Quotes of the Day:
"We hereby declare that Korea is an independent state and that Koreans are a self-governing people. We proclaim this fact to all nations to reaffirm the great truth that all humans are equal, so that our descendants may forever enjoy their rights to live as an autonomous people.
This declaration of ours is propelled by the strength of our five thousand years of history and the shared will of twenty million Koreans. It is made so that our nation may thrive in perpetuity and be in step with the larger trend of global evolution that is being shaped by the conscience of humanity. This is the will of heaven and the spirit of our time, and it springs from the rights all humans deserve. Nothing in the world shall stand in the way of our independence...."
- The March First Declaration of Independence (March 1, 1919)
https://overseas.mofa.go.kr/us-losangeles-en/brd/m_4394/view.do?seq=761378
This is why the Ukrainians will successfully defend their country and prevail in the long term:
"Ukranian woman teaching her people how to operate abandoned Russian tanks" (actually an APC but close enough for resistance work)
https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/t3lx16/ukranian_woman_teaching_her_people_how_to_operate/?utm
"We can't stop the missiles with demonstrations but we can show that we are all supporting the truth"
Thousands protest against Russia across European cities
For background:
Letter identity meanings painted on RF vehicles / armor
Sir – attached. From Yurij H of whom I wrote about yesterday. Further: The explanation is in Ukrainian, so the first “Z” is “Russian Federation of / from the east” - “east’ means from the Ukrainian perspective of the four cardinal directions, i.e., forces other than the ones coming from the other specified letters. Of course, that is just a tiny moot detail, but IMveryHO, is why our SOF, especially our quiet professionals SF, must be inside the minds, language, geography, history, and culture of our Ukrainian ally and courageous people / resistance.
Z – Russia
Z in box - from Crimea
O from Belarus
V Marines
X Chechens
A Special Operating Forces
Graphic here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yG8wY81S0XjRi-eZvaMKwFSEzByFx_i3/view?usp=sharing
1. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 11
2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 28, 2022
3. Special donation accounts with the National Bank of Ukraine and humanitarian organizations in Ukraine
4. Analysis | The Russian invasion has some logistical problems. That doesn’t mean it’s doomed.
5. Russia pummels Ukraine's No. 2 city and convoy nears Kyiv
6. Reading Putin: Unbalanced or cagily preying on West's fears?
7. A Team Of American And British Special Forces Veterans Are Preparing To Join Ukraine’s Fight Against Russia
8. Putin Accidentally Revitalized the West’s Liberal Order
9. Western Military Observers Shocked at How Badly Russia's Military Is Doing
10. The Russian People May Be Starting to Think Putin Is Insane
11. The solace for young Russians like me is that Putin is also digging his own grave in Ukraine
12. Ukraine Conflict Update - March 1, 2022 | SOF News
13. Biden Says Americans Shouldn't Worry About Possibility of Nuclear War
14. ‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes
15. How Russia built its new narrative of war
16. The Return of Containment
17. The Ukraine Invasion: What Lessons Is China Learning?
18. U.S. delegation arrives in Taiwan as China denounces visit
19. Intelligence Disclosures in the Ukraine Crisis and Beyond
20. FDD | Vladimir the Terrible
21. FDD | Putin Just Pushed the World Into an Even Bigger Energy Crisis
22. February Meeting Confirms Palestinian Leadership Needs an Israeli Bailout
23. Opinion | A Syrian rebel commander’s advice to Ukrainians on how to fight Russian invaders
24. Kyiv and Moscow Hold Talks as Ukrainian Troops Repel Russian Attacks
25. The West Is Winning, Russia Is Losing, and Biden Is Doing a Good Job
26. Danger zone: Putin’s nuclear threat and what it means
27. RT: Go F*** Yourself
28. Twisted Sister frontman on Ukrainians using hit song as battle cry: 'I absolutely approve'
29. U.S. Looks to Make China Pay For Close Ties to Russia in Ukraine Crisis
30. All Strategies Short of War: Getting the Most Out of the Gray Zone
31. Kremlin propaganda machine struggles to conceal Putin’s Ukraine war
32. The rouble’s collapse compounds Russia’s isolation
33. How U.S. Special Forces Can Fight Putin Without Starting World War III
1. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 11
UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 11
Institute for the Study of War, Russia Team
February 28
This daily synthetic product covers key events related to renewed Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Key Takeaways February 28
- Russian forces increasingly targeted Ukrainian airfields and logistics centers on February 28, particularly in western Ukraine. Russia likely seeks to ground the Ukrainian air force and interdict the ability of Western states to resupply the Ukrainian military.
- Russia deployed additional heavy forces and artillery that it has so far failed to employ in assaults on Kyiv to the city’s western approach on February 27-28. Russian forces will likely launch a renewed assault on western Kyiv on March 1.
- The Kremlin largely froze trade in foreign currencies and raised interest rates to halt the Ruble’s freefall on February 28 due to the imposition of Western sanctions. The ruble fell over 30 percent against the dollar on February 28.
- The United States and its European allies levied further sanctions targeting the Russian Central Bank, throttling Russia’s ability to prop up the ruble. Tax havens Switzerland and Monaco joined European Union (EU) sanctions, contravening the Swiss tradition of neutrality.
- NATO and EU countries prepared potential sanctions targeting Belarus following a sham constitutional referendum and intelligence suggesting Belarus could join the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
- The first round of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations in Gomel, Belarus, failed to yield any agreement.
- EU and Ukrainian leaders strengthened their push for quick Ukrainian admittance to the European Union.
- NATO and the EU announced more financial and military equipment support to Ukraine, including an EU package amounting to over 500 million euros of military aid.
- Russian shelling of civilian areas in eastern Ukraine and worsening food shortages across the country will likely exacerbate the refugee crisis across Ukraine and into Eastern Europe.
- Russian forces began using heavy artillery against central Kharkiv on February 28, indicating a dangerous inflection in Russian operations as the Kremlin chooses to use air and artillery assets it previously held in reserve.
- Russian forces resumed limited advances in northeastern Ukraine on February 28 after an operational pause on February 26-27.
- Russian and proxy forces resumed assaults on Ukrainian forces defending Mariupol from the east and deployed additional artillery and anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) assets to the Mariupol front line on February 28.
- Russian and Belarusian forces may be preparing for an additional line of advance from Belarus into western Ukraine.
- Russian successes in southern Ukraine are the most dangerous and threaten to unhinge Ukraine’s successful defenses and rearguard actions to the north and northeast.
- Russian troops are facing growing morale and logistics issues, predictable consequences of the poor planning, coordination, and execution of attacks along Ukraine’s northern border.
- Russian officials downplayed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 27 decision to place Russian nuclear and missile forces on their highest combat readiness orders. The United States declined to change its own alert levels.
Key Events February 27, 5:00 pm EST – February 28, 5:00 pm EST
Military Events:
The Russian military is reorganizing its military efforts in an attempt to remedy poor planning and execution based on erroneous assumptions about Ukrainians’ will and ability to resist. Russian operations around Kyiv remain limited as logistics and reinforcements arrive but will likely resume in greater strength in the next 24 hours. Ukrainian military leaders said that they have used the pause to strengthen Kyiv’s defenses and prepare to defend their capital in depth. The Ukrainian military likely cannot prevent Russian forces from enveloping or encircling Kyiv if the Russians send enough combat power, but likely can make Russian efforts to gain control of the city itself extremely costly and possibly unsuccessful.
The Russian military has begun using area-attack weapons including tube- and rocket artillery in the city of Kharkiv, dramatically increasing Russian forces’ damage to civilian infrastructure and the number of civilian casualties. Unconfirmed reports indicate the Russian military is also using thermobaric weapons, which can have devastating effects, especially on civilian targets. Ukrainian resistance in and around Kharkiv remains determined, but it is unclear how long Ukrainian defenders can hold if Russia sustains or increases attacks of this variety coupled with ground attacks supported by arriving Russian reinforcements.
Russian advances in southern Ukraine remain slower than they had been in the initial days of the war, possibly due to Russian efforts to concentrate sufficient combat power to conduct decisive operations against Mariupol and, possibly, Zaporizhia.
The next major phase of Russian offensive operations will likely begin within the next 24 hours and play out over the ensuing 48-72 hours. Ukrainian resistance remains remarkably effective and Russian operations, especially on the Kyiv axis, have been poorly coordinated and executed, leading to significant Russian failures on that axis and at Kharkiv. Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military, however, and Russian advances in southern Ukraine threaten to unhinge the defense of Kyiv and northeastern Ukraine if they continue unchecked.
Russian ground forces are advancing on four primary axes and a possible fifth axis, discussed in turn below:
1) Kyiv Axis: Russia deployed additional heavy forces and artillery it has so far failed to employ in assaults on the city to the western approach to Kyiv on February 27-28. Russian forces will likely launch a renewed assault on western Kyiv on March 1. Attacks by Russian light forces on the outskirts of the city failed to make progress on February 28. Ukrainian forces are unlikely to capitulate.
2) Northeast Axis: Russian forces began using heavy artillery against central Kharkiv on February 28, indicating a dangerous inflection in Russian operations as the Kremlin chooses to use air and artillery assets it has held in reserve to date. Russian forces additionally resumed limited advances in northeastern Ukraine on February 28 after an operational pause on February 26-27.
3) Donbas Axis: Russian and proxy forces resumed assaults on Ukrainian forces defending Mariupol from the east and deployed additional artillery and anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) assets to the Mariupol front line on February 28. Russian forces may attempt a renewed assault on Mariupol in the coming days. Russian forces likely intend to pin Ukrainian forces in place on the line of contact to enable Russian forces breaking out of Crimea to isolate them.
4) Crimea Axis: Russian forces continued limited advances on two axes out of Crimea—north toward Zaprozhia and west toward Mykolayiv, reaching the outskirts of Mykolayiv on February 28. Russia may struggle to fully supply both axes of advance and may be forced to choose which advance to prioritize.
5) Russian and Belarusian forces may be preparing for an additional line of advance from Belarus into Western Ukraine. The Belarusian 38th Air Assault Brigade deployed to Kobryn, near Brest in southwestern Belarus, on February 28. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 28 that there is a high likelihood of Belarusian forces joining Russian operations. ISW previously reported a Russian armored column assembling in Stolin, Belarus, on February 25 to support a possible advance into Rivne Oblast in western Ukraine. A Russian offensive in western Ukraine would likely seek to cut Ukraine off from ground shipments of Western aid through Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. However, Belarusian airborne forces would likely face similar difficulties to previous, failed, Russian airborne operations against Kyiv if they attempted airdrops.
Russian Activity
The Kremlin largely froze trade in foreign currencies and raised interest rates to halt the Ruble’s freefall on February 28 due to the imposition of Western sanctions. Foreign exchange payments will be blocked from March 1; the S&P marked Russian sovereign debt as having junk status on February 28.[1] The Ruble fell over 30 percent against the dollar on February 28, leading to massive lines at Russian ATMs amid concerns over inflation and bank runs.[2] TASS reported that Russians demanded nearly 1.4 trillion rubles in cash on February 25, with Sberbank and Tinkoff seeing increased demand for ATM withdrawals.[3]
The Kremlin sought to freeze foreign currency exchanges and lending to halt the Ruble’s freefall. The Russian Central Bank increased the key interest rate from 9.5 percent to 20 percent to accommodate for the depreciation of the Ruble and counter the risk of inflation, and Putin instructed banks to preserve lending rates prior to this increase.[4] The Central Bank additionally banned foreigners from selling Russian securities and ordered exporters to convert most of their foreign currency reserves into rubles.[5] The Central Bank canceled stock trading and closed the derivatives market on the Moscow Exchange on February 28.[6] Rossiya Bank temporarily limited issuing mortgages, consumer loans, car loans, credit cards, and overdrafts due to the Central Bank’s key rate increase.[7] Putin additionally signed a special decree on February 28 implementing several actions freezing the ability of Russians to sell foreign currencies.[8] Foreign exchange payments will be blocked from March 1, and the S&P marked Russian sovereign debt as having junk status on February 28.[9]
Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Russia will take additional measures responding to Western sanctions other than “special economic measures.”[10] Peskov claimed “sanctions will only strengthen import substitution in Russia” due to large-scale import substitution measures that have been in place since 2014.[11] Peskov stated that “the Russian economy is quite stable and largely oriented towards the domestic market.” Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov stressed that the Finance Ministry has prepared significant capital amnesty provisions to ensure domestic stability and protect Russian capital abroad.[12] The Kremlin will likely continue to obfuscate the crippling impact of Western sanctions.
Russia banned the airlines of 36 countries from entering Russian airspace on February 28, retaliating for European and Canadian bans on Russian airlines.[13] EU airspace regulations prevented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov from flying to Geneva, Switzerland for an arms control summit on February 28.[14] Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova downplayed the sanctions and media descriptions of dozens of grounded Russian planes.[15]
Russian officials downplayed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 27 decision to place Russian nuclear and missile forces on highest combat readiness orders and the United States declined to change its own alert levels.[16] White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on February 28 that the United States “sees no reason to change” US nuclear alert levels in response but emphasized that the United States must not underestimate Putin’s threats.[17] Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov emphasized on February 28 that Russian troops are simply following Putin’s orders and that their actions hold no dual meanings.”[18] Peskov called concerns of a Russia-NATO war “absolutely ridiculous” and said that Putin’s order came due to NATO leaders’ alleged “aggressive statements” on February 28.[19] Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Strategic Missile Forces, the Northern and Pacific Fleets, and long-range aviation began combat duty per the president’s order on February 28.[20] International Committee of the Russian Federation Council First Deputy Chairman Vladimir Dzhaborov incongruously stated on February 28 that the shift was not a threat of nuclear war but was instead a warning that all enemies should carefully consider actions against Russia.[21] Russian Permanent Ambassador to the UN Vasily Nebeznya claimed Russia is exercising “self-defense” against what Russia has repeatedly and falsely purported to be Ukraine’s goal “to restore access to nuclear weapons.”[22]
The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) falsely claimed victories on the Crimean and Donbas axes and falsely claimed that Russia had gained air superiority over Ukraine on February 28, reinforcing misleading perceptions of an easy military operation in Ukraine to the Russian public. Russian Defense Ministry Spokesperson Igor Konashenkov falsely claimed that Russia achieved air supremacy over all of Ukraine on February 28.[23] Russian state TV channels claimed that “the Russian military cannot back down now,” especially after gaining control over Ukrainian air space—likely to set information conditions for further Russian escalations (and casualties) in Ukraine.[24] Konashenkov additionally claimed that the Russian Air Force destroyed over 1,000 pieces of military infrastructure, emphasizing a Kremlin narrative of Russian military success.[25] Konashenkov also prematurely claimed that Russian forces captured Enegodar and the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant on the Crimea axis while Enegodar and Zaporizhia remained under Ukrainian control.[26] Konashenkov claimed that the Ukrainian military is replacing officers with reservists and that these reservists are still surrendering to Russian proxy forces.[27] Russian TV outlets also claimed that Ukrainian “nationalists” are looting Ukrainian cities and committing war crimes, likely to set conditions to justify the Russian seizure of urban centers.[28] Russian TV also amplified claims that Russian Armed Forces are now ready to deter a Western attack on Russia, claiming that the United States and NATO have forgotten that Russia is a nuclear power and will only negotiate with Russia if a “small nuclear missile” hits them.[29]
Belarusian Activity
NATO and the European Union (EU) announced they are prepared to levy sanctions against Belarus following intelligence assessments that Belarus will likely join Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Belarus’s adoption of a new Russia-favorable constitution allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons within Belarus.[30]
- Belarus’ Central Election Commission will validate the (likely highly falsified) Belarusian constitutional referendum results on March 3. The new constitution will give the Kremlin more de facto military control over Belarus and allow Belarus to host Russian nuclear weapons.[31] The revised Belarusian constitution also ends Belarus’ previously constitutionally enshrined neutral status.
- Belarus arrested 800 citizens for protesting the constitutional referendum on February 27.[32]
- US officials stated they are prepared to sanction Belarus given the high probability that Belarusian soldiers will join Russia in the invasion of Ukraine as soon as February 28.[33]
- The US State Department suspended all operations at the US Embassy in Minsk, Belarus, and authorized the voluntary departure of all non-emergency staff from the US embassy in Moscow on February 28.[34]
- A senior EU official told Reuters that the EU plans to sanction Belarusian exports, oligarchs, and central banks. The EU may cut Belarusian banks off from the SWIFT interbank payment system for aiding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[35]
- European countries including Lithuania, Latvia, France, and the United Kingdom, rejected the Belarusian constitutional referendum results as illegitimate and non-democratic.[36]
Ukrainian Activity
The Ukrainian government increased recruiting efforts and financial support to its military and several Western governments expressed support for Ukraine’s intent to accept foreign volunteers on February 28. The Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers announced that it will make monthly payments of over $3,300 to officers and around $1,000 for newly enlisted servicemembers on February 28.[37] Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also announced on February 28 that imprisoned Ukrainians with combat experience will be released from custody to fight in the war.[38] Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleskiy Reznikov announced that Ukraine will offer Russian soldiers full amnesty and five million rubles (about $46,800) to surrender.[39] Latvia’s Parliament unanimously voted to allow Latvian citizens to fight in Ukraine on February 28.[40] UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss originally affirmed her support for UK citizens who want to fight for Ukraine on February 27, but the United Kingdom reversed its position on February 28.[41] The Associated Press reported that many Ukrainians are returning from abroad to fight, with the Polish Border Guard stating that 22,000 Ukrainian citizens have entered Ukraine as of February 27.[42] Ten US and UK special forces and NATO veterans said that they will join Zelensky’s proposed new unit of foreign fighters.[43] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar stated that Ukraine has received several thousand applications from foreign nationals who want to join the foreign unit.[44] Ukraine’s finance ministry separately announced that it would offer war bonds to fund Ukraine’s military activity, primarily drawing from Ukrainian purchasers.[45]
The Kremlin reiterated its maximalist demands and refused any prospect of a ceasefire at the first round of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations in Gomel, Belarus on February 28.[46] The Ukrainian delegation demanded a ceasefire and the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine, including Crimea and Donbas.[47] The Russian delegation demanded Ukraine demilitarize, “de-nazify,” and relinquish the right to join NATO—the same maximalist demands the Kremlin made prior to its unprovoked invasion.[48] Head Russian delegate Vladimir Medinsky said that both sides found “some points on which to predict common positions” and did not elaborate.[49] Both sides agreed to meet again “in the coming days” but did not provide a date for the next round of negotiations.[50] Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei blamed Western intervention for the delay in organizing the negotiations and said he hoped the negotiations will prevent a “Slavic spring.”[51]
French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated international demands that Russia halt its offensive in Ukraine during a February 28 phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the negotiations.[52] The French readout claims Putin agreed to stop all strikes on civilian targets and preserve safe civilian access to roads out of Kyiv.[53] Putin said that only the unconditional recognition of Russian security interests, including Russian sovereignty over Crimea, Ukrainian neutrality, and the “demilitarization and denazification” of the Ukrainian government, will result in a settlement.[54] Macron also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of the negotiations on February 28 and stressed the need for an “immediate ceasefire.”[55]
US Activity
The United States and its allies announced sanctions against Russia to impede Russia’s access to international reserves and target assets Russian President Vladimir Putin could otherwise use as an emergency fund to stabilize the Russian economy. Tax havens Switzerland and Monaco joined the US and European sanctions on Russia. Switzerland also joined the EU in banning all Russian airlines from European airspace. The new US and allied sanctions prevent Putin from using more than 600 billion USD in Russian financial reserves to stabilize the Russian economy after other sanctions imposed by the international community.[56] Companies, market indexes, and committees around the globe also enacted their own form of sanctions on Russian companies, bonds, sports teams, and business partnerships on February 28.
- The US Treasury Department, EU, and United Kingdom implemented coordinated sanctions against Russia on February 28 that froze Russian Central Bank assets within the US, EU, and UK.[57] The sanctions blocked US and European citizens from participating in any transactions involving the Russian Central Bank, Russia’s National Wealth Fund, or the Russian Ministry of Finance.[58]
- The European Central Bank (ECB) reported on February 28 that Russian state-run bank Sberbank and its subsidiaries in southeastern and central Europe are likely to fail as Sberbank is unable to pay its debts or other liabilities. The United States and its allies targeted Sberbank in previous sanction packages and blocked the bank from the SWIFT payment system on February 27.[59] Sberbank is Russia’s biggest lender.[60]
- The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the Russian Direct Investment Fund, its management company, two of its subsidiaries, and CEO Kirill Dmitriev on February 28.[61]
- UK Foreign Minister Liz Truss stated the UK will coordinate a “full asset freeze on all Russian banks in days” in coordination with Western allies during a February 28 speech to parliament.[62] Truss said this move will prevent Russia from raising debt in the United Kingdom and isolate over three million Russian businesses from accessing UK capital markets.[63]
- The EU banned all Russian aircraft from landing, taking off from, or flying over EU territories on February 28. This move banned marketing carriers, Russian-registered aircraft, and non-Russian-registered aircraft owned or chartered by a natural-born or legal Russian citizen.[64]
- UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said on February 28 the United Kingdom will ban all Russian ships from entering its ports.[65]
- UK Interior Minister Priti Patel stated in a February 28 speech that the United Kingdom will lead international efforts to suspend Russia from the global police agency Interpol at the request of the Ukrainian government.[66]
- Swiss President Ignazio Cassis stated on February 28 that Switzerland will join EU sanctions against Russia, which will freeze the Russian president, prime minister, and foreign minister’s financial assets in Switzerland and target Russia’s financial reserves.[67] Cassis stated Switzerland will close its airspace to Russian aircraft except for humanitarian or diplomatic flights. Cassis said that Switzerland will join subsequent EU sanctions “on a case-by-case basis.”[68] Switzerland acknowledged its departure from its long withstanding tradition of neutrality in international conflict. The New York Times reports that Swiss national bank data showed Russian companies and individuals held over 11 billion USD worth of assets in Swiss banks as of 2020.[69]
- Monaco announced it will implement unilateral sanctions targeting Russian assets “identical” to the EU’s. Prince Albert said he supported “all efforts” to bring peace and encourage the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.[70]
- South Korea joined US and allied sanctions blocking Russian banks from the SWIFT international payment system and banned exports of “strategic items” to Russia on February 28.[71] South Korea announced its intention to ban supplies of electronics, semiconductors, computers, sensors, lasers, navigation and avionics, marine and aerospace equipment, and information and communications to Russia.[72]
- Japan joined international sanctions on Russia’s central bank and imposed sanctions on Belarusian organizations and individuals on February 28. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced Japan will also limit Japanese exports to Belarus.[73]
- Singapore imposed unilateral sanctions on Russia that block banks and financial transactions on February 28. Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan stated Singapore will implement export controls on items that could be used as weapons in Russia’s war. This action marks only the second time in history Singapore approved sanctions without UN Security Council approval.
- Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba called Ukrainian allies to impose a Russian oil and gas embargo on February 27. Kuleba stated that buying Russian oil and gas pays for the murder of Ukrainian men, women, and children.[74]
- Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis asked the EU to ban Russian ships at EU ports and in other territorial waters in an EU video conference on February 27.[75]
- Shell Global said on February 28 that it will end joint ventures with Russian state-owned energy corporation Gazprom and end involvement in financing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.[76]
- The Wall Street Journal reported on February 28 that JP Morgan Chase & Co. will remove Russian bonds from indexes for local-currency bonds (ESG GBI-EM) and dollar-bonds (ESF EMBI) which may “lead funds that track the indexes to sell their holdings.”[77]
- The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market halted trading multiple US-listed Russian stocks on February 28. NYSE reported that it halted the trading of Russian telecom operator Mobile TeleSystems, Russian mining and steel company Mechel, and Russian online real-estate classified company Cian “due to regulatory concern.”[78] Nasdaq halted the trading of Russian search engine operator Yandex, Russian online retailer Ozon Holdings, and several other Russian companies.[79]
- The International Olympic Committee announced on February 28 that it stripped Russian President Vladimir Putin of the gold Olympic Order awarded to him in 2001 and encouraged sports organizers to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes and officials from participating in international competitions.[80]
- Global football governing body FIFA and European football governing body UEFA suspended Russian national football teams and clubs from competition on February 28.[81] EUFA ended its sponsorship deal with Russian state-owned energy company Gazrpom across all competitions on February 28.[82]
NATO and EU Activity
European Union (EU) and Ukrainian leadership strengthened their push for Ukraine to join the EU on February 28. Several EU leaders stated their desire for Ukrainian to join the EU. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and eight EU member state presidents pressed for “immediate” steps to realize Ukrainian membership.
- European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen said on February 27 that Ukraine is “one of us” and should join the EU without committing to a specific timeline.[83]
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the EU to accept Ukraine to the EU “immediately” during a speech on February 28 and signed an official application for Ukraine to join the EU.[84]
- The presidents of Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia released a joint statement urging other EU member states to enable EU institutions to “immediately” grant Ukraine candidate country status and start membership negotiations on February 28.[85]
- The European Parliament’s mainstream political groups drafted a motion urging the EU to grant Ukraine candidate status on February 28. MEPs will vote on the motion on March 1.[86]
NATO and the European Union (EU) announced several financial and military aid packages for Ukraine on February 28.[87]
- EU defense ministers met virtually on February 28 to discuss coordinating weapons delivery and financial aid to Ukraine.[88] The European Council adopted two assistance measures worth approximately $560 million to finance defense equipment and supplies, including lethal weapons for the first time in the EU’s history, on February 27.
- UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the UK will provide additional military assistance to Ukraine in the “coming days” during a February 28 phone call.[89]
- Finland’s government announced on February 28 it will provide defense equipment to Ukraine including rifles, anti-tank weapons, and combat rations.[90]
- A US senior defense official stated on February 28 that US security assistance has continued to arrive in Ukraine as recently as February 27. The assistance includes “ground and airborne defensive capabilities.”[91]
Other International Organization Activity
International efforts to investigate alleged Russian war crimes increased as Russian forces began shelling residential areas of Kharkiv.
- Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces shelled a residential neighborhood in Kharkiv, causing “dozens” of civilian casualties on February 28.[92] Russian forces expanded shelling to residential areas in Kharkiv after attempting to enter the city on February 27.[93]
- Ukraine and its allies called for a UN inquiry into Russian war crimes during a UN session on February 28, citing Russian attacks on schools, orphanages, hospitals, and homes.[94] The UN Human Rights Council agreed on a proposal to hold an urgent debate on Russia’s invasion and consider a draft resolution for an investigation on March 3. China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Eritrea voted against the proposal.[95] UN experts will investigate all alleged violations of international law in Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics since 2014 if the inquiry moves forward.
- ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said on February 28 that the ICC will seek court approval to investigate alleged war crimes in Ukraine dating back to 2014.[96]
Russian attacks on urban areas and increasing food shortages are likely driving additional refugee flows to Europe, though international organizations continue to rally humanitarian aid shipments to Ukraine.
- The Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers expanded its list of critical imports to include more food items and some military goods as food shortages worsened on February 28.[97]
- Residents of Kyiv struggled to access food after the 36-hour weekend curfew ended on February 28. Many stores closed after bombings started in Kyiv on February 25.[98] Some Ukrainian supermarkets are rationing the amount of food customers can purchase.
- Approximately 250,000 people seeking to escape Ukraine are stuck at border crossings as of February 28. Polish Prime Minister Chief of Staff Michal Dworczyk stated that Polish border police allowed people without documents to enter Poland and that Poland and Ukraine are discussing simplifying entry procedures to speed up refugee processing.[99]
- The head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi, said on February 28 that more than 500,000 people have already fled Ukraine since fighting began. Grandi said that UNHCR’s teams are stepping up humanitarian efforts due to increasing human rights abuses.[100]
- Senior EU officials told Reuters that the EU is preparing to offer a three-year residence and work visa to displaced Ukrainians.[101]
- Russian Ministry of Defense spokesperson Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov claimed that Russian forces left an “open and safe” exit corridor from Kyiv along Ukraine’s Kyiv-Vasilkov (Vasylkiv) highway, which runs south but not directly out of the country.[102] ISW cannot verify this Russian claim.
- The South Korean government said on February 28 that it will provide $10 million in emergency humanitarian assistance to help Ukraine’s government, people, and refugees “facing a severe crisis due to the illegal invasion by Russia.”[103]
- Online donors have provided the Ukrainian army with a total of $33 million since February 25. Ukrainian citizens donated at least $14 million.[104]
- Poland announced that it will donate $545,000 to support the Ukraine work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on February 28.[105]
Individual Western Allies’ Activity
N/A
Other International Activity
N/A
[3] ttps://tass dot ru/ekonomika/13894233
[22] https://iz dot ru/1298117/2022-02-28/v-kremle-nazvali-nepriemlemymi-zaiavleniia-o-vozmozhnykh-konfliktakh-nato-i-rf
[25] https://iz dot ru/1298022/2022-02-28/mo-zaiavilo-o-zavoevanii-voennymi-rf-gospodstva-v-vozdukhe-nad-ukrainoi
[27] https://iz dot ru/1298243/2022-02-28/rezervisty-nachali-pribyvat-v-otbitye-u-vsu-silami-dnr-naselennye-punkty
[37] https://www dot mil.gov.ua/news/2022/02/28/ukraina-platitime-vijskovosluzhbovczyam-po-100-tisyach-griven-na-misyacz-postanova-kabminu/
[38] https://www dot ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3415659-ukrainians-with-real-combat-experience-will-be-released-from-custody-zelensky.html
[39] https://www dot mil.gov.ua/news/2022/02/28/zvernennya-ministra-oboroni-ukraini-oleksiya-reznikova/
[47] https://www dot currenttime.tv/a/arestovich-o-peregovorakh/31728002.html
[50] https://www dot unian.ua/politics/u-zelenskogo-anonsuvali-drugiy-raund-peregovoriv-z-rosiyeyu-novini-ukrajina-11722756.html
https://www.scmp dot com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3168699/south-korea-bans-exports-russia-strategic-items-joins-swift?module=storypackage&pgtype=homepage
https://www dot ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3415473-ukraine-insists-on-full-embargo-on-russian-oil-and-gas-kuleba.html
[97] https://www dot unian.ua/economics/finance/kabmin-priynyav-vazhlivi-rishennya-shchodo-importu-ta-zabezpechennya-jizheyu-likami-ta-vodoyu-novini-ukrajina-11722768.html
[105] https://www.gov dot pl/web/dyplomacja/wsparcie-polski-dla-dzialan-miedzynarodowego-komitetu-czerwonego-krzyza-we-wschodniej-ukrainie
2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 28, 2022
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, FEBRUARY 28, 2022
Mason Clark, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
February 28, 3:30pm EST
The Russian military is reorganizing its military efforts in an attempt to remedy poor planning and execution based on erroneous assumptions about Ukrainians’ will and ability to resist. Russian operations around Kyiv remain limited as logistics and reinforcements arrive but will likely resume in greater strength in the next 24 hours. Ukrainian military leaders say that they have used the pause to strengthen Kyiv’s defenses and prepare to defend their capital in depth. The Ukrainian military likely cannot prevent Russian forces from enveloping or encircling Kyiv if the Russians send enough combat power to do so, but likely can make Russian efforts to gain control of the city itself extremely costly and possibly unsuccessful.
The Russian military has begun using area-attack weapons in the city of Kharkiv, dramatically increasing the damage to civilian infrastructure and the number of civilian casualties it is causing. It is using tube- and rocket artillery against Kharkiv, and unconfirmed reports indicate that it is also using thermobaric weapons, which can have devastating effects, especially on civilian targets. Ukrainian resistance in and around Kharkiv remains determined, but it is unclear how long Ukrainian defenders can hold if Russia sustains or increases attacks of this variety coupled with ground attacks supported by arriving Russian reinforcements.
Russian advances in southern Ukraine remain slower than they had been in the initial days of the war, possibly due to Russian efforts to concentrate sufficient combat power to conduct decisive operations against Mariupol and, possibly, Zaporizhia.
The next major phase of Russian offensive operations will likely begin within the next 24 hours and play out over the ensuing 48-72 hours.
Ukrainian resistance remains remarkably effective and Russian operations, especially on the Kyiv axis, have been poorly coordinated and executed, leading to significant Russian failures on that axis and at Kharkiv. Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military, however, and Russian advances in southern Ukraine threaten to unhinge the defense of Kyiv and northeastern Ukraine if they continue unchecked.
Key Takeaways
- Russia deployed additional heavy forces and artillery that it has so far failed to employ in assaults on Kyiv to the city’s western approach on February 27-28. Russian forces will likely launch a renewed assault on western Kyiv on March 1.
- Russian forces began using heavy artillery against central Kharkiv on February 28, indicating a dangerous inflection in Russian operations as the Kremlin chooses to use air and artillery assets it has held in reserve to date.
- Russian forces resumed limited advances in northeastern Ukraine on February 28 after an operational pause on February 26-27.
- Russian and proxy forces resumed assaults on Ukrainian forces defending Mariupol from the east and deployed additional artillery and anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) assets to the Mariupol front line on February 28. Russian forces may attempt a renewed assault on Mariupol in the coming days.
- Russian forces increasingly targeted Ukrainian airfields and logistics centers on February 28, particularly in western Ukraine. Russia likely seeks to ground the Ukrainian air force and interdict the ability of Western states to resupply the Ukrainian military.
- Russian and proxy forces resumed assaults on Ukrainian forces defending Mariupol from the east and deployed additional artillery and anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) assets to the Mariupol front line on February 28. Russian forces may attempt a renewed assault on Mariupol in the coming days.
- Russian and Belarusian forces may be preparing for an additional line of advance from Belarus into western Ukraine.
- Russian successes in southern Ukraine are the most dangerous and threaten to unhinge Ukraine’s successful defenses and rearguard actions to the north and northeast.
- Russian troops are facing growing morale and logistics issues, predictable consequences of the poor planning, coordination, and execution of attacks along Ukraine’s northern border.
Russian forces increasingly targeted Ukrainian airfields and logistics centers on February 28, particularly in western Ukraine. Russia likely seeks to ground the Ukrainian air force and interdict the ability of Western states to resupply the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian General staff reported that Russian airstrikes increasingly concentrated on military and civilian airfields and air-defense assets on February 28.[1] Russian forces conducted thirty missile strikes and four airstrikes from 11:00 am local time February 27 to 11:00 am February 28.[2] US intelligence officials reported that Russia has fired 380 missiles, predominantly short-range ballistic missiles, since February 24.[3] The Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian air assets are increasingly targeting Ukraine from Belarusian airspace, though no Belarusian assets have launched operations as of now.[4] The Russian Ministry of Defense falsely claimed to have secured air supremacy over Ukraine on February 28.[5] Russian forces have still not secured air superiority five days into the invasion but likely seek to do so in coming days through increased strikes on Ukrainian air assets.[6] Western military aid to the Ukrainian air force, including EU plans announced on February 27 to send fighter jets to Ukraine, will be crucial in preventing Russian forces from achieving air superiority.[7] Russian forces likely seek to interdict US and European aid shipments through western Ukraine.
Russian ground forces are advancing on four primary axes, discussed in turn below:
- Kyiv;
- Northeast front;
- Donbas and Mariupol; and
- Crimea-Kherson.
1) Kyiv axis: Russia deployed additional heavy forces and artillery it has so far failed to employ in assaults on the city to the western approach to Kyiv on February 27-28. Russian forces will likely launch a renewed assault on western Kyiv on March 1. Attacks by Russian light forces on the outskirts of the city failed to make progress on February 28. Ukrainian forces are unlikely to capitulate.
- Russia deployed substantial additional forces to its offensive along the western bank of the Dnipro River on February 27-28. Maxar Technologies satellite imagery (see Appendix A below) captured an 11-mile-long Russian convoy approaching Antonov airport, about 17 miles from downtown Kyiv, at 11:00 am local time on February 28. Social media users observed additional Russian forces moving through southern Belarus on February 28.[8] Russian logistics columns were additionally spotted in southeastern Belarus, likely to support Russian attacks on eastern Kyiv.[9] Russian forces will likely attempt a renewed assault on western Kyiv with supporting artillery on March 1.
- Russian light forces continued unsuccessful attacks on Kyiv the night of February 27-28.[10] The Ukrainian General Staff reported Ukrainian forces have established a “dense and multilevel system of defense of the capital” on February 28.[11] Ukrainian forces likely successfully took advantage of the time granted by Russia’s operational pause February 26-27 to reinforce defenses in the city.
