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Francis P.

Ukraine has made Russia’s rear a battlefield, and it is doing it at a scale Russia can no longer brush aside.

It has not found a clean path to victory.

Storm Shadow Missile. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Washington is prone to this kind of mistake. It sees a successful strike campaign and starts imagining a cheaper war, one in which Ukrainian ingenuity and Western technology can compensate for the grim business at the front. Ukraine’s drones and missiles can make Russia pay more for the war. They cannot, by themselves, make Russian troops leave Donetsk.

Earl Shaffer never wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail alone.
He always saw the adventure as a tag-team effort with Walter Winemiller. The two men formed an inseparable bond while growing up in Pennsylvania and went off to serve their country during World War II.
Also Read: Mike Vining on Vietnam, Delta Force, and the sardines he never ateWinemiller died at Iwo Jima in February 1945, leaving Shaffer adrift without his best friend. His death understandably affected Shaffer deeply, as did what else he saw overseas while serving in the United States Army Signal Corps for 4½ years.

The worst of the oil shock looks like it is passing. The interim deal between the United States and Iran has begun reopening the Strait of Hormuz, tanker traffic is climbing back, and crude prices have fallen to their lowest levels since before the war.

The danger is what the United States spent to reach this point.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the country’s main cushion against exactly this kind of disruption, now sits at its lowest level in more than four decades, drained steadily through the crisis.

The fuel shortages set off by Ukraine’s drone campaign against Russian refineries have spread to the far edges of the country, reaching Siberia and the Pacific coast thousands of miles from any fighting.

By late June, more than half of Russia’s regions were limiting gasoline sales, turning a war aimed at oil refineries near the front into a nationwide problem at the pump. The shortages have now reached even the regions that produce much of Russia’s oil, where drivers wait in line for fuel, a situation their own government helped create.

HIMARS Rocket.

Vladimir Putin has spent the war insisting Russia is winning and that Ukraine’s strikes change nothing. On Sunday, he conceded, for the first time, that the country faces a fuel “deficit” and is going through what he called a difficult period, after Ukrainian drones set yet another major refinery ablaze. In the same remarks, he disclosed something else new, that Ukraine had offered to halt the deep strikes hammering Russian oil plants, and that he had turned the offer down. The admission is the story here.

The Russian Navy is preparing to return its most formidable surface combat ship to operational service, as following the most extensive modernisation ever undertaken on a Russian combat vessel, the nuclear-powered missile cruiser Admiral Nakhimov undertakes its final sea trials. The Kirov class cruiser has spent well over a decade undergoing reconstruction at the Sevmash Shipyard, emerging with entirely new combat systems, sensors and missile armament intended to keep it operational for decades to come.

During the recent 40-day deployment of the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning for 40 days of operations in the western Pacific, the Japan Air Self Defense Force and Maritime Self Defense Force not only closely monitored the carrier group, but also carried out “targeted simulated attacks,” according to Chinese state sources. Although Japanese media described warships and fighters conducting simulated attack profiles against the Chinese vessels, following significant controversies Japan’s Ministry of Defense claimed this had not occurred.

As the relationship between the United States and Canada continues to degrade, it now comes at the expense of each country’s industrial security.Last month, the Pentagon announced the unilateral suspension of the 86-year-old Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defense in response to what the White House sees as Ottawa’s failure to present a credible plan to spend 3.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035. And the opening of the gleaming new bridge between Detroit and Windsor has been long delayed in the tense run-up to the continental trade deal review.

During the Cold War, Europe kept asking whether Washington would risk an American city to save a European one. It was an impolite question, but a useful one, which is why it never quite left the room. It has now packed its bags and moved east. Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron created quite a stir with an important speech on French nuclear weapons policy.