War in Ukraine, Two Years Later

Happy Friday! The European Commission announced plans Thursday to cut red tape on agricultural subsidies, and China reached an agreement with the San Diego Zoo to send two pandas back to the States. Does TMD get results or what?

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Israel’s war cabinet agreed on Thursday to send Israeli representatives to hostage negotiations expected to be held in Paris today, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opted against sending negotiators to a meeting in Cairo earlier this month. The decision came as U.S. officials have been pushing Israel to participate in the talks. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told White House Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk on Thursday that the delegation would have a wider mandate for the talks, but the Israeli Defense Forces “will continue to expand its ground operation in Gaza.” 
• Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the chair of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, led a bipartisan congressional delegation with four colleagues on the committee to Taiwan on Thursday. The group met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in Taipei and President-elect Lai Ching-te, who is currently vice president. “The United States, Democrats and Republicans, stands with Taiwan, for your freedom and for ours,” Gallagher said at a press conference. “For as Taiwan goes, so goes the world.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning reiterated yesterday China’s opposition to “official interaction between the U.S. and Taiwan authorities.”
• The White House announced Thursday that new sanctions on Iran will be imposed “in the coming days” in response to existing Iranian support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. White House national security spokesman John Kirby referenced Iran’s reported move to send ballistic missiles to Russia, saying that, although the U.S. has “not seen any confirmation” the missiles have been transferred, “we have no reason to believe they will not follow through.” If the missiles are sent, Kirby said, the U.S. will impose additional sanctions. Also on Thursday, President Joe Biden met with Alexei Navalny’s widow and daughter in California, promising additional sanctions on Russia to be announced today. 
• Tens of thousands of AT&T customers experienced cell phone outages beginning early Thursday morning and lasting into the afternoon. The company did not disclose what brought service down, but the Federal Communications Commission and other federal agencies are investigating. “AT&T has no reason to think this was a cybersecurity incident,” Kirby told reporters. 
• The lunar lander Odysseus, built by Intuitive Machines of Houston, successfully landed on the moon Thursday night, the first time a U.S. craft has touched down on the moon’s surface in more than 50 years. “I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface and we are transmitting,” said company CEO Steve Altemus, referencing a rough landing sequence that required an additional orbit. “Welcome to the moon.” Odysseus’ journey marks the first time a commercial craft has landed on the moon in U.S. history.

A Grim Anniversary

Most Ukrainians went to sleep the night of February 23, 2022, unaware that, by morning, their lives would be forever changed.

They awoke the following morning to the sound of Russian bombs hitting their cities—the beginning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Two years on, Russia’s war has decimated much of the eastern part of the country, flattening once-vibrant cities, tearing families apart, and displacing millions of people. But the conflict hasn’t just permanently altered the lives of Ukrainians or changed the topography of their country: It’s affected the global geopolitical landscape as well, in ways that may endure past the war’s eventual end. 

There’s no doubt that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacted a staggering human toll. More than 6 million of Ukraine’s pre-war population of about 43 million people have fled the country, according to U.N. reports. Another 3 million are internally displaced. More than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and roughly 20,000 more injured—with the first full month of the war, March 2022, accounting for more than 7,000 deaths or injuries. Among those March casualties were at least 458 civilians murdered in Bucha, a town outside Kyiv. Meticulous investigations of this massacre suggest a particular unit of Russian soldiers likely committed war crimes.

Bucha is not the only city where such atrocities allegedly occurred: Ukrainian authorities say they’ve verified the names of at least 19,000 Ukrainian children who have been abducted, systematically taken from their parents and sent to Russian-occupied territories or into Russia itself in an effort to turn them against their home country. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest for the practice. 

