American (Non-)Diplomacy, China, NATO Support Revisited, Duck Shoot in Andriivka
I think the only appropriate update I can make on the ceasefire in Ukraine is that on Friday the Russians shot a ballistic missile with cluster munitions at Kryvyi Rih. It exploded above an apartment and hit a playground.
Eighteen people dead, six children. Russia is saying they hit a restaurant full of Ukrainian officers. The Ukrainian media were on the scene. No, it was an apartment courtyard, all the victims were civilians, there was nothing military anywhere. One of the dead kids was 15. Someone pointed out that for 11 years of that kid’s life, he lived in a country invaded by Russia.
US Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink commented:
“Horrified that tonight a ballistic missile struck near a playground and restaurant in Kryvyi Rih… This is why the war must end.”
My comment on Ms. Brink’s comment is, Her Excellency may have meant well, but, in Ukraine it’s considered pretty tone deaf to push political agenda on the backs of dead kids. You don’t cut a deal with a murderer of your children. You fight back with everything you have.
So do your friends.
The Ukrainian internet seems to have received Ms. Brink’s message much the same way, and posts are popping up pointing out that the LAST time the Russians blew something up in Ukraine and injured Ukrainians, she condemned the Russians directly and said the US would never accept it. The comments on her X page are pretty funny, and there are a lot of them. Since the internet is forever, it’s not going to be easy for Ambassador Brink to dig herself out of that diplomatic hole.
I’ll just add a screen shot from the Brink’s official August 2022 Happy Independence Day video she and the embassy media section made to show America has Ukraine’s back. The second taken is from the part where she says “America will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.”
The bidness of the ull bidness, and THE Panda
This is probably the most important news item of the month and quite possibly this quarter, even though it didn’t take place anywhere near the battlefield: The Trump administration has declared trade war on the entire world, and in my view, that’s going to have some serious effect on the Russo-Ukrainian War.
As many of you have no doubt observed, once the tariffs were announced US markets tanked immediately. From Ukraine, it looks like the US seems embarked on inflation and economic contraction at least on the level of the Covid epidemic, that American isolationism is back with a vengeance, and very possibly the Republicans have just committed political suicide.
But inside Ukraine, that wasn’t the big impact. War-wise, after all, it wasn’t like the Trump administration was planning to hand over to Ukraine a whole lot of weapons and support if the tariffs worked.
The big thing for Ukraine, I would say, is how the People’s Republic of China responded. Not with an offer for negotiations, nor with targeted counter-tariffs, not even with a standard Beijing-friendly slick propaganda campaign about benign, peaceful China that just wants to trade and make everyone rich; and greedy and money-worshiping America that wants to keep China down.
The Chinese retaliated with punishing, across-the-board tariffs of their own. They targeted everything, all US exports to China, no exceptions. No half measures. Superpower vs. superpower.
As a historical marker, this was a giant event. Less than a century ago industrialized nations – including the US – were running gunboats up and down the Yangtze River and shooting up government offices if they didn’t like how the local Chinese were treating foreign businessmen.
On Friday, modern, absolutely not-backward and inferior-to-nobody China picked up the gauntlet thrown down by the United States and the Trump White House and, apologies for the metaphor, slapped Uncle Sam across the face with it. If America wants a trade war with the People’s Republic, they can have a trade war. The Chinese think they can prevail.
Attached is a painting of Chinese soldiers in the Korean War that just might be a little less than totally historically accurate in all minor details, however, that’s for sure a wrecked US tank in the background. Anyone thinking the Chinese are scared of the Americans, this is part of the Chinese cultural heritage. They have not forgotten about American gunboats on the Yangtze.
For Ukraine, first, this means the chaos in international markets isn’t going to end soon because we are looking at a direct economic confrontation between Washington and Beijing and not only is neither side inclined to back down, the side doing so will lose face as a superpower. The only way this escalates is if militaries get involved. So Ukraine’s allies will be dealing with that.
But also, as a direct result of expectations, any China-US economic confrontation must force close to every economy on Earth to contract, for no short period of time, the bottom has fallen out from the price of crude oil. Which brings us to Russia.
