Svetlana Gotsyk
Svetlana Gotsyk is a pretty standard feel-good story from this week but, it’s worth pointing out, in the first place this would never make mainstream media, and second place this is the kind of heroism you see in Ukraine pretty much every day multiple times a day. Everyone knows lots of people who have made sacrifices. I think this gives an insight into Ukrainian resiliency and will to fight.
JOIN US ON TELEGRAM
Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.
As we have seen, some have ignored that, to their regret.
In Ms. Gotsyk’s case, she emigrated to the US in 1996, and once she grew up, she got into MMA fighting. Lord knows what her Ukrainian Mama thought about that, but that’s between her and her daughter. According to ESPN, Gotsyk, from 2014–21, fought 17 official MMA fights, winning twelve and losing five. Her weight class is “strawweight.” She was the world champion in that class four times.
For the last eight months, Gotsyk, a former Miami resident, has been a strike drone operator for the 79th Air Assault Brigade, in which capacity, she has burned tanks, armored personnel carriers, fighting positions and soldiers. Kurhave-Kostantynivka sector, so dead in the path of the big Russian Donbass offensive going on right now. She says she has lost track how many strikes she’s flown and how many targets she’s hit. Her call sign is “Phoenix,” which was pretty inevitable, since while she was fighting promoters billed her as “Phoenix Bird.”
ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December, 20, 2024
I assume “Bird” was added because the promoters felt that without that, fight fans would assume she was some woman from Arizona.
Anyway, in Russian propaganda and in lots of international media, Ukrainians who leave the developed West and nice lives to fight for their country, like Hatsyk, are losers or marginals or idiots who don’t understand the Big Picture.
And trust me, I have met more than a few weirdos who came to Ukraine to fight, for weird reasons — but all of them foreigners.
The thing that I think is worth bearing in mind, is that Ukrainian society is absolutely full of stories of Ukrainians who have come home to fight. Everyone knows someone, or has heard of some acquaintance’s acquaintance, who left a nice life in a decent country to come fight the Russians. Everyone knows people who have suffered directly from Russia’s invasion.
This is across the society. It’s pretty much total.
It really seems to me that people outside Ukraine just aren’t bothering even to try and understand how the Ukrainians see the war. If they did, they wouldn’t talk so much, some of them, about the Ukrainians “doing the smart thing” or “seeing reason” or “accepting reality” (You know. Like the Russians).
I guess it’s easy enough to subscribe to that point of view if you are outside Ukrainian society.
But inside Ukrainian society, you know, where the Ukrainians actually are, that’s idiocy and betrayal of people that you know.
As long as people like Gotsyk are on the line fighting – and there are hundreds of thousands of them – in my opinion, the millions of the rest of the Ukrainians are going to keep on backing them.
Countries that haven’t been invaded in the past three generations or more probably would do well to keep that in mind when suggesting to the Ukrainians whether or how, or how long they should fight.
The Kremlin made that mistake in 2022 when Putin and his buddies calculated the Ukrainians would roll over and quit.
Some of Ukraine’s allies somehow intend to repeat that Russian mistake. But they’re not the ones fighting.
It’s people like Gotsyk.
Video from 79th Brigade:
Korean “real deal”
One of the more entertaining news trends this week has been the slow acknowledgement by the big power players, by which I mostly mean NATO and the US, that yes there are North Korean soldiers in Russia and yes several thousand of them appear headed to Kursk region, probably to fight the Ukrainian military.
I won’t bother you with a detailed report time stamp list, but clearly, Ukrainian military intelligence is consistently ahead of the Western intelligence. It’s been funny to read HUR [Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate] report something about the North Koreans, and then a couple of days pass, and one of the big American publications reports US intelligence has “confirmed” the same thing.
In the news business, this is what being behind on a story often looks like. Sure, the CIA and their buddies could know everything down to the color of those soldiers’ underwear, and Langley is only telling people who Need To Know, which isn’t us.
But I can’t prove Western intelligence is behind the power curve. Maybe the bigshots the intelligence agencies work for really are better-informed.
But right now, apropos North Koreans we clearly are talking about soldiers without a lot of kit who are trundling round Russia in trains and, according to open sources anyway, the way they are spotted is by Russian civilians accidentally or intentionally sticking something on the internet that confirms where those North Koreans are and what they’re doing.
