Kursk And Pokrovsk: Dueling Campaigns
While Ukraine's incursion into Kursk continues to gain ground, Moscow's most successful summer effort is moving relatively quickly, for an orc operation. Is Syrskyi plotting another surprise?
Intro
The past week has seen Ukraine’s bold operation in Kursk solidify into a lasting occupation of ruscist turf. Putin has not given up on advancing in Ukraine, however, with the important hub of Pokrovsk in danger.
I was right where the so-called “experts” were wrong about Ukraine launching a major offensive this year instead of waiting until 2025. We’ll see if I’m right about Pokrovsk being a trap for the orcs.
In the first section I’ll offer a brief look at the past week. The second will compare the Kursk and Pokrovsk fronts, addressing how linked they really are. Finally I’ll go over key international developments while briefly laying out an alternate view of the science of International Relations that is sure to annoy everyone with a PhD in that or an adjacent field.
The hazard of a rogue scholar is that they feel zero compunction about lifting the shroud over the con artists masquerading as wizards in their grand Emerald City (and that is the one classic Americana reference you’ll get out of me). The Ivory Tower is an eternal struggle for resources like any other human system, and where there is no accountability scam artists will prowl.
Please note that I am not calling into question all scientific fields. Those that produce readily verifiable output - especially in engineering form - are generally pretty self-correcting. Few charlatans can get away with pretending that removing the roof from a house will have no impact on its function.
It’s a lot easier to pretend that the world is split into Team Democracy and Team Autocracy - your own side, of course, being the designated Good Guys bound to win through the grace of the divine in this tall tale. Even when members of your side act an awful lot like Putin.
And as for him… his war, as you might have heard, isn’t going all that well. Though I hear a new superweapon has been developed: a Tesla cybertruck with an ancient machine gun trapped to the back, courtesy of Kadyrov’s crew.
Shoot, Ukraine is certain to lose, now. Especially if Musk straps in and rides to Donbas. And people think that conman would ever have the intestinal fortitude to travel to Mars…
Weekly Review
Since I’ll spend most of the following section explicitly comparing Kursk and Pokrovsk, a brief summary will suffice despite these being the two hottest areas. Long story short, they should be seen as linked in a strategic sense, though you aren’t going to see an immediate impact on orc efforts in occupied Ukraine.
Moscow seems to be handling each front as its own separate franchise. The resources needed to sustain the offensives in Donbas for the next few weeks have already been allocated; Moscow is moving reserve formations that weren’t scheduled to be used for a while.
There will be a visible slowing of ruscist operations in Ukraine down the line. But it will likely entail Moscow taking reserves from every front except Pokrovsk in order to maintain the impression that it can take the town.
In Kursk, the past week has, as expected, seen Ukraine’s foothold firm up and expand. Ukrainian troops are there to stay, currently working to defeat incoming ruscist reinforcements as they arrive to prevent Moscow from establishing a consolidated front. This lets Ukrainian troops isolate ruscist positions instead of assault them directly.
The operation is about to finish its second week, and Ukraine is on the brink of securing an even wider chunk of the border, a front nearly 100km long. It appears that ruscist troops south of the Seym river are now almost totally cut off thanks to Ukraine dropping several bridges. With Ukrainian forces pushing along Moscow’s main defense line guarding Glushkovo, a border town about the same size as Sudzha, an orc withdrawal north this coming week looks inevitable.
It might not do them much good, though, as bloggers report Ukraine’s 82nd Air Assault brigade breaking through east of Korenovo and Tolpino, threatening to cut the ruscist troops in this area from Rylsk. That district center is also apparently under growing threat, with Centre for Defence Studies reporting Ukrainian scout teams laying ambushes along the highway between Rylsk and L’gov. I have to conclude that Ukraine really does hope to take Rylsk before the offensive runs out of steam.
On the eastern wing of the salient Ukrainian forces punched out a bit farther than I would have expected, securing positions near Giri and Belitsa, though one advance company got beat up in the process. Over the past week Ukraine has expanded the border breach by 20km and seized the original ruscist defense line built in the area - no doubt it will become a base for the subsequent defense of the territory.
Down in Pokrovsk, the battlefield looks very different. Setting aside the universe of difference in the relative pace of advance, it is definitely a bad thing that the orcs have managed to push another five kilometers along the railway that links Avdiivka and Pokrovsk. Another half a dozen villages in the region have fallen, and the enemy has reached the E-50 highway at a point overlooking the town of Selydove.
