected. And he’s certainly not the only one who was caught by surprise—the U.S. expected a rapid Russian success, with the Kremlin’s tanks inside Kyiv within days.

Many U.S. officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House believed Russia would quickly conquer Ukraine when it invaded last February. But Ukraine mounted an effective defense, and the Russian forces have retreated in some areas after ferocious counter-attacks. The outcome of the war hangs by a thread, and the U.S. was simply not expecting to find itself involved in a major international conflict that could go on for years.

Former military officials and intel insiders have told The Daily Beast that reviews are underway after failures in human intelligence and “lethargic” analysis led to warped predictions.

The misjudgment in Washington, D.C., was near-total. The U.S. did accurately warn that Putin’s threat of invasion was real, while some intel agencies—including those in Kyiv—sought to play down the likelihood of all-out war, but after that the biggest land conflict in Europe since World War II has confounded the world’s most extensive and costly intelligence agencies right here in the U.S.

The Ukrainians were clear from the outset that they would fight off invaders from the East with the same brutal dedication that saw Finland defeat the USSR in the infamous Winter War of 1939. So what went wrong back at the intel offices in Virginia and D.C.? Why did the U.S. not take them seriously enough? And was their analysis of Russia’s decrepit and weary army so badly out of date?

In March, the odds seemed heavily stacked against Ukraine. At the start of the war, Russia had about 900,000 active military personnel across its forces, compared with Ukraine’s 196,600. But a massive influx of Western equipment and a stronger-than-expected Ukrainian offense has surprised observers.

“I, along with many other people, misjudged the Russian military capabilities before this war began. I thought that they were much better prepared for a war like this,” retired U.S. Army Brigadier General Kevin Ryan said in an interview. “This is a high-intensity war that they hoped would be over soon.”

Ryan has been closely watching the Russian military rebuild after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. From 1998 to 2000, he served as senior regional director for Slavic States in the Office of Secretary of Defense and, from 2001 to 2003, as defense attaché to Russia.

“I think there’s a very real tendency to overestimate the capability of an adversary, not just the Russians, or the Chinese or anybody else,” he said.

Ryan said that Russia invested heavily in modern precision weapons like cruise missiles in recent years. But the problem is that the Russians didn’t have sufficiently trained troops to carry out attacks in Ukraine.

When Russia began building up its forces around the borders of Ukraine in February, “I expected that those forces would work so that they would accomplish their goal not because the Ukrainians couldn’t fight but because the Russians were overwhelming with size,” Ryan said. “And that turned out to be wrong.”

Jeffrey Pryce, a former senior official in the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, where he negotiated nuclear disarmament agreements with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, said in an interview that Russia “had a huge amount” of combat power but “used it very, very badly.”

One fundamental problem for Russia was that it has failed to achieve air superiority in Ukraine, leaving its troops open to attack, Pryce said. “Even if they took an airfield, they didn’t provide air support to a very light unit, and then that unit got decimated,” he added.

Figuring out how a conflict will unfold is no easy task. In an interview, Susan Cho, a former U.S. Army officer who worked in intelligence, said that battles are not just a matter of weapons and personnel.

“There are other factors that play a huge role in determining the outcome of a battle, which include leadership, tactics, tempo, and troop morale—and these factors are much more difficult to estimate prior to an actual war,” Cho added.

The failure by U.S. and allied intelligence agencies to predict how the war in Ukraine would work out is hardly unique, pointed out Hugh Gusterson, an expert in nuclear and drone warfare and professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.

“Russian intelligence also got Ukraine wrong, repeating their disastrous errors back in 1979 when they told [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev that Soviet soldiers would be welcomed by Afghans (who proceeded to kill 15,000 Soviet soldiers before the Soviet Union gave up),” he added. “And U.S. intelligence failed to foresee the strength of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that defeated them.”

Gusterson said predictions about future wars are usually based on the experience of previous wars, but new wars are won by learning from past campaigns and innovating. “In this war, for example, the Ukrainians have made innovative use of drones—drones bought from Turkey and off-the-shelf commercial drones—but who could have predicted that?” he added.