This has been going on for a good three weeks, and bottom line, my understanding of “Western intelligence” is that when it comes to Russia it’s about 99 percent satellite-based, meaning overflights and comms intercepts.
It’s a reasonable bet only the North Korean generals have smartphones, and none of the troops, so my assumption is it’s not easy for the NSA Elint people to track these guys or analyze people to figure out what they’re up to. So the way it looks to me, the Ukrainians know better than anyone else about this.
The latest HUR report, I assume derived from a thorough ransacking of the Russian internet plus probably information compiled from agents, about the North Koreans, as of this morning, is this:
Russia transferred more than 7,000 North Korean soldiers to areas near Ukraine. The North Koreans were armed, in particular, with 60mm mortars, AK-12 assault rifles, RPK/PKM machine guns, SVD/SVCH sniper rifles, Phoenix ATGMs, and RPG-7. They were also given some night vision devices, thermal imagers, collimator sights and binoculars.
Also this week a few images of North Koreans purportedly already in combat cropped, but they stink.
I’ve done an image grab from the two most widely-shared videos.
In the first, a drone drops a munition on what looks like a full platoon of men huddling in a trench and apparently unaware that doing that underneath a drone, in this war, is literally suicidal.
The video has been pretty widely shared but nowhere have I seen it credibly geo-located, and further, it’s a little difficult for me (or anyone else who’s worried about strike drones) to believe anyone could be as stupid as those soldiers were.
That being said, the strike video itself doesn’t look fake. Maybe it happened, maybe it’s a strike from two years ago when people didn’t understand how dangerous drones are.
The point is, this is nothing like credible evidence the North Koreans are in combat with the AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine).
The video has even reached China’s internet: 乌克兰战场的朝鲜部队第一次看见无人机，不躲不逃，翘首而望！
The second video, supposedly a North Korean soldier in a Russian hospital telling an interviewer War is Hell, is even worse: first place it seems to have come out conveniently already with an English-language translation; second place what’s up with that guy’s head bandages?
Three years into the war, that’s not what a standard treatment of head wounds looks like, on either side. My opinion, this is a fake video and a pretty primitive one at that.
Inside the Beltway hive-mind, or we should be grateful they know Ukraine exists
A perennial theme in Ukrainian media discussions and even opinion exchanges by gRANDmothers sitting on a bench in front of their (still hopefully intact) apartment building, is why the Americans seem so dense on helping Ukraine. After all, Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom in almost a pure black-white war, America is all about Freedom and Liberty, sometimes it seems like that’s the only thing Americans ever say to foreigners, so why can’t Ukraine get ATACMS?
As it happens some material crossed my screen recently that I think gives some insight on that.
The content was (and is) a white paper that was published, at the behest of Congress, by no less than the RAND Corporation in July. RAND, as many of you will know, is the Washington DC national security think tank of think tanks, these guys have been around forever. It is only a small exaggeration to say that from the outset of the Cold War right through the present, what RAND says, that’s the collective opinion of the mainstream in the US national security leadership.
RAND, it is true, hit controversy in the 1960s and early 70s for a research project that was aimed at finding out how the US invasion of Vietnam was affecting hearts and minds and what might the US do to affect the direction.
One scandal was the suppression of findings that, actually, US bomber strikes and rural patrols, complete with door kick-ins same as in Afghanistan, overall didn’t seem to be increasing Vietnamese public support of US troop operations.
But that was a long time ago. The present paper is called Report on the National Commission of Defense Strategy. The executive summary (which is what I personally call a cheat sheet for people who wish to appear informed without actually being so) is here.
And the actual report for people capable of reading more than a paragraph or two is here.
Again, in my view, the great usefulness of a RAND report is that it almost always reflects DC's general position as the institutions and bureaucracies talk to each other internally, rather than the statements those institutions hand out to the public.
There are always outliers of course but, and I think members of the Washington press pack will back me up on this, if RAND wrote it, that’s going to be more or less what the Beltway plans to think, and that will be the mainstream view driving US national security strategy.
The bottom line, as I read it, is that Beltway Washington is so intimidated by China, that they are afraid to commit to anything more than the bare minimum to help Ukraine, never mind confront and contain Russia.
The main theme of the paper is that the US has disarmed to dangerously low levels and that US aversaries led by China absolutely will take advantage of it if that trajectory isn’t changed. RAND argues for more funding to the military-industrial sector, serious investment in arms production capacity, and a cross-government US effort to counter China’s strategy to mold the world in its favor.
