Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[Firn]

@kaur: Yes, in general the voting does not go as smoothly as in more Western countries, but I doubt that masked, foreign known un-known gunmen controlling the place is all that common. As the sources say they denied access to the large majority which was against the seperation and impressed the more strongly Pro-Russia forces into supporting the mini-party of the current leader.

It is not clear whether the parliament was seized that day on his orders. On the one hand, the masked gunmen identified themselves as members of Crimea’s “self-defense forces,” all of which are, according to Aksyonov, directly under his control. On the other, he claims the seizure of the buildings was done “spontaneously” by a mysterious group of fighters. “We only knew that these were Russian nationalist forces,” he tells TIME in an interview Sunday. “These were people who share our Russian ideology. So if they wanted to kill someone, they would have killed the nightwatchmen who were inside.”

Instead, they let the guards go, sealed the doors and only allowed the lawmakers whom Aksyonov invited to enter the building. Various media accounts have disputed whether he was able to gather a quorum of 50 of his peers before the session convened that day, and some Crimean legislators who were registered as present have said they did not come near the building. In any case, those who did arrive could hardly have voted their conscience while pro-Russian gunmen stood in the wings with rocket launchers. Both of the votes held that day were unanimous. The first appointed Aksyonov, a rookie statesman with less than four years experience as a local parliamentarian, as the new Prime Minister of Crimea. The second vote called for a referendum on the peninsula’s secession from Ukraine.

[Firn]

Some interesting details about the Crimean economy, or it's dependence on the Ukrainian mainland. It is good to see that the author picked up an issue about I wrote more the a week ago. While I got the water and electricity pretty right, I was wrong about the natural gas 'imports'. The gas fields around the Crimea allow it to cover it's need all but in winter.

Crimea relies on the rest of Ukraine for 80-85 percent of the water that it consumes, 82 percent of electricity and 35 percent of gas, according to Mykhailo Honchar, a leading energy analyst at Kyiv-based think tank Strategy XXI. Access to these vital resources will loom prominently amid diplomatic discussions this week ahead of the so-called referendum.

....

“And Crimea doesn’t have its own supply of coal and oil products to speak of,” said Honchar.

The infrastructure between the occupied Crimea and Russia sustained didn't transport most of the goods and must be highly strained already by the military built-up. Critical nodes will be the the ferry service(s) in the Kerch straight and the ports, mostly Sevastopol. As far as I could tell goods still flow through the the land-bridges with Ukraine, but the checkpoints manned by self-declared milita and the increasingly sorry state of the security and rule of law must have taken it's toll. Needless to say for Ukraine it would be easy to stop the traffic there completely.

In general I think it was a pretty smart, likely lucky non-decision, not to cut the occupied territories off at once. This has allowed the seperatists to cut themselves into their own flesh by their actions and checkpoints.

Economically, Crimea cannot survive on its own without money from Kyiv. It requires some $700 million in financial assistance from the state to meet its annual expense budget. Vesti daily reported on March 11 that Crimea would need an estimated $5 billion in investments to integrate its economy and infrastructure with Russia. But for the time being, it remains reliant on Ukraine.

There is little doubt that the Crimea contains a relative high amount of retirees, among them a disproportional number of ethnic Russians which tend to be older then the overall populations. This is certainly one of the reasons why the Crimea takes more from the Ukraine then it pays in.

The unpaid supporters of the Russian invasion tend to be both old and ethnic Russians. Cutting off the pensions after the illegal 'referendum' will hit them hard, but allow the Russians to step in forcefully. The question is if this matters, and likely the Urkaine is better off by shutting off payments sometimes after it, if the situation does not change much. The same goes for the electricity, easy to do and it hits hard.

The author did not mention the demand shock in tourism. I saw it earlier as one of the biggest problems for the Crimean economy, as one of the two big pillars looks like it will crumble. The Kyiv Post had interesting recent numbers on that.

Overall the seperatists have certainly already inflicted massive damage on the occupied territory. Kviev can easily add to it greatly. Russia will likely pour in billions but there are of course many elements of an economy which can not be fixed in the short term. Plus with 'Goblin' the (ex?-)criminal leading a regime one can count on an greatly increased amount of curruption and missmanagement. The other occupied lands locked in 'frozen conflicts' by Russian are not exactly shiny examples of wide-spread economic growth and rule of law...

[jmm99]

Kaur:

HT; your link to Morgan, Dancing with the Bear: Managing Escalation in a Conflict with Russia (IFRI Proliferation Papers, No. 40, Winter 2012), is interesting theory. Of course, in the area of nuclear escalation and deterrence, everything is theory because the only practitioner has been the US (a point made more than once by the Soviets during the Cold War) - and, in 1945, Japan was not in a position to escalate !