Watch: Infighting between Russian troops leads to deadly friendly fire, reports say Ad: 0:12 0:15 https://s.yimg.com/rx/martini/builds/50810797/executor.htmlScroll back up to restore default view.

Also, Gusterson said intelligence agencies tend to see things from a distance. “They count weapons systems and soldiers under arms, and they repeat military judgments about the relative effectiveness of different weapons systems,” he added. “But wars are not just a contest between weapons systems and armies,” he said. “They are also won by tactical innovation, brilliant commanders, morale, stamina, and civilian solidarity.”

According to retired Lieutenant Colonel Hunter Ripley Rawlings IV, bureaucracy in the U.S. defense establishment may have contributed to the misjudgment of Russian forces.

“Having worked in the Pentagon, what happens is that people typically get lethargic, that here’s the same intelligence over and over again,” said Ripley, who now runs a nonprofit that provides equipment to Ukrainian troops. “It becomes kind of the drone in the background.”

Rawlings said that it’s unclear what would have been the material benefit if U.S. intelligence had foreseen the strength of the Russian invaders.

“What would we do with that information?” he added. “Well, we could galvanize and strengthen our allies. We could certainly place the 18th Airborne Corps into Poland, which we’ve done since the invasion commenced. But we weren’t going to defend Ukraine. We weren’t going to send men and tanks and materiel into Ukraine to defend them directly. They’ve become stronger allies, but I don’t know that we even saw them as allies. We saw them as on the fence.”

Rawlings said that U.S. intelligence underestimated the importance that drones would play in the war in Ukraine, leaving the Ukrainian forces without enough drones. To keep the supply of drones flowing, his nonprofit has been trying to send Western commercial drones to Ukraine through its neighbor of Poland.

“Poland has been one of our greatest allies and one of our biggest obstacles,” he said. “For a time, they were stopping anything that was remote-controlled.”

Russia Risks Knockout Blow in War as Putin Hits Rock Bottom

Laurence Pfeiffer, a longtime U.S. intelligence community insider whose career included stints as senior director of the White House Situation Room and chief of staff to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael V. Hayden, said the situation in Ukraine “appears to be a kind of a combination of, of a misjudgment of Russian military capability as well as a misjudgment of Ukrainian will and resolve.”

Pfeiffer said that defense establishment bureaucracy was part of the problem. “Your average bureaucrat is going to get rewarded for being conservative in their estimates as opposed to the opposite,” he added. “In other words, there’s a greater risk if I think that they can’t perform as capably as they’re advertising. So, therefore, the safer bet is to just go ahead and invest in a way that assumes that they have the capabilities that their advertising they have.”

Pryce said that there needs to be a reckoning on how the U.S. can better assess potential future conflicts.

“I’m sure that the intelligence community is engaging in a serious review of this,” he added “They’ve been asked by the Hill [to review the war in Ukraine], but they were engaged in it already. And so it’s one of the things that the intelligence community does is they’re constantly assessing, self-critiquing, evaluating, how well they did and how they can do better. And so, you know, I have no doubt that they’re doing a very serious job.”

One aspect of the intel community’s failure, is that the emphasis in recent decades has shifted towards fighting terrorism rather than clashes with global powers, as a result there is simply not as much of an obsession at the Pentagon or in Langley with tracking exactly how a potential superpower adversary will perform on the battlefield.

“There’s no question that from the time of the 9/11 attacks, for some years thereafter, there was an extremely heavy focus on counterinsurgency or operations, and also, just because of the deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, security policy and security resources are scarce,” Robert B. Murrett, a former senior intelligence official and vice admiral in the Navy, said in an interview. “And when you’re paying a lot of attention to one thing, it tends to degrade the amount of attention you’re paying to things like peer competitors.”