The Saudis it appears have aided and abetted the tail spin oil is in right now by increasing production in the beginning of the week, formally because they are mad other OPEC members are producing higher than quota. But we all know the Saudis are sharp businessmen and if they see an opportunity to force high-cost producers out of the market so they can grab market share, well the Saudis are sharp. If they saw or knew ahead of time what the Chinese response to the American declaration of trade war would be, then they would have had to have been very sharp indeed. They’ve been in the ull bidness a long time, of course.
The Brent/barrel (bbl) price fell from $75 to $65 in the space of 36 hours. According to Russian news feeds Russian Ural oil is now below $55/bbl and still retreating. I’ve read predictions that Brent is going to at least $60 and maybe lower, meaning Ural must dive below $50.
Oil and gas income is usually accounted to pay about 30-50 percent of the entire Russian state budget. Russia’s 2025 budget is built on the assumption Russia will export oil over the year at an average price of $69/bbl or higher. You do the math.
The only reason one might not call this “disastrous” for the Russian economy, is that “disastrous” may be too mild a word. If there is a world economic contraction and Russian exports of grain, lumber, fertilizers and metals shrink substantially along with Russian oil and gas earnings, then whatever economic damage Russia is going to suffer from the downturn, will be worse.
How much worse? If oil prices stay depressed for several months or more, and Russia’s other major exports tank parallel with that, then by the end of summer I predict the Kremlin will be struggling to pay soldiers and police, never mind arm them. I am not kidding.
OK, for the last time, do NOT listen to the US government when they talk about NATO
The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Europe at the end of this week. As I gather, his mission was to visit capitals, smooth ruffled feathers, and message that the US is definitely committed to NATO and NATO member states shouldn’t think that the US isn’t a reliable ally or, worse, deciding to be more friendly with Russia than with Europe.
Also, Secretary Rubio said, even though the US is really, really committed to Europe and NATO, Europe needs to spend a whole lot more on defense because in the past the US has paid for Europe’s defense pretty much all by itself and that can’t continue.
Of course, this week, same time as well, the White House started a trade war with every NATO state and placed zero tariffs on Russia, so I think we can say Rubio’s reconciling those things wasn’t easy.
Nor was that Rubio’s only problem. This week a sleek-looking Russian oligarch wife named Karina Rotenberg (pictured, with husband Boris, a billionaire former judo instructor of Vladimir Putin’s) on Tuesday got extremely good news: Sanctions placed on her by the US Department of Treasury in 2022 for helping her husband evade sanctions himself had been canceled.
That was of course a nice gesture by the US executive branch towards a deserving individual but since news stories involving Russian oligarch wives and American hypocrisy are easy to write, the pubs had a field day:
But the point of course is that the Europeans Rubio was talking to know perfectly well who Karina Rotenberg is and what it means if the Trump administration quietly cancels sanctions against her, and then sends the junior member of the Trump cabinet to Europe to argue America has Europe’s back not Russia’s, please believe him.
Some of the ground of the weakness of US reasoning on NATO and Europe we’ve covered here before. If one is talking European security, first thing, obviously, what’s most important is actual firepower on the ground. So, if you want to know the state of European security, first and foremost you must look at the Russian army and the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). More than anything else, as long as the Ukrainians are killing Russian soldiers and destroying Russian military equipment in quantity, Europe is safe.
But, if the discussion is theoretical NATO containment of Russia without the AFU, for whatever reason, then we already know some of the basic numbers as well. There are about 60-85 (definitions vary) viable combat brigades physically on the ground in the European NATO space. Of those, the US fields four.
Many of you have read this before, but to reiterate, specifically the US combat brigade commitment to Europe is a medium brigade (2nd Cavalry in Germany), a light brigade (173 Airborne in Italy) and two heavy brigades on nine-month rotations to Poland. (From 1st Armored and 3rd Infantry Divisions). There are also 2 aviation brigades with maybe 75 helicopters each. That’s it.
So this week, when Rubio was telling the Europeans that the US is committed to NATO, and that America has done a whole lot and Europe not much, he is a clever man but he was talking to diplomats and generals who unfortunately for Rubio know the difference between the numbers 3 and 82. Image of some NATO tankers, no Americans, at a gunnery range in Latvia, Nov. 2022.
That audience also very likely knew, because the Pentagon announced it in a press release last week, that the US canceled training with NATO, with no restart date planned, on mass transfers of US troops to Europe.
