Författare: Jonathan Este Senior International Affairs Editor Associate

Across the broad sweep of history, it’s usually overly simplistic to talk about a single event as a “turning point”. This is especially the case in a conflict such as the one in Ukraine. So many factors – geopolitical, strategic and economic – can and will continue to influence the course of the war.

So it would possibly suit the situation better to describe the passage of Joe Biden’s funding bill through the US Congress as providing an “inflection point” – although it is almost certainly too early to tell for sure. Reports from the battlefield are that Russian troops, mindful of the prospect that within months Ukraine will be able to call upon significant supplies of new equipment and ammunition, are pushing hard to take more territory as quickly as they can.

Basing its assessment on geolocated footage, the Institute for the Study of War has identified Russian advances along the frontlines in the eastern Donetsk region. The ISW estimates that Russia has captured 360 sq km of territory this year. Meanwhile Ukraine’s intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, has said he believes Russia to be planning a fresh offensive in May.

At the same time, Ukraine has begun to attack Russian positions deep in the rear using long-range army tactical missile systems (ATACMS) provided by the US in March. It is doing so in the knowledge that there will be much more where that came from.

Since Vladimir Putin sent his war machine into Ukraine on February 24 2022, The Conversation has called upon some of the leading experts in international security, geopolitics and military tactics to help our readers understand the big issues. You can also subscribe to our fortnightly recap of expert analysis of the conflict in Ukraine.

So perhaps this week has marked an inflection point in our coverage of the conflict. Last week we published a very stark piece by our regular contributors, Stefan Wolff of the University of Birmingham and Tetyana Malyarenko of the University of Odesa. The bleak headline: “Ukraine is losing the war and the west faces a stark choice: help now or face a resurgent and aggressive Russia” needs no explanation.

Within days, though, the blockage in Congress had been overcome and the House finally approved the provision of US$60– billion (£49 billion) in military aid to Kyiv. We asked Wolff to reassess the situation in light of this development. The headline on his latest piece, “US$60 billion in US military aid a major morale boost but no certain path to victory” presents a more hopeful, if measured, tone.

The state of the conflict in Ukraine as at April 2024.
Institute for the Study of War

Wolff identifies a development which chimes with we have already noted above: “given that they are now secure in the knowledge that supplies arrive soon, Kyiv will be less compelled to ration ammunition as it has been forced to do recently.” Hence the use of the precious, stockpiled, ATACMS in the past few days.

Read more:
Ukraine war: US$60 billion in US military aid a major morale boost but no certain path to victory

Meanwhile, Tatsiana Kulakevich, a scholar of international relations at the University of South Florida, believes the passage of the US president’s funding bill is good for the US as well. She argues that a Russian victory in Ukraine in the absence of western – but more specifically US – assistance would send the wrong message to China which has territorial ambitions of its own. On the other hand, a Russian loss in Ukraine, aided by an engaged US and a united Europe, sends a clear message of deterrence to China.

Not only that, she argued, but this aid package has its own economic benefits for the US. The $60 billion will form part of a much larger boost for US defence spending to update its own arsenal. And it’s a potential win for Biden personally, as he campaigns for re-election in November. Most Americans support helping Ukraine in its fight against Putin’s Russia. Being seen to act with decisive strength and determination will do his image no harm as his rival Donald Trump fights his own battles against a string of criminal charges.

Read more:
Senate approves nearly $61B of Ukraine foreign aid − here’s why it helps the US to keep funding Ukraine

The nuclear risk

Other developments in April have included a series of drone attacks in the vicinity of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine. The plant was captured by Russian forces in March 2022, about a week after the invasion began and has shut down in stages since – recently the final of six reactors at European’s largest nuclear plant was placed into a state of “cold shutdown”.

Europe’s largest nuclear power station: Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine.
Rokas Tenys/Shutterstock

Now Putin wants to start the plant up again to begin generating electricity. Ross Peel, an expert in nuclear security and safeguards, particularly in war, at King’s College London, explains why this is so perilous. He writes:

This would greatly increase the danger of a nuclear accident, as operating reactors allow much less time before an accident occurs if they are damaged or their safety systems are interrupted. The pressure and temperature inside an operating reactor are also much greater, creating the potential for large explosions and the widespread dispersal of radioactive material.

