On rivers and morale - James Meek in LRB:

“One of the minor blast effects is irony. The other university hit that Friday was the Admiral Makarov Shipbuilding University, once the centre of naval architecture in this city of former military shipyards. The university is named after Stepan Makarov, an officer in the Russian imperial navy, born in Mykolaiv and killed in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War. Also named after Makarov is the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, a frigate that has been firing missiles at Ukraine. Whether Admiral Makarov, the ship, is responsible for bombarding Admiral Makarov, the university, isn’t clear, but the two are no longer comrades. This is not the only ghostly doubling. The frigate became flagship after the cruiser Moskva was sunk by Ukrainian missiles early in the invasion. The Moskva was built in Mykolaiv, and rebuilt there in the 1990s, when Russia paid Ukraine to do the work. Now the Moskva is at the bottom of the sea, but on a wharf in Mykolaiv’s derelict shipyards a rusting replica of it is still afloat: its sister vessel, the Ukraina, launched on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse and still waiting to be fitted out.”

(…)

“Petrol is plentiful but expensive, and food abundant for those who can afford it. There are supermarkets in Mykolaiv whose shelves, groaning with fresh produce and packaged goods from all over the world, wouldn’t look out of place in Paris.
After curfew, when the sun was up, I walked to the centre of town, through wide streets lined with enormous old trees, weathered old houses – some built with the local stone, rakushnyak, a kind of limestone with a high proportion of fossilised crayfish shells – and grungy flowerbeds, evidently loved but lightly gardened, lurid with petunias, hollyhocks and orange lilies. There was little traffic and few people were about. Many have left the city, and many businesses are shut, though you can still find open shops and cafés. In the shade of Chestnut Park I came across a young man in a black T-shirt with a pistol on his belt, sitting on a bench and drinking latte from a takeaway cup.”

(…)

“That missile struck in daylight. Different areas of Ukraine have different degrees of justification for dropping their guard. On my way to the Black Sea I spent the afternoon in Kyiv. After downloading the national air-raid warning app I sat in a café. My phone went off at full volume a few seconds before the actual sirens did. I took my cue from the locals: rather than running for shelter, I turned the sound down, embarrassed. Kyivans continued to whizz past on electric scooters. At the far end of the café terrace, a photographer and a model carried on their fashion shoot. Kyiv hadn’t been attacked for weeks, but a fortnight later, it was. My train from Poland to Kyiv had passed through an Arcadian landscape of downs, meadows, ponds and spinneys. We stopped at Vinnytsia. Twenty minutes later, I was in the buffet when somebody looked up wide-eyed from their phone. Just after the train left Vinnytsia, Russia had dropped three missiles on the city, killing 25 people, including three children, and injuring more than two hundred. Vinnytsia, like Kyiv, is seldom struck. But people in Mykolaiv know that in any 24-hour period missiles are almost certain to fall.”

(…)

“The robber/rapist comparison breaks down for the minority of Ukrainians who want to keep an instrumental distance between themselves and the troops fighting in their name. One woman took me to see her daughter’s school, smashed by Russian missiles. Through the broken concrete you could see a shelf of library books exposed to the sun and rain. Instead of blaming Russia for firing missiles at the school, she blamed Ukraine for quartering soldiers there. (Schools in Mykolaiv haven’t been open since before the invasion – pandemic remote learning simply rolled over into conflict remote learning.)
When I asked her about Putin’s aims, she said: ‘I don’t know. He must have his reasons for what he’s doing.’ Did she think what he was doing was right? ‘I never get involved in politics.’ She mentioned that salaries in Russian-annexed Crimea were higher than in Ukraine. She’d been angry, earlier on in the fighting, when Russian troops were approaching Mykolaiv, about how close Ukrainian armoured vehicles were to her house. She was Russian-born. She was unhappy that Russian language teaching was disappearing from Ukraine. She said people were punished for using Russian. (This is untrue: Russian is still the dominant everyday language in Mykolaiv, and still very widely used in Kyiv, though it has been gradually restricted in schools since 2014.) When she said she’d been surprised to learn what a strong army Ukraine had, I thought she was displaying an unexpected Ukrainian patriotism. But thinking back on it, I realise she was expressing disappointment that the Ukrainian army hadn’t melted away, as Putin expected.”

(…)

“As much as the strength of armies matters, big wars turn on natural barriers: mountains and the passes between them, rivers and the bridges over them. There are no mountains on the former steppe of southern Ukraine, now flat farmland. But there are rivers, and one river in particular. The Dnieper, which splits Ukraine in two, runs from near Chernobyl at the Belarus border past Kyiv and a series of large industrial cities down to the Black Sea at Kherson. It’s vast. For much of its length, it’s miles wide. It’s better thought of as a series of reservoirs than a river. Half a dozen dams supplement Ukraine’s electricity supply: thanks to its whirring hydroelectric and nuclear power stations, along with the loss of its energy-hungry metallurgical plants in the east, invaded Ukraine has so much electricity to spare it’s started exporting it to the EU.
As both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army found during the Second World War, the Dnieper is a hard river to cross under fire, and there are few bridges. In most of Ukraine, Russian forces are a long way from the river, but even if the Ukrainian army continues to be pushed back in the east, the Dnieper should provide a secure line of defence for the west of the country, often known, thanks to the way the river flows, as ‘right-bank Ukraine’, which contains the greater part of Kyiv, as well as Odesa and Lviv. If the eastern front collapses and the war becomes about the defence of right-bank Ukraine, certain ideas which seemed fanciful and dangerous at the beginning of the invasion – a Western-enforced no-fly zone, foreign peacekeeping troops – become more practical. The problem is that while most of left-bank Ukraine is still in Ukrainian hands, in the south, the Russians crossed the Dnieper early in the conflict, and stayed.”