- Russian forces are likely continuing attempts to infiltrate the city. Ukrainian forces reported Russian troops attempted to use three captured ambulances to infiltrate Ukrainian lines in Kyiv on February 27.[12] UK media outlet the Times reported on February 28 that more than 400 Russian mercenaries are currently operating in Kyiv under orders to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, prompting Ukrainian forces to implement a strict curfew on February 26.[13] ISW cannot confirm this report, though it would track with Russia’s likely efforts to decapitate the Ukrainian government.
- Ukrainian forces continue to successfully defend against Russian efforts to encircle Kyiv west of the city, repulsing an attack on Irpin the night of February 27 and possibly temporarily recapturing Hostomel airport from Russian forces.[14]
2) Northeast axis: Russian forces began using heavy artillery against central Kharkiv on February 28, indicating a dangerous inflection in Russian operations as the Kremlin chooses to use fire assets it has held in reserve to date. Russian forces additionally resumed limited advances in northeastern Ukraine on February 28 after an operational pause on February 26-27. Ukrainian forces continue to delay and inflict losses on the Russian advance but will likely not be able to halt further advances if the Kremlin commits additional reserves.
- Russian forces used close air support and heavy artillery, including unconfirmed reports of thermobaric artillery, in assaults on Kharkiv on February 28. Russian Su-34 fighter bombers conducted strikes in Kharkiv on February 28, and Russian forces will likely increase their use of close air support in the coming days.[15] Russian Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) and traditional tube artillery began striking central Kharkiv on February 27-28, inflicting numerous civilian casualties.[16]
- The Russian use of heavy artillery against urban areas indicates a dangerous new phase in Russian operations. ISW previously warned that Russian forces would likely need to increase their use of air and artillery assets to overcome heavier-than-expected Ukrainian resistance but that Russia refrained from doing so to limit the informational and diplomatic effects of causing heavy Ukrainian civilian casualties and to avoid creating rubble and other obstacles-to-movement into and through Ukrainian cities. Russian forces will likely be able to overcome Ukrainian defenses in Kharkiv (and in Kyiv, if they choose to apply similar firepower there) while inflicting heavy civilian casualties and doing massive property damage.
- Russian forces resumed offensive operations in northeastern Ukraine, between Chernihiv and Sumy, on February 28.[17] Ukrainian forces claimed to halt attacks by Russian forces out of Khomutovka (in Kursk Oblast, Russia) towards Hlukhiv and Baturyn, west of Sumy.[18] Russian forces have not previously attacked this sector of northeastern Ukraine and likely seek alternate routes through to-date strong Ukrainian defenses. Elements of Russia’s 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet and 47th Tank Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army are operating along this axis.[19]
- Ukrainian forces also repulsed attacks on eastern Kyiv in Baturyn, from the direction of Chernihiv, on February 28.[20]
3) Donbas axis: Russian and proxy forces resumed assaults on Ukrainian forces defending Mariupol from the east and deployed additional artillery and anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) assets to the Mariupol front line on February 28. Russian forces may attempt a renewed assault on Mariupol in the coming days. Russian forces likely intend to pin Ukrainian forces in place on the line of contact to enable Russian forces breaking out of Crimea to isolate them. The Russians may be content to leave them there while concentrating on capturing Kyiv and imposing a new government on Ukraine. They may alternatively seek to encircle and destroy them or force them to surrender.
- Russian forces advancing on Mariupol from the west continued assembling in Berdyansk on February 28 but did not make any major assaults.[21] Russia may be halting these forces to instead prioritize the other two Russian advances out of Crimea toward Zaporizhia and Mykolayiv. They may, on the other hand, be waiting until they have concentrated enough combat power in this region before launching a full attack. Additionally, several videos of Ukrainian citizens in Berdyansk interdicting and harassing Russian forces circulated on Ukrainian social media on February 28.[22]
- Russian proxies in the 1st and 2nd Army Corps (the Ukrainian designations for the Russian-controlled military forces of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, respectively) conducted assaults along the line of contact in Donbas, supported by Russian artillery.[23] Proxy forces reportedly captured Hranitne, northeast of Mariupol, on February 28.[24] Ukrainian forces remain largely in place on the line of contact in Donbas. Russian forces likely seek to achieve a larger envelopment using forces breaking out from Crimea and currently advancing on Mariupol from the west.
-
Ukrainian forces reported capturing a Russian sniper from the 102nd Motor Rifle Regiment of the 150th Motor Rifle Division in Donbas on February 28.[25] If confirmed, this indicates at least elements of the previously uncommitted Russian 8th Combined Arms Army are active in Donbas.
- Russian forces additionally deployed additional MLRS, thermobaric artillery, and ATGM assets toward Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast on February 28.[26] Russian forces may attempt an assault on Mariupol from the east in the coming days.
4) Crimea axis: Russian forces continued limited advances on two axes out of Crimea—north toward Zaprozhia and west toward Mykolayiv, reaching the outskirts of Mykolayiv on February 28. Russia may struggle to fully supply both axes of advance and may be forced to choose which advance to prioritize.
- Russian forces continued to advance north toward Zaprozhia on February 28 but have not yet entered the city. The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to capture the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, approximately 50km southwest of the city, on February 28.[27] Russian forces in Melitopol likely deployed north to attack Zaporizhia on February 28.[28] ISW cannot confirm the extent of Russian advances toward Zaporizhia on February 28.
- The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops launched an assault on Mykolayiv at 11:00 am local time on February 28.[29] ISW cannot confirm the extent of Russian advances west of the Dnipro River, though Russian forces have likely encircled Kherson.
Russian and Belarusian forces may be preparing for an additional line of advance from Belarus into Western Ukraine. The Belarusian 38th Air Assault Brigade deployed to Kobryn, near Brest in southwestern Belarus, on February 28.[30] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on February 28 that there is a high likelihood of Belarusian forces joining Russian operations.[31] ISW previously reported a Russian armored column assembling in Stolin, Belarus, on February 25 to support a possible advance into Rivne Oblast in western Ukraine.[32] Russian forces have not launched a ground attack as of this publication. A Russian offensive in western Ukraine would likely seek to cut Ukraine off from ground shipments of Western aid through Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. However, Belarusian airborne forces would likely face similar difficulties to previous, failed, Russian airborne operations against Kyiv if they attempted airdrops.
Immediate Items to Watch
- Russian forces advancing north and east from Crimea threaten to cut off Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine if Kyiv does not withdraw them in the coming days.
- Russian forces began using artillery against residential areas in Kharkiv on February 28, likely signaling a dangerous new phase of Russian operations.
- Russian forces face growing morale and supply issues but will likely be able to overcome these handicaps.
- Russian forces continue to refrain from using their likely full spectrum of air and missile capabilities. The Ukrainian air force also remains active. Russian operations will likely steadily wear down Ukrainian air capabilities and eventually take the Ukrainian air force out of the fight.
- Russia has sufficient conventional military power to reinforce each of its current axes of advance and overpower the conventional Ukrainian forces defending them.
Appendix A – Satelite Imagery
Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies.
Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies.
Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies.
Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies.
Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies.
3. Special donation accounts with the National Bank of Ukraine and humanitarian organizations in Ukraine
Received from a trusted friend. This is sent with the permission and at the request of Ukraine's Office of the President for those who would like to help.
Special donation accounts with the National Bank of Ukraine and humanitarian organizations in Ukraine
From: Ukraine’s Office of the President
Account information
For UAH remittances:
Bank: National Bank of Ukraine MFO 300001
Account No. UA843000010000000047330992708 EDRPOU Code 00032106
Payee: National Bank of Ukraine
For USD remittances:
SWIFT Code NBU: NBUA UA UX
JP MORGAN CHASE BANK, New York SWIFT Code: CHASUS33
Account: 400807238
383 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10179, USA
Funds will be wired into account No. UA843000010000000047330992708
For GBP remittances:
SWIFT Code NBU: NBUA UA UX
Bank of England, London SWIFT Code: BKENGB2L
Account: 40000982
Threadneedle Street, London EC2R 8AH, UK
Funds will be wired into account No. UA843000010000000047330992708
For EUR remittances:
SWIFT Code NBU: NBUA UA UX DEUTSCHE BUNDESBANK, Frankfurt SWIFT Code: MARKDEFF
Account: 5040040066
IBAN DE05504000005040040066
Wilhelm-Epsteinn-Strabe 14, 60431 Frankfurt Am Main,Germany
Funds will be wired into account No. UA843000010000000047330992708
For CHF remittances CHF:
SWIFT Code NBU: NBUA UA UX ZURCHER KANTONALBANK, ZURICH SWIFT Code: ZKBKCHZZ80A Account: 0700-01227572
IBAN CH32 0070 0070 0012 2757 2
Josefstrasse 222, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland
Funds will be wired into account No. UA843000010000000047330992708
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SWIFT Code NBU: NBUA UA UX RESERVE BANK OF AUSTRALIA, Sydney SWIFT Code: RSBKAU2S
Account: 81753-2
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Funds will be wired into account No. UA843000010000000047330992708
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SWIFT Code:BOTK JP JT
Account: 653-0430048
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Here are the contacts of trusted organizations:
Come back alive – https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate/ (works directly with the command and personnel of military units, purchasing infrared thermal imaging cameras, night vision goggles, hemostatics etc)
Army SOS – https://armysos.com.ua/pomoch-armii (manages purchases of necessary ammunition, shields, intercommunication and reconnaissance facilities, etc. and delivers all goods directly)
Phoenix Wings – http://wings-phoenix.org.ua/en/about-fund/ ( the appropriate equipment & uniform, personal non-lethal protection (vests, helmets), required treatment of the wounded soldiers, and repair of the buildings used by the army)
Ukrainian Women Veteran Movement – https://www.uwvm.org.ua/?page_id=3437&lang=en (a consolidation of female veterans, amongst other things organizes preparation for actions in case of emergencies and defense situations.
Please share widely among the members of your community!
4. Analysis | The Russian invasion has some logistical problems. That doesn’t mean it’s doomed.
Conclusion:
Whether the supply problems the Russian army is experiencing will be decisive remains to be seen. But the bare fact that some units are having trouble and the invasion is proceeding slowly is not a sufficient reason, on its own, to conclude that the operation will fail.
Analysis | The Russian invasion has some logistical problems. That doesn’t mean it’s doomed.
As the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second week, some observers are starting to suggest that the Russian army’s slow progress and supply problems are evidence that the invasion is in trouble.
Russia may be facing logistical problems. But my research on the logistics of military operations suggests that this early in a campaign, such difficulties can be overcome.
Supply problems are the norm, not the exception
Even successful offensives usually have moments of high drama caused by supply shortages.
Indeed, success on the battlefield often causes supply shortages. As a force advances, its supply lines get longer, requiring more resupply vehicles in order to maintain the same rate of replenishment. The amount of broken and malfunctioning equipment also increases, which in turn increases the demand for spare parts, recovery vehicles and maintenance teams. As two historians writing about World War II observed:
To supply staffs, a breakthrough by their own forces presented problems almost as formidable as one by the enemy, for the methodical disposition forward of depots, dumps, fuel pipelines, and transport systems could not possibly keep pace with racing armored columns, even if the capacity of supply lines to the rear could be expanded rapidly enough.
More recently, the U.S.-led campaign to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 — widely regarded as one of the most successful military operations of modern times — had its supply headaches. For example, the ground portion of the war famously lasted just over four days, but the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division nearly ran out of fuel on Day 3 while trying to attack the Iraqi Republican Guard.
As Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor note in their history of the conflict, crisis was averted only by cobbling together an 18-hour emergency convoy of fuel tankers driven by a hodgepodge of soldiers trained for other jobs.
There were close calls during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, too. The U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division was supposed to be resupplied two days after the invasion began. But a confluence of events conspired to delay the first resupply until six days into the offensive. By then, despite stretching their initial supply of food and water as far as possible, some units had only enough on hand to last them a few more hours.
The supply problems in 2003 are rarely remembered now, but they were known and widely discussed at the time. As a Rand Corp. monograph on the logistics of the campaign noted:
Articles written in the midst of combat operations cited fears that the forces would soon run dry of critical supplies or provided descriptions of isolated problems. Later accounts catalogued lists of shortfalls, such as no spare parts delivered during combat operations, or described the sustainment system as one that was close to failure.
Indeed, articles in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere documented the many problems and expressed worry that the effort might stall or, worse, fail because of them.
Large military operations move slowly
The striking speed and maneuverability of modern tanks notwithstanding, military forces rarely advance at anywhere near the top speed of their vehicles. During the campaign against Iraq in 1991, for example, the average pace of the U.S. force was a little over 1 mph. Even the fastest division barely managed a little over 2 mph — the speed of a leisurely walk.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was no faster. It took U.S. forces about two weeks to cover the 350 miles from the Kuwait border to the outskirts of Baghdad. Some units took indirect routes and some sprinted over short distances, but the net pace of the invasion was about the same as in 1991.
These speeds may seem slow, but they are not unusual. In an old but still very useful study on how fast large forces advance during military operations, Robert Helmbold found that “even the most rapid advance rates of land combat forces are at least one or two orders of magnitude below that of their principal modes of movement.” Most military units, it turns out — even those participating in a successful invasion — spend the vast majority of their time standing still.
Units halt for any number of reasons, but a common one is to wait for supplies. This makes sense when we consider the mechanics of resupply. On average, resupply convoys must maintain an average speed much faster than the units they support because of the need to shuttle back and forth. The net result is to slow the overall pace of the advance, even if everything is going as planned.
It is still very early
None of this is to suggest that things are going exactly as planned for the Russian army or that it will succeed in Ukraine. However, it’s important to distinguish the difficulties that every operation confronts from those that are severe enough to lead to failure and defeat.
Only over time do shortages become decisive. It is the accumulation of resource deficits that leads to defeat, not a shortfall in any one unit. In successful operations, supply problems are common but isolated; in operations that founder on logistics, the number and scale of supply problems increase over time to the point where there is not enough combat power to continue the advance.
During the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 — perhaps the most famous example of supply problems leading to defeat — it wasn’t until German soldiers were on the outskirts of Moscow and were exposed to subzero temperatures, low on ammunition and living off a third of their daily rations that the advance stalled for good.
Whether the supply problems the Russian army is experiencing will be decisive remains to be seen. But the bare fact that some units are having trouble and the invasion is proceeding slowly is not a sufficient reason, on its own, to conclude that the operation will fail.
Ryan Baker (@RyanBaker51) is a full-time research analyst at Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), a nonresident fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, and a reserve officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CNA, the Navy, the Marine Corps or any other institution.
5. Russia pummels Ukraine's No. 2 city and convoy nears Kyiv
Russia pummels Ukraine's No. 2 city and convoy nears Kyiv
AP · by YURAS KARMANAU, JIM HEINTZ, VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV and DASHA LITVINOVA · March 1, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian shelling pounded the central square in Ukraine’s second-largest city and other civilian targets Tuesday and a 40-mile convoy of tanks and other vehicles threatened the capital — as Ukraine’s embattled president accused Moscow of resorting to terror tactics to press Europe’s largest ground war in generations.
With the Kremlin increasingly isolated by tough economic sanctions that have tanked the ruble currency, Russian troops advanced on Ukraine’s two biggest cities. In strategic Kharkiv, an eastern city with a population of about 1.5 million, videos posted online showed explosions hitting the region’s Soviet-era administrative building and residential areas. A maternity ward relocated to a shelter amid shelling.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the attack on Kharkiv’s main square “frank, undisguised terror,” blaming a Russian missile and calling it a war crime. “Nobody will forgive. Nobody will forget. ... This is state terrorism of the Russian Federation.”
As the fighting reached beyond military targets on Day 6 of a Russian invasion that has shaken the 21st century world order, reports emerged that Moscow has used cluster bombs on three populated areas. If confirmed, that would mean the war has reached a worrying new level.
The Kremlin denied Tuesday that it has used such munitions and insisted again that its forces only have struck military targets — despite evidence documented by AP reporters of shelling of homes, schools and hospitals.
The Russian defense minister vowed Tuesday to press the offensive until it achieves its goals, after a first round of talks between Ukraine and Russia yielded no stop in the fighting. Both sides agreed to another meeting in coming days.
Throughout the country, many Ukrainian civilians spent another night huddled in shelters, basements or corridors. More than a half-million people have fled the country, and the U.N. human rights office said Tuesday that it has recorded the deaths of 136 civilians, including 13 children. The real toll is likely far higher.
“It is a nightmare, and it seizes you from the inside very strongly. This cannot be explained with words,” said Kharkiv resident Ekaterina Babenko, taking shelter in a basement with neighbors for a fifth straight day. “We have small children, elderly people and frankly speaking it is very frightening.”
A Ukrainian military official said Belarusian troops joined the war Tuesday in the Chernihiv region, without providing details. But Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said he had no plans to join the fight.
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“I believe Russia is trying to put pressure (on Ukraine) with this simple method,” Zelenskyy said late Monday in a video address, referring to stepped-up shelling. He did not offer details of the talks between Ukrainian and Russian envoys, but he said Kyiv was not prepared to make concessions “when one side is hitting another with rocket artillery.”
As the talks along the Belarusian border wrapped up, several blasts could be heard in the capital, and Russian troops advanced on the city of nearly 3 million. The convoy of armored vehicles, tanks, artillery and support vehicles was 25 kilometers (17 miles) from the center of the city and stretched about 65 kilometers (40 miles), according to satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies.
“They want to break our nationhood, that’s why the capital is constantly under threat,” Zelenskyy said, saying that it was hit by three missile strikes on Monday and that hundreds of saboteurs were roaming the city.
Kharkiv, near the Russian border, is another key target. One after the other, explosions burst through a residential area of the city in one video verified by AP. In the background, a man pleaded with a woman to leave, and a woman cried.
Determined for life to go on despite the shelling, hospital workers transferred a Kharkiv maternity ward to a bomb shelter. Amid makeshift electrical sockets and mattresses piled up against the walls, pregnant women paced the crowded space, accompanied by the cries of dozens of newborns.
On the city’s main square, the administration headquarters came under Russian shelling, regional administration chief Oleh Sinehubov said. Images posted online showed the building’s facade and interior badly damaged by a powerful explosion that also blew up part of its roof. The state emergencies agency said that attack wounded six people, including a child.
Sinehubov said that at least 11 people were killed and scores of others were wounded during Monday’s shelling of the city.
Russia’s goals in hitting central Kharkiv were not immediately clear. Western officials speculated that it is trying to pull in Ukrainian forces to defend Kharkiv while a larger Russian force encircles Kyiv. They believe Putin’s overall goal is to overthrow the Ukrainian government and install a friendly one.
In a worrying development, Human Rights Watch has said it documented a cluster bomb attack outside a hospital in Ukraine’s east in recent days. Local residents have also reported the use of the munitions in Kharkiv and the village of Kiyanka near the northern city of Chernihiv, though there was no independent confirmation.
The International Criminal Court chief prosecutor has said he plans to open a Ukraine investigation and is monitoring the conflict.
Meanwhile, flames shot up from a military base northeast of Kyiv, in the suburb of Brovary, in footage shot from a car driving past. In another video verified by AP, a passenger pleads with the driver, “Misha, we need to drive quickly as they’ll strike again.”
And Ukrainian authorities released details and photos of an attack Sunday on a military base in Okhtyrka, a city between Kharkiv and Kyiv, saying more than 70 Ukrainian soldiers were killed along with some local residents. The attack could not be immediately confirmed.
In the face of that Ukrainian resistance and crippling Western sanctions, Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert — including intercontinental ballistic missiles and long-range bombers — in a stark warning to the West and a signal of his readiness to escalate the tensions to a terrifying new level. But a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States had yet to see any appreciable change in Russia’s nuclear posture.
Western nations have increased weapons shipments to Ukraine to help its forces defend themselves — but have so far ruled out sending in troops.
Messages aimed at the advancing Russian soldiers popped up on billboards, bus stops and electronic traffic signs across the capital. Some used profanity to encourage Russians to leave. Others appealed to their humanity.
“Russian soldier — Stop! Remember your family. Go home with a clean conscience,” one read.
Fighting raged in other towns and cities. The strategic port city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, is “hanging on,” said Zelenskyy adviser Oleksiy Arestovich. An oil depot was reported bombed in the eastern city of Sumy.
In the seaside resort town of Berdyansk, dozens of protesters chanted angrily in the main square against Russian occupiers, yelling at them to go home and singing the Ukrainian national anthem. They described the soldiers as exhausted young conscripts.
“Frightened kids, frightened looks. They want to eat,” Konstantin Maloletka, who runs a small shop, said by telephone. He said the soldiers went into a supermarket and grabbed canned meat, vodka and cigarettes.
“They ate right in the store,” he said. “It looked like they haven’t been fed in recent days.”
As far-reaching Western sanctions on Russian banks and other institutions took hold, the ruble plummeted, and Russia’s Central Bank scrambled to shore it up, as did Putin, signing a decree restricting foreign currency.
But that did little to calm Russian fears. In Moscow, people lined up to withdraw cash as the sanctions threatened to drive up prices and reduce the standard of living for millions of ordinary Russians.
The economic sanctions, ordered by the U.S. and other allies, were just one contributor to Russia’s growing status as a pariah country.
Russian airliners are banned from European airspace, Russian media is restricted in some countries, and some high-tech products can no longer be exported to the country. International sports bodies moved to exclude Russian athletes — in the latest blow Tuesday, Russians were barred from international ice skating events.
___
Isachenkov and Litvinova reported from Moscow. Robert Burns and Eric Tucker in Washington; Francesca Ebel, Josef Federman and Andrew Drake in Kyiv; Lorne Cook in Brussels; and other AP journalists from around the world contributed to this report.
___
AP · by YURAS KARMANAU, JIM HEINTZ, VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV and DASHA LITVINOVA · March 1, 2022
6. Reading Putin: Unbalanced or cagily preying on West's fears?
If he is unbalanced are there any near him who might take action against him? What would it take for someone or some group inside Russia to take action against Putin?
Reading Putin: Unbalanced or cagily preying on West's fears?
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV · March 1, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — For two decades, Vladimir Putin has struck rivals as reckless, impulsive. But his behavior in ordering an invasion of Ukraine — and now putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert — has some in the West questioning whether the Russian president has become dangerously unstable.
In recent days, Putin has rambled on television about Ukraine, repeated conspiracy theories about neo-Nazism and Western aggression, berated his own foreign intelligence chief on camera from the other side of a high-domed Kremlin hall where he sat alone. Now, with the West’s sanctions threatening to cripple Russia’s already hobbled economy, Putin has ordered the higher state of readiness for nuclear weapons, blaming the sanctions and what he called “aggressive statements against our country.”
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The uncertainty over his thinking adds a wildcard to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Western officials must confront Putin as they also wonder whether he comprehends or cares about cataclysmic consequences — or perhaps is intentionally preying on the long-held suspicions about him.
An aide to French President Emmanuel Macron, who spoke with Putin on Monday, said the Russian leader answered Macron “without showing irritation, in a very clinical and a very determined manner.”
“We can see that with President Putin’s state of mind, there is a risk of escalation,” added the aide, who spoke anonymously in line with the French presidency’s practice on sensitive talks. “There is a risk of manipulation from President Putin to justify what is unjustifiable.”
Foreign leaders have long tried to get inside Putin’s head and have been wrong before. And Putin in this crisis is showing many of the same traits that he has displayed since becoming Russia’s leader. Putin has directed invasions of neighbors, unspooled conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods, and ordered audacious operations like interfering in the past two U.S. presidential elections.
He single-handedly made landmark decisions like the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, consulting only his narrow inner circle of KGB veterans and keeping everyone else in the dark. He has long been surrounded by lieutenants reluctant to risk their careers by urging caution, let alone voicing adverse opinions.
He has also talked about nuclear war and once mused that such a conflict would end in Russians going “to heaven as martyrs.”
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Experts say Putin could be using the specter of nuclear conflict to fracture the growing support for Ukraine’s defense and to force concessions. His latest comments also suggest the sanctions are working.
“We have to know this is a sign that we’re getting to him,” said Jim Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “We just have to take that into account. We have to be cool.”
Officials in the U.S. were alarmed by a 5,000-word essay published under Putin’s name in July that argued Russians and Ukrainians are one people and blamed any divisions on foreign plots. One Biden administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. government’s internal thinking, said the intelligence community was concerned Putin was operating from “an emotional place” and driven by long-simmering grievances.
More recently, Macron went to meet with Putin and had several long phone calls before the invasion. A top official in Macron’s office said last week that Putin was “no longer the same,” had become “more stiff, more isolated,” and at his core had veered into the approach now playing out.
During a five-hour dinner between the two leaders, Putin spent more time railing about NATO expansion and the 2014 revolution in Ukraine than discussing the immediate crisis.
Putin’s perceived self-insulation was highlighted in recent official meetings broadcast by state television. He faced foreign leaders and close aides from the opposite end of a long table. No Russian official who spoke gave a dissenting view.
“He’s not had that many people having direct inputs to him,” said Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. “So we’re concerned that this isolated individual (has) become a megalomaniac in terms of his notion of himself being the only historic figure that can rebuild old Russia or recreate the notion of the Soviet sphere.”
Putin has long been committed to recovering lost glory, suppressing dissent and keeping neighbors in Moscow’s orbit. In 2005, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Russia has fought a war with Georgia, annexed Ukraine’s Crimea, backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, and earlier this year briefly deployed troops to help quell protests in Kazakhstan.
His public dismissals of Ukrainian sovereignty go back many years. In 2008, he is reported to have told President George W. Bush, “George, you have to understand that Ukraine is not even a country.”
A year before that, he displayed his anger toward the U.S. and NATO in a pivotal speech at the Munich Security Conference, blasting the alliance’s expansion eastward and attacking American military intervention abroad. The U.S. was mired at the time in the Iraq War, launched on the basis of false assertions about Iraq having nuclear weapons capability.
“The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way,” Putin said then. “This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations.”
Rep. Chris Stewart, a Utah Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had not seen evidence prior to the Ukraine invasion to suggest Putin was behaving irrationally, and he noted that other world leaders in history have been dismissed by outsiders as irrational. Putin, he said, has “an incredible appetite for risk when it comes to Ukraine.”
Two years ago, Putin endorsed the latest version of a Russian nuclear deterrent policy that allows for the use of atomic weapons in response to a nuclear attack or aggression involving conventional weapons that “threatens the very existence of the state.”
Putin’s associate Dmitry Medvedev, who served as placeholder president when Putin shifted into the prime minister’s seat due to term limits, said in 2019 that a move by the West to cut Russia off from the SWIFT financial system would amount to an effective declaration of war — a signal that the Kremlin may view Western sanctions as a threat on par with military aggression. The sanctions announced in recent days include cutting key Russian banks out of SWIFT. The ruble has since plummeted.
In 2018, Putin told an audience that Russia wouldn’t strike first in a nuclear conflict but theorized about retaliating against an imminent enemy attack, adding with a smirk: “We would be victims of aggression and would get to heaven as martyrs. And they will just die and not even have time to repent.”
James M. Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he did not believe nuclear war was imminent but there was real potential for escalation. Another possibility was Putin would use increasingly brutal non-nuclear tactics in Ukraine.
Acton suggested finding an “off-ramp” that might allow Putin a perceived victory. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. secretly agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling back from Cuba.
But, Acton added, “I’m not entirely clear whether he in his own mind knows what an off-ramp looks like right now.”
Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear policy at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said he wasn’t immediately worried about a nuclear escalation. But one danger of sending public signals about nuclear weapons is that they can be difficult to interpret, Lewis said, just as the world is trying now to understand Putin’s latest moves and intentions.
“He is isolated and making poor decisions and losing,” Lewis said. “And that is dangerous.”
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Isachenkov reported from Moscow. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Robert Burns in Washington, Angela Charlton and Sylvie Corbet in Paris, and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV · March 1, 2022
7. A Team Of American And British Special Forces Veterans Are Preparing To Join Ukraine’s Fight Against Russia
A Team Of American And British Special Forces Veterans Are Preparing To Join Ukraine’s Fight Against Russia
Pete Kiehart for BuzzFeed News
Members of the Georgian Legion paramilitary group of foreign fighters train on Jan. 14 in Kyiv.
KYIV — A group of 10 special operations forces veterans are staging in Poland and preparing to cross into Ukraine, where they plan to take up President Volodymyr Zelensky on his offer to “join the defense of Ukraine, Europe, and the world,” according to a US Army veteran arranging their passage.
The group, composed of six US citizens, three Brits, and a German, are NATO-trained and experienced in close combat and counterterrorism. They want to be among the first to officially join the new International Legion of the Territorial Defense of Ukraine that Zelensky announced Sunday, according to text messages reviewed by BuzzFeed News. Two former American infantry officers are also making plans to come to Ukraine to provide “leadership” for the group, the Army veteran recruiter said.
As intense fighting raged in the Ukrainian capital for the fourth day and Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered nuclear deterrence forces on high alert, Zelensky urged people around the world who can help fight Moscow’s “vile tactics” to enlist in Ukraine’s armed forces.
Pete Kiehart for BuzzFeed News
The commander of the Georgian Legion paramilitary group shows WhatsApp messages from an American inquiring about serving in Ukraine on Jan. 14 in Kyiv.
“This is the beginning of a war against Europe, against European structures, against democracy, against basic human rights, against a global order of law, rules, and peaceful coexistence,” Zelensky said in a statement announcing a decree on the creation of the unit. “Anyone who wants to join the defense of Ukraine, Europe, and the world can come and fight side by side with the Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals.”
The news of an official foreign unit was met with excitement by members of the Georgia National Legion, an English-speaking force of volunteers with Western military experience who train Ukrainian troops and sometimes deploy to the front line with the country’s marines.
“This is what we have waited for. It’s very good,” Levan Pipia, a legion soldier and Georgian army veteran of the 2008 war with Russia, told BuzzFeed News on Sunday.
Pete Kiehart for BuzzFeed News
A British soldier in the Ukrainian Army who goes by “Johnny” on Jan. 21 in Pavlopil, Ukraine
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss was quick to respond to the news, saying she supports British nationals who might go to Ukraine to fight “for democracy,” the BBC reported. She said Ukraine’s struggle was one for freedom, “not just for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe.”
Thousands of foreign fighters have flocked to Ukraine since Russia’s war against the country began in 2014. While most of them have been Russians and citizens of other former Soviet republics, hundreds have come from the European Union, roughly 40 have arrived from the US, and at least 12 from the UK, according to BuzzFeed News’ reporting and independent research done by experts who track such fighters.
The Western foreigners who have come to Ukraine are a motley crew. There are the idealists who believe their own countries aren’t doing enough to help the Ukrainians secure their freedom. There are the tourists who hop from conflict to conflict seeking adventure, war stories, and money. And then there are the extremists who have seen opportunities to link up with far-right paramilitary groups fighting in Ukraine. Of course, some of the foreigners fit into more than one category.
BuzzFeed News met Aiden Aslin, a 27-year-old British citizen who is serving his fourth year in the Ukrainian marines, at the eastern front line in Pavlopil in January. “I just want to support the Ukrainian state, the people, and help them fight for their sovereignty and independence,” he said.
In the weeks since Aslin’s story was published, dozens of men from the US, the UK, and European Union nations have emailed BuzzFeed News about the story and said they were interested in following in his footsteps.
Some in Ukraine’s military see the foreign fighters as filling the void of official Western military boots on the ground in Ukraine. President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that American forces will not be deployed to the country to fight alongside Ukrainians. The US withdrew military trainers from western Ukraine earlier this month.
Pete Kiehart for BuzzFeed News
Foreign fighters in the Georgian Legion paramilitary group after a training at their headquarters on Jan. 14 in Kyiv
In a briefing with reporters Sunday, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba invited foreigners interested in joining the international unit to contact foreign diplomatic missions of Ukraine in their respective countries.
“Now these people have a legal right and legal framework to fight under the chain of command of the armed forces of Ukraine,” he said. “Their access to Ukraine will be facilitated to the maximum extent possible.”
He said that the closure of airports due to Russian missiles presented a logistical challenge and that land crossings from EU countries are now the only way into Ukraine. “But we will help you,” he said.
He added: “Together we defeated Hitler, and we will defeat Putin, too.”
More on this
8. Putin Accidentally Revitalized the West’s Liberal Order
As an aside, shouldn't we move on from the "West?" What about the countries in the INDOPACIFIC? Japan, Australia, Korea, India and others? They support the international rules based order. in the "East."
Excerpts:
We are a long way from the ultimate outcome of Russia’s invasion, but even if Ukrainian military forces cannot prevail or President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government are killed or captured, it’s difficult to see how Putin’s broader gamble succeeds. If Zelensky falls, another leader will step forward. Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians have become anti-Russian. The scene depicted in Picasso’s Guernica, one of wanton and barbaric violence, is the best Putin can hope for: Conquering Ukraine will require unspeakable brutality, and even if Moscow succeeds on this count, foreign legions are flowing to Ukraine to assist an insurgency in bleeding Russia’s occupation. If Ukraine fends off Russia’s assault, it will be welcomed in NATO and the EU.
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Those of us already living in free societies owe Ukrainians a great debt of gratitude. Their courage has reminded us of the nobility of sacrifice for just causes. As Ronald Reagan memorably said, “There is a profound difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.” What Ukrainians have done is inspire Americans and others to shake ourselves out of our torpor and create policies of assistance to them, in the hopes that we might one day prove worthy of becoming their ally.
Putin Accidentally Revitalized the West’s Liberal Order
The Russian president thought he sensed an opportunity to take advantage of a disunited West. He has been proved wrong.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed a chorus of despair—beyond the cost in Ukrainian lives, the international order that the U.S. and its allies built after World War II is, we are told, crumbling. The writer Paul Kingsnorth has declared that the liberal order is already dead. The Indian journalist Rahul Shivshankar has argued that “in the ruins across Ukraine you will find the remains of Western arrogance.” Even the brilliant historian Margaret MacMillan has written that “the world will never be the same. We have moved already into a new and unstable era.”
The reverse is true. Vladimir Putin has attempted to crush Ukraine’s independence and “Westernness” while also demonstrating NATO’s fecklessness and free countries’ unwillingness to shoulder economic burdens in defense of our values. He has achieved the opposite of each. Endeavoring to destroy the liberal international order, he has been the architect of its revitalization.
Germany has long soft-pedaled policies targeting Russia, but its chancellor, Olaf Scholz, made a moving and extraordinary change, committing an additional $100 billion to defense spending immediately, shipping weapons to Ukraine, and ending the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was constructed to bring gas to Germany from Russia. Hungary, thought to be the weakest link in the Western chain, has supported without question moves by the European Union and NATO to punish Moscow. Turkey, arguably the most Russia-friendly NATO country, having bought missile defense systems from Moscow, has invoked its responsibilities in the 1936 Montreux Convention and closed the Bosphorus Strait to Russian warships. NATO deployed its rapid-reaction force for the first time, and allies are rushing to send troops to reinforce frontline states. A cascade of places have closed their airspace to Russian craft. The United States has orchestrated action and gracefully let others have the stage, strengthening allies and institutions both.
We are a long way from the ultimate outcome of Russia’s invasion, but even if Ukrainian military forces cannot prevail or President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government are killed or captured, it’s difficult to see how Putin’s broader gamble succeeds. If Zelensky falls, another leader will step forward. Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians have become anti-Russian. The scene depicted in Picasso’s Guernica, one of wanton and barbaric violence, is the best Putin can hope for: Conquering Ukraine will require unspeakable brutality, and even if Moscow succeeds on this count, foreign legions are flowing to Ukraine to assist an insurgency in bleeding Russia’s occupation. If Ukraine fends off Russia’s assault, it will be welcomed in NATO and the EU.
The Ukrainian government that so recently seemed mired in corruption and division has been outstanding: President Zelensky has refused to flee and inspired resistance; outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian military forces seem to have held their own. They understand that they’re in a battle of ideas, establishing, for example, a hotline for Russian prisoners of war to call their families.
Civil activism is the lifeblood of free societies, and Ukrainians have been excelling, including the sunflower lady, who cursed Russian soldiers; civilians lining up to collect arms and make Molotov cocktails, or change out street signs to confuse the invaders; and breweries retooling to produce weaponry.
