Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/22/22 William Arkin on Russia’s Failures in Ukraine

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

William Arkin joined Scott on yesterday's Antiwar Radio show to discuss the war in Ukraine. Arkin has spent the last two months following the war closely to try and get an accurate read on what’s happening on the ground. He shares his findings and latest analysis with Scott. Arkin believes that Russia’s military failures have exposed them as a paper tiger, invalidating all the money and resources that have been poured into NATO over the decades. At the same time, the absence of diplomacy and the apparent U.S. intentions to turn this conflict into a prolonged proxy war pose the greatest danger to Ukrainian civilians.  Discussed on the show: William M. Arkin’s Newsweek Page “Putin's Iskander Missiles Are Battle-Tested—and Can Carry Nuclear Warheads” (Newsweek) William Arkin is a military intelligence analyst, activist, author, journalist, academic and consultant. His award-winning reporting has appeared on the front pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. He is the author of American Coup: How a Terrified Government Is Destroying the Constitution and The Generals Have No Clothes: The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars. Follow him on Twitter @warkin. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, April 24th, 2022. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com. And author of the book, Enough Already. Time to end the war. on terrorism. You'll find my full interview archive. 5,700 of them now, going back to 2003,

right around this time, 19 years ago, at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right. Introducing this week's guest, it's William M. Arkin from Newsweek magazine. Welcome back to the show. William. How are you doing? Thanks for having me on again, Scott. very happy to have you here and frankly like I feel very lucky to have been able to read all of your great coverage of the war in Ukraine going back over these past few weeks here it's all at newsweek dot com I just want to start I guess if we could could you give us please an overview of how many people have been displaced how many people have been killed civilian and military and that kind of thing well if I knew any of the answers to that question Scott I could give you an overview you know we do know that 25% or so of the population in the east has been displaced by this war. And we do know that some 3 to 4 million people have left Ukraine altogether and are now finding shelter in Eastern Europe mostly. But overall, do we know how many civilians have actually died?

Do we know how many soldiers have actually died? I think the answer is still no. I can give you some sense of the magnitude of the war. and that is that we are talking about two large armies facing each other on the ground with tremendous reserves on the part of the Ukrainians, police, National Guard, territorial defenses, civilian volunteers, foreign mercenaries. They're all engaged in this war. I think the level of casualties amongst the soldiers has been higher than we probably have been told

That is that we're talking about probably somewhere in the area of 30 to 40,000 soldier deaths and severe injuries. And the level of civilian casualties, though the UN continues to doggedly say that only 2,500 civilians have died, the truth of the matter is that once the war settles and we see what's happened in Maripole in the south and we see what's happened in the other cities on the front lines that have been basically fighting for the last two months. And I'm talking about here the entire front line from Kharkiv in the north all the way through Luhansk and Dunbass, Donetsk provinces that are making up the Donbass. And then the offensive of the Russians from Crimea up north to try to take the entire southern half of Ukraine. we're probably talking about somewhere in the area of 20,000 or so civilian deaths, which is about at this point maybe 10 times more than what the UN is accounting for.

And what do you think about Russian military casualties in the war, ballpark? So I think the answer is that we can tell from Ukrainian numbers that about 20,000 or so Russian soldiers have been killed. That doesn't seem to be an inconceivable number to me. We have to remember how many Russian troops are actually on the ground and what they're actually doing and how many are actually at the front lines. I know that those arrows and those shaded areas on maps gives us a very distorted view of just how much progress Russia has made because we are talking about maybe a mile or so that they can move in a couple of days. And so we have these sweeping arrows that give a very false picture of the progress of the war.

But I would guess that the 20,000 number is probably right. So that means that the Russians have lost somewhere close to 20% of their starting forces. And though new troops are being sent in and have been sent in from the east, the truth of the matter is that those troops have never operated in combat. They weren't really prepared to go to war. They're not fully integrated into the Russian forces that are already there. And most importantly, the Russians have demonstrated that they're not really able to manage large-scale operations.