It would be wrong to downplay the severity of the situation here. Key brigades in the fight, including 47th Mechanized, 68th Jager (from a German term meaning ‘hunting’ that is generally applied to tough light infantry), and 25th Airborne, have fought a six-month phased withdrawal from the Durna river to the Vovcha river.
But this was their mission - not to bleed for ground, but to kill as many orcs and destroy as much of their equipment as possible. The Kursk operation makes it clear that Ukraine has deliberately economized in the Pokrovsk sector, not dispatching a lot of reinforcements to slow the enemy advance. The reason? In this kind of fight, the closer Moscow gets to Pokrovsk the more damage Ukraine will be able to inflict.
I’ll save a more detailed explanation for below. Moscow has not yet given up hope of advancing on other fronts, and has continued to launch attacks across Ukraine.
The second hottest sector of late is one often overlooked despite the ferocious battles Ukrainian troops continue to wage. Moscow has spent the past two years trying to push Ukrainian forces away from Volnovakha, an absolutely vital logistics node for occupied Ukraine west of Mariupol. I would go so far as to assert that if Ukraine can seize this town, victory is assured; the only reason Ukraine focused on Tokmak and Melitopol in 2023 is that Volnovakha is close enough to Mariupol and Donetsk and far from Kyiv, making the logistics balance tougher.
But that doesn’t mean Moscow isn’t afraid of its forces collapsing here at some point like they did in Kharkiv and were about to in Kherson before they pulled back over the Dnipro in 2022. 72nd Mechanized, and 79th Air Assault, along with 33rd Mechanized at the start of 2024 and the 31st after it was pulled off the Pokrovsk front a month back, plus Territorial Defense Brigades like the 116th and 105th and chopped battalions, have performed admirably. Here Moscow has even attempted mass mechanized assaults now and again using dozens of vehicles at once. Still Ukrainian troops have withdrawn at a glacial pace, the situation difficult but never catastrophic.
It is to be hoped that this front is one of the first to benefit from reserves flowing to Kursk and Pokrovsk. Moscow’s results have rarely matched the cost here and the main logistics thoroughfare to the key town of Vuhledar is still well behind the front line. However, these brigades have been fighting without much relief for a long time. They’ve got to go into the operational reserve to recover eventually - and hopefully get more modern gear, of which neither has enough considering their obvious skill.
The situation in Toretsk is similar to Vuhledar: not great, but reasonably under control. Here Moscow has made some more notable progress, largely thanks to Ukraine slowly pulling its troops behind the main defensive barriers around the town. With this area being so difficult to protect from glide bomb strikes and close to the large urban agglomeration of occupied Horlivka, as on the Pokrovsk front Ukraine can’t cling too tightly to fixed positions.
Niu-York has almost fallen (the orcs have taken New York!) while Nelipivka is under attack. Ukraine faces ruscist troops linking the spearheads that punched into Pivdenne and Niu-York meeting, but the enemy will then have to either move across open country west of Toretsk or secure a broad forest belt. Either way, a series of spoil heaps offering excellent views over the area have to be taken, and even if Moscow is able to push troops up to Dzerzhinsky street they have a dense nest of high rise concrete structures to deal with.
In time, Moscow can reduce Toretsk to rubble. But it’s going to take months and a lot of bodies, which will become increasingly scarce by the end of summer.
On the Kharkiv, Kupiansk, Chasiv Yar, Siversk, and Dnipro fronts Moscow has attempted to maintain a constant grind of offensive operations that Ukraine is mostly repelling without too much trouble. The intensity of fighting in Kharkiv appears to be most directly affected by the Kursk operation, with the reserves Ukraine was said to be building up for a counterattack here mostly appearing in Kursk.
The orcs appear to be moving their own operational reserves allocated to this front due east to slow Ukraine’s advance. While highly unlikely, there is a technically a risk of Ukraine breaking through to attack Belgorod from the Kursk salient. Moscow pretty much has to throw whatever it has into stabilizing the front line between Kursk and Belgorod.
Chasiv Yar is still seeing bitter fighting along the canal to the west, but so far the orcs have not held more than a foothold beyond. In Siversk ruscist troops continue to press 10th Mountain Brigade and 54th Mechanized, with 81st Airmobile up in Bilohorivka (that region’s town with that name, since every Ukrainian district seems to have at least one), but making only minor progress. In Kupiansk the orcs are still creeping towards the Oskil near Pishchane, but appear to be mostly stuck in a canyon with Ukrainian troops shooting at them from two sides.
