How the international media covered the Russo-Ukrainian war, July 21

A former supreme allied commander of NATO in Europe, James Stavridis, wrote a column on Bloomberg, discussing the chances that Putin would use a nuke or other mass killing weapons. Stavridis believes the chances the Russian president would use a nuke are extremely low, however, he might use chemical weapons instead. There are three key factors holding Putin back from using Moscow’s nuclear potential, according to the author. First, using nukes might worsen the Russian position in the global arena, including damaging its relations with China. Second, launching a nuclear attack, even if tactical, would make control of the escalation ladder harder. Third, Putin has conventional weapons that, if applied massively at a single city, could cause the same damage as a tactical nuclear weapon, so the benefits of using the latter would not outweigh the risks. Lastly, it is more probable that Putin would use a chemical weapon to strike terror into Ukrainians. He would likely support this effort with a disinfo campaign pointing to “US-Ukrainian chemical and biological programs”, believes Stavridis.

The Atlantic published an essay by David Patrikarakos, the author of “War in 140 Characters”, who writes about another weapon of the Russian hybrid war against democracy. “Russia’s Hunger War” explores Moscowʼs new disinformation campaign targeting Africans that spreads the idea that it is the West that should be blamed for food shortages. At the beginning of the full-scale Russian war in Ukraine, the West believed that Ukraine was winning the information war. Patrikarakos thinks this is wrong. Russia has not lost the information war. It has opened new fronts away from Western eyes. Africa, where anti-Western sentiment is already strong, is among Moscow’s primary targets. The message Kremlin promotes through coordinated media outlets and social media accounts is “​​Western sanctions against Russia are to blame for causing the shortages, and Ukraine is deliberately destroying grain supplies.” Beyond the important reason for Russia blocking Ukrainian grain – blackmail – another one is to pose itself as a savior, offering its’ own grain supply (much of it stolen from Ukraine) in exchange for supporting Russia in war. According to Patrikarakos, Russia’s exploitation of the food crisis is part of its broader “perpetual adversarial competition strategy”, aiming to nurture corrosive narratives undermining Western democracies and promoting Russia as a better partner for African countries.

The Economist writes about attempts to forecast the outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian war using software. As modern computers can collect, absorb and analyze massive amounts of data, the business of predicting the results of wars is overdriving. There are two broad groups of models: deterministic – those which would give the same effect based on input data, and others probabilistic – these models would provide different results based on different likelihoods of battle events. One of the pieces of deterministic software dedicated to this matter, the Major Combat Operations Statistical Model (MCOSM), runs algorithms based on data from 96 battles and military campaigns between the first world war and the present day. At the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, MCOSM predicted “operational success” chances as two and five for the invader and the defender, respectively. The outlet also writes about several probabilistic models and the principles that ground their operation. In practice, Ukrainians do not necessarily learn much from the software predictions. A Ukrainian colonel, who asked to remain unnamed, said the requests for advanced American forecasting models had not been helpful as USA experts are staying mum. One useful software developed by RAND is looking into factors influencing the will to fight. It includes not only the satisfaction with supplies but also more subtle matters like why they are fighting, what horrors are unfolding, and whether the enemy has demoralizing superiority. Among the factors influencing morale negatively are corruption, unemployment, a rising cost of living, and political polarisation. The Economist asked MCOSM to run the new prediction taking into account the Russian advantage in artillery and considering the findings of RAND. MCOSM scored both Ukraine and Russia five – in other words, a grinding stalemate.