Ukraine’s tenacity and creativity has ignited civil-society energy, corporate strength, and humanitarian assistance. The hacker group Anonymous has declared war on Russia, disrupting state TV and making public the defense ministry’s personnel rosters. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has promised to help keep Ukraine online. The chipmakers Intel and AMD have stopped sending supplies to Russia; BP is divesting from its stake in the Russian energy giant Rosneft; FedEx and UPS have suspended service to Russia. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is cutting all its investments in Russia. YouTube and Meta have demonetized Russian state media. (Even Pornhub is denying Russians access.) Belarusian hackers disrupted their country’s rail network to prevent their government from sending troops to support the Russian war. Polish citizens collected 100 tons of food for Ukraine in two days. Bars are pouring out Russian vodka. Iconic architecture in cities all over the free world is lit up with the colors of the Ukrainian flag to show solidarity. Sports teams are refusing to play Russia in international tournaments. The London Philharmonic opened its Saturday concert by playing the Ukrainian national anthem, and the Simpsons modeled Ukrainian flags. This is what free societies converging on an idea looks like. And the idea is this: Resist Putin’s evil.
Although we in the West sometimes lose faith that our values are universal, Putin certainly believes they are. Otherwise, why attempt to conquer a country to prevent it from succeeding? And why threaten prison sentences for Russians giving aid to Ukraine? Plenty of Russians seem to share our perspective: Protests took place in scores of Russian cities over the weekend, and thousands of people were arrested. The Russian tennis star Andrey Rublev wrote no war please on the lens of a TV camera during an interview. Russian soldiers are allowing civilian protesters to halt their tanks. Rumors abound that Putin has fired the chief of his military’s general staff. Reports have emerged that oligarchs such as Oleg Deripaska are calling for an end to the war.
Nor is the liberal international order just a project of the transatlantic alliance. The UN may not have been able to prevent Russian aggression, but it served its purpose of forcing accountability onto governments for their positions. Kenya’s ambassador to the UN reminded us all that smaller powers, countries that suffered imperial conquest, are some of the biggest beneficiaries of a system that affirms “the sovereign equality of states, and states’ inviolable rights to territorial integrity and political independence.” Japan has joined many of the Western sanctions against Russia, while Southeast Asian nations such as Singapore and Indonesia have condemned the invasion.
China has squirmed at having its longtime support for an individual state’s sovereignty conflict with its just-christened friendship treaty with Russia, and is balancing its political position of not enforcing sanctions by having to limit financing by Chinese banks for Russian goods because of the risk of exclusion from the global financial order. Russia’s argument that Ukraine isn’t really a state may seem consonant with China’s position toward Taiwan, but worldwide reaction to Russian aggression ought certainly to give Beijing pause before it considers an attempt to subjugate Taiwan.
Those of us already living in free societies owe Ukrainians a great debt of gratitude. Their courage has reminded us of the nobility of sacrifice for just causes. As Ronald Reagan memorably said, “There is a profound difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest.” What Ukrainians have done is inspire Americans and others to shake ourselves out of our torpor and create policies of assistance to them, in the hopes that we might one day prove worthy of becoming their ally.
9. Western Military Observers Shocked at How Badly Russia's Military Is Doing
Excerpts:
The sources pointed out just how shocked many in the broader NATO military community were at how incompetent Russian soldiers appeared, especially the officer and non-commissioned officer corps. Many described the professionalism and efficiency of the entire Russian military operations in Ukraine as unimpressive and sloppy.
Similarly surprising to the Western military community is just how good the performance of Ukrainian soldiers has been. Besides the prolific exploits of Ukrainian anti-aircraft operations (so much that there’s an urban legend of an Ukrainian fighter pilot ace known as the “Ghost of Kyiv”), Ukrainian units have also stood up against Russian special forces and won. Part of their success so far are the will and inspiration to fight (valuable to any fighting force), along with the steps Ukraine has taken since 2014 to improve its military, such as the NATO training its soldiers have received.
For example, even Ukraine’s ability to fly and lethally deploy the Turkish drone systems that first upset President Vladimir Putin in late 2021, without Russian air defense shooting them down has been surprising given its air superiority. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military is publishing videos claiming to show their successful attacks, which have been incredibly valuable for morale and drawing support from Western allies.
Western Military Observers Shocked at How Badly Russia's Military Is Doing
Multiple sources told VICE News that NATO military officials have been surprised by both Russian incompetence in the field and the fierce Ukrainian resistance.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has both surprised and informed Western military onlookers, who are getting a better view of what the Kremlin’s forces are capable of in the field.
And so far they aren’t impressed.
Multiple Western military sources who spoke to VICE News on background and on the condition of anonymity, because they weren’t authorized to speak with the media, say their opinion of Russia’s military abilities has gone down.
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“What I’m seeing is unbelievable,” said a source involved in the special forces community. “I think this is why they pivoted so hard toward influence operations,” they added, referring to Russia’s well-established meddling and troll farms used against Western democracies in recent years.
In the last several days, Russian forces have continued to hammer both the eastern Ukraine city of Kharkiv and the capital Kyiv with heavy bombing, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claims Russian troops have sustained at least 4,500 casualties. Ukraine’s defence forces, bolstered by civilian volunteers, have managed to keep Russian forces from overrunning Ukraine’s two biggest cities, although the on-the-ground fighting has moved closer to those locations. Ukraine has claimed it has severely damaged Russia’s supply lines, slowing the advance.
Another military source told VICE News that officials and analysts within the U.S. military were “psyched” to see what types of weapons and hardware their Russian adversaries are using and how their airstrike tradecraft and radar systems work. The brutal war, which has already claimed thousands of lives since it began last Thursday, also offers the chance to gain intelligence about Russian military operations and how they’ve evolved in recent years.
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“We haven’t seen them in a war like this in years,” a source said. “Even Syria wasn’t the same. This is a huge sample size.”
Though Russia recently sent troops to the war in Syria—mostly special operations forces and airpower—and in the war in Donbas (in a covert and unofficial capacity)—the current invasion of Ukraine has involved hundreds of thousands of troops and everything in the tool kit of the Russian military. As one source noted, Russia has gotten to watch and take notes over two decades of NATO wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
Russia hasn’t fought a war of this magnitude since the war in Chechnya, which occurred in 1994, several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But President Vladimir Putin has poured money and resources into the Russian military in a bid to modernize it as a modern fighting force capable of going up against any NATO military coalition.
The sources pointed out just how shocked many in the broader NATO military community were at how incompetent Russian soldiers appeared, especially the officer and non-commissioned officer corps. Many described the professionalism and efficiency of the entire Russian military operations in Ukraine as unimpressive and sloppy.
Similarly surprising to the Western military community is just how good the performance of Ukrainian soldiers has been. Besides the prolific exploits of Ukrainian anti-aircraft operations (so much that there’s an urban legend of an Ukrainian fighter pilot ace known as the “Ghost of Kyiv”), Ukrainian units have also stood up against Russian special forces and won. Part of their success so far are the will and inspiration to fight (valuable to any fighting force), along with the steps Ukraine has taken since 2014 to improve its military, such as the NATO training its soldiers have received.
For example, even Ukraine’s ability to fly and lethally deploy the Turkish drone systems that first upset President Vladimir Putin in late 2021, without Russian air defense shooting them down has been surprising given its air superiority. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military is publishing videos claiming to show their successful attacks, which have been incredibly valuable for morale and drawing support from Western allies.
10. The Russian People May Be Starting to Think Putin Is Insane
The question is how far will the Russian people go in opposition to Putin?
The Russian People May Be Starting to Think Putin Is Insane
MADMAN THEORY
The more desperately Putin tries to demonstrate his authority ahead of elections in 2024, the more his grip on power may slip away.
Updated Mar. 01, 2022 6:42AM ET / Published Mar. 01, 2022 4:22AM ET
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
There is a lot of talk in the West about Russian President Vladimir Putin being mentally unhinged. How could he not have known that his invasion of Ukraine would have serious consequences for his country? Or is he so obsessed with maintaining an image of greatness—especially ahead of Russia’s upcoming 2024 presidential elections—that he doesn’t care?
Either way, Putin risks losing the confidence of his people, whose economic suffering will increase as the conflict continues.
Perhaps the question of Putin’s sanity is beside the point, because there is little the West can do about it. Although both Hitler and Stalin were crazy by any psychiatric standard, they were still able to inflict horrific damage and death on millions of people. But Hitler did not have nuclear weapons, and Stalin’s hydrogen bomb was still being tested when he died. Putin’s nuclear arsenal, on the other hand, could destroy parts of the West in minutes.
In a nationally televised address last Thursday, Putin offered a menacing warning of Russia’s nuclear capability: “No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” On Sunday, Putin went even further by announcing that Russia’s nuclear forces have been put on high alert, an order that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called “dangerous rhetoric” and “irresponsible behavior,” which “adds to the seriousness of the situation.”
The only other time that the Kremlin’s nuclear threat reached this height was during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But Khrushchev—though volatile and impulsive—was apparently a rational actor, not consumed by the historical grudges and the need to show off his masculine credentials that seem to obsess Putin. Khrushchev also had to consider the views of fellow Politburo members. Although Putin purports to consult with advisers, he seems to make key decisions on his own. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Military Valery Gerasimov looked uncomfortable as they sat with Putin when he made Sunday’s announcement, but if they had reservations, they were ignored.
If Putin is indeed so detached from reality in his pursuit of his reckless confrontation with the West, what are his motivations?
First of all, like any dictator, Putin does not feel confident of his hold on power. He knows that he was not democratically elected to the presidency in 2018, or even in 2012, because serious contenders were barred from participating. Using his powerful security services, Putin has suppressed the media and arrested democratic oppositionists, including Alexei Navalny, who has been in jail for over a year after being poisoned. Ultimately, the Russian leader cannot be sure what his people really think of him.
“All Putin’s talk about the West destroying Russian values and NATO threatening Russia with nuclear weapons camouflages his intense fear of democratic aspirations in his own country.”
Putin’s approval ratings were around 65 percent at the end of 2021, which may seem impressive by Western standards, but Russians are conditioned to say they approve of their leader when there is no alternative. Adding to that, as Putin knows, the continued decline in incomes and living standards is a potential trigger for serious dissatisfaction with his leadership.
Because of this insecurity, Putin hates having democratic states on his country’s border, especially Ukraine. He doesn’t want his people to get ideas. All Putin’s talk about the West destroying Russian values and NATO threatening Russia with nuclear weapons camouflages his intense fear of democratic aspirations in his own country.
Putin admitted as much on Thursday: “Of course, the question is not about NATO itself. It merely serves as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile ‘anti-Russia’ is taking shape.” And later: “Russia cannot feel safe, develop, and exist while facing a permanent threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine.”
Putin is all the more alarmed about NATO support for states along Russia’s border because of his growing concerns over how much longer he is going to stay in power. Although the Russian presidential election is two years away, there is reportedly considerable disquiet in the Kremlin about what will happen in 2024. Putin himself said last October that he would not say what his plans are because “it would make the [political] situation unstable.”
Leadership succession in countries where the autocratic leader and his cronies have amassed great wealth at the expense of their people, as in Russia’s case, is fraught with danger. Once out of power, they could be called to account by the new government, and ensuring that a designated successor will protect their interests can be problematic, especially if members of the elite know one another’s secrets and there is infighting. Accusations of corruption are potent political weapons in Russia.
Putin needs to be in a strong position, with high support from Russians, when he decides what happens in 2024. Either he runs again or his loyal, hand-picked successor does, and he can retire happily to his sumptuous palace in Gelendzhik. He is staking his claim on Russia’s future by invading Ukraine and demonstrating to his patriotic citizenry that he can stand up to NATO.
Putin may have been inspired by memories of the Chechen war, which catapulted him to the presidency in 2000. He was a virtual unknown when Yeltsin appointed him prime minister—and his designated successor—in August 1999. As with Ukraine today, Putin used a false flag as an excuse to invade Chechnya, claiming that Chechen terrorists were responsible for September 1999 bombings in Russia. As a result of his determined pursuit of the ruthless Chechen war, Putin’s approval ratings sky-rocketed.
Significantly, in Thursday’s address, Putin mentioned this war and brought up the old, false accusation that the West had actively supported the terrorists there. Putin’s goal in Ukraine is the same as it was in Chechnya—installing a Kremlin-sponsored regime to take the place of one that won’t march to Moscow’s tune. He also hopes that his bold aggression will bring him the affirmation at home that he got with the Chechen war.
But all is not going according to Putin’s plan, with Ukrainian resistance stronger than expected and Western sanctions crippling. This is probably why Putin resorted to the insanity of his nuclear threat.
If Putin seems both narcissistic and deranged to the West, his own people may be getting the same impression, especially now that he has started talking about using nukes. And feelings of patriotism can only go so far when pocketbooks are empty. As political commentator Anton Orekh noted: “The effect of the current patriotic enthusiasm will be even shorter than after the Crimea. The economic situation is getting worse, so after some time even a victory over the Kiev junta and the Anglo-Saxons will arouse people less than prices in stores and half-empty shelves.”
Unlike those who lived under Stalin and Hitler, Russian people today do not face death if they protest on the street, though they can be thrown into jail, as we have seen with the thousands of arrests in the past few days. Nor would Putin’s subordinates be shot if they refused to go along with Putin’s further acts of aggression. So, hopefully, Russians themselves will take action and stop their leader before “the consequences we have never seen in our entire history” are allowed to occur.
11. The solace for young Russians like me is that Putin is also digging his own grave in Ukraine
Excerpts:
None of my younger Russian friends around the globe are surprised. We’re so used to feeling disappointed and embarrassed by our government that we barely feel shame any more. Like children of abusive parents, after so many years we forget what’s normal and what’s not. We simply sigh, shake our heads, and say: “Well, what did you expect?” The “global Russians”, as we call ourselves, long ago gave up on the prospect of having a country and government we’d be proud of.
I can’t help but be reminded of the Soviet war with Afghanistan: 15,000 Russian deaths. Nine years of combat. My mother told me stories of her former classmates, people she actually knew, arriving back in coffins. It was a totally pointless endeavour that cost Leonid Brezhnev the entire economy and helped contribute to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Putin, who is so keen on history, is unknowingly digging his own grave. With Russia cut off from Swift and facing sanctions from the EU, the US, and the UK, it’ll take only a few years before it runs into extremely hard times. And when it does, people will not be afraid any more. If history teaches us anything, it’s that people – even ones as stubborn and patient as the Russians – will not tolerate a lack of food. When the money runs out, so will Putin’s clock.
And we – the new generation of Russians – will be waiting.
The solace for young Russians like me is that Putin is also digging his own grave in Ukraine | Sergey Faldin
When sanctions bite and hard times hit the country, people will lose their fear. Then Putin will be finished
The reason you don’t see a revolution happening in Moscow is not that people don’t care about what’s happening in Ukraine. On the contrary, my social media feed is filled with posts from Russians opposing the war. “What happened?” they say. “How did we get to this? This is madness!”
People are saying they feel guilty about being Russian. People are burning their passports on camera. Hell, I posted: “I am Russian but Putin is not my president.”
But there are far fewer people actually out protesting. You have to understand that ordinary people in Russia are scared out of their minds. On the first day of the conflict, almost 1,000 protesters were jailed across Russia for walking outside with as little as a piece of paper that said: “I don’t want war.” According to the independent media source OVD-info, in the first four days of the war more than 5,200 people were arrested.
My friend spent time in jail for walking down the same street as the protesters. A professor of sociology, Grigory Yudin, was arrested in the centre of Moscow and reportedly beaten up in the back of an autozak (police bus).
There are now more police teams than I can count – with new names such as Rosgvardiya (Russia’s internal military force) – and they are ruthless. These forces were created several years ago specifically to wander the streets of Moscow (and other cities) and prevent anything “suspicious” from happening.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re an 18-year-old kid or a pregnant middle-aged woman, they’ll beat you up, put you in a wagon and take you in for questioning. When you have a former KGB agent in charge, you have a country that functions as an enormous jail.
It is painfully clear to us that this war is absolutely pointless. Putin is using false history lessons, lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union, and making claims about Nato advancing its forces simply to justify his own madness. I believe that the true answer to the question people ask on social media – “how did we get to this?” – is that Putin is insane.
I don’t know when or why this happened. Maybe it’s his age. Maybe his isolation during the pandemic caused him to question his legacy. I could believe anything now.
When my wife, who is Ukrainian, and I woke up last Thursday in our Dubai hotel room, our whole world had turned upside down. We turned on Putin’s televised address about the military operation. Twenty minutes later, we turned it off. We were scared by the vagueness of his report. What was a “special military operation”? Was this really a declaration of the third world war? We were disgusted by the theatrical performance of a president we had never chosen. We were even more disgusted by the thought that most people in Russia would believe him.
There’s a huge divide of opinions between the “New Russians” – my generation, people born in the 1990s, who never lived in Soviet times – and the older generation. Not one of my friends back home believes that Putin wasn’t planning this war for some time. The older Russians are fed lies by TV and other media to convince them that what Putin is doing is justifiable.
The big problem is that there is no coherent ideology in Russia. There is no shared way of interpreting the world. Instead, the simplistic idea that has become prevalent is a story of “us v them”. It’s extremely easy to sell and it gets votes. That’s the agenda that Putin has been pushing for the past decade or so.
He says that Ukraine is an enemy that is historically part of Russia but sold itself to Nato, or that everyone in the world is the US’s puppet.
These ideas are so contagious. When you try to reason with an average person in Russia, they might say something like: “The TV is right and you’re wrong. Also – you’re probably an agent of the CIA.” Many people live in ever-present fear and it’s easier for them to believe what they’re told. Standing outside the crowd can cost you your freedom.
None of my younger Russian friends around the globe are surprised. We’re so used to feeling disappointed and embarrassed by our government that we barely feel shame any more. Like children of abusive parents, after so many years we forget what’s normal and what’s not. We simply sigh, shake our heads, and say: “Well, what did you expect?” The “global Russians”, as we call ourselves, long ago gave up on the prospect of having a country and government we’d be proud of.
I can’t help but be reminded of the Soviet war with Afghanistan: 15,000 Russian deaths. Nine years of combat. My mother told me stories of her former classmates, people she actually knew, arriving back in coffins. It was a totally pointless endeavour that cost Leonid Brezhnev the entire economy and helped contribute to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Putin, who is so keen on history, is unknowingly digging his own grave. With Russia cut off from Swift and facing sanctions from the EU, the US, and the UK, it’ll take only a few years before it runs into extremely hard times. And when it does, people will not be afraid any more. If history teaches us anything, it’s that people – even ones as stubborn and patient as the Russians – will not tolerate a lack of food. When the money runs out, so will Putin’s clock.
And we – the new generation of Russians – will be waiting.
Sergey Faldin is a writer and podcaster based in Tbilisi
12. Ukraine Conflict Update - March 1, 2022 | SOF News
Excerpts:
Future Outlook
Many believe that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was an attempt to create a neutral or vassal state that will provide a buffer from NATO forces. He may or may not be able to do that. What he has done in five days is united NATO so it is stronger than ever before, now has more NATO troops on his borders, and has pushed the Ukrainian people closer to Europe and NATO. The war has been going badly for the Russians but may soon turn around as the bulk of his troops, tanks, APCs, and artillery get to the fighting zones. The current number of Russian troops (150,000 plus) is not enough to secure a country with a population of 44 million. How long the Russians stay in the occupied areas will determine how much they bleed from a Ukrainian insurgency that surely is now taking form.
Ukraine Conflict Update - March 1, 2022 | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, resistance by the Ukrainian people, response by NATO and European community, and humanitarian crisis.
Russian Offensive. The offensive had a short lull over the weekend, likely a factor of ammunition, fuel, and reinforcements catching up to the ‘front lines’. The Russian invasion has suffered some logistical problems, but these will be overcome in time. There may have been some time taken to make adjustments to strategy and tactics to account for the fierce Ukrainian resistance. However, offensive operations by the Russians were at a higher op tempo beginning on Monday (Feb 28). Russia has committed over 75% of the 150,000 troops that it had assembled along the borders of Ukraine.
Ukrainian airfields in the west have been interdicted with missile and air attacks in an attempt to ground the Ukraine Air Force. The Russian Air Force had a bit of a slow start. Logistic centers are also being targeted in the west to damage the supply lines of weapons and equipment coming across the border from Poland provided by NATO nations.
Russian Reinforcements. A miles-long convoy (estimates are about 64 klics long) of Russian troops, tanks, APCs, logistic and supply vehicles, and fuel trucks are enroute to the outskirts of Kyiv. Various news agencies have been highlighting the imagery by Maxar Techonologies depicting this long Russian convoy as it makes its way through Ukraine. They will soon begin staging for an assault on the capital city. Some of the equipment moving into Ukraine is the TOS-1A – a MLRS with a thermobaric projectile. Some social media accounts say this weapon has already been used in Ukraine. Probably more propaganda than anything is the report that 400 Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group flew from Africa to Ukraine to join the fight in Kyiv. The best-known private military company of Russia has a storied history.
Lviv Threatened? More reinforcements in the form of Belarus troops on the way heading south into northern Ukraine. A divisional sized unit of the Belarus army has been seen in the southeastern part of Belarus near the city of Brest. It is posed to head south into Ukraine along the Polish-Ukrainian border. This could threaten Lviv in the west, interdict the east-west route across Ukraine, and cut off resupply lines coming from the Polish border.
Kharkiv. The country’s second largest city located in northeast Ukraine is under assault with Russian forces controlling the major highways into and around Kharkiv. Civilian vehicles are not allowed to leave the city. Recent advances into the city (as of Monday night) were rebuffed by the Ukrainian defensive forces. The city is being subjected to bombardment by Russian artillery and MLRS units. The prospect is that eventually the city will fall to the Russians. With the bombardment of artillery and rockets numerous civilian casualties are likely to occur. The Russians will have to content with Ukrainians who, as long as supplies hold out, will have an advantage in the conduct of urban warfare.
Russian SOF. President Putin thanked his Russian special forces units for their heroic duty in Ukraine on February 27 (Sun). His thanks were extended during a televised address to Russia. (Reuters, Feb 27, 2022).
Ukrainian Defense. The defenders have been using anti-air and anti-armor missiles and rockets to great effect – contributing to the stalled Russian offensive. More of these defensive weapons will arrive in Ukraine. The Dutch have sent 200 Stinger missiles. Berlin confirmed that it is supplying Ukraine with 500 Stinger missiles and 1,000 anti-tank weapons. These MANPADs will complement the S-300 missile systems and BUK-M1 anti-aircraft systems of the Ukrainian defense forces. The Ukrainians have used the day-long pause in Russian operations to strengthen their defenses and make adjustments to their troop disposition. Is help coming? NATO may not send troops to Ukraine but former NATO soldiers are responding to requests for assistance. Some have SOF experience. Ukraine has temporarily lifted visas for foreigners who wish to join the International Legion recently formed by the country.
Eastern Units at Risk? There are more than 12 Ukrainian brigades defending the eastern border. They risk getting cut off by Russian forces moving up from Mariupol and down from Kharkiv. At some point the Russians could execute a pincer movement and cut these brigades off from retreat to central Ukraine. Kherson, in the south of Ukraine, is also under attack with Russians on the outskirts of the city.
Overall Situation
The Cyber War. There are reports of cyber attacks worldwide against a number of countries and private institutions. This was preceded with cyber attacks against the Ukrainians prior to the invasion. No doubt the Russians have unleashed their cyber warriors. Most countries are fighting back and there are likely ‘offensive’ cyber operations taking place that the public is unaware of. Ukraine has not been sitting on the sidelines in this area of the conflict. It has enlisted thousands of cybersecurity professionals in the war effort against Russia. The ‘IT Army’ has grown rapidly. Volunteers are recruited through a Telegram channel and tasks are assigned to the volunteers. “Ukraine’s Volunteer ‘IT Army’ is Hacking in Uncharted Territory”, Wired.com, February 27, 2022.
Exodus to the Border. More than 500,000 Ukrainians have fled the country, many finding refuge and safety in Poland, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and Slovakia. Long lines of cars and buses are stretched for miles at the border areas. Trains running from east to west in Ukraine are filled to capacity. Many have abandoned their cars on the roads after running out of gas and are trudging on foot with what little possessions they can carry. Many foreigners had been working and studying in Ukraine and are now finding their way across the border. Many of the Ukrainians departing for another country are passing through Lviv in western Ukraine. The city has been spared much of the fighting thus far but its citizens are preparing for the arrival of Russian forces. One man making his way out of Ukraine when the Russians invaded was the German spy chief – evacuated over a land route by German special forces. More than 150,000 Ukrainians are now internally displaced.
Humanitarian Crisis. The medical system in Ukraine is stretched and food is running low for the Ukrainians. While markets are open the food stocks are low. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are attempting to provide assistance to Ukrainians with shipments to the western border of Ukraine. The Russian artillery and rocket attacks are causing numerous civilian casualties.
Negotiations. Talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials took place on Monday (Feb 28) on the Belarus Ukraine border. It is unlikely that any progress was being made in the six hour long talks. The Russian delegation was led by Putin’s adviser on culture – not exactly a high-level representative. The meeting merely gave each nation the ability to project to the world their willingness to negotiate; there was no expectation by anyone that it would lead to a truce or ceasefire. There are indications that the talks will continue over the coming days.
International Response
NATO Jets for Ukraine. News reports on Sunday (Feb 27) said that the European nations would contribute fighter jets to Ukraine. These reports were initially met with some skepticism. Apparently the story was true. Poland, Bulgaria, and Slovakia still fly Russian-made planes similar to those flown by the Ukrainian air force. Over 70 planes will be sent to Ukraine, including 28 MiG-29s from Poland, 12 from Slovakia, and 16 from Bulgaria. Another 14 Su-25s will come from Bulgaria. The planes from Bulgaria are still in question. “Ukrainian pilots arrive in Poland to pick up donated fighter jets”, Politico, February 28, 2022.
Weapons on the Way. Australia is sending missiles, Finland small arms, and other nations are sending a variety of weapons, ammunitions, and munitions. These fly into countries bordering Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and others, and then are trucked to the western border of Ukraine.
Sanctions. On Sunday (Feb 28) the U.S. Department of State announced additional measures against the Russian financial system. The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets (OFAC) has prohibited any U.S. person from conducting any transaction involving the selected Russian financial institutions. Breaking its long tradition of neutrality, Switzerland will freeze assets of Russian companies and individuals that could total more than $11 billion in Swiss banks. Japan is also freezing assets of Russian banks.
Worldwide Response. Governments across the world are expressing their concern and outrage over the Russian invasion. Most are taking concrete steps to hurt Russia through a variety of methods. The United Kingdom is blocking Russian vessels from using its ports. Ukraine is switching to the European Union electric grid very soon, accelerating a planned move for 2023.
China. Not everyone is coming to the defense of Ukraine – whether through providing some sort of aid, restricting financial access, or just making public announcements condemning the invasion. One of these nations is China. One observer argues that China was, in fact, played. Read more in “Ukraine: Did China Have a Clue?”, Stimson, February 28, 2022.
Commentary and Analysis
Putin’s Inner Circle. There is a lot of speculation on whether Russia’s president will keep the support of his loyal base. Alexandra Vacroux, the executive director of Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, is interviewed by The Harvard Gazette, February 27, 2022.
Closing the Turkish Straits? Mark Nevitt, a Navy veteran and law professor, delves into the 1936 Montreux Convention to determine if Turkey can close the straits that control access between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. This closing action would not affect Ukraine but could have serious implications for the Russian navy. Read more in “The Russia-Ukraine Conflict, the Black Sea, and the Montreux Convention”, Just Security, February 28, 2022.
Insurgent Tactics. One of the eye-opening aspects of the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria a few years back was there use of commercial off-the shelf drones to conduct reconnaissance and attack enemy positions. The Russians will likely face this threat as well. Read more in “The Militant Drone Threat Is No Longer New. Why Does it Still Feel Novel?”, Modern War Institute at West Point, February 24, 2022.
The Coming Insurgency? The Central Intelligence Agency has been busy over the past several years (since 2014?) in training Ukrainian special forces and intelligence officers in intelligence collection and special operations. Many military analysts believe this is a good thing and that the Ukrainians will bleed the Russians so badly that they will be forced to withdraw from areas they intend to occupy over the long-term. But not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Jeff Rogg, a historian of U.S. intelligence and an assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security at the Citadel argues a different point of view. “The CIA has backed Ukrainian insurgents before. Let’s learn from those mistakes”, Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2022.
Long, Hard Months Ahead. An easy Russian victory is not in the cards. If Russia tries to hold captured Ukrainian cities they will find that space contested with insurgents carrying out a variety of attacks against their forces. Russian occupation troops in the countryside will meet the same level of resistance in a different form. The Ukrainians have over 500,000 veterans of the conflict in the east of the country where the two Russian dominated enclaves exist. The next phase of the war will be long, brutal, and contested. Andrew Heiner writes about “Preparing for the next phase in the Ukrainian conflict”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), March 1, 2022.
Podcasts and Videos
Podcast – Interpreting the First Few Days of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Michael Kofman and Ryan Evans discuss the early days of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in this podcast. War on the Rocks, February 28, 2022, 30 minutes.
Video – Urban warfare: The ‘combat in hell’ on Ukraine’s streets. Colonel (Ret) John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, describes the advantages held by defenders of the territory but maintains the fighting is “catastrophic” to all parties. He says the three-block war is troop intensive for the force on the offensive. Forces.net, February 27, 2022, 3 minutes.
Future Outlook
Many believe that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was an attempt to create a neutral or vassal state that will provide a buffer from NATO forces. He may or may not be able to do that. What he has done in five days is united NATO so it is stronger than ever before, now has more NATO troops on his borders, and has pushed the Ukrainian people closer to Europe and NATO. The war has been going badly for the Russians but may soon turn around as the bulk of his troops, tanks, APCs, and artillery get to the fighting zones. The current number of Russian troops (150,000 plus) is not enough to secure a country with a population of 44 million. How long the Russians stay in the occupied areas will determine how much they bleed from a Ukrainian insurgency that surely is now taking form.
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Image: Courtesy of a volunteer working in the Ukraine Evac effort.
13. Biden Says Americans Shouldn't Worry About Possibility of Nuclear War
Biden Says Americans Shouldn't Worry About Possibility of Nuclear War
WSJ · by Sabrina Siddiqui
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President Biden at Monday's Black History Month event at the White House.Chris Kleponis - Pool via CNP/Zuma Press
WASHINGTON -- President Biden on Monday rejected concerns about the potential for nuclear war amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Asked if Americans should be worried about a nuclear war, Mr. Biden said: "No." The president made the comments while leaving an event marking Black History Month at the White House, one day after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his country’s nuclear-deterrence forces to be put on alert.
Speaking at the same event, Vice President Kamala Harris praised the Ukrainian people in their fight against the Russian invasion.
"Today, the eyes of the world are on Ukraine and the brave people who are fighting to protect their country and their democracy," Ms. Harris said. "Their bravery is a reminder, a most recent reminder, that justice, equality and freedom must never be taken for granted by any of us."
14. ‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes
Excerpts:
Reynolds: So just as the world didn’t see Hitler coming, we failed to see Putin coming?
Hill: We shouldn’t have. He’s been around for 22 years now, and he has been coming to this point since 2008. I don’t think that he initially set off to do all of this, by the way, but the attitudes towards Ukraine and the feelings that all Ukraine belongs to Russia, the feelings of loss, they’ve all been there and building up.
What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course, yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.
‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes
Magazine
Putin is trying to take down the entire world order, the veteran Russia watcher said in an interview. But there are ways even ordinary Americans can fight back.
Putin at his annual news conference in December 2021. | Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo
02/28/2022 01:45 PM EST
Maura Reynolds is a senior editor at POLITICO Magazine.
For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.
That’s why I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most clear-eyed Russia experts, someone who has studied Putin for decades, worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations and has a reputation for truth-telling, earned when she testified during impeachment hearings for her former boss, President Donald Trump.
I wanted to know what she’s been thinking as she’s watched the extraordinary footage of Russian tanks rolling across international borders, what she thinks Putin has in mind and what insights she can offer into his motivations and objectives.
Hill spent many years studying history, and in our conversation, she repeatedly traced how long arcs and trends of European history are converging on Ukraine right now. We are already, she said, in the middle of a third World War, whether we’ve fully grasped it or not.
“Sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again,” Hill told me.
Those old historical patterns include Western businesses who fail to see how they help build a tyrant’s war chest, admirers enamored of an autocrat’s “strength” and politicians’ tendency to point fingers inward for political gain instead of working together for their nation’s security.
But at the same time, Hill says it’s not too late to turn Putin back, and it’s a job not just for the Ukrainians or for NATO — it’s a job that ordinary Westerners and companies can assist in important ways once they grasp what’s at stake.
“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force,” Hill said. “Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”
There’s lots of danger ahead, she warned. Putin is increasingly operating emotionally and likely to use all the weapons at his disposal, including nuclear ones. It’s important not to have any illusions — but equally important not to lose hope.
“Every time you think, ’No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would,” Hill said. “And he wants us to know that, of course. It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared…. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.”
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Maura Reynolds: You’ve been a Putin watcher for a long time, and you’ve written one of the best biographies of Putin. When you’ve been watching him over the past week, what have you been seeing that other people might be missing?
Fiona Hill: Putin is usually more cynical and calculated than he came across in his most recent speeches. There’s evident visceral emotion in things that he said in the past few weeks justifying the war in Ukraine. The pretext is completely flimsy and almost nonsensical for anybody who’s not in the echo chamber or the bubble of propaganda in Russia itself. I mean, demanding to the Ukrainian military that they essentially overthrow their own government or lay down their arms and surrender because they are being commanded by a bunch of drug-addled Nazi fascists? There’s just no sense to that. It beggars the imagination.
Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”
This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin. He spotlighted this during the performance of the National Security Council meeting, where it became very clear that this was his decision. He was in a way taking full responsibility for war, and even the heads of his security and intelligence services looked like they’ve been thrown off guard by how fast things were moving.
Reynolds: So Putin is being driven by emotion right now, not by some kind of logical plan?
Hill: I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007 when he put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.
Back then I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea, but some much larger action taken against Ukraine along with Georgia. And of course, four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership. But we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia.
Reynolds: Do you think Putin’s current goal is reconstituting the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, or something different?
Hill: It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.
Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.
I’ve kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all seriousness — that Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He’s said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.
Reynolds: Dominance in what way?
Hill: It doesn’t mean that he’s going to annex all of them and make them part of the Russian Federation like they’ve done with Crimea. You can establish dominance by marginalizing regional countries, by making sure that their leaders are completely dependent on Moscow, either by Moscow practically appointing them through rigged elections or ensuring they are tethered to Russian economic and political and security networks. You can see this now across the former Soviet space.
We’ve seen pressure being put on Kazakhstan to reorient itself back toward Russia, instead of balancing between Russia and China, and the West. And just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.
But amid all this, Ukraine was the country that got away. And what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that. He might leave behind some rump statelets. When we look at old maps of Europe — probably the maps he’s been looking at — you find all kinds of strange entities, like the Sanjak of Novi Pazar in the Balkans. I used to think, what the hell is that? These are all little places that have dependency on a bigger power and were created to prevent the formation of larger viable states in contested regions. Basically, if Vladimir Putin has his way, Ukraine is not going to exist as the modern-day Ukraine of the last 30 years.
Reynolds: How far into Ukraine do you think Putin is going to go?
Hill: At this juncture, if he can, he’s going to go all the way. Before this last week, he had multiple different options to choose from. He’d given himself the option of being able to go in in full force as he’s doing now, but he could also have focused on retaking the rest of the administrative territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. He could have seized the Sea of Azov, which he’s probably going to do anyway, and then joined up the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with Crimea as well as the lands in between and all the way down to Odessa. In fact, Putin initially tried this in 2014 — to create “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” but that failed when local support for joining Russia didn’t materialize.
Now, if he can, he is going to take the whole country. We have to face up to this fact. Although we haven’t seen the full Russian invasion force deployed yet, he’s certainly got the troops to move into the whole country.
Reynolds: You say he has an adequate number of troops to move in, but does he have enough to occupy the whole country?
Hill: If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.
