The worst news for Ukraine this week did not come from the sky. They sprung from the throat of an American congressman named Kevin McCarthy. It is very likely that McCarthy will take the gavel of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives in January. He is the man of the Republican Party, the candidate to win the mid-term elections, next month.
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McCarthy said on Tuesday that his party may no longer write “empty protests” at the behest of Ukraine. “Ukraine is important,” he said, but “people will be in the middle of a recession, and that can’t be the only thing they do.” In other words, the projected Republican majority in Congress intends to sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of political polarization in the US.
McCarthy gives Putin the formula for victory in Ukraine: wait for the collapse of his enemies. Regardless of the courage of the Ukrainians or the effectiveness of their military, they will not be able to finance their resistance to the occupation. Russia does not need to claim victory on the battlefield but to take advantage of the breathing space that its size and resources guarantee it. And of course she can scorch Ukraine with drones.
They are already freezing cold
The last two weeks have revealed Putin’s war plan: to make life unbearable for Ukrainians come winter. President Zelensky tweeted on Tuesday that a third of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had been destroyed. The electricity and water supply was cut off in more than a thousand cities and towns. The Deputy Minister of Energy told the BBC that in the city of Mykolaiv, near Odessa, there is no more heating, while the temperature at night drops to close to zero.
Military observers attribute this development to the presence of a new commander, General Sergei Sorobukin, who sharpened his jaws on the battlefields of the Syrian civil war. He gained experience in the systematic destruction of cities and infrastructure. He is now applying this experience to Ukraine. The difference between Syria and Ukraine is that the Syrian rebels (not just ISIS) lacked the tools of an organized state. They did not have a regular army, and ultra-sophisticated weapons did not flow to them from the West.
Sorobukin is not amazing just to bomb. He also fires off verbal catapults. “We have information about Kyiv’s plans to use illegal weapons in Harson,” he said in a television interview this week. Kherson is the southern city, which the Ukrainian army hopes to liberate from the Russians. News from the battlefield shows that 20 thousand Russian soldiers are in danger. The Russian governor calls on citizens to hurry and evacuate the city.
In “General Gog-Wamgog” Russian bloggers and tweeters found the war hero they longed for during long weeks of depressing news. Sorovkin celebrated his 56th birthday last week, and congratulatory posters were plastered on Russian websites, showing him next to burning chimneys of power plants and exploding high-rises.
Conventional slaughter
The joy for Ukraine’s Ida should come as no surprise to those who have been following the discourse in the Russian media in recent months. Calls for mass extermination were heard openly in the state media, and did not arouse any reservations. From the first day of the war, we knew that its explicit goal was to erase Ukraine from the map. Now we know that not only the state is in the crosshairs, but the population itself.
This war has undergone a transformation: it began with the high tones of a strategic struggle, and is becoming a conventional massacre. Eight months ago, Putin again boasted about what he thought was Russia’s unequivocal advantage in the hypersonic arms race, meaning ballistic missiles launched at 5 to 25 times the speed of sound, and beyond the interception capability of any defense system. Eight months later, Russia is waging war with unwieldy drones that travel at 125 mph and are at least theoretically within range of semi-automatic rifles. They’re easy to shoot down, but some always manage to evade and kill their targets.
These drones are not breathtaking technological achievements, but they are changing the battlefield to an extent that was unimaginable. In the very days when Ukraine is losing electricity and water, Ethiopia and Eritrea are completing their campaign of destruction against the people of Tigra, in northern Ethiopia, near the border with Sudan The Tigryan rebels were on the verge of victory in the civil war more than a year ago, and their ranks were approaching Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian army was at a loss.
In August 2021, a Dutch website was the first to publish photographic evidence of drone shipments from Iran to Ethiopia. Turkish drones also followed. The wheel of war turned with dizzying speed. The victorious Tigrians began a long retreat, from the entrances of Addis Ababa back to their strongholds in the northern cities. There it seemed that they would be able to defend themselves, but the last few days put an end to that hope. Ethiopian drones provide deadly background music to the lives of millions of Tigrians cut off from the outside world and at risk of starvation.
Ethiopia learned the importance of drones from Azerbaijan, which turned the wheel of a war of almost 30 years in 2020, through the intensive use of Israeli and Turkish drones against Armenia.
The Ukrainians were no strangers to drone warfare. Long before the Russian invasion, local drone enthusiasts cooperated, achieving impressive achievements back in 2019, against the Russian army in the east.
The first foreign drones in Ukraine’s service were made in Turkey: the same drones that were popular in Azerbaijan and Ethiopia, of the Bayraktar model. They did wonders against the Russian forces in the Donbass, and the Ukrainians even composed songs of praise for them. In August, a Turkish newspaper reported that the drone manufacturer plans to open a factory on Ukrainian soil, and include a research and development center. The Russians gritted their teeth.
Iranians in the Crimea
A strange, surprising and ironic state of affairs gives Iran and Turkey a leading position in the drone markets, on both sides of the war barrier. In recent days there have been reports that Iran has sent advisers and technicians to help the Russian military in operating its drones. According to the New York Times, the Iranians They arrived at a base in the Crimea, “far from the front.” But “far” in Crimea is never very far.
Iran’s actions in Ukraine require a reassessment of the nature of its relations with Russia. Of course, Russia pays in cash for the drones; but in this equation there is inevitably another means of payment, of a strategic nature. Iran may demand payment at the Golan gates. Can Israel afford to add and be neutral in the Ukraine war? Can Israel afford not to be neutral in the war Ukraine? Here we have a dictionary definition of “dilemma”.
Russia suffers from a growing shortage of weapons and ammunition. Arms dealers are not lining up to fill the shortage. It currently relies on sources such as Iran and North Korea, two countries eager to destroy the status quo in their regions. It is better to at least assume the possibility that Russian support will be the price asked, and maybe also be the price offered.