Month: November 2023

Russia hit Ukraine with an unprecedented barrage of Iran-manufactured loitering munitions. Ukrainian forces demonstrated notable innovations in robotic warfare. Mounting armor losses in Avdiivka forced the Russian military to alter its offensive operations there.

By Can Kasapoğlu

1. Battlefield Update

The Ukrainian front lines held firm this week, with defensive operations dominating the battlefield everywhere except in the Kherson sector. There, Ukraine’s counteroffensive picked up steam at the tactical level along the Orikhiv assault axis. 

Ukrainian combat formations have begun to cherry-pick high-priority Russian tactical assets, predominantly using first-person view (FPV) drones to inflict damage. Ukraine’s target set includes TOS-1A thermobaric rocket launcher systems, Russian drone warfare command-and-control nodes, and air defense systems. In reporting on their TOS-1A kills, Ukrainian sources drew attention to this weapons system’s role in disrupting Ukrainian bridgeheads along the Dnipro River. 

Russian forces sustained their push near Avdiivka and the eastern sector, escalating combat action near Bakhmut despite achieving limited advancements. The intensity of the shelling there remained high, suggesting that Russia is likely relying on supplies of shells from North Korea. Nonetheless, there have been no strategic alterations in the overall battlefield geometry. 

In the northeast, Russian assaults continued without territorial gains. Elsewhere in this region, ground activity was minimal, with no significant changes evident. In the south, both sides registered some progress, leading to limited changes of territory. Russian air strikes sustained their assault on civilian targets, with a continued focus on Ukrainian infrastructure in Kharkiv Oblast.

Importantly, Ukrainian detachments held their bridgeheads along the Dnipro’s left bank, indicating that Russian efforts to halt the cross-river operation have failed for now. Yet Ukrainian forces also made no significant territorial advances in the region, raising the possibility of another stalemate. It seems that the Ukrainian General Staff is willing to maintain its Dnipro bridgeheads at a tactical scale in preparation for a reloaded offensive, when it could deploy a meaningful number of follow-on forces to exploit the opportunity that the bridgeheads provide. 

2. Heavy Armor Losses Force Russia to Change Tactics in Avdiivka

After sacrificing a multitude of armored vehicles in the push to capture Avdiivka, the Russian military has been forced to change tactics, opting now for dismounted infantry assaults to attempt to take the city. The Russian high command’s initial armored assaults led to substantial attrition, with estimates suggesting a loss of over 200 tanks in three weeks by early November. In contrast, Ukrainian losses have remained comparatively minimal. 

Russia may also be experiencing similar levels of personnel losses. According to US estimates, several thousand Russian troops have lost their lives in the push for Avdiivka since early October; open-source intelligence also points to a rise in the number of small tactical infantry groups deployed in the region. Nonetheless, Russia’s offensive has made only minimal progress. And despite heavy losses, Moscow continues to pursue marginal gains at a high human cost, as it did in executing the meat grinder strategy it employed in the fight for Bakhmut.

Ukraine’s strategic deployment of the 47th and 53rd Mechanized Brigades, alongside artillery units, has fortified Avdiivka’s flanks. Combined with constant surveillance by Ukrainian drones married to a boosted artillery presence in the field, this has challenged Russian advances through an exposed, flat battleground. Ukraine’s effective anti-armor weaponry, mines, and cluster munitions have also impeded Russia’s efforts around Avdiivka. 

3. Kyiv Suffers Large-Scale Attacks by Iran-Designed Kamikaze Drones

On November 25, Russia attacked Kyiv with over 70 Iran-designed kamikaze drones, marking a new record since the outset of the ongoing war. The Ukrainian Air Force announced that it successfully intercepted 71 of the 75 Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 loitering munitions. Yet despite the high interception rate, around four kamikaze drones breached Ukrainian defenses, injuring five civilians and damaging dozens of buildings.

Open-source intelligence suggests that Ukraine conducted a large-scale drone attack of its own against Russia on November 26, most likely in retaliation for the strikes on Kyiv. Reportedly, Ukraine’s attacks targeted various cities, including Tula, Bryansk, and Moscow itself. 

As the drone plant operated jointly by Russia and Iran ramps up its activities and likely delivers thousands of loitering munitions, Russian drone salvos targeting Ukraine will likely increase. 

4. The Ukrainian Military Generates a Fast and Lightweight Combat Formation

German Leopard 1A5 tanks are now flowing into the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ arsenal in significant numbers. Recent open-source intelligence confirms the 44th Mechanized Brigade as the first recipient of the light but agile tanks. 

