Signs of a top-rank military purge in Russia

Citing Russian media but identifying the Moscow Times, which is not official and often unreliable, the British Daily Mail has published a shock report about a radical change in Russia’s military leadership.

According to the story, as published, General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of Russia’s armed forces, and Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov have been purged.

The story goes on to say that Gerasimov has been replaced by Colonel-General Mikhail Teplinskiy. A number of other news outlets claim “General Armageddon,” Sergey Surovikin, also is missing.

Meanwhile, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine and coordinator of the Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, claims that “Ukraine’s Defense Forces are fulfilling the number one task – the maximum destruction of manpower, equipment, fuel depots, military vehicles, command posts, artillery and air defense forces of the Russian army.”

Objective reports from the battlefield say that Ukraine has made very little progress and is losing more equipment and manpower than Russia. Moreover, it appears Russia has launched its own offensive operations in the north of Luhansk and is achieving success.

The story in the Daily Mail and Danilov’s curious statement may be part of the effort to jack up Ukraine’s prestige ahead of the NATO meeting in Vilnius. Ukraine is seeking NATO membership now, or short of that, an iron-clad security agreement.

US President Joe Biden says that the United States is considering offering Ukraine a security agreement like the one the US has with Israel. That US-Israel Agreement is not a pledge to defend Israel. Instead, it says that support for Israel “has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy.”

The US-Israel agreement means that the US will help Israel maintain a qualitative edge against its (otherwise undefined) opponents, something that the US has generally done, except when the US has withheld some weapons as a punishment for Israel’s alleged behavior on some issue such as settlements or Gaza or Hezbollah or Iran.

It isn’t clear whether Biden intends to offer this kind of agreement to Ukraine unilaterally, or whether he intends to get NATO to agree to join in on such an offer. Biden’s problem is that certain countries may have doubts about any long-term pledge, or completely oppose any such deal, as will Hungary.

NATO may content itself with some sort of statement about Ukraine’s importance and the long-term desirability for Ukraine to join NATO. If any NATO pledge demands Ukraine’s pre-war borders it will damage any possibility of peace talks.