Worthy audience on 10/11 December 2023 while the Israeli PM Benjamin Natanyahu was attending his War cabinet he was informed by his Adie that Russian president Vladimir Putin is on line & wants to talk to you immediately. Natanyahu almost ran to attend the call. The call lasted 50 Minutes, every word was mystery & the conversation remains highly classified. .Meanwhile Gen Asim Munir COAS Pakistan Army long due visit to USA materialized, amazingly in very good milieu of relationship. Let us wait & see what is in the offing? Folks what is most desired & as the luck would have it, we were startled by the news that Putin’s Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Ukraine Kyiv’s counter-offensive has ended in failure. This could be Nate’s Suez moment. As per the history the First World War eventually ended in part because the Allies had greater manpower. Brutally, they were able, especially after America had fully mobilized by the beginning of 1918, to throw more men at the front lines than the Central Powers. As the Russia-Ukraine warreach its 656 th Day here is the situation on Monday, December 11, 2023 :-
- This time, the demographic advantage is with Russia, whose population is three-and-a-quarter times the size of Ukraine’s. Russia has switched a third of its pre-war civilian production to weapons and ammunition, and may now have the edge when it comes to drones that modern equivalent of the barbed wire and machine guns that gave the defending side such a lethal advantage in the Flanders mud.
- The long-term costs to the Russian people of this shift to a wartime economy are dreadful. Vladimir Putin has condemned his long-suffering muzhiks to years of penury and hunger. But, for now, it has done the trick. Russia has made it through to winter without a Ukrainian breakthrough.
- Russian forces dropped an explosive from a drone on the town of Beryslav in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson. One civilian was killed and another wounded after Prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation into the incident, which took place on Saturday morning. Both victims had been walking on the street at the time of the attack, authorities said.
- US President Joe Biden will meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday at the White House where the two will discuss the “urgent needs” facing Ukraine. The meeting comes as Biden tries to reach an agreement with the United States Congress that would provide military aid for Ukraine and Israel. Zelensky is also expected to meet senators and hold private talks with House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson.
- Zelensky spoke briefly with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban while attending the inauguration of Argentinian President Javier Milei, according to a video published on the Argentinian Senate’s YouTube channel. Orban’s press chief Bertalan Havasi confirmed the encounter but did not say whether Orban would continue to oppose Ukraine’s entry into the European Union.
- Ukraine strongly condemned Russian plans to hold presidential elections next March in occupied areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, which Moscow annexed in 2022, declaring the polls “null and void” and promising to prosecute any observers sent to monitor them.
- Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, voiced hope that a coalition of countries formed to facilitate the return of Ukrainian children taken illegally to Russia by Moscow will work out a faster mechanism to bring them home. Some 19,000 children are still believed to be in Russia or separated from their families in Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine.
- Matviy Bidnyi, Ukraine’s minister of youth and sport, said the country must consider whether participating in the 2024 Olympics is in the nation’s interests after the International Olympic Committee announced athletes from Belarus and Russia would be able to compete as “neutrals” without flags, emblems or anthems.
- Municipal workers in Kyiv dismantled a statue of Mykola Shchors, a Soviet field commander during the Russian Civil War, as part of an ongoing campaign to remove all Soviet-era monuments.
- Bulgaria’s parliament approved the provision of additional military aid, including portable anti-aircraft missile systems and surface-to-air missiles, to Ukraine. The state-run BTA news agency said 147 lawmakers in the 240-seat chamber voted in favour of the plan. Ukraine will have to repair the weapons before they can be deployed, or use them for spare parts.?
1?? .Worthy audience the question is why we need to talk about Ukraine. While the world’s attention has been focused on the war between Israel and Hamas, grim tremors have been shaking that rich, black soil. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has failed – or, in Volodymyr Zelensky’s words, “did not achieve the desired results”.?As exhausted Ukrainians fall back from Russia’s ramparts and minefields, the initiative is swinging to the invaders. Russia is advancing through the skeletal remains of what used to be Marinka, a city in Donetsk, perhaps of greater psychological than strategic importance. Missiles are again hitting Kyiv. Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, has taken to the BBC?to warn that her country is in “mortal danger”
. Now, it is the Ukrainians’ turn to dig in, to try to hold what they have. As in 1914, a fortified line runs the length of the front, from the Dnieper delta to the Russian border. And, as then, military technology favors the defender, so that tiny gains are bought at terrible cost.
- We are all prone to hindsight bias, and there will no doubt be articles about how it was always going to be tough to unseat entrenched defenders. But this stalemate was far from predictable when the counteroffensive was launched in June. We were one of those who expected Ukraine to break through to the Sea of Azov, a move that might well have ended the war. During 2022, Ukraine had demonstrated that Russia could not resupply Crimea across the Kerch Strait. Breaking the land bridge would have left the Russian garrison on the peninsula cut off. Ukraine could have turned off its electricity and food, and a negotiating space would have opened.
- Why did we get it wrong? I had been talking not only to Ukrainians, but to British military observers with direct knowledge of the battlefield. They had watched the extraordinary Ukrainian gains in Kharkiv and Kherson in 2022 – gains that had emboldened the West to offer the kinds of matériel that they had previously held back from sending, lest it fall into enemy hands.?