The reason that China is seen as the US’ main adversary, basically, is that China has the potential of blockading Taiwan, and even that would so devastate the US economy that the US – read people inside the Beltway – must change policy so that China is deterred from doing that.
A war with China would be orders of magnitude worse, and the less credible the US deterrent to China is, the greater the chances of the war, the report argues.
I am of course aware that “the Chinese geo-political challenge” may really be “the US military-industrial complex sees the biggest profits in a big Air Force and Naval build up, and China’s the best pretext for that.”
The report doesn’t say anything about that.
The report also says nothing, at all, about failed US deterrence vs. Russia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is presented as a fait accompli by a hostile actor, not something that could have been prevented, but rather a conflagration that though worrying is under control and far less threatening than China to US national security.
US capability to deter Russia is taken as a given which, with the huge European war started by Russia now almost in its third year, makes me personally unsure that the US has the will to deter any aggression, anywhere.
I assume RAND doesn’t see things the way I do, because the Russian invasion of Ukraine hasn’t affected living standards in the US, and Chinese aggression supposedly might.
This is not surprising, but for Ukrainians or anyone else who thinks the US defends Freedom, well, that’s not what RAND saw as important in July 2024. Freedom isn’t mentioned once in the report.
As an example of how RAND and so the Beltway sees the real problem and how to fix it, there is this:
Unclassified public wargames suggest that, in a conflict with China, the United States would largely exhaust its munitions inventories in as few as three to four weeks, with some important munitions (e.g., anti-ship missiles) lasting only a few days. Once expended, replacing these munitions would take years to replace.
Which is all no doubt accurate, but, why cite a wargame? The Russo-Ukrainian War is a giant conventional war and battlefield results, repeatedly, have been directly linked to the presence or absence of munitions.
From a rigorous, academic point of view, if RAND wanted to convince its readers of the importance of robust supplies of munitions in a war, why cite a wargame at all?
After all, when the near-collapse of Ukrainian defenses and history’s first-ever army that used FPV drones as its main strike weapon, came as the direct result of a US cut-off of ammunition (and everything else) to Ukraine, for close to six months. People died. Ground was lost. Geo-political balances shifted. Decision-makers who were planning on one set of national security realities, were confronted with others. The consequences of insufficient ammo are real and serious.
Ukraine’s experience with near-feckless US support, delivering real battlefield disasters in a real war, isn’t even mentioned in the RAND study. The point is, as dumb and myopic and self-serving as that DC point of view is, in Beltway-think, that’s almost certainly the “reality” that the Beltway sees.
Ukraine in the report is mostly referenced as an object lesson using Russia as an example of how countries should or should not fight war. Russian military incompetence is criticized and Russian mobilization of its war industry is praised. Ukraine gets credit for innovating new weapons technologies quickly.
The most detailed language on how RAND sees the US handling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is this paragraph, which I quote in full:
“Russia intends to outlast the West’s willingness to support Ukraine and then seek what it would find to be a favorable outcome to the war. If Russia gains control over Ukraine, its border (including Belarus) with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states would stretch from the Arctic to the Black Sea, presenting significantly more demands for deployed NATO forces. Russia would be an emboldened and likely stronger power, requiring NATO to build and deploy additional forces, potentially at the expense of other locations where those resources could be applied. The only viable course of action is to increase the scale, capability, and freedom to use the materiel provided to Ukraine so that it can push Russia back. The White House is right to make clear that any Russian use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction if Russia is losing conventionally would be met with ‘catastrophic consequences.’”
As someone who reads a lot of government boilerplate, for whom getting lied to by officials is part of the job description, and who has been on the ground in four (!) shooting wars, let me translate that for you.
Regarding Ukraine, RAND recommends:
- The US seek an outcome where Russia does not completely conquer Ukraine. Russian control of Ukraine’s border with NATO is not acceptable.
- The primary US objective in Ukraine is to convince Russia and the world that the US will not sit idly by as Russia’s miltary-strategic influence expands.
- The US needs to support Ukraine so that Ukraine is able to contain Russia.
- The US needs to make clear to Russia it can’t use nuclear weapons or chemical weapons against Ukraine.
It’s not that things like Ukrainian territorial integrity, sovereignty, reparations, or even battlefield superiority aren’t even mentioned. And Freedom.
Rather, it’s that in the context of the entire report, it’s obvious, RAND sees substantial US backing of Ukraine as a strategic distraction.