The recent battle for control of Avdiivka, a city that has resisted Russian occupation in some form or another for a decade, underscored the latest tide shift in the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Fox News’ Bret Baier on Thursday that, over the course of the war, his government estimates one Ukrainian service member has been killed for every five Russians. The Russians’ approach in Avdiivka—throwing soldiers at the front line as cannon fodder to expend Ukrainian defenses—perhaps explains the disparity. Still, despite the brutality of the effort—or perhaps because of it—the Russian military captured the town over the weekend. It’s the most significant change to the front lines in a year.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which has tracked Russian troop movements since the first day of the full-scale invasion, suggested on Thursday that Russia could be “conducting a cohesive multi-axis offensive operation” for perhaps the first time in a year and a half. This approach is different from previous Russian offensives, the report’s authors say, because it’s neither a unified effort to take a single city, nor a series of attacks against towns too far away from each other to be mutually beneficial. Instead, this new offensive seems to be an effort to reach the Oskil River from several points along the front. “The design of this offensive operation is worth careful consideration regardless of its outcome as a possible example of the Russian command’s ability to learn from and improve on its previous failures at the operational level,” they wrote, predicting the direction of this advance in the map below.

For whatever successes it may achieve on the battlefield, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has had the unintended consequence, for Putin, of strengthening NATO. Just months after the initial invasion, Finland and Sweden reversed decades of neutrality and decided to join the defensive military alliance—Finland acceded in 2023, and Sweden is expected to do so soon, after overcoming opposition from Turkey and Hungary. 

Aside from expanding the alliance, Russia’s attack was also a clarifying moment for NATO members. “You have a reinvigoration of the purpose [and] of the mission that NATO has really lacked for the last 20 years,” Dmitri Alperovitch, founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank, told TMD. “NATO was not an alliance that was established, obviously, to fight terrorism in Afghanistan or elsewhere around the world. So bringing it back to its core mission, which was confronting, originally, the Soviet threat and, now, the Russian threat of occupation of Europe is helpful in crystallizing the purpose for all the members of the alliance.” 

But even as NATO remains relatively strong, European allies are seeing dark clouds gather on the other side of the Atlantic. The more than $40 billion in military aid the U.S. provided to Ukraine has run out, and additional American funding for weapons for the war-torn country is stalled in the U.S. House of Representatives, facing opposition from an increasingly isolationist faction of the political right. European nations are trying to step up their own production and distribution of materiel, but it would take years to make up for a U.S. shortfall. Meanwhile, struggling with so-called “shell hunger,” Ukrainian troops have had to begin rationing their remaining munitions, providing Russia the opportunity for further advances. “Will Ukrainians survive without Congress’ support?” Zelensky said Thursday, repeating a question he received from a journalist. “Of course. But not all of us.” 

The mood is somber among Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines who deal with the lack of ammunition every day, as Bennett Murray reports today for The Dispatch: 

From his command post about a mile away from the zero line, company commander Captain Marine, whose callsign is a reference to his original service branch before transferring to the Ground Forces, coordinated the defense while sitting in his dugout’s desk chair. He relies on Discord—an instant messaging and voice-over-internet platform predominately used by video game players—to speak with his officers while sending them live drone footage of the enemy.

Marine said he has never been more pessimistic, even compared to the war’s early days. 

“People back then were more motivated and most of the country didn’t know what real war is, and now we have so many casualties,” he said, adding that more weapons are desperately needed to defeat Russia. “We won’t win the war with just people, we have much fewer people than they have.”

Farther away from the zero line, at an artillery position around 10 miles from the front, Senior Lieutenant Yasen said he now has less than half the number of shells available to him last summer. His M109 self-propelled howitzer, which the U.S. gave to Ukraine, fires the 155mm NATO standard round that has emerged as the lifeblood of Ukraine’s defense. In the absence of new aid, Yasen’s men use shells donated from other, ostensibly neutral, nations.

The armament shortage creates more work for the artillery team, who must use their thin supply to compensate for mortar teams closer to the front who are even more poorly equipped. But their artillery fire is less accurate than it should be because the barrels on their cannons are in dire need of replacement themselves, having fired several times the recommended maximum number of rounds.

“The people of the United States and the government of the United States promised one thing,” said Yasen. “And the world heard what the Americans said—that they would support us as long as we need, as much as we need—but in the end what we are seeing is the United States ruining its own image.”

