Ukraine’s not-so-good ‘golden hour’
Our analyst looks at a bleeding nation’s diminishing options
Golden hour. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? It evokes a languid summer late afternoon.
In reality, it’s not lovely at all.
As our Ukrainian war analyst, Alexander Smukler of Montclair, explains it, the golden hour is the military term used for soldiers gravely injured on the battlefield. “If he is evacuated and gets professional medical intervention and attention during that first hour, it’s much more likely that he can be saved.” If help takes longer to get to him, or doesn’t get to him at all, the odds that he will survive plummet.
More broadly, Mr. Smukler said, the golden hour is the last time the apparent loser possibly can change the odds.
Mr. Smukler spent the first 30 years of his life in the Soviet Union, leaving just months before the empire unexpectedly crumbled in 1991. His analysis is based on that background, as well as from the intense study of Russia’s war in Ukraine that he’s conducted since it began in 2022. He feels Ukraine’s golden hour is at hand and if something positive doesn’t happen soon, the nation will lose the war.
The stakes are especially high now because Russia, the probable victor, is becoming worse in its conduct, he said, and illustrated it with the story of three Jews recently in the news.
There is Evan Gershkovich, the American Jewish journalist from Princeton, the son of Russian Jews, who wrote for the Wall Street Journal from Russia until he was arrested for espionage in March of 2023. He’s been imprisoned at the infamous torture center in Moscow called Lefortovo Prison on what are universally considered trumped-up charges (unless, of course, you are a Russian official. Then you assert that they’re real), and last week he was sentenced to 16 years in prison.
Then there’s Evgenia Berkovich, the Jewish theater director imprisoned for a play that Vladimir Putin, the autocrat-cum-president who rules Russia, doesn’t like. Her cause is particularly close to Mr. Smukler’s heart because her grandmother, Nina Katerly, was a famous human rights activist whom he respected tremendously. Zhenya, as Mr. Smukler calls her, was just sentenced to six years in prison. “She’s such a good poet,” he said.
And thirdly, there’s the nonbinary Jewish writer, intellectual, and activist who was known as Masha Gessen until recently, when they left their post as a New Yorker staff writer to write opinion pieces for the New York Times, among other places, as M. Gessen. Mr. Smukler has expressed his disapproval of Mx. Gessen’s stance on Jews and Israel in many places, including here, but he notes that they were tried in absentia and sentenced to eight years in prison, again in absentia, for the crime of criticizing the Russian military.
“These are absurd punishments,” Mr. Smukler said. He compared Ms. Berkovich’s sentence to the one meted out to Russian Jewish poet Joseph Brodsky in 1963; he was sentenced to five years and served two of them. And he likened the 16 years of Mr. Gershkovich’s sentence to the 13 years to which the famous refusenik (and now famous Israeli politician and public servant) Natan Sharansky was sentenced for spying in 1978; he served nine of those years.
“Putin’s regime by now is so brutal and so dangerous that it is becoming another North Korea,” Mr. Smukler said. “It must be contained somehow.”
So those are the stakes.
What’s going on in Ukraine?
“This is the golden hour there not only in the conflict, but also in the rapidly changing political situation in the world,” Mr. Smukler said.
“Ukraine is slowly, slowly losing the territories. Russia has not broken through the Ukrainian front line, which is gigantic, but it is slowly, slowly moving it back. Russia continues to push Ukrainians out of several key points in their defensive lines, including the towns called Toretsk and Chasiv Yar.
“The fight around these cities has continued for months, and Russia has been slowly, slowly advancing there, losing enormous amounts of manpower and weaponry,” Mr. Smukler said, citing war analysts — particularly Ruslan Leviev, the political activist who founded Conflict Intelligence Team and who also has been convicted and sentenced to prison in absentia — as estimating that Russia lost 600 tanks in that effort last month. “They are trying to attack, and they don’t care how much weaponry and equipment they lose.”
But the Russians have to care, he added, “because they now are feeling the deficit of the tanks and heavy military equipment. The stockpiles of tanks and howitzers and artillery — stockpiled during the Cold War — are running out. Military experts say that in a few months they will run out completely if the intensity of the conflict continues. The Russians already wasted everything in the reserves from the Cold War. Within five or six months, Russia will depend on its own production. So it’s increasing military production with enormous speed.
“Today, according to British intelligence, Russia can produce approximately 30 tanks a day. That’s approximately 9,000 tanks a year.”
That’s a lot of tanks.
“Russia also is suffering from a serious shortage of antimissile and air defense systems,” Mr. Smukler said. “They have relocated what they have from the east to the western front and to the center of Russia, to protect the biggest cities, leaving its far east and Siberia almost undefended. This is a very serious move and an unusual development. Since the early 1960s, Russia had a massive defensive line against China.”
That seems to show that the country’s understanding of where its worst threats lie has changed. They’ve moved west.