Russia inherited vast quantities of military supplies from the Soviet Union, but much of the equipment is outdated. Rawlings said that of the tanks in Russia’s vaunted First Guards Army, which is fighting in Ukraine, only about a quarter were modernized with modern night vision equipment and ballistic computers for accurate shooting.

“I was very surprised on the ground to see that it was that the Russian army was so far degraded in comparison with what I had expected,” he said.

Rawlings pointed out that President Putin announced in 2016 that he was modernizing the armed forces and proposed new tanks and weapons. But he said that U.S. intelligence failed to grasp how poorly Russian troops would perform on the ground.

Putin “designed new uniforms for his people, which is a lot of pomp and circumstance, but typically harkens the fact that they’re trying to reinvigorate the personnel, and then made a big show of talking about how unit leaders had more autonomy. What we found out is that was the exact opposite.”

Rawlings, who travels regularly to Ukraine, said he has spoken to Ukrainian fighters who had been on the front and said they had never seen a Russian officer on the front line. The Russian officers “were so far removed from the conflict, that the only people that I’ve ever spoken to that ever talked to Russian officers were those that captured them, and they said those Russian officers were overwhelmed.”

With Russia making veiled threats about using nuclear weapons, intelligence agencies are scrambling to assess just how real the threat is. Also at issue is exactly how capable Russia’s nuclear forces are.

“I would like to think that there are a lot of people around D.C. right now completely recalibrating a lot of potentialities because of what we now know about the weakness of the Russian military,” Pfeiffer said. “I mean, they truly are appearing to be, you know, solely a nuclear power. And frankly, there’s a part of me that scratches my head and says, ‘If they’re this bad with everything else? Maybe they’re pretty bad with their nuclear?’”

While fighting is still going on in Ukraine, many U.S. military officials are pointing to China as a potential threat. “China is looking at this war and they’re seeing the same things we are,” Ryan said. They’re seeing a mistake. They’re seeing that they themselves probably anticipated the Russian military was going to be better and more successful than it did in the first. So they’re asking the same question, and they’re wondering what it is that we need to do differently.”

The U.S. needs to learn from lapses in Ukraine, said Stuart Kaufman, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware. The U.S. needs to rely less on technology to improve its intelligence assessments. “We’ve got great signals intelligence, and we’ve got great photo-reconnaissance,” he said. “What we need is more human intelligence to get at that the human side of military performance. That’s our weak spot.”

The New York Times

Artillery Is Breaking in Ukraine. It’s Becoming a Problem for the Pentagon.

John Ismay and Thomas Gibbons-Neff – November 26, 2022

WASHINGTON — Ukrainian troops fire thousands of explosive shells at Russian targets every day, using high-tech cannons supplied by the United States and its allies. But those weapons are burning out after months of overuse, or being damaged or destroyed in combat, and dozens have been taken off the battlefield for repairs, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

One-third of the roughly 350 Western-made howitzers donated to Kyiv are out of action at any given time, according to U.S. defense officials and others familiar with Ukraine’s defense needs.

Swapping out a howitzer’s barrel, which can be 20 feet long and weigh thousands of pounds, is beyond the capability of soldiers in the field and has become a priority for the Pentagon’s European Command, which has set up a repair facility in Poland.

Western-made artillery pieces gave Ukrainian soldiers a lifeline when they began running low on ammunition for their own Soviet-era howitzers, and keeping them in action has become as important for Ukraine’s allies as providing them with enough ammunition.

The effort to repair the weapons in Poland, which has not previously been reported, began in recent months. The condition of Ukraine’s weapons is a closely held matter among U.S. military officials, who declined to discuss details of the program.

“With every capability we give to Ukraine, and those our allies and partners provide, we work to ensure that they have the right maintenance sustainment packages to support those capabilities over time,” Lt. Cmdr. Daniel Day, a spokesperson for the U.S. European Command, said in a statement.

When the ammunition for Ukraine’s Soviet-era guns, which fire shells 152 mm in diameter, grew scarce shortly after the invasion, NATO-standard howitzers that fire 155 mm shells became some of Ukraine’s most important weapons, given the vast stockpiles of compatible shells held by Kyiv’s partners.

