Quotes of the Day:
"Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory."
- George S. Patton
"My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth."
- Abraham Lincoln
"The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws."
- Walt Whitman
1. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 12
2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 1
3. Opinion | Ukraine’s stirring self-defense is no accident
4. Remarks of President Joe Biden – State of the Union Address As Prepared for Delivery
5. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: March
6. Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine
7. Zelensky assassination plot foiled, Ukrainian authorities say
8. Exxon to exit Russia, leaving $4 billion in assets, Sakhalin LNG project in doubt
9. Ukraine Conflict Update - March 2, 2022 | SOF News
10. Russian Troop Deaths Expose a Potential Weakness of Putin’s Strategy
11. What the West should do now to help Ukrainians on the battlefield
12. Volunteers flock to fight for Ukraine in pacifist Japan
13. Perspective | President Zelensky’s leadership of Ukraine’s resistance is a testament to democracy
14. Ukrainian brewery switches from beer to Molotov cocktails
15. The history of molotov cocktails, from the Spanish Civil War to Ukraine
16. Answer to Putin's Invasion of Ukraine Could Be NATO Expansion
17. Ukrainians say they are fighting on in southern city of Kherson
18. Biden rallies Congress behind Ukraine, says Putin has 'no idea what's coming'
19. What happened to Russia's Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
20. Russia, Ukraine and the West’s grand delusion of freedom
21. Five Lessons Learned From Sanctions on Iran for the Ukraine Crisis
22. Five Reasons Why Russia is Struggling in Ukraine
23. What a Russian soldier’s panicked text home reveals about Ukraine’s information war
24. The Impossible Suddenly Became Possible
25. Japan’s Possible Acquisition of Long-Range Land-Attack Missiles and the Implications for the U.S.-Japan Alliance
26. Russia-Ukraine war gives a glimpse of China’s new world order, and of Beijing’s faltering reputation
27. Sugio Takahashi, Pitfalls in Deterring a Taiwan Strait Conflict: “Unpreparable War,”.
28. Here's Why a Ukraine No-Fly Zone's a No-Go
29. Ukraine’s drone strikes reveal Russian planning failures, expert says
30. "Oh So Social" Conversation: Dr. Robert Gates and Dr. Michael Vickers
1. UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 12
UKRAINE CONFLICT UPDATE 12
Institute for the Study of War, Russia Team
With The Critical Threats Project, AEI
March 1, 2022
This daily synthetic product covers key events related to renewed Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Key Takeaways March 1, 2022
- [CORRECTION] Russian President Vladimir Putin likely moved Russia’s nuclear alert status to their highest peacetime level on February 27, the second of four possible levels.
- The Kremlin admitted Russian casualties in Ukraine for the first time but announced an implausibly low number of killed or wounded.
- Ukraine combatted Russian information campaigns while the Kremlin continued censoring information in Russia.
- Anti-war protests in Russia continued on March 1 despite mass arrests and government censorship.
- European Union (EU) countries are set to expand SWIFT sanctions as more private companies suspend operations and services in Russia.
- NATO and EU countries continued providing military aid but reneged on promised fighter jets for Ukraine on March 1.
- Private companies and Western governments sanctioned Russian state-affiliated media to combat Russian disinformation and propaganda on March 1.
- European and Ukrainian leaders advanced efforts to quickly admit Ukraine to the EU on March 1.
- Russian forces are setting conditions to envelop Kyiv from the west and attempting to open a new axis of attack from the east that would let them encircle the capital. It is unclear if Russia has sufficient combat power to complete such an encirclement and hold it against Ukrainian counter-attacks.
- Russian forces will likely launch a renewed ground offensive to seize Kharkiv following the air/artillery/missile attack it has been conducting in the past 24 hours.
- Russian and Russian proxy forces will likely solidify the “land bridge” linking Rostov-on-Don with Crimea, allowing Russian forces to move more rapidly from Rostov to reinforce efforts further west.
- Russia’s successful seizure of Kherson city may allow Russian forces to resume their interrupted drive toward Mykolayiv and Odesa.
- Belarusian forces have likely entered the war on Russia’s side despite denials by the Belarusian president.
Key Events February 28, 4:00 pm EST – March 1, 4:00 pm EST
Military Events:
Russian forces are completing the reinforcement and resupply of their troops north and west of Kyiv and launching an envelopment of the capital likely aimed at encircling and ultimately capturing it. This effort will likely accelerate in the next 24-48 hours. Russian operations against Kyiv are Moscow’s main effort. Russian troops are also undertaking three supporting efforts, one to seize Kharkiv, one to take Mariupol and secure the “land bridge” connecting Rostov-on-Don to Crimea, and one to secure Kherson and set conditions for a drive west toward Mykolayiv and Odesa. The three supporting operations are active, with the operation against Mariupol making the most progress in the last 24 hours.
Russian troops claim to have encircled Mariupol and have reportedly entered the city of Kherson in the south. Russian forces are receiving needed supplies and reinforcements that may facilitate much more rapid and effective operations in the coming 24-72 hours. The Russian effort around Kyiv remains poorly organized, however, with elements of many different battalions combined into what seem to be ad hoc groupings rather than operating under standing regiment or brigade headquarters. The initial errors in the Russian force composition and organization in Belarus and western Russia that ISW has previously reported on, which contributed to Russian logistical and operational failures around Kyiv, will be difficult to remedy quickly and will likely continue to cause friction and reduce the effectiveness of Russian operations even as supply issues are addressed and reinforcements come into the fight. It remains too early to evaluate the likely effective combat power the added Russian troops will bring.
Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time. The description of these efforts differs from previous reports’ discussion of axes because of the dynamic nature of the Russian military campaign
- Main effort—Kyiv;
- Supporting effort #1—Kharkiv;
- Supporting effort #2—Mariupol; and
- Supporting effort #3—Kherson and west.
- Kyiv: The Russian attack on Kyiv likely consists of a main effort aimed at enveloping and ultimately encircling the city from the west and a supporting effort along the axes from Chernihiv and Sumy to encircle Kyiv from the east. The long Russian column of combat and logistics vehicles north of Kyiv is likely setting conditions for the envelopment to the west, although it could also support attacks directly into the city from the positions Russian forces maintain in Kyiv’s northwestern outskirts. Russian forces are more likely to pursue the envelopment/encirclement than a direct assault into the city.
- Kharkiv: Russian forces remain unable to seize Kharkiv and have apparently concentrated on an air, missile, and artillery bombardment likely intended in part to enable a subsequent renewed ground offensive. The Russian military has continued using area-attack weapons in Kharkiv, dramatically increasing the damage to civilian infrastructure and civilian casualties. Russian forces have not reportedly attempted large-scale ground operations against Kharkiv in the last 24 hours but are likely instead using air, missile, and artillery bombardment to set conditions for a renewed ground attack sometime in the next 24-48 hours. Russian ground forces appear likely to conduct another frontal assault on Kharkiv from the northeast rather than attempt to envelop or encircle the city.
- Mariupol: Russian forces claim to have completed the encirclement of Mariupol by land and sea on March 1. ISW assesses with low confidence that Russian forces have completed the encirclement of Mariupol and will seek to compel the Ukrainian defenders to surrender or attack to seize it within the coming 24 hours.
- Kherson and west: Russian forces in the south appear to be holding their positions south of Zaprozhya, fighting to consolidate control of Kherson city, and encircling Mariupol to set conditions to seize it. Russian operations in the south do not appear to pose an imminent danger to Odesa within the next 24 hours. A Russian drive north through or near Zaprozhya to cut off Ukrainian forces fighting along the line of contact also appears very unlikely in the next 24-72 hours. Russian forces have likely secured control of Kherson city and are consolidating there before continuing their advance to the west.
Russian Activity
Kremlin officials denied conducting a war and blamed the West for escalating the situation in Ukraine on February 28 and March 1. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated the Kremlin’s claims that the West triggered escalations in Ukraine in a virtual address to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR) on March 1.[1] Lavrov claimed that Russia does not welcome the presence of US nuclear weapons in Europe.[2] Over 100 delegates from 40 nations walked out of the UNHCR meeting in support of Ukraine during Lavrov’s speech.[3] Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova claimed that Estonia and Poland refused to let the Russian delegation fly through their airspace to attend the UNHCR meeting in Geneva and called the boycotting delegates “hypocrites and bigots.”[4] Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced on March 1 that Russia will hold the first International Anti-Fascist Congress as part of the Army-2022 forum in August 2022 to “unite the international community” against “Nazi ideology.”[5] Shoigu’s comment furthers the Russian attempt to falsely paint the Ukrainian government as Nazis.
The Kremlin has admitted that Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine but is severely underreporting the casualties on March 1. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced that Russia will allocate five billion rubles to veterans of the Russian military operation in Ukraine and will pay 11,000 rubles (around $104) to the families of the deceased.[6] Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that two Chechen servicemembers have died during the operation in Ukraine as of March 1.[7] Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed on March 1 that Russian officials do not have data on Russian casualties in Ukraine despite noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin has “complete information” about the operation.[8]
The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) conducted kinetic and informational operations to disrupt Ukrainian communications and defend against accusations that Russia is committing war crimes. The MoD announced that it would strike the Ukrainian Security Service technological facilities and the 72nd Center for Information and Psychological Operations in Kyiv with high-precision weapons and urged Kyiv civilians “engaged in provocations” to evacuate.[9] Russian Armed Forces struck a TV tower in Kyiv shortly thereafter, killing five civilians.[10] Kremlin-sponsored TV defended the attack by claiming that the MoD warned civilians ahead of time. Russian TV said that Russia aims to combat “unprovoked [Ukrainian] information campaigns” such as cyberattacks.[11] Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov denied Ukrainian accusations of Russian war crimes and claimed Ukrainian nationalists are using Ukrainian citizens as human shields on February 28.[12] Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu claimed on March 1 that Ukrainian forces are placing large-caliber mortars and multiple-launch rocket systems in Ukrainian residential areas near courtyards and schools. Shoigu likely intended to defend Russian attacks on civilian areas and urban centers as justified military operations.[13] Shoigu reiterated that the operation in Ukraine will continue until Russian forces achieve all their goals, of which “the main task is protect the Russian Federation from the threat posed by Western countries.”[14] Russian forces also targeted Ukrainian civilian neighborhoods in Kharkiv on March 1.[15] The UN Human Rights Office reported that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused at least 100 confirmed civilian deaths and at least 400 civilian injuries as of March 1.[16] Peskov also claimed that the Kremlin will not be involved in “potential Ukrainian elections” in the future because Ukraine “is a different country.”[17]
Russian banks and politicians continued to attempt to stem the fallout from Western economic pressures on March 1. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin announced on March 1 that the Russian government had “temporarily” instituted capital controls to ban foreign businesses from exiting Russian assets to ensure they are not “making decisions under political pressure.”[18] Russia’s National Wealth Fund allocated 1 trillion rubles ($10.3 billion) to buy shares of Russian companies to further minimize sanctions fallout on March 1.[19] Stock and derivative trading remained closed on March 1, while money markets remained open.[20] The ruble traded at 101 rubles per dollar on March 1, a marked depreciation from the 81 rubles-per-dollar exchange rate on February 23.[21] The Russian Central Bank backtracked on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 28 ban on Russians paying off foreign debts, stating that Russian residents and companies will still be able to pay off foreign debt.[22] The Central Bank clarified that Putin only banned loans made by Russian residents to non-residents but does not ban Russian residents’ payments on foreign loans.
Western sanctions are beginning to hit Russian consumers directly beyond the currency fall and expanding inflation; Google Pay and Apple Pay ceased working with Russian banks, causing long lines on Moscow’s metro on March 1 as commuters scrambled to pay fares with cash.[23] Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov criticized Western sanctions for affecting non-economic spheres on March 1.[24] The Russian Ministry of Agriculture, Federal Antimonopoly Service, Ministry of Retail and Trade, and various retailers agreed on voluntary parameters to minimize trade margins on necessary consumer goods such as dairy, baked goods, sugar, and vegetables to maintain supply.[25]
Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom announced that it will continue to send normal amounts of gas through Ukraine to meet continuing European demand.[26] Gazprom is likely setting conditions to claim that it is meeting its international contractual obligations despite what the Kremlin calls “illegal” Western sanctions against Russian companies.
