‘When You Get to Shoot Back, the Morale Is Higher’

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

 

Kyiv, Ukraine — Last August in this city, I met Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, and he described to me what he called an “Axis of A**holes” operating around the world — a loose coalition of hostile states and allied groups attacking the innocent, seeking to destabilize and attack free countries, undermining democracies and the Western alliance, and conquering territory.

 

“Without U.S. weapons, we have obviously started to lose,” Zablotskiy began. “And this is not currently reflected in the areas lost, but it’s obvious that losses are accumulating. Even if you just look at publicly available data, sometimes we lose several tanks a day. Probably dozens killed every day.”

 

I asked Zablotskiy about the morale of the Ukrainian forces in the field. “It’s relatively simple,” he replied. “Of course, many people are tired, but when you get to shoot back, the morale is higher.”

 

The good news for Ukraine on the weapons front is that in addition to the Czech, Danish, Portuguese, and Greek donations of weapons I described yesterday, Germany has pledged to donate $543 million to the effort. And Canada is contributing $30 million. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the Czech government’s experience on the international arms market may well have given it serious advantages in connecting countries with artillery shells to sell and a Ukrainian army that desperately needs them:

 

Unlike the U.S., France or Germany, which mainly focused on ramping up domestic production to supply Ukraine, Czech officials said their initiative focused on sourcing existing materiel. Czech officials began quietly crisscrossing the globe, clinching sales deals and negotiating export licenses from scores of manufacturing nations.

 

The Czech officials said the country’s past as a Soviet satellite was an unexpected boon. It gifted the country both a substantial armaments industry with global customers and good relations with many nations in the Global South with large stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons and the capacity to produce more.

 

The officials are coy about where the shells are coming from but say suppliers include some allies of Russia. By contrast, similar entreaties by the U.S. and Western Europeans to potential suppliers in Africa, Asia and Latin America have been rebuffed, according to Western officials.

 

NATO and EU officials have publicly backed the Czech initiative in recent days. Germany has so far pledged over €500 million, which is by far the largest commitment of all participants, Czech officials said.

 

The Czech Republic’s approach was to act as a middleman, said Tomas Kopecny, the Czech special envoy for Ukraine who helped negotiate the deal. Prague approached nations it knew to have either manufacturing capacity or compatible ammunition in storage and connected them with a Western country that would place an order and pay for the shipment.

 

The Czech Republic would then organize the logistics, with shipments going either through its own borders or through third countries, blurring any direct link between the country of origin and Ukraine so as not to expose the supplier to Moscow’s ire.

 

One of Zablotskiy’s initiatives was getting U.S. police departments to donate seized guns to the Ukrainians — more for Ukrainian police than for use in the war. Back in 2002, the city of Miami set up a voluntary gun-buyback program, and in August, the city of Miami transferred 101 confiscated weapons to Ukraine. Phoenix started another program until Arizona AG Kris Maye determined that state law required the weapons to be sold, not donated.

 

Could One Long Bridge Be the Fulcrum of the War?

 

Add up Russia’s stockpiles of weapons, its arms imports from Iran and North Korea, its economic support through trade with China, its oil sales to India, and Putin’s willingness to both accept massive numbers of Russian casualties in order to gain and retain territory, and the absence of any serious political dissent in Russia . . . and the threat to Ukraine can seem extremely daunting.

 

Ten years ago this week, Putin reclaimed Crimea as a part of Russia. (Back in April 2014, the editors of National Review declared, “America must therefore adopt a policy aimed at reviving the West’s self-confidence and defeating Putin’s ambitious revanchism even if it takes a long time to succeed.” As you may have noticed, we didn’t get that policy, and now we live with the consequences.)

 

Today, the Crimean peninsula — and access to it — may be the fulcrum of the war.

