US has trained more than 7,000 Ukrainian troops since war with Russia began

US has trained more than 7,000 Ukrainian troops since war with Russia began

U.S. forces have trained more than 7,000 Ukrainian troops since Russia first attacked the country last year, the Pentagon’s top spokesperson said Thursday. 

Among those soldiers were 65 Ukrainians who completed training on the Patriot air defense system at Fort Sill, Okla., and returned to Europe this week, press secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters.  

Ryder also said that more than 4,000 Ukrainian troops in two brigades will have completed combined arms training in Germany, with one group equipped with Bradley fighting vehicles and one with Stryker vehicles.  

“Additional combined arms training is currently underway at Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels training areas in Germany, with two motorized infantry battalions consisting of 1,200 Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel,” he added.  

Another 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers have finished operator and maintenance training on more than 20 donated systems since April of 2022, a program that is ongoing, Ryder said.  

Altogether, the U.S. and its coalition partners are currently training more than 11,000 Ukrainian soldiers across 26 different countries.  

“The U.S. will continue to provide training and work closely with our allies and partners to ensure the Ukrainian people have the security assistance they need to defend their country and repel Russian aggression,” Ryder said. 

Ukrainian troops first arrived at Fort Sill in January to begin training on the Patriot missile system in an accelerated version of a course that typically takes up to a year to learn. 

The expertise was expected to take several months — an already sped up timeline — though the Ukrainian troops exceeded expectations and finished the course faster than planned.  

The Ukrainian forces will now be able to operate the Patriot systems President Biden approved to ship to the country in December, as well as a Patriot battery Germany committed to sending from its own inventory. 

US has trained more than 7,000 Ukrainian troops since war with Russia began | The Hill

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Russian offensive falters as Ukraine eyes counterattack

The Russian offensive that began in the late winter has largely stalled after failing to make any significant gains in eastern Ukraine, including in the town of Bakhmut, which has become a symbolic battle of the war and a priority for Moscow.

Russian forces are still pounding away at Ukrainian lines across the eastern front, but the intensity of the assault, which just weeks ago had put immense pressure on Kyiv, appears to be dying out.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Russian forces have not made any progress in the past 20 days from the southeast to the Luhansk region up north.

“The Russians are struggling in a big way,” Milley told a House Armed Services Hearing on Wednesday. “These forces are very undertrained, they are essentially doing frontal assaults into machine gun positions and they are getting slaughtered.”

“That’s also true across the entire frontline, from Kreminna all the way down to Kherson,” the top U.S. general continued. “The Ukrainians have fought a remarkable defensive fight and the Russians have not achieved their strategic objectives.”

With the Russian assault slowing down and more advanced western armor trickling in, including Germany’s Leopard 2 tanks and more Soviet-era fighter jets, Ukrainian forces have hinted they are poised to launch a long-anticipated counteroffensive.

Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrski, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said in a Telegram post last week the Russians have lost “considerable strength” during the offensive.

“Very soon we will take advantage of this opportunity, as we once did near Kyiv, Kharkiv, Balaklia and Kupyansk,” Syrski said, referring to successful Ukrainian counteroffensives last year.

The Russian offensive has lost steam but Moscow still has far more manpower than Ukraine, the biggest and most enduring obstacle for Kyiv in the war. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a partial mobilization last year that called up some 300,000 reservists. He also signed a decree on Thursday authorizing a semiannual conscription of 147,000 new conscripts between April and mid-July, although the servicemembers are likely to undergo training and it’s unclear if and when they will be deployed to the frontline.

Meanwhile, the Russian tactic of grinding out the war on the eastern frontline is wearing down both sides. Kyiv has inflicted heavy losses on Moscow but has faced a high death toll as well, particularly Bakhmut, according to the U.K. Defence Ministry.

Ukraine needs to transition the battle out of a defensive position with a strategic maneuver, said George Beebe, the director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Statecraft. 

“If you’re looking at this as a war of attrition, where the Russians are not actually focusing on big arrow movements on the map, but on grinding down Ukraine’s ability to bring manpower and munitions to the battle,” Beebe said, “then I think you get a different picture and the Russians may have more reason for optimism.”

Beebe also questioned whether Ukrainian troops have the capability to break through fortified Russian defenses — even with western armor, saying Ukraine needs hundreds of those to make a difference.

“I think the Ukrainians have their hands full,” he said. “I think what we’re headed for is a pretty long-term stalemate and the lines may move here and there, but I don’t think either side is going to win this war outright.”

For more than half a year, Moscow has applied much of its strength on taking Bakhmut, a mining town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine that has been devastated and reduced to rubble by shelling. 

Russia has come close to seizing the city after encircling it earlier this month but has failed to completely push Ukrainian defenders out.

Bakhmut sits at an important crossroads in Donetsk and serves as a regional supply hub. Russia has sought to capture the city in order to advance further west and fully capture the Donbas — the industrial heartland made up of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russia has seized most of Luhansk.

While Russia has undeniably seen Bakhmut as a strategic capture point, western analysts say its value is more symbolic because Ukrainians are dug in further west. The Kremlin is looking for a major victory it can tout to the public and Ukraine does not want to cede anything to Russia in fear of galvanizing the Russian war machine.