Morgan (from RAND) sums himself:

"Escalation", the tendency of belligerents to increase the force or breadth of their attacks to gain advantage or avoid defeat, is not a new phenomenon. Systematic thought about how to manage it, however, did not crystallize until the Cold War and the invention of nuclear weapons. Given the limitations identified in these Cold War approaches to escalation and the profound changes that have affected the strategic environment, a new framework for thinking and managing escalation against nuclear adversaries is needed. It should lead to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of escalation: its dynamics, forms, and the motives that drive it.

This paper attempts to fill a gap in the current strategic literature, and explores the challenges that NATO would face in managing escalation in a military conflict with a major nuclear power such as the Russian Federation. Escalation management is about keeping wars limited. In a war against Russia, Western leaders would need to weigh their interests in the issue at stake and adjust their war aims and efforts accordingly. They could secure success only if it is defined and pursued in ways that ultimately allow for compromise and do not threaten the survival of the Russian state or its leaders.

Morgan et al did a RAND study, Dangerous Thresholds - Managing Escalation in the 21st Century (2008):

Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition. When such competition entails military confrontation or war, the pressure to escalate can become intense due to the potential cost of losing contests of deadly force. Cold War–era thinking about escalation focused on the dynamics of bipolar, superpower confrontation and strategies to control it. Today's security environment, however, demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats involving not only long-standing nuclear powers, but also new, lesser nuclear powers and irregular adversaries, such as insurgent groups and terrorists.

This examination of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on historical examples from World War I to the struggle against global Jihad. It reveals that, to manage the risks of escalatory chain reactions in future conflicts, military and political leaders will need to understand and dampen the mechanisms of deliberate, accidental, and inadvertent escalation.

Informing the analysis are the results of two modified Delphi exercises, which focused on a potential conflict between China and the United States over Taiwan and a potential conflict between states and non-state actors in the event of a collapse of Pakistan's government.

Along the way, Morgan has also considered the "escalation ladder" in hypothetical conflicts with Iran and North Korea. See "Conclusion" to 2012 monograph (pp. 47-50 pdf), bringing all together:

All of this suggests that effective threshold management will be crucially important in an armed conflict with any of the aforementioned states. Western leaders will need to assess the balance of interests and identify each side’s critical thresholds. They will need to illuminate these thresholds to opponents in ways that deter deliberate escalation and reduce the risks of inadvertent escalation. They will need to manage their forces firmly to avoid escalatory accidents, and they will need to calmly evaluate and respond to the accidents that will inevitably occur over the course of the war. Most of all, they will need to restrain their objectives and settle for limited gains, which will most likely amount to defeating the opponent’s aggression in ways that simply preserve the status quo.

Thankfully, the world has never witnessed a major conventional war between nuclear-armed adversaries, much less one in which nuclear weapons were exchanged. Studies late in the Cold War raised serious doubts whether the latter could be kept limited, or even prosecuted in a coherent manner, given the massive disruptions in communications and physical, mental, and emotional dislocations that would occur at multiple levels of command once nuclear weapons began detonating on each side. Although a handful of analysts continued to lobby for counterforce, nuclear war-fighting strategies to the very end of the era, the ranks of those who accepted Kahn’s thesis that nuclear wars could be fought and won had by then grown exceedingly thin in the West and were substantially diminished in the East. The near consensus was that any nuclear war would likely be uncontrollable, resulting in consequences so tragic that victory, however defined, would be pyrrhic.

The implication of such a conclusion is that for any escalation management framework to be viable, it must inform strategy making while the conflict is well below the nuclear threshold. Further, it must face up to the uncertainties inherent in war – the lack of perfect information and perfect control; the subjectivity of perception; the inevitable miscalculations that result from incompetence, fear, and fatigue; and the general unpredictability of human behavior – and offer realistic approaches for managing these factors to the extent they are manageable. Cold War-era approaches to escalation management failed to meet those criteria. As a result, decision makers on both sides of the East-West divide abandoned them and relied instead on conflict avoidance.

