[1]
By John Helmer
@bears_with [2]
Is it MAGA or is it MEGA?
When President Donald Trump negotiated with President Vladimir Putin on Monday, May 19, was he aiming to lower the cost of the Ukraine war to the domestic US economy, or to enrich it by transferring the war cost to the Europeans, particularly Germany, so that most of their planned €150 billion in loans [3] and €650 billion in country budget outlays [4] for the “ReArm Europe Plan” to fight Russia will get spent in the US?
Is Trump counting on Putin to give him enough of a battlefield pause or armistice in the Ukraine so that Trump can expand US force deployments and allied military procurement further north along the front from the Baltic Sea to Finland and Greenland; south along the Iranian frontier; and east against China?
The last of these, the eastern front war against China – explained Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday – is now the strategic priority for the US. Implementing it requires sequencing Trump’s wars [5]. “Every minute we spend,” according to Rubio, “every dollar we spend on this conflict in Europe is distracting both our focus and our resources away from a potential for a much more serious and much more cataclysmic confrontation in the Indo-Pacific…they are related but they’re related both ways — they’re related on the one hand by the precedent that it could set, but they’re also related by the fact that every minute that we spend on this conflict that cannot be won by military means, every resource that’s expended into it is money and time that’s not being spent on preventing a much more serious confrontation from a global perspective in the Indo-Pacific.” – Min 53:51 [6].
This is bigger, “much more serious” than MAGA – Make America Great Again. It’s MEGA – Make the Empire Great Again.
When Rubio went on to explain what the Putin-Trump telephone call was aimed at doing, he was confident the US is taking advantage of what he called Putin’s political weakness, the vulnerability of the Russian economy, high battlefield casualties, and the slowness of the Russian military advance. “I think [Putin] approaches it — we have to assume – from a cold, calculated cost-benefit nation-state evaluation of what’s in the best interest of his view of Russia. What I’m pretty certain of is this is not the war [Putin] thought he was getting when he first invaded Ukraine. I think he anticipated that the government would collapse and that, uh, he would be greeted as a liberator. It has not turned out that way, and in fact Russia today controls less territory than they did after the first two months of the war so they’ve suffered significant losses — they’ve suffered the losses of at least you know by some estimates 200,000-250,000 men in uniform and the Ukrainians have suffered less but nonetheless suffered as well. It is a battlefield today in which the front lines move 10 kilometres at a time in one direction or another. Even if [the Russians] are advancing, they’re advancing at a tremendously high cost. But the challenge Russia faces now is their entire economy stirring up. In their regard we want to see the conflict end in a way that’s enduring, meaning not a peace that lasts three months and then restarts again, but something that’s enduring that both sides could live with for a long period of time without it restarting again.” Min 2:46.50 [6].
The idea that Putin cannot and will not challenge MEGA in Europe except slowly and weakly on the Ukrainian battlefield reinforces the American conviction that if Trump gives Putin enough rope now in the Ukraine, he will hang himself later in the face of MEGA strategy on all fronts, especially on Iran and China, as Putin did in Syria.
Even current critics of Trump’s negotiating tactics with the Russian president believe that Putin doesn’t want to fight MEGA, but aims to come to terms – business deals — that will undermine Russia’s alliances with Iran, North Korea, and China. Putin, as one of the critics claimed this week, “has clearly avoided winning the war because for him it can be achieved for a much greater purpose, a Great Power settlement, a new Yalta.” Min -8:4 [7]7.
A NATO veteran responds: “The Chinese are in an ill humour. They will take a dim view of any Russian double-dealing, including facilitation of Trump’s sequencing which we can be sure they are aware of.” Regarding Rubio’s answers to the questions he was asked by senators this week, he adds: “I view that hearing with Rubio as nothing more than a council of war.”
In the podcast later today [8] with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern, we will be discussing the implications for grand strategy on the Russian side, as well as the impact that Putin’s strategy is having on Russian military operations along the front lines.
[9]Click to listen today [8] at 19:30 Moscow time, 17:30 London, 12:30 Washington.
Speaking operationally, the daily bulletin from the Russian Defense Ministry [10] – banned for readers in many NATO countries – has been reporting the two main features of the battlefield. The first is the slow but steady acceleration of the advance on each of five army group directions, measurable by the rising rate of reported Ukrainian casualties. The second is the absence of electric war strikes against power plants and distribution grids west of Kiev.
The current daily average of Ukrainian Killed in Action (KIA) for May, as announced in Moscow, is 1,370; this compares with the average for April of 1,269, a month-on-month increase of 8%; for March of 1,255 (increase of 1%); for the second half of February, 1,183, and for the first half of February, 951. Since the beginning of February, these figures show the Russian spring offensive commencing and then gaining speed, territory, and firepower. The current daily KIA rate is now 44% higher than it was three months ago.
The record of Russia’s electric war strikes in the Ukraine indicates they occurred on October 10-12 and 16-20, 2022; October 22-27, 2023; March 29-30, 2024; June 1, 2024; and November 7, 2024. Putin then accepted Trump’s proposal for a 30-day halt to attacks on civilian energy infrastructure; that began after their telephone call on February 12 [11]. Click to follow each stage of the electric war [12]. These missile and drone strikes have not resumed since February.
Some Russian and western military experts believe there has been a correlation between the impact of the electric war strikes and the success of Russian ground offensives, notably because the disruption of electricity has reduced the Ukrainian capabilities to move equipment and reserves to the front, rebuild fortifications, fight back against Russian breakthroughs, and refresh weakened units.
In a series of eighteen podcasts, retired Hungarian Army major Mark Takacs has been documenting these trends tactically and operationally [13]. Russian military bloggers like Boris Rozhin [14] and Mikhail Zvinchuk [15] are inhibited in the analyses they publish but not because they lack the expertise or the sources. Together, however, they and Takacs expose the errors of fact and mistakes of judgement in Rubio’s account of Russian objectives and intentions.
Click to view the most recent Takacs analysis [16] (lead images, top) of the successful Russian offensive between February and April on the southern flank of the Donbass. The presentation draws several conclusions which are relevant for understanding the end-of-war negotiations now under way.
Despite their tactical victories, Takacs says the Russian advance has been hampered by lack of command-and-control between infantry, artillery, and air support, especially drones. Instead of parallel and coordinated fire support, Takacs says that Russian commanders are taking a week or longer to pepper their targets and soften defences with artillery and drone barrages launched in advance, before the infantry moves. When they break through Ukrainian defences or defeat Ukrainian units, Takacs claims the Russians are often unable to maintain their momentum and press their advantage going forward. One reason he gives is that often they are unable to interdict the deployment of Ukrainian reserves and prevent deliveries of replacement weapons and ammunition.
A NATO veteran says: “it’s clear that Putin has been restricting the General Staff. While the tempo of the spring offensive is increasing, the President’s rule to limit Russian casualties by reliance on drones and artillery will continue. The repeated holes punched in the Ukrainian lines followed up by persistent failure to exploit, surround and destroy the Ukrainian forces, tells us that Putin does not want to risk the possibility at the operational level of a Russian spearhead being cut off and destroyed. At the strategic level I think he’s concerned to avoid a potential battlefield success which might increase the pressure on Trump at home and among the NATO allies to escalate sanctions. Call this an operational regime of throttle down.”