Anti-war protests in Russia continued on March 1 despite a massive government crackdown on anti-war activity. Independent Russian human rights group OVD-Info reported that 6,830 people have been detained during anti-war protests since February 24, with 590 arrests made in 16 cities on March 1.[27] On February 27 alone, 2,802 people were detained in 56 cities.[28] The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) threatened criminal charges and up to 20 years imprisonment for any Russian citizen who passes information to Ukrainian intelligence services, expanding the February 27 announcement that any Russian citizen who is caught providing assistance to foreign states will be charged with treason.[29] The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) human rights body (ODIHR) condemned the crackdown on anti-war protests in Russia and Belarus as ”a grave violation of the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, core principles of democracy.”[30]
Opposition to the war in the international Russian-language community persists. A Russian-language Change.org petition against the invasion has received over one million signatures, and members of Russian professional organizations have signed similar petitions.[31] One hundred sixteen Belarusian jurists and lawyers wrote a letter calling for the immediate cessation of hostilities in Ukraine and cited numerous violations of both international and Belarusian domestic law.[32]
[Correction] Russian President Vladimir Putin likely moved Russia’s nuclear alert level to the highest used in peacetime, the second of four possible alert levels, on February 27. ISW and various media outlets previously incorrectly reported that Putin raised Russia’s nuclear alert to its highest possible level. Putin likely moved Russian nuclear forces from their lowest alert level (“constant”) to their next-highest (“elevated”), although the Kremlin’s language was likely intentionally vague.[33] Putin likely intended his order and subsequently vague rhetoric to accomplish two objectives: first, to alarm Western audiences with the risk of nuclear war and, second, to signal to the United States and other nuclear powers that Putin was not carrying out a dramatic nuclear escalation. 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.”[34] 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.[35] International Committee of the Russian Federation Council First Deputy Chairman Vladimir Dzhaborov 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.[36] 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.”[37]
UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace dismissed the change as rhetorical on February 28.[38] NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on March 1 that NATO saw “no need” to change its nuclear alert level. 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.[39] However, a leaked draft of an International Atomic Energy Agency statement for its planned March 2 meeting condemned Russian aggression as ”significantly raising the risk of a nuclear accident or incident.”[40]
Belarusian Activity
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko likely committed Belarusian troops to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite Lukashenko's vocal denials on March 1. Ukrainian Territorial Defense authorities claimed that Belarusian elements from Grodno (likely of Belarus’ 6th Mechanized Brigade) deployed to Chernihiv Oblast in support of the Russian offensive on March 1.[41] Lukashenko acknowledged that he deployed five Belarusian battalions to an unspecified location on Belarus's western border but denied planning to participate in Russian combat operations in Ukraine on March 1.[42] Belarusian elements are likely also positioned to open a new axis of attack against Western Ukraine, as ISW previously warned.[43] Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate warned on March 1 that Russia will likely stage a provocation to justify deploying 300 Belarusian tanks stationed approximately 30 kilometers from the Ukrainian-Belarusian border near Rivne and Lutsk oblasts in western Ukraine.[44] A Belarusian lieutenant colonel called on Belarusian soldiers to disobey any orders to attack Ukraine on February 27.[45]
Lukashenko is likely setting information conditions to support Belarusian forces’ participation in combat operations against Ukraine. Lukashenko presided over an expanded Belarusian Security Council meeting during which he showed a map of Ukraine partitioned into four sectors and Ukrainian military facilities destroyed by missile strikes from Belarusian territory on March 1.[46] Lukashenko alleged that Western-backed Ukrainian nationalists have promoted anti-Belarusian rhetoric and economic policies since 2014, that Belarus stopped a Ukrainian coup attempt in Belarus, and that Belarus blocked 12 Ukrainian special services personnel seeking to destabilize Belarus since 2019.[47] Lukashenko additionally stated that Belarusian air defense systems are on “high alert” to prevent attacks “in the back of Russian troops and that he asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to deploy S-400 air defense systems west of Minsk.[48]
Ukrainian Activity
Ukraine intensified its efforts to combat Russian misinformation campaigns as Russia continued to censor media coverage of the war on March 1. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov announced that Russia is preparing an information operation to falsely claim that Ukraine surrendered to Russia.[49] Reznikov stated that Russia will falsify documents and create fake videos to misinform Ukrainians about the war, likely to demoralize the population or trigger a Ukrainian coup against the government.[50] Reznikov emphasized that Ukraine will not capitulate.[51] Ukrainian regional officials created Telegram channels on March 1 to counteract Russian disinformation campaigns, ensuring direct communication with residents online.[52] Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov stated that Elon Musk’s Starlink internet terminals arrived in Ukraine and will provide internet coverage throughout the country if Russia strikes Ukrainian communication infrastructure.[53]
The Kremlin blocked several independent media websites for unfavorably covering the Russian invasion on February 28.[54] The Russian General Prosecutors’ Office took off the air a liberal radio station, Echo Moskvy, popular among city dwellers on March 1, indicating the Kremlin’s willingness to openly censor mainstream outlets.[55] The Prosecutor‘s Office also called for restriction of Russian liberal online outlet Dozhd for anti-Russian content.[56] The United Russia Party called on Russian Internet platforms to remove videos and images of the Russian war in Ukraine on March 1.[57] Russian State Duma Vice Speaker Anna Kuznetsova claimed that graphic videos of Russian military operation in Ukraine appear in children's content. The Kremlin will likely implement additional age restrictions on online outlets or justify the censorship of the Russian internet. Russian social media users also reported inconsistent access to Facebook and Instagram throughout March 1.[58] Russian technology and communications regulator Roskomnadzor reinstated slower loading speeds for Twitter users and refused to authorize Facebook’s independent fact-checking service.[59]
US, NATO, and EU Activity
The European Union (EU) is set to delist more Russian banks from the SWIFT financial network as more states join the sanctions campaign against Russia and Belarus. A growing number of private companies are also suspending operations and services in Russia.
- Anonymous Swiss officials told radio station SRF that Nord Stream 2 laid off all its employees and filed for bankruptcy on March 1 due to international sanctions.[60] Two unidentified sources told Reuters earlier in the day that Nord Stream 2 began working with financial advisers to clear some of its liabilities and may formally begin the bankruptcy process as soon as the week of February 28.[61] Nord Stream 2 AG stated in an email sent earlier on March 1 that it terminated an unspecified number of employee contracts because of US sanctions.[62]
- Two unidentified diplomats told The Wall Street Journal on March 1 that the EU will delist several more Russian banks from the SWIFT financial network, including VTB, VEB, Bank Rossiya, and Bank Otkritie. SWIFT’s board must formally vote to approve the EU’s decision.[63]
- Taiwanese Premier Su Tseng-chang stated Taiwan will block some Russian banks from the SWIFT international payments system in conjunction with Western countries. Taiwan banned certain exports to Russia including weapons, dual-use goods, and other technologies “unless there are legitimate reasons.”[64]
- France created a task force on March 1 to identify wealthy Russians tied to Russian President Putin with assets in France and to seize those assets. French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said the task force is a part of a broader strategy to “cause the collapse of the Russian economy.”[65] French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire stated on March 1 that “[France] is waging an all-out economic and financial war on Russia” that will cause the Russian economy to collapse before clarifying that France was not “at war” and did not wish to harm the Russian people.[66]
- US payment card firms Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. blocked multiple Russian financial institutions from their networks on March 1. Visa announced it was taking “prompt action to ensure compliance” with US sanctions.[67] Cards of banks disconnected from the Visa and Mastercard systems will not work abroad or with online foreign stores.[68]
- More private international companies suspended operations and services in Russia. Apple suspended all product sales and support for Apple Pay.[69] The world’s two largest container shipping companies, Maersk and Mediterranean Shipping Company, suspended all non-humanitarian operations.[70] UPS, Delta, and American Airlines halted all overflights.[71] Disney and Sony paused all film showings, Warner Brothers suspended the release of the upcoming Batman film, and the Russian government could soon ban Netflix after the streaming company refused to comply with new rules mandating the showing of 20 state-backed government channels.[72]
- UK Foreign Minister Liz Truss announced new sanctions targeting four senior Belarusian defense officials and two Belarusian military entities as Western intelligence officials warned of possible Belarusian participation in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[73]
- The International Energy Agency (IEA) decided to release 60 million barrels of oil from its emergency reserves, likely to counter the effect of Western sanctions on global oil prices. The US energy secretary branded the move as an effort to reduce dependence on Russian oil following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[74]
NATO and European Union (EU) countries continued providing Ukraine with military and financial assistance but reneged on supplying promised fighter jets on March 1.[75]
- NATO countries Poland, Bulgaria, and Slovakia reversed their previous decisions to supply Ukraine with Russian-made fighter jets on March 1, citing that they provided other forms of humanitarian and financial aid, lack the resources, or are wary of military interference in Ukraine due to a possible “nuclear confrontation with Moscow.”[76] However, those states and other NATO and EU countries will continue to provide defense aid to Ukraine, including air-defense missiles, anti-tank weapons, ammunition, field rations, small arms, and other materials.[77]
- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced on March 1 that Australia and NATO will provide $50 million-worth of lethal and nonlethal military assistance to Ukraine.[78] Australia will primarily provide anti-tank weapons, ammunition, and humanitarian aid.
- US senators called for additional monetary and logistical assistance to Ukraine on February 28.[79]
NATO and European Union (EU) countries and private companies sanctioned and limited Russian state-affiliated media to combat Russian disinformation and propaganda.[80]
- EU industry chief Thierry Breton said on March 1 that the European Commission is seeking EU approval of sanctions to prohibit EU operators from broadcasting any Russian state-affiliated media.[81]
- NATO and EU countries pressured tech giants Facebook, Google, and Twitter to do more to combat Russian disinformation on February 28, including suspending Russia state-affiliated accounts, labeling Russian state-affiliated tweets, and increasing fact-checking.[82]
- Google, Facebook, and TikTok banned Russian state-affiliated media in Europe to limit the Kremlin’s reach on March 1, triggering Russian accusations of Western censorship.[83] Twitter stated it will label Russian state-affiliated media tweets and will disrupt Russian propaganda algorithms to reduce visibility on the platform.[84] Google blocked the Russian state-affiliated RT and Sputnik YouTube channels in Europe.[85]
- DirectTV prohibited the broadcast of RT America on March 1.[86]
- Lithuania asked Apple and Android to remove the Uber-like Russian Yandex taxi service application from their platforms within the country on February 28.[87]
- The hacking group Anonymous hacked more than 300 Russian and Belarusian government websites to display anti-war and anti-Putin messaging on February 28.[88]
European and Ukrainian leaders advanced efforts to admit Ukraine to the EU on March 1.
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainians are “fighting to be equal members of Europe” and called for Europe to “show it is with Ukraine” by admitting Ukraine as an EU member while addressing the European Parliament on March 1.[89]
- The European Parliament officially accepted Ukraine’s request for candidate status on March 1.[90]
- Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said Ukraine’s EU application “must be considered differently” since the EU is not a military bloc, indicating Russia’s potential openness to Ukrainian membership in the EU.[91]
Other International Organization Activity
N/A
Humanitarian Efforts
International organizations and several countries announced additional humanitarian aid to Ukraine on March 1 and prepared for millions of Ukrainian refugees to enter the EU.
- The European Commission Vice President said the EU is planning to announce blanket protection status for all those fleeing Ukraine.[92] This measure will give refugees automatic access to the EU’s health, education, and housing facilities.
- UN humanitarian agencies launched appeals for $1.7 billion in emergency aid to address the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine on March 1.[93] The UN estimates that 12 million people inside Ukraine and over 4 million Ukrainian refugees will need assistance in the coming months.
- The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on March 1 that over 660,000 people have fled Ukraine since February 24 and UNHCR Chief Filippo Grandi warned that Europe could be facing its worst refugee crisis in the last century.[94]
- The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) appealed for $163 million for their 2022 operations in Ukraine and neighboring countries on March 1.[95] The IFRC also appealed for $109 million from the national level Red Cross societies to assist an initial two million people in Ukraine.
- UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on March 1 that the UK would relax visa rules for Ukrainians moving to the UK to live with relatives.[96] Johnson stated that he expects more than 200,000 Ukrainians to move in with relatives in the UK.
- France announced on March 1 it will donate an additional $111 million in financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.[97] France also delivered 33 tons of emergency aid to Ukraine via Poland on February 28. [98]
- Taiwan sent 27 tons of medical supplies to Ukraine on February 28.[99]
Individual Western Allies’ Activity
N/A
Other International Activity
China, Turkey, Israel, and India are attempting to maintain relations with both Russia and Ukraine by taking a neutral position and encouraging negotiations. Unlike China, Israel, and India, however, Turkey has openly criticized the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
- China has avoided condemning Russia’s military actions in Ukraine and maintains that Russia has legitimate security concerns. China has called for negotiations and restraint on both sides. Chinese officials abstained from voting on a UN Security Council resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 25.[100] Chinese President Xi Jinping told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a February 25 phone call that China supports negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.[101] The Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said that China would play a “constructive role” in easing Ukraine’s humanitarian situation. [102]
- Turkey has voiced support for Ukraine but has also worked with Russian officials to negotiate a ceasefire. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for NATO and EU enlargement to include Ukraine on March 1, rebuking Russian demands that NATO refuse entry to Ukraine.[103] Erdogan and Defense Minister Hulusi Akar continued attempting to negotiate a ceasefire in phone conversations with Ukraine on February 26 and Russia and Belarus on February 28.[104]
- Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett offered to mediate a Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire on February 27 during a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.[105] Israel did not co-sponsor a UN Security Council resolution on February 25 condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[106] Israel has accepted Ukrainian Jewish refugees and sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine during the crisis but refused to offer military aid.[107]
- India has avoided taking a public stance on the invasion. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged an end to all violence during a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24.[108] India abstained from the February 25 UN Security Council resolution condemning the Russian invasion.[109] The Indian Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian and Ukrainian ambassadors to India to call for “urgent safe passage for Indian nationals” in Ukraine after Russian shelling killed an Indian national in Kharkiv on March 1.[110]
[4] https://iz dot ru/1298762/2022-03-01/zakharova-nazvala-litcemerami-boikotirovavshikh-vystuplenie-lavrova-diplomatov; https://tass dot ru/politika/13917903
[5] https://iz dot ru/1298717/2022-03-01/shoigu-anonsiroval-provedenie-pervogo-mezhdunarodnogo-antifashistskogo-kongressa; https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/13912229
[7] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/03/01/kadyrov-rasskazal-o-gibeli-dvuh-chechenskih-voennyh-v-ukraine
[9] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/03/01/minoborony-rf-anonsirovalo-udary-po-ob-ektam-sbu-v-kieve-dlya-presecheniya-informatsionnyh-atak-i-prizvalo-zhivuschih-ryadom-lyudey-pokinut-doma
[14] https://tass dot ru/armiya-i-opk/13912143; https://rg dot ru/2022/03/01/shojgu-glavnaia-zadacha-operacii-na-ukraine-zashchita-rf-ot-ugrozy-so-storony-zapada.html
[26] https://iz dot ru/1298613/2022-03-01/gazprom-zaiavil-o-shtatnykh-postavkakh-gaza-cherez-territoriiu-ukrainy
[29] https://tvrain dot ru/news/fsb_prigrozila_delami_o_shpionazhe_za_peredachu_informatsii_razvedke_ukrainy-548835/?from=rss
[32] https://reform dot by/300182-belarusskie-advokaty-i-juristy-vystupajut-za-nemedlennoe-prekrashhenie-vojny-v-ukraine
[35] https://iz dot ru/1298117/2022-02-28/v-kremle-nazvali-nepriemlemymi-zaiavlen...
[37] https://iz dot ru/1298117/2022-02-28/v-kremle-nazvali-nepriemlemymi-zaiavleniia-o-vozmozhnykh-konfliktakh-nato-i-rf
[47] https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/soveshchanie-s-chlenami-soveta-bezopasnosti-i-rukovodstvom-soveta-ministrov
[51] https://hromadske dot ua/posts/vorog-planuye-poshiriti-fejki-pro-nibito-kapitulyaciyu-ukrayini-z-pidroblenimi-dokumentami-ta-video-reznikov
https://meduza dot io/news/2022/03/01/mastercard-otklyuchila-neskolko-rossiyskih-bankov-ot-svoey-platezhnoy-sistemy-iz-za-sanktsiy; https://reform dot by/300234-visa-pristupila-k-vypolneniju-sankcij
[68] https://meduza dot io/news/2022/03/01/mastercard-otklyuchila-neskolko-rossiyskih-bankov-ot-svoey-platezhnoy-sistemy-iz-za-sanktsiy
[91] https://iz dot ru/1298699/2022-03-01/peskov-prokommentiroval-zaiavku-ukrainy-o-vstuplenii-v-es.