Scheduled to operate both the Leopard 1A5 and the Polish Wolverine armored vehicle by next year, the 44th Brigade has become a key unit in Ukraine’s evolving military strategy. An alliance of German, Dutch, and Danish contributors has supported the refurbishment and deployment of nearly 200 Leopard 1A5s, a remnant of the 1980s, to support Ukrainian troops on the front lines.

But even when these tanks arrive, Ukraine’s brigades will be unevenly equipped. The Leopard 1A5’s 105-millimeter guns are efficient, but its armor, only 70 millimeters thick at its broadest point, presents a significant vulnerability. Similarly, the Wolverine’s design prioritizes mobility over armor, compromising its defensive capabilities. Therefore, while the 44th Brigade will feature high mobility and agility, it may be ill-equipped for heavy combat scenarios. 

Yet Ukraine’s success on the battlefield will depend on more than armor. Other critical factors will also play a vital role, including artillery ammunition supply, mine-reconnaissance capabilities, and command leadership. Without establishing a clear advantage in artillery firepower, Ukraine’s reloaded counteroffensive will risk remaining slow and fragile. Mine detection and clearance are also vital for armored operations. Therefore, advanced reconnaissance techniques and engineer support will be crucial for maneuvering beyond defensive lines.

5. As Ukraine Innovates with Drones, Russia Attempts to Follow Suit 

Ukraine’s robotic warfare concept of operations (CONOPS) is becoming increasingly innovative. Kyiv’s use of mobile and silent remote-controlled ground drones demonstrates this progress. Hidden in trenches, these drones reportedly feature a heat sensor that detonates when Russian troops range within its impact radius. Another remarkable innovation in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) recently unveiled by Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation is the Backfire drone. Mykhailo Fedorov, the head of the ministry, has praised the UAV, which possesses a range of 35 kilometers, for being impossible to jam.

Russia will undoubtedly continue trying to outmatch Ukraine’s efforts in the electromagnetic spectrum. To counterbalance Kyiv’s growing prowess in unmanned warfare, Moscow is now incorporating portable radio jammers into its assault tactics, as recent footage of two destroyed MT-LB armored vehicles featuring these assets demonstrates. While the jammers didn’t prevent the vehicles’ destruction—which could have been caused by mines, artillery, or battery failure—they may have temporarily impeded Ukrainian drone operations.

• About the author: Can Kasapoğlu is a Hudson Senior Fellow 
• Source: This article was published by the Hudson Institute

By Robert Coalson

(RFE/RL) — When Henry Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923, Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin was still alive and the ghosts of World War I still haunted Europe. He grew up as Jewish child while Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, fleeing with his family to the United States in 1938. He was 29 when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died in 1953 and 39 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was 45 and already approaching the center of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment when Soviet-led tanks crushed the Prague Spring uprising in 1968.

“The century of Henry Kissinger was no easy one, but its great challenges fit his great and curious mind,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on the X social media platform on November 30 in reaction to the news that Kissinger had died at the age of 100.

A historian by training and avocation, Kissinger was the doyen of realpolitik who viewed international relations through the prism of great-power politics. From his doctoral dissertation on early 19th-century politics, which was published in 1957 as A World Restored, until the end of his life, Kissinger argued that a world order tacitly accepted by the great powers was “legitimate.”

“‘Legitimacy’ as here used should not be confused with justice,” he elaborated in the book. “It means no more than an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy.”

As a result, Kissinger struggled with the dynamic events of the post-Cold War transitions — among them the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he met frequently, and the tortured relations between Russia and Ukraine.

In a July 2022 interview with Der Spiegel, Kissinger was flummoxed when asked to find an “instructive” historical precedent “for understanding and ending the war in Ukraine.”

“Right off the top of my head, I cannot give a direct answer,” Kissinger responded. “Because the war in Ukraine is on one level a war about the balance of power. But on another level, it has aspects of a civil war, and it combines a classically European type of international problem with a totally global one. When this war is over, the issue will be whether Russia achieves a coherent relationship with Europe — which it has always sought — or whether it will become an outpost of Asia at the border of Europe.”

“And there is no good historical example,” he concluded.

For many experts, Kissinger’s focus on the strategic balance among global and regional powers placed blinders on his analysis.