In 2015, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was at the Munich Security Conference after the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. And he talked about Ukraine not being a country, saying pointedly that there are many minority groups in Ukraine — there are Poles and there are Romanians, there are Hungarians and Russians. And he goes on essentially almost inviting the rest of Europe to divide Ukraine up.
So what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other places where there’s a division of the country between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different statuses.
Reynolds: So step by step, in ways that we haven’t always appreciated in the West, Putin has brought back a lot of these countries that were independent after the Soviet collapse back under his umbrella. The only country that has so far evaded Putin’s grip has been Ukraine.
Hill: Ukraine, correct. Because it’s bigger and because of its strategic location. That’s what Russia wants to ensure, or Putin wants to ensure, that Ukraine like the other countries, has no other option than subjugation to Russia.
Reynolds: How much of what we’re seeing now is tied to Putin’s own electoral schedule? He seized Crimea in 2014, and that helped to boost his ratings and ensure his future reelection. He’s got another election coming up in 2024. Is any of this tied to that?
Hill: I think it is. In 2020, Putin had the Russian Constitution amended so that he could stay on until 2036, another set of two six-year terms. He’s going to be 84 then. But in 2024, he has to re-legitimate himself by standing for election. The only real contender might have been Alexei Navalny, and they’ve put him in a penal colony. Putin has rolled up all the potential opposition and resistance, so one would think it would be a cakewalk for him in 2024. But the way it works with Russian elections, he actually has to put on a convincing show that demonstrates that he’s immensely popular and he’s got the affirmation of all the population.
Behind the scenes it’s fairly clear that there’s a lot of apathy in the system, that many people support Putin because there’s no one else. People who don’t support him at all will probably not turn out to vote. The last time that his brand got stale, it was before the annexation of Crimea. That put him back on the top of the charts in terms of his ratings.
It may not just be the presidential calendar, the electoral calendar. He’s going to be 70 in October. And 70 you know, in the larger scheme of things, is not that old. There are plenty of politicians out there that are way over 70.
Reynolds: But it’s old for Russians.
Hill: It’s old for Russians. And Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something else. There seems to be an urgency for this that may be also driven by personal factors.
He may have a sense that time is marching on — it’s 22 years, after all, and the likelihood after that kind of time of a Russian leader leaving voluntarily or through elections is pretty slim. Most leaders leave either like Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko thought that he might leave, as the result of massive protests, or they die in office.
The only other person who has been Russian leader in modern times longer than Putin is Stalin, and Stalin died in office.
Reynolds: Putin came to power after a series of operations that many have seen as a kind of false flag — bombings of buildings around Russia that killed Russian citizens, hundreds of them, followed by a war in Chechnya. That led to Putin coming to power as a wartime president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 also came at a difficult time for Putin. Now we’re seeing another big military operation less than two years before he needs to stand for election again. Am I wrong to see that pattern?
Hill: No, I don’t think you are. There’s definitely a pattern here. Part of Putin’s persona as president is that he is a ruthless tough guy, the strong man who is the champion and protector of Russia. And that’s why Russia needs him. If all was peaceful and quiet, why would you need Vladimir Putin? If you think of other wartime leaders — Winston Churchill comes to mind — in peacetime, Winston Churchill got voted out of office.
Reynolds: Speaking of Chechnya, I have been thinking that this is the largest ground military operation that Russia has fought since Chechnya. What did we learn about the Russian military then that’s relevant now?
Hill: It’s very important, that you bring this point up because people are saying Ukraine is the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. The first largest military action in Europe since World War II was actually in Chechnya, because Chechnya is part of Russia. This was a devastating conflict that dragged on for years, with two rounds of war after a brief truce, and tens of thousands of military and civilian casualties. The regional capital of Grozny was leveled. The casualties were predominantly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. The Chechens fought back, and this became a military debacle on Russia’s own soil. Analysts called it “the nadir of the Russian army.” After NATO’s intervention in the Balkan wars in the same timeframe in the 1990s, Moscow even worried that NATO might intervene.
Reynolds: What have we learned about NATO in the last two months?
Hill: In many respects, not good things, initially. Although now we see a significant rallying of the political and diplomatic forces, serious consultations and a spur to action in response to bolster NATO’s military defenses.
But we also need to think about it this way. We have had a long-term policy failure going back to the end of the Cold War in terms of thinking about how to manage NATO’s relations with Russia to minimize risk. NATO is a like a massive insurer, a protector of national security for Europe and the United States. After the end of the Cold War, we still thought that we had the best insurance for the hazards we could face — flood, fire etc. — but for a discounted premium. We didn’t take adequate steps to address and reduce the various risks. We can now see that that we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions. Think about Swiss Re or AIG or Lloyds of London — when the hazard was massive, like during Hurricane Katrina or the global financial crisis in 2008, those insurance companies got into major trouble. They and their clients found themselves underwater. And this is kind of what NATO members are learning now.
Reynolds: And then there’s the nuclear element. Many people have thought that we’d never see a large ground war in Europe or a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, because it could quickly escalate into a nuclear conflict. How close are we getting to that?
Hill: Well, we’re right there. Basically, what President Putin has said quite explicitly in recent days is that if anybody interferes in Ukraine, they will be met with a response that they’ve “never had in [their] history.” And he has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. So he’s making it very clear that nuclear is on the table.
Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured out what he was saying. In one of the last meetings between Putin and Trump when I was there, Putin was making the point that: “Well you know, Donald, we have these hypersonic missiles.” And Trump was saying, “Well, we will get them too.” Putin was saying, “Well, yes, you will get them eventually, but we’ve got them first.” There was a menace in this exchange. Putin was putting us on notice that if push came to shove in some confrontational environment that the nuclear option would be on the table.
Reynolds: Do you really think he’ll use a nuclear weapon?
Hill: The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.
The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.
So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.
It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared. That’s exactly what he wants us to be. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.
Reynolds: So how do we deal with it? Are sanctions enough?
Hill: Well, we can’t just deal with it as the United States on our own. First of all, this has to be an international response.
Reynolds: Larger than NATO?
Hill: It has to be larger than NATO. Now I’m not saying that that means an international military response that’s larger than NATO, but the push back has to be international.
We first have to think about what Vladimir Putin has done and the nature of what we’re facing. People don’t want to talk about Adolf Hitler and World War II, but I’m going to talk about it. Obviously the major element when you talk about World War II, which is overwhelming, is the Holocaust and the absolute decimation of the Jewish population of Europe, as well as the Roma-Sinti people.
But let’s focus here on the territorial expansionism of Germany, what Germany did under Hitler in that period: seizure of the Sudetenland and the Anschluss or annexation of Austria, all on the basis that they were German speakers. The invasion of Poland. The treaty with the Soviet Union, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, that also enabled the Soviet Union to take portions of Poland but then became a prelude to Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Invasions of France and all of the countries surrounding Germany, including Denmark and further afield to Norway. Germany eventually engaged in a burst of massive territorial expansion and occupation. Eventually the Soviet Union fought back. Vladimir Putin’s own family suffered during the siege of Leningrad, and yet here is Vladimir Putin doing exactly the same thing.
Reynolds: So, similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions?
Hill: Correct. And he’s blaming others, for why this has happened, and getting us to blame ourselves.
Reynolds: And you see this now.
Hill: You totally see it. Unfortunately, we have politicians and public figures in the United States and around Europe who have embraced the idea that Russia was wronged by NATO and that Putin is a strong, powerful man and has the right to do what he’s doing: Because Ukraine is somehow not worthy of independence, because it’s either Russia’s historical lands or Ukrainians are Russians, or the Ukrainian leaders are — this is what Putin says — “drug addled, fascist Nazis” or whatever labels he wants to apply here.
So sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again. The other thing to think about in this larger historic context is how much the German business community helped facilitate the rise of Hitler. Right now, everyone who has been doing business in Russia or buying Russian gas and oil has contributed to Putin’s war chest. Our investments are not just boosting business profits, or Russia’s sovereign wealth funds and its longer-term development. They now are literally the fuel for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Reynolds: I gather you think that sanctions leveled by the government are inadequate to address this much larger threat?
Hill: Absolutely. Sanctions are not going to be enough. You need to have a major international response, where governments decide on their own accord that they can’t do business with Russia for a period of time until this is resolved. We need a temporary suspension of business activity with Russia. Just as we wouldn’t be having a full-blown diplomatic negotiation for anything but a ceasefire and withdrawal while Ukraine is still being actively invaded, so it’s the same thing with business. Right now you’re fueling the invasion of Ukraine. So what we need is a suspension of business activity with Russia until Moscow ceases hostilities and withdraws its troops.
Reynolds: So ordinary companies…
Hill: Ordinary companies should make a decision. This is the epitome of “ESG” that companies are saying is their priority right now — upholding standards of good Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance. Just like people didn’t want their money invested in South Africa during apartheid, do you really want to have your money invested in Russia during Russia’s brutal invasion and subjugation and carving up of Ukraine?
If Western companies, their pension plans or mutual funds, are invested in Russia they should pull out. Any people who are sitting on the boards of major Russian companies should resign immediately. Not every Russian company is tied to the Kremlin, but many major Russian companies absolutely are, and everyone knows it. If we look back to Germany in the runup to the Second World War, it was the major German enterprises that were being used in support of the war. And we’re seeing exactly the same thing now. Russia would not be able to afford this war were it not for the fact that oil and gas prices are ratcheting up. They’ve got enough in the war chest for now. But over the longer term, this will not be sustainable without the investment that comes into Russia and all of the Russian commodities, not just oil and gas, that are being purchased on world markets. And, our international allies, like Saudi Arabia, should be increasing oil production right now as a temporary offset. Right now, they are also indirectly funding war in Ukraine by keeping oil prices high.
This has to be an international response to push Russia to stop its military action. India abstained in the United Nations, and you can see that other countries are feeling discomforted and hoping this might go away. This is not going to go away, and it could be “you next” — because Putin is setting a precedent for countries to return to the type of behavior that sparked the two great wars which were a free-for-all over territory. Putin is saying, “Throughout history borders have changed. Who cares?”
Reynolds: And you do not think he will necessarily stop at Ukraine?
Hill: Of course he won’t. Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized world. This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has done.
Reynolds: He’s blown up the rules-based international order.
Hill: Exactly. What stops a lot of people from pulling out of Russia even temporarily is, they will say, “Well, the Chinese will just step in.” This is what every investor always tells me. “If I get out, someone else will move in.” I’m not sure that Russian businesspeople want to wake up one morning and find out the only investors in the Russian economy are Chinese, because then Russia becomes the periphery of China, the Chinese hinterlands, and not another great power that’s operating in tandem with China.
Reynolds: The more we talk, the more we’re using World War II analogies. There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.
Hill: We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.
All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.
But this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war. I mean he has got swathes of the Republican Party — and not just them, some on the left, as well as on the right — masses of the U.S. public saying, “Good on you, Vladimir Putin,” or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S. for this outcome. This is exactly what a Russian information war and psychological operation is geared towards. He’s been carefully seeding this terrain as well. We’ve been at war, for a very long time. I’ve been saying this for years.
Reynolds: So just as the world didn’t see Hitler coming, we failed to see Putin coming?
Hill: We shouldn’t have. He’s been around for 22 years now, and he has been coming to this point since 2008. I don’t think that he initially set off to do all of this, by the way, but the attitudes towards Ukraine and the feelings that all Ukraine belongs to Russia, the feelings of loss, they’ve all been there and building up.
What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course, yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.
15. How Russia built its new narrative of war
Excerpts:
The largest question is how the battle will play out – social media footage of broken-down Russian vehicles and Ukrainian soldiers mocking Russian military equipment might be widely shared, but will likely need to be balanced against stories of Russian success elsewhere, particularly if the Kremlin becomes willing to use its Chechen war playbook of much more savage firepower.
For Ukraine, the fight is only just beginning. Initial – and possibly only fleeting – victories such as the apparent temporary eviction of Russian airborne forces from Hostomel airport on the morning of February 25 prompted brief rejoicing on local social media, while the 13 border guards killed on Snake Island in the Black Sea who told a Russian warship crew to “go fuck themselves” were lauded. Russia still took the island, and later broadcast footage of what it said were further captured Ukrainian personnel.
Ukraine and its Western backers – including the UK – now need to find a narrative that pushes back against that of Russia, but they will only be able to truly do so if the war goes in the right direction. NATO allies like Estonia are stepping up support for one simple reason – the future of Europe may be decided in Ukraine, and there is much to lose.
How Russia built its new narrative of war » Wavell Room
Experimental Feature: Audio Read Version
On Friday, January 28, Eduard Basurin, defence spokesman of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic appeared on the most watched TV station in Russia – Rossiya 1- and accused Britain and the United States of plotting with Ukraine to launch an imminent attack on territory controlled by pro-Russian separatists.
The offensive operation, BBC Monitoring quoted him as saying, was being developed by the Ukrainian General Staff “with the support of specialists from the United States and Britain. And when it has been put together, when it is completely ready… It is supposed to be put into action.”
For more than a year, media outlets and leaders based in the twin Donbas separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk have been telling those that live there that a Ukrainian offensive was being prepared. In recent weeks, that story has also become a ubiquitous feature of almost every daily Russian news broadcast, reaching millions across the former Soviet Union and beyond.
The first three weeks of February 2022 saw what appears a pre-planned narrative of escalation. Quite often disingenuous statements from Russian and separatist leaders, false accusations of Ukrainian and allied actions and a drumbeat of a military activity that appears designed to permanently shift global geopolitics against the West.
Understanding what Russia has just done is key to working out how the UK and its NATO allies should approach this confrontation going forward. It highlights a number of likely misconceptions that continue to bedevil Western planning, including oversimplistic assumptions that have often focused on individual items of Russian online disinformation at the cost of the bigger picture.
In other areas, however, Britain in particular has played this well. What Britain and its allies must now do is learn from those successes and play its part in building a united and cohesive allied effort to confront an almost existential threat.
As the US and Britain have been briefing, despite Russia’s overwhelming firepower, not everything in the first 72 hours of the war went as Moscow might have hoped.
Russia’s narrative of escalation was almost certainly planned
For all Russia’s half-hearted attempts to its actions look like a response to aggression from Ukraine, the pattern of escalation looks increasingly like a planned schedule, the sort of messaging “grid” Western political operatives have long used for electoral communications to deliver a rolling narrative that serves their ends.
It is a campaign that reached its pivotal moment in the final week of February with an orchestrated series of events ranging from real-world shelling along the Donbas frontline in Ukraine to “live” political theatre from the Kremlin, TV and social media broadcast from the front and what appears to be primitively faked and prefilmed “incidents”.
On Monday, February 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin assembled his top advisers in a cavernous, gleaming white-painted hall in the Kremlin to discuss Russia’s options on Ukraine. It was described by Russian TV as an “unprecedented” “live” broadcast – although images of Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu’s watch suggest that, like so much else released, it was actually recorded earlier, although in this case likely the same day.
In a somewhat rambling speech that evening that questioned Ukraine’s existence as a nation, Putin announced his decision to recognise the separatist republics and send in military “peacekeepers”. By the Wednesday – Defender of the Fatherland Day, a public holiday in Russia – Russian TV bulletins were broadcasting from the forming up points of Russian armour in Donetsk.
By then, Putin had Parliamentary approval to use the military outside Russia’s borders, was talking of the importance of “disarming” Ukraine and accusing it of preparing to build atomic arms. After weeks of criticising the US for its talk of imminent invasion, Ukraine’s government was mobilising reservists and calling for the three million Ukrainian nationals within Russia’s borders to flee immediately.
This confrontation has been a long time coming
On February 10, 2007, a 54-year-old Putin took to the stage at the Munich Security Conference in front of a smiling Chancellor Angela Merkel and launched into a savage evisceration of what he described as a dangerous and disingenuous unipolar world order led by a US already “destroying itself from within”.
As well as attacking Washington’s recent military interventions in Iraq, he expressed particular anger at NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe, saying it broke an explicit pledge made in 1990 by NATO Secretary General Manfred Warner. Seen in Russia as a defining point for Kremlin foreign policy, Putin’s Munich speech was referenced explicitly by all three of Russia’s top-viewed weekend new shows on Sunday, February 13, who referred to it as “prescient” and tied it directly to the face-off with Ukraine.
To an extent, Putin’s prediction of a more multipolar world from the economic shift to the BRIC economies of Brazil, India, China alongside an energy-rich Russia is exactly what has come to pass. But Putin is now also doing exactly what he accused the US of in 2007 – attempting to use the threat or reality of force to reshape the world as he might wish.
This is a long-running trend. At several points since 2007 – during a confrontation with Estonia over the movement of a Russian war memorial later that year that prompted a suspected Russian cyber attack, in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014 and Syria the next year, Russia has proved willing to escalate and use force faster than anyone expected.
As Moscow has shown twice in the last year, nothing grabs the attention of the world like moving tanks, troops, jets and ships in a way that suggests their use might be imminent. In both April last year and more lately from November, Russian media coverage of its mobilisation along Ukraine’s borders has been limited – and Russian officials have accused the US and others of “hysteria” for highlighting them – but the Kremlin clearly knew that by moving these forces, they would grab global and regional attention.
Ukraine has clearly long been a particular preoccupation, going back at least as far as the 2004-5 “Orange Revolution” that saw a pro-Russian government swept from power.
A July article by Putin on the Kremlin website using multiple historical examples to present Ukraine as part of Russia in what the Institute for Modern Russia described as less academic argument than declaration of intent.
Russia will continue to use every argument and lever at its disposal
As late as the evening of Wednesday February 23, there was still talk Russia might stage a last minute “false flag” event to justify military intervention, with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba warning an incident might be underway in Crimea with the reported evacuation of a chemical plant.
Warnings over an alleged Western-backed Ukrainian “chemical attack” Have been a periodic feature of separatist and other Kremlin-backed media in recent months. Those that live in the separatist-run regions were a particularly paranoid diet of news – enough for Ukraine to successfully get both Donetsk and Luhansk TV stations banned from YouTube.
Within Ukraine itself, the Kremlin lost one of the most powerful pro-Russian voices in February last year when it closed down the live broadcasts of several TV channels owned by Victor Medvedchuk, an oligarch, politician and personal friend of Putin. More recently, Ukraine has also restricted channels belonging to Yehvan Murayev, the Ukrainian businessman who Britain accused in January of being a potential Kremlin puppet after an invasion.
But that hasn’t stopped a torrent of disinformation from a network of other sites, channels and social media feeds, particularly on Russian networks Telegram and VK, the latter also banned within Ukraine.
In more normal times, Russia’s most egregious disinformation tends to be broadcast on terrestrial television and fringe websites such as RIAFAN, one of several platforms owned by Yevgeny Prigorzin, a former Kremlin catering contractor and friend of the Russian leader dubbed “Putin’s chef” also accused of running the Wagner mercenary group.
Such feeds – as well as pro-Kremlin “war reporters” such as Semon Pegov – a.k.a. “War Gonzo”, whose Telegram channel is often cited by other media – have pushed multiple false narratives in recent weeks, including multiple “incidents” in the days before the invasion that often appear to have been lazily delivered and filmed days in advance. One image of a burnt-out skeleton in a car contained a skull that appeared already subject to autopsy.
In his justification speeches for war on Monday night and Thursday morning, however, Putin made no reference to these cases. Falling back on his larger preoccupations with Ukraine’s supposed lack of statehood and claims that it needed to be disarmed and prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons.
With fighting underway, Russian messaging has moved to pushing stories of Russian victories and Ukrainian defeats and cowardice. Pro-Kremlin website Politnavigator claimed Ukrainian civilians dissatisfied with the government welcomed Russian troops and encouraged them to “drive to Kyiv”. Other stories claimed the capture of Chernobyl prevented an attempted Ukrainian “dirty bomb” and accused Russian pro-peace demonstrators in Moscow of being “liberals repeating Ukrainian Nazi slogans.
Claiming Ukraine is controlled by neo-Nazi elements have been a long-running feature of Russian propaganda. This intensified last April during Russia’s military mobilisation and again more recently. As Russian forces advanced on the Azov Sea port of Mariupol on February 25, “War Gonzo” Pegov was pushing that line again, accusing local neo-Nazi groups of using Ukrainian citizens as human shields and attempting to turn the town into “a new Grozny”.
The most important narratives now are about who will truly win
As the BBC Radio Four Today programme broadcasting live from Kyiv spoke to Defence Secretary Ben Wallace in London on the morning of Friday, February 25, Ukraine’s government was handing out assault rifles and encouraging residents to stockpile Molotov cocktails as Russian armour approached the capital.
Wallace pledged to help Ukraine “fight for every street with every piece of equipment we can get them”, but made it clear neither UK personnel or aircraft would fight Russia is that would lead to “a war across Europe”. The previous night, BBC correspondent Frank Gardner was even blunter on the World Service – the involvement of Western forces in combat and Ukraine would lead to a world war that no one was willing to risk.
In the last year, the UK has carved out a reputation as Ukraine’s most solid backer within Europe alongside Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The January 27 media day showcasing the end of the first UK-run NLAW anti-tank rocket training was particularly successful, footage run across multiple Ukrainian TV and also picked up by Russia and foreign broadcasters.
The real fight, however, is only just beginning. Previous UK and US support to Ukraine – particularly the JOINT ENDEAVOUR parachute drop in September 2020, HMS Defender’s transit last year and US RAPID TRIDENT drills both this year and last all appeared an attempt to push a narrative of Western support outside NATO membership. That is being tested, and has risked feeling hollow – in the Baltic states, the site of Western embassies closing and evacuating brought growing speculation the same might happen there.
The great unknown that will determine what happens next, however, is how the invasion of Ukraine plays out. For now, Russian broadcasters are pushing a relentless narrative of success, the easy surrender of Ukrainian forces and Russian overwhelming firepower. Advances in the Donbas have been credited almost entirely to the forces of the separatist “People’s Republics”, while elsewhere Russian channels have stressed that cities and civilians have not been targeted.
On a talk show on Channel One on February 25, host Artyom Sheynin said events were “horrible” but that the situation in Ukraine – particularly for those of the separatist republics – had become “absolutely hopeless and no other options were left… Using the terminology of military surgery, sometimes you have to cut off, amputate the foot to stop gangrene spreading to the whole leg.”
That has not, however, been enough to stop dozens of protests in Russian cities and thousands of reported arrests. If UK and Ukrainian claims of 500 (according to Wallace) or up to a thousand Russian dead in the first two days are accurate, that would raise serious questions as to how long Moscow could maintain its military effort without a domestic backlash that appears already underway.
The largest question is how the battle will play out – social media footage of broken-down Russian vehicles and Ukrainian soldiers mocking Russian military equipment might be widely shared, but will likely need to be balanced against stories of Russian success elsewhere, particularly if the Kremlin becomes willing to use its Chechen war playbook of much more savage firepower.
For Ukraine, the fight is only just beginning. Initial – and possibly only fleeting – victories such as the apparent temporary eviction of Russian airborne forces from Hostomel airport on the morning of February 25 prompted brief rejoicing on local social media, while the 13 border guards killed on Snake Island in the Black Sea who told a Russian warship crew to “go fuck themselves” were lauded. Russia still took the island, and later broadcast footage of what it said were further captured Ukrainian personnel.
Ukraine and its Western backers – including the UK – now need to find a narrative that pushes back against that of Russia, but they will only be able to truly do so if the war goes in the right direction. NATO allies like Estonia are stepping up support for one simple reason – the future of Europe may be decided in Ukraine, and there is much to lose.
About the author Related Posts
Peter Apps
Peter Apps is an experienced foreign correspondent and British Army reservist.
16. The Return of Containment
The "C" word is used again.
Excerpts:
Even if Beijing has its doubts, however, it is hardly in its interest to help the United States against Russia. Indeed, Chinese leaders no doubt welcome the U.S.’s renewed preoccupation with security in Europe because it gives Beijing more freedom of maneuver in its own region. China is also likely to help alleviate some of the economic consequences of sanctions for Russia, though there are limits to how much it can do, especially on the financial side, where transactions largely remain the domain of western currencies from which Russia has now been banned.
Containing Russia will therefore require paying attention to China. One way to increase the West’s leverage over Beijing would be to strengthen the political, economic, and military ties between the advanced democracies in Asia, Europe, and North America. An expanded G-7, for example, could include Australia and South Korea as well as the involvement of the heads of the EU and NATO. These nations and organizations will need to devise common strategies and policies not only to contain Russia but also to compete effectively with China.
February 24 was a turning point in history. Democratic powers of the West are once again called upon to defend a rules-based order that has been violently uprooted. Fortunately, the Western powers possess the innate strength necessary to contain Russia and outcompete China for influence across the globe. The only real question is whether they have the will and determination to do so in unison.
The Return of Containment
How the West Can Prevail Against the Kremlin
March 1, 2022
Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine did not come as a surprise. The United States and its European allies learned last fall what Russia planned to do, and even publicized the Kremlin’s plans to the world. Even so, they failed to prevent Russia’s onslaught on its much weaker neighbor. Once they ruled out direct military assistance to Ukraine, deterring a Russia bent on controlling its neighbors and upending the post-1990 European security order was always going to be a tall order.
The same threats that failed to dissuade Russia from invading before—severe sanctions, military assistance to Ukraine, and beefing up NATO—are unlikely to compel Russia from changing course now. Instead, Washington and its democratic allies need to embark on a strategy of containment that increases the cost to Russia and eventually forces internal political change that brings the brutal regime of Vladimir Putin to an end.
The outlines of this playbook are familiar, first set out in the late 1940s by George F. Kennan, a senior diplomat in the Moscow embassy, and elaborated on in the pages of this magazine. Kennan argued that the Stalin regime’s paranoia and insecurities represented a clear danger to the West and called for steady, forceful counterpressure. But Kennan also believed the Soviet Union was weak and suffered from internal contradictions that would ultimately undo the regime. Containment took 40 years to succeed and involved plenty of needless mistakes by the United States—including launching the Vietnam War and backing the violent overthrow of a number of governments. But the policy ultimately unleashed forces inside the Soviet Union that led to the end of the regime.
A return to a robust policy of containment is now the West’s best option. The fundamental goal will remain the same as the old policy: to counter Russian expansionism, inflict real costs on the Russian regime, and encourage internal change that leads to the ultimate collapse of Putin and Putinism. Of course, it needs to be adapted to the realities as they exist today rather than those that prevailed at the end of World War II. In particular, Russia’s close ties to a strong and newly assertive China will have to be addressed proactively.
Still, Russia isn’t the Soviet Union, a military and ideological colossus nearly equal to the United States. Although it remains a nuclear power, its military is a shadow of its former Soviet self, and its economy is smaller than Canada’s, which has a quarter of Russia’s population. Meanwhile, the West has grown stronger. The United States retains unrivaled military power and has an economy 13 times larger than that of Russia. Europe, a defeated continent scarred by war and poverty after World War II, has emerged as a cohesive economic giant with a military that, although underfunded, enjoys significant modern capabilities to defend against a stretched Russian military. As a result, although a policy of containment will not deliver swift success or victory, its steady application in the months and years ahead should drive the necessary change in Russia within the next five to ten years.
Three Pillars
An effective twenty-first century update of containment would consist of three main pillars: maintaining U.S. military strength, decoupling Western economies from Russia, and isolating Moscow. Together, these three elements will steadily increase the cost to Russia of continuing its expansionist policies, foment internal dissent and debate, and ultimately could force a change in governance. To be clear, such change must be driven internally—although the United States seeks an end to Putinism, this will occur only when the Russian people decide the time has come. Also, a return to containment will not lead to an immediate end to the war in Ukraine. That will require additional measures, including providing Ukraine with the military means it needs to defend itself and resist occupation if Russia succeeds in taking over part or all of the country. And it will require massive economic and humanitarian assistance to help the besieged population in Ukraine and those who have been forced to flee the country.
Although the United States and other NATO countries maintain significant militaries, two decades of European under-investment and U.S. military engagement in the Middle East and Afghanistan have left NATO profoundly unprepared for a return to a strong deterrent posture. The subordination of the Belarussian military to Russian command and the invasion of Ukraine mean that a new front line is being drawn from the Baltic to the Black Sea—with the eastern borders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania effectively marking NATO’s new eastern flank. As a result, NATO needs to move swiftly to defend the new front.
The alliance has taken steps to bolster deterrence in the East, but these moves fall short of what the situation demands. The United States has doubled its ground presence in Poland, to 9,000 troops, and sent air and naval reinforcements to other countries. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have increased their military presence in Romania, Slovakia, and the Baltic states. NATO has activated its 40,000-strong Response Force for the first time, though current plans do not include full mobilization of the entire force. While these initial steps have strengthened the forces that were deployed East in the wake of Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, they amount to little more than a tripwire that will be unable to offer a robust defense if Russia attacks NATO territory.
NATO’s moves have fallen short of what the situation demands.
That is why a fundamental rethinking of NATO’s forward force posture is now necessary. NATO needs to deploy tens of thousands of troops, rather than the few thousand that have so far been committed. The most immediate requirement is to deploy two to three combat brigades to eastern Poland and southern Lithuania to defend the Suwalki gap, the 60 miles that separate Russian Kaliningrad and Belarus. If Russian or Belarussian forces were to connect these territories, the Baltic states would effectively be cut off from the rest of NATO.
Preparing for a long-term presence in the East will also require making significant investments in ports, rail lines, airfields, roads, fuel supply, and other critical infrastructure to improve NATO’s capacity to rapidly reinforce its troops. Moreover, given Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons, combined with the deployment of nuclear-capable and likely armed missiles in Kaliningrad and other parts of western Russia and possibly in Belarus, NATO will need to consider the adequacy of its nuclear posture.
None of this is to suggest that NATO needs to prepare for war. The point is that deterrence now requires greater visibility and forward presence than was the case before Russia attacked Ukraine. Whatever Putin may be thinking about forcefully revising the post-1990 security order in Europe, NATO needs to make clear that he cannot succeed. That requires a strong deterrent presence East and a major commitment to increase spending for the long run. Germany’s decision to spend 100 billion euros now and at least two percent of GDP on defense going forward is a big step in the right direction.
Beyond Military Might
Although military strength is a core requirement of deterrence, it is not enough. Indeed, the forward deployment of military forces will initially reinforce the divisions in Europe—and would leave the peoples of Ukraine, the Caucuses, and indeed of Belarus and Russia, under Putin’s dominion. The West cannot allow a return of an Iron Curtain dividing Europe. That is why the new containment also needs a policy of economic decoupling and political isolation—measures that are designed to inflict ever increasing costs on Russia and force change from within.
The sanctions announced by the United States and its allies are an important first step. Russia has been effectively cut off from credit and financial support, and technology export controls will severely curtail imports into Russia. Meanwhile, sanctions on Putin, his cronies, and their families will leave them isolated in their dachas in Russia, unable to gallivant on their yachts in St Tropez or their London duplexes. Though many have criticized these sanctions as too little, too late, these critiques assume that their purpose is to stop Russia’s military advance. That was never going to happen. Instead, sanctions are designed to inflict costs over months and years to force a change of behavior.
The effectiveness of sanctions on Russia will depend on two factors. First, their sting requires that they be applied by as many countries as possible. The Biden administration has been right to walk in lockstep with Europe, even as it has engaged diplomatically for months to push for the maximum possible sanctions. It may make people in Washington feel good for the United States to announce a rash of sanctions, but unless others agree to follow, their impact will be limited. As the case of Iran has shown, coordinated sanctions from 2010 onwards produced a real nuclear agreement; the unilateral maximum pressure from the United States since 2018 has only led Iran to accelerate its nuclear program.
Europe gets 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia.
Second, energy is key. Former Senator John McCain once memorably described Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country.” But it is a big gas station, especially for Europe, which still gets 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Some countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Latvia are almost completely dependent for their gas heat and electricity on imports from Russia. Although restricting Russian oil and gas imports would hit the Russian economy, which is highly dependent on fossil fuel exports, the damage such restrictions would do to European economies would be grave as well. True decoupling will thus take years, not weeks or months, as Europe finds alternative sources of gas and reduces its reliance on fossil fuels as part of its climate change commitments.
Aside from military strength and economic decoupling, Russia will also need to be isolated politically. Its unprovoked attack represented a blatant violation of the UN Charter and international law and runs counter to Russia’s commitment not to change borders by force—a commitment Moscow repeated numerous times in European security declarations, including the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, the Charter of Paris in 1990, and the Astana OSCE Declaration in 2010. And Russia clearly violated its explicit guarantee in 1994 to respect Ukraine’s borders and territorial integrity in return for Kyiv’s commitment to give up its nuclear weapons. There can be no return to business as usual with an outlaw regime.
To be sure, diplomatic channels need to remain open, as they were during the Cold War. But Russia’s normal engagement with the rest of the international community must come to an end. The International Olympic Committee’s recommendation that sporting competitions ban athletes from Russia and Belarus was the right call, as was the decision by FIFA and UEFA to ban Russian soccer teams from the World Cup and European championships. The isolation must extend well beyond sports, however. There is no place for Russia in the G20 and the diplomatic dance of European leaders heading off to Moscow that preceded Russia’s attack on Ukraine needs to cease. Aside from Russia’s complete and unconditional withdrawal from all of Ukraine—including the territory it has occupied and annexed since 2014—there is nothing to talk about. That includes suspending the strategic stability talks that were aimed at creating a predictable and stable relationship with Russia. No such relationship is possible so long as Putin is in power. "We will make sure that Putin will be a pariah on the international stage," President Biden declared.
At the same time, just as during the Cold War, there needs to be a concerted effort to engage Russian civil society. Inside Russia, opposition to the war is already surprisingly widespread, as evidenced by the demonstrations that erupted in recent days in more than 50 cities. As Russian soldiers return in body bags and sanctions begin to bite, that opposition is bound to grow. Russians will need access to accurate information, which Western governments can provide through social media, the internet, and broadcasting. People-to-people exchanges should continue. The United States has opened doors to refuseniks before. It can do so again.
Updating the Playbook
To succeed, the new containment policy must be embraced by all Western allies—in Europe, in North America, and even in Asia. Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, is keen to exploit divisions within and between democracies. It has interfered in elections for years and supported far right politics in Europe and beyond. It has used bribes and Western energy dependence to divide Europe. Putin saw the divisions within NATO sown by U.S. President Donald Trump during his four years in office, and the disagreements over Afghanistan and submarine sales to Australia that occurred since, as evidence that the West was weak and divided. Now, he likely thought, was the time to strike.
Putin was wrong. The West has been remarkably unified in its response. Even before Russia’s attack, Western unity within NATO and beyond had solidified. The Biden administration, perhaps learning from its Afghanistan stumbles, did a superb job of bringing its allies together by sharing information, consulting frequently, and demonstrating tough, determined leadership. The result has been significant: strong sanctions, bolstered deterrence, and total political solidarity with Ukraine.
To preserve this unity, the United States, which has once again emerged as a leader of the West, will need to carefully listen to allies and be willing to change course to keep everyone on board. There will be times when internal divisions will raise questions about the solidity of the coalition. During the Cold War, NATO seemed to be in perpetual crisis—except when it mattered most.
There is no place for Russia in the G20.
An important difference between the Cold War era and today is the status of China. No longer a bit player on the global scene, Beijing has emerged as the Washington’s biggest competitor and largest geopolitical challenger in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. The Ukraine crisis emerged at a moment when the relationship between Russia and China has become particularly close. Their leaders have met 38 times since Xi Jinping became president of China in 2012, including most recently at the opening of the Winter Olympics. There, they issued a joint statement noting that their partnership had “no limits.” Far from condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing has blamed the United States and NATO for taking insufficient account of Russia’s security interests.
Beijing’s pronouncements, however, contained an undercurrent of unease with Putin’s moves. The joint statement was notably silent on Ukraine, and official statements have consistently stressed China’s principled commitment to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations. China abstained on a UN Security Council Resolution condemning Russia, rather than joining Moscow in voting against. And Beijing has never recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea, suggesting it may keep an open mind on the future of Ukraine. There is scope, therefore, for quiet diplomacy to gauge whether Beijing might be persuaded to help put pressure on Russia.
Even if Beijing has its doubts, however, it is hardly in its interest to help the United States against Russia. Indeed, Chinese leaders no doubt welcome the U.S.’s renewed preoccupation with security in Europe because it gives Beijing more freedom of maneuver in its own region. China is also likely to help alleviate some of the economic consequences of sanctions for Russia, though there are limits to how much it can do, especially on the financial side, where transactions largely remain the domain of western currencies from which Russia has now been banned.