2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 1
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 1
Frederick W. Kagan, George Barros, and Kateryna Stepanenko
March 1, 3:00 pm EST
Russian forces are completing the reinforcement and resupply of their troops north and west of Kyiv and launching an envelopment of the capital likely aimed at encircling and ultimately capturing it. This effort will likely accelerate in the next 24-48 hours. Russian operations against Kyiv are Moscow’s main effort. Russian troops are also undertaking three supporting efforts, one to seize Kharkiv, one to take Mariupol and secure the “land bridge” connecting Rostov-on-Don to Crimea, and one to secure Kherson and set conditions for a drive west toward Mykolayiv and Odesa. The three supporting operations are active, with the operation against Mariupol making the most progress in the last 24 hours.
The Russian attack on Kyiv likely consists of a main effort aimed at enveloping and ultimately encircling the city from the west and a supporting effort along the axes from Chernihiv and Sumy to encircle Kyiv from the east. The long Russian column of combat and logistics vehicles north of Kyiv is likely setting conditions for the envelopment to the west, although it could also support attacks directly into the city from the positions Russian forces maintain in Kyiv’s northwestern outskirts. Russian forces are more likely to pursue the envelopment/encirclement than a direct assault into the city.
The Russian military has continued using area-attack weapons in the city of Kharkiv, dramatically increasing the damage to civilian infrastructure and civilian casualties. Russian forces have not reportedly attempted large-scale ground operations against Kharkiv in the last 24 hours but are likely instead using air, missile, and artillery bombardment to set conditions for a renewed ground attack sometime in the next 24-48 hours. Russian ground forces appear likely to conduct another frontal assault on Kharkiv from the northeast rather than attempt to envelop or encircle the city.
Russian forces in the south appear to be holding their positions south of Zaprozhya, fighting to reduce Ukrainian positions in Kherson and seize that city, and encircling Mariupol to set conditions to seize it. Russian operations in the south do not appear to pose an imminent danger to Odesa within the next 24 hours. A Russian drive north through or near Zaprozhya to cut off Ukrainian forces fighting along the line of contact also appears very unlikely in the next 24-72 hours.
Russian troops claim to have encircled Mariupol and have reportedly entered the city of Kherson in the south.
Russian forces are receiving needed supplies and reinforcements that may facilitate much more rapid and effective operations in the coming 24-72 hours. The Russian effort around Kyiv remains poorly organized, however, with elements of many different battalions combined into what seem to be ad hoc groupings rather than operating under standing regiment or brigade headquarters. The initial errors in the Russian force composition and organization in Belarus and western Russia that ISW has previously reported on, which contributed to Russian logistical and operational failures around Kyiv, will be difficult to remedy quickly and will likely continue to cause friction and reduce the effectiveness of Russian operations even as supply issues are addressed and reinforcements come into the fight.[1] It remains too early to evaluate the likely effective combat power the added Russian troops will bring.
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces are setting conditions to envelop Kyiv from the west and attempting to open up a new axis of attack from the east that would let them encircle the capital. It is unclear if Russia has sufficient combat power to complete such an encirclement and hold it against Ukrainian counter-attacks.
- Russian forces will likely launch a renewed ground offensive to seize Kharkiv following the air/artillery/missile attack it has been conducting in the past 24 hours.
- Russian and Russian proxy forces will likely solidify the “land bridge” linking Rostov-on-Don with Crimea, allowing Russian forces to move more rapidly from Rostov to reinforce efforts further west.
- Russia’s successful seizure of Kherson city may allow Russian forces to resume their interrupted drive toward Mykolayiv and Odesa.
- Belarusian forces have likely entered the war on Russia’s side despite denials by the Belarusian president.
Russian forces are engaged in four primary efforts at this time:
- Main effort—Kyiv;
- Supporting effort #1—Kharkiv;
- Supporting effort #2—Mariupol; and
- Supporting effort #3—Kherson and west.
Main Effort—Kyiv Axis: Russian forces continue to move into position and to resupply in preparation for a likely attempt to envelop Kyiv from the west.[2] Russian operations on this axis consist of a main effort aimed at enveloping and ultimately encircling the city from the west and supporting efforts along the Chernihiv and Sumy axes to encircle it from the northeast and east.
Subordinate main effort west of Kyiv along the west bank of the Dnipro
- The long column approaching Kyiv from the northwest (on the west bank of the Dnipro) reported by Maxar Technologies consists of numerous trucks and an indeterminate number of combat vehicles. Elements of the 104th Regiment of the 76th Airborne Division based around Pskov are likely accompanying the convoy along with artillery and engineering assets including bridging equipment. Additional combat elements are in defensive positions oriented toward Antonov Airfield in Holstomel according to imagery provided by Maxar Technologies, likely screening the convoy against possible Ukrainian attacks from near the airfield, control of which is contested. ISW is unable to assess the overall combat power in this convoy at publication time. Reports that the convoy’s length grew from 17 to 40 miles are likely inaccurate. A spokesperson from Maxar Technologies has clarified to ISW that Maxar obtained new imagery showing more of the convoy, not the convoy getting longer.
- Russian forces are present in the northwest outskirts of Kyiv. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense reported Russian forces looting in areas of Kyiv’s western suburbs in Bucha, Hostolmel, and Novy Basaniv on March 1.[3] Ukraine’s General Staff reports that Russian forces at unspecified locations near Kyiv have taken up and are fortifying defensive positions, activity consistent with preparations for an encirclement and subsequent siege of the capital.[4] A Maxar spokesperson noted to ISW that imagery shows a significant concentration of Russian forces at Zdvyzhivka, a village on the road between Antonov Airfield and the ring road leading south, along which the long convoy appeared to be driving. These forces could be positioned to attack or secure the airfield, to screen the convoy as it moves past, or both.
- Social media users report Russian tanks present in Makariv, a town on that ring road approximately 30 miles west of the center of Kyiv.[5] The presence of Russian mechanized forces at Makariv suggests that the Russians intend to conduct a relatively deep envelopment of Kyiv, possibly following roads south as far as Fastiv before turning east, although they could choose avenues of approach to the capital further east. A reported Russian airstrike in Fastiv District could support this assessment, although the airstrike was more likely aimed at an ammunition depot in that district.[6] An envelopment or encirclement so far from central Kyiv would require considerable Russian combat power to complete and to maintain against Ukrainian counterattacks. ISW is unable to assess whether Russia has concentrated enough combat power north of Kyiv to complete such an operation.
- Russian efforts within and in the immediate vicinity of Kyiv have reportedly relied on saboteurs and reconnaissance elements, often out of uniform or wearing Ukrainian uniforms, rather than on attacks by regular combat forces.[7]
Subordinate Supporting Effort #1—Chernihiv Axis
- Russian forces have conducted rocket and missile attacks in the Chernihiv region and appear to be concentrating forces in Belarus for a renewed attack on the city. Chernihiv is an important road junction on the Desna River, and Russian forces may be focusing on capturing rather than bypassing it to open up the arterial highway leading southwest toward Kyiv on the east bank of the Desna. They did not make much progress in the last 24 hours on this axis but appear to be concentrating reinforcements for renewed efforts in the next 24-48 hours.
- A column of Russian combat vehicles reportedly moved east from the Chernihiv group of forces toward Bobrovytsya (roughly 65 kilometers northeast of Kyiv) on March 1.[8] This movement is likely an effort to link up with Russian forces from the Sumy axis whose advance had stalled around Nizhyn (roughly 115 kilometers east of Kyiv) as of March 1.
- Russian Iskander missiles reportedly hit the Ukrainian Operational Command North Headquarters and destroyed Ukrainian forces and fuel storage in the Chernihiv Oblast on February 28.[9] The Ukrainian General Staff also reported that Russian troops fired rockets at Chernihiv City on March 1 after failing to take it.[10]
- Ukrainian Territorial Defense authorities claimed on March 1 that Belarusian combat troops have entered Chernihiv Oblast in support of the Russian offensive.[11]
- Russian forces are continuing to concentrate in Belarus likely to support renewed operations along both the Chernihiv and western Kyiv axes. Satellite imagery showed at least 63 Russian helicopters at the V. D. Bolshoy Bokov Airfield near Mazyr in Gomel Oblast, Belarus, on February 28.[12] The helicopters appeared to be a mix of attack and transport craft that might be used either to conduct air assault operations or to provide rapid resupply of forward units, as well as direct air attack against Ukrainian positions.[13] Numerous social media reports indicate Russian fixed- and rotary-wing air operations at many locations throughout Belarus, including near Minsk, Baranovichi, Gomel, and Grodno.[14]
Subordinate Supporting Effort #2—Sumy Axis (approximately 115 kilometers from Kyiv)
- Russian forces on the Sumy axis appear to have concentrated on reducing pockets of Ukrainian resistance in the last 24 hours. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops have encircled Sumy, Lebedyn, and Okhtyrka and have been shelling Okhtyrka heavily.[15] Russian forces do not appear to have made much forward progress on this axis in the last 24 hours.
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv: Russian forces remain unable to seize the city and have apparently concentrated on an air, missile, and artillery bombardment likely intended in part to enable a subsequent renewed ground offensive. Russian forces have used bombers, tube artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS), and reportedly thermobaric weapons against Kharkiv.[16] Russian ground forces remain positioned near the city and may commence renewed offensive operations within the next 24-72 hours. The Russian air, artillery, and missile barrage may also be intended to generate panic and reduce the morale of Ukrainian defenders in Kharkiv and elsewhere. It is unlikely to achieve that effect. It is too early to evaluate the likelihood that a renewed Russian ground offensive will succeed in taking the city.
Supporting Effort #2—Mariupol: Russian forces claim to have completed the encirclement of Mariupol by land and sea on March 1.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that elements of Russia’s 8th Combined Arms Army and proxy forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic tried and failed to take Mariupol on March 1.[18] Multiple sources report heavy fighting around the city, but ISW has been unable to verify Russian claims of having encircled it nor identify the forward trace of Russian and proxy positions near it.[19] ISW assesses with low confidence that Russian forces have completed the encirclement of Mariupol and will seek to compel the Ukrainian defenders to surrender or attack to seize it within the coming 24 hours.
Supporting Effort #3—Kherson and West: Russian forces have likely secured control of Kherson city and are consolidating there before continuing their advance to the west. Multiple sources reported elements likely of the 7th Airborne Division and SPETSNAZ units throughout Kherson City on March 1, and Ukrainian forces will likely lose control of the city within the next 24-48 hours.[20]
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces maneuvering to the west and southwest of Kyiv to envelop and then encircle it
- Russian forces securing the crossings over the Desna near Chernihiv and/or linking up with forces advancing from the Sumy axis to open a new front against Kyiv from the east
- Belarusian ground forces beginning active participation in the Russian offensive campaign
- Russian ground forces launching an offensive against Kharkiv following the air/missile/artillery attacks
- Russian forces around Kherson resuming their advance toward Mykolayiv and Odesa
- Russian and proxy forces commencing an offensive to take Mariupol
3. Opinion | Ukraine’s stirring self-defense is no accident
An OPED from a quiet professional. He tells an important story about Ukraine and resistance. MG Repass is too humble to tell the whole story. When he was the commanding general of Special Operations Command Europe he directed his staff to develop what evolved into the resistance operating concept which was (and is) a concept to help Eastern European, Balkan and Baltic countries to prepare to resist Russian aggression. But what is really important about this OpED is how he writes to give all the credit to Ukraine, the government, the military, and the people. That is the way it is done as a quiet professional.
He also conducted an excellent interview on CNN today. When the video is published I will provide the link. It is very educational and provides substantive analysis and insights you do not get from the mainstream military analysts and commentators.
Conclusion:
Ukraine is in an existential fight and could very well send a defeated Russia back inside its borders, speeding Moscow’s decline into irrelevance. Ukraine is the vanguard of the defense of Western liberal order. We — the U.S. government and people — need to do our part to help the Ukrainians succeed — and soon.
Opinion | Ukraine’s stirring self-defense is no accident
Army Maj. Gen. Mike Repass retired in 2013 after serving 33 years. He commanded the U.S. Special Operations Command Europe until 2013 and has been directly involved with Ukraine security matters since 2016.
Russia has committed a strategic blunder and is getting punished by the Ukrainian people and their armed forces for its aggression. The Ukrainian response is not a coincidence. Rather, it is the result of widespread preparations undertaken since 2014.
Over the past seven years, the Ukrainian leadership has been very clear-eyed about reforming its government to prepare for this moment. The Ukrainians have reshaped their national defense structures to cooperate with NATO militaries more easily and have made important leadership, doctrinal and tactical changes. They have also built Territorial Defense Forces and instituted programs to involve others in the common defense.
The Ukrainian armed forces are well-led by combat-proven leaders from the most senior level down to the tactical units, all of which have shared the hardships of fighting the Russians and separatists in the Donbas region. The tactical units have been well-prepared by Western trainers. Their military training systems have been reformed with the assistance of NATO countries; their forces are in the final stages of moving away from Soviet-style, field doctrine.
What has surprised many Western observers is the massive efforts by everyday Ukrainians to defend the nation. Office workers, beauty queens, the elderly and veterans have all turned out to take up arms against the Russian invaders.
This volunteer corps didn’t just happen by accident, either. Ukrainians share a patriotic zeal to defend their homes and way of life from Russian ruination. The result is a national response that has, at least so far, been admirably resilient. That’s partly because Kyiv saw this coming and prepared its people. Ukraine passed a law in July of 2021 authorizing the creation of the Territorial Defense Forces and laying out a structure for integrating local militias in each of the 25 oblasts, or regions, and in the largest cities. That law also made provisions for the formation of a resistance force in the event of Russian occupation.
The Territorial Defense Forces were largely in place when Russia invaded this past week. When more than 130,000 citizens volunteered to take up arms, there was a designed structure in place for them to step into.
