Are we drifting slowly towards a World War? The weekend brought various unsettling pieces of news. The *** for tat strikes are ongoing and getting worse. More wild berries warehouses were destroyed an insider report the destruction of the Saint Petersburg warehouse may be curtains for the business.
At the same time Russia has escalated its payback and has targeted Odesa as I was speculating on Friday except it’s using the FAB glide bombs not missiles. These things are massive WWII-era gravity bombs that carry up to 3000kg of explosive (drones carry about 50kg) that the Russians strapped motors and wings on. They haven’t used them against Odessa before which handles 90% of Ukraine’s seaborne exports. The AFU has nothing in its arsenal to stop them because they fall more than fly. This is a new problem on top of the lack of PAC interceptor ammo. And the attack on the ports threatens Ukraine’s grain export and its valuable revenues.
Ukraine is doing the same thing to Russia; its ports are also under attack and have been brought to halt, including Novorossiisk, the main port carrying Kazakh oil out of Central Asia. The White House is not happy about this, nor is President Kassym Jomart Tokayev, who asked Putin to stop the war this weekend.
But even more worryingly, Ukraine hit an Iran ship on the Caspian. It has long been known that Russia is sending military supplies to Iran via the sea, but the attacak effectively joins the two conflicts. The motivation is pretty clear: relations between Kyiv and Washington have drastically improved in the last few months – starting with the Trump/Zelenskiy meeting in the Vatican in April, according to Zelenskiy, and by “supporting” Trump’s war in Iran, the Ukrainian president is clearly trying to curry favour with the White House. Ze I due to be in Washington tomorrow as despite all the bonhomie, he still deseperately needs more Patriot ammo and the US has given him any at all – just a piece of paper that grants permission to make them. (Actually, just assemble them, as Ukraine can’t make the components either.) The war in the Gulf is back on and the closure of the Bab el-Mandeb straights by the Houthis opens a new thretre of operations and is a fresh blow to the global energy markets. Military action between the Saudis and Houthis is already hotting up.
Russia is also still having problems and the locals are getting very worried. I talked to Moscow this morning where people are talking about leaving the city for the summer, and maybe the country too.
There is a wide and growing expectation that Puint will call a general mobilisation this autumn; one detail was job ads posted online by recruiting companies for “specialits in mass mobilisation” have appeared, fuelling that fire.
And the language coming out of the Russia has changed. People are more frequently using the word “war” in place of the “special military operation.” There is talk is of a “total war”. I know it looks like Russia is already committed to a total war, but things could get far worse. A general mobilisation would be part of that. The use of FAB glide bombs against Odesa is another.
Ukraine’s new Commander-in-Chief Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi has just called for a wide audit of the AFU to just see what he has got, and has been tasked with getting ready for this winter’s campagin which is clearly going to be brutal. There are reports that AFR is already stockpiling missiles and drones for that campagin. Given the expanding production, Russia will have a lot more missiles this winter than it did last winter, exactly as Ukraine runs out of the last air defence ammo supplies. Ukraine started this war with just under 60GW of generating capacity, and now has only 14GW left. It’s already in energy deficit and importing power from the EU is not goinig to work as the transmission line capacity is not big enough.
Europe is not helping. After Trump dropped the peace talks ball, the EU was supposed to pick it up and hasn’t. All three of the E3 leaders are headed to the door – UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has already left – but all they are doing is building factories to make Ukrainian weapons as fast as they can.
It’s all falling to pieces as no one seems interested in ending this conflict.
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