The different outcomes of the weekend’s attacks on Tel Aviv and Kharkiv reflect factors practical and political.
ABOVE: over the weekend, a fire truck was destroyed in Kharkiv, Ukraine by a “Shahad 136” drone produced by Iran
ABOVE: missiles from Israel’s “Iron Dome” on their way to intercept Iranian-launched drones over Tel Aviv
17 April 2024 — It was a tale of two cities this past weekend. On Sunday morning, people in Tel Aviv went about their lives largely as usual despite the 300 drones and missiles that Iran had fired at Israel just hours before. French, U.S., UK, and Israeli forces destroyed nearly all of the projectiles except one.
But more than a thousand miles due north, Ukrainians in Kharkiv mourned 20 people killed over the weekend, the latest to die in a Russian bombardment campaign that has taken the lives of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure.
Both attackers used Iranian-made Shahed 136 drones. The different outcomes reflect factors practical and political. Said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a Tweet on Monday:
Shaheds in the skies above Ukraine sound identical to those over the Middle East. The impact of ballistic missiles, if they are not intercepted, is the same everywhere. European skies could have received the same level of protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar full support from its partners in intercepting drones and missiles. Terror must be defeated completely and everywhere, not more in some places and less in others.
Olena Halushka, co-founder of the International Centre for Ukrainian Victory, blamed the Biden administration’s strategy of under-arming Kyiv to avoid provoking Moscow:
Russia and Iran were given two years to test out Shahed drones in action against us, Ukrainians, and improve technologies accordingly. Two years. That was supposed to manage escalation.
On Monday, reporters asked White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby why the United States and allies had shot down Iranian drones over Israel but not Ukraine:
Two different conflicts, different airspace, different threat picture. And the President has been clear since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine that the United States is not going to be involved in that, that conflict in a combat role. We have provided air-defense systems to Ukraine until Congress halted that aid. Unfortunately, we can’t do that right now. Because we don’t have that national security supplemental funding that, that they so desperately need.
Note to readers: there is a certain level of bullshit to this argument. There are certain air-defense systems and missile systems being decommissioned by the U.S. military that could be given or sold to Ukraine or U.S. Western allies outside of the Congressional aid package, and legally permissible. There is a brutal, dark backstory of what is going on here, beyond the limits of this post.
The U.S. Senate passed a bill more than two months ago to provide more aid to Ukraine. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has long blocked a vote on the bill, though he may soon allow something to come to the floor. On Monday, he promised separate bills for funding for Ukraine, Israel, and other “crises.”
But House members of both parties seem far more receptive to the plight of Israel than Ukraine, which is in a far weaker military position.
Note to readers: as noted in the latest report from the Institute for the Study of War (in my opinion the Institute reports are the most authoritative analysis of the war), Russian forces are making their move, exploiting the delays to U.S aid. They have switched from fighting for individual positions and instead are now maneuvering in wide-scale attacks on the battlefield again:
“Ukraine cannot hold the present lines now without the rapid resumption of U.S. assistance, particularly air defence and artillery, that only the U.S. can provide rapidly and at scale.
Lack of air defence has exposed Ukrainian frontline units to Russian aircraft that are now dropping thousands of bombs on Ukrainian defensive positions for the first time in this war.
Ukrainian artillery shortages are letting the Russians use armoured columns without suffering prohibitive losses for the first time since 2022.”
Over the weekend, U.S. Congressional representatives rallied to provide Tel Aviv with new military aid, working to get a bill to the White House within hours. That doesn’t just reveal favoritism, it also underscores a failure on the part of the Biden administration, said Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and a senior advisor to Human Rights First. In an interview last night on CNN International, Hodges said Biden needs to make the case for Ukraine and outline a strategy for victory:
This reflects the continued failure of the administration to clearly specify the strategic endstate for the war by Russia against Ukraine. The guiding principles seem to be limiting the possibility of escalation and keeping Ukraine barely in the fight. This is strategic illiteracy and only serves to achieve the opposite of escalation management. The MAGA-faction of Congress obviously is hugely responsible for the blockage of further aid, but the administration has left the door open for this because of its strategic leadership failure.
But several practical considerations make it easier to defend Israel from air attack:
• Israel is much smaller than Ukraine, allowing them to create consolidated and layered air defense systems.
• Israel is able to use aircraft in a permissive airspace to shoot down inbound missiles and drones.
• Israel’s allies have the ability to launch ballistic missile defenses from ships in the Mediterranean, and fighters capable of cruise missile defense from air bases in the region if required. In other words, U.S. warships were able to help Israeli forces shoot down the incoming threats as they patrolled the waters off Israel’s Mediterranean coast.
But Ukraine’s Black Sea coast is all but cut off to the United States right now, thanks to Turkey. The United States has not had any ballistic missile defense capable ships in the Black Sea for the past two years once Turkey closed the Bosphorus Straits to most warships. The United States does have aircraft in Europe that can shoot down Russian cruise missiles and Shahed drones over parts of Ukraine – but only if Washington were to impose a no-fly zone over the country.