Read more:
Ukraine war: Putin’s plan to fire up Zaporizhzhia power plant risks massive nuclear disaster

And Zaporizhzhia doesn’t represent the only nuclear risk in Ukraine, writes Nino Antadze, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. There are four nuclear plants in Ukraine as well as the abandoned shell of the Chernobyl plant which was the site of the worst nuclear accident in history and remains uninhabitable nearly 40 years on.

To wage war around these sites invites trouble, writes Antadze. When Chernobyl melted down in 1986, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that radioactive fallout affected an area of 150,000 sq km in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. You have to hope Putin keeps that in mind.

Read more:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left the entire region at a heightened risk of radioactive pollution

Fear and contagion

As campaigning season gathers momentum in Ukraine, both sides are beefing up conscription and enacting legislation to extend and toughen draft laws to get more men into uniform to boost troop numbers and relieve, in the case of Ukraine’s army at least, soldiers who have been at the frontlines for more than two years.

Wanted: weapons and soldiers to carry them.
EPA-EFE/Yuri Kochetkov

But it’s not just the two warring nations that are introducing or extending their conscription policies. A number of Nato members, including Latvia, have reintroduced conscription, and others such as Sweden and Estonia have extended it. Tony Ingesson, an expert in the politics of military decision-making at Lund University in Sweden, looks at the history of the draft – and the lengths many young people will go to to avoid it.

Read more:
Military conscription is returning to Europe, but is it really a more equal way of mobilising? What history tells us

Another country which has been watching the progress of the war in Ukraine with trepidation is Georgia, which was itself invaded in 2008 and which has two breakaway provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, that have been occupied by Russian troops ever since. By and large the Georgian people actively support Ukraine or are simply opposed to the conflict. But the country’s government is led by the pro-Russia Georgian Dream party.

New legislation introduced recently, the “foreign agents” law would mean that civil society groups and the media need register as being “under foreign influence” if they receive funding from abroad. It’s seen as a direct attack on NGOs operating in Georgia, writes Natasha Lindstaedt, an expert in authoritarian regimes at the University of Essex, who says it’s all part of the country’s drift towards autocracy under Georgian Dream.

A similar law was enacted in 2012 by Putin’s regime in Russia. But when Georgian Dream tried to introduce a similar measure last year it triggered huge popular protests, forcing the government to drop the bill. Lindstaedt believes the law would seriously damage Georgia’s prospects of becoming a member of the EU, something 80% of the country wants. So it’s hard to see this law being any more popular this time around.

Read more:
Georgia is sliding towards autocracy after government moves to force through bill on ’foreign agents’

Doomsday scenario

This week, Russia has vetoed a US-drafted resolution in the UN security council which called on countries to prevent an nuclear arms race in outer space, prompting the US to question whether Moscow had something to hide in this regard and the rest of the world to protest that having so many nuclear weapons on Earth is bad enough as it is.

For Becky Alexis-Martin, a lecturer in peace studies and pacifist academic at the University of Bradford, this message can’t be repeated too often. She sees an already dangerous world becoming ever more perilous as a result of the rising tensions between Russia and the west, the strife in the Middle East which could escalate into regional conflict and an increasingly assertive China.

Meanwhile, after decades in which the threat of an all-out nuclear war seemed have dissipated, many countries are now rearming, while some new player, Iran and North Korea among them, are openly pursuing their nuclear ambitions and look close to developing their own arsenals – if indeed they don’t already have them.

Alexis-Martin paints a disturbing picture of a new cold war which could turn hot at any time. A war in which everyone is a loser.

Read more:
New ’cold war’ grows ever warmer as the prospect of a nuclear arms race hots up

Ukraine Recap is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our recaps directly in your inbox. Läs mer…

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have reportedly been conducting operations in the Beit Hanoun area of the northern Gaza Strip conducting raids on Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets. The IDF says it has been working on information gleaned from questioning Palestinian fighters captured in the fighting.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post on April 17, the Palestinian fighters were hiding out in schools in the area. A warning was issued to civilians to evacuate the buildings before the Israeli military moved in, the IDF said.

Meanwhile, ceasefire talks have been suspended as Israel reportedly prepares to move on Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians remain trapped. The Guardian reported this week that the IDF had confirmed buying 40,000 tents for evacuees.

Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox.

When it comes to how the IDF identifies its targets, investigative journalists in Jerusalem have published reports recently delving into the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by Israel’s military and intelligence agencies in its conduct of the war. The investigation, by online Israeli magazines +927 and Local Call examined the use of an AI programme called “Lavender”. This examines a range of data to identify possible Hamas fighters. As Elke Schwarz, a reader in political theory at Queen Mary University of London, explains, this could include social network connections and family relationships.