There’s growing concern in Brussels and in European capitals—particularly along NATO’s eastern flank, countries most vulnerable to Putin’s aggression—that if Ukraine falls, Poland, Romania, or the Baltics could be next, sparking a larger conflict between NATO and Russia. “[Ukrainians] just need the tools to do the job,” Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said earlier this month of the need for continued U.S. aid to Ukraine. “They are doing God’s work on our behalf. We just need to enable them, because they can’t defend themselves with bare hands.” He offered a personal plea to House Speaker Mike Johnson to put the Ukraine aid to a vote, adding that European aid to Ukraine now totals more than the U.S. contribution.

“There is growing anxiety, I would say, across Western Europe, especially at the official level about what Russian long-term intentions mean and in the near term, the risks of escalation stemming from accidents, inadvertent clashes, all sorts of things that could go wrong that could bring NATO and Russia into direct confrontation,” Ian Lesser, vice president of the German Marshall Fund, told TMD. “The greater concern in Brussels, both in NATO and within the EU, has been about the predictability of the American commitment to European security.”

Former President Donald Trump’s remarks earlier this month encouraging Putin to invade NATO allies who “didn’t pay”—a clumsy reference to member-countries’ commitment to spend 2 percent of their annual GDP on defense—have also reinforced anxieties about the U.S. commitment to its allies. “It is not by accident that, the closer you are to Russia, the more you’re spending on defense,” Sikorski said. Poland, which shares a significant land border with Ukraine, outspends the 30 other NATO countries on defense as a percentage of GDP. 

Even as Russia’s industrial defense base has been remarkably resilient, experts told TMD, the Kremlin’s relationships—some old, some burgeoning—with other bad actors across the globe are fueling the Russian war machine. China, Iran, and North Korea are all propping up Russia’s war effort, either economically or militarily. “I think a direct consequence of the war has been the forging, or the deepening, of this ‘Eurasian belt of tyranny,’” Will Inboden, a former member of President George W. Bush’s National Security Council, told TMD. 

Putin’s last overseas trip before the invasion began was to Beijing, where he and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged unconditional friendship. China hasn’t gone so far as to provide lethal aid to Russia, but neither has it sat idly by. Chinese exports of dual-use technology and equipment—from earth-moving machinery to dig trenches to ball bearings to make tanks to chips to build weapons—have likely been indispensable to Russian defensive and offensive operations. The U.S. and EU are reportedly considering sanctions on Chinese firms that are exporting goods to help Russia continue the war. 

Meanwhile, in 2023, Russia became China’s chief supplier of crude oil—sold at a deep discount, but nevertheless helping to blunt some of the effects of Western economic sanctions on Russia. China has also increased coal imports from Russia, though the government reimposed tariffs on the fuel in January after removing them in early 2022 in response to the instability in the energy markets caused by Russia’s invasion. “It’s been a relationship of mutual convenience, and China has only done what’s been good for China,” Alperovitch told TMD. 

Some countries are doing what China so far hasn’t: supplying lethal aid to Russia.

Russia has used Iranian attack drones since at least the summer of 2022 to attack civilian critical infrastructure and deplete Kyiv’s ever-dwindling air defenses. In December, Ukrainian officials estimated that Russia had flown roughly 3,700 Iranian drones into Ukraine since the war began. 

The Iranian weapons haven’t come cheap. A recent hack of a front organization for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps uncovered a trove of documents—the authenticity of which The Dispatch could not independently confirm—suggesting each kamikaze Shahed drone could cost Russia around $193,000, six times the price originally reported by The Guardian in October 2022. The documents also revealed that Russia had paid for some of the drones in gold. “This is very much a transactional relationship, and it’s depleting Russian foreign reserves,” Alperovitch said. Iran is also reportedly supplying surface-to-surface ballistic missiles to Russia. 

North Korea is also in the mix, providing Moscow with large shipments of ammunition—perhaps more than 1 million artillery shells so far—after Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un struck a deal last fall for the rounds in exchange for access to sensitive missile and satellite technology. For good measure, Putin threw in a luxury Russian car in violation of U.N. sanctions. (“I, actually, frankly, didn’t know there was such a thing as a Russian luxury car,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller joked Wednesday. “I hope Kim got the extended warranty.”) 

