War is mainly a catalogue of blunders. – Winston Churchill, 1950
A recent troubling development has come to public attention regarding pressure placed upon Ukraine by the United States (U.S.) to end its targeting of Russian oil refineries, storage depots and port facilities in response to Russia’s invasion and its unceasing attacks on civilian infrastructure. Global oil prices have trended upward to 15% currently and may effect U.S. gasoline prices in the course of the year, escalating inflation concerns as yet another consequence of Russian malfeasance. In the end, protracting this conflict with decision-making in the West that falls short of the mark does little to bring Ukraine or the world some promise of a decisive conclusion with restoration of a sovereign nation.
Ukraine’s tactic of attacking Russia’s oil industry using drones has succeeded in destroying an estimated 12% of Russia’s production capacity to date. To put this into context, Russia is heavily reliant on its fossil fuel sector to pay for as much as a third of its 2024 war budget. By the end of 2023, its oil and gas revenue had already fallen 24% due to the price cap placed upon Russian crude by the U.S. and the European Union (EU). The sanctions imposed upon Russia to limit profit generated by its main export worked to a degree by reducing its tax revenue more than 40% heading into the third quarter of 2023.
Not unexpectedly, the Kremlin, through subterfuge, was able to circumvent some of the imposed restrictions thereby increasing its earnings above that imposed by the cap. Evasion of the oil price cap in addition to increased war spending helped Russia’s economy to recover from its 3.5% drop in gross domestic product (GDP) in the third quarter of 2022 to a growth of 5.5% during the same period in 2023. Its overall GDP growth of 3.6% for 2023, in fact, reportedly outpaced that of both the U.S. and Europe. As a consequence, the U.S. and its allied international coalition tightened enforcement of the price cap while increasing the costs of selling the oil by imposing further sanctions on tankers carrying oil above the cap. In response, by January 2024, India stopped receiving shipments of Russian crude after it had increased imports by 40% in 2022-2023.
China, over the years, has managed to save considerable sums of money purchasing sanctioned crude oil from both Iran and Russia by paying with yuan rather than the U.S. dollar and having the oil transported by tankers operating outside maritime regulations. More recently, cash flow to Russia has been significantly delayed as Chinese banks were forced to comply with the new Western sanctions. The same has come true for banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where a number of accounts linked to Russian trading have been suspended. Similar protracted processes of bank payment, lasting months, have otherwise come into effect in both the UAE and Turkey, creating considerable difficulty balancing accounts in Russia.
The war in Europe has reached a critical stage brought on by several factors. not least of which can be attributed to the dithering of GOP members and their Speaker in the U.S. House of Representatives. There has also been delay in procurement and even refusal of delivery of specific strategic munitions required for Ukraine to decisively conduct the war from the outset. The latter only succeeded in creating an ultimate stalemate on the front and seriously undermined the later Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023. The notable lack of effective long-range artillery and absolute lack of air superiority was not a prescription for success as any junior military officer would attest. Yet the West has remained paralyzed with fear for too long over any hint of providing such capability so as not to upset Russia. On the other hand, Russia has had no qualms about continuing its war crimes unabated upon the sovereign territory of Ukraine, destroying civilian infrastructure and denying its people adequate heating for the winter by eliminating energy production facilities even while it threatens neighboring nations for intervening.
Economic measures designed to deter Russia’s war effort have been imposed from the outset and should continue long into the future but they are slow in their cumulative effect upon its economy. They cannot be counted upon to bring about the desired outcome in the immediacy of the humanitarian tragedy that has unfolded. There is, for instance, the issue of the seizure of Russia’s foreign bank assets and those of several Russian oligarchs flaunting their riches globally. The extremity of the protracted legal concern over the apparent circumvention of regulatory requirements is laughable in the face of overt Russian criminality readily manifest in the villages of Ukraine, not to mention Syria and elsewhere around the globe.
So why is it that Ukraine must countenance these atrocities and not attempt to put an end to this war in the manner it perceives to be most effective? In the absence of sufficient support it needs from elsewhere, it has resorted to strike with its own manufactured weaponry at a target well-known to be vital to Russia’s war effort. Ukraine has wanted to remove the Russian pox from its territory for too long, to reclaim its land fully and to rebuild itself. Its goal has been to bring an end to the threat of Russian imperialism for itself and its European neighbors in the long term. In the current predicament with its reduced military capacity, Ukraine has innovated an approach that seeks to diminish both Russia’s economic sustainability and its ability to conduct offensive operations by targeting its fossil fuel industry and its military aerial assets.