Military activity on the Gaza Strip, April 17.
Institute for the Study of War

Schwarz writes here: “The category of what constitutes relevant features of a target can be set as stringently or as loosely as is desired. In the case of Lavender, it seems one of the key equations was ‘male equals militant’.” Shades, she says, of the US doctrine during the drone wars of Barack Obama’s administration that apparently held that “all military-aged males are potential targets”.

Needless to say, the potential for misidentification is enormous. It’s important to note that the IDF is not the only military to be working with AI in this way. The US Department of Defense is known to be working on what it calls “Project Maven”, which – we’re told – allows the user to sign off on up to 80 targets an hour, apparently barking out the prompt to “accept, accept, accept”. As the 1970s Milgram experiments into obedience to authority suggested, controversially, humans – particularly men – will perform actions that are tantamount to torture if directed to with sufficient authority.

Read more:
Gaza war: Israel using AI to identify human targets raising fears that innocents are being caught in the net

These are also not the first reports to emerge about Israel’s alleged use of AI to identify targets. Natasha Karner, a researcher into emerging technologies and global security at RMIT University in Australia, writes that the IDF was boasting of winning the first “AI war” in its’ intensive 11-day Operation Guardian of the Walls campaign in 2021.

But one function of the way the IDF is harnessing Lavender in this current conflict is its use alongside other systems. One called “Habsora” (or Gospel) tells the system that a building potentially houses a suspected fighter and another, apparently called “Where’s Daddy?”, reports on when the target returns to the building, which may or may not also contain the fighter’s family.

Read more:
Israel accused of using AI to target thousands in Gaza, as killer algorithms outpace international law

The Iranian dimension

Away from the charnel house that is the Gaza Strip, the focus has been on the aftermath of Israel’s strike on the Iranian embassy in Baghdad on April 1. The strike killed seven members of Iran’s Islamic Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the Quds Force commander overseeing Syria and Lebanon.

According to Scott Lucas, an expert in Middle East conflicts at University
College Dublin, Israel has been assassinating Iran’s top military and intelligence brass for years. But what set the April 1 attack apart from the rest was that this was an attack on a diplomatic premises, ruled by international law to be “inviolable”. As is his wont, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed revenge, declaring: “The Zionist regime will be punished by the hands of our brave men. We will make it regret this crime and others it has committed.”

Writing on April 11, Lucas kindly agreed to answer our questions on whether this would be likely to escalate into an all-out regional conflict. He felt that Khamenei’s rhetoric was very much performative. It was meant for both internal consumption, to rally a restless population suffering from a parlous economy crippled by sanctions and angry at the regime’s oppression, and to project strength in the region.

Iranian mourners march at the funeral of the seven members of the IRGC killed in Israel’s April 1 airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria.
EPA-EFE/Abedin Taherkenareh

He speculated that Iran could launch an air assault, but this could undo Tehran’s diplomatic efforts over months to portray Iran as much of a victim as Gaza and to try to sow division between Israel and the US. And this was very much how it was to turn out when Iran’s drones and missiles flew last weekend.

Read more:
Could Israel’s strike against the Iranian embassy in Damascus escalate into a wider regional war? Expert Q&A

Far from driving a wedge between Israel and the US, Paul Rogers, a Middle East specialist at the University of Bradford, believes it has actually brought them together again. We’ve reported here before the chill that was settling over the relationship between US president Joe Biden and Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This had even reached the point where many thought the White House was reconsidering the extent of its military support for Israel. Iran’s drone and missile bombardment on April 13 changed all that, writes Rogers:

Israel … moved from being drawing condemnation by the US and many western governments for its conduct of the campaign in Gaza to an ally that needs strong support.

Read more:
Gaza war: Iran’s attack on Israel has brought Washington back on side – for now

Meanwhile Gavin Hall, a teaching fellow in political science and international security at the University of Strathclyde, thinks that despite being widely viewed as a tactical blunder on Iran’s part, the April 13 missile and drone attack could well play in its favour over the longer term.

Hall believes the attack will put considerable pressure on Israel as it calibrates its response. At present, Netanyahu is presiding over a fractured political coalition and is deeply disliked by a majority of Israel’s population. Too heavy-handed and he risks Gaza spiralling into an all-out escalation. But he can’t afford to be seen as weak either. The attack has also put pressure on Israel’s relationship with Jordan, which was the first Arab state to recognise Israel back in 1994 and now faces pressure from its own people for helping defend Israel.

