ANOTHER RUSSIAN SHIP SUNK: While intense fighting continues in the northeast near Kharkiv, with Russia reclaiming some lost territory from the early war, Ukraine aggressively targets Russia in occupied Crimea in the south. Utilizing drones and missiles, Ukraine has disabled air defenses and ignited fuel depots, culminating in the sinking of another Russian warship based in Sevastopol over the weekend.
“Another bad day for the Russian Black Sea Fleet,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry posted on X on Sunday. “Overnight, Ukrainian defenders destroyed a Russian minesweeper Project 266M ‘Kovrovets.’ Great job, warriors!”
The Institute for the Study of War cited a “prominent Kremlin-affiliated Russian milblogger” who claimed Ukraine fired a dozen U.S.-provided long-range ATACMS missiles, of which nine were shot down but three hit the warship that sank.
“We are deterring Russian pressure, and I thank each brigade and unit involved,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on his social media account this morning. “Russia wants to show that it defines the course of the war. Our task is to thwart Russia’s attempt to expand the war and to prevent the occupier from breaking the front line.”
LESSONS FROM THE BATTLE OF THE BLACK SEA
ZELENSKY: ‘WE STOPPED THEM’: In an interview with Agence France-Presse, Zelensky claimed the Russian advance in the Kharkiv region has been blunted for now but that he needs more air defense, more troops from Ukraine’s recent mobilization law, and importantly, permission from the United States to stop having to fight with one hand tied behind its back.
“They can fire any weapons from their territory at ours,” Zelensky said. “This is the biggest advantage that Russia has. We can’t do anything to their systems, which are located on the territory of Russia, with Western weapons.”
“They started their operation. It could consist of several waves. There was the first wave, and the situation there is controlled,” Zelensky told Agence France-Presse, but he added he expects Russia to keep pushing to gain territory. “Russian forces are 5 to 10 kilometers from the border to the point where we stopped them. … I won’t say it’s a great success, but we have to be sober and understand that they are going deeper into our territory.”
“I believe that today, we have about 25% of what we need to defend Ukraine. I’m talking about air defense,” Zelensky said. “As for the aircraft, I say this openly: So that Russia does not have air superiority, our fleet should have 120 to 130 modern aircraft. In total, we need this fleet of F-16s in the number I am talking about in order to have parity.”
At the Pentagon this morning, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. will host a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in which representatives from nearly 50 nations will discuss getting critical aid to Ukraine. Austin’s opening remarks will be livestreamed at 8 a.m., and Austin and Brown will brief reporters after the session at 12:30 p.m.
UKRAINIAN FORCES ENJOY ARTILLERY SHELL DELIVERY MILESTONE
CAVOLI: ‘I’M CONFIDENT THEY WILL HOLD THE LINE’: On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted his forces have no intention of attempting to capture Kharkiv, stating the Russian move into northeastern Ukraine was solely for establishing a buffer zone to stop Ukraine from shelling the Russian border city of Belgorod.
But NATO’s assessment indicates Putin’s hesitance is likely due to his inadequately trained troops’ inability to conduct a major assault. “The Russians don’t have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrough,” said Gen. Christopher Cavoli, supreme allied commander Europe, after a meeting of NATO military chiefs last week. “More to the point, they don’t have the skill and the capability to do it, to operate at the scale necessary to exploit any breakthrough to strategic advantage.”
Zelensky echoed this in his Agence France-Presse interview. “They want to attack, [but] they understand that [attacking] Kharkiv is very difficult. It is a big city, and they understand that we have forces that will fight for a long time,” he said. “They don’t have the forces [for] a full-scale offensive on the capital like the one they had at the beginning of the invasion.”
On CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered a more sober assessment. “The circumstances in Ukraine right now are quite dire,” he told host Margaret Brennan. “The six-month delay in getting the supplemental passed has been a problem and poses a real crisis.”
“The Russians are moving, not only around Kharkiv but elsewhere along the front. Putin has taken the last six months to a year to rearm, reequip, to recruit,” Gates said. “I’ve read numbers that he’s putting as many as 30,000 new troops a month into Ukraine. They have more troops in Ukraine now, the Russians do, than they did at the beginning of the war.”