The physical damage of refineries will accelerate the economic impact of sanctions in more ways than hampering Russia’s ability to maintain its pace of oil export. The means by which the damage can be repaired has become another concern for Russia with the exodus of multinational companies and their engineering expertise, equipment and parts. Recent repair needs for a broken turbine within a gasoline-producing unit at the NORSI refinery, operated by Lukoil, could not be met because the expertise resided in a U.S.-owned multinational petroleum engineering firm, Honeywell Universal Oil Products, which had left Russia in 2022 after its invasion of Ukraine. The NORSI refinery, responsible for 11% of Russia’s gasoline supply, was forced to cut production by 40% at a cost of about $100 million a month. Protracted delays with such repairs inevitably will hurt yields significantly when the 40 largest Russian refineries, all with integrated Western technology and software imbedded in their operations, are targeted increasingly by Ukrainian drones.
It is a mistake to suggest that Ukraine cease its attacks upon Russia’s fossil fuel industry as it would only add to those already made by the West that have served to protract this war and have led to the devastation of the current invasion. It is in Ukraine’s interest to limit any further blunders moving forward.
The misjudgments of Vladimir Putin as they concern his invasion of Ukraine are as monumental as they are plenty, but these are topics for future discourse. Despite such grievous failure, Putin’s continued hold on power is more a reflection of what has become of Russia that its people have not seen beyond his propaganda to realize the consequences of the war and the shame that must be borne by them long into the future. In turn, there is also much to answer for on the part of the West and its management in response to Putin’s belligerence.
Insufficient Response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea
It is true that, at the time of the forced 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea by its paramilitary, Russians formed the majority of its ethnic composition despite the peninsula being contiguous with territorial Ukraine. Crimea was consumed by the Russian Empire under Catherine II in 1783 when it was inhabited largely by Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group aligned at the time with the Ottoman Empire. A process of purging Tatars from Crimea continued throughout Russia’s tsarist rule and into its Soviet period culminating in Stalin’s genocidal campaign of deportation and outright murder of the Tatars following World War II. In 1954, First Secretary of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to then Soviet Ukraine as a means of solidifying a sense of unity with Ukraine and giving foundation to further Russification of both Ukraine and Crimea. Ukraine proceeded to invite Tatar families back to Crimea so that by 1991, 150,000 Tatars had returned to their homeland. Putin’s 2014 forced annexation of Crimea led to a resumption of persecution of the Tatars with the outlawing of their representative body, elimination of its media and numerous individual human rights violations. There is no foundation for Putin proclaiming Crimea to be Russia’s “spiritual holy land,” as he put it, in the face of such historic criminality and no right for claiming Crimean territory to be anything other than what it had been prior to his 2014 invasion. Putin’s desire to overtake the territory of eastern Ukraine has to do with his need to establish a land bridge to Crimea in order that it can be said to be contiguous with Russian-occupied territory rather than with Ukraine.
The sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the EU at the time were ineffectual while material support for Ukraine to oppose Russia’s illegal occupation was nonexistent. The response not only provided Putin with substantial accolades within Russia but emboldened his further intervention in eastern Ukraine where Kremlin-backed separatists confronted Ukrainian forces with the conflict there escalating to the outright Russian invasion of February 2022.
Trump Administration’s Extortion of Ukraine for Munitions
More than a blunder, this episode amounted to an overt abuse of presidential authority. In 2019, then President Donald Trump attempted to use the leverage of military aid for Ukraine in return for undertaking investigations that would falsely assert involvement of his political rival at the time, Vice President Joe Biden, in a scheme to influence prosecutorial activity in Ukraine in order to enrich his son and family. This abuse of power led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2020 although the entire affair involving President Biden has only recently been reaching the point of dismissal for lack of any evidence that would validate the original accusation.
At the time, there was a failure to understand that Ukraine was already engaged in a war with Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine. The delay caused by the illegal withholding of a congressionally mandated near $400 million of military aid prevented the U.S. Defense Department from spending the funding until the following year when the coronavirus pandemic had begun to manifest globally. The episode not only affected the operational and psychological preparedness of Ukraine’s military, giving traction to Russia’s territorial gains, but demonstrated to Putin that U.S. leadership was prepared to barter national security for political and personal gain. This, in turn, would encourage him to proceed with his subsequent invasion plans which frankly appeared to be already a consideration in 2014 but was finally made a reality by early 2021.