Attacks along the Azov Front continue, but are more scattered than in the past. Most of Moscow’s operations near the Dnipro aim to eliminate a lesser-known Ukrainian bridgehead still maintained by at least one Marine Corps brigade. Haven’t heard from a couple of those in a while and Ukraine was raising a third, and 21st Mechanized seems to have been quiet too. I expect Ukraine still has 4-6 brigades in reserve that will commit to a fight in September.
It appears that the biggest immediate beneficiary of Ukraine’s push into Kursk has been anyone near a target orc glide bombs or Iskander ballistic missiles might hit. Glide bomb attacks have been kept fairly close to the front thanks to Ukraine apparently scattering Patriots in assault mode - two launchers with command and power vehicles receiving radar data from the broader network.
Shahed drones and the occasional small missile strike have been noted in Ukraine’s interior, and it seems likely that Moscow is building up for a big revenge attack. But right now the priority seems to be hitting what Ukrainian units the crippled drone surveillance network Moscow relies on can actually locate. And, of course, decoys.
Air defense systems are coming under fire too, but that’s partly a function of how many Ukraine appears to have moved in or near Kursk. I’d bet that Patriot systems are in place near Sumy, and Buk launchers converted to fire Sea Sparrow missiles have been destroyed, implying more are around. One Su-34 was reported downed in Kursk, a pattern that will hopefully repeat.
Ukraine’s own long range strike campaign continues to deliver. Four air bases supporting Putin’s war on Ukraine were reportedly struck by drones, ATACMS strikes are still battering Crimea, and not a week goes by that an oil refinery somewhere in russia doesn’t take a hit.
Aside from inflicting a steady drip of damage and interfering with operations, this forces Moscow to spread its air defenses thin. And ideally away from the front, where Ukraine’s aviators are braving the hazards posed by orc interceptors and SAM systems to deliver bombs inside of russia proper.
Another veteran MiG-29 pilot was recently lost, though. This raises the question of whether Ukraine’s F-16s will need to begin flying close escort, using their jamming pods to protect other jets.
One of the most important elements of a U.S. Navy carrier air wing is the EA-18G Growler, a dedicated electronic warfare variant of the Super Hornet that can also pack a few air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. Truth be told, Growlers paired with role-specific drones, not white elephants like the F-35 or Moscow’s Su-57, are probably the future of aviation.
An F-16 carrying the right pods can act like a Growler, creating an electronic shroud that should improve the survivability of Su-27 and MiG-29 jets toting JDAMs and HAMMERS. Of course, a squadron of actual Growlers would be better. But the US is clearly using the training pipeline as a channel of control over the development of Ukraine’s air power, so 20 F-16s and 40 pilots by the end of the year is all Ukraine will receive in the short run. Maybe half a dozen Mirage 2000s.
I’ve been arguing for a full year now that Ukraine would launch a new counteroffensive in 2024, despite nearly all western experts insisting that Kyiv would wait until 2025, not only because makes simple military sense but because setting the expectation of an earlier offensive adds urgency to the case for speeding aid. The lead time to get anything significant done in a western bureaucracy is at least a year.
Kursk and Pokrovsk: Two Different Varieties Of Trap
The connection between the Kursk and Pokrovsk fronts is not the fact that either side has too few resources to commit to halting the other’s progress. They are twins because both involve Ukraine forcing Moscow to act in a manner contrary to its own interest.
Putting it bluntly, Ukraine is literally putting a leash on Moscow’s combat power, guiding it where Ukraine prefers. Ukraine isn’t in control of what Moscow does on any given front, but Kyiv can calibrate the relative resource burn to ensure the exchange rate goes in its favor.
It does this by forcing the orcs to fight in the worst possible conditions. In Kursk Ukraine threatens vital logistics routes to make Moscow deploy troops in a predictable way, allowing for their isolation. In Pokrovsk, Ukraine only holds firm at a line until the difficulty of doing so rises past a threshold, at which point it deliberately cedes ground while inflicting as much damage in the process.
I can’t think of a better way to illustrate the defects in standard-grade category obsessed western thinking, which wants to label everything then presume that automatically constrains behavior. Offense, defense - these are relative postures chosen after taking into consideration tactical, operational, and strategic factors, not distinct forms of warfare. The real question is how far you’re trying to operate from your support base and how fast each side can react to changes in the others’ disposition. Geography structures everything.