PENTAGON INSPECTOR GENERAL WARNS OF UKRAINE’S ‘ENDEMIC CORRUPTION’
Good Monday morning and welcome to Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense, written and compiled by Truth Voices National Security Senior Writer Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) and edited by Stacey Dec. Email here with tips, suggestions, calendar items, and anything else. Sign up or read current and back issues at DailyonDefense.com. If signing up doesn’t work, shoot us an email and we’ll add you to our list. And be sure to follow me on Threads and/or on X @jamiejmcintyre
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HAPPENING TODAY: A court in London is expected to rule today on whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published thousands of classified U.S. military documents on the internet more than a decade ago, can be extradited to the United States to stand trial on espionage charges.
The U.S. has provided assurances to the High Court in London that Assange will receive a fair trial, but lawyers for Assange have argued that under the U.S. Espionage Act, he could face the death penalty and questioned if, as an Australian citizen, he would be afforded free speech rights under the First Amendment.
The court could either permit the extradition or allow for another round of appeals.
US TO PULL TROOPS OUT OF NIGER SLOWLY WHILE HOPING FOR A DIFFERENT RESULT: After five days of discussions in the Nigerien capital of Niamey, the Pentagon has agreed to a plan to withdraw all 1,000 U.S. troops from the country by Sept. 15.
The negotiations were concluded over the weekend by Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, and Lt. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, director of joint force development in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to the Pentagon.
“The Nigeriens committed to a number of things, including the ongoing protection of U.S. forces, the agreement to facilitate, including diplomatic clearances and facilitating with force protection, and a whole series of other efforts on their part to help us move safely and rapidly in the withdrawal,” a senior defense official told reporters on a conference call on Sunday.
Following a coup in Niger last year, the country has been ruled by a military junta that has shifted its allegiance more toward Russia and asked both French and U.S. counterterrorism troops to leave the country.
“Obviously, we’re working against the backdrop of [a] much more challenging political situation, but we’re in close contact throughout with the country team here and the ambassador,” the official said. “We have a lengthy history with them going back well over a decade, and working with them over the course of these discussions proved out that that relationship’s very strong.”
“We’re looking forward to future dialogues,” a senior military official said. “They thought it was important to emphasize that they did not see this as the closing of the relationship but that a new relationship needed to be negotiated.” Nigerien military leaders, he said, felt that given the long-standing relationship, “they don’t want to have it completely dissolved.”
SCHUMER’S PLAN TO BLAME GOP FOR INACTION AT BORDER: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced plans over the weekend to hold a vote on the bipartisan border bill that was effectively killed when former President Donald Trump opposed it.
“Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike were prepared to join arms and act to secure our nation’s border as part of the national security supplemental. Unfortunately, just as the border proposal was being finalized, former President Trump demanded Congressional Republicans kill the legislation,” Schumer said in a Dear Colleague letter released Sunday. “The former president made clear he would rather preserve the issue for his campaign than solve the issue in a bipartisan fashion.”
“I hope Republicans and Democrats can work together to pass the bipartisan border bill this coming week,” Schumer wrote in announcing his plan to schedule a vote on the bill this week. “The Border Act overhauls our asylum laws, hires thousands of new border agents, invests in cutting edge technology to stop the flow of fentanyl, and gives the President new authorities to close the border,” he said, adding it is “by any objective measure, a tough, serious-minded, and — critically, bipartisan — proposal to secure our border.”
Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), who negotiated the compromise bill on behalf of Senate Republicans at the behest of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), called Schumer’s move a “political ploy” aimed at election-year messaging.
“Instead of us pointing at each other and doing political stunts, let’s solve this. Let’s actually sit down and figure out how we’re going to resolve it,” Lankford said on the Senate floor. “The bill that I worked with Sen. [Chris] Murphy and Sen. [Kyrsten] Sinema on, we’re not going to be able to pass. So let’s find the sections of it that we can pass.”
“If President Biden would enforce the border the same way President Obama did, much less the same way President Trump did, the border would be very different,” he said. “Everybody sees that. Everybody also sees we need a change in the way we do asylum policy. That’s a change that has to be done in Congress. That’s a vote that we have to be able to take.”
SCHUMER REINTRODUCING BIPARTISAN BORDER BILL TO SENATE BUT SHARES DOUBTS OVER CHANCES
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