Against this force, Russia has fielded a technologically superior army of more than 160,000 troops operating in approximately 100 tactical groups, plus its long-range missile strike forces and air force. The maritime forces from the Black Sea fleet and the Caspian flotilla have sealed off the Black Sea coastline. Moscow has added troops from its southern, northwestern and far eastern military districts to create two echelons of assault forces. We have seen the first echelon in the first four days of fighting, followed by the operational pause to bring in the second echelon forces to continue the assaults.
What comes next? Little of consequence will come out of this first set of negotiations. Putin will not bargain in good faith and will use the time to resupply and reposition his forces for the next, possibly final, offensive. We should expect Putin to escalate and intensify operations to close this campaign on his terms. Yes, there will be widespread destruction in the cities. This will horrify Western observers, as it is intended to do. Putin wants to put his boot on Ukraine’s neck, then use the urgency of the moment to restructure the global security arrangements to his liking.
Confounding his strategy are the resilient Ukrainians, who are outsmarting him tactically and making deep strikes on Putin’s pride and power via social media. The object of their defense is to make Ukraine too painful to consume or control, which has worked well so far.
Time and mass, however, are on the Russians’ side. The West must act immediately to rearm the Ukrainian defenders. President Biden’s $600 million in military aid was enough to get things moving. But these transfers take time, which Ukraine does not have. Congress is contemplating a $6.4 billion Ukraine supplemental package that will be rolled into a defense measure set for a Senate vote later this month. Ukraine can’t wait that long, and the Russians certainly won’t wait.
Ukraine is in an existential fight and could very well send a defeated Russia back inside its borders, speeding Moscow’s decline into irrelevance. Ukraine is the vanguard of the defense of Western liberal order. We — the U.S. government and people — need to do our part to help the Ukrainians succeed — and soon.
4. Remarks of President Joe Biden – State of the Union Address As Prepared for Delivery
Remarks of President Joe Biden – State of the Union Address As Prepared for Delivery
MARCH 01, 2022
•
United States Capitol
Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President, our First Lady and Second Gentleman. Members of Congress and the Cabinet. Justices of the Supreme Court. My fellow Americans.
Last year COVID-19 kept us apart. This year we are finally together again.
Tonight, we meet as Democrats Republicans and Independents. But most importantly as Americans.
With a duty to one another to the American people to the Constitution.
And with an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny.
Six days ago, Russia’s Vladimir Putin sought to shake the foundations of the free world thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways. But he badly miscalculated.
He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead he met a wall of strength he never imagined.
He met the Ukrainian people.
From President Zelenskyy to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, inspires the world.
Groups of citizens blocking tanks with their bodies. Everyone from students to retirees teachers turned soldiers defending their homeland.
In this struggle as President Zelenskyy said in his speech to the European Parliament “Light will win over darkness.” The Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States is here tonight.
Let each of us here tonight in this Chamber send an unmistakable signal to Ukraine and to the world.
Please rise if you are able and show that, Yes, we the United States of America stand with the Ukrainian people.
Throughout our history we’ve learned this lesson when dictators do not pay a price for their aggression they cause more chaos.
They keep moving.
And the costs and the threats to America and the world keep rising.
That’s why the NATO Alliance was created to secure peace and stability in Europe after World War 2.
The United States is a member along with 29 other nations.
It matters. American diplomacy matters. American resolve matters.
Putin’s latest attack on Ukraine was premeditated and unprovoked.
He rejected repeated efforts at diplomacy.
He thought the West and NATO wouldn’t respond. And he thought he could divide us at home. Putin was wrong. We were ready. Here is what we did.
We prepared extensively and carefully.
We spent months building a coalition of other freedom-loving nations from Europe and the Americas to Asia and Africa to confront Putin.
I spent countless hours unifying our European allies. We shared with the world in advance what we knew Putin was planning and precisely how he would try to falsely justify his aggression.
We countered Russia’s lies with truth.
And now that he has acted the free world is holding him accountable.
Along with twenty-seven members of the European Union including France, Germany, Italy, as well as countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and many others, even Switzerland.
We are inflicting pain on Russia and supporting the people of Ukraine. Putin is now isolated from the world more than ever.
Together with our allies –we are right now enforcing powerful economic sanctions.
We are cutting off Russia’s largest banks from the international financial system.
Preventing Russia’s central bank from defending the Russian Ruble making Putin’s $630 Billion “war fund” worthless.
We are choking off Russia’s access to technology that will sap its economic strength and weaken its military for years to come.
Tonight I say to the Russian oligarchs and corrupt leaders who have bilked billions of dollars off this violent regime no more.
The U.S. Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of Russian oligarchs.
We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts your luxury apartments your private jets. We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.
And tonight I am announcing that we will join our allies in closing off American air space to all Russian flights – further isolating Russia – and adding an additional squeeze –on their economy. The Ruble has lost 30% of its value.
The Russian stock market has lost 40% of its value and trading remains suspended. Russia’s economy is reeling and Putin alone is to blame.
Together with our allies we are providing support to the Ukrainians in their fight for freedom. Military assistance. Economic assistance. Humanitarian assistance.
We are giving more than $1 Billion in direct assistance to Ukraine.
And we will continue to aid the Ukrainian people as they defend their country and to help ease their suffering.
Let me be clear, our forces are not engaged and will not engage in conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine.
Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine, but to defend our NATO Allies – in the event that Putin decides to keep moving west.
For that purpose we’ve mobilized American ground forces, air squadrons, and ship deployments to protect NATO countries including Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
As I have made crystal clear the United States and our Allies will defend every inch of territory of NATO countries with the full force of our collective power.
And we remain clear-eyed. The Ukrainians are fighting back with pure courage. But the next few days weeks, months, will be hard on them.
Putin has unleashed violence and chaos. But while he may make gains on the battlefield – he will pay a continuing high price over the long run.
And a proud Ukrainian people, who have known 30 years of independence, have repeatedly shown that they will not tolerate anyone who tries to take their country backwards.
To all Americans, I will be honest with you, as I’ve always promised. A Russian dictator, invading a foreign country, has costs around the world.
And I’m taking robust action to make sure the pain of our sanctions is targeted at Russia’s economy. And I will use every tool at our disposal to protect American businesses and consumers.
Tonight, I can announce that the United States has worked with 30 other countries to release 60 Million barrels of oil from reserves around the world.
America will lead that effort, releasing 30 Million barrels from our own Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And we stand ready to do more if necessary, unified with our allies.
These steps will help blunt gas prices here at home. And I know the news about what’s happening can seem alarming.
But I want you to know that we are going to be okay.
When the history of this era is written Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.
While it shouldn’t have taken something so terrible for people around the world to see what’s at stake now everyone sees it clearly.
We see the unity among leaders of nations and a more unified Europe a more unified West. And we see unity among the people who are gathering in cities in large crowds around the world even in Russia to demonstrate their support for Ukraine.
In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.
This is a real test. It’s going to take time. So let us continue to draw inspiration from the iron will of the Ukrainian people.
To our fellow Ukrainian Americans who forge a deep bond that connects our two nations we stand with you.
Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he will never gain the hearts and souls of the Ukrainian people.
He will never extinguish their love of freedom. He will never weaken the resolve of the free world.
We meet tonight in an America that has lived through two of the hardest years this nation has ever faced.
The pandemic has been punishing.
And so many families are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to keep up with the rising cost of food, gas, housing, and so much more.
I understand.
I remember when my Dad had to leave our home in Scranton, Pennsylvania to find work. I grew up in a family where if the price of food went up, you felt it.
That’s why one of the first things I did as President was fight to pass the American Rescue Plan.
Because people were hurting. We needed to act, and we did.
Few pieces of legislation have done more in a critical moment in our history to lift us out of crisis.
It fueled our efforts to vaccinate the nation and combat COVID-19. It delivered immediate economic relief for tens of millions of Americans.
Helped put food on their table, keep a roof over their heads, and cut the cost of health insurance.
And as my Dad used to say, it gave people a little breathing room.
And unlike the $2 Trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefitted the top 1% of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people—and left no one behind.
And it worked. It created jobs. Lots of jobs.
In fact—our economy created over 6.5 Million new jobs just last year, more jobs created in one year
than ever before in the history of America.
Our economy grew at a rate of 5.7% last year, the strongest growth in nearly 40 years, the first step in bringing fundamental change to an economy that hasn’t worked for the working people of this nation for too long.
For the past 40 years we were told that if we gave tax breaks to those at the very top, the benefits would trickle down to everyone else.
But that trickle-down theory led to weaker economic growth, lower wages, bigger deficits, and the widest gap between those at the top and everyone else in nearly a century.
Vice President Harris and I ran for office with a new economic vision for America.
Invest in America. Educate Americans. Grow the workforce. Build the economy from the bottom up
and the middle out, not from the top down.
Because we know that when the middle class grows, the poor have a ladder up and the wealthy do very well.
America used to have the best roads, bridges, and airports on Earth.
Now our infrastructure is ranked 13th in the world.
We won’t be able to compete for the jobs of the 21st Century if we don’t fix that.
That’s why it was so important to pass the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—the most sweeping investment to rebuild America in history.
This was a bipartisan effort, and I want to thank the members of both parties who worked to make it happen.
We’re done talking about infrastructure weeks.
We’re going to have an infrastructure decade.
It is going to transform America and put us on a path to win the economic competition of the 21st Century that we face with the rest of the world—particularly with China.
As I’ve told Xi Jinping, it is never a good bet to bet against the American people.
We’ll create good jobs for millions of Americans, modernizing roads, airports, ports, and waterways all across America.
And we’ll do it all to withstand the devastating effects of the climate crisis and promote environmental justice.
We’ll build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, begin to replace poisonous lead pipes—so every child—and every American—has clean water to drink at home and at school, provide affordable high-speed internet for every American—urban, suburban, rural, and tribal communities.
4,000 projects have already been announced.
And tonight, I’m announcing that this year we will start fixing over 65,000 miles of highway and 1,500 bridges in disrepair.
When we use taxpayer dollars to rebuild America – we are going to Buy American: buy American products to support American jobs.
The federal government spends about $600 Billion a year to keep the country safe and secure.
There’s been a law on the books for almost a century
to make sure taxpayers’ dollars support American jobs and businesses.
Every Administration says they’ll do it, but we are actually doing it.
We will buy American to make sure everything from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the steel on highway guardrails are made in America.
But to compete for the best jobs of the future, we also need to level the playing field with China and other competitors.
That’s why it is so important to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act sitting in Congress that will make record investments in emerging technologies and American manufacturing.
Let me give you one example of why it’s so important to pass it.
If you travel 20 miles east of Columbus, Ohio, you’ll find 1,000 empty acres of land.
It won’t look like much, but if you stop and look closely, you’ll see a “Field of dreams,” the ground on which America’s future will be built.
This is where Intel, the American company that helped build Silicon Valley, is going to build its $20 billion semiconductor “mega site”.
Up to eight state-of-the-art factories in one place. 10,000 new good-paying jobs.
Some of the most sophisticated manufacturing in the world to make computer chips the size of a fingertip that power the world and our everyday lives.
Smartphones. The Internet. Technology we have yet to invent.
But that’s just the beginning.
Intel’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who is here tonight, told me they are ready to increase their investment from
$20 billion to $100 billion.
That would be one of the biggest investments in manufacturing in American history.
And all they’re waiting for is for you to pass this bill.
So let’s not wait any longer. Send it to my desk. I’ll sign it.
And we will really take off.
And Intel is not alone.
There’s something happening in America.
Just look around and you’ll see an amazing story.
The rebirth of the pride that comes from stamping products “Made In America.” The revitalization of American manufacturing.
Companies are choosing to build new factories here, when just a few years ago, they would have built them overseas.
That’s what is happening. Ford is investing $11 billion to build electric vehicles, creating 11,000 jobs across the country.
GM is making the largest investment in its history—$7 billion to build electric vehicles, creating 4,000 jobs in Michigan.
All told, we created 369,000 new manufacturing jobs in America just last year.
Powered by people I’ve met like JoJo Burgess, from generations of union steelworkers from Pittsburgh, who’s here with us tonight.
As Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown says, “It’s time to bury the label “Rust Belt.”
It’s time.
But with all the bright spots in our economy, record job growth and higher wages, too many families are struggling to keep up with the bills.
Inflation is robbing them of the gains they might otherwise feel.
I get it. That’s why my top priority is getting prices under control.
Look, our economy roared back faster than most predicted, but the pandemic meant that businesses had a hard time hiring enough workers to keep up production in their factories.
The pandemic also disrupted global supply chains.
When factories close, it takes longer to make goods and get them from the warehouse to the store, and prices go up.
Look at cars.
Last year, there weren’t enough semiconductors to make all the cars that people wanted to buy.
And guess what, prices of automobiles went up.
So—we have a choice.
One way to fight inflation is to drive down wages and make Americans poorer.
I have a better plan to fight inflation.
Lower your costs, not your wages.
Make more cars and semiconductors in America.
More infrastructure and innovation in America.
More goods moving faster and cheaper in America.
More jobs where you can earn a good living in America.
And instead of relying on foreign supply chains, let’s make it in America.
Economists call it “increasing the productive capacity of our economy.”
I call it building a better America.
My plan to fight inflation will lower your costs and lower the deficit.
17 Nobel laureates in economics say my plan will ease long-term inflationary pressures. Top business leaders and most Americans support my plan. And here’s the plan:
First – cut the cost of prescription drugs. Just look at insulin. One in ten Americans has diabetes. In Virginia, I met a 13-year-old boy named Joshua Davis.
He and his Dad both have Type 1 diabetes, which means they need insulin every day. Insulin costs about $10 a vial to make.
But drug companies charge families like Joshua and his Dad up to 30 times more. I spoke with Joshua’s mom.
Imagine what it’s like to look at your child who needs insulin and have no idea how you’re going to pay for it.
What it does to your dignity, your ability to look your child in the eye, to be the parent you expect to be.
Joshua is here with us tonight. Yesterday was his birthday. Happy birthday, buddy.
For Joshua, and for the 200,000 other young people with Type 1 diabetes, let’s cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month so everyone can afford it.
Drug companies will still do very well. And while we’re at it let Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, like the VA already does.
Look, the American Rescue Plan is helping millions of families on Affordable Care Act plans save $2,400 a year on their health care premiums. Let’s close the coverage gap and make those savings permanent.
