Weekly Overview Cables - Ukraine War and terribly unwise messaging from Washington.

Ukraine war updates.

• 1)Russia intensifies the tempo of offensive operations.

• Russian forces continue to make gains in Ukraine, with intense offensive operations in the Donetsk region, especially around Bakhmut, making “day and night” defense efforts challenging according to Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi.

• And increasing the tempo of attacks makes good sense for Moscow - at the time when US funding is still hanging in the balance and Ukraine is on the brink of running out of air-defense ammo, why wouldn’t Putin maximize the pressure?

• In fact, at this moment in time, the only major factor placing a real limit on Russia’s advance is their own lack of manpower and materiel.

• Both sides are essentially stuck in a race to gain (Russia) and deny (Ukraine) advantage on the battlefield, and the crux of the current stage of the war can be summarized in the following way: will Western aid come in time before Russia is able to capitalize on objectively favorable conditions and maximize its battlefield gains?

• 2) Ukraine’s new milestone in deep strikes.

• Ukraine has now conducted deepest attacks in Russia thus far when its drones targeted production facilities in Yelabuga and Nizhnekamsk, Tatarstan, striking a factory producing Shahed-type drones (where Iranians are helping Russia to scale the production of these drones to 6,000 per year by mid 2025) 932 miles from the Ukraine border.

• In addition, there were further strikes on Russian airfields: Ukrainian drones hit Morozovsk airbase in Russia.

• Originally, Ukraine claimed that this attack resulted in 20 casualties among airfield personnel, the destruction of six warplanes, and significant damage to eight others.

• But the open-intel (OSINT) community was quick to point out the lack of corroborative evidence of this alleged destruction, and in fact, the new photos from the airbase show little damage sustained at the relevant airbase.

• If it turns out to be an exaggeration/falsehood, this would certainly not be the first time that Kyiv overstates its success..

• And they need to be careful with such claims: not only is it dispiriting to soldiers and an entire nation to learn the ultimate (less glamorous) truth, but Kyiv risks undermining its credibility on the global stage.

• At the time when Russian propaganda is already working overtime to undermine Ukraine, the very last thing they need is to inflict self-harm on their worldwide credibility.

• 3) Russia’s attempts to tie Moscow attacks to Ukraine continue to falter.

• Moscow is becoming ever so desperate in attempting to ‘‘uncover’’ (or rather, insert) ever so tenuous link between the Tajik-origin Islamist ISIS-K terrorists detained for their role in Moscow attacks and Ukraine.

• First, there was FSB finding ‘‘pro-Ukraine’’ material on the terrorists’ phones (although FSB is the very institution that proudly tortures suspects and poisons underwear of Russian opposition politicians - not exactly the most credible source of intel one could say) and then there was a brazen (and baseless) allegation that apparently, Ukraine had deeper links with Tajikistan and was recruiting men as mercenaries from this remote central Asian country.

• Tajikistan vigorously denied this of course, and to be clear, there is also total lack of evidence to back these claims.

• (side note: if anything, it is Russia that has disproportionately recruited ethnic minorities from deprived regions of its own Federation and has been willing to go to the other side of the Atlantic to recruit actual mercenaries from Cuba - for which, it has received an unexpected rebuke from the Cuban government. There was also a similar recruitment campaign in Africa and India (and officials in Delhi were also unhappy about this - describing in detail how many Indians were completely unaware and were in fact ‘‘duped’’ into serving in combat roles in Ukraine.))

• But more important (and certainly more damning to Russia’s claims), was the revelation that Iran had actually alerted Russia about a possible security threat from ISIS-K.

• Iran’s warning ‘‘to prepare for a significant operation in Russia’’ came mere days before (as opposed to America’s warning that arrived 3 weeks prior to the attack), and was even more generic than that offered by Washington (America’s intel included more specifics - like the suggestion that ‘‘theaters’’ could be some of the targets).

• And Iran’s intel was acquired during interrogations of those arrested in connection with deadly bombings in Iran (in January - which Washington also warned about).

• Now then, it is one thing for Russians to dismiss intel from an adversary and claim lack of utility due to ‘‘generalness’’ of the information.

• But when it is your most important ally (at least in deed - if not officially)?

• Iran is the most important ally to Russia in the Ukraine war.

• Sure there are millions more artillery shells from North Korea, and optical equipment from China, but Iran is providing the biggest range of game-changing weapons (including ballistic missiles) and actually helps Russia to build its own drone factories.