Ukrainian President Voldoymyr Zelensky told the Associated Press this week that losing Bakhmut could mean more international support for Russia. Putin could then push for a settlement unfavorable to Kyiv, he said.

“If he will feel some blood — smell that we are weak — he will push, push, push,” Zelensky said. “We can’t lose the steps because the war is a pie — pieces of victories. Small victories, small steps.”

Western analysts say Russian casualties have run high in the battle. Ian Stubbs, a senior military advisor at the United Kingdom’s Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), estimated about 30,000 Russian troops and soldiers with the mercenary outfit Wagner Group have died or been wounded in Bakhmut.

Stubbs said the offensive has stalled and Russia needs to regroup and resupply, also claiming the losses revealed a systematic problem for the Kremlin.

“The astounding levels of incompetence in Russia’s military leadership that have eroded Russia’s military reputation are clear for all to see,” Stubbs said in a Wednesday speech.

Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has claimed control of most of the town but has repeatedly criticized the Russian military for not supplying his troops with enough ammunition.

Prigozhin recently admitted the battle for Bakhmut had “badly damaged” his soldiers but also “practically destroyed” the Ukrainian army, according to an audio tape obtained by Reuters.

Other Russian offensive operations in eastern Ukraine have also floundered.

Russia has failed to capture Vuhledar, a town in Donetsk that serves as a gateway to the southern Zaporizhzhya region, which was taken by Moscow early in the war.

The battle for Vuhledar resulted in an enormous number of Russian armor casualties as Ukraine devastated battle tanks around the town.

Russia may be preparing to reconstitute a brigade to resume another offensive operation in Vuhledar, but they have already done that multiple times and are unlikely to be successful, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Moscow appears to have refocused its efforts on the town of Avdiivka, located about 50 miles south of Bakhmut.

Rybar, a prominent Russian military blogger, claimed in a Telegram post this week that Russian forces were advancing from the north of Avdiivka and south of the town.

The U.K. Defence Ministry said in an intelligence update on Tuesday that Russia is pushing to encircle Avdiivka but has failed to gain significant ground after suffering heavy armor losses.

For Ukraine, a potential counteroffensive could come if Russian forces slow down further to reorganize.

The most talked about opportunity is a break into the southern Zaporizhzhya region around the occupied city of Melitopol to cut off a land bridge to Crimea, but Ukrainian troops will face stiff resistance from Russian-held lines.

Stephen Biddle, an adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Ukraine will take ground in the counteroffensive — but the dispute is over how fast and at what cost.

Last fall, Ukraine faked that it would attack the southern Kherson region but instead went for Kharkiv.

Biddle said this was effective because the Russians “didn’t have enough troops to defend normal densities everywhere” and lost territory when it repositioned, but he said a similar scenario is unlikely this time.

“The Russians have subsequently mobilized an additional 300,000 soldiers and they spent months and months and months digging in and preparing defenses really all on the frontier,” Biddle said.” It would not be safe to simply assume that the Russians will have vulnerabilities to the kinds they had in the fall.”

Russian offensive falters as Ukraine eyes counterattack | The Hill

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Syria foreign minister makes first Egypt visit for more than a decade

• An Egyptian security source said the visit was aimed at putting in place steps for Syria’s return to the Arab League

CAIRO: Egypt and Syria agreed to strengthen cooperation on Saturday during the first official visit by a Syrian foreign minister to Cairo in more than a decade, the latest sign of Arab states mending ties with President Bashar al Assad.

Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad was embraced by Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry as he arrived at Egypt’s foreign ministry in the first official trip since before the uprising and conflict that began in Syria in 2011.

President Assad was shunned by many Western and Arab states due to the war in Syria, which splintered the country and left hundreds of thousands of people dead.

“The ministers agreed to intensify channels of communication between the two countries at different levels during the coming phase,” a statement from Egypt’s foreign ministry said.

Egypt also reiterated its backing for a “comprehensive political settlement to the Syrian crisis as soon as possible.”

An Egyptian security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the visit was aimed at putting in place steps for Syria’s return to the Arab League through Egyptian and Saudi Arabian mediation.

The Cairo-based Arab League suspended Syria’s membership in 2011 and many Arab states pulled their envoys out of Damascus.

Some countries, including the United States and Qatar, have opposed the rehabilitation of ties with Assad, citing his government’s brutality during the conflict and the need to see progress toward a political solution in Syria.

But key regional powers including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have recently signalled increasing openness toward Damascus.

Egypt’s Shoukry visited Syria and Turkiye in February after the devastating earthquakes there, and on Saturday reiterated a pledge of support for its victims.

Egypt’s foreign ministry published pictures of Shoukry warmly greeting Mekdad at the foreign ministry on the banks of the Nile, as well as in one-on-one talks and leading a wider discussion.

Syria foreign minister makes first Egypt visit for more than a decade (arabnews.com)

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ASEAN Finance Ministers and Central Banks Consider Dropping US Dollar, Euro and Yen; Indonesia Calls for Phasing Out Visa and Mastercard

An official meeting of all ASEAN Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors kicked off on Tuesday (March 28) in Indonesia.