From the Russian point of view, that’s an American green light to Russia to capture and hold as much of Ukraine as possible, without actually destroying Ukraine or using a nuke. There is no other way the Kremlin can interpret it.
And that, ladies and germs, is appeasement.
Quite neatly, this American strategic tap dance enables anyone who buys into the report’s conclusions — and remember, this was ordered by Congress to make informed decisions — to pronounce the survival of a viable Ukrainian state, or even the people themselves, as not particularly a US priority. All the US needs is Russia contained. Doing more than that is a waste of resources.
I promise you that in less than a decade we will be reading position papers about how the US flubbed its handling of the Russia-Ukraine War, just like we are reading reports right now that the US by being so intent on defeating terrorists and building capital “D” democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, flubbed noting Russia’s military expansion from 2005–2011. And, was asleep at the switch as China went from Third World manufacturing country to a superpower, in a world where America had a three decades’ geo-poltical head start.
And now, RAND’s wisdom is that since the US now has a rival, the thing to do is to cut Europe loose.
In 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain cut a deal with Hitler in which Hitler promised not to invade anywhere, if Britain would sign, upon which Germany’s occupation of part of Czechoslovakia took place. Chamberlain said the agreement prevented war “a quarrel in a faraway land between people of which we know nothing.”
There is a huge literature on the details, but in simple terms, Chamberlain’s policies were driven by two assumptions, first, the First World War was so horrible for Western Europe that any sacrifice of principle was justified, and no geo-political risk was acceptable, to endanger civilized nations from going through that again.
The second driver, obviously, was that London and Paris, never mind DC, if push came to shove, would rather see people in East Europe be enslaved or die for sure, rather than risk upsetting economies and voters at home. Anyone who objected to that got the “Well be an adult, that’s how politics works” argument.
Anyone who doesn’t see the parallel between those days and now, is someone whose intellectual honesty I would have to question.
Speaking of which, the report says this is about how the US has been alliance-building so far, you know, like Chamberlain did in 1939, when he and Western Europe sold the Czechoslovakians and then the Poles down the river, and by “down the river” I mean, “helped condemn millions of people to war, death camps and economic disaster.”
Recognizing the indispensable role that allies play in promoting international security, the United States has successfully bolstered bilateral and multilateral alliances in the Pacific, strengthened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and created new arrangements, such as AUKUS. The United States cannot compete with China, Russia, and their partners alone — and certainly cannot win a war that way.
It mystifies me how people as smart as the people that RAND hires, and in an institution with an intellectual tradition as solid as RAND’s, can argue in one place Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demolition of the European security structure isn’t worth serious effort, yet, later on, the paper explains the US is really good at developing strong relationships with its allies.
These are countries directly threatened by Russian military aggression and whose national security is directly undermined by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
With US interest in European security so lukewarm, a reporter might ask, exactly how interested are Europeans going to be getting on board to “contain” China? Not even the US itself recognizes Taiwain’s independence. And the US thinks the Europeans will go to war over Taiwan?
Deterring Chinese military moves against Taiwan in the future – it’s not just my opinion, it’s what RAND thinks – will live or die on US credibility as a leader of western nations’ collective security action.
Which means, the Beltway thinks that a hot war in Europe can be, sorry for the metaphor, back-burnered and the Europeans will be fine with that.
It’s nuts. It’s like RAND thinks the British, French, Poles, Germans, Poles, Scandinavians, Dutch, Baltics, Turks and Greeks all are sitting around waiting for DC and RAND to tell them what to do, and that it’s kind of like GE, whatever is good for the US is automatically good the national security of all these European countries. The people in DC HAVE heard that Europe isn’t monolithic and that actually some of those countries have higher living standards than the US, right?
Here’s some RAND text, again, the target audience is Congressmembers and their staff, on what the US has been doing on arming Ukraine and helping Ukraine increase fighting capacity:
The Commission applauds the DoD’s role in forming and hosting two multilateral efforts to organize and coordinate military training, intelligence-sharing, and provision of weapons and equipment to Ukraine: the Security Assistance Group-Ukraine and the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (Rammstein Forum). These efforts demonstrate unique US leadership capabilities and the power of operationalizing alliances. The United States must retain its leadership role in the alliance…
I’m obliged to point out that had the Germany’s and the Frances of the world kept their militaries fit and paid their 2 percent GDP into defense spending, then maybe Russian might have been deterred even without the Americans.