- to be cont. -

[jmm99]

All that (in Part 1) recalls the differing viewpoints of Herman Kahn and Hugh Everett. Kahn popularized his "escalation ladder" and other thermonuclear war concepts in a number of books. See John Wohlstetter's Herman Kahn: Public Nuclear Strategy 50 Years Later - A Compendium of Highlights from Herman Kahn’s Works on Nuclear Strategy (Hudson Institute, September 2010), a brief survey (29 pp.) of four of Kahn's books:

On Thermonuclear War (1960) ...
Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962) ...
On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (1965) ...
Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s (1984, posth.)

and Herman Kahn: Applying His Nuclear Strategy Precepts Today (Hudson Institute, October 2010, 17pp.).

Hugh Everett was far more pessimistic than Kahn; and wrote very little (most still classified) about his involvement in WSEG (which, via WSEG Staff Study No. 46, informed the 1961 Kennedy-McNamara Flexible Response Policy) - from Everett's Wiki:

... Everett was invited to join the Pentagon's newly-forming Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), managed by the Institute for Defense Analyses. ... In 1957, he became director of the WSEG's Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. After a brief intermission ..., Everett returned to WSEG and recommenced his research, much of which, but by no means all, remains classified. He worked on various studies ... [e.g., Hugh Everett III and George E. Pugh, "The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear-Weapon Campaigns", in Biological and Environment Effects of Nuclear War, Hearings Before the Special Sub-Committee on Radiation of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, June 22–26, 1959, Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959.
...
Of those studies, Linus Pauling said: [They] permit us to make an estimate of the casualties of such a war. This estimate is that sixty days after the day on which the war was waged, 720 million of the 800 million people in these countries would be dead, sixty million would be alive but severely injured, and there would be twenty million other survivors. The fate of the living is suggested by the following statement ...: 'Finally, it must be pointed out that the total casualties at sixty days may not be indicative of the ultimate casualties. Such delayed effects as the disorganization of society, disruption of communications, extinction of livestock, genetic damage, and the slow development of radiation poisoning from the ingestion of radioactive materials may significantly increase the ultimate toll.' ..."

Regardless of whether one leans toward Kahn or Everett, one finds no certainty in the "nuclear escalatory ladder". Kahn himself recognized that and more (from Wohlstetter, Oct 2010):

NUCLEAR TABOO

Allied powers in the West have long stressed the “firebreak” between conventional and nuclear use. Some emerging powers show no signs of recognizing this. Kahn did, and warned that consequences of crossing the nuclear line again and thus ending the taboo carry unpredictable, potentially horrific dangers.

Kahn stressed the value of the nuclear taboo:

That other “easily recognizable limitations” exist is clear; but it remains true that once war has started no other line of demarcation is at once so clear, so sanctified by convention, so ratified by emotion, so low on the scale of violence, and—perhaps most important of all—so easily defined and understood as the line between not using and using nuclear weapons.[32]

On weakening the nuclear threshold:

Nevertheless, I believe that two or three uses of nuclear weapons would weaken the nuclear threshold, at least to a degree where it would no longer be a strong barrier to additional uses of nuclear weapons in intense or vital disputes. There would ensue a gradual or precipitate erosion of the current belief—or sentiment—that the use of nuclear weapons is exceptional or immoral. The feared uncontrolled escalation would be rather more likely to occur at the second, third or later use of nuclear weapons than as a consequence of first use.[33]

...
On the difficulty of restoring the tradition and custom of nonuse after nuclear use:

More important, in a world in which there is no legislature to set new rules, and the only method of changing rules is through a complex and unreliable systems-bargaining process, each side should—other things being equal—be anxious to preserve whatever thresholds there are. This is a counsel of prudence, but a serious one: it is not often possible to restore traditions, customs or conventions that have been shattered. Once they are gone, or weakened, the world may be “permanently” worse off.[35]

32 OE, p. 95.
33 OE, p. 98. Strategists call “first‐strike” starting nuclear war from scratch; “first-use” escalates an ongoing conventional conflict, as America did in 1945.
...
35 OE, p. 133.

OE = Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (1965)

That brings us back to the topics of "Special War" and "Limited War". Morgan cites Strachan, Are European Armed Forces Only Able to Wage Limited War? (2011), in one of his footnotes:

Abstract: For a long time, Western armies were organized to fight total war. Since the end of the Cold War, they have been reduced, but have been engaged in conflicts requiring large deployments. European societies no longer know what type of war they have to conduct. Indeed the very concept of limited war and its instruments need to be rethought.
...
If the Cold War in Europe had become hot, it would not have been limited except in one respect: it would have been short. Armies became smaller because they were not expected to sustain resistance for more than a few weeks. Germany in particular ... wanted to keep the ladder of escalation to nuclear release short and steep. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) war games tended to end with a nuclear exchange within days.