Second – cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combatting climate change.
Let’s provide investments and tax credits to weatherize your homes and businesses to be energy efficient and you get a tax credit; double America’s clean energy production in solar, wind, and so much more; lower the price of electric vehicles, saving you another $80 a month because you’ll never have to pay at the gas pump again.
Third – cut the cost of child care. Many families pay up to $14,000 a year for child care per child.
Middle-class and working families shouldn’t have to pay more than 7% of their income for care of young children.
My plan will cut the cost in half for most families and help parents, including millions of women, who left the workforce during the pandemic because they couldn’t afford child care, to be able to get back to work.
My plan doesn’t stop there. It also includes home and long-term care. More affordable housing. And Pre-K for every 3- and 4-year-old.
All of these will lower costs.
And under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in new taxes. Nobody.
The one thing all Americans agree on is that the tax system is not fair. We have to fix it.
I’m not looking to punish anyone. But let’s make sure corporations and the wealthiest Americans start paying their fair share.
Just last year, 55 Fortune 500 corporations earned $40 billion in profits and paid zero dollars in federal income tax.
That’s simply not fair. That’s why I’ve proposed a 15% minimum tax rate for corporations.
We got more than 130 countries to agree on a global minimum tax rate so companies can’t get out of paying their taxes at home by shipping jobs and factories overseas.
That’s why I’ve proposed closing loopholes so the very wealthy don’t pay a lower tax rate than a teacher or a firefighter.
So that’s my plan. It will grow the economy and lower costs for families.
So what are we waiting for? Let’s get this done. And while you’re at it, confirm my nominees to the Federal Reserve, which plays a critical role in fighting inflation.
My plan will not only lower costs to give families a fair shot, it will lower the deficit.
The previous Administration not only ballooned the deficit with tax cuts for the very wealthy and corporations, it undermined the watchdogs whose job was to keep pandemic relief funds from being wasted.
But in my administration, the watchdogs have been welcomed back.
We’re going after the criminals who stole billions in relief money meant for small businesses and millions of Americans.
And tonight, I’m announcing that the Justice Department will name a chief prosecutor for pandemic fraud.
By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office.
The only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.
Lowering your costs also means demanding more competition.
I’m a capitalist, but capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism.
It’s exploitation—and it drives up prices.
When corporations don’t have to compete, their profits go up, your prices go up, and small businesses and family farmers and ranchers go under.
We see it happening with ocean carriers moving goods in and out of America.
During the pandemic, these foreign-owned companies raised prices by as much as 1,000% and made record profits.
Tonight, I’m announcing a crackdown on these companies overcharging American businesses and consumers.
And as Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up.
That ends on my watch.
Medicare is going to set higher standards for nursing homes and make sure your loved ones get the care they deserve and expect.
We’ll also cut costs and keep the economy going strong by giving workers a fair shot, provide more training and apprenticeships, hire them based on their skills not degrees.
Let’s pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and paid leave.
Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and extend the Child Tax Credit, so no one has to raise a family in poverty.
Let’s increase Pell Grants and increase our historic support of HBCUs, and invest in what Jill—our First Lady who teaches full-time—calls America’s best-kept secret: community colleges.
And let’s pass the PRO Act when a majority of workers want to form a union—they shouldn’t be stopped.
When we invest in our workers, when we build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out together, we can do something we haven’t done in a long time: build a better America.
For more than two years, COVID-19 has impacted every decision in our lives and the life of the nation.
And I know you’re tired, frustrated, and exhausted.
But I also know this.
Because of the progress we’ve made, because of your resilience and the tools we have, tonight I can say
we are moving forward safely, back to more normal routines.
We’ve reached a new moment in the fight against COVID-19, with severe cases down to a level not seen since last July.
Just a few days ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the CDC—issued new mask guidelines.
Under these new guidelines, most Americans in most of the country can now be mask free.
And based on the projections, more of the country will reach that point across the next couple of weeks.
Thanks to the progress we have made this past year, COVID-19 need no longer control our lives.
I know some are talking about “living with COVID-19”. Tonight – I say that we will never just accept living with COVID-19.
We will continue to combat the virus as we do other diseases. And because this is a virus that mutates and spreads, we will stay on guard.
Here are four common sense steps as we move forward safely.
First, stay protected with vaccines and treatments. We know how incredibly effective vaccines are. If you’re vaccinated and boosted you have the highest degree of protection.
We will never give up on vaccinating more Americans. Now, I know parents with kids under 5 are eager to see a vaccine authorized for their children.
The scientists are working hard to get that done and we’ll be ready with plenty of vaccines when they do.
We’re also ready with anti-viral treatments. If you get COVID-19, the Pfizer pill reduces your chances of ending up in the hospital by 90%.
We’ve ordered more of these pills than anyone in the world. And Pfizer is working overtime to get us 1 Million pills this month and more than double that next month.
And we’re launching the “Test to Treat” initiative so people can get tested at a pharmacy, and if they’re positive, receive antiviral pills on the spot at no cost.
If you’re immunocompromised or have some other vulnerability, we have treatments and free high-quality masks.
We’re leaving no one behind or ignoring anyone’s needs as we move forward.
And on testing, we have made hundreds of millions of tests available for you to order for free.
Even if you already ordered free tests tonight, I am announcing that you can order more from
covidtests.gov starting next week.
Second – we must prepare for new variants. Over the past year, we’ve gotten much better at detecting new variants.
If necessary, we’ll be able to deploy new vaccines within 100 days instead of many more months or years.
And, if Congress provides the funds we need, we’ll have new stockpiles of tests, masks, and pills ready if needed.
I cannot promise a new variant won’t come. But I can promise you we’ll do everything within our power to be ready if it does.
Third – we can end the shutdown of schools and businesses. We have the tools we need.
It’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again. People working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office.
We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.
Our schools are open. Let’s keep it that way. Our kids need to be in school.
And with 75% of adult Americans fully vaccinated and hospitalizations down by 77%, most Americans can remove their masks, return to work, stay in the classroom, and move forward safely.
We achieved this because we provided free vaccines, treatments, tests, and masks.
Of course, continuing this costs money.
I will soon send Congress a request.
The vast majority of Americans have used these tools and may want to again, so I expect Congress to pass it quickly.
Fourth, we will continue vaccinating the world.
We’ve sent 475 Million vaccine doses to 112 countries, more than any other nation.
And we won’t stop.
We have lost so much to COVID-19. Time with one another. And worst of all, so much loss of life.
Let’s use this moment to reset. Let’s stop looking at COVID-19 as a partisan dividing line and see it for what it is: A God-awful disease.
Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans.
We can’t change how divided we’ve been. But we can change how we move forward—on COVID-19 and other issues we must face together.
I recently visited the New York City Police Department days after the funerals of Officer Wilbert Mora and his partner, Officer Jason Rivera.
They were responding to a 9-1-1 call when a man shot and killed them with a stolen gun.
Officer Mora was 27 years old.
Officer Rivera was 22.
Both Dominican Americans who’d grown up on the same streets they later chose to patrol as police officers.
I spoke with their families and told them that we are forever in debt for their sacrifice, and we will carry on their mission to restore the trust and safety every community deserves.
I’ve worked on these issues a long time.
I know what works: Investing in crime preventionand community police officers who’ll walk the beat, who’ll know the neighborhood, and who can restore trust and safety.
So let’s not abandon our streets. Or choose between safety and equal justice.
Let’s come together to protect our communities, restore trust, and hold law enforcement accountable.
That’s why the Justice Department required body cameras, banned chokeholds, and restricted no-knock warrants for its officers.
That’s why the American Rescue Plan provided $350 Billion that cities, states, and counties can use to hire more police and invest in proven strategies like community violence interruption—trusted messengers breaking the cycle of violence and trauma and giving young people hope.
We should all agree: The answer is not to Defund the police. The answer is to FUND the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.
I ask Democrats and Republicans alike: Pass my budget and keep our neighborhoods safe.
And I will keep doing everything in my power to crack down on gun trafficking and ghost guns you can buy online and make at home—they have no serial numbers and can’t be traced.
And I ask Congress to pass proven measures to reduce gun violence. Pass universal background checks. Why should anyone on a terrorist list be able to purchase a weapon?
Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued.
These laws don’t infringe on the Second Amendment. They save lives.
The most fundamental right in America is the right to vote – and to have it counted. And it’s under assault.
In state after state, new laws have been passed, not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert entire elections.
We cannot let this happen.
Tonight. I call on the Senate to: Pass the Freedom to Vote Act. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And while you’re at it, pass the Disclose Act so Americans can know who is funding our elections.
Tonight, I’d like to honor someone who has dedicated his life to serve this country: Justice Stephen Breyer—an Army veteran, Constitutional scholar, and retiring Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Justice Breyer, thank you for your service.
One of the most serious constitutional responsibilities a President has is nominating someone to serve on the United States Supreme Court.
And I did that 4 days ago, when I nominated Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. One of our nation’s top legal minds, who will continue Justice Breyer’s legacy of excellence.
A former top litigator in private practice. A former federal public defender. And from a family of public school educators and police officers. A consensus builder. Since she’s been nominated, she’s received a broad range of support—from the Fraternal Order of Police to former judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans.
And if we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure the Border and fix the immigration system.
We can do both. At our border, we’ve installed new technology like cutting-edge scanners to better detect drug smuggling.
We’ve set up joint patrols with Mexico and Guatemala to catch more human traffickers.
We’re putting in place dedicated immigration judges so families fleeing persecution and violence can have their cases heard faster.
We’re securing commitments and supporting partners in South and Central America to host more refugees and secure their own borders.
We can do all this while keeping lit the torch of liberty that has led generations of immigrants to this land—my forefathers and so many of yours.
Provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, those on temporary status, farm workers, and essential workers.
Revise our laws so businesses have the workers they need and families don’t wait decades to reunite.
It’s not only the right thing to do—it’s the economically smart thing to do.
That’s why immigration reform is supported by everyone from labor unions to religious leaders to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Let’s get it done once and for all.
Advancing liberty and justice also requires protecting the rights of women.
The constitutional right affirmed in Roe v. Wade—standing precedent for half a century—is under attack as never before.
If we want to go forward—not backward—we must protect access to health care. Preserve a woman’s right to choose. And let’s continue to advance maternal health care in America.
And for our LGBTQ+ Americans, let’s finally get the bipartisan Equality Act to my desk. The onslaught of state laws targeting transgender Americans and their families is wrong.
As I said last year, especially to our younger transgender Americans, I will always have your back as your President, so you can be yourself and reach your God-given potential.
While it often appears that we never agree, that isn’t true. I signed 80 bipartisan bills into law last year. From preventing government shutdowns to protecting Asian-Americans from still-too-common hate crimes to reforming military justice.
And soon, we’ll strengthen the Violence Against Women Act that I first wrote three decades ago. It is important for us to show the nation that we can come together and do big things.
So tonight I’m offering a Unity Agenda for the Nation. Four big things we can do together.
First, beat the opioid epidemic.
There is so much we can do. Increase funding for prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and recovery.
Get rid of outdated rules that stop doctors from prescribing treatments. And stop the flow of illicit drugs by working with state and local law enforcement to go after traffickers.
If you’re suffering from addiction, know you are not alone. I believe in recovery, and I celebrate the 23 million Americans in recovery.
Second, let’s take on mental health. Especially among our children, whose lives and education have been turned upside down.
The American Rescue Plan gave schools money to hire teachers and help students make up for lost learning.
I urge every parent to make sure your school does just that. And we can all play a part—sign up to be a tutor or a mentor.
Children were also struggling before the pandemic. Bullying, violence, trauma, and the harms of social media.
As Frances Haugen, who is here with us tonight, has shown, we must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.
It’s time to strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children.
And let’s get all Americans the mental health services they need. More people they can turn to for help, and full parity between physical and mental health care.
Third, support our veterans.
Veterans are the best of us.
I’ve always believed that we have a sacred obligation to equip all those we send to war and care for them and their families when they come home.
My administration is providing assistance with job training and housing, and now helping lower-income veterans get VA care debt-free.
Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan faced many dangers.
One was stationed at bases and breathing in toxic smoke from “burn pits” that incinerated wastes of war—medical and hazard material, jet fuel, and more.
When they came home, many of the world’s fittest and best trained warriors were never the same.
Headaches. Numbness. Dizziness.
A cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin.
I know.
One of those soldiers was my son Major Beau Biden.
We don’t know for sure if a burn pit was the cause of his brain cancer, or the diseases of so many of our troops.
But I’m committed to finding out everything we can.
Committed to military families like Danielle Robinson from Ohio.
The widow of Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson.
He was born a soldier. Army National Guard. Combat medic in Kosovo and Iraq.
Stationed near Baghdad, just yards from burn pits the size of football fields.
Heath’s widow Danielle is here with us tonight. They loved going to Ohio State football games. He loved building Legos with their daughter.
But cancer from prolonged exposure to burn pits ravaged Heath’s lungs and body.
Danielle says Heath was a fighter to the very end.
He didn’t know how to stop fighting, and neither did she.
Through her pain she found purpose to demand we do better.
Tonight, Danielle—we are.
The VA is pioneering new ways of linking toxic exposures to diseases, already helping more veterans get benefits.
And tonight, I’m announcing we’re expanding eligibility to veterans suffering from nine respiratory cancers.
I’m also calling on Congress: pass a law to make sure veterans devastated by toxic exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan finally get the benefits and comprehensive health care they deserve.
And fourth, let’s end cancer as we know it.
This is personal to me and Jill, to Kamala, and to so many of you.
Cancer is the #2 cause of death in America–second only to heart disease.
Last month, I announced our plan to supercharge
the Cancer Moonshot that President Obama asked me to lead six years ago.
Our goal is to cut the cancer death rate by at least 50% over the next 25 years, turn more cancers from death sentences into treatable diseases.
More support for patients and families.
To get there, I call on Congress to fund ARPA-H, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
It’s based on DARPA—the Defense Department project that led to the Internet, GPS, and so much more.
ARPA-H will have a singular purpose—to drive breakthroughs in cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and more.
A unity agenda for the nation.
We can do this.
My fellow Americans—tonight , we have gathered in a sacred space—the citadel of our democracy.
In this Capitol, generation after generation, Americans have debated great questions amid great strife, and have done great things.
We have fought for freedom, expanded liberty, defeated totalitarianism and terror.