“Such an approach may work in normal times, but it inevitably fails to capture the possibilities of change or what happens when change begins,” Paul Goble, a retired CIA analyst and an expert on former Soviet republics, told RFE/RL. “Thus it misses the major turning points in world history, and that is true of Kissinger during his career. He failed to see the demise of the Soviet empire abroad and within the U.S.S.R. and failed to understand the power of peoples to change things, regardless of how much power their governments appeared to have.”

In an essay for RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service published in June, Ukrainian academic Petro Kralyuk argued that Kissinger long had a blind spot when it came to Ukraine. The country was mentioned only twice in Kissinger’s 1994 book Diplomacy.

The first mention, Kralyuk notes, was an approving reference to U.S. President George Bush’s August 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech to the Ukrainian parliament in which he cautioned lawmakers against “suicidal nationalism” and urged them to seek “freedom, democracy, and economic reform” within the framework of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s proposed new Union Treaty.

In the second — and, to Kralyuk’s mind, more telling — reference, Kissinger wrote: “The vast majority of leading figures in Russia, regardless of their political beliefs, refuse to recognize the collapse of the Soviet empire or the legitimacy of the successor states, especially Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy.”

“This thesis that Ukraine is ‘the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy’ shows that Kissinger considers Russia and Ukraine as one thing and therefore understands the position of Russian politicians who do not accept the independence of the former republics of the U.S.S.R.,” Kralyuk wrote.

Throughout most of Putin’s years in power, Kissinger advocated a “cooperative relationship” with Moscow, as he told a U.S. Senate committee in January 2018. Over much of this time, the Kremlin was reportedly a client of Kissinger’s political-consulting firm, Kissinger Associates. Kissinger first met Putin in the early 1990s, when Putin worked in the administration of St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak and was a member of the bilateral Kissinger-Sobchak commission to promote Western investment in Russia.

“Kissinger became an apologist for Muscovite imperialism, viewing Russia as a great power entitled to dominate its ‘sphere of influence,’” Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C., told RFE/RL. “He was stuck in the Cold War narrative and largely ignored the interests of smaller or emerging states.”

“It is not possible to bring Russia into the international system by conversion,” Kissinger told The Atlantic in 2016. “It requires deal-making, but also understanding. It is a unique and complicated society. Russia must be dealt with by closing its military options, but in a way that affords it dignity in terms of its own history.”

After Moscow’s 2014 occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and its fomenting of a separatist conflict in parts of eastern Ukraine, Kissinger seemingly continued to view Ukraine as a part of Russia’s sphere of interests. In a commentary for The Washington Post less than a month after Moscow’s seizure of Crimea, Kissinger argued that “to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country.” He urged “wise Ukrainian leaders” to “opt for a policy of reconciliation between the various parts of their country” and said flatly, “Ukraine should not join NATO.”

In a 2015 interview in The National Interest, a U.S. magazine, Kissinger said: “The relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in the Russian mind. It can never be limited to a relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from Ukraine’s.”

In a speech in Moscow in 2016, Kissinger said Ukraine should serve “as a bridge between Russia and the West, rather than as an outpost of either side.”

As late as May 2022, Kissinger was calling for a cease-fire in Ukraine and a restoration of the line of contact as it stood before Russia’s full-scale invasion that February. These remarks were widely viewed in Ukraine as a demand that Kyiv give up its claim to Crimea, although Kissinger said in the July 2022 Der Spiegel interview that he intended the status of Crimea to be the subject of further negotiation.

In January 2023, however, Kissinger, addressing the Davos World Economic Forum, expressed “admiration for the president of Ukraine and for the heroic conduct of the Ukrainian people.” And in September, he met in Washington with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and conceded that the continuing Russian aggression had altered his thinking.

“Before this war, I was opposed to the membership of Ukraine in NATO because I feared that it would start the very process that we are seeing now,” he told Zelenskiy. “Now that this process has reached this level, the idea of a neutral Ukraine under these conditions no longer makes sense.”

Written by RFE/RL’s Robert Coalson with reporting by Current Time, RFE/RL’s Russian Service, and RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service. Ramazan Alpautov of RFE/RL’s Idel.Realities contributed to this report.

• Robert Coalson is a senior correspondent for RFE/RL who covers Russia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe.

Today marks 365 days since India assumed the G20 presidency. It is a moment to reflect, recommit and rejuvenate the spirit of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” One Earth, One Family, One Future.

As we undertook this responsibility last year, the global landscape grappled with multifaceted challenges: recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, looming climate threats, financial instability and debt distress in developing nations, all amid declining multilateralism. In the midst of conflicts and competition, development cooperation suffered, impeding progress.

