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Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse, your regular dispatch from Washington, D.C.
Sunday marked the two-month anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a grim benchmark buried under other horrific milestones. According to the U.N., 5.2 million Ukrainians have fled the country, another 7.7 are internally displaced, and another 10.3 million are trapped in their homes near the front lines. A third mass grave in Mariupol has been spotted from space and Ukrainian authorities estimate that more than 20,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the port city that is now effectively under Russian control. Russians are also planning an astroturf referendum in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, which was taken early in the war. If it’s the kind of referendum Russia staged in Crimea in 2014, expect to see a Kherson People’s Republic that quickly asks to join Russia
The Ukrainian economy has been devastated by the war, even as it enters a new phase: the Russian military announced that it planned to take the entirety of both the Donbas and the southern coast of Ukraine. But readers of TWBW will have known for weeks that this was Moscow’s Plan B: to make Ukraine a landlocked rump state.
Meanwhile, the British government estimates that some 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in just two months of fighting, taking out a full quarter of the invading force. Other estimates put the number over 20,000 dead soldiers and independent Russian journalists found that, in addition to about 10 Russian generals, 317 Russian officers had been killed. “Not normal and not an accident,” a former senior Pentagon official told me.
Still, support for the war remains high in Russia, in part because the Kremlin now has total control of the informational landscape and, take it from me, the rhetoric on Russian TV has reached new levels of absolute insanity. It’s also, in part, because with assistance from the Russian Central Bank, the Russian currency has recovered everything it had lost in the first weeks after the invasion, energy prices are sky high, and the sanctions have yet to trickle all the way down to regular Russians. Though there’s growing evidence that sanctions will make it very difficult for Russia to replace all that hardware it has lost in Ukraine.
But today I want to take you back to Washington, to pull back the curtain a little bit on how the city is handling the war, how it is learning on the fly to supply an ally fighting for its very life, and how certain frustrations with the Ukrainian leadership are now a thing of the halcyon past.
P.S. As a reminder, you're currently receiving the free version of Tomorrow Will Be Worse at {{customer.email}}. For full access to my reporting, and to all of my talented colleagues, I hope you’ll subscribe here.
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Any U.S. military aid comes with various practical considerations, and it’s not just the price tags. Though, for those who are unaware of how American military aid works, much of it is the U.S. government moving money from one of its pockets to another. Assistance that isn’t in the form of cash is usually money American taxpayers are paying U.S. manufacturers to make weapons in America, which are then sent to recipients of this aid. Cash assistance is different. In the case of Ukraine, it is, in part, going to buy weapons and ammunition used by the Warsaw Pact—old Soviet-made hardware that the Ukrainian army still uses.
The war in Ukraine is a new experience for Washington. For one, it is not a war that the U.S. started and it is not one where American troops are on the ground. The fact that it is all happening so quickly, and has taken such unexpected turns, has meant that many of the traditional considerations have gone out the window...
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