Containing Russia will therefore require paying attention to China. One way to increase the West’s leverage over Beijing would be to strengthen the political, economic, and military ties between the advanced democracies in Asia, Europe, and North America. An expanded G-7, for example, could include Australia and South Korea as well as the involvement of the heads of the EU and NATO. These nations and organizations will need to devise common strategies and policies not only to contain Russia but also to compete effectively with China.
February 24 was a turning point in history. Democratic powers of the West are once again called upon to defend a rules-based order that has been violently uprooted. Fortunately, the Western powers possess the innate strength necessary to contain Russia and outcompete China for influence across the globe. The only real question is whether they have the will and determination to do so in unison.
17. The Ukraine Invasion: What Lessons Is China Learning?
Excerpts:
Political power is as personal as it is institutional within the CCP in general and its ruling class in particular. Therefore, it is critical to leverage on what matters to individual leaders and the institutions that support them. The most obvious target is the vast wealth of China’s ruling elite. Much of it is entwined with China’s most significant multinational companies or hidden in foreign banks, making this elite more vulnerable to financial sanctions. The intelligence agencies of Western countries know a great deal about the hidden assets of members of the Chinese ruling class, and publishing such information would itself be a serious blow to the CCP regime. The United States has never taken these systematic actions, but now is the time to openly prepare for such actions, which by itself will be an effective deterrent to Xi’s ambitions for Taiwan.
Another element of deterrence is also necessary: strategic clarity. Although the United States and NATO have yet to take direct military action against Russia, and may not in the future, the United States must explain to its people and the world that the Taiwan issue is different, and that the United States has not only a moral but legal responsibility to defend Taiwan. The past policy of strategic ambiguity may have played its due role, but as China’s ambition and capacity to unify Taiwan by force is becoming more and more obvious, and especially given that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has become a reality, the United States must abandon the existing strategy. Vagueness will no longer be enough to stop Xi.
Finally, Russia is currently standing at the forefront of those confronting the democratic world. In addition to sanctions, the international community should fully support the anti-war and pro-democracy forces of the Russian people and strive to achieve political reform there so as to remove the root causes of dictatorship and military violence. This would not only be a more fundamental way to end the Ukrainian crisis and erase Putin’s fascist rule. It would also present the most profound warning to Xi, because what he fears most is the possibility that the liberal-minded and peace-loving people might combine with breakaway members of his ruling clique to form an effective force against Xi and CCP totalitarianism. Russia’s growing isolation, especially Putin’s political downfall, over its aggression against Ukraine would tell Xi that the same fate might await him if he dared invade Taiwan.
The Ukraine Invasion: What Lessons Is China Learning?
Xi Jinping is watching Ukraine with one eye on Taiwan. The West must give him reason to think any invasion would be disastrously costly.
By Jianli Yang and Yan Yu
March 01, 2022
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In the morning of February 24, Russian military forces launched a comprehensive invasion of Ukraine, and Western governments immediately announced a new round of sanctions against Russia. Beijing’s public statements have been as ambiguous as ever, expressing respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, yet at the same time expressing understanding of Russia’s security concerns, and refraining from calling the military action an “invasion.”
Driven by the need to jointly confront the United States, China has chosen to form a strategic alliance with Russia. Just before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met, and the two sides signed 15 significant cooperation agreements covering a wide range of geopolitical and trade areas. On the very day of Russia’s invasion, China announced that it would allow wheat imports from Russia. This kind of cooperation at such a time is undoubtedly an expression of commitment to and support of Putin, which increases his confidence in his aggression against Ukraine and Russia’s ability to resist Western economic sanctions.
While Putin is the main culprit of the unfolding Ukraine crisis, Xi’s role of “holding a candle to the devil” cannot be ignored. As the military conflict intensifies and economic sanctions against Russia take hold, while Xi will not directly support Russia’s invasion, it is still his premeditated plan to maintain China’s partnership with Russia and secretly provide economic assistance to it. China has been Russia’s largest trading partner for 12 consecutive years and Russia is China’s largest energy exporter. When Western countries announced sanctions against Russia, Beijing said that such measures “are never a fundamental and effective way to solve the problem.” This would undoubtedly bring great hope to a Russia embattled by economic woes.
The Russian invasion has put Putin in the harsh spotlight of international public opinion, relieving the Xi regime of the diplomatic problem of being regarded as the greatest threat to the democratic world in recent years. At the moment, Xi may be enjoying the euphoria of being arguably the biggest winner of the Ukraine crisis. He must also be closely scrutinizing the reaction of all parties, which will serve as reference material for calculating his Taiwan plans.
The United States and NATO have so far shown no desire to engage in direct military intervention, which could be a positive sign for Xi. Although in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum the United States and Britain made certain security guarantees for Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine’s abandonment of nuclear weapons, now Biden has said the U.S. military will not go to war with Russia over Ukraine. If there is a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait, will the United States adopt the same strategy? Although Taiwan and Ukraine differ in terms of geopolitical strategy, geographic environment, and their role in international supply chains, U.S. military restraint in this Russia-Ukraine incident has undoubtedly become an important consideration for Xi, perhaps leading him to underestimate the resolve of the United States and the West to defend Taiwan militarily.
But Xi will surely also pay close attention to the fact that although the United States and NATO are not directly carrying out military strikes against Russia, the economic sanctions are biting and widespread. Perhaps Xi is not very concerned about that. First, as mentioned above, at the Winter Olympics Russia and China already discussed how to limit the effect of Western economic sanctions. China will provide an economic transfusion to Russia’s economy, so that the effect of sanctions against Russia will not be immediate. Second, if Beijing militarily attacks Taiwan, while it must consider the economic sanctions that major Western countries will inevitably take, China, with a stronger and broader industrial base than Russia, may be more able to rely on its domestic market to prevent its economy from collapsing. In this regard, the Xi regime has done certain preparations in recent years.
What must be more alarming to Xi is the economic sanctions imposed by Western countries on Putin and his close associates, including freezing the overseas assets of he and his family. Due to the intricate connection between China and the international financial and trade system and the fact that countless officials and their families have transferred assets to the United States and other countries over the years, there is no doubt that similar sanctions would be hugely damaging to the Xi regime. This will affect China’s major political families. Since reform and opening up, these political elites have been able to accumulate huge fortunes, big portions of which are constantly being transferred overseas. Moreover, the second and third generations of communist China’s founders are more internationally oriented, and this overseas wealth functions as the foundation of their international ties.
If faced with severe economic and personal sanctions, can a consensus be formed within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime to engage in behavior similar to Putin’s? The CCP’s power structure differs from the narrow one of the Putin oligarchy. Even if he is indisputably the “core” leader, Xi may have to consider the demands of other political figures, and other top CCP leaders may in fact have the ability to restrain Xi’s risk-taking impulse.
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It is also important for Xi to pay heed to the reaction of the Russian people to the invasion. Anti-war demonstrations have broken out in numerous Russian cities. Hundreds of Russian scientists and journalists who cover international politics have signed an open letter condemning Russia’s military action. If Xi takes military action against Taiwan, will the attitude of Chinese people from all walks of life toward the war be what he desires? Or will the people, who will have to endure greater economic hardship in case of war, be willing to take risks and threaten the stability of the regime?
In this regard, Xi may be more confident even than Putin was, because the CCP regime has a huge advantage over Russia in terms of monopoly of information, suppression of speech, and deceiving the public. Moreover, Xi has mobilized his people’ s nationalism by advocating the “great rejuvenation of the nation.” During the China-U.S. trade war, and management of the COVID-19 epidemic, Xi cultivated nationalist enthusiasm to shift the focus away from the CCP’s mistakes. Now many netizens of China have expressed support for Russia’s invasion, believing that the intervention of the United States was an important factor leading to the conflict. If Xi launches military conflict in the Taiwan Straits, this well-controlled public opinion could be a blessing to the legitimacy of such action. This is certainly what Xi wants.
However, if the anti-war attitude of the Russian people could catch fire and endure, and thus threaten Putin’s rule, it would definitely undermine Xi’s confidence. There is no guarantee that Chinese who demand freedom, who oppose any war launched by Xi, or who are suffering from economic sanctions, along with members of the ruling clique who will be hit personally by individual sanctions imposed by the West, will not form forces beyond Xi’s control.
Given this, in the face of Putin and Xi’s joint efforts to date, and Xi’s possible calculations on Taiwan in reference of the Ukraine crisis, we suggest responses for the United State and its allies to take.
China has become Russia’s economic lifeline. Given China’s extensive trade relations with the United States and Europe, for now Western sanctions against Russia will mean that China will parasitically benefit from the hardship of the Russian people, thereby simultaneously alleviating Putin’s pain and lessening the impact of these sanctions. Therefore, the United States must also closely monitor trade between Russia and China, preformulate collective economic sanction plans on China, and impose them when necessary. China’s economy is still largely dependent on international trade. Given the potential inadequacy of purely domestic economic activity to promote continued growth in time, if international financial ties are suddenly lost, China’s economy may falter or even fall. Xi is in urgent need of maintaining both political and economic stability together to build up his mandate to stay in power for an unprecedented third term at the 20th Party Congress this fall. He could not afford to ignore major economic sanctions imposed by the West.
Political power is as personal as it is institutional within the CCP in general and its ruling class in particular. Therefore, it is critical to leverage on what matters to individual leaders and the institutions that support them. The most obvious target is the vast wealth of China’s ruling elite. Much of it is entwined with China’s most significant multinational companies or hidden in foreign banks, making this elite more vulnerable to financial sanctions. The intelligence agencies of Western countries know a great deal about the hidden assets of members of the Chinese ruling class, and publishing such information would itself be a serious blow to the CCP regime. The United States has never taken these systematic actions, but now is the time to openly prepare for such actions, which by itself will be an effective deterrent to Xi’s ambitions for Taiwan.
Another element of deterrence is also necessary: strategic clarity. Although the United States and NATO have yet to take direct military action against Russia, and may not in the future, the United States must explain to its people and the world that the Taiwan issue is different, and that the United States has not only a moral but legal responsibility to defend Taiwan. The past policy of strategic ambiguity may have played its due role, but as China’s ambition and capacity to unify Taiwan by force is becoming more and more obvious, and especially given that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has become a reality, the United States must abandon the existing strategy. Vagueness will no longer be enough to stop Xi.
Finally, Russia is currently standing at the forefront of those confronting the democratic world. In addition to sanctions, the international community should fully support the anti-war and pro-democracy forces of the Russian people and strive to achieve political reform there so as to remove the root causes of dictatorship and military violence. This would not only be a more fundamental way to end the Ukrainian crisis and erase Putin’s fascist rule. It would also present the most profound warning to Xi, because what he fears most is the possibility that the liberal-minded and peace-loving people might combine with breakaway members of his ruling clique to form an effective force against Xi and CCP totalitarianism. Russia’s growing isolation, especially Putin’s political downfall, over its aggression against Ukraine would tell Xi that the same fate might await him if he dared invade Taiwan.
18. U.S. delegation arrives in Taiwan as China denounces visit
I thought this report received some pushback from the Administration and that it was not at its behest. Of course regardless of US denials, to China it is tantamount to an official visit.
U.S. delegation arrives in Taiwan as China denounces visit
TAIPEI/BEIJING, March 1 (Reuters) - A delegation of former senior U.S. defence and security officials sent by President Joe Biden arrived in Taipei on Tuesday on a visit denounced by China and happening in the midst of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The visit, led by one-time chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, comes at a time when Taiwan has stepped up its alert level, wary of China taking advantage of a distracted West to move against it.
Beijing claims the democratically governed island as its own and has vowed to bring it under Chinese control, by force if necessary.
Mullen, a retired Navy admiral who served as the top U.S. military officer under former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is being accompanied by Meghan O'Sullivan, a former deputy national security adviser under Bush, and Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense under Obama.
Two former National Security Council senior directors for Asia, Mike Green and Evan Medeiros, are also on the trip, which is intended to "demonstrate our continued robust support for Taiwan," a U.S. official told Reuters.
The group touched down in a private jet at Taipei's downtown Songshan airport and were met by Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu.
They will meet President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday, the same day former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will also arrive, though he is coming separately and as a private citizen.
China describes Taiwan as the most sensitive and important issue in its ties with the United States, and any high-level interactions upset Beijing.
"The will of the Chinese people to defend our country's sovereignty and territorial integrity is immovable. Whoever United States sends to show support for Taiwan is bound to fail," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said of the visit.
Taiwan Premier Su Tseng-chang told reporters earlier on Tuesday that the trip showed "the importance both of the Taiwan-U.S. relationship and Taiwan's position" as well as the staunch U.S. support for the island.
"It's a very good thing," he added.
Their flight, from Washington via Anchorage, made an unusual arrival, flying down Japan's Ryukyu Islands before turning to approach Taipei from Taiwan's northeast coast and well away from China, data from flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed.
The more normal approach path for their direction of travel is over the East China Sea.
On Saturday, a U.S. warship sailed through the sensitive Taiwan Strait, part of what the U.S. military calls routine activity but which China described as "provocative". read more
Wang went further on Tuesday, using even stronger terms.
"If United States is trying to threaten and pressure China with this then we need to tell them that in the face of the Great Wall of steel forged by 1.4 billion Chinese people, any military deterrence is but scrap metal," he said.
"The gimmick of having a U.S. warship sail through the Taiwan Strait should be left to those who foolishly believe in hegemony."
Reporting by Yew Lun Tian and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Simon Cameron-Moore
19. Intelligence Disclosures in the Ukraine Crisis and Beyond
It is a brave new world. I am supportive of the effective use of intelligence being released to the public. It can be very useful to support influence operations.
Excerpts:
Too Soon to Tell
The Ukrainian experience will certainly influence future information campaigns, and it is essential that policymakers and the intelligence community are scrupulous in evaluating its lessons. While it may be tempting to suggest that the shrewd deployment of information was critical in rallying the unified, hard-line consensus against Russian aggression, it is impossible at this stage to know for sure. Although measuring one variable — intelligence disclosures — within an exceptionally complex system will be difficult, it is a vital exercise, since the reputation and credibility of the United States are in the balance.
One thing is certain: we are witnessing the most information-dense conflict in the history of war. In an era when anyone can be an intelligence collector, analyst, and consumer, the Russian invasion of Ukraine will force every nation and its intelligence services to more carefully calibrate the relationship between intelligence, diplomacy and public opinion.
Intelligence Disclosures in the Ukraine Crisis and Beyond - War on the Rocks
We’ve been transparent with the world. We’ve shared declassified evidence about Russia’s plans and cyberattacks and false pretexts so that there can be no confusion or cover-up about what Putin was doing. Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences.
In the run-up to Russia’s invasion, the public had access to an exceptionally coherent “all-source” intelligence picture. There is now more high fidelity open source reporting on Russia’s military activities than ever before, alongside formerly-secret intelligence insights into Russian intentions. It is too soon to tell whether this will have the impact that Biden hopes. But it isn’t too soon to begin thinking hard about the best way to approach declassifications in this far less secret world.
In addition to ensuring that declassifications effectively balance transparency with the need to protect sensitive sources and methods, the United States should continue to evaluate how intelligence disclosures can appropriately and responsibly be used as an element of policy. This means maintaining a healthy and democratic relationship between political leaders and the intelligence community while also remaining attuned to the way intelligence, with all its uncertainties and caveats, will be received by the public.
An Increasingly Open Environment
This may be the first time that the United States has used intelligence as part of a proactive “prebuttal” strategy on this scale. But it almost certainly will not be the last. Narrative is a key front in war, and information is the ammunition. Although the United States has been accused of being slow to adjust to the realities of the modern information environment, this is not fair. For years, senior military commanders advocated the type of proactive name-and-shame strategies that Biden has used with Russia. There could be no better target: Putin, for his part, has long recognized the value of information operations, what one Russian military expert called the “war of meanings.”
Long gone are the days where United States dramatically confronted the Soviet Union with declassified imagery disproving Russian lies about its activities in Cuba, which Calder Walton discussed this week in these same pages. Today, government intelligence disclosures are, in many ways, contributing to a public intelligence picture that is increasingly “all-source,” to use an intelligence term of art. As a result, the environment for these latest disclosures is unlike any that preceded it. Never has the collapse of the nation-state’s monopoly on intelligence been clearer. The world is collectively tracking Russia’s movements and operations in near real-time. It is safe to say that high-fidelity open-source intelligence has finally gone mainstream.
To illustrate, imagine the current open-source intelligence environment as its own sovereign intelligence enterprise. There are space-based remote sensors. Maxar and Planet conduct the geospatial intelligence mission, delivering near-persistent high resolution satellite imagery that allows analysts to document troop movements and build-ups in detail. On the ground, sensors are everywhere — often in the form of cellphone cameras — capturing military movements, such as transport west of military equipment from Russia’s far east. On Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, additional human sources — with varying credibility and access — are sharing real-time updates on key indicators, like long queues for gasoline or intensifying shelling in Donetsk. What becomes clear in processing all of this data, however, is that insight into capabilities is often plentiful, while insight into intentions can be sparse.
Amid this backdrop of seemingly universal transparency, governments are reassessing their relationship with secrecy. While secrecy is not dead (the United States does still spend $84 billion per year on intelligence programs) it has grown sluggish in its old age. And so, it is into a highly saturated information environment that Washington is deploying secrets about Russian false flag, disinformation, cyber, and military operations at an unprecedented rate.
Clear Capabilities and Murky Intentions
The relationship between capabilities and intentions is one of the eternal tensions in intelligence analysis. One unfortunate historic lesson is that when decision-makers (and all humans for that matter) lack insight into what others are thinking, they often substitute their own judgments. This has been the case in numerous well-documented intelligence failures, and contributed significantly in to warning failure during the Korean War and prior to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Cynthia Grabo, the late doyenne of warning analysis, taught that “it is not a question of intentions versus capabilities, but of coming to logical judgments of intentions in light of capabilities.” In Kuwait, for example, leaders underestimated the likelihood of war due to faulty assumptions about the mindset of Saddam Hussein, despite ample evidence of a massive military buildup. Prior to Russia’s Feb. 22 invasion, this same capabilities-intentions gap was at the center of disagreements about the meaning of Russia’s military build-up. In November 2021, an unnamed European diplomat, faced with mounting evidence of Russia’s activities on Ukraine’s border and lacking further insight into Russia’s calculus, was skeptical: “We don’t see that there is intention on Putin’s part so far.”
What makes the recent intelligence disclosures so remarkable is the way they are augmenting the already deep insights into Russian capabilities by delivering additional allegations about Putin’s strategy and intentions. Even if the primary intended recipient of these declassifications is Putin himself, their biggest impact might be bridging the public knowledge gap between Russian capabilities and intentions. In a battle of narratives, quick action can be decisive. Once Russia undertakes a particular maneuver and overlays it with its own version of events, efforts to establish ground truth after the fact face an uphill battle.
Careful Candor
The American declassification campaign is not without risk. There is certainly risk to sources and methods, as noted in several articles about recent disclosures. Calder Walton’s latest article in these pages cites the historical record in describing the challenges of managing disclosure. Most notably, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy did authorize Amb. Adlai Stevenson to confront the Soviets with declassified U-2 imagery at the United Nations, but the world did not learn until later that the United States and the United Kingdom were also relying on highly sensitive human intelligence information from Soviet military intelligence officer Oleg Penkovsky. This underscore the enduring challenge for officials grappling with disclosure decisions. While the Soviets were already aware of the U-2’s existence and capabilities — which probably eased Kennedy’s decision to declassify imagery — Penkovsky’s life was quite literally in the balance. He was executed six months later.
Making determinations about sharing declassified intelligence information is a risk management process that, ideally, is conducted collaboratively between the intelligence community and the White House. Such processes should be designed to maintain the secrecy of human sources and the integrity of technical sources while maximizing the utility of intelligence to policymakers.
Without processes in place to balance intelligence community concerns about sources and methods with the intelligence needs of policymakers, the negative consequences for all sides could be substantial. Broken trust between intelligence officials and policymakers over the protection of sensitive sources and methods could disrupt essential intelligence functions. Fearing that sensitive, singular information may be leaked or disclosed without robust consultation, the intelligence community might restrict information sharing. While intelligence officials would certainly continue to keep the president and other senior leaders informed, the crucial “middle” of the national security bureaucracy — the real engine of decision-making, policy, and strategy — may find its access to some information limited. Managing such competing concerns and interests between intelligence and policy is a key National Security Council function, and it will require constant vigilance if declassifying sensitive intelligence information proves to be a core element of future crisis management efforts.
The bigger risk is one of trust. When publicizing intelligence information as part of a crisis, decision-makers need to carefully evaluate how the message will be received and understood by the intended audience. Intelligence is often ambiguous, uncertain, and even contradictory. Sometimes it is wrong. It is a tool for reducing uncertainty, not eliminating it. Raw collection is accompanied by caveats about a source’s placement and access. Analysts convey judgments using words of estimative probability, sometimes correlated to tables mapping these words to a numerical probability range. There is a patois in intelligence that frustrates and confuses even its most dedicated consumers.
Injecting intelligence — with all its caveats and uncertainties — into a hyper-charged information environment carries tremendous risk for the messenger. Opponents will capitalize on any opportunity to “prove” accusations wrong. As Michael Allen writes, “intelligence isn’t perfect—if it were, it would be called information.” This is in no way intended to suggest that the public is incapable of processing and analyzing declassified intelligence. But it underscores how governments incur significant reputational risk, even when their intelligence is accurate. Consider the recent allegation that Russia was planning to release a fake video as part of a pretext for invading Ukraine. Should such a video never materialize, can it be proven that the intelligence was wrong? Or was the lack of evidence attributable to the Russians changing their plans based on publicization of their intentions? Who bears the burden of proof? Compounding the challenge, if governments do not elaborate on the sourcing of their disclosures to protect sources and methods, they will be more likely to face accusations of obfuscation or misinformation.
Finally, it is a slippery slope when intelligence services are deployed as arbiters of truth. Successfully navigating the challenges of this era of strategic competition requires governments like the United States to engage in narrative battles — to fight in the war of meanings. But they should do so in a way that enlightens, rather than distorts.
Intelligence officers should participate disclosure decisions, and they should clearly and objectively articulate potential risks to existing sources and accesses. But it is important that this collaborative relationship does not erode the necessary and fundamental barriers between intelligence and policy. Intelligence informs policy. It does not make it. When the use of intelligence information itself becomes the policy, efforts to identify and evaluate information that is relevant to policy could unconsciously morph into something closer to shaping or supporting policy. It is essential for all parties involved to be ever-mindful of intelligence’s responsibility to inform and policy’s responsibility to decide and implement. As countless recent and historic examples illustrate, these boundaries are not always crystal clear.
The need for vigilance, however, leads into the second complex issue, which is how to maintain a trusted intelligence-policy relationship when things (inevitably) go wrong. An oft-repeated phrase is that “there are no policy failures. There are only intelligence failures.” There are plenty of examples where politicians have been quick to blame for failed policies on intelligence agencies. This will create even more problems in a future where intelligence agencies — whether they embrace their role or not — regularly find themselves at the center of diplomatic confrontations. When publicly deployed information proves wrong, and the United States loses credibility with its intended audience, will intelligence agencies be made to bear blame? History suggests they might. If the United States is serious about maturing and sustaining the types of activities that have shaped the Russia crisis, then new models for accepting risk and responsibility for the use of intelligence will be necessary.
Too Soon to Tell
The Ukrainian experience will certainly influence future information campaigns, and it is essential that policymakers and the intelligence community are scrupulous in evaluating its lessons. While it may be tempting to suggest that the shrewd deployment of information was critical in rallying the unified, hard-line consensus against Russian aggression, it is impossible at this stage to know for sure. Although measuring one variable — intelligence disclosures — within an exceptionally complex system will be difficult, it is a vital exercise, since the reputation and credibility of the United States are in the balance.
One thing is certain: we are witnessing the most information-dense conflict in the history of war. In an era when anyone can be an intelligence collector, analyst, and consumer, the Russian invasion of Ukraine will force every nation and its intelligence services to more carefully calibrate the relationship between intelligence, diplomacy and public opinion.
Jake Harrington is an intelligence fellow with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C..
20. FDD | Vladimir the Terrible
FDD | Vladimir the Terrible
fdd.org · by Clifford D. May Founder & President · February 25, 2022
Clifford D. May
Founder & President
James Brooke
Visiting Fellow
John Hardie
Research Manager and Research Analyst
Ivana Stradner
American Enterprise Institute
About
As feared and anticipated, Vladimir Putin sent his troops over the border into Ukraine – an act of aggression and a blatant violation of international law. If Ukrainians, over the days ahead display courage, defiance, and determination, can they stop Putin from stripping them of their right to independence, sovereignty, and self-determination?
Having shown little will to contain Putin after he dismembered Georgia in 2008, or after he seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed it in 2014, what can – and should – American and European leaders do now? And if Putin emerges victorious from this war, will that sate his appetite — or whet it?
Discussing these issues with Foreign Podicy host Cliff May are James Brooke, FDD visiting fellow who has lived in and covered Russia for The New York Times, Bloomberg, the Voice of America and other publications; Ivana Stradner, Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; and John Hardie, research manager and research analyst at FDD.
MAY: As feared and anticipated, Vladimir Putin has sent his troops over the border into Ukraine, an act of aggression and a blatant violation of international law. If Ukrainians over the days ahead display courage, defiance, and determination, can they stop Putin from stripping them of their right to independence, sovereignty, and self-determination? Having shown little will to contain Putin after he dismembered Georgia in 2008, and after he seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed it in 2014, what can and what should American and European leaders do now? If Putin emerges victorious from this war, will that sate his appetite or whet it?
I’m Cliff May. Discussing these issues with me today are James Brooke, FDD visiting fellow, who has lived in and covered Russia for The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Voice of America and other publications. Also, with us is Ivana Stradner, Jeane Kirkpatrick visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and John Hardie, research manager and research analyst at FDD. I’m pleased you are joining us too, here on Foreign Podicy. So John, let me begin with you. It’s a fast-moving situation. As we record this on Thursday morning, what’s the military situation? What do we know? I know you’ve been tracking a million different sources online and elsewhere. Go ahead.
HARDIE: Right. Yeah. Thanks, Cliff. As you say, there is fast moving information flying about, but I’ll try to give you the best sense I can as of early this morning. So late yesterday morning Moscow time, Putin released a speech which was actually prerecorded on Monday, announcing that Russia is beginning a special military operation. The goal of which is to demilitarize and dematify Ukraine, which is basically to install a puppet regime, but will cut military ties with the U.S. So as expected, Russia has conducted numerous missile and airstrikes against key Ukrainian military targets and infrastructure, talking about things like air defenses, command posts, air bases, ports, bridges, and weapons storage facilities. This is throughout the entirety of Ukraine.
So, this includes the capital, east, west, et cetera. Meanwhile, airborne troops are dropping behind Ukrainian lines to seize critical points, including one of the capitals airports. Meanwhile, Russian ground forces are attacking from multiple axes, including from Belarus, Northeastern Ukrainian, Donbas and Crimea. The Russian forces will likely conduct inter movements to encircle Ukrainian forces in the east, where the bulk of the Ukrainian military is located. The goal there is to cut them off from a capital to prevent them from conducting an organized retreat. Then another pincher movement will attack the capital and overthrow the machine.
MAY: Let me just follow. Do we have any sense that Putin is demanding or asking President Zelensky of Ukraine to surrender, capitulate, get in a plane, or get out of the country? Any sense of that?
HARDIE: Yeah. So, in his speech, Putin said to Ukrainian forces, “Lay down your arms and you won’t be harmed.” Zelensky tried calling Putin and that apparently went unanswered.
MAY: Right.
HARDIE: So, I don’t think Putin’s really interested in negotiating at this point. I saw one, I have to stress, an unconfirmed report that there was Turkish military transport aircraft in the capital potentially to take away the president. But again, that’s unconfirmed. So, I can’t validate that.
MAY: Got it. Ivana, I think a little background just reminding people. I mentioned that in 2008, Putin carved two chunks out of Georgia. He didn’t take over the whole country. He took two provinces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and they are essentially vassals of Russia and have been ever since. In 2014, I mentioned he invaded Crimea and had plenty of forces there already. He annexed it in a very short order. But also, which I didn’t mention in 2014, he began to support separatists in the Donbas region. This is the whole eastern region. Just talk a little bit about what has happened and what our reaction in the West has been to what’s been going on in the whole Eastern section of Ukraine that borders Russia.
STRADNER: Yeah, absolutely. So let me maybe just give you a timeframe, how we actually – how it got to be this way. So everything started already, the crisis in Ukraine in 2013 against the President Victor Yanukovych, because he decided not to move forward with a European Union integration. There was a huge crackdown –a protest in the country that escalated further. He decided to leave the country in February 2014. Guess what? Immediately, the month later, Russia decided to employ its well-known hybrid warfare doctrine and employ a little green man. So basically, Russia was like, “We have nothing to do with this.” They took their troops actually to control over the Crimean region. Guess what? It’s a very similar situation like now. So everything that our intelligence cited about, the pretext, it’s really nothing new, because that’s precisely what Russia was doing even back then, arguing that was the need to protect the rights of Russian citizens and Russian speakers living in Crimea and Southeast Ukraine.
So, in terms of the pretext, it was absolutely a similar thing. Several months later we saw a pro-Russian separatist in Donetsk in the Luhansk region of Eastern Ukraine, and that they actually had a referendum to declare independence from Ukraine. Of course, Russian troops, they fully took control over Crimea before they annexed it. So, this is really nothing in terms of that. Then he continued in 2014 because it further escalated with the European Union. I don’t know if some of you can remember, where there was actually a Malaysian Airlines flight that was shot over the Ukrainian airspace. That was really a landmark moment for this particular crisis. Then of course, everyone asked like, “Why Putin was acting this way?
Probably he’s thinking why not? Because even then, on the United States and the European Union, they were quiet about this whole thing. But then in 2015, they decided to seize this violence with the means of course that you were going to hearing later, probably hear it every single day and now in the news. So, this was a shot of history and by then yesterday, actually two days ago, he [Biden] said that the invasion began two days ago. That was, I think, very wrong because the Russian invasion already started in 2014. This is just the continuation of what Putin has been doing over the past eight years and I think we should really perceive it through those lenses.
MAY: Jim, I’m going to ask you a threshold question here and Ivanna and John, think about it, if you want to answer it too, you can. I can imagine somebody listening to this podcast and saying, “You know what? I don’t know anything about Ukraine. I don’t care about Ukraine. Why are they all so upset about Ukraine? It was a part of the Soviet union. Now Putin wants it. Part of Russia. This is not important to me.” Why should America care about this?
BROOKE: Yeah, thank you, Cliff. Well, there are 40 million Ukrainians who want to be part of the West, who want to be part of the EU who look west, who vacation, work, and study in the EU and they’re really overwhelmingly oriented westward. They want to be part of that. I think in the bigger picture, we will remember today, February 24, the way people remember December seven and 9/11. This is a turning page in history. For the first time in 75 years, a European state has attacked another European state. It is the end of the post-Cold War benefit time when the Germans can get by with a 65,000-man army. We’re in a new world now, and either you stop the Russians now, or you let them keep moving and next will be the Baltics. It’s very significant that the Kremlin has gobbled up Belarus and swallowed it up.
They’ve stationed 30,000 troops. Half of them are coming into Chernobyl right now, as they’re fighting over Chernobyl, which is a potential radioactive disaster. But Belarus borders on two NATO member states, Latvia, Lithuania, which both happened to be former Soviet socialist republics, and both are quite happy being free market multi-party democracies. They do not want to be part of Russia. So, this is very important to stop Russia now. This is 1938 with the Germans and Sudetenland. Yes, the convenient thing was peace in our time, and at the end of that process, 50 million people were killed.
So, it’s very significant that the U.S. act now and keep sending anti-ship, anti-tank, anti-craft, and anti-drone missiles to Ukraine. Ukrainians do not want American boots on the ground. Ukraine has been fighting Russia for eight years. They have the second largest army in Europe after Russia –200,000 men and women. They have battle, experienced veterans. They have reservists, they have their own militia and they have a history of partisan warfare. From 1944 to 1954, more Soviet security personnel were killed in Western Ukraine than during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. So the Ukrainians can seem meek and mild and polite and nice, which they all are. They also can be very tough, and I think we’re going to see that toughness coming out in coming days and weeks, starting today.
MAY: I’m going to make another point, but you’re free to disagree with, agree with or add to. That is this, that we fought World War I, to stop an evil empire from conquering Europe and another evil empire from conquering Asia. They were alive. They were the Axis powers. We felt it was necessary not to let the world fall under the Jack Boots of such totalitarians. Then we fought the Cold War, because even after World War II, a lot of Europe was still under a totalitarian a totalitarian jackboot, that of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact was not like NATO. The Warsaw Pact was like the Hotel California. You can check in, but you can’t check out. Remember Hungary in 1956. Remember Czechoslovakia in 1968. So that’s why we fought the World War II.
That’s why we fought the Cold War. Now, if we are to say, “Yeah. Putin can go ahead, and he can take over Belarus. He can take over Ukraine. He can finish taking over Georgia. Then he can turn on Western Europe, more broadly the Baltics,” which we’ll talk about in the minute, we’re essentially saying, “You know what? No. There was no need to fight World War II. There was no need to fight the Cold War, because we don’t really care if the rest of the world ends up totalitarian and if there’s no freedom and no democracy in the rest of the world. We’ve got oceans to protect us. We have borders.” Although the Southern border is not –it’s like a swinging screen door at this point. Anybody can walk in. Anybody can walk out.
But that’s essentially what we’re saying. It’s a very different view of the world. Ivanna or John, you want to comment on that? You’re welcome to. If not, I know exactly where I want to go from here.
STRADNER: I would like to say a few things. I really think that this is a threat to the entire world. I think as of yesterday, the world does not look in the same way. This could be the end of the international liberal order. I mean, think about this. Yesterday evening, there was an emergency session in the United Nations Security Council. While permanent member states were putting forward their arguments, Russia started an invasion. In the midst of this whole thing, just to make a notion about the UN, I mean, we should also not forget that Russia is actually in February has a presence in the United Nations Security Council. That’s one thing that I would like to add.
The second thing is no matter what, I’ll put it bluntly, the unilateral world order is over. We are really in the midst of the competition with China and Russia. For many, many years, people were thinking, “Who cares about Russia? It’s absolutely not a great power, weak economy, et cetera, et cetera,” and Putin thrives on this type of misunderstanding. The third thing is I’m afraid that Putin is not going to end here. Whoever thinks that Donbas, that’s it, I’m afraid that is going to be up for disappointment very soon. I’m very concerned about what’s going to happen in Moldova, because what’s going to happen in Moldova in Transnistria. It can have a serious impact on Odessa and the Black Sea. Then also Romania is at stake, the Baltic states, but also the Balkans. Let alone we should also maybe even consider what Russia is doing even in cyberspace to challenge us.
The fourth thing that I would also like to add in this conversation, for many years, we’ve been having problems with the Transatlantic partnership. I think this is also wake-up call for our European partners. Let’s not forget that only three days ago, the German Chancellor who openly stated, “I cannot imagine a war in Europe.” I think that’s a very problematic thing. I sometimes think those people live in a parallel universe. This could be at least one positive thing to make better ties with our European partners.
MAY: I just want to highlight a couple things you said there. One is that after World War II, the victors, really the U.S. in particular, created the UN and the UN was supposed to prevent conflicts and solve conflicts. It doesn’t do that at all. Russia was put on, or the Soviet Union was put on the Security Council. Now it’s Russia. China is on the Security Council. The UN is unhelpful here. Then you have within the UN, organizations like the UN Human Rights Council, which is a place that violators of human rights go to have impunity from criticism and Americans pay for all of this. We also have had this belief that if we just pronounce the word diplomacy, if we just say we’re looking for a diplomatic solution, all these things go away. This is magical thinking. This is a fantasy.