And built the strongest, freest, and most prosperous nation the world has ever known.
Now is the hour.
Our moment of responsibility.
Our test of resolve and conscience, of history itself.
It is in this moment that our character is formed. Our purpose is found. Our future is forged.
Well I know this nation.
We will meet the test.
To protect freedom and liberty, to expand fairness and opportunity.
We will save democracy.
As hard as these times have been, I am more optimistic about America today than I have been my whole life.
Because I see the future that is within our grasp.
Because I know there is simply nothing beyond our capacity.
We are the only nation on Earth that has always turned every crisis we have faced into an opportunity.
The only nation that can be defined by a single word: possibilities.
So on this night, in our 245th year as a nation, I have come to report on the State of the Union.
And my report is this: the State of the Union is strong—because you, the American people, are strong.
We are stronger today than we were a year ago.
And we will be stronger a year from now than we are today.
Now is our moment to meet and overcome the challenges of our time.
And we will, as one people.
One America.
The United States of America.
May God bless you all. May God protect our troops.
###
5. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: March
March 1, 2022 | FDD Tracker: February 2, 2022-March 1, 2022
Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: March
David Adesnik
Trend Overview
Edited by David Adesnik
Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, ending what hope remained that Washington and Moscow could “build a stable and predictable relationship,” as President Joe Biden initially proposed. As Russian forces advanced toward Kyiv, Western sanctions against Russia and arms transfers to Ukraine went much further than Washington and its allies threatened while attempting to deter the invasion. Had their readiness to do so been clear from the outset, perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin might have hesitated to invade. An even less pleasant surprise for Putin has been the resilience of Ukrainian forces in the first days of the war; whether they can keep playing David to the Kremlin’s Goliath is open to considerable doubt, even as Western arms and materiel begin to flow freely.
Despite Moscow’s aggression, the Biden administration continued working with Russia to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, with signs of a possible agreement in early March despite Tehran’s continued obstruction of UN nuclear inspections. Putin waited patiently for the Winter Games to wrap up in Beijing before launching his invasion, letting the Chinese government finish its celebration of impunity for the atrocities it continues to commit against its citizens.
“The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world,” Biden wrote during his presidential campaign, warning that “this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.” Will the president now take those words to heart?
Trending Positive
Trending Neutral
Trending Negative
Trending Very Negative
6. Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine
A Q&A.
Excerpts:
I’m curious what you think, if any, of the moral dimension to what’s going on in Ukraine right now.
I think there is a strategic and a moral dimension involved with almost every issue in international politics. I think that sometimes those moral and strategic dimensions line up with each other. In other words, if you’re fighting against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, you know the rest of the story. There are other occasions where those arrows point in opposite directions, where doing what is strategically right is morally wrong. I think if you join an alliance with the Soviet Union to fight against Nazi Germany, it is a strategically wise policy, but it is a morally wrong policy. But you do it because you have no choice for strategic reasons. In other words, what I’m saying to you, Isaac, is that when push comes to shove, strategic considerations overwhelm moral considerations. In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy.
But in the real world, that is not feasible. The Ukrainians have a vested interest in paying serious attention to what the Russians want from them. They run a grave risk if they alienate the Russians in a fundamental way. If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly what’s happening now. So my argument is: the strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If there had been no decision to move NATO eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine.
That advice seems a bit implausible now. Is there still time, despite what we’re seeing from the ground, for Ukraine to appease Russia somehow?
I think there’s a serious possibility that the Ukrainians can work out some sort of modus vivendi with the Russians. And the reason is that the Russians are now discovering that occupying Ukraine and trying to run Ukraine’s politics is asking for big trouble.
So you are saying occupying Ukraine is going to be a tough slog?
Absolutely, and that’s why I said to you that I did not think the Russians would occupy Ukraine in the long term. But, just to be very clear, I did say they’re going to take at least the Donbass, and hopefully not more of the easternmost part of Ukraine. I think the Russians are too smart to get involved in an occupation of Ukraine.
Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine
For years, the political scientist has claimed that Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine is caused by Western intervention. Have recent events changed his mind?
The political scientist John Mearsheimer has been one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps best known for the book he wrote with Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Mearsheimer is a proponent of great-power politics—a school of realist international relations that assumes that, in a self-interested attempt to preserve national security, states will preëmptively act in anticipation of adversaries. For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”
The current invasion of Ukraine has renewed several long-standing debates about the relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Although many critics of Putin have argued that he would pursue an aggressive foreign policy in former Soviet Republics regardless of Western involvement, Mearsheimer maintains his position that the U.S. is at fault for provoking him. I recently spoke with Mearsheimer by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether the current war could have been prevented, whether it makes sense to think of Russia as an imperial power, and Putin’s ultimate plans for Ukraine.
View more
Looking at the situation now with Russia and Ukraine, how do you think the world got here?
I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.
You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy?
If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, NATO expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.
You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,” and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. NATO can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a liberal democracy.
It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.
The Monroe Doctrine, essentially.
Of course. There’s no country in the Western hemisphere that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces into that country.
Right, but saying that America will not allow countries in the Western hemisphere, most of them democracies, to decide what kind of foreign policy they have—you can say that’s good or bad, but that is imperialism, right? We’re essentially saying that we have some sort of say over how democratic countries run their business.
We do have that say, and, in fact, we overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave.
Of course we did, but I’m wondering if we should be behaving that way. When we’re thinking about foreign policies, should we be thinking about trying to create a world where neither the U.S. nor Russia is behaving that way?
That’s not the way the world works. When you try to create a world that looks like that, you end up with the disastrous policies that the United States pursued during the unipolar moment. We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well.
I think it would be difficult to say that America’s policy in the Middle East in the past seventy-five years since the end of the Second World War, or in the past thirty years since the end of the Cold War, has been to create liberal democracies in the Middle East.
I think that’s what the Bush Doctrine was about during the unipolar moment.
In Iraq. But not in the Palestinian territories, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or anywhere else, right?
No—well, not in Saudi Arabia and not in Egypt. To start with, the Bush Doctrine basically said that if we could create a liberal democracy in Iraq, it would have a domino effect, and countries such as Syria, Iran, and eventually Saudi Arabia and Egypt would turn into democracies. That was the basic philosophy behind the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine was not just designed to turn Iraq into a democracy. We had a much grander scheme in mind.
We can debate how much the people who were in charge in the Bush Administration really wanted to turn the Middle East into a bunch of democracies, and really thought that was going to happen. My sense was that there was not a lot of actual enthusiasm about turning Saudi Arabia into a democracy.
Well, I think focussing on Saudi Arabia is taking the easy case from your perspective. That was the most difficult case from America’s perspective, because Saudi Arabia has so much leverage over us because of oil, and it’s certainly not a democracy. But the Bush Doctrine, if you go look at what we said at the time, was predicated on the belief that we could democratize the greater Middle East. It might not happen overnight, but it would eventually happen.
I guess my point would be actions speak louder than words, and, whatever Bush’s flowery speeches said, I don’t feel like the policy of the United States at any point in its recent history has been to try and insure liberal democracies around the world.
There’s a big difference between how the United States behaved during the unipolar moment and how it’s behaved in the course of its history. I agree with you when you talk about American foreign policy in the course of its broader history, but the unipolar moment was a very special time. I believe that during the unipolar moment, we were deeply committed to spreading democracy.
With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014. NATO expansion, E.U. expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia. What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.
Let’s turn to that time and the annexation of Crimea. I was reading an old article where you wrote, “According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine Crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian president Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a longstanding desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe.” And then you say, “But this account is wrong.” Does anything that’s happened in the last couple weeks make you think that account was closer to the truth than you might have thought?
Oh, I think I was right. I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible.
You mean because the Russians did the annexation and the invasion?
Yes.
I was interested in that article because you say the idea that Putin may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in Eastern Europe, is wrong. Given that he seems to be going after the rest of Ukraine now, do you think in hindsight that that argument is perhaps more true, even if we didn’t know it at the time?
It’s hard to say whether he’s going to go after the rest of Ukraine because—I don’t mean to nitpick here but—that implies that he wants to conquer all of Ukraine, and then he will turn to the Baltic states, and his aim is to create a greater Russia or the reincarnation of the Soviet Union. I don’t see evidence at this point that that is true. It’s difficult to tell, looking at the maps of the ongoing conflict, exactly what he’s up to. It seems quite clear to me that he is going to take the Donbass and that the Donbass is going to be either two independent states or one big independent state, but beyond that it’s not clear what he’s going to do. I mean, it does seem apparent that he’s not touching western Ukraine.
His bombs are touching it, right?
But that’s not the key issue. The key issue is: What territory do you conquer, and what territory do you hold onto? I was talking to somebody the other day about what’s going to happen with these forces that are coming out of Crimea, and the person told me that he thought they would turn west and take Odessa. I was talking to somebody else more recently who said that that’s not going to happen. Do I know what’s going to happen? No, none of us know what’s going to happen.
You don’t think he has designs on Kyiv?
No, I don’t think he has designs on Kyiv. I think he’s interested in taking at least the Donbass, and maybe some more territory and eastern Ukraine, and, number two, he wants to install in Kyiv a pro-Russian government, a government that is attuned to Moscow’s interests.
I thought you said that he was not interested in taking Kyiv.
No, he’s interested in taking Kyiv for the purpose of regime change. O.K.?
As opposed to what?
As opposed to permanently conquering Kyiv.
It would be a Russian-friendly government that he would presumably have some say over, right?
Yes, exactly. But it’s important to understand that it is fundamentally different from conquering and holding onto Kyiv. Do you understand what I’m saying?
We could all think of imperial possessions whereby a sort of figurehead was put on the throne, even if the homeland was actually controlling what was going on there, right? We’d still say that those places had been conquered, right?
I have problems with your use of the word “imperial.” I don’t know anybody who talks about this whole problem in terms of imperialism. This is great-power politics, and what the Russians want is a regime in Kyiv that is attuned to Russian interests. It may be ultimately that the Russians would be willing to live with a neutral Ukraine, and that it won’t be necessary for Moscow to have any meaningful control over the government in Kyiv. It may be that they just want a regime that is neutral and not pro-American.
When you said that no one’s talking about this as imperialism, in Putin’s speeches he specifically refers to the “territory of the former Russian Empire,” which he laments losing. So it seems like he’s talking about it.
I think that’s wrong, because I think you’re quoting the first half of the sentence, as most people in the West do. He said, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.” And then he said, “Whoever wants it back has no brain.”
He’s also saying that Ukraine is essentially a made-up nation, while he seems to be invading it, no?
O.K., but put those two things together and tell me what that means. I’m just not too sure. He does believe it’s a made-up nation. I would note to him, all nations are made up. Any student of nationalism can tell you that. We invent these concepts of national identity. They’re filled with all sorts of myths. So he’s correct about Ukraine, just like he’s correct about the United States or Germany. The much more important point is: he understands that he cannot conquer Ukraine and integrate it into a greater Russia or into a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union. He can’t do that. What he’s doing in Ukraine is fundamentally different. He is obviously lopping off some territory. He’s going to take some territory away from Ukraine, in addition to what happened with Crimea, in 2014. Furthermore, he is definitely interested in regime change. Beyond that, it’s hard to say exactly what this will all lead to, except for the fact that he is not going to conquer all of Ukraine. It would be a blunder of colossal proportions to try to do that.
I assume that you think if he were to try to do that, that would change your analysis of what we’ve witnessed.
Absolutely. My argument is that he’s not going to re-create the Soviet Union or try to build a greater Russia, that he’s not interested in conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia. It’s very important to understand that we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine. The argument that the foreign-policy establishment in the United States, and in the West more generally, has invented revolves around the claim that he is interested in creating a greater Russia or a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union. There are people who believe that when he is finished conquering Ukraine, he will turn to the Baltic states. He’s not going to turn to the Baltic states. First of all, the Baltic states are members of NATO and—
Is that a good thing?
No.
You’re saying that he’s not going to invade them in part because they’re part of NATO, but they shouldn’t be part of NATO.
Yes, but those are two very different issues. I’m not sure why you’re connecting them. Whether I think they should be part of NATO is independent of whether they are part of NATO. They are part of NATO. They have an Article 5 guarantee—that’s all that matters. Furthermore, he’s never shown any evidence that he’s interested in conquering the Baltic states. Indeed, he’s never shown any evidence that he’s interested in conquering Ukraine.
It seems to me that if he wants to bring back anything, it’s the Russian Empire that predates the Soviet Union. He seems very critical of the Soviet Union, correct?
Well, I don’t know if he’s critical.
He said it in his big essay that he wrote last year, and he said in a recent speech that he essentially blames Soviet policies for allowing a degree of autonomy for Soviet Republics, such as Ukraine.
But he also said, as I read to you before, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.” That’s somewhat at odds with what you just said. I mean, he’s in effect saying that he misses the Soviet Union, right? That’s what he’s saying. What we’re talking about here is his foreign policy. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you think that this is a country that has the capability to do that. You realize that this is a country that has a G.N.P. that’s smaller than Texas.
Countries try to do things that they don’t have the capabilities for all the time. You could have said to me, “Who thinks that America could get the Iraqi power system working quickly? We have all these problems in America.” And you would’ve been correct. But we still thought we could do it, and we still tried to do it, and we failed, right? America couldn’t do what it wanted during Vietnam, which I’m sure you would say is a reason not to fight these various wars—and I would agree—but that doesn’t mean that we were correct or rational about our capabilities.
I’m talking about the raw-power potential of Russia—the amount of economic might it has. Military might is built on economic might. You need an economic foundation to build a really powerful military. To go out and conquer countries like Ukraine and the Baltic states and to re-create the former Soviet Union or re-create the former Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe would require a massive army, and that would require an economic foundation that contemporary Russia does not come close to having. There is no reason to fear that Russia is going to be a regional hegemony in Europe. Russia is not a serious threat to the United States. We do face a serious threat in the international system. We face a pure competitor. And that’s China. Our policy in Eastern Europe is undermining our ability to deal with the most dangerous threat that we face today.
What do you think our policy should be in Ukraine right now, and what do you worry that we’re doing that’s going to undermine our China policy?