It begs the question: If you were a European decision-maker, would you bet your country’s national security on the theory that Donald Trump would go to war for Estonia?
But that’s just combat brigades. What about defense budgets? Maybe, the US commitment to Europe, in money terms, is a shameful swindle of US taxpayers that must come to an end. Perhaps, it would be the right thing to take Rubio and the administration at their word. Why not accept the argument “The US does everything Europe does nothing, look at all the money we’re spending!” on faith?
So I dug around. The clearest source I found was a 2018 International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) paper that broke US spending on European security into several parts. The numbers laid out in the report are still pretty useful to us today.
According to IISS, in 2018, the US was paying about 22 percent of the NATO central fund (now it’s about 16 percent) which was at the time about $685 million. US expenditures associated with Europe on Alliance Ground Surveillance, Strategic Airlift Command, NATO Ballistic Missile Defense and “unique capacities” (this is security geek speak for NSA, usually) altogether was $6.87 billion. Plus, at the time, there was about 90,000 personnel and bases in the European space for which the US was paying for, which amounted to about $24.4 billion. Then there was money spent on deploying troops temporarily to Poland to deter Russia, and helping Ukraine a bit, which in 2018 was $4.78 billion. Plus there were US donations to NATO allies – this was mostly paying for training events – by Pentagon standards chump change worth $24 million.
Altogether, bottom line, 2018, according to the IISS, about $36 billion of the US total defense budget went to European security in one way or another. That worked out to about 5.1-5.5 percent of all US defense outlays that year.
Naturally, in 2024 the “help Ukraine with weaponry” category added about $28 billion as the Biden administration panicked that year and in about four months tried to force all the planned Ukraine aid to Ukraine before the Trump people came to power. But that spending stopped once the new regime was installed, we can see it.
The total US defense budget for 2024, about $850 billion, was about 11 percent more than in 2018, i.e. $752 billion. I think it’s a no-brainer to expect that US defense expenditures towards European security will not go up in 2025 and probably will fall.
Therefore, if we use the $36 billion 2018 figure as a baseline and adjust for inflation to about $40 billion today, then, Marco Rubio coming to Europe and saying to European states that the US is doing too much and the Europeans are doing too little about European security is inane. It’s just stupid, and in Rubio’s context he’s insulting his audience.
Inherently, if a country is physically located in Europe, pretty much its entire defense budget goes somehow towards Europe security. The US is a world superpower. Only a small part of its defense budget goes towards European security. In 2018 it was about 5 percent. In 2025 it’s very likely to be no more than that.
Global Firepower figures, my calculation, these states all are paying more for European security than the US, right now, and it’s really not a fair comparison as the overall US economy is several times larger than the economies of any of these countries: UK ($71.5B), France ($55B), Ukraine ($53.7B), Germany ($50B), and Türkiye ($47B).
Add in smaller NATO states like Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Denmark etc., and a very different picture from the White House dogma emerges. According to EU figures, total continental defense spending – this is without the UK – in 2024 was about $330 billion. That’s compared with probably about $40 billion by the US.
Yes, yes, I’m aware France, UK and Türkiye have security commitments outside the European space, but, the numbers you just read don’t take into account major spending planned in 2025, particularly by Poland and Germany. All in all, I think it’s fair to say that Europe is spending at least 10 times more on European security, than the US is. Not the other way around.
So, the next time someone like Marc Rubio says “The Europeans aren’t paying enough to defend Europe, and the Americans are getting gouged into paying to defend Europe by the evil and dishonest Europeans,” my answer will be:
1. Actually the European economy is a bit smaller than the US economy.
2. Even with that slightly smaller economy, Europe is probably spending about 10 times more on defending the continent than the US is.
3. The US per year spends maybe 5 percent of its defense budget on Europe. Given history, the US-Soviet/Russia superpower rivalry, minor developments like World War II, all the US weaponry Europe buys and all the usefully located bases in Europe the US gets to use, it’s pretty serious stretch call that five percent an outrageously big price for the United States to pay. After all, Europe’s paying the other 95 percent.
4. The US is a founding member of NATO and if the American people don’t want to live up to the commitments of past generations of Americans to help defend European security, democracy and freedom, as a 5-6 percent partner, they should just STFU and GTFO.