If I’m planning to fend off an offensive that aims to reach Pokrovsk from Avdiivka, there are two key defensive lines I want to hang onto if I can. The first runs along the Vovcha, but it has a weak point above the Vovcha headwaters where the railway runs. The next ideal line runs roughly between the two ridges that host the M-30 and H-32 highways, 10-15km to the west of the Pokrovsk outskirts.
The advantage of this second line, aside from being well within artillery range of Pokrovsk, is the presence of three settlements around the size of Ocheretyne: Hrodivka, Novohrodivka, and Selydove. Each will make excellent defensive satellites, able to host a thousand soldiers in basements with easy access to the front line on the nearby ridge. There are a lot of targets for the glide bombs to remove.
To the immediate south, the Ukrainsk-Kurakhivka line isn’t even under threat, 59th Motorized and 117th Territorial Brigades maintaining positions well to the west of the Vovcha. That should allow Ukrainian troops to make the orc salient from Prohress to Zhelanne a truly vicious cauldron. If I’m right, this was Syrskyi’s plan for this sector.
He appears to have finally gotten it through the heads of the people running the whole show in Kyiv that it isn’t worth sacrificing lives over untenable ground. I don’t think the whole Butcher moniker was ever justified - the extended fight in Bakhmut was probably a political choice that went against his advice, given how he appears to fight when left to his own devices. Snow Leopard fits him better.
I suspect that Syrskyi is one of those commanders who is always up to something on an angle you aren’t paying attention to. Rather than respond to crises, he tries to produce some of his own.
The fact that the Pokrovsk sector is not receiving substantial reinforcements looks like a sign of Syrskyi’s overall approach. It’s very, very hard to stop a ruscist steamroller once it gets going. The entire Soviet operational paradigm (Deep Battle, as some call it, though like Blitzkrieg it’s an artifact of historians compressing years of iterative development along a common trajectory) is geared towards this end.
The tried and true method for beating Soviet methods is to let most of the firepower fall on undefended ground. A thin line of scattered forward outposts contains just enough combat power to force the enemy to deploy a substantial force to safely force them out. As soon as possible after making contact, the initial defense line is abandoned, letting fire support make the other side pay for exposing themselves.
Unfortunately, because of the need to rest personnel who have been in the fight for over two years straight, Ukraine has had to press cooks, clerks, and other folks who have spent the war working sustainment positions into combat roles. With fourteen brigades supposedly being prepared for action, most of the new recruits from the expanded draft as well as the veterans needed to train and lead them are unlikely in play.
The Kursk campaign is almost certainly the first of a series, the next hitting once Syrskyi has decided to stabilize the front in Kursk and swaps out assault troops for fresh infantry brigades. By mid-September I would expect Ukraine to be mostly digging in, preparing to absorb attacks by the tens of thousands of ruscist troops it wants to draw there.
Pokrovsk, on the other hand, seems set to involve weeks of forcing the enemy to pay dearly for every block in the outlying towns. It’s possible that Ukraine will (or be forced to) mount a defense closer to the town, but that’s a big risk since inbound logistics shipments will be vulnerable to enemy fire.
Another very real possibility is that Ukraine will release a force of four to six brigades to launch a counterattack on the orc’s 25km northern flank. That Moscow has not attempted to push Ukraine back here would seem to imply strong Ukrainian defenses it would rather not tackle. If a month from now Ukraine moves to assert drone superiority with success, a counteroffensive aimed at Ocheretyne could threaten to cut the orcs west of the Vovcha off as illustrated above.
If I were in Syrskyi’s position and I had any hope at all of engineering this, I’d try it instead of throwing reserves in to slow a steamroller that’s putting itself in an ideal position for a counterattack. Retaking Avdiivka would secure useful positions that Ukraine had to leave before they were completely annihilated because it ran out of shells.
By striking in Kursk, Ukraine has created a front that Moscow simply can’t ignore. Unlike the others across occupied Ukraine, Putin won’t be able to just freeze the battlefield and ignore it, secure in the knowledge that it’s fortified enough that Ukraine can’t break through more than a few kilometers.