We should be pivoting out of Europe to deal with China in a laser-like fashion, number one. And, number two, we should be working overtime to create friendly relations with the Russians. The Russians are part of our balancing coalition against China. If you live in a world where there are three great powers—China, Russia, and the United States—and one of those great powers, China, is a pure competitor, what you want to do if you’re the United States is have Russia on your side of the ledger. Instead, what we have done with our foolish policies in Eastern Europe is drive the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. This is a violation of Balance of Power Politics 101.
I went back and I reread your article about the Israel lobby in the London Review of Books, from 2006. You were talking about the Palestinian issue, and you said something that I very much agree with, which is: “There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the lobby of the United States it has become the de facto enabler of Israeli occupation in the occupied territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians.” I was cheered to read that because I know you think of yourself as a tough, crusty old guy who doesn’t talk about morality, but it seemed to me you were suggesting that there was a moral dimension here. I’m curious what you think, if any, of the moral dimension to what’s going on in Ukraine right now.
I think there is a strategic and a moral dimension involved with almost every issue in international politics. I think that sometimes those moral and strategic dimensions line up with each other. In other words, if you’re fighting against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, you know the rest of the story. There are other occasions where those arrows point in opposite directions, where doing what is strategically right is morally wrong. I think if you join an alliance with the Soviet Union to fight against Nazi Germany, it is a strategically wise policy, but it is a morally wrong policy. But you do it because you have no choice for strategic reasons. In other words, what I’m saying to you, Isaac, is that when push comes to shove, strategic considerations overwhelm moral considerations. In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy.
But in the real world, that is not feasible. The Ukrainians have a vested interest in paying serious attention to what the Russians want from them. They run a grave risk if they alienate the Russians in a fundamental way. If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly what’s happening now. So my argument is: the strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If there had been no decision to move NATO eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine.
That advice seems a bit implausible now. Is there still time, despite what we’re seeing from the ground, for Ukraine to appease Russia somehow?
I think there’s a serious possibility that the Ukrainians can work out some sort of modus vivendi with the Russians. And the reason is that the Russians are now discovering that occupying Ukraine and trying to run Ukraine’s politics is asking for big trouble.
So you are saying occupying Ukraine is going to be a tough slog?
Absolutely, and that’s why I said to you that I did not think the Russians would occupy Ukraine in the long term. But, just to be very clear, I did say they’re going to take at least the Donbass, and hopefully not more of the easternmost part of Ukraine. I think the Russians are too smart to get involved in an occupation of Ukraine.
7. Zelensky assassination plot foiled, Ukrainian authorities say
I have not seen any other reporting on this.
Zelensky assassination plot foiled, Ukrainian authorities say
Axios · by Ivana Saric · March 1, 2022
Volodymyr Zelensky. Photo: Presidency of Ukraine/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The big picture: According to the Telegram message, Danilov said that a unit of elite Chechen special forces, known as Kadyrovites, had been behind the plot and had subsequently been "eliminated."
- "We are well aware of the special operation that was to take place directly by the Kadyrovites to eliminate our president," Danilov said, per the post.
- Ukrainian authorities had been tipped off about the plot by members of Russia's Federal Security Service who do not support the war, he added.
- Danilov elaborated that the Kadyrovite group had been divided into two, with one being destroyed in Gostomel and the other "under fire."
Go deeper
Axios · by Ivana Saric · March 1, 2022
8. Exxon to exit Russia, leaving $4 billion in assets, Sakhalin LNG project in doubt
Exxon to exit Russia, leaving $4 billion in assets, Sakhalin LNG project in doubt
© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A logo of the Exxon Mobil Corp is seen at the Rio Oil and Gas Expo and Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil September 24, 2018. REUTERS/Sergio Moraes
By Sabrina Valle
HOUSTON (Reuters) -Exxon Mobil on Tuesday said it would exit Russia oil and gas operations that it has valued at more than $4 billion and halt new investment as a result of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
The decision will see Exxon (NYSE:XOM) pull out of managing large oil and gas production facilities on Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East, and puts the fate of a proposed multi-billion dollar liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility there in doubt.
"We deplore Russia's military action that violates the territorial integrity of Ukraine and endangers its people," the company said in a statement critical of the intensifying military attacks.
Its planned exit follows dozens of other Western companies ranging from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Boeing (NYSE:BA) to BP (LON:BP) PLC, Shell (LON:RDSa) and Norway's Equinor ASA that have halted business or announced plans to abandon their Russia operations.
Exxon, which is scheduled to meet with Wall Street analysts on Wednesday, did not provide a timetable for its exit, nor comment on potential asset writedowns. Its Russia assets were valued at $4.055 billion in its latest annual report, filed in February.
Earlier, Exxon began removing U.S. employees from Russia, two people familiar with the matter said. The number of staff being evacuated was unclear. The company sent a plane to Sakhalin Island to retrieve staff, one of the people said.
Exxon operates three large offshore oil and gas fields with operations based on Sakhalin Island on behalf of a consortium of Japanese, Indian and Russian companies that included Russia's Rosneft. The group had been advancing plans to add a LNG export terminal at the site.
"Exxon's Russian business is relatively small in the context of its wider enterprise, so it does not have the same significance as it has to BP or TotalEnergies, if it were to abandon its Russian assets," said Anish Kapadia, a director at energy and mining researcher Pallissy Advisors.
The company, which has been developing its Russian oil and gas fields since 1995, had come under pressure to cut its ties with Russia over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation".
The Sakhalin facilities, which Exxon has operated since production began in 2005, represents one of the largest single direct investments in Russia, according to a project description on Exxon's website. The operation recently has pumped about 220,000 barrels per day of oil.
Japan's Sakhalin Oil and Gas Development (SODECO), which owns a 30% stake in the Sakhalin-1 project, is trying to confirm details of Exxon's announcement, a spokesperson said, adding that it will keep an eye on the Russia-Ukraine situation and decide what to do in the future.
State-backed oil producer Japan Petroleum Exploration Co (Japex), which owns 15.285% in SODECO, is also checking details of the Exxon's announcement and will talk to its partners to decide a future plan, a Japex spokesperson said.
9. Ukraine Conflict Update - March 2, 2022 | SOF News
Another useful run down from SOF News.
Ukraine Conflict Update - March 2, 2022 | SOF News
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, Ukrainian defense, NATO, international response, and humanitarian crisis.
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Russian Offensive. With the ever closer huge column of troops, tanks, APCs, artillery, and support vehicles approaching Kyiv comes the fear that the encirclement of the capital city will soon be complete and violent street to street urban warfare will soon ensue. Other areas of eastern Ukraine are under attack as well. In the north, south, and along the eastern frontier. The cities of Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Kherson are all under attack. Kharkiv and Kyiv are still in Ukrainian hands . . . for now. The Institute for the Study of War provides an map with a daily update of Russian occupied areas of Ukraine.
Russian Strategy and Tactics. The offensive did not start off well. Perhaps the Russians were a bit optimistic on the numbers of troops and tanks needed to deliver a ‘shock and awe’ campaign and achieve its objectives. Certainly the logistics train has not supplied enough fuel, food, and ammunition for the troops fighting in the various areas of Ukraine. The inability to knock out the air defense and air force of Ukraine has also met criticism.
“Russia’s military strategy thus far has holes in it big enough to drive a Russian tank through . . . if it hadn’t run out of gas.”
Ukraine Evac Volunteer, March 1, 2022.
Artillery and MLRS. A long-time Soviet strategy was the use of massed artillery and rocket fire to prepare for the advance of infantry and tank formations into enemy territory. The Russians still rely on this in their doctrine. A recent inventory to their weapons systems is the TOS-1 MLRS Heavy Flamethrower System. This weapon will cause terrible damage to those on the receiving end. The MRLS and thermobaric weapon is mounted on a tank chassis.
Current Russian Disposition. Estimates of pre-invasion Russian strength were between 150,000 to 200,000 arrayed along the border of Ukraine. These troops were in encampments along the Belarus, Russian, and Russian-occupied Crimea borders. It is estimated (Mar 1) that at least 80% of these troops are now in Ukraine. In addition, there are some ‘private actors’ involved in the offensive – the shadowy Wagner Group (mercenaries) is reported to have hundreds of fighters now in Ukraine.
Kharkiv. The second largest city located in the northeast of Ukraine is encircled and under attack. It is on the receiving end of artillery and rocket barrages. Kharkiv is cutoff from any troop reinforcements and resupply of ammunition, food, and other essential equipment. With a population of 1 1/2 million the fear of large numbers of civilian casualties may be realized as Russian troops try to enter the city proper.
Crimea Axis. The move north of Russian forces from Russian-occupied Crimea has had some success. It appears the area just north of Crimea has been secured. Some elements of these Russian forces have moved towards the Ukrainian city of Mariupol located on the coast of the Sea of Azov. It is anticipated that other forces from the Crimea axis will push towards the coastal city of Odessa on the Black Sea. News reports say that the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson is under attack and may soon fall into Russian hands. The city is located north of Crimea and sits on the Dnieper River where it flows into the Black Sea. Kherson is on the road to Odessa.
Moldova a Target? A recent briefing by Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko has shown a battle map live on TV. Some analysts have taken a close look at the briefing map and came away with the conclusion that there will be a move of Russian troops from Odessa to and beyond the Moldova border. The unrecognized breakaway state of Transnistria is located in Moldova along the Ukraine border. There are currently Russian troops based there. Watch a video clip of the briefing entitled “Russia’s secret plot to invade second nation leaked”, news.com.au, March 1, 2022.
Ukrainian Defense. The citizenry of Ukraine are stepping up to defend their homeland. Apparently some older Ukrainian women are ready to help defend their country by joining the ‘Babushka Battalion‘. (Aljazeera, Feb 14, 2022). Some of the larger Ukrainian cities are now under siege. While fighting in an urban environment is difficult for both defender and attacker there are some tactics and techniques that can sway the outcome of the battle. (Task & Purpose, Feb 28, 2020).
Assassination Attempt on Zelensky. Ukrainian officials say that they were informed by discontented Russian Federal Security Service agents who “have no desire to take part in this bloody war” about an attempt to assassinate the Ukrainian president. The attempt was by the Kadyrovites, a Chechen paramilitary organization. “Ukraine foils assassination attempt on Zelensky by Chechen special unit”, The Jerusalem Post, March 1, 2022.
West Sends Weapons. The anti-armor and anti-aircraft weapons being sent to the Ukrainian armed forces will make a big difference in the battlefield calculus. The Stingers and anti-tank weapons are reducing the effectiveness of Russian aircraft and Russian tanks.
Information Operations And Cyber Warfare
Social Media Platforms Take Action. Google has banned two Russian outlets on YouTube – Russia Today and Sputnik. Facebook has pulled ads from some Russian accounts and it is adding warning labels to content from the Kremlin’s websites. It is also changing up its search function to diminish the traffic heading to state-controlled Russian Facebook accounts. TikTok, a Chinese platform, has allowed pro-Russian propaganda on its site. Read more in “Big tech grapples with Russian state media, propaganda”, AP News, March 1, 2022.
Russia and Social Media. Some Russian media platforms in Russia have been taken offline – by the Russian government. The opposition media outlets of TV Rain and Echo of Moscow have had their access blocked. Russia has been ‘losing the hearts and minds’ battle. Slawomir Sierakowski tells us why in “Putin’s empire of lies”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, March 2, 2022.
Social Media and News Coverage. Many of the video clips shown on network and cable television news programs come from TikTok, Telegram, and other social media platforms. Some of it is propaganda and disinformation. Much of it is recycled video clips of past conflicts (Ukraine 2014). Learn “How CNN geolocates and verifies social media footage from Ukraine”, CNN.com, February 28, 2022.
Russia Under Cyber Attack. State and non-state actors are hitting Russia hard with cyber attacks. In the latest cyber attack against Russia a group of hackers called NB65 claims it has taken control of the Russian Space Agency. Some hackers are targeting Russia’s satellites. “Prominent hackers target Russia’s satellite infrastructure”, Cyber News, March 2, 2022.
The Belarus Card. Russia is going to use influence operations to justify intervention on the part of Belarus into the Russian-Ukraine war. Look for a ‘false flag’ operation where a ‘provocative attack’ is conducted by Ukraine against Belarus that gives that nation cover to launch attacks against Ukraine. Currently Belarus forces are mobilized and staged for entry into Ukraine. Russian forces have been using Belarus as a staging and support area and have launched attacks from Belarus into northern Ukraine.
International Response
NATO and EU. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization seems more united than it has been in many years. Granted it supported the Afghan mission for two decades after invoking Article five. But it has not shown this must resolve in standing up to Russia in a long time. Estonia and Latvia are sending needed war supplies – anti-tank weapons, ammunition, and fuel. And those MiG-29s for Ukraine? May not be happening after all. Ukraine may see an accelerated admission into the European Union.
U.S. Troop Movements -ABCT. An entire armored brigade combat team is being deployed to Europe from the United States. The 405th Army Field Support Brigade in Kaiserlautern, Germany will be outfitting the ABCT with vehicles and equipment for the 1st ABCT of the 3rd Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, Georgia. It appears that the arriving ABCT will link up with their vehicles and equipment at Grafenwoehr, Germany. Learn more how Army prepositioned stocks in Europe are activated to support the deployment of the ABCT. (Army.mil, Mar 1, 2022).
Russia’s Isolation Grows. As a major economy and large nation in the global system Russia has been taking part in “. . . intricate supply chains, banking, sports, and countless other threads of deep connection.” Until now. It is now experiencing isolation from the international financial community. The international sports scene is shunning Russia. Its airplanes are no longer allowed to make many international flights. Even its commercial ocean-going vessels are finding a lack of safe harbors. When the always neutral country of Switzerland turns its back on you, then you know you have a problem. “From banking to sports to vodka, Russia’s isolation grows”, AP News, March 1, 2022.
United Nations Drama. Russian’s foreign ambassador to the United Nations attempted to speak during a conference in New York at the UN. About 90% of the attendees got up and walked out. Sign of the times.
SOTU. During the U.S. State of the Union speech there were signs of blue and yellow in the audience. Colors of Ukraine. President Biden announced a ban on Russian aircraft flying through American airspace.
Poland Accepts War Refugees. Two pedestrian refugee crossings were opened up along the Polish Ukrainian border. There are long lines of people departing Ukraine on foot. Poland and the Polish people have been very supportive of the Ukrainian refugees. The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) has estimated that over 500,000 people have fled Ukraine. The bordering countries of Poland, Slovakia, Moldova, Hungary, and Romania are accepting refugees.