Meanwhile, NATO looks strong in a way, except for the fact that it’s really a defense alliance. People get into it and then they expect the United States to protect them, because most of the European countries are spending less than 2%, 3% or so of their GDP, and they’re not capable and they’re not ready. Let me just go to you, John, on this one in particular, because let’s suppose Putin emerges victorious and he says, “Okay. There are ethnic Russians in Estonia. There are ethnic Russians in Lithuania. There are ethnic Russians in Latvia and I have a province. It’s called Kaldenberg, which is west of Lithuania and not attached to Russia by land. There is land bridge and I want a land bridge. I want to protect the poor Russian people in Lithuania who are suffering under the heel of the West.” is NATO prepared? We have an Article 5 NATO commitment to defend Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Is NATO prepared to do that successfully? John, you want to take a crack at that?
HARDIE: Yeah. Well, to your point, Cliff, I think we are not prepared and we need to invest a lot more heavily in getting prepared. A Russian attack against the Baltics is not a likely scenario, but if you had asked me a year ago, would Russia invade Ukraine in attempt to overthrow the regime in Kyiv, I’d told you no. Hell no. So, I think we need to be prepared for the fact that Putin seems to be in a different sort of head space than he was even just a couple years ago. So predicting his next moves is not going to be easy and we need to be prepared for a broad range of contingencies. That means boosting our defense investment in Europe. It means investing in military mobility across the continent. It means preparing for the implications of a greater permanent Russian presence in Belarus. So there are a whole range of new threats in the European security environment that we and our allies need to prepare for.
MAY: I’m going to make this point before I go to you, Jim. That is I believe, I think most of us at FDD believe that the U.S. capitulation to the Taliban and its de facto ally, al-Qaeda, after all these years in Afghanistan, that sent a strong message not the least to people like Putin. I think he probably asked himself, “If the Americans aren’t willing to fight the Taliban, I mean, these guys –really they should be no match, then he’s not going to fight me. So, if I want to take Ukraine, what am I waiting for? This is a great time.”
Meanwhile, as we talk and as we speak, negotiations are going on in Vienna, in which we believe, I hope I’m wrong, that the U.S. is about to capitulate again, this time to the Islamic Republic of Tehran by giving them billions of dollars in exchange for an agreement that provides no help, at most delays very shortly possibly, I doubt it, their acquisition of nuclear weapons while they are also dominating Lebanon through Hezbollah. [They] may having turned Lebanon into a failing state, while their militias operate with impunity in Iraq, while they support the Houthis in Yemen, while they give weapons to the Palestinians in Gaza, so they can foment wars there. None of this will change from this ad yet we’re going to hear, I’m afraid, American diplomats saying, “What a victory we have just achieved in Vienna,” vis-à-vis Tehran. All of this looks so weak.
Now saying that, Jim, I want to have you talk a little bit about sanctions, because a lot of people think, “Okay. That’s what we need to do, sanctions.” President Biden is putting sanctions on Russia, but from what I can tell, tell me if I’m wrong, they’re not crippling sanctions. Not at this point ad I think from Putin’s point of view, he’s already discounted the sanctions. He knows what they’ll do and what they won’t. It’s an inconvenience, but it’s unlikely to stop him. What do you think?
BROOKE: Yeah. Well, I agree with you and Russia has $600 billion in cash reserves. They have a huge pillow that can get them through the next couple of years and Putin himself may well be the world’s richest man. So, the feeling is that the sanctions are going to be tough, but probably not stop Putin. A few hours ago, Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, asked for Russia to be expelled from SWIFT, which would be very important. That would really hurt them in terms of their foreign trade and –
MAY: People need to know – SWIFT is an international banking system. If you’re off SWIFT, it’s very hard to be –
BROOKE: North Korea.
MAY: Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right.
BROOKE: You’re North Korea. You’re out of it. No. I agree with you. By the way, one little correction, the date is February 24. I was looking forward to spring. But we will –February 24 as the date. I think what will carry the day, it’s the missiles. It’s the military aid. In terms of Europe, I hope this has been a wake-up call. We’ve had six months of repetitive lies by Russian officials saying, “We will not invade Ukraine.” Peskov, the spokesman for Putin and the spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry have said this again and again, “We are not planning to invade Ukraine.”
So, if people were asleep, hopefully they woke up to the fact that you cannot trust what the Kremlin says. I do fear and I do recognize, that the Afghan debacle was a green light for the Kremlin. I was in Kyiv in August. I remember this happening and I remember reading the Kremlin media outlets saying basically, “Ukraine, you’re next.” They were saying that six months ago, back in August. The signal was, “The U.S. is weak. The U.S. bugged out of Afghanistan. The U.S. sold them down the river, let them fall apart. And surprise, surprise, Ukraine. Start packing your bags for the West.” So that is an obvious lesson in the impact of being weak. I do think I agree with you, Ivana, on what’s called the “salami tactics”, “Oh, we’ll just give them Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odessa, and maybe they’ll be happy with that,” and it just keeps going, and going, and going. The famous Soviet approach to diplomacy is that, “What I have mine is mine and what is yours is negotiable.”
MAY: We can talk about that. Ivana, do you have any other comments as to, do we have any sense of how Russians are responding to this? That’s a hard thing to know because I don’t trust some of their polls, but I don’t really trust the polls. We have seen demonstrations that have been closed down. I don’t know. What’s your sense of how Russians are perceiving what’s going on here?
STRADNER: I’m monitoring, quite closely, the information space in Russia. First and foremost, it’s very, very polluted, but it’s nothing new because Russia has been pedaling its agenda and propaganda for a very long time. So in terms of the Russian opposition, we already know how the Russian opposition ends up over there, in prison and completely silenced. So there were a couple of people who tried to protest and they were immediately arrested. I do not also foresee any big protests against this type of war. I’m not surprised because we already know what happened last year and the year before, when people actually tried to protest against Putin’s regime.
I’m also concerned about one particular thing. Some people would claim, yeah, we can actually spread information on social media platforms. And Putin knows this thing. Last year, he made this new law on social media, which is, in my view, a Draconian law because everything that Putin doesn’t like, he immediately punishes social media platforms. Not only that, he already has capabilities for an alternative internet, Runet. He already made alternative social media platforms. So whoever – you know thinks that young Russians can actually, in the future, can have real information, that I think, will be up to debate.
In terms of what the Russian media is saying, if that was also your question, some people are claiming that they are the victims of genocide. All of those things that our intel community has been sharing about pretext and full slag operations. So, information is absolutely polluted and the information space over there just mirrors what Putin wants his audience to hear.
MAY: So, my two cents on this is that, if Putin wins and wins quickly and cleanly, a lot of people say, “You know what? He’s strong and he’s standing up for Russian interest and that’s great.” If a lot of body bags come back, they’ll say, “What did he get us into this for?” That’s natural psychology. Go ahead, Ivana.
STRADNER: I just wanted to add one more thing. One of the major concerns that I had over the past few months, I was very, very concerned by reading Russian news, the rhetoric, was absolutely like the Soviet era. They absolutely changed the rhetoric and this rise of nationalism over there has been rapidly rising. In terms of how many people die in Russia, first of all, I am not even sure that Putin has any obligation to disclose this information. Secondly, does actually really Putin even care about those things? Look, every single American soldier who died, we have a memorial wall, et cetera, et cetera. Something like that does not exist in Russia. They are just going to knock on the first available door and get another 18 year old and send him to fight for Russia. So I really think, about this crisis, we really need to start thinking like the Kremlin thinks.
MAY: FDD houses the Barish Center on Media Integrity, and this raises some really interesting issues that I hope we’ll study more. I’ll maybe go to you, John, on this to begin with and that is the extent with which and the skill with which Putin manages to use disinformation. People don’t know that disinformation is not an English word. It comes from the Russian word, dezinformatsiya. Right? It’s different from misinformation. John, just tell us a little bit about that and Jim, you know a lot about it, too, from your years there.
HARDIE: Yeah. Thanks, Cliff. So, the Russians and the Soviets before them have a long history of using disinformation as part of active measures to influence, subvert, shape foreign countries and their governments and their people. Disinformation has really been a huge, integral part of this conflict for months now, whether it’s the false flag attacks in the Donbas and elsewhere, trying to create pretext for Russian military aggression. So, Putin is always trying to shape the way people look at Russia, their pressure on their government, their faith in their government, and undermining confidence. It’s really integral to the way that the Russian Special Services conduct activity abroad.
MAY: Jimmy, you want to add anything on that?
BROOKE: Yeah. Just a couple things, if I could. One, Ivana, I had a friend in Moscow who sent me a message on Viber saying, “Jim, you know what’s going on. What’s going on?” She’s in the Russian media capital and she doesn’t understand what’s happening. There have been a couple opinion polls of Russian men between 18 and 25, overwhelmingly disinterested in attacking Ukraine. As we know, there are probably million minimum Russians who have relatives in Ukraine. There’s a lot of family ties there. If this were a war against Chechnya, there might be more popular support.
I think, also, on the genocide issue, I did this piece for FDD that was put up on the website about 48 hours ago. Just as the Georgian War started, then President Medvedev started accusing Georgia of genocide and of killing South Ossetians en masse, in thousands. He used the word thousands and the Kremlin media immediately picked it up as thousands, thousands, thousands killed. The Ossetians later said this desensitized us to the ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages. When we heard about the thousands killed, we said, “Screw them. Burn them out. Send them down to Georgia,” whatever. These are communities they’d lived next to for hundreds of years.
Now, this is what’s happening and then six months after the war was over, the Russians came out with an official death toll of 168, not thousands, but 168. So it’s very much part of their blueprint, their MO of disinformation, which has concrete impacts and just distracting people and setting up very, very bad views of things.
I think Putin is very sensitive about body bags. We saw this. I was in Moscow during the Second Chechen War and he was breaking up these mothers of soldiers movements, groups, and secret burials. We’ve seen that with Russian officers and soldiers killed inside the occupied parts of Ukraine. Photographers are chased out of cemeteries. Tombstones do not show where these men were killed. They’ve really tried to throw the cloak over the death toll there. I know the Ukrainians now are gunning for Russian soldiers and determined to run up the death tally. And Putin will have to–
Stalin lost a quarter million men in Stalingrad and he called it a victory. The demographics of Russia are totally different. This is a society that is slowly imploding. The Slavic portion is imploding slowly. There’s a shortage of young men, families, communities, and apartment blocks do not want to lose their young men. So he’s going to have to keep the wraps on the death toll and keep the death toll down, if he can, which I don’t think was going to work, but that’s where we are.
HARDIE: Can I just jump in quickly to pick up on Jim’s point? It’s not just contract soldiers participating in this operation. There’s actually conscripts, as well and think about the fact that Putin didn’t only lie to the West and to Ukraine about his intentions in Ukraine, he also lied to thousands of families of Russian soldiers who–they were sent to Belarus or wherever from thousands of miles away in Russia’s Far East, saying, “Oh, you’re here for exercises.” Well, that drags on. Now, they’re participating in military operations, including conscripts. This can have a very destabilizing effect on the social political environment, including on military retention and recruitment. So this could have far-reaching impacts.
MAY: Go ahead, Ivana.
STRADNER: I just wanted to add one more thing, in terms of Russia’s disinformation. Last year, Russia just had a new national security strategy and for the first time since Putin came to power, they mentioned, for the first time, information security in the national security strategy. A few months ago, actually, Russian Minister of Defense, Shoygu, he said that information has become a weapon and not only that, in 2017, Russia also established information troops. So Russia pays so much attention to information security because Russia correctly understands whoever has information superiority actually can win the war.
MAY: And this is another subject, but I do not think the U.S. does information [security] very well, but I’ll leave that for another time. We’ve got less than five minutes and I want to get into a couple more subjects. We’re not going to, obviously, touch on–there’s so many ramifications. We can’t touch on everything. One is, okay, we talked about banking sanctions. The ones so far are not robust enough, SWIFT would be–People talk about oil and gas sanctions. That’s difficult because oil and gas sells, even though the current administration really wants us all off oil and gas and to use electric cars and wind and solar power and that sort of thing. But China will buy whatever oil and gas Russia has and they’ll get it at a discount if others don’t buy it. Germany has gone and made itself more dependent on Russia. Now they’re talking seriously about not letting Nord Stream 2 be completed. That’s an oil and gas pipeline from Russia direct to Germany, cutting out Ukraine. Representative Dan Crenshaw, somebody I admire, he has pointed out that we import in the U.S., 595,000 barrels of oil per day from Russia.
The Keystone XL Pipeline, which was closed down under the current administration, would’ve produced 830,000 barrels per day. One of the things I think the West–and by the way, the Germans have also shut down their nuclear reactors, which are emissions free. It seems to me, one of the lessons out of this is that energy policy needs to be reappraised in the West. Jim, I think you’re nodding. I’ll go to you first on that.
BROOKE: It’s tricky because 40% of the EU’s gas imports come from Russia. A fast move would be traumatic for the EU. Surprise, surprise. The sun does not shine very strongly in Northern Europe in the winter and the wind is somewhat erratic, so they need gas to compensate for the ups and downs of the renewable production. Not enough is coming up from Algeria, or down from, I guess, Norway and Holland–the Netherlands. This is a wakeup call and the people who thought that Russia was a reliable gas supplier are in for a big surprise. Putin pinched the hose this summer and this fall and the prices went way up. I think at some times there have been eight times increase in 12 months. Putin has racked in. There’s been a huge transfer of wealth from West to East due to these high gas prices.
Presumably, the Europeans can draw the conclusion that Russia is not a reliable energy supplier. There’s an interesting proposal, and the Turks are building this Istanbul Canal, which would allow LNG into the Black Sea, which would be a game changer for Ukraine in its little part of the world. But I think I’ll leave it to that. One quick point about Putin’s future. It’s not smart to lose a war in Russia. In 1905, they lost against the Japanese and the Czars were almost toppled.
We know what happened in 1917 when they were losing the war. We know what happened in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union collapsed within a couple years of Afghanistan. We forget that in about, I think early July 1941, when the Germans had almost driven to the outskirts of Moscow, a unit trotted up the road to Stalin’s Dacha and he came out and said, “You’re here to shoot me. Take me prisoner.” Because he so massively mishandled the defense of Russia. If Russia loses, it’s going to be very hard for Putin to hold on to power. So put that in your pipe and smoke it for the future.
MAY: All right. I’m going to make this my exit. I’ve got a dozen more topics I’d like to bring up. I don’t think we have time right now. We may come back another day, but I’m going to offer a question and comment, and you talk about it as you will. One is, people have to remember that we’re talking about Russia, but Russia isn’t a de facto alliance at this point with Xi Jinping, who has been, at best, ambiguous about that. But if Russia can take and conquer a foreign state or recognize a state with independence, Taiwan is, in Xi Jinping’s words, “a rogue province.” Do you really think the U.S. is going to do anything about that? At that point, Asia is pretty much gone for the U.S. Two, people are saying we have to pivot to Asia, but that means giving up Europe.
We need to be able to do a lot of different things. I would argue we don’t have a military prepared to that. And the spending is not nearly where it needs to be in the capabilities. If America’s military is charged with climate change, well, then we’re not going to spend as much energy as we need to on our adversaries, our enemies and our perspective adversaries. I think it’s also important to worry a little bit about this point, about what Putin might want to do to the U.S. If he sees the U.S. beginning to put pressure on him economically, or in other ways, sending military materials as we should have been to a greater extent for years, as we have been to some extent as we need to be, if the insurgency continues, he might say, “I have nuclear weapons. I’m going to threaten you with them.”
There’s hybrid warfare. He has already used cyber warfare against the U.S. including against, of course, Ukraine and against many other countries in Europe. All of these things remain. I’m going to start with, let me start with you, John, and you comment on whatever you think is important within this range of topics. John?
HARDIE: Cliff, you mentioned cyber. I think this can be hugely important in the weeks and months ahead. I’m very worried about our critical infrastructure and that of our allies in Europe. These things are vital to our way of life and economic prosperity, but they’re not well defended enough. Russia has vast and very capable cyber units. They’re very active. They’ve probed all of our critical infrastructure and things like power plants, et cetera. We need to be vigilant, and we need to invest a lot more in the type of cyber defense tools that our Center for Cyber [Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at FDD] works on all the time. That’s something to watch.
MAY: Very good. Very important. Go ahead, Ivana. Yes.
STRADNER: I would like to really echo what John just said in terms of cyber. Make no mistake, but Russia is definitely going to challenge the United States asymmetrically in cyber space. That’s something that I really, really see, and it’s nothing new. Russia has been doing that for years. Also, the real question here is what can WE do for Ukraine? In terms of cyber space, I think the United States and the United Kingdom are already helping, but we need to definitely invest more, not only in defensive cyber capabilities, but also to strengthen a number of offensive cyber capabilities.
The real question is, also, when it comes to our European allies, I’m not actually entirely sure that many of them possess offensive cyber capabilities. Some may claim that, actually, this is very important to mention that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a few weeks ago, openly stated that World War III has already started in cyberspace. They already think that we are at war with them. The problem, I think the most challenging part for us is how to challenge Russia asymmetrically, but not to be in direct conflict with Russia, because this can really, really escalate further and have serious repercussions for our security.
MAY: Jim, your closing thoughts for now? Because we’re going to be you discussing this a lot more in the in the days and weeks.
BROOKE: I agree with Ivana and John. Ivana, I definitely agree with we need to take the offensive in cyber. For some reason, we put up with literally billions in dollars and millions of man and woman hours and repairing the damage. We send a note to Moscow saying, “Gee, I wish you wouldn’t do that.” I think it’s time to slap back in an aggressive way and take out their capabilities. I was in Kyiv when the Russians turned out the power and they did it very subtly. It was just one corner of Kyiv between three and five o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night. Most people really didn’t notice it. I think the Russians have enormous cyber capability. They have not shown their hand. They haven’t shown what they are capable of doing. Watch this space. You may see this in Ukraine over the next week or two. That’s my thought.
MAY: All right. To be continued. For now, thank you so much, Ivana. Thank you, John. Thank you, Jim and thanks to all of you, as well. We’re out there and listen to us and we welcome your comments, your suggestions, your questions, your criticisms, whatever. Be with us here on Foreign Podicy.
fdd.org · by Clifford D. May Founder & President · February 25, 2022
21. FDD | Putin Just Pushed the World Into an Even Bigger Energy Crisis
Excerpts:
All this means that the United States and Europe won’t be able to reduce prices unless they fundamentally reassess their energy security policies. Both U.S. and EU policymakers need to be frank with their publics and communicate that renewable energy sources—even if their buildout is accelerated—can’t substitute for fossil fuels at anywhere near the speed required to make up for the shortage in oil and gas supply. What’s more, weather-dependent wind and solar power require other energy sources—natural gas and nuclear power—to deliver a steady supply of electricity to homes and businesses. By promulgating the fiction that fossil fuels can be easily phased out and investments in maintaining production aren’t needed, the United States and Europe have handed Russian President Vladimir Putin significant leverage over their energy prices. High energy prices can easily trigger a global recession, significant inflation, and massive popular discontent, as the world saw in 1973 and at other times since. It bears repeating: Like it or not, fossil fuels are in just about everything we do, including food that needs energy-intensive fertilizer to grow, tractors and combines to harvest, and trucks to bring to stores. Already, some factories have shut down or reduced production in Europe and China due to high natural gas prices, potentially sparking a recession.
Moreover, Europe should commission new pipelines for natural gas imports, including from the Caspian Sea region, the Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa. The EU should end its opposition to European gas providers signing long-term supply contracts and mandate much higher gas storage to reduce the chance of shortages and maintain stable prices.
Energy security has always been a key pillar of national security. It’s time for U.S. and European policymakers to recognize this basic fact and act accordingly—or they and their publics will face a very rough time in a worsening energy crisis.
FDD | Putin Just Pushed the World Into an Even Bigger Energy Crisis
fdd.org · by Dr. Brenda Shaffer Senior Advisor for Energy · February 28, 2022
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1973 global oil crisis, international energy markets and the global economy are about to receive a similar jolt. Since Russia attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24, the price for crude oil has twice soared as high as $105 a barrel—a level last seen in 2014. And things could get a lot worse from here. Even if the current sanctions imposed on Russia do not explicitly target the energy trade, sanctions on banks and other entities will impede Russia’s oil, natural gas, and coal exports, wreaking havoc on global energy markets. In addition, the dangers for oil tankers traveling in the Black Sea will reduce oil reaching global markets, including seaborne supplies from non-Russian producers such as Kazakhstan. The cut in Russian oil and natural gas supplies to markets will have spillover effects and further jack up the prices of coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG), adding another burst to inflation.
The crisis underlines that it’s time for Western governments to be honest with their publics about the basic facts of energy security, restore their own energy production, and enhance the reliability of European energy imports. Even if the crisis with Russia is resolved soon—a very big if—Western governments need to make fundamental changes in their approaches to energy policy. The question of energy security was never gone, but Russia’s war has put it back at the top of the agenda.
In coming days, Russian energy exports—oil, natural gas, and coal—will be significantly curtailed, even without sanctions. Traders buying energy cargoes, banks issuing letters of credit, shippers needing to insure their cargoes, and many other participants in the global energy trade will be cautious with all transactions and thus likely pass even on nonsanctioned ones involving Russia. This was the case with the recent round of sanctions on Iran. Companies tended to overcomply to avoid U.S. retribution. In the current case, companies will be even more averse to trading with Russia or processing Russian payments for fear of reputational damage and pressure from investors.
Just like the 1973 oil crisis, the current energy crisis is taking place while energy markets are already stretched. The tight market will amplify the impact of the lost Russian supplies. And unfortunately, all the signs are pointing to higher prices—perhaps much higher prices—that will be stay us even if the war comes to a quick conclusion one way or another.
Prior to the current crisis, oil prices were high and on an upward trend. This was mainly because U.S. oil production plummeted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has returned nowhere near pre-pandemic levels. All other major producers have been pumping at pre-pandemic rates, and there is very little spare capacity left in the global oil markets that could quickly come online to replace the shortfall in U.S. production or Russian exports. Global inventories of stored oil are also being rapidly drawn down, and there hasn’t been enough investment in new production. Even OPEC has fallen substantially short of its output targets, suggesting capacity is limited as existing wells decline and aren’t replaced with new discoveries.
Some politicians have been shocked by Russia’s war into rediscovering the concept of energy security.
On the demand side, global oil consumption has returned to pre-pandemic rates—and is likely to continue to rise, especially once international travel snaps back. The pandemic led to higher base demand for oil: There has been increased use of plastics (which are made from petroleum) because of the rising use of masks, disposable goods, and various consumer wares as spending shifted online; at the same time, use of public transportation is sharply down as many people switched to cars.
Meeting this new oil demand without a further jump in price requires producing additional oil, something few Western governments have been willing to openly admit. And one of the only countries that has major underutilized oil production capacity is the United States. U.S. President Joe Biden’s policies and his political base’s sentiments against fossil fuels are major factors that have prevented fresh investment in U.S. oil production. Canada is another major global producer with substantial additional capacity, but it is constrained by transport, especially since Washington has been squeamish about the pipeline projects that would bring more Canadian oil to market.
This past weekend’s new sanctions, though they were carefully constructed to exempt Russian natural gas exports to Europe, will inadvertently reduce them. Like the global oil market, the European gas market was already in crisis before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because of the European Union’s own actions. In the hope of fostering greater use of renewable energy, the EU and individual European governments in recent years undertook policies that greatly hurt Europe’s energy security, not least by putting the brakes on efforts to diversify energy supplies. While Europe has secured some new gas supplies, for instance by building LNG terminals and the completion in 2020 of the Southern Gas Corridor, which supplies Southeastern Europe and Italy from Azerbaijan, these projects have been nowhere near enough.
Brussels went further in hurting its ability to tap new gas supplies by ending most long-term natural gas contracts; one of the reasons was to force utilities to use more renewables. The long-term gas contracts had provided European consumers with secure supply at a stable price. Markets in Europe that have access to gas via long-term contracts, such as Italy and Greece, are faring much better in the current energy crisis than those that chose to rely on the spot market for gas. Ending long-term contracts and increasing gas trade at spot hubs strengthened Russia’s ability to influence prices as the main swing producer with the ability to rev up and reduce supplies at the hubs. In recent years, European governments have also thoughtlessly reduced the scale of required gas storage, further hurting the continent’s energy security. All this has been obvious to energy experts for some time.
Some politicians have been shocked by Russia’s war into rediscovering the concept of energy security. On Sunday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany would begin to diversify its gas imports with the construction of two LNG import terminals, the country’s first. Gas storage requirements will also be increased, and the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action is considering slowing down Germany’s nuclear phaseout.
But the country with the largest potential for mitigating the energy crisis with new oil and gas supplies shows no sign of learning from the crisis. When White House spokesperson Jen Psaki was asked about the impact of the Ukraine crisis on the oil price on Saturday, she reiterated that the Biden administration will continue to concentrate on renewable energy. There was no sign of a shift to encouraging U.S. oil and gas production, let alone an increase in pipeline capacity to access Canadian supplies.
As it seeks to reduce energy inflation in advance of the U.S. midterm elections, the Biden administration appears to believe it has an ace up its sleeve: a renewed nuclear deal with Iran. Some believe that a deal will quickly bring additional Iranian barrels to market, leading prices to plummet again. This is unlikely to be much more than a temporary blip. Energy traders have largely factored in the expectation of increased Iranian supplies. And there may not be as much Iranian oil ready to ship as the administration believes. It’s an open secret that a lot of Iranian oil is already traded. China already buys Iranian oil uninhibited. Iranian oil has many ways to circumvent U.S. sanctions—some is exported via Iraq and Kuwait, and there is a vast fleet of off-the-books oil tankers specializing in shipping Iranian crude and other liquid fuels. Similarly, reports that the International Energy Agency is coordinating a release of strategic petroleum reserves by member countries, including the United States, don’t signal much relief. Any price drop would likely be short-lived given the growing gap between production capacity and demand.
All this means that the United States and Europe won’t be able to reduce prices unless they fundamentally reassess their energy security policies. Both U.S. and EU policymakers need to be frank with their publics and communicate that renewable energy sources—even if their buildout is accelerated—can’t substitute for fossil fuels at anywhere near the speed required to make up for the shortage in oil and gas supply. What’s more, weather-dependent wind and solar power require other energy sources—natural gas and nuclear power—to deliver a steady supply of electricity to homes and businesses. By promulgating the fiction that fossil fuels can be easily phased out and investments in maintaining production aren’t needed, the United States and Europe have handed Russian President Vladimir Putin significant leverage over their energy prices. High energy prices can easily trigger a global recession, significant inflation, and massive popular discontent, as the world saw in 1973 and at other times since. It bears repeating: Like it or not, fossil fuels are in just about everything we do, including food that needs energy-intensive fertilizer to grow, tractors and combines to harvest, and trucks to bring to stores. Already, some factories have shut down or reduced production in Europe and China due to high natural gas prices, potentially sparking a recession.
Moreover, Europe should commission new pipelines for natural gas imports, including from the Caspian Sea region, the Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa. The EU should end its opposition to European gas providers signing long-term supply contracts and mandate much higher gas storage to reduce the chance of shortages and maintain stable prices.
Energy security has always been a key pillar of national security. It’s time for U.S. and European policymakers to recognize this basic fact and act accordingly—or they and their publics will face a very rough time in a worsening energy crisis.
Brenda Shaffer is a faculty member at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, a senior advisor for energy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center. Follow her on Twitter @ProfBShaffer. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Dr. Brenda Shaffer Senior Advisor for Energy · February 28, 2022
22. February Meeting Confirms Palestinian Leadership Needs an Israeli Bailout
Excerpts:
Unfortunately, the PA can no longer rely on political leadership or largesse from regional Arab states. In 2020, Arab donations to the PA decreased by 85 percent. In 2021, the United Nations estimated that the PA would have an $800 million budget deficit, describing the situation as “dire.”
To counteract Palestinian instability, even amidst Palestinian threats to cut coordination, Israel has extended several goodwill measures to help the PA. In early January, Sheikh and Lapid worked together to approve the citizenship status of thousands of Palestinians. Abbas and Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz hammered out a number of economic issues, such as legalizing the status of 9,500 undocumented Palestinians, authorizing the construction of 900 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, and disbursing $192 million to offset Ramallah’s loss of foreign aid.
Israel does not want to see a failed state on its border. That is why Israel is working overtime, security concerns notwithstanding, to support rising pragmatic leaders such as Sheikh and Faraj. These are measures that Israel must continue to take, while considering others. However, whether Israeli efforts can actually help sustain the West Bank’s flailing government remains to be seen.
February Meeting Confirms Palestinian Leadership Needs an Israeli Bailout
Israeli-Palestinian security coordination is also indispensable for Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Like someone drowning, the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah is flailing about, barely keeping its head above water. Israel should throw Ramallah a life raft, but it must be careful not to allow itself to get pulled under.
At the early February meeting of the Palestinian Central Council (PCC), Palestinian leaders could barely keep track of the myriad challenges they face. This was the first meeting since 2018 of the PCC—a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) body that has assumed many of the responsibilities of the Palestinian parliament.
To its credit, the council took the opportunity to fill vacancies and reinvigorate the geriatric Palestinian leadership. Most notably, the PCC elected Hussein al-Sheikh, who is widely hailed as pragmatic and moderate, to be the next PLO secretary-general. This grants Sheikh an inside lane to succeed octogenarian President Mahmoud Abbas and inherit the herculean task of guiding the Palestinian national project out of its current malaise.
Since 2007, Sheikh has headed the Palestinian Authority (PA) General Authority of Civil Affairs. In this capacity, he has been one of the primary contacts with Israeli authorities regarding civilian matters in the West Bank. In January, Sheikh became the first Palestinian leader to meet with Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid.
Also on the rise is Majed Faraj, who heads the PA’s General Intelligence Service. The two men are key players in Abbas’ innermost circle and accompany the Palestinian president on his diplomatic missions. Like Sheikh, Faraj has close working relationships abroad and helps guarantee West Bank security coordination, the most durable point of cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian governments.
Unfortunately, this coordination is now in peril. At the same PCC meeting where a new generation of leaders were tapped to inherit the Palestinian government, the council called for a halt to security ties until Israel recognizes a Palestinian state.
Terminating security coordination would be disastrous. Israeli security officials estimate that in 2016 alone, such coordination resulted in the safe return of at least 300 Israelis who wandered into Palestinian territory. It has also prevented countless terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens.
Israeli-Palestinian security coordination is also indispensable for the PA. Without it, the Hamas terrorist organization could run rampant in the West Bank, a bloody prospect for the territory’s three million Palestinians. The PA has relied heavily on Israel to help maintain order ever since Hamas ousted Fatah from Gaza in their 2007 civil war. The Palestinians remain divided between the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-ruled West Bank. Hamas cells in the West Bank have stoked Fatah fears of being dislodged.
To make matters worse, as they prepare to inherit leadership positions, Sheikh and Faraj must now wade through a minefield in their own party. Their ascent comes at the expense of other likely successors to Abbas, namely Fatah Central Committee chief Jibril Rajoub and his deputy, Mahmoud al-Aloul, who might hold grudges and embrace even more extreme positions that could encumber pragmatic cooperation in the West Bank. Another challenge could come from Marwan Barghouti, a popular Fatah militant serving in Israeli jail for masterminding multiple terrorist attacks in the early 2000s.
Mohammed Dahlan, former Fatah strongman in Gaza, could pose a different challenge. He is backed by the United Arab Emirates and has established power bases in the West Bank—something Sheikh and Faraj lack. Dahlan recently received a further boost when he secured a million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine for Gaza. Faraj’s security forces have arrested and reportedly even killed Dahlan supporters in recent months, a sign of the perceived threat that Dahlan may pose.
Beyond the political wrangling, Sheikh and Faraj will need to distance themselves from the Palestinian public’s increasingly negative attitudes toward their government. A December 2021 poll found that 73 percent of respondents in the West Bank and 77 percent in Gaza demand Abbas’ resignation. The PA’s June 2021 killing of anti-corruption activist Nizar Banat further inflamed tensions, provoking rare demonstrations against PA brutality and corruption.
Unfortunately, the PA can no longer rely on political leadership or largesse from regional Arab states. In 2020, Arab donations to the PA decreased by 85 percent. In 2021, the United Nations estimated that the PA would have an $800 million budget deficit, describing the situation as “dire.”
To counteract Palestinian instability, even amidst Palestinian threats to cut coordination, Israel has extended several goodwill measures to help the PA. In early January, Sheikh and Lapid worked together to approve the citizenship status of thousands of Palestinians. Abbas and Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz hammered out a number of economic issues, such as legalizing the status of 9,500 undocumented Palestinians, authorizing the construction of 900 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, and disbursing $192 million to offset Ramallah’s loss of foreign aid.
Israel does not want to see a failed state on its border. That is why Israel is working overtime, security concerns notwithstanding, to support rising pragmatic leaders such as Sheikh and Faraj. These are measures that Israel must continue to take, while considering others. However, whether Israeli efforts can actually help sustain the West Bank’s flailing government remains to be seen.
David May (@DavidSamuelMay) is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Abdel Abdelrahman is an intern. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
Image: Reuters.
23. Opinion | A Syrian rebel commander’s advice to Ukrainians on how to fight Russian invaders
Practical advice from the Syrian opposition and their interesting assessment of the Ukraine situation and leadership.
Excerpts:
“The Russian invaders, with as many weapons and numbers they have over you, are still cowards,” he said. “And they are still fighting on land that is not theirs. The land fights alongside you. Remember that.”
Akaidi said the most effective way to repel advancing Russian forces is to widely deploy Stinger antiaircraft missiles, as well as antitank and anti-armor systems. The Stingers are the most important, because Russian pilots will avoid any area where they see Stingers being used effectively.
“When you take down a couple of planes in a specific place, you know you can operate more freely in that place, because they are afraid to fly over it, and that’s a really key thing,” he said.
The United States and Europe have provided Ukraine with some Stingers, Javelin antitank systems and other weaponry, and more are on the way.
“Stingers are a huge blessing — rely on these. Because these are air-defense systems that scare the hell out of the Russians,” Akaidi said.
Ukrainians should also be confident because they have several things the Syrian opposition never had, including a well-trained and well-equipped fighting force led by a democratic government and a strong democratic leader in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“You have a courageous and brave president. You have a courageous and brave leadership. Band around them,” Akaidi said.
Opinion | A Syrian rebel commander’s advice to Ukrainians on how to fight Russian invaders
Ukrainians have joined a gruesome but not-so-exclusive club — victims of unprovoked Russian military attacks and reported war crimes. The Syrian opposition, which has been attacked by Russian forces for almost seven years, has some advice for Ukrainians on surviving Russian military assaults and fighting invading Russian soldiers. They say that each day Ukrainians resist Russian aggression and fight for their homeland is a victory against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Syrian opposition is standing in solidarity with Ukrainians, as it did in 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine. After Putin took his first chunk of Ukraine by force when he invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea, he deployed the Russian military to help the Bashar al-Assad regime, Iran and Hezbollah kill civilians rallying for freedom and democracy in Syria. As the West stood by, Russia began a brutal campaign of reported war crimes and targeting civilians for cruel death that is still ongoing today.
Abdul-Jabbar Akaidi, a former colonel in Assad’s army who defected in 2012 and joined the opposition, has been fighting Russian invaders for seven years and studying their tactics. He was the commander of the Revolutionary Military Council and a general in the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo while Russia, Assad and Iran carpet-bombed the city and starved its people. I asked him what advice he has for Ukrainians trying to repel invading Russian troops.
“First of all, I want to say that it is not advice that our Ukrainian brothers and sisters need from us; it is support from the West,” he told me. “But to begin my advice, I would say to not rely on the international community, to not rely on the United States, because they gave Putin a blank check and an open hand in Syria.”
The international community has earned its distrust among Syrians. Despite years of reports compiling evidence that the Russian military and Russian mercenary contractors were working with Assad to commit war crimes against Syrian civilians, there has been no accountability for Putin or his generals. Their alliance is very relevant today in Ukraine.
Assad was the first world leader to celebrate Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last week. Syrian opposition sources tell me that Russia is now recruiting Syrians to come fight for them in Ukraine, as they did already in Libya. As it turns out, what happens in Syria doesn’t stay in Syria. Russia used Syria as a training ground for the Ukraine war, testing more than 300 different weapons in Syria since 2015, according to the Russian government.
“It has been seven years of intense training with live ammunition, live weapons, live airplanes against live targets, including children,” he said. “The U.S. and Europe allowed Russia to kill unabated in Syria with every sort of weapon, and the world is now paying the price for that in Ukraine.”