Biden Administration’s “Escalation Management” of the War
The Biden administration and the U.S. Congress have provided substantial military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine since the time of the 2022 Russian invasion, ostensibly, on the premise that sufficient defensive and limited offensive capability would cause Russia to abandon its war plans. However, failure to provide effective long-range artillery, fighter aircraft and air defense during the first year of the war as military doctrine would require, resulted in stalemate on the front, caused Ukraine’s 2023 spring counteroffensive to dwindle before a heavily reinforced Russian defensive line and, worst of all, prolonged the agony of war for Ukraine’s civilian population. Repeated Russian threats of nuclear retaliation also seemed to provide the Biden administration, specifically, its National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, with further justification to proceed with its ongoing cautionary support of Ukraine. The implications for Russia resorting to nuclear warfare would not only substantiate the argument that its conventional forces are not up to the task but would leave it exposed to the dire consequences of an unknown and immediate forceful military response from which it could lose all. Russia’s ongoing success with its nuclear propaganda has now created a pattern of predictable behavior further paralyzing the U.S. government beyond its own very evident inherent timidity.
The current ineffectual House of Representatives with its slim GOP majority and a dilatory Speaker has at the very least substantially delayed the Senate bipartisan-approved funding proposal for Ukraine’s war effort and will undoubtedly attempt to further compromise it. The Trump-led, pro-Putin GOP faction continues its assault on reason with no inclination toward considering the consequences of their actions for the U.S. and Europe. The frustration comes with knowing that this problem need not have existed had the Biden administration, when control of Congress was still in hand with Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, taken action before the 2022 elections. The lack of decisive aid given to Ukraine from the start has allowed the war to be prolonged only to bring us to the present circumstance wherein Speaker Michael Johnson has thwarted the entire enterprise to the point of threatening defeat for Ukraine.
Enforcement of Sanctions
Economic pressure has been promoted as a means of constraining the efforts of rogue nations to conduct war and perhaps have been found to work to a degree. The measures imposed and the effectiveness of their enforcement would appear to be the necessary required elements to be effective. Russia began an aggressive disinformation campaign to promote the idea that its economy remained robust in the face of western sanctions. The disinformation spread within the news and social media was already in evidence within months of its invasion and has continued unabated. This all gave the impression that the effects of sanctions could be overcome even in the near term. Whether the latter interpretation of current circumstances had merit or not, the impact of international sanctions was naturally intended to be cumulative. However, active enforcement would have helped to accelerate the effect along with more rapid countermeasures to overcome ways in which Russia attempted to circumvent restrictions. More details of Russia’s economy are described in a prior essay for a greater overview of its state-of-affairs. The matter of seizure of Russia’s foreign bank assets and those of its oligarchs is also regarded as additional penalty under review and can be looked upon as another concern that has moved too slowly.
The Blunder Yet to Come
For Putin, Crimea is what matters. Establishing a land corridor to Crimea through eastern Ukraine comes secondary and, of course, a complete subjugation of Ukraine would be the ultimate achievement for someone with his imperial designs. The territory of Crimea is of great strategic value as a means of projecting Russian military strength into the Mediterranean Sea, specifically its eastern basin. Its military air bases and four deep seaports, Sevastopol, Feodosiya, Kerch and Yalta are major assets that establish for Russia an immediate presence in a critical geopolitical landscape at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa.
For Ukraine, a return of its territory that includes Crimea and assurance of its continued sovereignty is what matters. Achievement of these goals requires not only the forceful removal of Russian forces but something much more substantive – the removal of future threats from Russia. For this to happen, the current conflict must end decisively both militarily and economically to give indication that any return to the battlefield would be impossible for Russia without being further crippled.
Russia’s penchant for authoritarian rule and its longstanding commitment to a nationalist theme which appears to unify its people and its institutions around a central decision-making authority should raise ongoing doubts about its future direction. The disastrous decisions of its leaders during the past century and now its questionable current state-of-affairs bears witness to the terrible consequences of leaving decisions in the hands of a malign or self-serving leader, unwilling to gather consensus. Both World Wars I and II were marked by a manifest incompetence of Russia’s leaders, Tsar Nicholas II and Josef Stalin, respectively, only to be followed by Leonid Brezhnev’s ill-fated decision to invade Afghanistan and Putin’s brutal interference in Chechnya, Georgia and now Ukraine.
Deterrence against any repetition of Russian aggression is critical in the absence of any serious attempt by Russia to bring about a change in government oversight that would indicate it has the intention of making a genuine effort to be part of a rules-based global community. Otherwise, Ukraine’s situation requires it to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and for Crimea to become a NATO base as part of a lend-lease arrangement in partial payment for the heavy debt owed to the organization for the support it has received in defense of its territory. To accomplish such an end requires courage on the part of the U.S. and NATO to understand the realpolitik of the moment and to draw the threat of Russian aggression to an end. To do otherwise, it will be for history to record the monumental blunder of the century.
Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2024. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.
