Western officials are debating the Kremlin’s calculations in not trying harder to halt weapons shipments in Ukraine. Analysts wonder whether a bigger mobilization by Moscow is on the horizon.
I don't yet know who the Times reporter is on this piece, I have just read (and copied and pasted) the lede, but I will bet you ten bucks it's David E. Sanger. Let's see...
Part of the reason appears to be sheer incompetence...But American and European officials also say that President Vladimir V. Putin’s tactics in recent weeks have appeared to be remarkably cautious, marked by a slow-moving offensive in eastern Ukraine, a restrained approach to taking out Ukrainian infrastructure and an avoidance of actions that could escalate the conflict with NATO.
The apparent restraint on the ground stands in contrast to the bombast on Russian state television, where Moscow is described as being locked in an existential fight against the West and where the use of nuclear weapons is openly discussed. The issue is whether, as the war grinds on, Mr. Putin will change tack and intensify the war.
... Ben Wallace, the British defense secretary, predicted last week that Putin would use the speech [on Victory Day (over Nazi partners) in WWII] for an official declaration of war and a mass mobilization of the Russian people.
It is wise to heed Mother.
American and European officials say that they have not seen any on-the-ground movements that would show any much larger push with additional troops beginning on May 9 or soon after. Those officials now expect a slower, grinding campaign inside Ukraine. But they do not disagree that Mr. Putin could use the speech to declare a wider war and a deeper national effort to fight it.Sanger would not write something as inane. The prediction is May 9 the war dec. and mobilization will be announced. Why would we see any ground movement now?
...Putin appears to be in a military holding pattern, [he does] one that is allowing Ukraine to regroup and stock up on Western weaponry. On Monday, a senior Pentagon official called Russia’s latest offensive in eastern Ukraine “very cautious, very tepid.” In Russia, there is grumbling that the military is fighting with one hand tied behind its back...
“This is a strange, special kind of war,” Dmitri Trenin, until recently the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, said in a phone interview from outside Moscow. “Russia has set some rather strict limits for itself...
Trenin is one of the few analysts from his think tank, shuttered last month by the Russian government, who chose to stay in Russia after the war began. He said that he was struggling to explain why the Kremlin was fighting at “less than half strength.”
... across the Atlantic, officials and analysts are asking themselves similar questions as Mr. Trenin.
For weeks, officials in Washington have discussed why the Russian military has not been more aggressive in trying to destroy the supply lines that send Western arms shipments into Ukraine.
...
Then there is the question of why Russia hasn’t hit back harder against the West. The Kremlin narrative is of an existential war with NATO being fought on Ukrainian soil, but Russia is the one taking military losses while the West keeps a safe distance and supplies weapons that kill Russian soldiers.
...
And then there is Moscow’s world-leading nuclear arsenal, with an estimated 5,977 warheads: Their catastrophic capability is being hyped in ever-shriller terms in the Russian media.
American and allied officials have debated why Mr. Putin hasn’t tried widespread or more damaging cyberstrikes. Some say that Mr. Putin has been effectively deterred. [I wish they would name names for such a preposterous statement.] The Russian military, struggling to make gains in Ukraine, cannot handle a wider war with NATO and does not want to give the alliance any excuse to enter the war more directly.
Others argue that a cyberstrike on a NATO country is one of the few cards Mr. Putin can play and that he may be waiting for a later stage in his campaign to do that.
While Putin has been unafraid of escalating the rhetoric, his actions have suggested he does not want to do anything that could prompt a wider war.
“The general sense is that he wants to snatch some sort of victory out of this debacle of his,” said the American defense official, suggesting that Mr. Putin was not interested in “borrowing more trouble.”
Before the invasion on Feb. 24, Mr. Trenin, of the Carnegie center, predicted that the Ukrainian military would put up a fierce resistance and that Mr. Putin would discover a lack of political support for Russia in Ukraine. On that, Mr. Trenin turned out to be right.
What he was wrong about, Mr. Trenin said, was the information that aides and commanders would provide to Mr. Putin about Russia’s capabilities, which turned out to be flawed.
We are back to "Putin is not being told the whole truth"? I thought that was discredited.