But, a nation state is best judged not by its past, but by what it’s up to right now. And right now, viz. a viz. Ukraine:
- France just armed, trained and equipped a full-dress Ukrainian combat brigade, basically every man from rifleman to colonel. Not the US.
- Poland is decisively on track to field the most powerful land force in Europe, including Russia and Ukraine. Not the US, the Americans aren’t even close.
- Germany just launched production lines for shells and armored fighting fighting vehicles, in Ukraine. Not the US. Reddit news flash on that attached.
Reddit news pic, published this month, about news that the Germans were setting up armored vehicle and air defense vehicle production in Ukraine. If I worked for Rheinmetall, I might raise an eyebrow if some smart person from DC told me America is “leading” Ukraine’s defense effort. There ain’t no big US corporations manufacturing arms in Ukraine.
- Britain is by a significant margin the lead nation for intelligence-sharing with Ukraine. I can’t go into detail, but I am confident that if it’s foreign-generated targeting information the Ukrainians are acting on, the sources were British. Not the US.
- The Danes and the Lithuanians are in Ukraine, now, producing munitions and drones. Not the US.
- Late addition: Belgium on Saturday signed an agreement to manufacture anti-drone missiles, in Ukraine. Not the US.
That doesn’t look like American leadership on Ukraine to me, it doesn’t even look like America trying hard on Ukraine. Maybe I’m missing something of course — but then, RAND is saying the US behavior we seeing, is the behavior its analysts recommend.
Which brings me back to hearts and minds. It doesn’t seem to me like RAND sees European hearts and minds as an American strategic priority.
Just one Cavalry Division
Here’s a link to an op-ed written by General T. Michael Moseley, 18th Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, a military guy who among other things pretty much led the fielding of the most expensive US weapons program ever, the F-35 Lightning II fighter. An image of him and the plane, known by pilots as “Fat Amy,” is attached. The link here is through Yahoo! so you can read the op-ed without a paywall.
On the left is a former USAF Chief of Staff named General Moseley. He thinks future wars will be fought by advanced aircraft (like the F-35, right) and skilled airmen. He’s entitled to his opinion. Once other generals said cavalry had a place in wars, and there are a ton drones in the war inUkraine.
Why the cavalry reference? Well, because I can remember a time back when the Vietnam War wasn’t (yet) a national US disaster but just a faraway conflict against people we knew nothing about (see the continuity there?) and if you looked you could find even in the late 1960s and 1970s old cavalrymen who thought there still was a place for a horse and a horseman in the US military.
I recommend you read Moseley’s views yourself. As I see it he thinks drones aren’t decisive in war, but air strikes and guided missiles are, so let’s not skimp on making the US air strike capability really powerful.
On the one hand, this is standard inter-service tax dollar chasing; he’s an Air Force guy, the Navy wants go gear up for a giant force expansion to counter China’s, so he’s pushing for taxpayers and Congress to give plenty of love to bombers, fighters, pilots, and no doubt well-stocked officers’ club bars, [not so] cool standard-issue pilot shades and spiffy leather jackets. That’s not surprising at all, just one Washington guy’s point of view, aimed at other Washington people.
The thing that caught my attention was the “proofs” Moseley gave that air power and air strikes are relevant in modern war, to wit, US missile strikes against the Houthis, and Israeli air strikes against Iran. General Moseley points to them and tells the reader “See? Conventional air superiority is how you win wars!”
The problem is, of course, that the Houthis are still there, the Iranians are still there. We don’t know (and neither does Moseley) how much damage was caused, but, we can be nearly certain that left alone there is little question the Iranians and Houthis will repair lost capability, and if unchecked they will get back to square one and the problem will be the same as before the air strikes.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the real reason General Moseley supports air strikes and air superiority, and thinks dimly of FPV drones, is that air strikes will lead to more air strikes and more resources spent on air superiority.
There are some who say FPV drones are the future and pilots and manned military aircraft are becoming obsolete as we watch. Which is why I led off this review with a watercolor from Frederic Remington, one of the great Western artists, of some troopers and an officer, 10th United States Cavalry, on probably somewhere in Arizona, shortly before the turn of the last century.
Reprinted from https://stefankorshak.substack.com/ with the author's permission. You can find the original article here.
The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.
You can also highlight the text and press Ctrl + Enter