The Pentagon has sent 142 M777 howitzers to Ukraine, enough to outfit about eight battalions, the most recent tally of U.S. military aid to Ukraine shows. Ukrainian troops have used them to attack enemy troops with volleys of 155 mm shells, to target command posts with small numbers of precision-guided rounds and even to lay small anti-tank minefields.

Russia and Ukraine have struggled to meet the demand for artillery ammunition on the front. Russia has turned to North Korea for ordnance, and Ukraine has requested more shells from its allies.

The United States has shipped hundreds of thousands of rounds of 155 mm ammunition for Ukraine to fire in the largest barrages on the European continent since World War II and has committed to providing nearly 1 million of the shells in all from its own inventory and private industry.

Ukrainian forces have also received 155 mm shells from countries besides the United States. Some of those shells and propellant charges had not been tested for use in certain howitzers, and the Ukrainian soldiers have found out in combat that some of them can wear out barrels more quickly, according to U.S. military officials.

After the damaged howitzers arrive in Poland, maintenance crews can change out the barrels and make other repairs. Ukrainian officials have said they would like to bring those maintenance sites closer to the front lines, so that the guns can be returned to combat sooner, the U.S. officials and other people said.

The work on the howitzers is overseen by U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany but may soon fall under a new command that will focus on training and equipping Ukrainian troops.

“It’s not altogether surprising that there are maintenance issues with these weapons,” said Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “They didn’t get a full training package for them and then were thrown into the fight, so you are going to get a lot of wear and tear.”

The Western artillery weapons provided to Ukraine, in the form of rocket launchers and howitzers, have sharply different maintenance needs. Of the former, HIMARS vehicles need little work to keep firing their ammunition, which is contained in pods of preloaded tubes. But howitzers are essentially large firearms that are reloaded with ammunition — shells weighing about 90 pounds each — and fired many hundreds or thousands of times, which eventually takes a toll on the cannon’s internal parts.

The nature of the artillery duels, in which Ukrainian crews often fire from extremely long distances to make Russian counterattacks more difficult, places additional strain on the howitzers. The larger propellant charges required to do that produce much more heat and can cause gun barrels to wear out more quickly.

Currently, Ukrainian forces are firing 2,000 to 4,000 artillery shells a day, a number frequently outmatched by the Russians. Over time, that pace has caused problems for Ukrainian soldiers using M777 howitzers, such as shells not traveling as far or as accurately.

Some of the issues can be traced, in part, to the howitzer’s design. Built largely with titanium, which is lighter than steel but just as strong, the weapon is easier to move on the battlefield and quicker to set up than earlier guns — a clear advantage for the United States when it began using the M777 in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s.

In those wars, unlike in Ukraine, the M777 was generally used to fire small numbers of shells in support of troops.

The United States did, however, get a glimpse of what might happen to Ukraine’s M777 howitzers five years ago, during the campaign to defeat the Islamic State group.

In 2017, a Marine artillery battery from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina deployed to Syria with four M777 guns and fired more than 23,000 rounds of 155 mm ammunition in five months of supporting combat operations in Raqqa — nearly 55 times what a typical battery of that size would normally fire in a year of peacetime training.

As a result, three of the battery’s howitzers had to be removed because of excessive wear over the course of that deployment and were replaced with guns held in reserve in Kuwait.

When one of the howitzers went down, the others simply fired more, an option the Ukrainians are forced to choose daily.

Associated Press

Russia steps up missile barrage of recaptured Ukrainian city

Sam Mednick – November 25, 2022

KHERSON, Ukraine (AP) — Natalia Kristenko’s dead body lay covered in a blanket in the doorway of her apartment building for hours overnight. City workers were at first too overwhelmed to retrieve her as they responded to a deadly barrage of attacks that shook Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson.

The 62-year-old had walked outside her home with her husband Thursday evening after drinking tea when the building was struck. Kristenko was killed instantly from a wound to the head. Her husband died hours later in the hospital from internal bleeding.

