Quote:

---

Is President Trump Prepared to Respond to the Ukraine Situation?

This is a test.



By Robert Bateman

Feb 2, 2017

Russian interests are attacking Ukraine, again. Let us be clear about that. President Trump has pretty much done nothing. And now we are confused. So here are a few facts:

• The nation of Ukraine is a sovereign state.
• They used to be a part of the USSR.
•That ended when the Soviet Union broke up at the end of the Cold War.
•Some Russians do not like that. But the fact remains, Ukraine is a sovereign nation.

Over the past several years, many people have wondered if the country could stand on its own. After all, like all of the former "Warsaw Pact" and several former "Soviet" Republics (who are all NATO members now), Ukraine did not join NATO. Then Russia literally took over a whole region of Ukraine and annexed it, declaring it part of Russia again. That is undisputed.

And so an independent nation is losing territory to an aggressive attack from conventional and unconventional forces led indirectly (but definitively) by Vladimir Putin.

President Trump says that he thinks that the former head of the KGB is a good guy. He had, as he described it, a great conversation with the former Communist spymaster on Saturday. If that is true, then President Trump just got played for an actual fool. Again.

Hours after Trump got off the phone with Putin, Russian munitions started landing upon civilians inside the nation of Ukraine. That is to say, inside a part of the sovereign nation of Ukraine that is being disputed by "rebel separatists." But these "separatists" in the area are just not just homegrown DIY "rebels." No, that cannot be true, because they can't make that artillery. To get that kind of firepower, you need munitions, and the munitions can only come from one place. (I really hope the former intel officer, Michael Flynn, explained this to the President.)

Here is the thing about modern mass-fired rocket-artillery ammunition such as that which has been landing in Ukraine since just after President Trump got off the phone with Mr. Putin: You cannot make it in a garage. Each round is about a grapefruit-size in diameter, and the whole thing weighs about 1/2 of my own body weight. It is precisely engineered. Keep that in mind.

We Americans have been fighting in several countries for 16 years now, and the general American public has become used to the idea that "rebels" or "insurgents" can build their tools in backyard toolshops. And that's true—when you are talking about IEDs, and car bombs (known to us as VBIEDs, that is Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices), and the ubiquitous suicide bomber vests.

Tactics wins battles, but logistics wins wars.

But tube-fired rocket artillery fired from conventional military rocket launchers? No chance.

I have said it before, but I cannot avoid repeating what I taught my cadets at West Point or my graduate students at Georgetown University: Tactics wins battles, but logistics wins wars.

Which brings us back to Southeastern Ukraine.

Does mass artillery fire fit into your definition of "kerfuffle"? On Sunday, when the situation went, literally, ballistic, logistics began to matter. Firing that type of round means you have a supply, and that means a steady industrial factory source for these rockets.

What seems clear is that the Russians (or their nominal proxies) started firing 40-round-per-vehicle bombardments by 122mm rockets (each carrying 44 lbs of warhead), fired from GRAD missile launchers. (Which happened to be banned in the last now-defunct ceasefire.)

But Ukranians are also being hit by standard artillery and mortars.

Ceasefire monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, tallied 2,260 "ceasefire violations," and that was just on Sunday. Starting, or maybe just continuing, in the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning, the separatist forces launched another attack on the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka. The shelling seems to be continuing to this moment.

Which sort of makes all of us wonder, what is Trump's response?

---