5. Objectively, Europe is perfectly capable of defending itself without the US. It is even more so if the AFU is counted as Europe’s ally.
6. Honestly, considering the wrong-headedness and arrogance of the US position right now, the Poles, Germans, British, Greeks and Spaniards need to think seriously about turning the US’s European troop bases into civilian housing developments. The Naval Station Rota could be turned into a yacht club – that’s seriously valuable waterfront property. European defense orders should stop going to Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing, and be sent instead to Thales, Airbus, Saab and Rheinmetall.
Attached, a less than respectful drawing of not-yet US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, this dates back to 2016.
The NYT and the Moskva
At the start of the week the New York Times (NYT) published a giant 5,000 word article on all the “secrets” about US involvement in the war. As nearly as I can gather, the NYT got access to a lot of the US military and government people involved in doing the American side of the war while Biden was in power, plus a smaller number of Ukrainians who were in the AFU under General Zaluzhny’s wing. In other words, people NOT involved in fighting the war right now.
It was, obviously, very America-centric, to read it you would believe that the Americans were calling the shots and the war was won and lost inside the Beltway. But there still were some interesting information nuggets.
You should just read the article yourself, but, as an example of a factoid worth knowing, at one point in the article an unnamed but by implication very important US government source tells NYT that there was something sneaky or off-the-reservation that the Ukrainian military intelligence boys did, this is HUR, so the boss of HUR got called into the office of the CIA station chief in Kyiv and got read the riot act. I think it had something to do with Ukrainian strikes inside Russia.
That’s not the factoid. Everyone in Ukraine and I mean everyone in Ukraine knows who the boss of HUR is: Kyrylo Budanov. And every account I have seen and heard is that Budanov is just about the last person this side of the Ural Mountains to get called in anywhere to be read the riot act by anyone. This is a guy that’s trained with the CIA so he knows the organization for real with all the bureaucracy and big nation inefficiency, not by movie reputation. He’s done behind-the-lines work for years, combat and covert, and he’s up against Vladimir Putin and the FSB in a full-on conventional war, and not only are his guys winning, they’re winning so often he jokes about it in public. The idea some CIA flunky would tell Kyrylo Budanov what to do, is about as credible as the idea a mid-level CIA bureaucrat could issue the head of Mossad orders. So that was funny.
The insight part was this: At another point in the article there is an account about the sinking of the Moskva cruiser in April 2022. Apparently the Americans spotted it sailing in the west end of the Black Sea, gave that spot to the Ukrainians for general information, and then were totally surprised when the Ukrainians without further warning sank the cruiser. Hundreds dead, biggest warship in the Black Sea Fleet, very complicated operation involving misdirecting the cruiser’s air defense radars with Bayraktar drones, and a pair of Ukrainian anti-ship Neptune missiles performing as advertised.
According to the article, the Americans were angry the Ukrainians had “escalated” the war by sinking the Black Sea’s flagship and embarrassing the Kremlin without clearing it with the Americans first, and also were appalled that the Ukrainians would shoot anti-ship missiles the Americans didn’t know the Ukrainians even had, because the sneaky Ukrainians hadn’t told the Americans they had the missiles. The weapon is called a Neptune.
What this tells people in Ukraine that watch this stuff, is that if the NYT article is to be believed, some aspects of US support to Ukraine in the early phases of the war wasn’t just hesitant and inept, it was badly informed if not just incompetent. The Americans didn’t know the Ukrainians had Neptune Missiles? Seriously? We’re supposed just to accept that?
The existence of functioning Neptune missiles in the hands of the Ukrainians was anything but a secret. People like me reported on it. The first field tests, the deployment, the profiles about brilliant Ukrainian military engineering, it was in print media, on television, for a couple of weeks there it seemed like the only thing the Ukrainian navy was doing was advertising Neptune missiles. There was a video of the missile punching a hole through a shipping container more than 100 km. distant. This was I think 2020.
One possibility is that the NYT article was accurate on this point, the Americans were just ignorant, so the next time someone tells you the Americans are skilled at delivering foreign assistance and cooperating with their foreign partners, remember Ukraine’s Neptune missiles and the Moskva and take that with a boulder of salt.
