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This week's edition brought to you by Mary Kate Aylward, Publications Editor
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| | JUNE 10, 2023 | We began the week wondering whether Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia had begun and ended the week with a seemingly clear answer: Yes, at least in its initial form. But what shape it will take and which objectives the Ukrainian military will pursue are still not certain, thrown into question by the June 6 collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine. Amid all the speculation, our experts sought a balance in conveying what we know and still don’t know. I’m biased, of course, but I think they succeeded. | | |
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| |  The facts. Much remains unknown, for example, about the Nova Kakhovka dam collapse. The latest installment of the Digital Forensic Research Lab’s Russian War Report offers insights from the ground and from space—our researchers tracked what pro-Kremlin media said about the dam collapse, and satellite maps captured the destruction unleashed. Cross-referencing satellite imagery and a digital elevation model, our analysts were able to pinpoint the areas most at risk of potential flooding downstream of Nova Kakhovka. Zoom in to see the data. | | |
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| |  The analysis. In this interview with the Global Dispatches podcast, John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine, explains why the evidence points to Russian involvement in the dam’s collapse. “The now flooded battle lines along the Dnipro river were likely to be a key focus of a Ukrainian counteroffensive,” he notes. Tune in for a big-picture understanding of the dam's collapse. | | |
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| |  But wait, there's more. Why would the Ukrainian military focus on those now-flooded areas? Because they’re a gateway to the Crimean peninsula—and cutting off the land bridge running through southern Ukraine between Crimea and Russia is a key goal of the counteroffensive. “Putting serious pressure on Crimea is the fastest way to end the war on conditions acceptable to Ukraine,” John writes in the Washington Post, teaming up with Dan Fried, a fellow former US ambassador and assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Rolling back Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation, in John and Dan’s view, would be the kind of “ringing defeat” that would settle the war instead of stalemating it. Read on for maps and more counteroffensive analysis. | | |
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| |  Saudi strife. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to Riyadh this week hoping to calm the troubled US-Saudi relationship. So Jonathan Panikoff, a former US deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East, penned a timely guide to what’s behind Saudi Arabia’s worldview at the moment. “Saudi officials’ single overriding goal is to create, in record time, a vibrant and diverse economy to ensure the kingdom’s wealth and regional hegemony long after oil is no longer the world’s dominant energy source,” he writes. The kingdom’s foreign policy is “but a shadow” of that domestic goal, which requires high oil prices in the short term. Click here for more on how to understand the drivers of Saudi statecraft. | | |
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| |  Markets moving first. “The risk of investing in Chinese securities has soared over the past year,” Jeremy Mark writes, and for many fund managers overseas, the benefits no longer outweigh those risks. Jeremy came to us after working at the International Monetary Fund, but you don’t need to be an economist to grasp his overarching point here and its significance. Just as China’s economy struggles to rebound from years of “zero COVID” shutdowns, with an aging population and a lot of real-estate debt, foreign investors are shifting their capital away from China. Dive into the financial implications for Beijing here. | | |
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