Ukraine Update 9/4/2023
UKRAINE HAS A NEW DEFENSE MINISTER
Ukraine has replaced its defense minister and Zelensky has nominated Rustem Umerov to the post, replacing Oleksiy Reznikov. There are unconfirmed rumors Reznikov, who hails from L’viv, will become Ukraine's ambassador to the UK.
While there were accusations of significant corruption in Ukraine's defense ministry and finger pointing at Reznikov, he remained in his post and was not formally accused of wrongdoing. There are still reports of corruption and the sale of western armaments to third parties outside Ukraine.
Umerov has almost no defense experience. He is currently the chairman of the State Property Fund, whose mission is to attract investment into Ukraine, and has been closely involved in prisoner of war exchanges. He also served as a senior negotiator in the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
Umerov as a businessman was successful in the telecom business in Ukraine. His ethnicity is Tatar and Crimean, but he was born in Uzbekistan.
We are about at the end of the Ukrainian counter offensive which is why Reznikov was kicked out, since he can now be blamed for the failure.
There are reports that Ukraine is ginning up a major manpower recruiting effort to try and build a new army of 500,000 by 2025. To do that the country will have to dip into the privileged who mostly have bought their way out (bribed) of the war. The London Guardian reports that thousands of Ukrainian men are avoiding military service.
Ukraine is also changing the recruitment requirements to include all males between 25 and 55 and those who were excluded for medical reasons. Ukraine also will be undertaking a major campaign in Europe demanding that male, recruitment eligible males living outside Ukraine be returned to Ukraine for the Ukrainian army. There are about 5.2 million registered refugees from Ukraine in Europe with Poland holding the largest amount outside of Russia, with 1,194,642 as of last July.
There have already been clashes in Poland with Ukraine trying to dragoon young men. There are also clashes in Moldova.
Young people continue to leave Ukraine. Last week a group of young men were stopped in L’viv on their way out of the country. With the expansion of draft criteria to include medical cases and older citizens, the crackdown on exits is likely to spiral up.
The western press (especially in the UK and US) continue to claim that somehow Ukraine's counter offensive is gaining ground and even breached Russia's first line of defense. This is propaganda. Ukraine has suffered horrendous losses.
Tass quotes Russian President Putin, speaking on the margins of his meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on September 4th, saying: "As for the stalling of the counter-offensive , it is not a stalling, it is a failure." Tass went on to report "The Russian Defense Ministry also noted that the Ukrainian army had been making unsuccessful offensive attempts since June 4. Over the past two months, Kiev has lost more than 43,000 troops and about 5,000 pieces of various military equipment, including 26 planes and 25 Leopard tanks."
If the current reports on Ukraine’s emerging strategy are correct, Ukraine will attempt to hold the current contact line and try and stabilize the military situation while it reconstitutes its forces. with a two year window to get to a level to continue the war aggressively. The strategy seems to imply that the arrival in Ukraine of new weapons and some additional deep strike capabilities can hold off the Russians for the next few years. The Russians are still playing their cards very close to the vest, so what Russia does in the coming weeks (aside from its current active defense posture) remains unknown.
It is likely Moscow is waiting to see what signals may come from Washington. Erdogan's current visit to Sochi and his meeting with Putin may bring along messages from the Biden administration. Judging from Putin's remarks, the Russians have not fully evaluated what they are being told. In the next few weeks Putin and his generals will need to sort out their next moves.
Does anyone seriously expect Putin and the Russians to sit by passively as Ukraine spends two years to equip and train (largely at US taxpayer expense) a reconstituted half a million man army?
I think Putin learned his lesson when Ukraine and NATO used the Minsk 2 Agreement as a subterfuge to buy time to create a more robust Ukraine military force. He won't go down that road a second time!
I see the replacement of Resnikov by a Crimean Tatar negotiator with no Defense experience, along with the arrest of Kolomoisky, main backer of the Donbas war after 2014, as the beginning of an endgame.
Washington leaks critical of progress towards the Sea of Azov began on 17 August, along with Kiev's PR pushback about a breakthrough at Robotyne and the commitment of their best brigades, beginning in Western media the same day.
After two weeks of positive media reports of the fall of Robotyne each day, every day, since 17 August, but no progress toward Verbove, leaving vulnerable narrow flanks, Kyiv seems now to have got the message from Washington, first offered by Milley in November 2022: this is as good as it gets, agree a ceasefire and we can all talk about security guarantees and territory, as in March 2022 before Johnson arrived to scupper the first talks.