Those less close to the inner German border, and particularly the United States, wanted the ladder to be longer and the process of ascent more gradual. Their interpretation of the strategy of "flexible responseʺ, adopted by NATO in 1967, stressed the initial use of conventional military capabilities as much as the final sanction of nuclear release.
...
With the end of the Cold War, and the removal of the immediate threat of a major war of self-defence within Europe, that hope – implicitly at least – has become even more fervent. ... They cannot command the man-power for ʺtotal war". The question that is more pressing is whether they can command the manpower for long wars of lower intensity.
...
At the heart of Europe’s problem is the lack of a unifying conception of war – a conception which can tie the armies of Europe and their parent societies into a common narrative. ... The European folk memory of war is still shaped by the Second World War, by "total warʺ. Two consequences follow.

The first is that armies exist only for purposes of direct national self-defence in what the English language no longer calls ʺtotal war", but "major warʺ or increasingly ʺexistential war". The corollary of a war for national survival should be an expectation that in such a war armies should be both conscripted and large, reflective of their parent societies in terms of their social composition and even more in values.

The second is the obverse of that position. Given the destructiveness for Europe of modern war, and particularly of the two world wars, war is not in fact a continuation of policy by other means. War represents the failure of policy, and so has no political utility.

Today Europe’s armies are designed less to fight and more for diplomatic leverage. Small contingents are a means by which a state pays its dues to the international community and to the multilateral organisations, principally the European Union, NATO and the United Nations, in which most modern, westernised and democratic nations invest their hopes of a stable international order.

This "tokenismʺ can extend to bilateral relations, particularly given the possible long-term need to call in aid from the United States. The real military strength of NATO lies with America, and by sending forces to Afghanistan other states are investing in a favour bank with the US if their security is threatened in the future. Alliances help keep armies small and serve to constrain the circumstances in which they may be used.

The question for NATO's future is exactly what account balance is now on deposit in the US "favour bank". Unless that account is very large (in relation to other "favour bank" accounts), EU-NATO should probably be planning on relying on its own resources to do whatever jobs it believes must be done.

Both sides of the pond might elect, re: "Special-Limited War", to learn how to eat soup with a knife; or how to make toothpicks with a shovel. The latter seems to me a more practical skill, but what do I know about practicality.

Regards

Mike

[Firn]

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine printed an article from Svetlana Alexievich, a noted belorussian author with partial Ukrainian roots. A good deal of her work was on aspects of WWII and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. I think the article does a fine job at painting the various different moods in this conflict.

---

What is at stake in Crimea? is a mostly political piece on this site usually devoted to economic research. Earlier they wrote about the emergency economic measures for Ukraine, which I missed.

Their call for a debt restructuring caught my eye:

One step is to bring in the IMF as well as other donors (EU, USA, etc.) to bridge the short-term gap in foreign currency reserves.

These funds are essential to avoid a drastic immediate fiscal contraction in the immediate future. They are necessary to enable authorities to inject capital into Ukrainian banks. The amount of required support is likely to be in tens of billions of dollars. Moreover, a restructuring of some of Ukrainian debt is necessary to avoid outright default.

1) Most of Ukraine’s external debt was accumulated under the previous corrupt regime.
2) The new leaders have little moral obligation to commit to reimburse that debt, and creditors have little moral standing to demand repayment: they knew who they lent to.

[kaur]

I think that USA has very good knowledge how Soviet Union /Russia manages their problems.

http://jmw.typepad.com/files/state-d...propaganda.pdf

Today there are very few communist parties left, but there is new (appeared right after collapse of SU) lever in the CIS and Baltic states space - Russian compatriots. Russia used arms in Georgia and in Crimea because he felt that compatriots are in danger. As far as I do understand Russia is carrying out same kind of active measures that are listed in that paper. It is also deja vu, when I hear Russian side talking that in Ukraine there is battle between US and Russia (EU is just US proxy + Nuland's "#### EU"). The same motivation was used during Soviet adventures around the globe during Cold war (Mitrokihn's book). If you understand Russian, then here head of Crimean compatriots talks about US action. This statement was made 3 months ago.

http://vksors.org.ua/video/v-vseukra...vennikov-video

Firn, i'm sure that Aksenov was brought to power through the same compatriots network.

[AmericanPride]

Firn,

Just a quick comment about Ukraine's debt. According to this site and this site, Ukraine's debt was in decline until 2007 and has been increasing year over year ever since. The majority of the debt was accumulated between 2007 and 2009 as a result of the global recession and during the presidency of Yushchenko. Corruption appears to be a bipartisan activity in Ukraine.