Already in Ukraine, there are credible allegations of the Russian military targeting hospitals with internationally banned weapons such as cluster bombs. When Putin can’t achieve his military goals with conventional forces, there is no weapon, even chemical weapons, that he will not use on innocent civilians, Akaidi said. Putin will do anything to break the will of the people.
But Ukrainians should know they have a distinct advantage, he said, because they are fighting for something dear to them — their homes and families. The Russian soldiers have no morale because they have no real motivation. Ukrainians also know their land better and can use that knowledge to outmaneuver the Russian forces.
“The Russian invaders, with as many weapons and numbers they have over you, are still cowards,” he said. “And they are still fighting on land that is not theirs. The land fights alongside you. Remember that.”
Akaidi said the most effective way to repel advancing Russian forces is to widely deploy Stinger antiaircraft missiles, as well as antitank and anti-armor systems. The Stingers are the most important, because Russian pilots will avoid any area where they see Stingers being used effectively.
“When you take down a couple of planes in a specific place, you know you can operate more freely in that place, because they are afraid to fly over it, and that’s a really key thing,” he said.
The United States and Europe have provided Ukraine with some Stingers, Javelin antitank systems and other weaponry, and more are on the way.
“Stingers are a huge blessing — rely on these. Because these are air-defense systems that scare the hell out of the Russians,” Akaidi said.
Ukrainians should also be confident because they have several things the Syrian opposition never had, including a well-trained and well-equipped fighting force led by a democratic government and a strong democratic leader in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“You have a courageous and brave president. You have a courageous and brave leadership. Band around them,” Akaidi said.
Even without these advantages, Syrian opposition forces in Aleppo held out for years under brutal assault and siege against Russia, Assad, Iran, Hezbollah and the Islamic State. Each day of resistance puts more pressure on Putin, because he must think about his economy and his domestic unrest as Russian soldiers come home in body bags.
Winning against Russia sometimes means simply continuing the resistance against them and making Putin pay a higher price for his aggression, by fighting and surviving each day, Akaidi said.
“Just know that you are more powerful than people think,” Akaidi wants to tell the Ukrainians. “Band together and fight them as long as you can. ... We believe in you. We are praying for you to last.”
24. Kyiv and Moscow Hold Talks as Ukrainian Troops Repel Russian Attacks
Yes we are going to second guess our decisions on not providing all necessary weapons and equipment to help Ukraine defend itself over the past two administrations.
Excerpt:
Several countries that had previously declined to supply Ukraine with sophisticated weapons to help offset Russia’s military advantage have changed their minds in recent days, and the EU on Sunday made an unprecedented decision to fund Ukraine’s arms purchases. Antitank and antiaircraft missiles supplied to Ukraine by the U.S., the U.K., Poland and Baltic states before the war’s breakout have already helped to redress the balance, Ukrainian officials have said.
Kyiv and Moscow Hold Talks as Ukrainian Troops Repel Russian Attacks
Negotiators make some progress and return to their capitals with plans to meet again in coming days, Russian reinforcements stream in and Ukraine holds Kyiv
Updated Feb. 28, 2022 11:53 pm ET
WSJ · by Yaroslav Trofimov
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, wearing a green baseball cap, arrived Monday for talks with Russian delegates in Belarus.
Photo: sergei kholodilin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Russia continued to throw more troops into Ukraine, while Kyiv bolstered its military by mobilizing 100,000 new troops and arming its units with sophisticated new weaponry flowing in from the West.
Authorities in Kyiv, which was under curfew starting Saturday afternoon while Ukrainian forces engaged in firefights in several neighborhoods with Russian infiltrator units wearing civilian clothes or Ukrainian uniforms, allowed residents to move around on Monday morning. Long lines snaked around grocery stores and pharmacies as Kyivites patiently waited for their turn.
The city was calm, with no looting or violence, as regular troops and volunteers with yellow armbands manned checkpoints at key intersections.
“Neighborhood people gave us all this—old washing machines, tires, roofing, anything they could throw out of their windows—to create this barricade,” said one of the volunteers, 30-year-old Taras Oleksandovych, who joined the new Territorial Defense force on Sunday, after a shootout with Russian infiltrators in his neighborhood of high-rises on Kyiv’s western edge. “We will resist.”
Sturdier tank traps, concrete blocks and orange garbage trucks blocked key roads. Electronic billboards that once advertised nightclubs and sushi restaurants beamed black-and-white messages to the enemy. “Russian soldier, go f— yourself,” said one in central Kyiv.
Members of the Territorial Defense force in Kyiv stopped a man during a curfew in the city on Sunday.
Photo: CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS
Police officers carried out checks after stopping a car in Kyiv on Monday.
Photo: UMIT BEKTAS/REUTERS
On the front lines along the city’s northern and western edges, soldiers were buoyed by recent victories. “The famed Russian special forces came here, and ran away so fast that they left us three vehicles as trophies,” said a Ukrainian trooper as he readied to leave on a mission.
In a sign that Russia doesn’t so far have control of the skies, convoys carrying Ukrainian reinforcements rumbled in broad daylight through the city, including several long-range artillery pieces followed by truckloads of shells.
“On the fifth day of the full-scale Russian war against the people of Ukraine, we’re standing firm,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday. “Every crime that the occupiers commit against us brings us closer and closer to each other. Russia never imagined that it would face such solidarity.”
While air-raid sirens sounded through the early hours of Monday, the intensity of Russian airstrikes was much lower than in previous nights.
Russian President Vladimir Putin refused to take a call from Mr. Zelensky on the eve of Thursday’s invasion, which he said seeks to oust the Ukrainian government and “demilitarize” the country.
People lined up outside a supermarket in central Kyiv on Monday after the city’s curfew was lifted.
Photo: Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press
Shelves were empty in the bread aisle of a store in Kyiv on Monday.
Photo: CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS
Russian officials said shortly after the war began that they would talk to Kyiv only once Ukrainian troops laid down their arms. Mr. Putin later urged the Ukrainian army to stage a coup against the country’s democratically elected president. The fact Moscow now seeks unconditional talks was celebrated by Ukrainian officials as an achievement for Ukraine and its armed forces.
Russia sent a delegation to the southern Belarusian city of Gomel on Sunday, but Mr. Zelensky initially said he refused to meet in a country that has become a launchpad for Russia’s attacks.
Mr. Zelensky did, however, speak by phone to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko later on Sunday, and said that he agreed to have his envoys meet with the Russian delegation on the river Prypiat along the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. Mr. Lukashenko pledged during the conversation, the two men’s first in two years, that no Russian military activity would be carried out from Belarus in the meantime, Mr. Zelensky said.
Because of continued fighting, the team sent by Mr. Zelensky had to travel to the talks on a circuitous route via Poland. The group includes the Ukrainian minister of defense, Oleksii Reznikov, and the majority leader in the Ukrainian parliament, David Arakhamia.
The Russian delegation includes presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky; Russia’s deputy ministers of defense and foreign affairs; Leonid Slutsky, the head of the International Committee of Russia’s State Duma; and Russia’s ambassador to Belarus, Boris Gryzlov, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Mr. Medinsky told Russian state news agency RIA that Russia’s representatives were ready for negotiations at any time. “Every hour for us is a saved life,” the agency cited him as saying.
In the five days of the offensive, Russia so far hasn’t seized any big Ukrainian city, and dozens if not hundreds of Russian troops have been taken prisoner, their videos posted on social media so that their families in Russia could find out about their fate. Russia’s military on Sunday acknowledged for the first time that its forces suffered fatal casualties in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said they wouldn’t accept anything short of Russia withdrawing its forces and restoring the country’s territorial integrity. “The enemy is losing steam,” said Mr. Zelensky’s adviser Oleksiy Arestovych. “Another day or two, and the offensive will collapse.”
Ukraine, which has standing armed forces of about 200,000 service members, said it had mobilized an additional 100,000 troops in the past 48 hours. Russia massed some 190,000 on Ukrainian borders before the invasion, according to U.S. estimates.
A mother and her daughters reached the Polish border crossing of Medyka after a two-day, 300-mile journey from central Ukraine.
Photo: Dawid Zielinski for The Wall Street Journal
Russia acknowledged on Sunday for the first time that it had suffered fatal losses in the war on Ukraine, but didn’t release numbers and claimed that Ukrainian losses were several times higher. Ukraine has adopted a policy of not releasing military casualty figures. Russian military spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Russia has hit 1,067 Ukrainian military targets since the war began, denied that Moscow was striking civilian targets and called on Ukrainian forces to surrender.
Mr. Arestovych warned Sunday that, despite promises made by Mr. Lukashenko to Mr. Zelensky, Kyiv had information that Belarusian armed forces were ready to enter the conflict on Russia’s side. He dismissed the military significance of such a move, saying that Belarus had only some 45,000 troops, with 17,000 of them combat-capable, and that many would be reluctant to fight their Ukrainian neighbors. A ballistic missile fired from Belarus hit the Zhytomir airport west of Kyiv on Sunday afternoon, Ukrainian officials said.
With each day, Ukraine’s government has projected growing confidence, saying that heavy resistance throughout the country had thwarted Mr. Putin’s plan to overthrow the Ukrainian leadership and destroy its command-and-control capabilities in a lightning strike.
“These three days have forever changed our country and the world,” Mr. Reznikov, the Ukrainian defense minister, said Sunday morning. “These will be trying times ahead. But now we are no longer the only ones to believe in our victory. And that is why we are receiving the aid that was unthinkable three days ago.”
Several countries that had previously declined to supply Ukraine with sophisticated weapons to help offset Russia’s military advantage have changed their minds in recent days, and the EU on Sunday made an unprecedented decision to fund Ukraine’s arms purchases. Antitank and antiaircraft missiles supplied to Ukraine by the U.S., the U.K., Poland and Baltic states before the war’s breakout have already helped to redress the balance, Ukrainian officials have said.
WSJ · by Yaroslav Trofimov
25. The West Is Winning, Russia Is Losing, and Biden Is Doing a Good Job
From the real conservatives at the Bulwark who are patriots who put the country first.
Excerpts:
In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, Joe Biden used his administration to loudly and transparently demonstrate that Putin’s irredentist claims were bunk and that the looming invasion was a premeditated act of aggression.
He simultaneously worked—quietly—with NATO and the EU to achieve a larger consensus than there has been on any military matter before the alliance since . . . well, let’s call it a generation.
Biden did not draw lines in the sand. He did not personalize the conflict. He did not turn himself into the star of the show. He did not allow anyone, anywhere, to believe that this was about America.
Since the invasion, Biden has been a full partner with our European allies. He has not pushed them into decisions. He recognized that having a united front was more important than any particular aspect of the response. And after only four days Europe came to the conclusion—on its own—that it would do everything the American foreign policy establishment had wanted. Biden understood that these countries needed to come to the decision to fight back on their own, and not be publicly cajoled into it.
The West Is Winning, Russia Is Losing, and Biden Is Doing a Good Job
Ukrainian servicemen get ready to repel an attack in Ukraine's Lugansk region on February 24, 2022. (Photo by ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP via Getty Images)
1. Chaos Reigns
Last week I wrote that with the outbreak of war, no one was in control. Four days later, this point has been clearly illustrated.
In the span of 96 hours:
Belarus has become a nuclear state.
Germany has chosen to re-arm.
Finland and Sweden have signaled that they are interested in joining NATO.
Ukraine has applied to join the E.U.
That’s a decade’s worth of geopolitical change in four days.
Over the weekend a consensus seemed to gel that Ukraine might somehow “win” this conflict. Certainly this is now a greater possibility than it was two weeks ago. But it is also true that Russia seems to have been fighting in a reasonably restrained manner—I’m comparing their rules of engagement to what we saw in Grozny and Aleppo. Obviously, even the manner in which Russia has engaged so far is contemptible.
But at some point, Putin could decide to take the gloves off.
If that happens, what then?
Again, no one is in control.
It’s possible that his soldiers could refuse orders to flatten Kyiv or deploy thermobaric weapons against the population. It’s also possible that they’d follow his orders and create a humanitarian catastrophe. We don’t know and neither does Putin.
Let me sketch out a few possible scenarios for the coming days, which span a wide range of outcomes.
(1) Putin seeks a ceasefire. Facing an assault that has bogged down, financial ruin, and the possible creation of an organized opposition to his rule, Putin decides that he needs to retrench and focus all of his attention on survival. He offers some sort of compromise—Russia takes direct control of the breakaway “republics” and Ukraine promises not to join NATO for ten years. Putin then declares victory and tries to consolidate his position at home.
(2) Putin is deposed. There’s a revolt in the Army. They find a viable figure either somewhere in the government or in the wider oligarchy to be installed as president. The regime changes. This is a scenario Russia has some experience with.
(3) Putin uses a nuclear weapon. I share Tom Nichols’ assessment that Putin’s escalation of nuclear readiness is a man bluffing with weak cards. But sometimes a guy looking to bluff with nothing but a pair of 4’s becomes so pot-committed that he pushes all-in.
It seems unlikely that Putin would order the use of a nuke. Even if he ordered it, the chances of his order being carried out are not 100 percent.
But still.
(4) NATO winds up actively engaged with Russian forces. This might be the worst-case scenario and Biden, the EU, and NATO have been wise to avoid any actions that might lead to a direct exchange of hostilities.
But what happens if Putin decides to level Kyiv?
At that point, maybe the pressure to create a No Fly Zone in order to stop the mass killing of civilians becomes irresistible.
And any attempt to create a No Fly Zone is likely to end with NATO and Russia shooting at each other. Which is probably the most dangerous and destabilizing scenario possible.
Some of these scenarios are more plausible than others. The point of this exercise isn’t prediction, but rather demonstrating how it is impossible for any actor to know how this episode will end. There are simply too many actors, too many moving parts, too many dynamics and cross-currents and unknowns.
2. Biden Has Done a Good Job
In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, Joe Biden used his administration to loudly and transparently demonstrate that Putin’s irredentist claims were bunk and that the looming invasion was a premeditated act of aggression.
He simultaneously worked—quietly—with NATO and the EU to achieve a larger consensus than there has been on any military matter before the alliance since . . . well, let’s call it a generation.
Biden did not draw lines in the sand. He did not personalize the conflict. He did not turn himself into the star of the show. He did not allow anyone, anywhere, to believe that this was about America.
Since the invasion, Biden has been a full partner with our European allies. He has not pushed them into decisions. He recognized that having a united front was more important than any particular aspect of the response. And after only four days Europe came to the conclusion—on its own—that it would do everything the American foreign policy establishment had wanted. Biden understood that these countries needed to come to the decision to fight back on their own, and not be publicly cajoled into it.
Biden also understood that the EU and NATO are actually very powerful allies and that when they work in concert with the United States, we represent a significant geopolitical force.
At home, by not being publicly domineering, Biden has made it much harder for Republicans to polarize public opinion over Ukraine. Because Joe Biden has not allowed Ukraine to become an issue about Joe Biden. This should make the continued prosecution of Russia more tenable in the short and medium term.
Biden has done all of this—a hawk’s dream response—without escalating the conflict or pushing the West closer to kinetic warfare with Russia.
The West is stronger because of the actions of the Biden administration and Russia is weaker because of them.
The last month has represented America’s best showing in foreign policy in a generation, and this with a president playing a weak hand in a crisis forced on the country.
It would be nice if Biden got some credit for this from the public. He’s only making it look easy.
Get #RealTalk on Ukraine, Russia, politics, and everything else. No tribalism. No bullshirt.
3. Rubles from Heaven
If you want to get smart about the financial hellstorm that Russia has now entered, you should read Adam Tooze.
If you do not have time to read an entire essay on the subject, here’s a quick summary:
Now here’s Tooze talking about how Russia is fighting back on the economic front of the war:
The Russian central bank has since 2008 acquired a wide range of tools to dampen stress in financial markets and limit their impact on the real economy. As Vladislav Inozemtsev put it on the invaluable Riddle website:
Already on Sunday the bank announced across the board support for the financial system.
Phil Stewart @phildstewart
(Reuters) -Russia's central bank announces a slew of measures to support markets as it scrambles to manage the fallout from Western sanctions, including: * Buying gold on domestic market * Repurchase auction with no limits * Easing curbs on banks' open foreign currency positions96 Retweets
It is also moving to block the exit for foreign investors, who can no longer liquidate financial assets they hold in Russia.
Phil Stewart @phildstewart
BREAKING - The Russian central bank has ordered market players to reject foreign clients' bids to sell Russian securities from 0400 GMT on Monday, according to a central bank document seen by Reuters. The bank did not reply to a Reuters request for comment.1,586 Retweets
The latest report is that Russia will force companies to sell 80% of their foreign currency earnings - in other words buy rubles. This in effect substitutes private balance sheets for the central bank which is sanctioned. It is a de facto form of exchange controls.
Whether this will be enough to hold the system together only time will tell.
On Monday the first line of defense was to hike interest rates to a punitive 20 percent and put back the opening of markets until 3 pm Moscow time. All the trading up to that point consisted in Westerners unwinding exposed Russian positions.
26. Danger zone: Putin’s nuclear threat and what it means
Passion, reason, and chance. Let's watch out for chance.
Excerpts:
As Angela Stent, a Russian foreign policy expert at Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution put it in a Twitter Spaces conversation with Grid last week, “Russia is a nuclear superpower. The United States cannot send U.S. troops to fight Russian troops in Ukraine because this could lead to Armageddon. The Russians like to talk about the possibility of a ‘limited’ nuclear war, but it would be irresponsible for the U.S. to do that, and we all have to be worried about the possibility that this war could draw in some of Ukraine’s neighbors.”
Even if NATO troops stay out of Ukraine, they are being deployed in large numbers to Eastern Europe to reassure NATO allies. This may also induce Russia to build up forces of its own. With missiles flying at targets in Ukraine just a few hours drive from NATO member states like Poland and Romania, the risk of a fatal miscalculation is alarmingly high. Adding to the tension: Russia’s ally Belarus on Sunday held a referendum that would pave the way for Russian nuclear weapons to be based in the country.
It seems unthinkable that Putin would use nuclear weapons unless Russia itself were actively under attack by foreign powers. But a lot of things have happened because of the war that seemed unthinkable a week ago.
Danger zone: Putin’s nuclear threat and what it means
Vladimir Putin is an autocrat with nuclear weapons and an economy under existential threat. That’s a frightening combination.
Global Security Reporter
February 28, 2022
The threat of nuclear weapons has loomed over the Ukraine crisis since before the war began. On Feb. 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin personally presided over strategic nuclear exercises, including the launch of ballistic missiles, in a clear demonstration of the country’s nuclear capabilities. In his declaration of war on the morning of Feb. 24, Putin threatened any outside countries that might “hinder us, and … create threats for our country” with “such consequences that you have never experienced in your history.” He added: “All necessary decisions in this regard have been made. I hope that I will be heard.”
Putin’s words were widely interpreted as a threat to use nuclear weapons against countries that intervened militarily on Ukraine’s behalf.
Putin made the threat more explicit on Feb. 27, announcing that he was putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert, citing new economic sanctions slapped on his government and “aggressive statements” by NATO leaders. According to Defense One, it was the first time either Russia or the United States had raised its nuclear alert level since Washington did so during the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War, nearly a half century ago.
This is not the sort of threat one makes lightly, nor one the world can take lightly. Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, with 1,458 strategic warheads deployed on 527 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, as well as a stockpile of almost 5,000 more. As important as all those numbers is this basic fact: Virtually the entire world is in range of its most advanced ICBMs.
So far, there are no signs that nuclear forces have actually been deployed following Putin’s announcement. Rose Gottemoeller, who has served as U.S. under secretary of state for arms control as well as deputy secretary general of NATO, told Grid that Putin, who came of age at the height of the Cold War, “may have it in his mind that this is something superpowers do when they need to send a clear signal.”
The difference, she noted, is that while in the Cold War, “the U.S. would raise DEFCON, then the Soviets would raise DEFCON and then negotiations with Henry Kissinger involved would begin,” this time the Biden administration has made a point of not raising its own alert level in response to Putin’s threat. “That would be my approach,” Gottemoeller said. “Just don’t respond to this nuclear saber rattling and not to get into the public interchange with him.”
Still, what makes Putin’s statements particularly unnerving is that Putin’s nuclear red line isn’t clear. Yes, Russia has been on the receiving end of condemnations and tough economic sanctions this week, but that was surely anticipated — and Russia has been under heavy sanctions since annexing Crimea in 2014. It’s true that a number of countries are providing weaponry to the Ukrainians — including some, like Germany, that were previously reluctant to do so — but that’s not unprecedented. During the Cold War, the Soviets aided the North Vietnamese against the Americans and the Americans aided Afghanistan’s mujahedeen against the Soviets. The nuclear threat was never put forward in such public fashion.
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But as Sam Charap, a Russia analyst at the Rand Corporation, warned in the Washington Post on Sunday, Putin may believe that all the pressure is aimed at removing him from power: “Credibly communicating the limits of our intentions — even though the sanctions themselves are totally justified — is really difficult. … It is plausible for them to interpret our sanctions as an attempt to fundamentally damage the Russia state and overthrow its government.”
If Putin feels that economic pressure — an area where the U.S. and NATO have an overwhelming advantage — threatens his regime’s survival, he could choose to push back in an area where the playing field is more even.
Even more unnerving: Putin is believed to be extremely isolated — literally so, during the pandemic — and his decision-making and public statements increasingly erratic. The war in Ukraine has not gone as easily as anticipated, and the economic and political backlash may be more severe than expected. It’s hard to judge what decisions Putin might take if he feels the walls closing in on him.
As Nicholas Miller, a Dartmouth professor who focuses on nonproliferation issues wrote on Twitter, “Ever wondered what happens when you strangle the economy of a nuclear-armed, autocratic great power in the midst of a major war? I guess we’re about to find out.”
How Russia’s nukes impact NATO soldiers
Whatever Putin’s red lines are, there is one that Ukraine’s backers are taking seriously: Putin’s warning against those “who create threats for our country.” Right now, no NATO country is actively considering sending its own troops into Ukraine or enforcing a no-fly zone that might entail shooting down Russian planes. This is partly because Ukraine is not a member of NATO and therefore not covered by the alliance’s mutual defense guarantee, but the nuclear threat also has a lot to do with it.
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As Angela Stent, a Russian foreign policy expert at Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution put it in a Twitter Spaces conversation with Grid last week, “Russia is a nuclear superpower. The United States cannot send U.S. troops to fight Russian troops in Ukraine because this could lead to Armageddon. The Russians like to talk about the possibility of a ‘limited’ nuclear war, but it would be irresponsible for the U.S. to do that, and we all have to be worried about the possibility that this war could draw in some of Ukraine’s neighbors.”
Even if NATO troops stay out of Ukraine, they are being deployed in large numbers to Eastern Europe to reassure NATO allies. This may also induce Russia to build up forces of its own. With missiles flying at targets in Ukraine just a few hours drive from NATO member states like Poland and Romania, the risk of a fatal miscalculation is alarmingly high. Adding to the tension: Russia’s ally Belarus on Sunday held a referendum that would pave the way for Russian nuclear weapons to be based in the country.
It seems unthinkable that Putin would use nuclear weapons unless Russia itself were actively under attack by foreign powers. But a lot of things have happened because of the war that seemed unthinkable a week ago.
Russia’s nuclear fears
Putin didn’t just use the nuclear threat in the early days of the conflict; he also used it in his justification for war. In addition to accusing NATO of placing nukes in Eastern Europe, Putin suggested that Ukraine itself is seeking a nuclear arsenal. In his Feb. 21 speech recognizing Ukraine’s two breakaway regions, Putin said that “Ukraine intends to create its own nuclear weapons, and this is not just bragging. Ukraine has the nuclear technologies created back in the Soviet times and delivery vehicles for such weapons. … If Ukraine acquires weapons of mass destruction, the situation in the world and in Europe will drastically change, especially for us, for Russia. We cannot [help] but react to this real danger.” He also accused Western countries of helping Ukraine acquire these weapons.
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It was, even by Putin’s standards, a wild accusation: There is no evidence Ukraine is building a nuclear weapons program. It’s impossible to know whether Putin really believes what he said. Given that several of his recent statements also referenced the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s possible he was employing one of his favorite tactics: using Western powers’ own rhetoric, in this case false claims about weapons of mass destruction, to justify his actions.
But Putin was also referring to some actual history, which is vital for understanding how these two countries came to this point.
Ukraine’s nuclear past
For a brief time after its independence, Ukraine was home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, with an estimated 1,900 of the Soviet Union’s strategic warheads on its territory, along with 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 44 strategic bombers. Critically, Ukraine never had the ability to use these weapons. They were connected to command-and-control systems that led back to Moscow. But there were fears at the time that Ukraine’s government could seize “positive operational control” of these weapons. In 1994, the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Russia signed an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, under which, in exchange for Kyiv relinquishing its Soviet nukes and signing on to the global Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), these nuclear powers agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and refrain from using force against it.
Obviously, the Budapest Memorandum has not aged well. After 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and sent troops into eastern Ukraine, some Ukrainian officials suggested it was time for the country to “think about nuclear status again,” and support for the idea stood at roughly 50 percent. But Ukraine never actually took steps toward building a nuclear deterrent.
Ukraine’s experience, along with other events in recent years, may cause other countries to rethink their nuclear status.
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Consider this: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 1991. Twelve years later, Iraq was invaded, and Saddam’s regime was overthrown. Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya agreed to give up its nuclear program in 2003. Eight years later, a NATO-led air campaign helped bring down his government; after the revolution, Gaddafi was killed. Now, the world has watched as one of the few countries that actually possessed weapons and gave them up is attacked by the country to which it surrendered them.
Consider also the contrast with North Korea, where officials have openly cited the Libya example as evidence for why they need their own nuclear deterrent. North Korea is not only at minimal risk of a foreign invasion, its tyrannical dictator earned several meetings with a U.S. president.
One can make the case that the nuclear capability affords geopolitical protection.
“The reality is that when you have a large nuclear power dismembering its neighbors, a lot of states are going to look at that and say, ‘a bomb looks pretty good,’” Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told Grid. “I certainly think a country like Taiwan has to be looking at this,” he added, noting that Taiwan has had a nuclear weapons research program in the past.
If the war in Ukraine hadn’t broken out, the biggest diplomatic news story of this week would probably have involved Iran and the ongoing talks over a return to the 2015 nuclear deal, which one Iranian diplomat says have now entered a “now or never” phase. Convincing any country of the wisdom of forgoing a nuclear deterrent might be a lot harder than it was a week ago.
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The “MAD” future
It’s been 73 years since the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon, ushering in the age of nuclear standoff. Today, seven more countries have them. As international relations go, the idea of nuclear deterrence — that states will avoid using nuclear weapons against each other because of the risk of mutually assured destruction (MAD) — has a pretty good track record. Even in the worst of times, nuclear powers have been careful not to let things escalate too far. The Cuban missile crisis is the classic case of a near disaster, and a surreal illustration of the fear of escalation took place in 2020 when troops from China and India — over 500 nuclear warheads between them — fought over a disputed Himalayan border with rocks and clubs rather than guns.
But in what’s been called the “new Cold War,” will deterrence continue to hold, particularly if more countries seek a nuclear deterrent of their own? There are realistic fears that China could attempt to invade and take over Taiwan in the coming years. Unlike with Ukraine, Biden has not ruled out sending in U.S. troops in that scenario.
The other problem with the deterrence concept is that it assumes both parties are rational or that they view reality in the same way. A prevailing notion is that Putin’s Russia would never attack NATO member states, including the former Soviet nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Members of the alliance, including the United States, are treaty-bound to treat such an attack the same way they would an attack on their own territories and respond in kind. But some of the West’s most knowledgeable Russia experts have also spent the last few months suggesting that Putin would never do something so irrational as attack Ukraine.
“Leaders have access to different streams of information,” said Lewis. “They have their own world views and their own internal politics. Stalin refused to believe Hitler was going to invade. Saddam Hussein’s life depended on understanding that George Bush was going to go to Baghdad. He got it wrong. Leaders have their own information bubble and their own biases and can talk themselves into this stuff.”
Putin seems to take it as an article of faith that Ukraine’s current government was installed by Western powers and that it poses a real and direct threat to his country’s security. The fact that this notion seems absurd to Americans and Europeans is beside the point.
Western countries may perceive moves like shipping weapons to Ukraine, ratcheting up the sanctions pressure on Moscow and moving troops to Eastern Europe as “limited” measures meant to avoid escalation. We’re putting a lot of faith in the assumption that Putin sees them that way too.
27. RT: Go F*** Yourself
I disagree. We should not ban it. We need to use it. We need to exploit it. We should use it to expose Putin's strategy. We need to teach Americans what is propaganda. I watch it on YouTube and there is a banner in the upper left corner reminding us that it is state funded media. Understanding the Russian's propaganda messages can provide insight into Russian intent and its strategy.
RT: Go Fuck Yourself
Get Putin’s propaganda network off of our platforms.
Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but the events of the past week should make plain to the American corporations and useful idiot chuckleheads who have been propping up RT America and other Russian state television that it’s time to cut the cord once and for all.
This has been obvious to anyone with a modicum of situational awareness for a long while now, of course, though too many Americans seem to have not gotten the memo.
One might have expected that a failed NFL color commentator who fancies himself an “intelligent” comedian would be high-IQ enough to have recognized the pitfalls associated with hosting bimbomercials on a cable network that is a state-run mouthpiece for a vicious tyrant. And yet for Dennis “Mensa” Miller, staring back at his own visage on the small screen proved too alluring. While Miller proved to be a disappointment, pre-Ukraine invasion we shoudn’t have been surprised that a boozy actor in twilight or a roided-out sidekick to Gorilla Monsoon would take work as Putin’s court jester, given their limitations. Work is work.
But the problem with having official Russian agitprop on the air in America isn’t simply the personalities who are whoring themselves out. It’s the corporations who give the network space in our living rooms.
Scores of American content providers have been complicit in promulgating Putin’s propaganda. This has continued despite the U.S. government detailing exactly what it is that the Russians are doing and the late John McCain successfully pressing Congress to pass legislation that relieved cable operators of any obligation to lease space for programming owned, controlled, or financed by the Russian government.
Despite the government providing a flashing red siren about the danger and giving an off-ramp to any organization that wanted to act responsibly, those who have continued to participate in the Russian scheme have faced no real consequences.
That free pass should expire today. The first steps in this direction have taken in the last 24 hours with YouTube, Meta, and TikTok instituting Russian state media bans across Europe. It must not stop there.
We need a societal death penalty for anyone who chooses to profit off Russian state television in all its forms.
Podcast · February 28 2022
Democracy and freedom have seemed to be on the decline. But Ukraine’s pushback against authoritarianism…
In the declassified portion of the U.S. intelligence agencies’ report on Russia’s pro-Trump influence operation during the 2016 campaign, it was revealed that Moscow pumped nearly $200 million per year into distributing RT programming in the West. The way it normally works in cable/satellite TV is that the provider pays the channel—ESPN or TNT or whatnot—for the right to carry the network. Russia inverted the system, paying blood rubles to any carrier willing to put its channel in the lineup.
The network secured deals with the major satellite providers DirecTV and Dish. And while the McCain legislative language has caused the network to founder among traditional cable providers, RT does tout that American viewers can find them on the Buckeye cable system in Toledo and on Spring City Cable outside Chattanooga. (This could be important information for comrades Carlson and D’Souza, should they decide to decamp to Real ’Murica in order to further foment the Russophile resistance.)
I reached out to the networks in both Toledo and Spring City to see if they might want to dump the Ruskies. So far, no reply from either.
Yet while RT has had trouble getting carried by cable providers, they’ve done a good job of penetrating what are known as “over the top” streaming services.
Sling, the streaming arm of Dish Network, carries RT and even has a special “news” package that provides True Patriots™ access to both RT and Newsmax for the low price of $6 per month. Meanwhile Roku offers RT America just up the dial from Steve Bannon’s War Room. It’s these sort of streaming deals that contribute to RT popping up all kinds of places you might not expect.
These types of services provide RT much greater reach than their spot in the quadruple digits on the satellite dial. Hotels, cabs, and transportation centers airing deranged spin about Putin’s prowess to captive audiences is providing a totally unnecessary and borderline traitorous assist to the Russian dictator.
Meanwhile, online the picture is even uglier. This morning, YouTube began blocking channels “connected to Russian state-backed media outlets RT and Sputnik” just days after they took the half-decade-overdue step of pausing the monetization of RT on their platform, but that came after the network had built a subscriber base of 4.6 million people, more than double that of the Washington Post, and more even than this publication’s humble channel. (Subscribe today!)
RT’s Twitter account has nearly 3 million followers for their victim-blaming spin. On TikTok they are successfully proselytizing in Spanish to 700k+ tokkers’ FYPs sandwiched between the thirst traps and dance routines.
That’s just what we are seeing in the West.
While the pernicious effect on the homeland may not be the same, American companies pumping Russian agitprop into Moscow shouldn’t be let off the hook either. Netflix, for example, has picked a wonderful week to start sniffing glue. On March 1, as part of their entry into the Russian market, they were going to be forced to broadcast state television like Channel One and NTV. What timing!
Western leaders in the public and private sectors will have many choices in front of them in the coming weeks that carry more weight than the fate of the RT profiteers. We should have no illusions that cutting the cord on a half-baked propaganda network with washed-up D-list stars and weird North Korea apologia will halt Russia’s attempted advance.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. We’ve seen other unimaginably stupid attempts at democracy destabilization succeed in the not so recent past, if you don’t recall. And we can’t forget that millions of Americans think these 8chan yokels infiltrated the American security state and are constantly on the cusp of both taking down a global pedophile ring and resurrecting a handsome Kennedy scion from the dead.
So, ya know, better safe than sorry.
But even if you aren’t convinced that RT poses a threat, there’s the principle.
This great country of ours is built on free expression. The independent, creative minds we have nurtured are what led to our dominance in the media and technological space.
So while a bunch of revanchist, needle-dicked, tyrant apologists have the First Amendment right to be heard, the rest of us should feel no obligation to allow them to ride in the wake of our success and contaminate the water table.
It seems to me that if internet hordes want to target a company for their sins, the ones who have chosen to air Putin’s “Fair And Balanced” Ukraine invasion coverage seem to be committing a higher crime and misdemeanor than Spotify platforming Joe Rogan’s Rocks for Jocks.
When RT comes calling American platforms looking to buy a spot on the dial, those on the receiving end should be unanimously replying in the immortal words of the border guards on Snake Island: Go fuck yourself.
As for those who don’t have the gumption for that, who are still helping Putin spread his poison: DirecTV, Dish, Sling, Roku, the Hartford Sheraton, the South Beach Hotel chain, YouTube, Dennis Miller, Rick Sanchez, Jesse Ventura, William Shatner, the guy controlling the remote at the Minneapolis Airport Bar, and the rest . . . they should be shunned, denounced, and be forced to experience the consequences of their choices.
Or as my Oakland neighbor put it:
28. Twisted Sister frontman on Ukrainians using hit song as battle cry: 'I absolutely approve'
Very cool.
Twisted Sister frontman on Ukrainians using hit song as battle cry: 'I absolutely approve'
The Hill · by Sarah Polus · February 28, 2022
Twisted Sister's Dee Snider is praising Ukrainians who have turned one of his band's hit songs into a rallying cry.
"I absolutely approve of Ukrainians using 'We're Not Gonna Take It' as their battlecry," the frontman tweeted on Saturday about their adoption of the 1984 song.
He added, "My grandfather was Ukrainian, before it was swallowed up by the USSR after WW2. This can't happen to these people again!"
Ukrainians have reportedly reappropriated the hard rock hit into a protest anthem amid an invasion by Russia.
Snider's approval stands in stark contrast with his feelings on the song being used by people protesting COVID-19 mask mandates in 2020. At the time, Snider blasted the protestors, dubbing them "selfish assholes" with a "moronic cause," and writing that they did not have his permission to use the song.
Snider addressed the opposing reactions in a tweet later on Sunday.
"People are asking me why I endorsed the use of 'We’re Not Gonna Take It' for the Ukrainian people and did not for the anti-maskers," Snider wrote. "Well, one use is for a righteous battle against oppression; the other is a infantile feet stomping against an inconvenience."
