049 The Erickson Report for March 3 to 16, Page One: Ukraine

049 The Erickson Report for March 3 to 16, Page One: Ukraine

Our top story, as it has been, is Ukraine.

But I'm not going to talk about current events there; it's just not possible. Once the invasion started on February 4, there is no way a show like this, on once every two weeks, can even try to keep up with events that you can watch live changing minute to minute.

So I have no idea what the situation will be when you see this. So instead I'm going to offer some general comments and observations that I think could be of merit or future use no matter the facts on the ground.

First, I said last time that if my predictions about events proved to be wrong, I would own my failure. The problem in doing that is that I'm not sure to what degree I failed because my prediction was that Pukin' would not invade unless....

The "unless" was important. I referred to an old quote that "faced with the choice of humiliation and war, nations historically have preferred war" and so in a confrontation, if you don't want a war, you have to give the other side a way to back out without appearing to backing down; a graceful exit, some have called it; or as I put it, a way to back down without appearing to be kneeling down.

That point was actually widely discussed, widely referenced in the days before the war; more - considerably more - that one analyst said we have to find something to give Pukin' something that he can point to as a victory. Even the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee said just that. And they're still saying it now as a way to stop the war, even as it becomes harder to find what such a thing could be.

The last time out I mentioned a few ideas that had been proposed. One was declaring a moratorium on new members of NATO. Another, related one, was Ukraine declaring itself neutral. Some proposed the idea of insisting that Ukraine live up to the agreement it made in 2015 for self-rule for the breakaway provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas region of southeast Ukraine.

To that I added my idea: That, plus plus a passive acknowledgement - nothing direct, more like a soap opera character who leaves a scene and then no one ever mentions their name again, just a passive acknowledgement - that Crimea is gone, that there is no way it will again be part of Ukraine in the foreseeable future. I suggested that those things together could be enough because while Pukin' could claim a victory about the self-rule and maybe even Ukraine, Ukraine could say no, it's just doing what it already committed to, it's just that negotiations are taking longer than expected. Meanwhile, neither side gives up anything over which it actually had control nor does either side gain anything over which it did not already have control.

At this point I have to interject that it must be said the the US intelligence was good. The Russian buildup was described accurately and the timetable, with the likely time for an invasion being set for between February 20 and March 1, was spot on.

We're not used to this, especially those of us schooled on Indochina and Iraq. But we need to remember that American intelligence is actually pretty good; it's when that intelligence is massaged for political ends that it gets screwed up. This time reporting it accurately served the political purpose, so it was done that way.

Which means that ultimately, it's possible that none of the ideas for a graceful exit would've worked and we would have found ourselves right where we are anyway. We just don't know.

What I do know is that they weren't tried. We, that is, the US and NATO, the West, did not offer Pukin' a way out. Instead, our entire policy could be summed up in just four words: stand down, no concessions.

Which raises another question: Why wasn't a way out offered? If the intelligence was as good as it seems to have been, a real prospect of a war within a limited time frame if nothing changes, why the unyielding stance?

I gave my reasons, the only four reasons I could think of. The US and NATO - I'm just going to say NATO from now on - either were ignorant of that history of nations preferring war to humiliation, they actually wanted a war, they thought Pukin' wouldn't actually pull the trigger and they could bully him into just backing down, or something was being negotiated in secret.

I think events since have shown I was right in thinking that third alternative was the right one: They though they could bully Pukin' into a humiliating political surrender.

That, with the hideous addendum that they also believed that if war came, it would be over almost before it started. Indeed, a number of analysts outside the government were talking in terms of a war measured in hours, not even days much less weeks.

And it appears that's what Pukin' thought.

Analysts say that the strategy that was seen had been based on the premise that an initial barrage of missile strikes and a thrust toward Ukraine’s capital coupled with the rapid seizure of a few key objectives would bring about the quick collapse of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, which would surrender or flee, after which a pro-Russia puppet government could be installed.

Other proof can be found in a statement slated for release on February 26 but instead of being withheld was put out on schedule, supposedly accidentally. The statement reads as though it was intended as a celebration of victory in Ukraine, indicating the Kremlin thought the war would be over in less than two days.

And we can see that expectation within the reports just from the first day that the invaders had not gotten as far as they expected - in other words, they expected to have accomplished a good deal more - and soon after that reports of Russian military vehicles abandoned on the road because they had run out of gas.

The importance of those latter reports is that this is not like some medieval battlefield where you walk to wherever you're going, carrying for the most part your weapons with you, either across your back or strapped to your waist, and if you need food or other supplies you just steal them from the surrounding countryside.

A modern army requires food, fuel, technical and technological support, communications, ammunition, a supply line far more extensive and complex than even a 19th century campaign. It requires large-scale logistics. And it certainly appears that the Russian attack gave little thought to that because they thought it unnecessary.

That expectation of near-immediate collapse may also explain why even now Russian officials can't agree on purpose of invasion.

Before the invasion, Pukin' made claims of "genocide" against ethnic Russians in Luhansk and Donetsk. Then there was the claim that the government in Kyiv was a drug cartel of neo-Nazis and it was about "de-Nazification," about being peacekeepers and arresting the criminals. Then at the UN on March 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Ukraine of having "made territorial claims against the Russian Federation" and of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons - which considering the reason Ukraine doesn't have nukes is that it voluntarily gave them up in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees from the US, the UK, and Russia to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine, maybe bringing that up wasn't the smartest thing for Lavrov to do.  