They're okay at the battalion level. That's a thousand men or so. But beyond that, they haven't really been able to pull all of those pieces together. The logistical supply lines behind the Russian forces are still broken. The ability to move fuel, ammunition, and even food to the frontline troops is still a mess. The Russians haven't particularly done very well in their so-called new offensive that began on April 18th. But here's the truth about the war, Scott. The Russians lost in the north.

However they want to play it, they were not able to take Kiev and they were not able to take Chernaiv. and they withdrew their forces, and we should see it as a Ukrainian victory over the Russians rather than what everybody was reporting, which was, oh my God, the Russian forces are moving from the north to the south. That's a monumental task, and these forces were badly beaten and badly damaged, and they will need weeks, if not months, to recuperate and reorganize themselves to be a meaningful fighting force. So almost everything in the South is really the forces that the Russians began with and those forces that they brought in from Russia itself, which are not really combat ready. So I look at the war and I say, well, wait a minute, they lost in the north and in the

south other than their movement through much of Kersen and Zaporisia, which are the two provinces that are north of Maripole, they haven't really managed to take much more territory. In fact, in Lujansk, that's the northern part of Donbass. They started the war controlling about 60% of the territory of Lujansk, and now as of today, they control about 80% of that territory, so they've gained another 20%. But they still don't even control these Russian-dominated areas. areas of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, they have not been able to make the progress that they've wanted to make on the ground. And the Ukrainians give them credit have mounted a spectacular territorial defense. You know, just from looking at the last 20 years of America's wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan, I know it is different. As you said, these are real state armies, not, you know, one power versus an insurgency and everything. It took us 20 years to lose 7,000 guys. So when you say the Russians seem to have lost 20,000. Sounds like there must have been at least one big set piece battle where they got completely wiped out or something, no? Well, I don't think it's one battle. I mean, the Russians have been operating along a very broad front. So let's say even in the towns north of Kiev, like Bukha, that we've heard so much about because of the massacre of civilians there, the truth is that that was five battalion tactical groups on the part of Russia. So that's about 5,000 men fighting against an equivalent Ukrainian force, why Bukha looks so horrible,

why Erpin and Hustamel and all of these other cities look so horrible now that we've seen after the Russian withdrawal is that the Russians have largely been relegated to operating on the main roads because they have not been able to pull off off-road operations. And, well, when you operate on the main roads, what do you do? You go through all the towns and the villages. And so that's where the fighting has actually taken place. And that's exactly what's going on in the South as well. So that's why you both see a large number of civilian casualties from people who were not able to evacuate from those towns.

But also at the same time, it sets sort of the phenomena of what separates the Ukraine war from other wars. When the United States attacked Iraq in 2003, the army swept through the desert to make their way to Baghdad. In this particular case, the Russians have almost exclusively operated on highways, roads and small roads, even dirt roads. And so they have been going through these towns and villages as part of their offensive. And so that's where the fighting has ended up taking place. All right. Now, on the narrative overall, that they were definitely on their way to try to achieve a regime change in Kiev, but then they were beaten back by Ukrainian forces with Lockheed Brand javelins and all these kinds of things. I heard a counter narrative to that, or I read a counter narrative to that, which was that that was mostly a faint in order to divide the Ukrainian military while the Russians took their real prize, which was the land between, I guess, Donetsk and Crimea there, including the city of Maripole, in order to create their so-called

land bridge in the south. But you're not buying that at all. Do I read you right? Well, I mean, the facts don't support that supposition, Scott. The reality is that we now have captured Russian documents that show us that they were, in fact, intent upon taking Kiev, and they thought that they would be able to get there in less than 72 hours. So I think that that the truth is, and this again separates the Russian war from U.S. practices in the past, is that they attacked along an entire front line from Crimea all the way in the south through the east and up to the north, that they encircled the entire eastern periphery of Ukraine. And they didn't use air power in the way that the United States might use air power,