Although there isn’t a good reason for Ukraine to seize the Kursk nuclear power plant, that it could is meant to weigh on Putin’s mind. Hence the return of claims that Ukraine might launch dirty bomb attacks, a revival of the nuclear escalation scenario -just about the only realistic one - that Putin’s people started pushing after Kherson fell. Putin wants the west to believe that he’ll try a dirty bomb attack, blame it on Ukraine, then have an excuse to retaliate with a real nuke without losing Chinese support.
This doesn’t get him anything, though, so it remains highly improbable. Nuclear threats emanating from the Kremlin are just part of Putin’s con. They only work because western leaders want them to. They’ll take any excuse to drag this war out.
Western experts are determined to present Ukraine’s offensive into Kursk as a desperate gamble when it is perfectly logical. Once you accept that Ukraine can and should fight wherever it can generate an advantage, attacking across the international border beyond occupied Ukraine makes sense if it forces Moscow to fight where it would rather not.
It’s apparent that the political class in the USA is not pleased with developments, though it can’t exactly criticize Ukraine openly without looking craven, at least not until it can be blamed for some setback down the line. This is why journalists who rely on maintaining a relationship with government officials to get access to alleged insider information have chosen to tell the story of the Kursk Campaign as one of Ukraine making a bold but perhaps foolhardy bet. That point in the legend where the hero might have taken a step too far.
Every military offensive is a dangerous gamble because so much can go wrong and human lives are at stake. A lot ultimately will go wrong, and if you aren’t thoroughly prepared the adaptive capacity of all involved can be swamped with fatal results.
Ukraine’s Kursk campaign has so far been a model of caution. Ukraine amassed substantially more soldiers close to target over a period of two months than Moscow had ready to defend on short notice. They carefully scouted the region and rehearsed the essential first phases of the operation. By cutting the US out of the planning loop, Ukraine preserved operational security, as Moscow sincerely believes that Ukrainians can’t act without US direction.
I sincerely doubt that the United States Army could pull off what Ukraine did without total air superiority, something impossible against a true peer threat, to use the Pentagon’s favored lingo. Sorry folks, but after twenty years of counterinsurgency followed by a determined effort by the bureaucracy to imagine that it’s 1950 again, you might as well get rid of the active duty Army and rely solely on a properly funded National Guard. Let the Marine Corps handle high intensity ground operations overseas and give Ukraine all the Army’s gear.
The trouble with the American military mainly resides at the higher levels, where it effectively merges with the arms industry thanks to the revolving door between the Pentagon and major companies. Like Ukraine - and the U.S. Armed Forces in World War Two - after the start of any major conflict the establishment will have to go through a painful process of shedding the dead weight that clings to any organization not subjected to proper accountability. It might not last long enough to get the chance.
Unfortunately, the media is tightly embedded in this system thanks to intensive Pentagon outreach after the Vietnam war. Pretty much the only defense coverage you’ll find is either insider navel-gazing like War on the Rocks or outright sponsored technophilia like The War Zone. That leads to an information ecosystem that apparently can’t comprehend exactly what Ukraine is doing in Kursk and why the move is such elegant brilliance.
It is a mistake to contrast Kursk and Pokrovsk without laying out the true link between them. Putin has to both repel Ukraine’s Kursk campaign and make progress in Donbas on at least one front. This forces Moscow to burn resources at an incredible rate. Putin is repeating the mistakes of mid 2022, his empire following a declining power curve while Ukraine’s keeps gaining strength despite wishy-washy western allies.
Ukraine has to destroy the enemy’s combat power, and that can be done on enemy territory, using their own defense lines - cool. Reduction of Putin’s military strength is the prerequisite to meaningful negotiations because only when Putin can’t continue the war will he withdraw to guard his vulnerable throne. The faster we get there, the sooner the nightmare can be over for everyone. The longer it takes, the more people on both sides have to die and the worse the secondary consequences will be.
Failing to send Ukraine all the gear and ammunition that it can absorb is enabling Putin’s attempted genocide. It’s also stupidly self-destructive, evidence of the hard truth that the leaders of the western world don’t want Ukraine to win and never have.
Yet Ukraine keeps dragging them towards that very place because it has no other choice. That’s not going to stop, no matter how snippy the coverage of Ukraine and Zelensky gets.
Geopolitics: Why The West Fears Victory In Ukraine
It’s been interesting these past couple weeks watching the steady drip of news pieces in the US press emerge to imply that Ukraine’s offensive into russia was a mistake. Talks meant to stop attacks on energy infrastructure were allegedly canned, as are any hope of ceasefire negotiations in the near term. All of a sudden the Pentagon is dangling fancy JASSM missiles to Ukraine when it’s pretty much guaranteed that delivery will be delayed time and again or become a partisan football.