But speaking of nukes, that brings up something else. Pukin' said something about putting Russia's “deterrence forces” - its nuclear weapons - on a “special regime of combat duty.” The result was a spate of new stories claiming he had put Russia's nukes in a state of "high alert."

He didn't. A higher state, yes; "high," no.

Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, described it as "normally, under the day-to-day status, the system is not capable of transmitting orders" to launch nuclear weapons. But, he added, "you can bring it into the status where it is capable," which is what he felt had been done.

Meanwhile, former Russian military officer Konstantin Eggert told the German news outlet Deutsche Welle there are four levels of alert in the Russian military: regular, heightened, the threat of war, and full or complete.

It could be compared to the US's DEFCON system for nuclear weapons, which has five levels, DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1, ranging from what's called "Fade Out" or day-to-day level of operations up to "Cocked Pistol," where we are or soon will be in a nuclear war.

Despite some confusion about just what Pukin' meant since the term “special regime of combat duty” is not used by the Russian military, the consensus came down to a move from "regular" to "heightened." But not "high."

That, however, does not mean that the threat of nuclear war is not higher than it was a week or two ago. But it does mean you need not have sleepless nights over it.

At least not yet. The danger of World War III now lies in the question of what happens if Pukin' essentially - as some are now with unnecessary glee are predicting will happen - loses in Ukraine. Not just doesn't get all he wants, but outright loses, fails, the whole thing collapses. What happens then?

You need to realize this is very personal, very emotional, with Pukin'.

Go back to that February 26 statement that read like a celebration of victory in Ukraine. These are some quotes from that statement:

"A new world is being born before our eyes. ... Russia is restoring its unity.... Yes, at a great cost, yes ... but there will be no more Ukraine as anti-Russia. Russia is restoring its historical fullness, gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together - in its entirety of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians [i.e. Ukrainians]. ... [Referring to Russia's relations with the West:] Not even Russia, but the Russian world, that is, three states, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, acting in geopolitical terms as a single whole. ... Even the deaf could hear - Russia is returning. ... This is Russia's return of its historical space and its place in the world."

Contrary to what some have asserted, his dream is not to reassemble the Soviet Union. He's not thinking back to the 1980s before the breakup of the Soviet Union, he's not thinking back to the 1960s or '50s or even the Stalin era of the '30s. He's thinking back to the Czars.

He dreams of restoring the old imperial Russia, one of the great empires of history, which at its peak ranged from the border of Poland to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic Ocean to the border of Afghanistan. He's thinking back to the palaces and the glitter and the gilt and the glory, the glory of Mother Russia. This is what this is about, this is his dream.

So what happens if the result of invading Ukraine is it all blows up in his face, with military defeat combined with a cratered economy, a growing internal unrest and opposition - opposition now also popping up in Belarus - and the resulting humiliation in the eyes of major parts of the world? Would he think "If I'm going down, if everything I wanted is lost, if everything I dreamed of is ashes, I'm going to take the world down with me?" It seems unlikely, it probably is unlikely, but it is possible. In that event, would he be restrained by those around him? Could he be?

So don't have sleepless nights but maybe toss and turn some before you do sleep.

And part of the reason for that tossing and turning goes back to the "unnecessary glee" at the prospect of Pukin's defeat I mentioned. Because something else I raised last time to which I think events have added emphasis and backing is that there are those in the West, in NATO, and even in Moscow who are secretly delighted at recent events heralding a return to the good old days of the good old Cold War and its clear lines and seeming lack of complexity and its, in the eyes of the various foreign policy establishments but creepily to the rest of us, "stability" despite all the proxy wars where the Cold War wasn't all that cold for the people in those places.

It's an attitude reflected in the language of President Blahden's State of the Union address, with its references to it all being about "freedom versus tyranny" - even if we do have people like Viktor Orban on our side and we have increasing reports of bigotry and racism in Ukraine directed against non-white people trying to flee the fighting - language harking back to the rhetoric of decades earlier.

So expect, no matter what happens in (or to) Ukraine, years of heightened, on-going tension between Russia on the one hand and the US and Europe on the other and for all you young folks, welcome back to the world your elders grew up in. Welcome back to a world where peace activists knew about Alcems and Slickems and Glickems, knew the difference between MRVs and MIRVs and MaRVs, where "throw weights" and "ceps" were meaningful terms and the advice to "duck and cover" was a source of bitter amusement. Toss and turn indeed.

Which makes it relevant to raise this here. The "no-fly zone" now being pushed by Ukraine is a terrible idea, so terrible there should be active pushback. Ukrainian officials - including Zalenskyy - should be asked what they think would happen in that event: "Do you think Russia will just go 'Oh, ok, we didn't know it is a no-fly zone, we won't do that any more?' And when that doesn't happen, how do you enforce such a thing?

"You are asking for NATO to shoot down Russian jets; you are asking in fact for the US and NATO to effectively declare war on Russia. That is insane. And if that means that there are limits on how much support the West will give Ukraine, then that’s what it means."

It's one thing to want NATO to accept the risk of World War III - which it is already doing in its current support if things really do go south for Pukin' - but it's quite another to demand that NATO be the one to start it.