Russia launched an invasion into neighboring Ukraine five days ago, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has since asked for his nation to be admitted to the European Union.
The Hill · by Sarah Polus · February 28, 2022
29. U.S. Looks to Make China Pay For Close Ties to Russia in Ukraine Crisis
Excellent. Make China uncomfortable.
U.S. Looks to Make China Pay For Close Ties to Russia in Ukraine Crisis
Sanctions and UN debates are aimed in part at making Beijing feel discomfort over Russia’s invasion and dividing the two, U.S. officials say
Punitive economic measures imposed on Russia, particularly export controls on certain technologies, would potentially hit China if its businesses and banks try to help Moscow, according to the officials.
If China “or any other country wants to engage in activity that would be subject to our sanctions, they’ll be subject to our sanctions,” a State Department official said.
The U.S. is using international forums to force China to take a public stand on the invasion, an administration official said. At the United Nations Security Council on Friday, when Russia vetoed a U.S.-backed resolution requiring Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, China abstained, along with India and the United Arab Emirates, drawing criticism from the U.S.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the countries that abstained were aligning themselves with the “aggressive and unprovoked actions of Russia.”
The U.S. is pushing for a UN General Assembly debate this week on a similar resolution, with an eye toward dividing Russia from China, UN diplomats said. A meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week is another opportunity.
China has called for a negotiated solution to the Ukraine crisis and has chafed at U.S. suggestions that Beijing will be tainted by association with Moscow.
“The truly discredited countries are those that want only interfere in other countries’ internal affairs and wage wars in the name of democracy and human rights,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in Beijing last week.
China's UN ambassador, Zhang Jun, addressed the United Nations Security Council on Friday, when China abstained from a U.S.-backed resolution requiring Russia to withdraw from Ukraine.
Photo: Seth Wenig/Associated Press
The Beijing-Moscow entente presents a geopolitical challenge for the U.S., potentially requiring Washington to prepare for conflict on both ends of the Eurasian continent, instead of focusing on what has been the Biden administration’s top priority of countering China. Already the Ukraine conflict has delayed release of key strategy documents on defense and national security as the administration works through the new challenges.
Getting China to lessen support for Russia would further isolate Moscow over Ukraine, reduce the ability of the two to work together on other issues and call into question Beijing’s reliability as a partner, the officials said.
The sanctions and other measures the U.S. and European allies are assembling against Russia, the officials said, also serve as a signal to Beijing of what it might face if it attacks Taiwan, a democratically ruled island that Beijing claims as Chinese territory. The message is that naked aggression and breaking core global rules have consequences, the administration official said.
Coaxing Beijing to ditch Moscow will require a combination of careful diplomacy and signaling, since the two governments see the U.S. as trying to blunt their global ambitions, former officials and foreign-policy specialists said.
If the administration proceeds down the path of seeking to divide Russia and China, “we could make China feel very, very unc
omfortable and perhaps rethink the advantages of being close to Moscow,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based think tank.
China has been struggling to adjust its public position on Ukraine since the invasion, trying to honor its partnership with Russia, while calling for negotiations and reiterating its long-professed principles of national sovereignty and noninterference.
China’s balancing act has proved difficult on the ground in Ukraine, despite the countries’ robust trade and investment relations; China is a major purchaser of Ukrainian corn and wheat. Over the weekend, China’s embassy in Kyiv warned Chinese still in the country to keep a low profile and not display identifying signs.
Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, China-Russia relations are as close as they have been since the Sino-Soviet bloc of the early 1950s, united by the leaders’ shared goal to diminish U.S. power, which they see as aimed at hampering their interests. That was given bold expression when Mr. Xi hosted Mr. Putin this month on the eve of the Olympics, amid the Russian buildup of forces around Ukraine.
A 5,000-word statement released afterward criticized the U.S. and its alliances for undermining China’s and Russia’s security interests. It opposed expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—adopting the position taken by Mr. Putin as he threatened Ukraine and marking the first time Beijing explicitly backed Moscow on a European security issue.
Since November, when the Biden administration began warning about Russia’s positioning of troops in border areas near Ukraine, officials have tried to get Beijing to use its influence with Moscow to stop an invasion. In recent weeks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke twice with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the matter.
“We asked the PRC that they use that influence in a constructive way, in the first instance, to prevent war, and now that we’re in the midst of an invasion to put a halt to it as quickly as is can be achieved,” the senior State Department official said, referring to the People’s Republic of China, China’s official name. Another official said the outreach to China was similar to that to other countries that might have influence with Moscow, including Kazakhstan.
After the Putin-Xi statement this month, Biden administration officials huddled to discuss strategies for dealing with the Beijing-Moscow cooperation, people briefed on the matter said. The officials decided on a tactic to highlight the partnership and make China pay a price for it, the people said.
Escalating sanctions are among the sharpest warning flares to Beijing. The U.S. and European Union are largely cutting off Russia’s financial sector from the Western financial system and ordering freezes of any assets in the West held by Mr. Putin and members of his inner circle. Export controls enacted by the U.S., the EU, Japan and others prohibit the transfer of critical technologies.
Washington is watching to see if Chinese financial institutions will try to fill the financing shortfall or whether Chinese technology companies will seek to skirt new limits on exports to Russia.
President Biden has a working relationship with Mr. Xi that dates back a decade to when the two were vice presidents, according to former officials. Asked Thursday if he was urging China to help isolate Russia, Mr. Biden said, “I’m not prepared to comment on that at the moment.”
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Friday: “As it relates to China, you know, I would say that the president’s view, of course, is that now is the time for leaders of the world to not just speak out clearly against President Putin’s flagrant aggression and to stand with the people of Ukraine, but this is not a moment for equivocation or hiding or waiting to see what happens next.”
—Vivian Salama, Courtney McBride and Lingling Wei contributed to this article.
30. All Strategies Short of War: Getting the Most Out of the Gray Zone
Sub--threshold campaigns and sub-threshold competition reminds me of some of our 1960's terminology such as sublimated war.
View graphic here:
Conclusion:
Establishing a coherent typology of aims for persistent subthreshold competition—from erosion to intervention to preparation to signaling—will allow policymakers to better integrate such efforts with other instruments of statecraft. Subthreshold campaigns should not be conflated with either specific tools or characteristics, such as deniability and gradualism. They can involve a range of objectives and draw on a variety of assets, many of which are typically associated with high-intensity activity. Moreover, the subthreshold space is itself the product of a competition to define its boundaries—one that is shaped by a nation’s doctrine for warfighting. Governments must put subthreshold campaigns in their proper context alongside other tools of state power and understand what they can plausibly achieve, if such campaigns are to remain relevant in an age of renewed great power competition.
All Strategies Short of War: Getting the Most Out of the Gray Zone - Modern War Institute
Even as open warfare has returned to Europe, states will continue to compete aggressively below the threshold of hot war. Campaigns that are persistent, fall short of warfare, and involve a panoply of state tools feature prominently in both the US 2018 National Defense Strategy and the United Kingdom’s 2021 Integrated Operating Concept. The latter is notable for making the goal of persistent campaigning a key military function and incorporating into the military’s lexicon the objective of constraining rivals without resorting to war. So-called subthreshold activity has become a core military function.
Yet as widely discussed as subthreshold competition is, it remains poorly defined. Strategists have an unhelpful tendency to define it either by the use of tools that are more deniable or less visible than traditional military action or by conflating it with the strategic gradualism seen in theaters such as the South China Sea. This is a mistake. Definitions based on the methods used by specific parts of a government cannot guide campaigns that coordinate tools from across the government. And conflating subthreshold competition in general with the specific characteristics of individual conflicts obscures the range of objectives that states have historically sought by means short of open war.
To compete effectively in the subthreshold space, policymakers need a better understanding of what they are dealing with. As I show in a recent report, subthreshold campaigns exist alongside other military and diplomatic options, from engagement to warfighting, and can have several plausible objectives, from eroding another state’s capacities to preparing the ground for a hot war. And such competition is not limited to obscure, or deniable, tools. Traditional military forces can play a crucial role. A proper understanding of subthreshold competition, one based on ends rather than means, will allow governments to coordinate action and set realistic objectives in the gray zone.
Setting the Threshold for War Is a Strategic Choice
The exact point at which subthreshold activity ends, and war begins, is not set in stone. Much existing work begins from the assumption that the West’s adversaries have gained an advantage by keeping confrontations just below the threshold that would cause a war to break out. Yet there is no objective yardstick to determine which actions will provoke a military response, and which will not.
The most tempting definition of subthreshold activity is competitive behavior that does not involve the use of lethal force. But in recent decades, states have on many occasions used kinetic force against each other without entering a state of war. Notable among these are reported clashes between US forces and Russia’s Wagner Group in Syria and an airstrike by Russian planes on Turkish soldiers in Syria. And there is ample precedent for states to treat acts that did not involve the use of force as a basis for war. Nations have, for example, threatened war against states that host hostile nonstate actors and have responded to economic coercion with military force. The lack of consistent patterns of behavior defies efforts to define the boundaries of subthreshold competition in objective terms.
Instead, these boundaries are the product of strategic choices by the states involved. Consider the analogous cases of the 1965 Pleiku attacks, in which North Vietnamese forces struck a US helicopter base in South Vietnam, and recent attacks on American facilities in Iraq by Iranian proxies. The United States treated the former as a basis for open war while the latter have become part of a wider pattern of low-level competition between Iran and the United States and its regional allies. The difference lies in the wider strategic context. In 1965, the United States had already decided to go to war. As National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy later commented, “Pleikus are like streetcars”: once the decision to go to war had been made, a justification would come along sooner or later. By contrast, because open warfare is in no party’s interest in the Middle East, a range of analogous acts have been grandfathered into subthreshold competition.
The subthreshold space, then, is a flexible concept. Its boundaries exist due to tacit agreement by the contestants and are the subject of a parallel competition to define them on terms favorable to one side. Take the India-Pakistan rivalry. India, the conventionally stronger actor, wishes to lower the threshold at which it can escalate to open warfare—thus rendering acts such as proxy warfare and terrorism above the threshold. For its part, Pakistan wishes to expand the scope of subthreshold competition by threatening to respond to an Indian conventional escalation with weapons of mass destruction. Pakistan needs to deter India from treating its support for proxies as anything other than subthreshold activity.
This dynamic, whereby the conventionally weaker nation seeks to expand the subthreshold space by deterring the other party from framing provocations as acts of war, can be seen elsewhere. Consider the 2010 sinking of the South Korean navy ship, the ROKS Cheonan, and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island by North Korea, or Iran’s provocations in the Persian Gulf. In each case, the target was convinced to treat the attack as below the threshold for open war by the prospect of catastrophic escalation—with weapons of mass destruction or artillery emplaced near Seoul in the case of North Korea and missile raids on key infrastructure and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the case of Iran.
The overarching trajectory of the relationship between two nations also affects how they frame certain actions. The Nixon administration could mine Haiphong harbor—and risk killing Chinese and Soviet sailors—because the wider dynamics of détente gave both China and the Soviet Union a stake in their relationship with the United States and thus an incentive to treat the act as competition rather than war. In 1941, by contrast, Japanese leaders treated US sanctions—a decidedly nonkinetic tool—as a casus belli. They believed Japan’s relationship with the United States had deteriorated irrevocably and felt that delay would only ensure war on unfavorable terms. The contours of the subthreshold space, then, are something policymakers must define and enforce as a strategic choice—and they have incentives to define them differently when interacting with different opponents or, indeed, the same opponent at different times.
What Subthreshold Campaigns Can Do
As a general matter, states seek four primary campaign objectives through subthreshold action: strategic erosion, supporting a partner involved in active hostilities, preparing to wage open war on favorable terms, and costly signaling.
Erosion, the most widely studied of the four goals, typically entails undermining an adversary’s capabilities or will. Consider the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s drumbeat of incursions near Taiwan, which requires the Taiwanese air force to scramble jets in response, at a cost of some $900 million a year—around 10 percent of Taiwan’s defense budget. Or, in a similar vein, consider China’s disruption of Vietnamese economic activity in Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, which has cost Vietnam at least a billion dollars. In each case, the initiator achieved meaningful aggregate effects through limited tactical activity.
Moreover, there is a mismatch between tactical and strategic results. A tactical stalemate can still serve the wider aim of strategic erosion if it forces an opponent into asymmetrical resource outlays. These asymmetrical resource outlays are often a function of the initiator’s ability to decide on the time and place of escalation.
Erosion is not an exclusively non-Western approach, nor should it be conflated with low-visibility or deniable tools. Take, for example, the Reagan administration’s approach to competing with the Soviet Union. The administration’s proxy wars against Soviet client states were coupled with efforts to undercut Soviet energy exports, the deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) in Europe, and the publicized (if exaggerated) work on strategic missile defense. These policies aimed to impose further pressure on the Soviet Union’s already overstretched economic base.
The success of the US strategy illustrated two things. First, it demonstrated the importance of having a clear goal. Focusing on eroding the Soviet resource base allowed the United States to coordinate a range of tools and agencies because it gave them a shared lexicon within which to situate their efforts. Second, the competition showed that subthreshold need not mean invisible. High-profile tools like GLCMs and missile defense systems were crucial to the US strategy. Conventional military hardware, even nuclear weapons, can play an important role in subthreshold campaigns.
The importance of military power to subthreshold competition is well illustrated in the next goal states often aim for: tipping the balance of a war in a partner’s favor without becoming a belligerent. During the Russian-Japanese war in 1904–05, for example, Britain took a range of measures to impede the unification of the Russian Baltic and Black Sea fleets. These ranged from denying the former access to coaling stations and shadowing its movements to complicating Russian commanders’ decision-making by raising their uncertainty regarding British actions. Keeping the fleets apart allowed Japan to defeat a numerically superior navy. Britain secured a strategic coup without firing a shot.
Efforts to shift the balance of a conflict in a partner’s favor can involve positioning forces to tie down one side’s military as a hedge against the possibility that the nonbelligerent will join the conflict. It can also entail the covert provision of specialist capabilities to one party—witness Iranian aid to the Houthi missile program or the covert Soviet provision of surface-to-air missiles and operators to Egypt during the 1969–70 war of attrition with Israel. By placing a thumb on the scales of an ongoing conflict, states can often deliver rapid and decisive effects—underscoring the importance of not conflating subthreshold competition with gradualism. Sub-threshold competition can also be used to set the conditions for war on favorable terms—an approach that mirrors erosion, except here erosion is a prelude to war rather than a substitute.
Finally, subthreshold campaigns can reinforce signaling, brinkmanship, and perception management. Russia’s periodic GPS jamming during NATO exercises, mock runs on radar installations, and simulated nuclear strikes at the end of its Zapad military exercise might be viewed in this regard. They collectively serve as costly signals of Russia’s capacity to escalate in a conflict and constrain opponents psychologically prior to any fighting. If, for example, opposing states perceive Russia as willing to escalate dramatically on only minor provocations, they might be reluctant to take certain options, such as neutralizing Kaliningrad in a conflict scenario—thus turning a militarily vulnerable Russian bastion into a sanctuary from which antiaccess capabilities can operate. Cultivating psychological constraints in an opposing party through careful perception management can be a key function of subthreshold activity.
Establishing a coherent typology of aims for persistent subthreshold competition—from erosion to intervention to preparation to signaling—will allow policymakers to better integrate such efforts with other instruments of statecraft. Subthreshold campaigns should not be conflated with either specific tools or characteristics, such as deniability and gradualism. They can involve a range of objectives and draw on a variety of assets, many of which are typically associated with high-intensity activity. Moreover, the subthreshold space is itself the product of a competition to define its boundaries—one that is shaped by a nation’s doctrine for warfighting. Governments must put subthreshold campaigns in their proper context alongside other tools of state power and understand what they can plausibly achieve, if such campaigns are to remain relevant in an age of renewed great power competition.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: Taiwan Air Force F-16A (Credit: Global Aviation Travels Photography)
31. Kremlin propaganda machine struggles to conceal Putin’s Ukraine war
I hope we are pumping more resources into Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to get the news to the Russian people.
Kremlin propaganda machine struggles to conceal Putin’s Ukraine war
As Vladimir Putin launched his military assault on Ukraine, the country’s media censor issued a series of stark warnings. Any outlet that cited sources other than the Kremlin or its armed forces could be banned, even for using the words “attack, invasion, or declaration of war” to describe it.
“We stress that it is Russian official information sources who have accurate and up-to-date information,” the censor Roskomnadzor said.
Such fierce enforcement of the official narrative for the “special military operation” that Russia’s military began in Ukraine on Thursday is part of a huge propaganda barrage accompanying the invasion.
“It’s like a movie. The super commandos are conducting a special military operation and everything is super,” said Tikhon Dzyadko, editor of TV Rain, one of 10 media outlets to be threatened with a ban. “This is all done to make sure that society doesn’t know there’s a real, bloody war going on, so they’re trying to hide information from them as much as possible.”
The campaign builds on a well-oiled machine that has shaped Russians’ perceptions to deliver sound support for previous conflicts in eastern Ukraine and Syria, as well as a brutal crackdown on dissent at home and in neighbouring Belarus.
This time, however, the picture being painted by the Kremlin is so at odds with the reports from Ukraine itself that even top officials and spin-doctors have struggled to handle the cognitive dissonance required.
Putin has framed the war as an operation to liberate Russian speakers in the separatist-controlled Donbas border region — leading news anchors to largely avoid so much as mentioning the fierce battles going on across the rest of Ukraine.
As Ukrainians across the country shelter underground from Russian air strikes, news channels have run footage of peaceful days in Kyiv and repeated the military’s denials that it is launching strikes on populated areas, or even fighting there at all.
“The Ukrainian authorities . . . are in fact waging war with their own population in cities where there are no Russian troops, first and foremost in Kyiv,” said Artyom Sheinin, host of a political talk show on state TV.
Ukrainian troops in Kyiv. Russian news anchors have largely avoided mentioning the fighting outside of that in the Donbas region © AFP via Getty Images
The efforts not to mention the war, or even call it one, have left Russian media outgunned by a huge wave of posts by Ukrainians on social networks that they have struggled to counter.
When Russia captured the city of Melitopol on Saturday, it claimed locals had put up no resistance and the elderly had welcomed them by waving red flags. That account was immediately tested by a video on social media showing a man angrily berating troops to their face.
The reality of the conflict even appears to have surprised some of the invading forces themselves. In videos posted by Ukrainians, men said to be Russian soldiers are seen admitting they did not know where they had been sent, with some stuck on the roadside after their vehicles ran out of fuel.
“They live in Putin’s cartoons. They really believe that the population will greet them here and that the military will surrender,” said Kostyantyn Batozsky, a Ukrainian political analyst.
“It’s in the worst Soviet tradition of denying reality: they denied Chernobyl, and exactly the same thing is happening.”
Even some of Putin’s most ardent supporters appear concerned that Russia is struggling to wrest control of the narrative.
“There’s not nearly enough official information,” Alexander Gamov, a veteran reporter for a pro-Putin tabloid, complained to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on a Saturday call with reporters.
“It’s just lots of half-baked rumours in the information space, and the official narrative is just drowning. Media are forced to fill that vacuum with Telegram channels and so on,” he said.
Russia began to change tactics on Saturday, after Ukraine claimed it had withstood a fierce night-time assault on Kyiv and its president Volodymyr Zelensky posted social media videos showing himself and top aides still in the capital — in contrast to Putin’s self-imposed seclusion.
State TV abandoned some of its usual weekend programming for special episodes of political talk shows repeating the government line.
On Sheynin’s talk show, analyst Kira Sazonova said Russia’s military had “found themselves in a difficult situation precisely because they have the best intentions . . . to place humanitarianism above military objectives.”
Russia’s struggle to keep control of the war’s story, however, may not necessarily have consequences for Putin’s approval ratings. State television is the primary source of news for four out of five Russians, while the country has begun limiting access to Facebook and Twitter since the invasion began.
In the run-up to the conflict, when Russia repeatedly denied it would invade and mocked western warnings that later turned out to be accurate, the Kremlin’s messaging seemed to have worked.
Sixty per cent of Russians believed the west was the cause of the tensions, 16 per cent blamed Ukraine and only three per cent thought Russia was responsible, according to a poll published on the day of the invasion by the independent Levada Center.
Yet the longer the war goes on, the more Russians’ perception of it may change, said Nikolai Petrov, a senior research fellow at Chatham House.
“All alternative voices have been suppressed, any possibility of organising protests has been destroyed, but that doesn’t mean that the Kremlin can do whatever it wants for as long as it wants,” Petrov said.
“Information about what happens in Ukraine gets passed along from person to person — you can’t shut it off. That’s why they’re counting on it being relatively quick and bloodless in Russians’ eyes,” he added. “But it might turn out totally differently.”
32. The rouble’s collapse compounds Russia’s isolation
A step toward strategic strangulation?
The rouble’s collapse compounds Russia’s isolation
Capital controls may soon follow, destroying the last vestige of the country's financial credibility
Feb 28th 2022
ON MONDAY, as financial markets began trading in Asia, the value of the Russian rouble collapsed. The cause was harsh Western sanctions introduced over the weekend. In effect these freeze Russia’s foreign currency reserves and begin to lock Russian banks out of the SWIFT network for arranging international transactions. The US dollar rose by as much as 40% against the rouble, taking the Russian currency from its Friday closing level of around 84 to the dollar to as high as 118, a new record.
The move will be one of the largest one-day slumps in the Russian currency’s modern history, similar in scale to the one-day declines recorded during the worst moments of the country’s financial crisis in 1998, when Russia defaulted on its debt. In mid-morning in Moscow, the Russian central bank raised its key interest rate from 9.5% to 20% in an effort to stem the rouble’s slump, and the country’s finance ministry ordered companies with foreign-currency revenues to convert 80% of their income into roubles.
The rouble’s collapse shows how isolated the government has become. Its functional exclusion from international financial markets could do the economy grave harm. A plunging currency makes imports of everything from cars to medical products dramatically more expensive. External debts, much of which are denominated in dollars, will be more difficult to service. The rouble’s decline will further reduce the falling quality of life for the Russian middle class, and it will harm any company that has to pay for overseas goods and services.
The country’s central bank has ordered financial institutions to reject the instructions of foreign clients attempting to sell Russian securities, a move that may be the beginning of controls to prevent massive outflows of capital. Any ban on foreign investors from getting out their money could sour what little is left of the country’s reputation as an investment destination. Over the weekend, Russian citizens queued outside banks to withdraw their money. Panic about the stability of Russia’s financial system could yet lead to bank runs.
Oil prices climbed higher, on worries about disruptions to supply, possibly because of embargoes. On Monday-morning trading in Asia, they rose to just short of $100 per barrel, up by around 5% compared with their levels at the end of last week. As a huge exporter of oil and gas, Russia would usually gain from higher energy prices. But the plunge of the rouble suggests that the extra revenue from commodity sales is expected to pale in comparison to the damage done by sanctions.
The spillover in other markets was muted in early trading on Monday, with benchmark equity indexes in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo not far from their levels at the close on Friday. American and European market indices were lower, but not drastically so. But as investors scramble to work through the knock-on effects of the conflict for assets around the world, more frenetic trading activity may yet be to come.
The threat of more severe sanctions has become increasingly real since financial markets closed for the weekend on February 26th. The announcement that America, Britain and the European Union would target the Russian central bank and its ability to sell its $630bn in foreign-exchange reserves, much of which are held in overseas custody, could frustrate Russia’s ability to defend the value of its currency. On Monday morning, the EU prohibited all transactions with the Central Bank of Russia.
Russian banks’ bid-and-ask quotes for US dollars—the prices at which a dealer will buy or sell—widened dramatically during the weekend, demonstrating both uncertainty about what lies ahead and also how keen holders of dollars are to hang onto hard currency. Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, quoted a spread of around 22% between purchases and sales of dollars even before Monday’s enormous move in the exchange rate. One week ago, the spread was just 5%.
The Russian government has made efforts in recent years to protect itself from the full impact of any further international sanctions. In 2014 the central bank established an alternative financial messaging system to SWIFT, called SPFS. Last year it boasted that the system’s message volume exceeded 20% of SWIFT’s levels in 2020, with around 400 institutions connected to the system, including several foreign companies.
But recent international sanctions mean that banks overseas will hesitate to participate in any workarounds that could violate incoming sanctions. In 2020, when the American Treasury Department imposed sanctions on political and security figures in Hong Kong, even Chinese banks in the territory would not hold accounts for those who had been targeted. The reason is that they were fearful of losing access to dollar-denominated payment and settlement.
Direct exposure between the Russian financial system and the rest of the world is slim, but not non-existent. Banks based in Russia record $134bn in liabilities owed to institutions abroad, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements, around 0.4% of the global total. Four-fifths of the country’s 15.5trn-rouble government bond market is held domestically. That means there is less risk of direct financial contagion from a Russian financial crisis.
A handful of European banks—Hungary’s OTP, Austria’s Raiffeisen, France’s Société Générale and Italy’s UniCredit—have meaningful exposure to Russia or Ukraine, according to S&P global ratings, a credit-rating agency. But there is no obvious current equivalent to Long-Term Capital Management, the American hedge fund which collapsed in 1998 as a result of highly leveraged bets on Russian government bonds, threatening to take much of Wall Street with it.
Instead, the most important effects of Russia’s financial distress could flow through real economic channels. The rising price of oil will exacerbate inflation which has already surged in most of the Western world. And Chicago wheat futures for delivery in May rose by around 7% during overnight trading, to a little over $9 per bushel. As a staple foodstuff across much of the world, more supply disruptions will mean higher food prices, too. According to Rabobank, a Dutch bank, Russia and Ukraine account together for 30% of global wheat exports.
The reaction of the Federal Reserve to the market ructions adds another element of uncertainty. Until the conflict erupted, expectations that the Fed might signal its intention to whip inflation with a 0.5 percentage point interest-rate increase were growing. Based on market pricing, investors still expect the American central bank to raise rates at its mid-March meeting, but by a more restrained 0.25 percentage points.
If the weakness of the rouble endures and efforts to prevent capital from leaving the country continue, the financial damage to Russian businesses and livelihoods could be lasting. The diversification of Russia’s economy away from commodities would have been set back by years. Just as Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has made himself a pariah by invading the country next door, so the Russian economy could end up being isolated, too.
Our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here
33. How U.S. Special Forces Can Fight Putin Without Starting World War III
Note that not a single Special Forces soldier was interviewed for this.
"SOGs"
Excerpts:
Amenta’s co-author, Dan Blakely, another former Ranger, agreed that having local operators for sourcing information would be invaluable in the Ukraine conflict.
“Not only do you get the real-time HUMINT (human intelligence) of what the Russians are doing, but you can have a real pulse of the continued capabilities of the Ukraine military [and] learn the weaknesses and capabilities of our enemies,” including “what weapons, vehicles, aircraft, tactics, and troop units they are using.”
Blakely added that such intel was vital for developing “future strategic plans should the U.S. and NATO allies get involved.”
When it comes to gathering HUMINT, one option for elite U.S. forces is the use of Special Operation Groups (SOGs). Amenta described the typical SOG as a small, covert, reconnaissance task force, often made up of intelligence agents from the NSA or CIA, paired with Special Forces soldiers like Green Berets or Delta Force commandos. In order to avoid detection, the SOGs are able to work undercover within local populations.
“They’ve essentially mobilized the entire nation.”
...
But not everyone is in favor of using SOGs in Ukraine.
Dr. Robert J. Bunker, the research director at the security consultancy ℅ Futures LLC, said the risk that an SOG team or a NATO equivalent could be killed or captured, and linked back to their countries of origin, means that the risk far outweighs the reward.
Putting U.S. intelligence gatherers on the ground in any capacity is just not a “viable option,” Bunker said. “In my opinion it is too escalatory given the fact that both the Putin regime and the U.S. are nuclear armed powers… We simply do not want NATO or U.S. forces and Russian forces getting into direct contact with one another.”
How U.S. Special Forces Can Fight Putin Without Starting World War III
PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY
From intelligence-gathering to training civilians in guerrilla tactics, here’s what the U.S. and NATO might do to push back against the Russian invasion while avoiding escalation.
Updated Mar. 01, 2022 1:33AM ET / Published Feb. 28, 2022 4:52AM ET
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
President Biden has already declared that neither U.S. nor NATO military forces will be deployed to the conflict sparked by Russian forces pouring across Ukraine’s borders. The dangers of escalation are simply too great, especially given the threats that volatile Russian President Vladimir Putin has made regarding the use of nuclear weapons. Direct involvement, the thinking goes, is just too risky.
But that doesn’t mean the U.S. won’t be indirectly involved. From gathering intelligence on the ground to training potential civilian partisans in guerrilla warfare, it’s extremely likely the U.S. and NATO will seek to influence events on the battlefield. Here’s how that might work.
According to former U.S. Army Ranger Tom Amenta, there are advantages to having on-site, operational intelligence gathering in Ukraine that can’t be equaled by remote technologies like satellite imagery or radio signal interceptions.
A Ukrainian serviceman gives a thumb up before an attack in Lugansk region on Feb. 26, 2022, the day Russia ordered its troops to advance in Ukraine “from all directions.”
Anatolii Stepanov/Getty Images
“The value of boots on the ground [in intelligence] is that you get a ‘finger tip feel’ of what is going on,” said Amenta, co-author of the book The Twenty-Year War, in an interview with The Daily Beast. Such intel gives U.S. military observers “a feel of the people and of the battle space and allows for the ability to gauge the situation, almost in real time, and see what is going on with the Russians and Ukrainians to assist commanders in planning.”
Amenta’s co-author, Dan Blakely, another former Ranger, agreed that having local operators for sourcing information would be invaluable in the Ukraine conflict.
“Not only do you get the real-time HUMINT (human intelligence) of what the Russians are doing, but you can have a real pulse of the continued capabilities of the Ukraine military [and] learn the weaknesses and capabilities of our enemies,” including “what weapons, vehicles, aircraft, tactics, and troop units they are using.”
Blakely added that such intel was vital for developing “future strategic plans should the U.S. and NATO allies get involved.”
When it comes to gathering HUMINT, one option for elite U.S. forces is the use of Special Operation Groups (SOGs). Amenta described the typical SOG as a small, covert, reconnaissance task force, often made up of intelligence agents from the NSA or CIA, paired with Special Forces soldiers like Green Berets or Delta Force commandos. In order to avoid detection, the SOGs are able to work undercover within local populations.
“They’ve essentially mobilized the entire nation.”
“These men and women are extremely skilled in blending into environments, gathering intelligence and also being able to work with and help guide [and] assist local military forces,” Amenta said.
Because secrecy is of paramount importance, SOGs working in Ukraine would likely be limited to just a few officers in each unit. But Amenta framed it as an issue of quality over quantity, saying that the “training, raw intelligence, and ability to rapidly ideate and think strategically is what wins the day here.”
But not everyone is in favor of using SOGs in Ukraine.
Dr. Robert J. Bunker, the research director at the security consultancy ℅ Futures LLC, said the risk that an SOG team or a NATO equivalent could be killed or captured, and linked back to their countries of origin, means that the risk far outweighs the reward.
Putting U.S. intelligence gatherers on the ground in any capacity is just not a “viable option,” Bunker said. “In my opinion it is too escalatory given the fact that both the Putin regime and the U.S. are nuclear armed powers… We simply do not want NATO or U.S. forces and Russian forces getting into direct contact with one another.”
Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Hal Kempfer, who served as a U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Officer, said that it’s “very possible” that the U.S. has spies on the ground in Ukraine. But Kempfer also said a safer option to avoid escalation would be to utilize Ukrainian nationals to gather vital HUMINT information and pass it on to their counterparts in the U.S. and NATO.
Ukrainian soldiers look out from a broken window inside a military facility, after an explosion in Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 26, 2022.
Emilio Morenatti
“We don’t really need to have [U.S. or NATO spies on the ground] because we can deal directly with Ukraine forces, many of whom we’ve trained, and trained to a standard where they can provide tremendous intelligence capability,” Kempfer said.
“They’ve essentially mobilized the entire nation. You have federal law enforcement [mobilized]. They’re really good at observing and reporting. And good at avoiding detection while they do that. So a lot of them might be wearing civilian clothes and collecting intelligence,” he added.
Even if U.S. special forces did not enter Ukrainian territory, that does not mean they won’t be playing a vital role. One of their most important functions might well be training Ukrainian soldiers or ordinary citizens in the tactics of guerrilla warfare they would need to resist the occupation of their homeland. Just such tactics were employed by Mujahideen fighters during the Soviet-Afghan war of the late 20th century—tactics that eventually forced the Soviets to withdraw.
On Friday, the BBC reported that at least 18,000 assault rifles had been handed out to the citizens of Kyiv, and the international community is rife with speculation that the conflict could devolve into a prolonged anti-Russian insurgency.
That’s partly because Ukraine is almost the size of Texas, with a population of about 43 million people. About 70 percent of the population is concentrated in urban areas, meaning that: “We could be looking at house-to-house fighting in which tens of thousands of armed defenders face the invading forces,” said research director Bunker.
In the event that the major cities were pacified by the Russian forces, an occupation phase would then begin during which “Ukrainian civilians and the relatives of the insurgent fighters” would be targeted, Bunker said. “Along with the brutality of such an occupation this would begin to strain the Russian economy to logistically support the deployed force.”
Former Ranger Amenta agreed with Bunker that Russian forces could get bogged down in a potential quagmire. “Once you take the territory you are no longer the aggressor. [Then] you are in static positions that restrict your freedom of movement, and you’re an easier target,” Amenta said. “And 200,000 Russian soldiers against 43 million people who don’t like you—that’s a really hard thing to accomplish.”
In the event of a prolonged insurgency that might turn into a war of attrition, the U.S. and NATO would likely see it in their own interests to provide training and munitions to partisan fighters, in similar fashion to what the U.S. did in Europe during the Nazi occupation.
“It’s all fun and games until someone throws a nuke.”
When asked, a senior U.S. defense official told The Daily Beast that the U.S. would not rule out training Ukrainians. “We’re going to continue to look for ways to support the Ukrainian armed forces, and to help them defend their country,” they said.
Former Marine Colonel Kempfer, who cited similar efforts conducted by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, described training host-nation personnel as “a traditional Army Special Forces mission.” Amenta agreed, calling such training the Special Forces’ “bread and butter.”
“They’d be teaching [Ukrainian partisans] how to use things like Stinger anti-air missiles and javelin anti-tank weapons to slow down Russian tanks and helicopters. They’ll also teach ambush and guerrilla warfare techniques, especially things that can destabilize or slow down the Russian movement, and, if they were attempting to hold territory, to make it very difficult for them to keep it.”
One major question might be where would such training take place. If U.S. forces are barred from entering an occupied Ukraine, nearby NATO allies like Poland and Romania would seem like potential candidates. American troops arrived in both of those nations this week to help them defend against potential Russian incursions, meaning that the personnel needed for setting up guerrilla warfare schools may already be in place.
A Ukrainian soldier smokes a cigarette outside Kharkiv, Ukraine, Feb. 26, 2022.
AP Photo/Andrew Marienko
The trouble with basing training camps in NATO countries, said Kempfer, is that the Kremlin might see that as aggressive interference within its sphere of influence.
“If you train partisans in Romania or Poland and then they return to Ukraine [to engage Russian forces]—how would Putin view that? You have to look at the political volatility of that.”
Kempfer also pointed to Putin's KGB background and his penchant for being ruthlessly vindictive against any perceived threat.
“This is someone who used a nerve agent to assassinate dissidents on British soil… My concern would be that if we brought [the partisans] to a NATO country Putin could take some sort of overt military action against that NATO country and that would cause a massive escalation. The other concern is that he would use covert means against that country to destabilize the situation in and around where we’re doing the training. That’s very much in his kit bag.”
Kempfer said that one solution might be the use of virtual or online training. “From an operational risk perspective, that’s the safest thing we can do,” he said.
Kempfer also discussed the possibility that many members of the Ukrainian diaspora in the U.S. and Western Europe might see themselves as beholden to return to their homeland to take up arms.
“I fully believe that’s going to happen,” Kempfer said, and also mentioned that such an influx of voluntary foreign fighters could provoke Putin into unfairly claiming deliberate interference by the U.S. or NATO.
“There’s reality and then there’s whatever Russia wants to say,” Kempfer said. “It’s all fun and games until someone throws a nuke.”
Shannon Vavra contributed to this story.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