Then there’s the implication in so much of the characterization of Ukraine’s campaign in Kursk that those wild Ukrainians might actually be a little crazy. Again, it’s subtle, but the techniques are the same deployed when an influential person in the USA is accused of abusing their wife. It’s too much trouble to pursue until someone gets murdered.
US media coverage of the entire campaign has been rife with negging lately, a tactic used to win a debate by casting so much doubt on an opponent that all of their ideas appear unsupportable. It often takes the form of some supposed expert offering a laundry list of reasons why any proposed action will be difficult or could run into problems. It’s a psychological game, the goal being to make the opponent look unprepared or unreasonable and thereby condemn anything they advocate for.
Negging is a common power play you see across American society, especially when a plan might jeopardize someone’s interests. America has become a stakeholder oligarchy where a seat at the table is power because it means you can slow or veto any policy that makes you nervous. The one rule is never to upend the table itself by rocking any boats too hard.
This is one of the major vehicles for defeating policy proposals disliked by influential types in the US political machine. It’s notable how until around September of 2022 Ukraine could do no wrong and NATO aid, along with Putin running out of missiles or dying of natural causes, was set to liberate Crimea any day. Then, once Ukraine proved that it can actually win this thing and bring down Putin, American leaders got real anxious.
People often see the weird way the American policy system operates as evidence of conspiracy, but the truth is far duller. The market for information isn’t necessarily about producing quality goods, but the perception thereof. Effecting a conspiracy is hard; getting lots of people to believe what they already would prefer to is much more straightforward. Create an environment where certain kinds of beliefs are more acceptable than others and you gain tremendous sway over pubic discourse.
Luckily for propagandists around the world, people’s perception of information often matters more than anything else. In addition, if enough people say that something is true, for the purposes of broader society it is. Belief can have material consequences - take that, false philosophical dichotomy between moral and material!
It’s routine for historians to talk about blitzkrieg, for example, without mentioning that the term was concocted by an American and applied to way of fighting war that the Germans never actually practiced. But the spectacular defeat of the French and British in 1940 was a shock of the sort that requires public explanation: admitting that these two global colonial powers were actually out-thought and out-fought by a force with inferior strength was not popular after the war was won.
So the simple speed of the German advance to the Channel was conveniently taken as evidence the Germans had invented a radical new method of waging war. Better to lose to that than because of what amounted to professional malpractice by a generation of military and political leaders.
Small wonder people believe in conspiracy theories when so much of what is called history proves to be thinly veiled mythology. Now, consider why people really consume news. Yes, most of us share a natural desire to learn about the world, but do we seek out and pay for sources that give us the full, unvarnished scientific truth? Nah, because that’s boring for most folks. I appreciate that so many people get something out of this blog, but most never will, because it’s work for most people to read this.
If you want to talk about contrasts rooted in distorted perception, look no further than the ongoing disparity between how the USA treats aid for Ukraine and Israel. Note how one country’s military operations leave total devastation despite its enemy’s lack of ability to inflict the same degree of pain, while the other genuinely follows the laws governing the humane conduct of war?
I get that people are still being killed, but rules like taking every precaution to avoid civilian casualties are all that really separate one combatant from another. This claim has nothing to do with so-called Just War Theory, which is just another way of saying that authorities in the USA get to decide what’s Just for them to do to everybody else. It’s a simple statement of human nature: most of us reject the side that does the greatest visible harm. The root of why many people are so angry about what Israel is doing in Gaza is outrage at the needless death of children, not antisemitism.
What’s antisemitic is to think that Israel can behave like this while claiming to be acting on behalf of Jewish people everywhere without putting them in danger. Whatever your justification, if you act like a monster, people will treat you like one. And sorry, fellow Americans, but this quasi-sacred alliance with Israel only goes one way. It became obsolete and a serious security liability to boot long ago, mostly thanks to Israel’s total disregard for the laws of war.
Inside the USA, pro-Israel lobbyist groups actively work to subvert Americans’ First Amendment rights and attack politicians they don’t agree with in a way that Putin or Xi’s agents could only ever dream with their deceptive Facebook ads (are there any other kind?). Yet does the media care? Nope - and so it does Putin a service. His buddy Netanyahu too.