“So basically, although Russia is suffering an enormous loss of military equipment every week, and Putin is losing thousands of soldiers every week but is not announcing mobilizationin despite a deficit in manpower, still the situation is beneficial to Putin. He is advancing, and he considers that his situation is getting stronger every day.
“We know that the Russian strategy has not changed. Russians still are destroying the Ukrainian civil infrastructure. That is the strategy that Putin chose to diminish [Ukrainian President Volodymr] Zelensky’s power and popularity. He is trying to make civilians miserable.
“It is an enormously hot summer. People don’t have air conditioning. They don’t have anything. No electricity. No water. No sewage. No elevators.
“There was the horrific attack on the children’s hospital in Kyiv.” News reports tell us that about 27 people were killed and 117 injured when a missile struck Okhmatdyt hospital, a facility that treated severely sick kids. “Major military experts said that the Russian missile hit the hospital, the biggest children’s hospital in Kyiv, destroying the neonatal unit.
“Attacks like these, on residential buildings or hospitals, happen all the time in Ukraine, but outside Ukraine people never talk about them.” They don’t know about them, Mr. Smukler said.
“When Israel uses drones or missiles or attacks a terrorist nest inside Gaza, there are massive demonstrations against Israel in the United States,” because it’s all over the news. But there’s not much reporting about attacks from Russia — “there’s little mention about how many people are suffering because, for example, Russians hit children’s hospitals, or huge apartment buildings, or schools — and we don’t see people demonstrating on the streets supporting Ukraine or demanding that Russians stop killing children in Ukraine. They care about children in Gaza, but they don’t care about children in Ukraine.”
So, Mr. Smukler said, “Ukraine is weakening. It’s bleeding, from a military, political, and international point of view.
“You don’t have to be an expert to realize that this is its golden hour. In six to eight months, Ukraine will face major political and military dangers.”
Some of those difficulties come from changes in the outside world, Mr. Smukler said. “We see an enormous shift in the global game of thrones, due to recent elections in France, Great Britain, and the European Council. And of course we know that the elections in the United States will change the whole ball game.”
For now, however, Europe’s support of Ukraine seems unchanged.
Now, Mr. Smukler said, Great Britain’s new Labour government “is probably one of Ukraine’s strongest allies from the G7. Its policies toward Ukraine are unchanged, even though the Conservative government lost power. Last week, the U.K. committed to sending $4 billion to Ukraine every year in military help. Because of the intensity of the conflict, Ukraine needs at least $150 billion per year in military supplies and economic aid to defend itself, but still, the British government sent the message that its support of Ukraine will continue, and that the new prime minister, Keir Starmer, will continue his predecessor’s policy there.
“In France, we know that the parties on the right gained in Parliament, but they do not control the government or control the prime minster, and we think it is not difficult to predict that President Macron will continue his support of Ukraine.” Germany also has kept its support unchanged.
But Ukraine is not allowed to use the weapons it gets from Europe and the United States inside Russia. “The biggest problem for Ukraine today is that to minimize their losses from the Russian air force and Russian military systems, they need to have the ability to hit them on the ground.” But they’d have to use military equipment from outside Russian territory to do so, and they are not permitted to take those actions.
“Although F-16s would not be a miracle cure, most of the F-16s that were promised a long time ago didn’t arrive. Nobody knows how many planes were delivered or how many pilots were trained. Most experts think that there were only 12 of them. Ukraine definitely needs to increase its antimissile and air defense systems. It needs more Patriot missiles from the United States or its American allies.”
Most of all, “the population is suffering, and the country is not able to mobilize more manpower. There is an enormous deficit in manpower.”
It needs help.
“The U.S. Congress has allocated $60 billion, to be given before the presidential election, and I am almost sure that the Biden administration will do everything possible to provide the help it promised and the money that was allocated for the military before the new administration comes in.”
But, of course, the House of Representatives, controlled, if barely, by a Republican majority, withheld the aid allocated to Ukraine for nine months, and those months made a huge and terrible difference in Ukraine’s ability to hold off Russia.
“Now, after the Republican convention, it has become 100 percent clear, by Trump choosing JD Vance as vice president, that if they win, the future administration will strongly oppose military and financial aid to Ukraine.
“If Trump had chosen Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio, it would have been different. Vance is by far the senator most strongly against military aid to Ukraine. It seems to me that he doesn’t know the history of the Cold War, and he doesn’t care. He is not yet experienced in foreign policy, but his position — that we should not give help to Ukraine — is well known. And obviously Trump has a similar position.
“Despite his saying that he has a plan in his pocket to stop the war right away, nobody knows what the plan is. He keeps saying that if he had been president, the war never would have happened, and if he would move into the White House again, there would be no more bloodshed.
“There is a well-known saying in Russia that history does not accept the word ‘would.’”
But Mr. Smukler believes that Trump actually does have a plan, or at least that other world leaders have a plan, and he’d go along with it. “We know that with his VP pick, Trump showed us that he will minimize help to Ukraine, because the VP is an important player in the U.S. security council.” In fact, it was because of the opposition of Vance and other Republican senators to sending aid to Ukraine that the aid was halted for nine months. “That delay cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives,” Mr. Smukler said.