Read more:
Why Iran’s failed attack on Israel may well turn out to be a strategic success

The nuclear option?

One of the possibilities being widely canvassed is that Israel could mount some kind of attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. This has been revitalised in the years since Donald Trump pulled the US out of the deal negotiated by his predecessor Barack Obama.

Iran’s nuclear weapons programme as at June 2012.
Sémhur/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA

Christoph Bluth, an international security expert at the University of Bradford, believes this is unlikely. He walks us through the history of Iran’s nuclear programme, a story littered with the bodies of Iranian nuclear scientists and the wreckage of its nuclear facilities thanks to fiendish cyberattacks such as the Stuxnet virus developed by Israel and the US that was launched against Iran in 2010.

Since Trump quit the nuclear deal, Iran has gone full-steam ahead in ramping up its nuclear weapons programme, while reportedly hiding its key installations in deep underground bunkers that are thought impossible to destroy from the air. Any sort of ground assault appears out of the question too, concludes Bluth.

Read more:
An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons programme is unlikely – here’s why

Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox. Läs mer…

The air war in Ukraine has intensified considerably over the past few months, with a dramatic increase in the number of sorties being flown by Russia’s airforce. Some observers believe that, having gained a degree of initiative on the ground – for example, with the capture of the strategically important city of Avdiivka in the eastern Donetsk region – the Kremlin’s war planners want to capitalise on this by maintaining the momentum.

Accordingly, Russia has intensified its assault on Ukraine’s defences, while maintaining the attacks on power infrastructure that has been a key strategy since it launched its invasion in February 2022.

The latest blow was the destruction, on April 11, of the largest power-generating plant in Ukraine’s Kyiv region. The Trypilska thermal power plant (TPP) was the largest supplier of electricity to the Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions. It was the last of three major plants run by power generation company Centrenergo still in operation – one in the Donetsk region was occupied by Russian troops in the summer of 2022, and the second, in Kharkiv, was destroyed in a Russian attack in March.

There has been little, if any, good news for Ukraine’s war planners in recent months, writes Christopher Morris of the University of Portsmouth. Morris, an expert in military strategy, points to recent Russian advances west of Avdiivka and other pressure points along Ukraine’s frontlines as evidence of increasing Russian confidence that the tide might be turning their way.

The state of the conflict in Ukraine, April 9 2024.
Institute for the Study of War

Morris believes that now more than ever, Kyiv’s western allies need to heed the pleas of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as he begs them to send more weapons. Time is not on his side. The Washington Post recently ran a story detailing what it called Donald Trump’s “secret, long-shot plan to end the war in Ukraine”, which would involve “pushing Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia”.

There’s no indication from Zelensky that he’d give any of Trump’s suggestions houseroom – and it also appears extremely unlikely from what Vladimir Putin has said that the Russian president would want to stop there anyway. But if Trump does win the US presidential election in November, it seems very unlikely that Kyiv can continue to count on US help. And that would shift the balance decisively in Russia’s favour.

Read more:
Ukraine war: battlefield tipping in Russia’s favour as Kyiv begs allies for more arms

As we have noted before in our coverage of the conflict, Russia has successfully transitioned its economy on to a wartime footing, and its armaments industry is now operating to a capacity greater than many experts believed it was capable of two years ago.

Moscow has also proved to be good at adapting and improving its stock of Soviet-era weaponry for use on the modern battlefield. An example of such ingenuity is the way its technicians have adapted its old “dumb bombs”, basically unchanged since the second world war – the sort of munitions you dropped from an aircraft overflying a target – into what are known as “glide bombs”.

As military historian Gerald Hughes of the University of Aberystwyth writes, glide bombs are dumb bombs with wings and a fairly rudimentary guidance system attached. They have a range of about 70km and are much cheaper than other air-launched missiles. Russia’s use of these guided missiles has increased by 1,600% over the past 12 months, with the result that Ukraine’s defences – and cities such as Kharkiv – are taking a pounding.

Meanwhile, Zelensky continues to plead for arms. And if the US politicians dragging their heels over signing Joe Biden’s aid package into law need a really potent message that Ukraine requires more and better air defence systems, then the havoc being caused by these relatively cheap and unsophisticated weapons should be enough.