 

Allow Wikipedia to summarize the basics of the Kursk bridge:

 

The Crimean Bridge, also called Kerch Strait Bridge or Kerch Bridge, is a pair of parallel bridges, one for a four-lane road and one for a double-track railway, spanning the Kerch Strait between the Taman Peninsula of Krasnodar Krai in Russia and the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea. Built by the Russian Federation after its annexation of Crimea at the start of 2014, the bridge cost $3.7 billion and has a length of 12 miles, making it the longest bridge in Europe and the longest bridge ever constructed by Russia.

 

The Crimean Bridge is about as important as a transportation artery can get, although apparently the Russians have started using ferries to move ammunition and weapons to Crimea. Ferries are slower than trains and trucks; once you’ve crossed the water, you need to unload the cargo and load it onto trains or trucks to get it to its destination. But the Russians have good reason to fear that a giant cargo truck or train full of ammunition or explosives would make an extremely tempting target for the Ukrainians’ drones.

 

Intermittently during the war, the Ukrainians have managed to damage the bridge and temporarily halt traffic, but the Russians have always managed to repair and reopen it. The bridge was closed for half an hour Sunday morning.

 

Last month, the commander of Ukraine’s Navy, Vice Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, predicted that the Crimean Bridge would be destroyed by the end of this year.

 

In a December essay in Foreign Affairs, Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, and three co-authors offer a detailed look at the challenge, and potential colossal consequences, of destroying the bridge — as opposed to just temporarily interrupting traffic:

 

[D]estroying the bridge will be a difficult task. It has been expertly constructed to bear heavy traffic. Its size, strength, and durability are such that it has withstood repeated Ukrainian attacks. For Kyiv to succeed in permanently disabling or destroying the bridge, Ukraine’s Western allies must provide far larger numbers of powerful precision-guided missiles. This will be a matter of both quantity and quality: a debilitating attack will necessitate a massive salvo of missiles to overwhelm Russia’s formidable missile defenses in Crimea and strike multiple vulnerabilities on the bridge simultaneously or one critical element repeatedly. Either strategy requires greater numbers of sophisticated missiles, including U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missiles and German Taurus missiles. Until Ukraine’s allies provide these or similar bunker-busting precision weapons — and lots of them — the bridge is likely to continue serving the Russian war effort.

 

As you may recall from last week, the German government refuses to send Taurus missiles, and Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, says his country’s troops would have to be sent to Ukraine to program them. Hodges and his co-authors continue:

 

In the buildup to the February 2022 invasion, the bridge was the only way that Russia could efficiently supply its Crimean logistics hubs and military bases with weapons, ammunition, equipment, personnel, and medicines. Today, Russia’s occupation of the southern Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia is largely sustained by military forces and supplies transported across the bridge. The loss or effective disruption of this supply route would make it challenging to sustain Russian military operations in Ukraine, especially given the enormous quantities of artillery ammunition required to hold back Ukrainian forces. If Kyiv succeeded in disabling the Crimean bridge, it would dramatically increase the likelihood of a total collapse of Russian defenses in southern Ukraine.

 

As they lay out at the linked article, however, inflicting irreparable damage to the bridge is an extremely tall order that would likely require multiple precise strikes with ATACMS missiles with unitary warheads weighing 500 pounds — or, “an engineered demolition using explosive charges placed directly on the bridge at critical points, as is done in controlled civil demolitions. But this requires unimpeded access to the bridge, which Ukrainian forces do not have.” Ukraine has been making more attacks on Crimea — it mounted at least 184 attacks on Russian military and infrastructure targets in Crimea, the Black Sea, and the Russian shore in 2023 — but getting commandos in place to put explosive charges on the bridge is an exceptionally difficult task.

 

South Carolina GOP senator Lindsey Graham is in town, and he declared during his visit that he hopes Ukrainians “get ATACMS so you can knock the damn bridge down linking Crimea to Russia.”

 

Get enough long-range missiles in the hands of the Ukrainians, and they can take enough shots to destroy the bridge. Destroy the bridge, and the Russian forces in the south lose their supply lines. If Russian forces in the south lose their supply lines, many will likely surrender.