Ukraine is also facing a more capable enemy. Most military strategists believe that no Iranian attack could match the quality or capability of Russian attacks against Ukraine. And Ukraine lacks the kind of direct military support that Israel enjoys. Jordan and even Saudi Arabia are actively helping to defend Israel, with aircraft/pilots and with munitions. Ukraine has zero active help and gets only a smattering of what it needs to defend itself
Ukraine could, for example, use Israel’s Iron Dome system to defend key cities, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out providing the necessary technology to Kyiv.
Still, as Ben Hodges said in that CNN interview I referenced above, Israel’s defense has lessons for Ukraine’s defenders:
It’s clear that Iran, like Russia, is willing to use hundreds of drones, rockets and missiles against civilian targets and so protection of civilian populations, power grids, and critical infrastructure requires extensive air/missile defense capabilities and practice and resilient power systems. We need to get the same sort of capability and active help to Ukraine. And we need to dramatically increase our own capabilities in NATO.
Also, in Europe, there is another factor: a pervasive fear of the Russian empire stretching across Europe, and what Putin might do in/to each European country. Yes, Russia controls more and more of Western political life and thought. But it is more than that ….
Pro-Russian politicians have now taken power in Hungary and Slovakia, with an expectation they will take power in the upcoming Austrian elections. Russia is taking control of more and more of Western political life and thought.
But it is kinetic war, too.
Just two instances from my colleagues in Poland. Russian plots on Poland have intensified, escalating brazen spy and sabotage war on a key Ukraine ally.
Note to readers: which is no surprise. It is unquestionably the flow of U.S. and NATO arms through Poland that has turned the country into the most critical battleground in the espionage wars. More than 80% of all the weapons to Ukraine move by rail through Poland.
1. Last year, the Polish intelligence service busted an extensive Russian spy ring whose goal was to disrupt rail movements across Poland: a group of about 10 young Ukrainians who had been recruited by the Russian intelligence services to scout Polish seaports and place GoPro cameras and tracking devices along railway lines and stations. The purpose was to derail trains carrying arms across the border destined for the Ukrainian military.
2. The arrest this past January of a Russian operative plotting to blow up a paint factory in the Polish city of Wroclaw didn’t get much attention. But it should have, a senior NATO official told me. The paint factory wasn’t some random target. It was right next to a fuel depot. The Russian plan was straightforward sabotage. He said:
The purpose was to ignite a giant conflagration that would cause the fuel depot to explode, resulting in a terroristic type of event that could disrupt the flow of weapons to Ukraine through Poland. And that’s scary.
The Polish paint factory plot was only one example of a marked uptick in Russian covert operations across Europe – including “active measures,” to use the old Cold War term that is getting ever more attention from U.S. national security and intelligence officials.
As a strategic supplement to its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s security agencies have stepped up their game of late, deploying bribes, bots and a proliferation of phony news sites pumping out disinformation about the war – not to mention brazen assassinations and sabotage operations such as the paint factory attack (which was aborted and busted by Poland’s internal security agency).
The purpose of virtually all of these actions appear to revolve around buttressing Moscow’s goal of crushing Ukrainian resistance – either by undermining political support for Kyiv in the west, disrupting the flow of arms to the embattled nation or, in the case of the recent murder in Spain of a Russian helicopter pilot who defected, punishing any sign of internal dissent to its war goals.
In a sense, the recent flurry of Russian ops is an updated and expanded version of the hybrid warfare playbook the Kremlin used in 2016 when the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian military, hacked into Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign emails, laundered the embarrassing contents through WikiLeaks and deployed an army of trolls assembled by (then) Putin crony Yevgeny Prighozin to plant fake stories on Facebook and Twitter.
As it turns out, what’s past is prologue – to much more. Just last month, acting on the same day, Polish, Czech and Belgian officials announced they had uncovered a seemingly continent-wide plot to bribe European Parliament members, with much of the cash believed to have been steered toward leaders of far right nationalist parties more inclined to be favorable to Moscow.
The European bribery/propaganda plot was a further expansion of an earlier operation during the run up to last October’s Polish elections. Stories began popping up in far right nationalist news sites about Ukrainian refugees committing murders of Polish citizens and getting away with it. There were even stories about Ukrainian women breaking up Polish families, seducing Polish men and breaking up marriages.
There is much more to write but I’ll wrap up with this. A long time U.S. military contact at NATO told me:
We are more concerned about kinetic war. Yes, the U.S. will be challenged by both the ongoing kinetic wars and the information wars, the latter of which Russia excels in because they have always played the long game (and we have not) and knew the growing power of information and cyber war over 20 years ago.
But kinetic war scares me. Russia, bloodied but resurgent in Ukraine, has earned useful combat experience against a skilled foe, and is only growing its competency on battlefields in areas like electronic warfare. Yes, we assist Ukraine across many fields of electronic warfare. But the Pentagon, emerging from a more-limited form of combat in the Middle East, can only study and theorize what Moscow has learned from its large-scale war in Ukraine. We do not have that experience having no real boots-on-the-ground.
Russia in recent years has turned the lights back on at Soviet-era military facilities throughout the region, refurbishing a constellation of bases that outnumber NATO’s collective presence there. Given Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea 10 years ago and its bid now to fully subjugate Ukraine, Moscow’s moves have raised questions about its real larger ambitions.
More to come.