“Russians took the two most precious people from me,” their bereft daughter, Lilia Kristenko, 38, said, clutching her cat inside her coat as she watched on in horror Friday as responders finally arrived to transport her mother to the morgue.

“They lived so well, they lived differently,” she told The Associated Press. “But they died in one day.”

A salvo of missiles struck the recently liberated city of Kherson for the second day Friday in a marked escalation of attacks since Russia withdrew from the city two weeks ago following an eight-month occupation. It comes as Russia has stepped up bombardment of Ukraine’s power grid and other critical civilian infrastructure in a bid to tighten the screw on Kyiv. Officials estimate that around 50% of Ukraine’s energy facilities have been damaged in the recent strikes.

The Ukrainian governor of Kherson, Yaroslav Yanushevych, said Friday that Russian shelling attacks killed 10 civilians and wounded 54 others the previous day, with two neighborhoods in the city of Kherson coming “under massive artillery fire.”

The Russian shelling of parts of the Kherson region recently recaptured by Kyiv compelled authorities to transfer hospital patients to other areas, Yanushevych said.

Some children were taken to the southern city of Mykolayiv, and some psychiatric patients went to the Black Sea port of Odesa, which is also under Ukrainian control, Yanushevych wrote on Telegram.

“I remind you that all residents of Kherson who wish to evacuate to safer regions of Ukraine can contact the regional authorities,” he said.

Soldiers in the region had warned that Kherson would face intensified strikes as Russian troops dig in across the Dnieper River.

Scores of people were injured in the strikes that hit residential and commercial buildings, lighting some on fire, blowing ash into the air and littering the streets with shattered glass. The attacks wrought destruction on some residential neighborhoods not previously hit in the war that has just entered its tenth month.

After Kristenko’s parents were hit, she tried to call an ambulance but there was no phone network, she said. Her 66-year-old father was clutching his abdominal wound and screaming “it hurts so much I’m doing to die,” she said. He eventually was taken by ambulance to the hospital but died during surgery.

On Friday morning people sifted through what little remained of their destroyed houses and shops. Containers of food lined the floor of a shattered meat store, while across the street customers lined up at a coffee shop where residents said four people died the night before.

“I don’t even know what to say, it was unexpected,” said Diana Samsonova, who works at the coffee shop, which remained open throughout Russia’s occupation and has no plans to close despite the attacks.

Later in the day, a woman was killed, likely from a rocket that hit a grassy patch nearby. Her motionless body lay on the side of the road. The violence is compounding what’s become a dire humanitarian crisis. As Russians retreated, they destroyed key infrastructure, leaving people with little water and electricity.

People have become so desperate they’re finding some salvation amid the wreckage. Outside an apartment building that was badly damaged, residents filled buckets with water that pooled on the ground. Workers at the morgue used puddles to clean their bloody hands.

Valerii Parkhomenko had just parked his car and gone into a coffee shop when a rocket destroyed his vehicle.

“We were all crouching on the floor inside,” he said, showing the ash on his hands. “I feel awful, my car is destroyed, I need this car for work to feed my family,” he said.

Outside shelled apartment buildings residents picked up debris and frantically searched for relatives while paramedics helped the injured.

“I think it’s so bad and I think all countries need to do something about this because it’s not normal,” said Ivan Mashkarynets, a man in his early 20s who was at home with his mother when the apartment block next to him was struck.

“There’s no army, there’s no soldiers. There are just people living here and they’re (still) firing,” he said.

Kherson’s population has dwindled to around 80,000 from its prewar level near 300,000. The government has said it will help people evacuate if they want to, but many say they have no place to go.

“There is no work (elsewhere), there is no work here,” said Ihor Novak as he stood on a street examining the aftermath of the shelling. “For now, the Ukrainian army is here and with them we hope it will be safer.”

Mstyslav Chernov and Bernat Armangue in Kherson contributed reporting.