Top of the agenda are discussions to reduce dependence on the US Dollar, Euro, Yen, and British Pound from financial transactions and move to settlements in local currencies.

The meeting discussed efforts to reduce dependence on major currencies through the Local Currency Transaction (LCT) scheme. This is an extension of the previous Local Currency Settlement (LCS) scheme that has already begun to be implemented between ASEAN members.

This means that an ASEAN cross-border digital payment system would be expanded further and allow ASEAN states to use local currencies for trade. An agreement on such cooperation was reached between Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand in November 2022. This follows from Indonesia’s banking regulator, stating on March 27 that the Bank of Indonesia is preparing to introduce its own domestic payment system.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has urged regional administrations to start using credit cards issued by local banks and gradually stop using foreign payment systems. He argued that Indonesia needed to shield itself from geopolitical disruptions, citing the sanctions targeting Russia’s financial sector from the US, EU, and their allies over the conflict in Ukraine.

Moving away from Western payment systems is necessary to protect transactions from “possible geopolitical repercussions,” Widodo said.

Of the ASEAN nations, just Singapore has enforced sanctions on Russia, while all other ASEAN nations continue to trade with the country. There has been alarm at being caught up in US-led secondary sanctions, as are short to impact Central and South Asia countries involved in cotton manufacturing, a major industry in the region employing millions of people.

Foreign investors in Asia may wish to consider the amount of US dollars, Euros and Yen held in their accounts in light of a pending ASEAN currency trade decision. Professional discussions should be taken regarding any movement of company funds to alternative currencies. 

ASEAN Finance Ministers and Central Banks Consider Dropping US Dollar, Euro and Yen, Indonesia Calls for Phasing Out Visa and Mastercard (aseanbriefing.com)

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Asian Concerns Over Looming Secondary Sanctions For Supplying Russia Raw Cotton

An academic conflict is developing about which is the more globally important: Ukraine, or Asia.

Central and South Asian countries are becoming concerned about sheer volume of sanctions the United States is placing on Russia as this is impacting their own manufacturing. One of the issues now appearing on the horizon is raw cotton, a significant crop in Asia.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in early March and warned their governments about the need to comply with the sanctions of the West against Russia. Otherwise, he said, there will be consequences. Raw cotton sanctions are being planned for inclusion in the Russian sanctions products in H2 this year with the threat of secondary sanctions being imposed against the Central and South Asian economies.

The goal is obvious: to block the development of the Russian textile industry by provoking a shortage of raw materials. At least 60% of the Russian industrial capacity has long been tied to cotton processing, with the Russian textiles industry almost 100% dependent on imports from Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Sudan, Turkiye, and Uzbekistan.

All these countries may fall under parallel anti-Russian sanctions, although the extent of the actual secondary sanctions may vary. It also signals a shift in strategy in targeting specific Russian industries regardless of whether they are directly involved in the Ukraine conflict or not. Kiev will argue Russian soldiers are equipped with clothing derived from cotton. Asian manufacturers will point to the fact that cotton production is a major industry employing millions of people and an integral part of their own economies. An academic conflict is developing about which is the more globally important: Ukraine, or Asia.

World cotton prices have been growing since 2022 and, according to forecasts, this trend will continue. India currently accounts for 40% of all global cotton supplies with China second, however the United States also has its eyes on developing its own cotton industry. Russian payments for imported cotton (including cotton fibre) are estimated at US$300 million per annum and increasing.

Russia therefore is taking steps to restore the South Russian cotton growing industry, which began in the mid-2010s in the Lower Volga region, and in Stavropol and Dagestan, after a period of some stagnation, is now accelerating. Cotton has long been cultivated in the Crimea.

The Russian cotton industry has been encouraged not just to ring-fence it from sanctions – this is a modern occurrence. Instead, this was encouraged to take advantage of the growing supply of raw materials Central Asia, as well as from the same Egypt, China, Turkey, Pakistan, Syria, Sudan and so on, as trade partners with Russia.

Russia’s domestic annual demand for cotton is estimated at 230-250 thousand tonnes, of which up to 25% can be replaced by South Russian raw cotton in the next 1-3 years. The rest needs to be sourced elsewhere.

It is also important that the development of cotton growing makes it possible to reduce the area of unused land, and therefore avoid the degrading of potential agricultural soils while creating employment both in agriculture and in light industry.

The US use of sanctions meanwhile continues, although in cotton there is a twist. In the mid-2010s, Washington imposed a ban on imports of Turkmen and Uzbek cotton to the United States under the pretext that child labour was being used in these countries. This ban was lifted in 2021, although the US does not need cotton imports, because it remains among the largest producers and exporters of the material.

This indicates that the United States is concerned about cotton deliveries to Russia from Central and South Asia. Whether it can import enough to keep the Central and South Asian governments satisfied to mitigate against secondary sanctions however is another matter – but one that will become a global political football later in the year.

Source: AsiaIs

Asian Concerns Over Looming Secondary Sanctions For Supplying Russia Raw Cotton - Silk Road Briefing

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