(…)

“Thousands of Russian troops arrived in early March, hoping to surround and neutralise Mykolaiv to pave the way for an assault on Odesa. At one point, with the city almost completely encircled, Marchenko defied an order from Kyiv to blow up the Varvarivsky bridge, Mykolaiv’s last connection to the outside world. A group of policemen armed with anti-tank missiles drove Russian troops from Kulbakino. Ukrainian artillery began to thin out the invaders. Far beyond their supply lines, heavy on high-tech equipment but light on basic infantry, the Russians were diluted in the wide green Ukrainian flatlands. Defeated around Mykolaiv, and further north at Voznesensk, they retreated to the positions they’ve pretty much held ever since, roughly on the administrative border between Mykolaiv and Kherson regions, halfway between the two cities, which in normal times are only an hour and a half’s drive apart. They have set the concrete plant in Kherson to work making fortifications for the string of villages that mark the 150-mile perimeter of their western foothold, and are hunkered down, waiting for the Ukrainians to mount their long-promised effort to drive them back across the Dnieper.
This front could become part of a new border between Russia and Ukraine, a temporary ceasefire line that becomes permanent, like the border between the two Koreas. I asked Leonid Klimenko, the head of another of Mykolaiv’s universities, the Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, what he thought of this idea. He gave it short shrift, partly because he assumed, on the basis of past experience, that Russia would carry on shooting, even if it stopped trying to advance. ‘The ceasefire line would only be about 20 km from Mykolaiv. It would be a second Mariupol. They would be continually shelling the city. The city couldn’t develop, nothing would get built. It would be a catastrophe. Nobody would want to study here; what parent would allow their children to study on a campus that might get hit by an artillery shell? For us the minimum is to free Kherson city, to liberate right-bank Ukraine, and to let the Dnieper protect us from Russia.’” (…)

“Many cities in the communist world were economically devastated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but few fell so far, so fast, as Mykolaiv. In its heyday as a centre of shipbuilding for the Soviet navy, it was closed to outsiders. Every morning, thirty thousand workers went to the yard on foot and by tram. Those who weren’t building warships were making parts for warships, or working in one of the nuclear weapons bases outside the city. Two gigantic eggshell blue cranes that still loom over the city were bought by the USSR from Finland to build aircraft carriers. The Soviet Union fell apart just as four reactors were due to be installed on its first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The reactors were taken away, the aircraft carrier was cut up for scrap, and the shipbuilders lost their jobs, their status, their framing of the world.
As that industry vanished, another was trying not to. ‘You can imagine how hard it was for us to maintain the agriculture system here after the fall of the Soviet Union,’ said Oleh Pilipenko, head of one of the communities of Ukrainian villages known as a ‘hromada’. ‘In the 1990s farmers were standing watch over their equipment at night with weapons in their hands to make sure it wasn’t stolen. And now, in the most barbaric way, it’s all been destroyed.’”

(…)

“While he was in Nova Kakhovka, Pilipenko said, he was able to talk to some of the Russians about their situation. Morale fell in May when the expected troop rotation didn’t happen. The original plan, he learned, had been to take the whole of Ukraine in one week. ‘Kyiv would fall in three days, the government would either be evacuated or captured, and if the government was evacuated, the entire Ukrainian armed forces would surrender. They understood that our most effective troops were in Donbas, so they didn’t confront them head-on at first, they wanted to surround them and force them to lay down their arms, as with Mariupol. But when months passed without effect ... they understood they’d fallen victim to their own propaganda.’”

Read the article here.

An excellent article about the ambiguities of war in general, about this war in particular.

In 2008 I visited Mykolaiv and Kherson, especially Kherson struck me back then as an extremely impoverished city, periphery, forgotten by the center.

Read the article here.

After approximately 70,000 death or wounded Russian soldiers (according to the CIA) in less than six months the morale must be low, but not low enough to end the war. And Russia is still willing to sacrifice its young men, much more so than Western European countries, if this means that liberal democracy is dying, as certain right-wingers love to proclaim, remains to be seen. Human sacrifice is problematic. Monotheism is built on that idea that the gods don’t need to eat humans anymore, in order to be lovable gods.

The Dnieper as the river that separates Russian-occupied Ukraine from the western part appears me to me a plausible prediction. We know from the Battle of Stalingrad that a river (in that case the Volga) can be lethal. Military equipment of course changed since then, and therefore also the military strategy, but according to Leek not so much. Watch the Dnieper.