which is to soften up and destroy infrastructure as a prelude to the ground operation. Why not? All of it happened at the same time. All of it. The missile war, the air war, the ground war, it all took place at the same time. And I think that in fact Putin was trying to take Kiev and take the land of the Donbass. Now that they have been had to revisit what their objectives are, by what. with their withdrawal in the north, now they're saying they're intent upon taking Donbass

and most recently the articulation of military commanders on the ground who have been quoted in the Russian press are that they're intent upon taking not just Donbass, that's the two provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, but at the same time that they want to take all of southern Ukraine in order to provide a land bridge from Russia to Transnitsia, which is a rebel region of Moldova that's on the other side of Ukraine. So they're changing their objectives sort of on the fly, if you will, but the reality is that they are not even able to just take the territory that they intended to take in Donbass. And while they are doing a little bit better further west in southern Ukraine, they did not

manage to get to Mikhailaya. They did not manage to ever get close to Odessa. And so the Russians are just not doing very well. And though they will probably revise their objectives once again to fit with whatever it is that they are able to do, I think by May 9th, which is the big date, by Victory Day in Russia, the reality will be that Putin will find some way to declare victory, to say that they have achieved their objectives, of course, now those objectives will have been revised three or four times, and to sort of accept a ceasefire in order to be able to declare victory, that that's the key date that we should now be watching. I wanted to follow up on one of your points earlier there about why they didn't deploy heavy air power first the way that both Bushes did in their Iraq wars.

Because they suck. I mean, that's the reality, Scott. The Russian Air Force is an adjunct of the Russian army. It's not an independent arm. It doesn't have strategic objectives in the way that we think about them when we think about American targeting deep into Iraq or deep into Afghanistan. The Russians have barely been able to undertake very many strikes outside of the battlefield. And though the use of air power in support of Russian ground forces has been intense, there was no efforts on the part of Russia to destroy the electrical grid, to destroy the communications fabric. The Internet is still working in Ukraine to destroy the roads and bridges. The truth of the matter is that there was just no strategic. campaign on the part of Russia. So if we look at it and mirror image the U.S. and we say, oh, my God,

they didn't do these strategic things. And so therefore, they failed. We have to stop mirror imaging the Russians and say, oh, in the context of what they believe, which is that this is a true land war and not an air power dominant war, as we've seen in the Middle East, then we can see the war in a different way and not just mirror image the U.S. experience, but actually realize that Russia is fundamentally a ground power. It's a land power, and the United States is a naval and air power, and they're just different countries. Hang on just one second. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety.

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Talking with Bill Arkin from Newsweek about the war in Ukraine, one more mirror image here. What do you think about the idea that Putin's pearls told him that they're going to greet us with flowers and candy in the east of the country? They'll see us as protectors and welcome us, and we'll just roll right in, no problem. Well, I do think that that comparison is apt, Scott. The truth of the matter is that the Russians completely misreferenced. read the Ukrainians, I think before we guffaw too much about the error of their intelligence, we should also recognize that U.S. intelligence didn't have a clue as to what was actually going to transpire. Yes, they could count the Russian troops and the Russian tanks that were

building up in Belarus and in the western part of Russia that were preparing to engage in Ukraine. But U.S. intelligence did not have any particular insights as to what Russian strategy would be, as to how difficult the Russians would have. And you know what? A shot had barely been fired in this Ukraine war, Scott, before U.S. generals and U.S. Defense Department spokespeople and pro-military observers were saying, oh, my God, we need to increase defense spending. We need to spend even more. We need to do even more. And that is the dominant narrative now in Washington and in NATO, when the truth of the matter is that what this war really teaches us

is that the Russians are a paper tiger, that they're not really a threat to NATO. They can barely even maintain themselves in Ukraine. And so, in fact, it isn't the case that we need to increase defense spending. It's more of a case that we need to revisit the very question of the Russian threat. All right. Now, there's so much more to talk about here, Bill, and so little time. But it's interesting, you know, the way that you portray the balance on the scales here in the war.