Assuming the G20 chair, India sought to offer the world an alternative to the status quo, a shift from gross domestic product-centric to human-centric progress. India aimed to remind the world of what unites us, rather than what divides us. Finally, the global conversation had to evolve — the interests of the few had to give way to the aspirations of the many. This required a fundamental reform of multilateralism as we knew it.

Inclusive, ambitious, action-oriented and decisive — these four words defined our approach as G20 president. And the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration, unanimously adopted by all G20 members, is testimony to our commitment to deliver on these principles.

Inclusivity has been at the heart of our presidency. The inclusion of the African Union as a permanent member of the G20 integrated 55 African nations into the forum, expanding it to encompass 80 percent of the global population. This proactive stance has fostered a more comprehensive dialogue on global challenges and opportunities.

The first-of-its-kind “Voice of the Global South Summit,” convened by India in two editions, heralded a new dawn of multilateralism. India has mainstreamed the Global South’s concerns in international discourse and ushered in an era where developing countries take their rightful place in shaping the global narrative.

Inclusivity also infused India’s domestic approach to the G20, making it a people’s presidency that befitted that world’s largest democracy. Through “jan bhagidari” (people’s participation) events, the G20 reached 1.4 billion citizens, involving all states and union territories as partners. And on substantive elements, India ensured that international attention was directed to broader developmental aims, aligning with the G20’s mandate.

At the critical midpoint of the 2030 Agenda, India delivered the G20 2023 Action Plan to Accelerate Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, taking a cross-cutting, action-oriented approach to interconnected issues, including health, education, gender equality and environmental sustainability.

A key area driving this progress is robust digital public infrastructure. Here, India was decisive in its recommendations, having witnessed the revolutionary impact of digital innovations like Aadhaar, UPI and Digilocker first-hand. Through the G20, we successfully completed the Global Digital Public Infrastructure Repository, a significant stride in technological collaboration. This repository, featuring more than 50 digital public infrastructures from 16 countries, will help the Global South build, adopt and scale such infrastructures to unlock the power of inclusive growth. 

For our “One Earth,” we introduced ambitious and inclusive aims to create urgent, lasting and equitable change. The New Delhi declaration’s “Green Development Pact” addresses the challenges of choosing between combating hunger and protecting the planet by outlining a comprehensive roadmap, in which employment and ecosystems are complementary, consumption is climate-conscious and production is planet-friendly.

In tandem, the G20 declaration calls for an ambitious tripling of global renewable energy capacity by 2030. Coupled with the establishment of the Global Biofuels Alliance and a concerted push for green hydrogen, the G20’s ambitions to build a cleaner, greener world is undeniable. This has always been India’s ethos and, through Lifestyles for Sustainable Development, the world can benefit from our age-old sustainable traditions.

Further, the declaration underscores our commitment to climate justice and equity, urging substantial financial and technological support from the Global North. For the first time, there was a recognition of the quantum jump needed in the magnitude of development financing, moving from billions to trillions of dollars. The G20 acknowledged that developing countries require $5.9 trillion to fulfill their nationally determined contributions by 2030.

Given the monumental resources required, the G20 emphasized the importance of better, larger and more effective multilateral development banks. Concurrently, India is taking a leading role in UN reforms, especially in the restructuring of principal organs like the UN Security Council, which will ensure a more equitable global order.

Gender equality took center stage in the declaration, culminating in the announcement of a dedicated Working Group on the Empowerment of Women, which will be formed next year. India’s Women’s Reservation Bill 2023, reserving a third of India’s parliament and state legislative assembly seats for women, epitomizes our commitment to women-led development.

The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration embodies a renewed spirit of collaboration across these key priorities, focusing on policy coherence, reliable trade and ambitious climate action. It is a matter of pride that, during our presidency, the G20 achieved 87 outcomes and 118 adopted documents, a marked rise from the past.

During our G20 presidency, India led the deliberations on geopolitical issues and their impact on economic growth and development. Terrorism and the senseless killing of civilians is unacceptable and we must address it with a policy of zero tolerance. We must embody humanitarianism over hostility and reiterate that this is not an era of war.

I am delighted that, during our presidency, India achieved the extraordinary: it revitalized multilateralism, amplified the voice of the Global South, championed development and fought for the empowerment of women everywhere.

As we hand over the G20 presidency to Brazil, we do so with the conviction that our collective steps for people, planet, peace and prosperity will resonate for years to come.