Meanwhile there’s Ukraine. Setting aside the moral case, because American leaders clearly set American (unless you live in Ukraine or russia grabbed you) and Israeli lives above all others, Ukraine is destroying billions of dollars worth of hardware the US would otherwise have to spent trillions over the next couple decades keeping ready to deter or defeat. Now, I don’t think for a second that the USA has what it takes to fight or win a war any more nor will again. It’s merely a brand, now. But the Pentagon plans to pretend otherwise, as I suppose it must, and so the fact of the matter is that harm done to Putin’s war machine and industry now is a net gain for American national security for decades to come.
It stands to be asked - what is the root of this gross disparity? Why the outrageous double standard on support for Ukraine and Israel? How is it somehow tolerable that Ukraine must fight with limits on how far it can shoot missiles into the territory of an aggressor that kills civilians nearly every day while Israel can slaughter tens of thousands of Palestinians?
For the same reason why if you believe that governments around the world are ever going to tackle climate change, pandemics, or poverty with the tenacity required to avert a billion or so unnecessary deaths between now and the middle of the century, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona to sell you. It’s also the reason why western leaders are terrified of Victory in Ukraine.
The tragedy of global governance is that there isn’t any to speak of. What so many professors and pundits call the “liberal international order” or some flavor thereof is a theory, not reality. So is the construct of Western Civilization, just like the Global South and East. They’re both really just fairy tales, part of a belief system preached by politicians on television and professors at esteemed universities because it sounds nice to people on the right side of the metaphorical divide.
All countries, whether the regimes that rule them are democratic or autocratic, focused on expansion or development, are basically the same. They’re self-reproducing social organisms, amounting to little more than claims to power that people within them tolerate so long as they provide certain useful services.
Anyone who has lived through the end of the Cold War, War on Terror, and now the seemingly inexorable movement to Cold War 2.0 has been subjected to a wildly distorted storyline about how geopolitics operates. There is no contest between autocracy and democracy, no confrontation between East and West with the South caught in the middle. There’s just an array of a couple hundred countries big and small - many of the larger ones like russia, the USA, and India set to become multiple countries themselves - all working their way through the wreckage of the European colonial system.
It takes a long time for some historical trends to play out. In 1900, almost the entire world was claimed by a European colonial power or a country that once was a colony. Since the Europeans blew that up, the number of countries has grown. Empires are obsolete and unmanageable, relics of a dying era. They always have been, but even more so now.
Nobody told the leaders of russia or the USA, though, and possibly not India or China either. Same is true of a fair few American CEOs. Some countries, autocratic or democratic, are oriented towards expansion because the regime in charge sees this posture as serving its desire to amass more power. However, a country’s actions are always taken in consideration of the likely effects, including the response of other countries - especially more powerful ones.
And so geopolitics takes the form of a dance, members of regimes coming to see themselves as a kind of community. And so they are, because they’re made up of people facing similar challenges, so they develop a common language. Most have less freedom of action than they pretend, but the actions that are taken tend to have a lot of inertia, used as signals to calibrate future behavior long down the line.
Those involved also tend to see themselves as distinct from the rest of us, their sacred knowledge too complicated for ordinary mortals to comprehend. So they tell us all stories, often simplistic ones designed to boost someone’s interests.
The simplistic Cold War 2.0 narrative that so many embrace is a deliberate branding effort meant to lock in decades of wasted military spending on equipment that’s already functionally obsolete and employed using doctrine that’s even more so. What Eisenhower called the Military-Industrial Complex is now the Military-Industrial-Media Machine, a self-reproducing organism that thrives on delivering the perception of military value.
Woe unto it if it’s ever truly tested. Putin’s failures on the road to Kyiv were foretold by the US failure to beat insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan, though Putin drew entirely the wrong lesson.
America’s MIMM is an alliance of giant defense and technology companies who employ politicians and pundits to conduct nonstop cognitive and information warfare designed to keep an exceptionally lucrative status quo going forever. Virtually identical to the alliance between Industry and State that hollowed out the USSR, it will continue eating away at USA by diverting 50% or more of all federal discretionary funding - the stuff Congress can actually play with - to a set of institutions that would probably lose to Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade if it tried to conquer the world in a few years.
After spending decades pretending that US power is everywhere and impossible to resist, sucking up trillions of taxpayer dollars, the beneficiaries of the most epic con in human history are loathe to give up what they have. Their objective is to do everything possible to make it 1992 for as long as possible.