And so I wonder how all that affects the question of diplomacy here. Because it seemed like if there was going to be a real deal, it would be some kind of recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the quote, unquote, you know, ironical so-called independence of the Donbass there and neutrality for Ukraine and a forswearing of them eventually joining NATO. But if the Russians are getting beaten back as badly as you say, then that means the Americans and the Ukrainians then feel that much less incentive to deal along those lines, even though I think quite clearly Putin's not going to settle for less than that. So it seems like maybe that's why there's no diplomacy going on, is because

nobody wants to give in from the position that they're in right now. Well, it's unfortunate that there's no diplomacy, but I think there's a more of a systemic problem. When the United States and NATO lined up in such unity against Russia, and even countries like Sweden and Finland, you know, joined the sanctions regimes and have supported Ukraine with arms and assistance, the truth of the matter is, there's what we lost is we lost a third party. We lost an objective third party that could go in there and knock heads together and say, you guys have got to come to some conclusion because we're just now fighting in a stalemate over the bodies of dead Ukrainians and more Ukrainian civilians

are going to die when Ukraine, you have no prospect of defeating Russia and Russia, you have no prospect of defeating Ukraine. So let's first cease fire and then second, begin the tough negotiations that are going to either create some kind of demilitarized zone between these two combatants. And we have examples of that, for instance, on the Korean Peninsula. Or let's come to some conclusion in which Ukraine makes the concession that it won't join NATO and will become neutral and Russia in exchange cedes this territory here or there. It's not the end, like it won't be a peace treaty, it'll be an armistice of some sort. That to me is the logical outcome and it's the one that I thought was happening a couple of weeks ago when everything was sort of upset by the calls

of genocide and war crimes and blah, blah, blah. And the end result of that was to halt negotiations. I mean, Macron, the French president, has said explicitly that he had a dialogue going on with Putin, and it all ended after the Bucca massacres were uncovered. And so we're missing that element. The United States is not a third party. The UN is toothless, as we know. And so there isn't really somebody who's going to help to get this negotiations underway. And though I applaud that the Biden administration is supporting Ukraine, the truth of the matter is that by sending arms to Ukraine, as everyone around that country is doing now, we're prolonging the war rather than using our diplomatic tools to try to find some way to stop the fighting

and stop the killing. Now, Bill, I know this would sound crazy and you'd scold me for it, but I read it in the Washington Post on April the 5th. They said some in NATO prefer to see the war continue to see the Ukrainians continue fighting and dying, they said. Fighting and dying and did not want to see the war end too early. And I wonder how much of that thinking do you think is behind? Well, our State Department's refusal, it's been 65 days since Blinken met with Sergei Laver. I don't credit anybody with having a secret test tube in the basement in which they are diabolically making a brew of Ukraine versus Russia. But they are right in one regard, Scott, and this is really the most important thing that people should take away.

The war in Ukraine has challenged the West in so many ways, not just in terms of recognizing Russia's, propensity towards war and invasion, but also in the sense of it's a kind of a crisis of identity for NATO and the Western alliance. And I feel at this point that there is this sense that we're going to fight on for weeks or months and that somehow this is going to achieve Ukrainian victory over the Russians. I just don't see on the ground how that's going to actually take place. And I am fearful to some degree that if the Russians really feel like their backs are up against the wall, that they might escalate, chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, or escalate in other ways.

And so I don't agree that anyone intended it to be this way, but the truth is that this is how it has developed. Whether you think that there was intent behind it or not, this is how it is developed. We are fighting to the last Ukrainian death, and that is just not a good position for the United States to be in. And I think that the absence of diplomacy, it's not just the American responsibility. There are other countries as well that are in a good position to be the intermediaries like the French. But the absence of a diplomatic effort that equals the war effort, it sort of belies the entire last two decades of American foreign policy, which was, oh, yeah, we think

that diplomacy is just as important as the military is. They're equal partners. And yet here we are two months into a war. And basically, it's all about the military and diplomacy with the Russians doesn't even exist. Yeah. All right. Now, you mentioned about how the use of the term genocide here, sabotage diplomacy, and you have an important story about Buka or Buka or however you pronounce it here, and the massacre there where you're talking to some people from DIA and other places too, I guess. So I was wondering if you could clear up what happened there, whether that amounts to genocide or not, who did it, and that kind of thing. The truth of the matter is that I've been focused in all of my reporting since this war began on what actually is happening on the ground.

