What just happened
- Ten people were killed in a racially-motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and another shooting in California left one dead and five wounded.
- Boris Johnson prepared legislation to rewrite the Northern Ireland Protocol (more below).
- A daughter of Morad Tahbaz said the UK’s foreign office has forgotten about her father, who is a hostage in Iran.
This is not the same as saying Ukraine will win, but it’s close. Ukrainian resilience and Russian incompetence are creating the possibility of a comprehensive Russian defeat that would make the world a better place, if only the moment can be seized.
As the media focus on the war continues to fade and Europe wavers on the merits of a full Russian energy embargo, it’s worth noting in particular:
- The Russian Donbas offensive has stalled. This was yesterday’s formal assessment by Nato’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, and it’s based on evidence Russian forces i) have abandoned their goal of encircling Ukrainian troops between Izyum and Donetsk, ii) are facing sustained Ukrainian counter-attacks near Izyum, and iii) suffered catastrophic losses trying to cross the Siversky Donets river last week.
- Finland and Sweden are confident Turkey won’t veto their fast-track applications, which are supported by the rest of the alliance and by a sea-change in public opinion in both countries since the invasion; and which mock Putin’s goal of halting Nato’s eastward advance.
- Russia may have lost a third of its ground forces since invading and suffering defeats in the battles for Kyiv and Kharkiv, according to the UK’s defence ministry. Ukraine claimed today its forces counter-attacking north of Kharkiv have reached the Russian border.
- Pro-Russian military bloggers are turning against Moscow. For the first time since the invasion, normally reliably pro-Kremlin voices with big online followings are calling out Russian failures instead of parroting Putin’s propaganda. One quoted by the NYT said stupidity and equipment shortages had “burned” at least one battalion tactical group, and possibly two, in last week’s river battle.
- Putin is losing faith in his forces, according to one of his former prime ministers. Mikhail Kasyanov tells Deutsche Welle Putin “has started to realise that he’s losing this war”, having been misled by his generals about the state of his army before the invasion and its progress on the battlefield since.
The case against this analysis rests on the sheer scale of resources Putin can call on if he wants to. Russian forces are well-placed in principle to complete the land bridge he craves from southern Russia to Crimea, and they are already reportedly regrouping for another attempt to cross the Siversky Donets.
It’s also true that Kasyanov’s personal experience of Putin is from another age (he was prime minister from 2000 to 2004). But his assessment of Putin as badly informed and insulated from reality as his regime drifts from autocracy to dictatorship echoes precisely that of Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman in a new book falling out of briefcases all over Washington – Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century.
Fighting back against spin dictators requires above all “the active resistance of the informed,” Guriev and Treisman write. Those disgruntled bloggers may be canaries in a very dark coal mine.