The degree to which these relationships will last is an open question—but several experts TMD spoke to suggested that it seems possible that deepened cooperation, transactional though it may be, could endure. “I see these partnerships as enduring and developing because there’s no reason for them to stop,” said Iulia Joja, director of the Black Sea program at the Middle East Institute. “The dependencies that they’re creating are ample on each other, so they will need each other more in the future. And as long as they have a common enemy […] they have no reason to stop this cooperation.” 

With NATO’s eastern flank being in a precarious position and the cascading effects of Russia’s partnerships, Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Finland and Turkey, thinks there’s a “dawning realization that we are in a kind of global conflict already.” 

“And while the United States is not directly fighting in that conflict,” he told TMD, “we are a participant in the sense that we have friends and partners and allies who are deeply engaged.” 

Worth Your Time

• Writing for his Kyiv-based Substack, The Counteroffensive, Tim Mak provided deep reporting on the dramatic battle of Antonov Airfield the day Russia invaded Ukraine. “This single moment was the point of maximum danger and vulnerability for the survival of the modern Ukrainian state,” he wrote. “Having taken the airfield in an air assault, the Russians now had the opportunity to land massive cargo planes filled with armored vehicles and thousands of troops, right in the suburbs of Kyiv. With that ability, the city could fall within hours, and with it, the democratically-elected government. … During the disorganized, frenzied battle that followed, Ukrainian resistance—and luck—turned the tide of the entire war. This epic stand by the people who fought at Antonov Airfield pierced the idea of Russian military superiority, and of a quick military victory. Shocked as they were about the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian morale skyrocketed with this tale of resistance. The story of this epic, 36-hour battle is also the story of how Ukrainians prevented Kyiv from falling into Russian hands.”
• In his latest op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove argued the 2024 presidential election will be chaotic and difficult to predict. “In this age of near-parity between Democrats and Republicans, candidates must get 90 percent or more of their party’s followers and carry independents to win,” he wrote. “But there’s more to the 2024 campaign than 1+1=victory. … More than any election in recent memory, this one involves contingencies piled on uncertainties topped by imponderables. It’d require an impossibly large whiteboard to diagram this complicated campaign equation. In a normal year, either man would be vulnerable and easy pickings. But this isn’t a normal year.”

Presented Without Comment

President Joe Biden, in remarks after “canceling” another $1.2 billion in student loans for about 153,000 borrowers:

Early in my term, I announced a major plan to provide millions of working families with debt relief for their college student debt. Tens of millions of people in debt were literally about to be canceled, their debts. But my MAGA Republican friends in the Congress, elected officials, and special interests stepped in and sued us and the Supreme Court blocked it, they blocked it. But that didn’t stop me. I announced we’re going to pursue alternative paths for student debt relief for as many borrowers as possible.

Also Presented Without Comment

Associated Press: [Major League Baseball] Players Miffed at Sport’s New See-Through Pants, Relaying Concerns to League

Also Also Presented Without Comment

The Hill: Jan. 6 Pinball Game Featured at CPAC Exhibit

Toeing the Company Line

• This weekend will feature two special editions of Dispatch Live! On Saturday at 4 p.m. ET/ 1 p.m. PT, Jonah, Steve, Mary, and Declan will be joined by (🔒) Tim Mak and Bennett Murray—two reporters who’ve been on the ground in Ukraine—to discuss the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine. Additionally, The Dispatch panel—Sarah, Jonah, Steve, and Mike—at the Principles First summit will be streamed and available to both members and non-members on Sunday at 11 a.m. ET/8 a.m. PT. Keep an eye on your inbox for more information about how to tune in.
• In the newsletters: Nick wondered (🔒) if Joe Biden is actually getting a raw deal from the media as many liberals are claiming.
• On the podcasts: Jonah and David (French) discussed the much-anticipated release of Dune: Part Two on The Skiff (🔒). 
• On the site: Bennett Murray reports from the front lines in Ukraine on soldiers’ morale two years into the war, and Richard Goldberg slams what he argues is the Biden administration’s self-interested (and pointless) proposed deal for Hezbollah and Israel.

Let Us Know

Do you remember the day two years ago when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine? What were your expectations then of how the war would play out?