And though I look at Bucca and say to myself, this was a tragedy, because this war was literally taking place inside this village, the truth of the matter is that 400 civilians died. And 400 civilians equals 0.01% of the population of Bucca. To call it genocide is to sort of do genocide a disservice. genocide would mean that the Russians were intent on destroying the Ukrainian people, and yet they've shown no propensity towards, for instance, attacking inside the urban area of Kiev during this entire conflict or using their Air Force in a strategic way to actually achieve any kind of genocide. I think the Russians could have done a lot more damage than they actually did, but my God, if we say that somehow we're being pro-Russian, when just the facts on the ground support,

that. And so do I think that there have been war crimes in Ukraine? Absolutely. But war crimes come down to what an individual does, whether that individual is actually committing the war crime or the individual is commanding that troops go out there and intentionally attack civilians or intentionally destroy civil infrastructure. So do I think there have been war crimes? Yes. Do I think that there have been tragic places that have been in the middle of this war? Yes, absolutely. And we still don't know how many people actually died in Kharkiv or Maripal, where they're saying as many as 20,000 civilians died.

I mean, we just don't know the answer right now. But to call it genocide and to call it all, just one big giant war crime, is kind of taking away our reasoning faculty and taking away our ability to stop the war. And so I can see on the part of the United States why it uses that rhetoric, why it gets to that place. But if we are so blinded that we cannot see Russia as being a rational actor, that we just see it as being like the evil Putin, then we are not able to find a solution to the war short of watching the Ukrainians die while we do nothing except put more arms in the hands of the Ukrainians so that more Ukrainians die. All right. Now, last topic here. The question of nuclear weapons. And you have this story talking about

the possibility of Russia breaking out tactical nuclear weapons in this war. Is that a real concern, William Arkin? It is a real concern, Scott, because we're getting to the place where Putin might be threatened, where the state, you know, the Putin state might be threatened. And in fact, that is Russian doctrine. You know, if the state is threatened, then that is the cause for escalation to the use of nuclear weapons. So I take it seriously and U.S. intelligence takes it seriously. They're closely watching every Russian nuclear move. And this week, especially, we saw a test of a new Russian ICBM, a long-range missile.

And in the context of that test, even the Russians said, we hope that NATO will notice what we're doing. So it wasn't an explicit nuclear threat, but the Russians are definitely, you know, from the first night of the war, they have been making nuclear threats, that if NATO intervenes on the ground, that they will escalate, blah, blah, blah. But here is the truth. It seems at this point that we have some power over this. We play a role. What we do in this war now plays a role. And Russian forces, I think, rather than like going on the offensive and parading through Ukraine in the largest tank battle since World War II and all the narrative

that you're reading in the mainstream media, the Russians are really having a difficult time advancing again. And the truth is that the Russians may find themselves in a situation in the not too near future where their only option is to escalate. Now, you say, well, you know, we shouldn't help the Russians in any way, but the truth is we should help the Russians. We should help the Russians to stop fighting, to find the way to stop fighting. If our priority is peace and if our priority is protecting the civilian population, which is the very basis of yelling genocide and war crimes, then we need to find a way in which we can give Putin and out.

And so instead, our military only strategy at this point, which is not giving Putin and out, is just basically relegating Ukraine to being our proxy battlefield against the Russians forever. All right, you guys, that is William M. Arkin. He's at Newsweek. You're cheating yourself if you're not reading every single thing he writes there. His most recent book is The Generals Have No Clothes, The Untold Story of Our Endless Wars.

Thanks, Bill. Thank you so much for having me on, Scott. And that's Anti-War Radio for this morning. You'll find the full interview archive at Scott Horton.org and YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See all next week.