Washington's criticism is misplaced: attacks on oil refineries will not have the effect on global energy markets that U.S. officials fear. These strikes reduce Russia's ability to turn its oil into usable products; they do not affect the volume of oil it can extract or export. In fact, with less domestic refining capacity, Russia will be forced to export more of its crude oil, not less, pushing global prices down rather than up. Indeed, Russian firms have already started selling more unrefined oil overseas. As long as they remain restricted to Russian refineries, the attacks are unlikely to raise the price of oil for Western consumers.
Yet they can still inflict pain inside Russia, where the price of refined oil products, such as gasoline and diesel, has begun to surge. The strikes are achieving the very objectives that Ukraine's Western partners set but largely failed to meet through sanctions and a price cap on Russian oil: to degrade Russia's financial and logistical ability to wage war while limiting broader damage to the global economy. Kyiv must take wins where it can, and a campaign to destroy Russia's oil-refining capacity brings benefits to Ukraine with limited risk.
Why Ukraine Should Keep Striking Russian Oil Refineries | Foreign Affairs
The notion of an invincible Red Army is propaganda. The Red Army was formidable, but it was also beatable. Of its three most consequential foreign wars, the Red Army lost two.
It was defeated by Poland in 1920. It defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, after nearly collapsing in 1941. (Its win in that instance was part of a larger coalition and with decisive American economic assistance.) Soviet forces were in trouble in Afghanistan immediately after their 1979 invasion and had to withdraw a decade later.
Russia is not the USSR. Soviet Ukraine was a source of resources and soldiers for the Red Army. In that victory of 1945, Ukrainian soldiers in the Red Army took huge losses — greater than American, British and French losses combined. It was disproportionately Ukrainians who fought their war to Berlin in the uniform of the Red Army.
Today, Russia is fighting not together with Ukraine but against Ukraine. It is fighting a war of aggression on the territory of another state. And it lacks the American economic support — Lend-Lease — that the Red Army needed to defeat Nazi Germany. In this constellation, there is no particular reason to expect Russia to win. One would expect, instead, that Russia's only chance is to prevent the West from helping Ukraine — by persuading us that its victory is inevitable, so that we don't apply our decisive economic power.
Today's Russia is a new state. It has existed since 1991. Like Brezhnev before him, Russian President Vladimir Putin rules through nostalgia. He refers to the Soviet and also the Russian imperial past. But the Russian Empire also lost wars. It lost the Crimean War in 1856. It lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. It lost the First World War in 1917. In none of those three cases was Russia able to keep forces in the field for more than about three years.
It is normal for Russia to lose wars. And, in general, this led Russians to reflect and reform. Defeat in Crimea forced an autocracy to end serfdom. Russia's loss to Japan led to an experiment with elections. The Soviet failure in Afghanistan led to Gorbachev's reforms and thus the end of the cold war.
The peaceful Europe of today consists of powers that lost their last imperial wars and then chose democracy. It is not only possible to lose your last imperial war: it is also good, not only for the world, but for you.
Opinion: Russia Can Lose This War | CNN
Our total count of visually documented Russian tank losses during their 2022 invasion of Ukraine has just reached 3000!
— Jakub Janovsky (@Rebel44CZ) May 8, 2024
What an epic failure from a self-proclaimed military superpower.
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