A second possibility is that someone inside the US defense structure knew about the Neptune missile capacity and the Americans were deeply involved in the sinking of the Moskva, but the Americans want NYT to tell the world the Americans had nothing to do with it, not us, we didn’t even know the Ukrainians HAD missiles like that.
In any case, later on in the week the Ukrainian navy released a few more details, the first missile hit in the ship’s galley which took out the cruiser’s main command post, which was right nearby, and the second missile hit the stern. Eventually a video surfaced of the first hit; it looks pretty solid. Seems like a fire caught and because of bad weather and failed comms the crew couldn’t put it out. Moskva image.
Avdiivka-Kurakhove
The situation on the front remains opposite of quiet, there’s substantial fighting going on most intensely in the east but there are flash points pretty much in every sector. Ukraine’s Belgorod carve-out seems still to be holding – this is week three – and it seems like a Ukrainian toe hold remains in Kursk region. In general, in the north the shooting seems to have dialed down somewhat – 36th Marines was either off the line or not under pressure enough to host guests and have pictures taken with President Zelensky. Attached is an image of some Ukrainian jarheads with Zelensky.
In the Kurakhove-Avdiivka area, this is roughly the Pokrovsk sector, on Thursday the Russians decided the ground was dry enough and they had collected enough “volunteers” to attempt a mounted assault with armored vehicles near the village of Andriivka. They even built a turtle tank protected all around with protective skirts, anti-drone netting and – not making this up – log walls. Image of the tank burning.
I am assuming what happened is that since all the Ukrainian units on the other side were well-armed and well-rested, and since fighting for the past several weeks had been just infantry skirmishing, this attack got the full attention of the local brigade battle command center and, worse for the Russians, every drone unit in driving distance seems to have shown up to get in on the action as well.
Meaning, there is more than the usual helping of drone video to use for geo-location and to confirm unit kill claims.
Although the assault seems to have taken place in the 33rd Mech Brigade’s sector, by the time it was over, drone units from 25th Airborne and 77th Air Assault had gotten aircraft over the battlefield, one can only guess how many of the organic artillery battalions were involved. I can only imagine all the battery commanders volunteering salvos because they’d figured out they were in range.
So basically, it was a bloodbath.
Many of you by now should be pretty familiar with the drill. The Ukrainians waited for the Russians to get well out into the open, then dropped mines in the paths of the vehicles, and then once the vehicles were stopped they called in mortars and artillery, several times it was cluster munitions, and then the drones came in to torch the vehicles and hunt survivors. These are defensive tactics the AFU has been honing, I would say, for close to two years.
Reportedly the Russians lost 19 combat vehicles hit, 7 destroyed, 12 disabled, and 20-60 men in less than an hour. Among that a tank, two IFVs, and three golf carts. No Russian progress, survivors ran away, it’s hard to see how any Ukrainians suffered more than breaking a sweat. It looks possible to me not a single Ukrainian was hurt.
If you will pardon me, it’s battles like this that make people saying “The Ukrainians are doomed, they will lose” look like idiots. If you wipe out the other guy and don’t take any casualties yourself, you’re not losing. This link will get you to more detail and videos.
Current news that is positive and negative but may shock you
OK, the US is saying that there really is a ceasefire in place about not blowing up each other’s power grid and the view of the White House seems to be the Ukrainians more or less are trying and the Russians not really.
Pursuant to that, or possibly, as the main cause of that, this week the Kherson police duly reported that Russian shell fires destroyed – they seem to have been taking very detailed notes – 4 natural gas pipelines, 1 electrical transformer, and a petrol station. Also a power plant was hit and no less than 45,000 Khersonites were left without electricity.
In hours, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha announced he had made sure Ukraine’s good friends the Americans were made aware of these Russian transgressions regarding the Important Ceasefire in Ukraine.
The next day (March 29), no less than the President of Ukraine declared in his daily evening speech that Ukraine had formally informed the United States of more “Russian energy violations,” handed over evidence and grid coordinates, and requested that the all-powerful Americans intervene with the Russians and make the Russians stop shooting, as the Americans had promised the Ukrainians the Americans would do.