Now, he thinks that “Trump and his inner circle are working on plans to stop the war — at what cost we don’t know. Possibly by giving Putin the victory.
“Just about two weeks, ago, Victor Orban,” Hungary’s strongman, “traveled around the world to meet with four key players in the global game of thrones. He met with Zelensky,” Ukraine’s president, “and then he flew to Moscow to meet with Putin, and after that he flew to China to meet with Xi Jinping,” China’s president. “And then he went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. It’s shuttle diplomacy, and it showed me that this group of key players on our chessboard are formulating and framing new peace negotiations and the terms of the future agreements. We’ll hear the details soon after the election in the United States, if Trump wins.”
Mr. Smukler is not a fortune teller. He does not know who will win in November, especially after President Biden withdrew from the race and threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“But I do know that Trump has a plan, based on my sources and analysis,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that Trump made it. We can call it a Putin plan. But I know that it exists, and that Zelensky knows the details. He knows that if Trump wins, he wouldn’t move a finger to help Ukraine.
“Putin has already announced what he wants. At the maximum, as he already has said, he is willing to stop the fighting and freeze the front lines as they are now, and he wants to retain all the territories that he already has said were Russian. That includes Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea. He wants to guarantee that Ukraine never will be a member of NATO, and he wants the sanctions to be lifted. It seems to me and my sources at the highest level of Ukrainian political circles that Ukraine is ready to discuss part of the plan.
“Zelensky is concentrating on the territories. It is clear to Ukraine’s political leaders that they are so destroyed that it will take trillions of dollars to bring them back to prosperity, and the Ukrainians never will have those resources. And those are the territories that Ukrainians ran away from, so the only people remaining there — and there are not many of them — are Russian-speaking people who are not loyal to Ukraine.
“Luhansk and Donestsk are self-announced republics that have been at war since 2014. Ukrainian leaders understand that they are lost de facto anyway. It would take years and years and billions of dollars to take them back and restore civil order.
“Crimea is not an issue. Russia will never give it back unless it is defeated completely on the battlefield. So that leaves Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The negotiations around them depend on how strong Putin’s position is. Russia needs a land bridge to Crimea, so strategically, he has to control them.
“Because the question of membership in NATO is not in Zelensky’s control. That will be discussed by the global players. The question of sanctions will be discussed and decided by a big group of players. They were implemented by many countries, by the EU and the United States. There will have to be a mutual agreement. It can’t just be the United States lifting the sanctions, which would be difficult to get through Congress anyway if the Republicans don’t control the White House, the Senate, and Congress. It will be very difficult to convince the EU to lift the sanctions, so we will see very complicated diplomatic activity, but the frame of the agreement already is known. Orban discussed the details of the plan with Zelensky, Putin, Xi, and Trump.
the conference at Potsdam in 1945.
“The most important question Zelensky faces is the territories.
“I predict that if Trump will come to power, we will witness a new conference similar to Potsdam,” when the three Allied leaders, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin, came together in 1945 to discuss the end of World War II and the reshaped world. “Trump, Putin, and Xi will sit together to discuss the future coexistence plan,” Mr. Smukler said. “That is what Orban is trying to negotiate.”
But, he said grimly, “although on the one hand, as you know, my heart belongs with Ukraine, and I know that they are very heroic, on the other hand I don’t want to see the third world war happen.” He fears that such an outcome might possibly follow a Democratic win, because the aid the United States would give Ukraine might well be too little too late.
“After spending billions of dollars on Ukraine, everyone sees that Ukraine is losing, both because they are getting help, but not enough, and also the help is to defend themselves, not to liberate occupied territories. It’s not clear how long they can fight and bleed without enough help.
“At a certain point, it is possible that the Democratic administration might understand that they have to send troops in, and so will NATO, and they will have boots on Ukraine.
“As soon as that happens, Putin will announce that it is a world war, and will start attacking European cities. And that’s how the war will ignite.
“So I think that by now, somebody has to stop the war. Ukraine cannot simply continue fighting. If the Russians break through the front lines, and if Putin is willing to announce mobilization, he will smash Ukraine up to the Polish border, and that will be a disaster.
“So now we are in a dangerous situation, and we could lurch into war if somebody doesn’t stop it.
“A year ago, we still had hope. Ukraine was advancing, and we thought more weaponry would help. We also thought that Russia’s economy would choke on the sanction. But now we see that Russia is flourishing and rebuilding. It’s getting all kinds of help from China, and an enormous amount of help from India, which is buying enormous amounts of Russia oil with huge discounts.
“Zelensky already understands that he is losing.”
So this story doesn’t end with much hope, but as we’ve seen in the last few weeks, situations change rapidly, and predictions that are safe one day seem foolhardy the next. Yes, this is Ukraine’s golden hour. But it’s not the end. Not yet, anyway.
comments