Read more:
Ukraine war: Russia’s devastating use of Soviet-era ’glide bombs’ shows how urgently Kyiv needs air defence systems

Since Vladimir Putin sent his war machine into Ukraine on February 24 2022, The Conversation has called upon some of the leading experts in international security, geopolitics and military tactics to help our readers understand the big issues. You can also subscribe to our fortnightly recap of expert analysis of the conflict in Ukraine.

Our colleagues in the US have published an article by Tatsiana Kulakevich, a scholar of eastern Europe at the University of South Florida, which delves into the politics being played out in the US over providing arms to Ukraine. Kulakevich believes the US is very unlikely to abandon Ukraine to its fate.

One reason is the increased threat this will pose for Nato, whose member states sharing a border with Russia are already extremely nervous about the prospect of an emboldened Putin, flushed with military success, taking advantage of an isolationist US to indulge in further military adventures.

But Kulakevich also points to the steady and inexorable rise of China as another reason the US can’t afford to assume an isolationist position. Put simply, Washington needs Europe to compete with Beijing. She quotes US Navy admiral Samuel J. Paparo, who said in February 2024 that Russia’s potential loss in Ukraine is “a deterrence in the western Pacific and directly reassures partners”.

Read more:
House of Representatives holds off on Ukraine aid package − here’s why the US has a lot at stake in supporting Ukraine

Nervous Nato gears up

The possible reelection of Trump as US president is focusing minds across Nato. You may remember Trump quipped back in February that he would “encourage” Russia to attack any of the US’s Nato allies whom he considers not to have paid their fair share of the budget.

Friend you can count on? Many Nato countries are anticipating a possible second Trump presidency by beefing up their defence budgets.
EPA-EFE/Edward M Pio Roda

While he later dismissed this as campaign hyperbole, most observers believe that Trump is less interested in European security and the fortunes of the Nato alliance – which recently celebrated 75 years without a major war in Europe – than any of his predecessors, and certainly the current incumbent.

Michelle Bentley, a reader in international relations at Royal Holloway University of London, believes that Nato members need to “Trump-proof” their defence policies as a matter of urgency. She says European countries need to increase their defence spending to cold war levels, and that more cooperation to reduce the alliance’s dependence on the US will also be important.

While there are signs this is already happening, Bentley says that, as November approaches, it will increasingly be a priority.

Read more:
Waiting for Trump to be re-elected is wrong – Nato leaders need to Trump-proof their policies now

Another sign of how seriously some of Russia’s neighbours are taking the threat of an emboldened Putin is the fact that many countries are either beefing up their conscription policies or thinking about doing so.

Rod Thornton, a defence expert at King’s College London, has been looking at conscription and national service policies across a range of European countries, and writes that the war in Ukraine has served as spur for the reintroduction of the call-up across the continent. France and Germany, which both got rid of conscription (Germany as recently as 2011), are now talking about reintroducing it.

Sweden, which recently joined Nato, dropped conscription in 2018 but has brought it back while introducing what it calls its “total defence service”. This will increase the number of people called into uniform from 4,000 a year to 100,000. The Baltic countries, which feel particularly vulnerable as a result of sharing a border with Russia, are all reviewing their conscription numbers.

There’s even been talk of bringing back national service in the UK, with newspaper columnists citing falling numbers in Britain’s armed forces as an example of how far the country has fallen as a military power. Thus far, though, it remains just that: talk.

Read more:
Ukraine war: why many Nato countries are thinking of introducing conscription and the issues that involves

China and Russia cosy up

Days before Putin sent his war machine into Ukraine, he met with Chinese president Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Beijing Winter Olympics, where the pair posed for photos and declared a “no-limits friendship”. Now, we’re told, the two countries have taken this even further (if this were rhetorically possible) after Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, travelled to meet his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Beijing this week.

We asked Natasha Kuhrt, an international security expert from King’s College London, what messages the west should draw from what we know about their conversation. Her verdict is that increased cooperation between the two countries, which pointedly talked of the west’s “cold war thinking” and US “bullying”, should be taken very seriously indeed.

She concludes: “At the 2022 Madrid summit, Nato belatedly acknowledged the importance of the Russia-China relationship, and the worst-case scenario of a two-front war. This meeting does not diminish those fears.”

Read more:
How have China and Russia beefed up their relationship after Ukraine war wobble? Expert Q&A

Ukraine Recap is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our recaps directly in your inbox. Läs mer…