The day after that, Zelensky told reporters it was his “firm expectation” that the ceasefire process would work because he had every confidence in the Americans. He didn’t say “World’s Greatest Dealmaker Donald Trump,” but he might as well have.
Sergey Lavrov, a war criminal to my mind but nonetheless a seasoned diplomat, did much the same thing: This week he announced that he had informed the United Nations of the time, place and type of Ukrainian ceasefire violations, and requested that body get the evil Ukrainians to stop, and said that he was glad America would make the Ukrainians stop, because the Americans had told Russia they could do that.
Versailles was nice, lots of European diplomats
Even the Germans got into the act. If you remember where we last left our heroes, the US and Ukraine are still dickering over a rare earths mining deal more exploitative in favor of the US than the Versailles treaty was of the Germans after World War I, or the terms the Congolese found themselves under once they started working for Leopold II.
This week German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a Green who is a great friend of Ukraine and who I believe is angling, probably against serious odds, to keep her job with the incoming SPD-CDU, was in Kyiv. Talking to reporters about things Foreign Minsters talk to reporters about, Frau Baerbock mentioned that yes, she is aware of the rare earths deal, and certainly, whatever terms the Americans might wring out of the Ukrainians were just those two parties’ business.
But, she added, one must not forget Ukraine is tracking to join the EU. That organization has rules about how a country might make deals with a non-EU state. Obviously, Donald Trump’s rare earth deal with Volodymyr Zelensky would have to meet EU rules about fair remuneration, transparency, and since it was Baerbock talking I have no doubt she meant environmental protection as well.
Point is, this is a broad hint of Ukraine’s next line of defense dragging out or emasculating the rare earths deal. The Ukrainians will say: Sure, we’ll sign it, obviously we trust the US has Ukraine’s best interests at heart. But if EU rules prevent Ukraine turning over development rights to Donald J. Trump personally of every mineral and square meter of ore from the Siversky Donets to the Tysa, well we the Ukrainians would just love to do that deal but also we need to join the EU. Especially since you our wonderful friends the Americans say Ukraine can’t be in NATO. So we agree it’s a really beautiful deal, but let’s talk about it some more.
Rubio ought to pay attention. This is how real diplomats do stuff.
Crimea Raids
It didn’t make the news elsewhere very much so the record needs to reflect that on April 1 Russian police carried out a wave of raids on the homes of Crimean Tatars in the village of Zemlyanychne, Bilohirsk district. FSB officers broke into at least four residences, no warrant, just the standard pretext of searching for weapons and “prohibited” materials. The home of the parents of a Crimean Tatar journalist working for the Kremlin-hostile ATR TV channel, a lady named Gulsum Khalilova, was hit. Her father, Khalil Khalilov, 75 and bedridden, felt poorly with the Russian cops in his house. He was hospitalized by an ambulance. The Russians took electronic devices in the home into state custody.
This is a fair example of what the Ukrainians think they are fighting against. Not as a matter of principle. But in terms of: “Whatever Russia controls is going to be a place where the Russians are going to be doing this to innocent Ukrainians.”
Cavoli says recruiting is improving
The outgoing US Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher Cavoli testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and since he’s leaving because the Trump administration wants its own man in the job, and he’s probably retiring to a think tank, this was a reasonable chance to get a generic top-of-the-US-military view of the war without too much political filter.
According to Cavoli, Russia is short weapons and manpower, but, they’ve militarized their economy and he claimed they will fairly soon be producing 250,000 artillery shells a month. I’m not sure I believe that, and even if it’s true I question whether the Russians have enough guns and gunners to shoot it off effectively. But he’s the four star and that’s his view. Image of him and Zaluzhny.
As to Ukrainian artillery ammo, Cavoli said that the expectation is that the “Czech Initiative” – this is 122mm and 155mm shells for Ukraine acquired in markets outside Europe – should deliver to Ukraine 840,000 shells this year. As an aside Macron and the French this week said that Europe is currently filling about half of Ukraine’s total shell needs, and that’s about two million shells a year. I saw an EU-sourced report saying the European Union by end of 2025 expects to be manufacturing about two million shells a month of all types for all needs, not just Ukraine.
