NATO or Nuclear? While Trump Assembles His Team, Ukraine Races to Consolidate Positions for an Armistice in January
Talk grows of a Korea-style agreement with a demilitarized zone that could freeze positions for decades.
President-elect Trump moving fast to create foreign policy and defense teams, Russia and Ukraine are racing to stake out positions on the ground. As talk grows of a Korea-style armistice and demilitarized zone, positions occupied today could be frozen for decades.
The deadline appears to be Mr. Trump’s January 20 inauguration. In one sign of optimism, Ukrainian Eurobonds surged by 12 percent over the past month. Some investors bet that President-Elect Trump will crack heads and force a compromise to end a war that has caused an estimated 1 million killed and wounded.
In a last minute lunge for land, Russia is fighting what is shaping up to be the bloodiest battle of the war. Fielding 50,000 Russian and North Korean troops, the Kremlin seeks to end a three-month long occupation of a 250-square mile chunk of Russia’s Kursk Region. On Monday, Russia lost a record 1,950 soldiers killed and seriously wounded in the war, according to the Ukraine’s Armed Forces General Staff. This followed the loss of 1,770 soldiers on Sunday.
Although the war has slipped from daily headlines, October was the bloodiest month for Russian soldiers since Mr. Putin launched his frontal attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Each day, Russia lost an average of 1,500 soldiers killed or wounded, the chief of Britain’s defense staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, told the BBC on Sunday.
With these losses, Russia may resort to filling the ranks by importing as many as 100,000 North Koreans, Ukrainian defense officials predict. This intense fighting comes as both Ukraine and Russia keep an eye on the American political calendar. Vice President-elect Vance has talked about a ‘land for peace’ deal, where an armistice would come with a demilitarized zone.
On the Korean peninsula, a 160-mile long DMZ backed by American soldiers has kept the two Koreas apart since it was instituted in 1953. In Vietnam, the 47-mile long DMZ ultimately failed. First, North Vietnamese soldiers first went around it. Then, in 1975, they went through it. In Germany, the Cold War era, 858-mile long “Inner Border” kept the two Germanies apart from 1945 to 1990.
In all three cases, neither side formally recognized the other side’s sovereignty. Land races preceded the barbed wire going up. Today, advisors to President Trump oppose stationing American troops to patrol an 800-mile long DMZ across southeastern Ukraine. They say the gun barrels should be European. On Tuesday, Britain’s Boris Johnson told GB News: “We will then have to pay to send British troops to help defend Ukraine.”
As the war drags on, Ukrainian public opinion increasingly is open to trading some land for iron clad security guarantees. In a poll released Tuesday by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 32 percent of respondents were open to Ukraine giving up “some of its territories” for a peace deal. This was three times the level of 18 months ago. However, 58 percent said that “under no circumstances” Kyiv should surrender land to Russia.
Mr. Putin shows no public sign of offering Ukraine any concessions. Instead, he seems to believe he is winning. However, signs of stress indicate that his generals are throwing their all into achieving maximum gains before talks to freeze positions in place.
On the materiel side, Russia’s army is running critically short of armaments. North Korea is supplying half of the artillery shells fired by Russia this year. This week photos emerged of a train hauling two North Korean-made M1989 Koksan 170-millimeter self-propelled howitzers.
“Foremost among Russia’s arms bottlenecks is its inability to replace large-caliber cannons,” reads a report, “Russia’s War Economy Is Hitting Its Limits,” posted yesterday in Foreign Policy. “Russia has been losing more than 100 tanks and roughly 220 artillery pieces per month on average.” The authors note that Russia’s two rotary forges can only produce a total of 20 barrels a month.
In a sign of the times, the CEO of Mosfilm, the Soviet era film studio, met this week with Mr. Putin to announce a patriotic gesture. The studio will give to Russia’s army its working props for war movies — 28 T-55 tanks, eight PT-76 light tanks, and six infantry fighting vehicles. They will be needed. Kreigsforscher, a Ukrainian Marine drone operator based in Kursk, posts on X that in just one village, Zelenyi Shylakh, he tallies 88 destroyed Russian vehicles.
On the personnel side, the Kremlin announced Wednesday that it is cutting payments to soldiers injured in Ukraine. Instead of paying $30,000 to each injured soldier, a sliding scale will cut payments to as low as $1,000. Russian POWs say that many commanders deliberately leave the bodies of dead soldiers on battlefields. That way, the dead are listed as “missing,” and the government does not have to make bereavement payments to widows.
After nearly 1,000 days of war, Russia has lost 714,380 soldiers killed or wounded, according to Ukraine’s daily tally. As of May payouts for war casualties hit $26 billion, according to a study by Thomas Lattanzio and Harry Stevens, “Wounded Veterans, Wounded Economy: The Personnel Costs of Russia’s War.”
Many Ukrainians believe that Mr. Putin is surrounded by yes men and that he does not understand his army’s dire straits. As a result, they are skeptical that he will negotiate a real armistice. After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia repeatedly signed — and then ignored — a string of ceasefires. The solution, some Ukrainians say, is to build a nuclear bomb.
The Times of London reports that a paper on Ukraine’s nuclear weapons potential was to be presented Wednesday to a Ukrainian Defense Ministry conference. The paper was prepared by the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, an influential Ukrainian military think tank.
“The weight of reactor plutonium available to Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons,” the report says, according to the British newspaper. “The amount of material is sufficient for hundreds of warheads with a tactical yield of several kilotons.” Such a nuclear weapon would have about one tenth the power of the American ‘Fat Man’ bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945.
“That would be enough to destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial or logistics installations,” the Times quotes the report’s author, Oleksii Yizhak, a director at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government research center that advises President Zelensky and Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council.
Within hours of posting, the newspaper report was denied by Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Heorhii Tykhyi. He posted on X: “We do not possess, develop or intend to acquire nuclear weapons.” However, in September, after a meeting in New York with then-candidate Trump, Mr. Zelensky summarized Ukraine’s security choice as “NATO or nuclear.”
https://www.nysun.com/article/nato-or-nuclear-while-trump-assembles-his-team-ukraine-races-to-consolidate-positions-for-an-armistice-in-january
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