This includes, I’m afraid to say, refusing to hand Ukraine all the equipment it needs or the license to use it as it chooses. There’s always going to be another new effort to quietly press Ukraine to accept that Putin isn’t going away and because he’s so darn set on it Ukraine will have to give up Crimea.
That pathetic plan simply isn’t going to work. As much as Ukraine’s Kursk campaign has shattered the illusions that sustain Putin’s power, it has also crushed most of those that keep the leaders of the Western World brand in business. Ukraine is a more reliable defender of democracy and the true leader of the free world if anyone has a right to claim that title. It will be Ukraine that teaches future military leaders around the world, not the USA.
In the Middle East, the standard mode of peacemaking by slowing everything down usually works and somehow seems to be right now because none of the regimes really want a war aside from Hamas, which is now back to being a guerilla outfit even if it can no longer be destroyed in a material sense. Iran and Hezbollah love their little protection racket, pretending to stand up to big bad Israel while carefully following a set of rules. Even when Israel breaks them no one really wants to trigger the all-out war.
Though Gaza continues to be pummeled without relent, Iran appears to be happy enough to latch onto the ceasefire talks Biden is letting drag out to give Netanyahu time to kill Sinwar and declare victory and allow Tehran an excuse to retaliate for Iran killing Hamas’ leader there in an indirect manner. With any luck, the ploy will work, saving at least some of the hostages and sparing Gaza a few weeks of war - until the ceasefire inevitably breaks down after Netanyahu decides Hamas broke the deal. The war between Israel and Iran can simmer until Trump gets back in office, his supposed isolationism almost certain to break down in Iran’s case if not Taiwan’s or Ukraine’s.
As far as US elections go, there’s little to be said. My standing forecast remains that Trump is set to narrowly win the electoral college if the patterns of the past few elections hold. If he slips behind and narrowly loses, he’ll make every effort to get the Supreme Court to throw the election to Congress where he stands a good chance of being installed… with Walz as his Vice President.
Harris has to win by a large enough margin to make electoral shenanigans futile to minimize the odds of the Supreme Court getting involved. And so far, it looks like her campaign is set to be a saccharine Disney comic book extravaganza heavy on “vibes” but light on meaningful policy. Taking on price gougers sounds all well and good until you A. look at the data to see that the worst offenders are government regulated utilities; and B. realize that Republicans will turn that rhetoric right around and insist that the federal government wants to tell your mom and pop corner store how to do business.
So good luck with that. This what happens when your party has decided to cater first and foremost to college-educated suburbanites. Joy sells well to people with enough income to pay for it.
Conclusion
Over the past week the leadership in Kyiv has confirmed the scope and intent of the Kursk campaign. Summed up, it’s the same as Ukraine’s operations in 2022: inflict maximum casualties.
Contrary to the myths of russia spread in English-speaking media, Putin can’t carry on this war forever. New recruits are again becoming scarce while casualty rates exceed replacement levels. The old Soviet warehouses are more than half empty, the quality of most ruscist gear in a steady decline.
This is what the early stages of metabolic collapse look like. There is no going back to 1992, which the allied response to Ukraine’s Kursk invasion proves has been the objective of policymakers in D.C. and Berlin since day one.
That’s the main reason why Ukraine’s incredible success is mostly buried in US press coverage, submerged under the banal rituals of the American political clown show. The would-be Masters Of The Universe control nothing, reacting to events beyond their comprehension. Meanwhile, soldiers in Ukraine are actually making history, reshaping the world with their ongoing blood sacrifice in a conflict that never should have been.
Героям слава! Heroiam Slava! Glory to the heroes!
By defying the world’s expectations time and again, Ukraine is blowing the future wide open for the rest of us. Ukrainians are granting the entire world a vision of what it looks like when everyone calls the bluffs of the powerful with cohesion and force.
This is why the real story of what Ukraine has accomplished these past years has to be kept off the front pages. True empowerment, a vision of real solidarity in the defense of meaningful freedom, is what Ukraine’s fight offers everyone. That plus the democratized combat power made possible by the Network Age threatens to generate an actual worldwide revolution that claws power back from autocrats everywhere - including the technocratic viziers infesting too many democratic countries.
They’ve colonized science, passing off mere institutional guidelines as binding theory. In the process, they’ve become blind to the sources of their own demise.
But they can sense that there’s something uncontrollable about what’s happening in Ukraine. And they are afraid. As it should be.