Cavoli said that currently the US now makes about 40,000 155mm artillery shells a month and hopes to reach a monthly production capacity of 90,000 rounds in 2026. I’ve read reports it was 70,000 a month already. The point is, what with the Trump administration, it looks like US support to Ukrainian shell reserves can be marginal at best.
The general impression I get is that Ukrainian and Russian artillery ammo volumes will be roughly even this year, unless there is a monkey wrench thrown into Russian shell production (tariffs?), in which case Ukraine could become the side with more firepower.
Cavoli also talked about manpower. He said that Ukraine’s manpower shortage, although still present, is much less pressing than before, and further that now the Ukrainian army is in very strong fortifications, which means the AFU is pretty likely to hold in most places at most times no matter what the Russians do. This generally matches what the troops themselves are saying, although the message I get varies a lot from unit to unit. The better-run the unit, the less they seem to be complaining about personnel shortages, is the impression I get.
Apropos of manpower, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense this week announced it was putting into effect a “ new rotation mechanism” which plans for units to do 90 days at the front and then some period of time last multiple months off the front. In one sense this is nothing different than AFU SOP during the Donbas War period, just expanded. Source was an MP on the parliamentary committee on national security, defense and intelligence, name of Fedir Venislavsky. The point is that this appears to be the AFU plan if and when a ceasefire happens and the AFU mission becomes man a line just in case, rather than conduct combat operations.
Gripen in Spanish is La Grifo
I note the news this week that Colombia has selected Sweden’s Saab JAS 39 Gripen E/F fighter jets over the American F-16 in a competition to modernize its air force. The Columbians bought Swedish not made-in-USA, according to President Gustavo Petro, because the Swedes offered an eight-year interest-free payment deferment and financing from Swedish banks.
Senior Petro did not mention the “kill switch” (i.e., politically motivated cut off by Washington of access to electronic battle data and critical spare parts) issue with F-16s, as was suffered recently by Ukraine in the first weeks of March. This purchase will make Colombia the second Gripen operator in Latin America after Brazil.
I mention the sale not so much to ding dumb US foreign policy by monkeying around with a US weapon capacity in another country’s hands after-market, but more to register that with every foreign Gripen deal Saab’s capacity to produce more increases, economies of scale become more possible, and the price of the aircraft comes down. Almost every fly-guy I know says Gripen is the ideal jet for Ukraine’s air force, cheaper to operate, designed to fight Russian aircraft, easy to maintain, operates from primitive strips, etc.
As an at least partially displeased F-16 operator (great plane, awful customer treatment) this is an arms transfer Ukraine will watch extremely closely.
Har har har, I bet he didn’t expect that
This week a Ukrainian turncoat who fled to Russia to become an anti-Kyiv propagandist, Kirill Molchanov, showed up in the news in an atypical way.
Russian television viewers know him pretty well for appearing on Russian state television as an “honest Ukrainian,” in which capacity he has advanced the for-us boring narratives about Ukraine being run by Nazis, ethnic Russians being oppressed in Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens throwing flowers and cheering when their village is liberated by the Russian army, the absolute precision with which the Russian army destroys the AFU and never even musses the hair of a Ukrainian civilians, and above all, how brilliant Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine policy is and will be.
This week Molchanov found himself in the news another way: arrested by Polish police and then extradited to Ukraine. He’s in the hands of the SBU right now.
What apparently happened was that Ukraine’s SBU working at least with the Polish secret services, and probably the Germans as well, convinced Molchanov that he had been invited as a big wheel speaker at a conference in Germany, where he would be put up in an excellent hotel, wined and dined on the host’s nickel, and then get a nice speaking fee for telling the “reality about Russia and Ukraine” to a friendly audience.
I’m not clear where he crossed the border into Poland, but I suspect it was from Kaliningrad. In any case, once he got into Polish territory the Polish border police detained him, and within 48 hours he had been extradited to Ukraine to face charges. The imagination is really the limit: he’s a Ukrainian citizen so he could get nailed for treason, war crimes, slander AND libel, jaywalking, you name it. His only hope I guess is that he has useful information on the FSB, but knowing how the FSB operates, I very much doubt it. Image of Mr. Molchanov looking glum while newly in the hands of the SBU.
Reprinted from Kyiv Post’s Special Military Correspondent Stefan Korshak’s blog. You can read his blog here.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
Source: Stefan Korshak