• Not only that, there is also massive help with sanctions evasion and coordination in securing hard to get (and limited in numbers) high-value semiconductors.

• Consequently, Moscow’s pathetic attempts to link this attack to Ukraine fail even further when there is a new revelation that it is in fact its most important ally against Ukraine that warns them about impending ISIS-K attacks.

• 4) Ukraine finally lowered the conscription age.

• President Zelenskyy signed a law lowering the age limit for military conscription from 27 to 25 years, following approval by the Verkhovna Rada last May.

• 5) Russian disinformation campaigns become ever more sophisticated.

• If previous campaigns were relying on conspicuous trolls to disseminate obvious factual untruths, the more recent campaigns double-down on pre-existing doubts and aim to nudge the frame of the debate into a pro-Russian territory.

• The scale has increased massively - and tactics utilized are now also more insidious and aim to spread ‘‘opinions’’ vs statements of facts (making it harder to identify obvious trolls).

• For example: a Russian disinformation operation used over 50,000 fake accounts to post 200,000 daily messages aimed at convincing Germans that support for Ukraine jeopardizes their prosperity and increases the risk of a nuclear conflict.

• It is hard to overstate how different this is to traditional disinformation campaigns: imagine opening your twitter account and seeing normal-looking accounts sharing “opinions’’ on the Ukraine war - how do you distinguish this from real accounts?

• Human beings look for shortcuts in decision-making and this enormous social proof is a powerful obstacle to overcome.

• If you see hundreds of thousands of posts from your fellow compatriots that ostensibly appear to express ‘‘worry around nuclear escalation’’, then how likely is it that your own opinion will not be affected even just a little?

• At the very least, this will legitimize and crystallize the highly damaging pro-Kremlin narratives.
  

The US ambassador to NATO commits a major strategic blunder.

• Commenting on Ukraine’s deep strikes (on energy infrastructure) within Russia, the US ambassador to NATO, Julianne Smith pushed back against such missions:

  “That is something that the United States is not particularly supportive of. We are focused on the right to defend its territory, to push Russians out of its territory."

• There are several things very wrong with this statement:

• 1) It is logically inconsistent and an outright bad judgement.

• Why would the US not be supportive of deep strikes that hit hard and impose costs on the Russian state?

• Unlike Russia, Ukraine is not hurling ballistic missiles at residential buildings, and if they are hitting oil refineries and other industrial infrastructure sites, it is in retaliation to Russia’s ongoing campaign to destroy Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.

• 2) It is a bit rich coming from Washington.

• Ukraine is not able to defend its own infrastructure as needed, because it simply lacks enough Patriot missiles (and other SAMs like the German IRIS-Ts).

• This lack of capability is something that the US could fix - but it is not doing that, and so the very least Ukraine can do now, is to impose similar costs on Russia.

• It is a little inconsistent for the US to expect restraint from Ukraine hitting back at Russia’s own energy infrastructure when it won’t even provide sufficient help for Kyiv to protect its own infrastructure.

• 3) It is weak and incentivizes bad outcomes.

• What is the signaling to Moscow?

• That the US is increasingly uncomfortable with Ukraine’s military operations?

• And (leaving aside the negative signaling around reliability displayed to other allies who watch from the sidelines) how does that affect Putin’s perceptions of the US resolve as an ally of Ukraine?

• Recall that one of the primary assumptions Putin maintains (to this day) is that he will be able to outlast the west in the battle of wills.

• He has already been reinforcing his confirmation bias thanks to the foot-dragging on the Ukraine aid in Congress.

• And now America is also not supportive of Ukraine’s deep strikes on energy infrastructure in Russia?

• What does it say about Washington’s escalation dominance and resolve?

• If the tide of the war was to once again change in Ukraine’s favor, would Putin ever believe that Washington would support Ukraine going all the way and liberating all of its territory (including Crimea)?

• And if there is no risk of that, then Russia is essentially insured against the worst case scenario, and if it is insured against the extreme downside, then why not go all the way and play for maximum gains?

• In fact, that is what Moscow is already doing, and such comments from America’s ambassador to NATO will do very little to incentivize any other conduct from Putin.

• As such, the comments made here were not not merely a diplomatic faux pas - they were far more consequential than that: they most likely had an impact on Moscow’s strategic calculus, and most certainly not in a favorable way..