- Ukraine now had long-range missiles, mine-clearing kit and modern tanks. At the same time, the Prigozhin mutiny had shown how soft Russia was behind the hard shell of its front lines.But the invaders had learnt from their earlier mistakes. While Ukraine rushed to train its men in how to operate their new weapons last spring, Russia seeded?mile after mile of landmines, built fortifications, dug trenches and amassed drones
.?
- Putin needs only to hang on for another 12 months. Even if Donald Trump is not elected the former president makes no secret of his admiration for the Russian tyrant, once going so far as to declare that he trusted Putin before the US security services – Republican congressmen have turned against the war. Last week, they blocked President Biden’s ￡88 billion aid package to Ukraine.Their concern is supposedly financial, but a bigger motive may be their partisan dislike of Biden, the same ignoble impulse that led an earlier generation of Republican congressmen to oppose Harry Truman’s war in Korea. For the MAGA wing, there is also a lingering resentment of the cameo role that Ukraine played in the Trump impeachment drama.
- For a long time, Putin was too scared to stray beyond Russia’s borders. Quite apart from an international arrest warrant, he had a well-founded fear of assassination. His only foreign ventures were to former Soviet states, and two friendly dictatorships: Iran and China.
- But, this week, Putin visited two neutral dictatorships the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The footage shows beyond doubt that it was the despot in person, not a body double. What gave him confidence to travel to places that have security links with the West? Is it possible that some tentative entente has been reached? Might the Saudis have been asked to sound him out, discretely and deniably, as a possible prelude to peace talks??
- If so, we risk a Suez-level disaster for the Western democracies. Any deal that rewards Russian aggression will signal to the rest of the world that Nato, with all its collective wealth and weaponry, could not succeed in the minimal goal of rescuing a country that its two most powerful members, the US and the UK, had undertaken to protect.
- The case for intervention in Ukraine is not that it is a liberal democracy. Sure, it is vastly more liberal than Russia, but it falls well short of our standards. Russophile parties have been banned, and there is a worry that the crackdown might extend to pro-Western opposition politicians, too. This week, one of our friend correspondent was at a meeting of global Centre-Right parties at which Petro Poroshenko, the former president, was meant to speak. At the last minute, he and two of his MPs were banned from leaving Ukraine and though Poroshenko patriotically declined to make a fuss, it left me wondering, not for the first time, why Zelensky refuses to draw other parties into a wartime coalition.
- Then again, Poland was run by an authoritarian government in 1939. That did not alter the fact that it was attacked without provocation after we had guaranteed its independence – just as we guaranteed Ukraine’s independence in 1994 when it surrendered its nuclear arsenal.
3?? .Worthy audience while we are not ourselves at war this time, we are so invested in the Ukrainian cause that a Russian victory and absorbing conquered territory is a Russian victory, present it how you would mean a catastrophic loss of prestige for the West and the ideas associated with it: personal freedom, democracy and human rights.Conflicts will spread as regimes that never cared for liberal values in the first place realize that there is no longer a policeman on the corner. Venezuela’s outrageous claims against Commonwealth Guyana are just the start of this process.“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its?superiority in applying organised violence
,” wrote Samuel Huntington. “Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”But this is not yet over. Ukraine has driven Russia out of the western Black Sea, which is open again to international shipping. We should be on our guard against the tendency that George Orwell observed during the Second World War, whereby intellectuals over-interpret each new military development – a tendency, he believed, not shared by ordinary people. Just as there was excessive pessimism immediately after Russia invaded, and excessive euphoria when Kherson was retaken, so we should not infer too much from this setback.?
- It is still possible to imagine a peace deal that does not overtly reward aggression. Perhaps the eastern oblasts could win autonomy under loose Ukrainian suzerainty; perhaps an internationally supervised referendum might be held in a demilitarized Crimea.?
- But if Russia ends up annexing land by force, it is not just the West that will lose; it is the entire post-1945 international order.?
4? . Inference. The current fighting season is still an arm length away from over in Ukraine, but it is already clear that the war unleashed by Vladimir Putin in February 2022 may not continue with same intensity into the coming year. Developments on the Ukrainian battlefield in 2024 will likely depend on a number of factors including geopolitical considerations, election cycles, weapons deliveries, and the availability of ammunition. So far, Ukraine has largely relied on the munitions stockpiles accumulated by partner countries prior to February 24, 2022. However, these supplies are not infinite and are already running low. “The bottom of the barrel is now visible,”?noted
?NATO’s most senior military official, Admiral Rob Bauer, in early October. Efforts are currently underway to improve the situation, with the US and European countries working to boost production of artillery shells and other munitions. Ukraine itself has also recently?signalled its intention
?to dramatically increase domestic arms manufacturing by entering into a series of joint production agreements with international partners. While there are signs of progress toward resolving Ukraine’s munitions supply issues, it will be many months before any major breakthroughs are achieved. Meanwhile, the intensity of artillery fire along the 850 kilometer front line of the war means that projected production is unlikely to meet Ukraine’s needs until the second half of 2024 or early 2025.