Humanitarian Corridor? The Ukrainian health minister is working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to organize the delivery of food and medicine to areas of Ukraine. This may, if allowed by the Russians, bring needed humanitarian aid to Russian occupied areas as well as Ukrainian held areas.
Commentary
Putin – Unbalanced or Cagey? Over the past year national security observers and leaders of various nations have expressed concern and caution over the state of mind of President Putin. His decision to invade Ukraine and recent announcements of increasing the readiness of Russia’s nuclear forces have people scratching their head. “Reading Putin: Unbalanced or cagily preying on West’s fears?”, AP News, March 1, 2022.
Urban Warfare. Military analysts are watching the upcoming fight for the large cities of Ukraine. How this plays out – a superior conventional force fighting to take embattled cities from a weaker defending force augmented with civilians given weapons. Read more on this in “The Two Debates in Military Circles the War in Ukraine Could Help Settle”, by John Amble, Modern War Institute at West Point, March 2, 2022.
Bleeding Russia. James L. Bruno provides his thoughts on how to make Vladimir Putin pay a heavy price for his invasion of Ukraine. He describes how it was done in the 1980s with the ill-fated Soviet Union intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. By the time the Soviet Union exited Afghanistan ten years later some 15,000 had been killed and 35,000 wounded. The failure in Afghanistan led to, in part, the fall of the Soviet empire (CIA report, 1999). Read more in “How to Make Russia Bleed”, Dispatches from Exile, February 28, 2022.
‘Shock and Awful’ – Lessons From the War. William M. Arkin, an author and national security journalist, provides a detail account of the first days of the Russian offensive and points out some lessons that the Pentagon and U.S. national security establishment should be taking notes on. “Shocking Lessons U.S. Military Leaders Learned by Watching Putin’s Invasion”, Newsweek, March 1, 2022.
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Photo: A member of the Ukraine National Guard.
10. Russian Troop Deaths Expose a Potential Weakness of Putin’s Strategy
I hope Voice of America and and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are making Russian casualty reports a main effort for their reporting. These are trusted news sources in Russia (and around the world)
Russian Troop Deaths Expose a Potential Weakness of Putin’s Strategy
March 1, 2022
Videos and photos show the bodies of soldiers left behind on the battlefield, officials say, and the charred remains of tanks and armored vehicles.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia visiting the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow last week. Rising military casualties in Ukraine could seriously erode support for Mr. Putin.Credit...Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik, via Reuters
March 1, 2022
WASHINGTON — When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, President Vladimir V. Putin was so worried about Russian casualty figures coming to light that authorities accosted journalists who tried to cover funerals of some of the 400 troops killed during that one-month campaign.
But Moscow may be losing that many soldiers daily in Mr. Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine, American and European officials said. The mounting toll for Russian troops exposes a potential weakness for the Russian president at a time when he is still claiming, publicly, that he is engaged only in a limited military operation in Ukraine’s separatist east.
No one can say with certainty just how many Russian troops have died since last Thursday, when they began what is turning into a long march to Kyiv, the capital. Some Russian units have put down their arms and refused to fight, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Major Ukrainian cities have withstood the onslaught thus far.
American officials had expected the northeastern city of Kharkiv to fall in a day, for example, but Ukrainian troops there have fought back and regained control despite furious rocket fire. The bodies of Russian soldiers have been left in areas surrounding Kharkiv. Videos and photos on social media show charred remains of tanks and armored vehicles, their crews dead or wounded.
The body of a Russian soldier left on the side of a road in Kharkiv, Ukraine, last week. The Russian government admitted for the first time on Sunday that “there are dead and wounded” troops, but offered no numbers.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
The Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, acknowledged on Sunday for the first time that “there are dead and wounded” Russian troops but offered no numbers. He insisted Ukrainian losses were “many times” higher. Ukraine has said its forces have killed more than 5,300 Russian troops.
Neither side’s claims have been independently verified, and Biden administration officials have refused to discuss casualty figures publicly. But one American official put the Russian losses as of Monday at 2,000, an estimate with which two European officials concurred.
Senior Pentagon officials told lawmakers in closed briefings on Monday that Russian and Ukrainian military deaths appeared to be the same, at around 1,500 on each side in the first five days, congressional officials said. But they cautioned that the figures — based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and on-the-ground media reports — were estimates.
For a comparison, nearly 2,500 American troops were killed in Afghanistan over 20 years of war.
For Mr. Putin, the rising death toll could damage any remaining domestic support for his Ukrainian endeavors. Russian memories are long — and mothers of soldiers, in particular, American officials say, could easily hark back to the 15,000 troops killed when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Afghanistan, or the thousands killed in Chechnya.
Russia has deployed field hospitals near the front lines, say military analysts, who have also monitored ambulances driving back and forth from Russian units to hospitals in neighboring Belarus, Moscow’s ally.
“Given the many reports of over 4,000 Russians killed in action, it is clear that something dramatic is happening,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, who was NATO’s supreme allied commander before his retirement. “If Russian losses are this significant, Vladimir Putin is going to have some difficult explaining to do on his home front.”
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, added, “There are going to be a lot of Russians going home in body bags and a lot of Russian families grieving the longer this goes on.”
In particular, Pentagon officials and military analysts said it was surprising that Russian soldiers had left behind the bodies of their comrades.
“It’s been shocking to see that they’re leaving their fallen brethren behind on the battlefield,” said Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration. “Eventually the moms will be like, ‘Where’s Yuri? Where’s Maksim?’”
A woman arguing with police during an anti-war protest in Moscow last week. Russian mothers have long brought attention to military losses that the government tried to keep secret. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Already, the Ukrainian government has begun answering that question. On Sunday, authorities launched a website that they said was meant to help Russian families track down information about soldiers who may have been killed or captured. The site, which states it was created by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, says it is providing videos of captured Russian soldiers, some of them injured. The pictures and videos change throughout the day.
“If your relatives or friends are in Ukraine and participate in the war against our people — here you can get information about their fate,” the site says.
The name of the site, www.200rf.com, is a grim reference to Cargo 200, a military code word that was used by the Soviet Union to refer to the bodies of soldiers put in zinc-lined coffins for transport away from the battlefield; it is a euphemism for troops killed in war.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to Know
Card 1 of 4
Russian convoy. Satellite images show a Russian military convoy stretching 40 miles long on a roadway north of Kyiv, with a number of homes and buildings seen burning nearby. Experts fear the convoy could be used to encircle and cut off the capital or to launch a full-on assault.
Migration wave. At least 660,000 people, most of them women and children, have fled Ukraine for neighboring countries, according to the U.N. refugee agency. It’s the most intense wave of European migration since at least the 1990s.
The website is part of a campaign launched by Ukraine and the West to counter what American officials characterize as Russian disinformation, which includes Russia’s insistence before the invasion that the troops surrounding Ukraine were simply there for military exercises. Information and the battle for public opinion around the world have come to play an outsize part in a war that has come to seem like a David vs. Goliath contest.
On Monday, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, read out before the General Assembly what he said were the final text messages from a Russian soldier to his mother. They were obtained, he said, by Ukrainian forces after the soldier was killed. “We were told that they would welcome us and they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass,” he wrote, according to Mr. Kyslytsya. “They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard.”
The decision to read those texts, Russia experts and Pentagon officials said, was a not-so-veiled reminder to Mr. Putin of the role Russian mothers have had in bringing attention to military losses that the government tried to keep secret. In fact, a group now called the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia played a pivotal part in opening up the military to public scrutiny and in influencing perceptions of military service, Julie Elkner, a Russia historian, wrote in The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies.
Russian service members atop an armored vehicle in Crimea last week. Ukraine’s defense minister offered Russian soldiers cash and amnesty if they surrendered.
On Tuesday, a senior Pentagon official said entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense. In some cases, Russian troops have punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.
The Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operational developments, declined to say how the military had made these assessments — presumably from a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks might be across the sprawling battlefield.
Images of body bags or coffins, or soldiers killed and left on the battlefield, a Biden administration official said, would prove the most damaging to Mr. Putin at home.
Ukrainian officials are using the reports and images on social media of Russian casualties to try to undercut the morale of the invading Russian forces.
On Monday, Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, offered Russian soldiers cash and amnesty if they surrendered.
“Russian soldier! You were brought to our land to kill and die,” he said. “Do not follow criminal orders. We guarantee you a full amnesty and 5 million rubles if you lay down your arms. For those who continue to behave like an occupier, there will be no mercy.”
Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
11. What the West should do now to help Ukrainians on the battlefield
Conclusion:
The bravery of Ukrainians in defending their homes is deeply inspiring, but American and European leaders should not be lulled into a sense of complacency. The conflict, unfortunately, is just getting started, and Russian forces will send reinforcements and use more devastating tactics. We should sprint faster than ever to help Ukraine.
What the West should do now to help Ukrainians on the battlefield
By Ryan Brobst, Bradley Bowman, John Hardie and Jack Sullivan
As Russian President Vladimir Putin escalates his invasion designed to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government, Kyiv is pleading for as many anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons as possible. While the Biden administration on Saturday approved additional military assistance for Ukraine, there is more the United States and its NATO allies must do — and fast.
That should include expediting and expanding existing shipments of weapons, focusing on what Ukrainian forces need most and what can be delivered quickly. NATO members should not stop there, however. The United States should work with Kyiv to open multiple supply lines to Ukraine to facilitate the delivery of weapons and other supplies, while providing the Ukrainian military with actionable intelligence it can use to target invading Russian forces. To get ahead of the evolving conflict, the United States and its allies should also focus on getting Ukrainians the tools they will need for urban warfare against occupying Russian forces.
As we watch this tragedy unfold in Ukraine, the bad news is the Biden administration, Ukraine, and NATO allies were unable to deter a Russian invasion. The good news is Ukrainians are fighting hard and Western weapons are helping them defend their country.
U.S.-made Javelin and UK-made NLAW anti-tank missiles have proven deadly against Russian ground vehicles. Ukrainian forces defended themselves in 2014 with only “RPGs and it was difficult to destroy T-72 [tanks],” a Ukrainian military official reportedly said. Now, thanks to Western weapons, “it’s not a problem.”
The success of these weapons is encouraging, but they will be expended and lost as combat continues. Some experts suggest the Ukrainian Army will start to run out of ammunition in a week and may run out of Stinger missiles and Javelin anti-tank missiles before then. Russia has not yet committed its full military might, so the Ukrainians will need all the anti-tank weapons we can send.
We should send all the small arms, grenade and rocket launchers, ammunition, night vision/thermal imaging equipment, rations, medical supplies, and communication devices the Ukrainian resistance needs to operate effectively and communicate securely in the brutal urban warfare likely to become more prevalent in the coming days. Small drones for conducting intelligence, surveillance, and even attack in urban fighting would be helpful, too.
However, delivering the weapons is more complex than deciding what to send. With aid flowing from so many countries around the world, the U.S. military should use its unmatched logistics capabilities to coordinate supply efforts.
A senior U.S. defense official said Monday there is no single unified body coordinating aid. In addition to shoring up NATO’s eastern flank, this should be a top priority for U.S. European Command. This materiel should continue to be delivered via Poland, but NATO should also work to open supply lines from Slovakia and Romania, as Hungary has disappointingly refused to allow lethal weapons to transit its territory.
It would be unwise to presume Moscow will not try to interdict weapons shipments to Ukraine once they arrive. We should assume Russian agents on the ground and Russian ISR assets are closely monitoring the border crossings into Ukraine.
Additional supply routes will enable faster delivery and help prevent bottlenecks at the border. Moreover, having multiple routes will reduce the risk of interdiction, since a single supply corridor would be more vulnerable to Russian strike assets.
NATO-operated NASAMS, SAMP/T, and Patriot air defense systems should be redeployed on NATO soil near the distribution points to deter Russian interference. The United States could transfer to Ukraine Avenger and M-SHORAD mobile systems to escort the shipments once in Ukraine.
To bolster Ukrainian defensive efforts, the United States and its allies should also provide Ukraine’s forces with real-time, actionable battlefield intelligence. The EU will soon begin sharing satellite intelligence with Ukraine and should prioritize timely delivery of the information so Ukrainian forces can act on it. This should include advance warning of major Russian military movements along with targeting information focused on Russian ground, air, and naval assets operating within Ukrainian territory or conducting attacks on Ukraine from the Black Sea.
Providing intelligence to Ukraine entails a number of practical challenges. Senior U.S. defense officials have stated the Pentagon has only limited visibility into events on the ground because U.S. planes or drones flying above Ukraine have departed.
However, U.S. assets can still obtain some intelligence that should be shared with the Ukrainian military whenever possible. Russian attacks along multiple axes complicate Ukrainian defense planning and mean better intelligence about their advances can be an exceptional asset for Kyiv.
Airborne assaults have played a prominent role in the war. If U.S. intelligence assets can detect future assaults, prior warning will allow the Ukrainian military to avoid surprises, better defend itself and inflict greater damage on invading forces.
At sea, U.S. air and space assets can track Russian ships and share this information with Ukraine in near real-time. Intelligence sharing should have two priorities. First, pass Ukraine intelligence on any amphibious landings Russia may be maneuvering to conduct. Second, share the location of Russian warships operating within range of Ukrainian’s limited ground- or air-based anti-ship missiles. Thus far, the U.S. has denied doing so. The Biden administration should reverse this policy and share this information with Ukraine using preexisting intelligence channels or new ones if necessary.
The bravery of Ukrainians in defending their homes is deeply inspiring, but American and European leaders should not be lulled into a sense of complacency. The conflict, unfortunately, is just getting started, and Russian forces will send reinforcements and use more devastating tactics. We should sprint faster than ever to help Ukraine.
Ryan Brobst is a research analyst at the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Bradley Bowman is senior director. John Hardie is a research analyst at FDD, where Jack Sullivan is a research associate.
12. Volunteers flock to fight for Ukraine in pacifist Japan
This is very interesting. Send the Samurai to Ukraine.
Volunteers flock to fight for Ukraine in pacifist Japan
TOKYO, March 2 (Reuters) - Keiichi Kurogi was one of dozens of men in Japan who offered to join an "international legion" to fight Russian invaders after Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for volunteers.
Kurogi, a 39-year-old office worker who lives in southwestern Japan, told Reuters he rang the Ukrainian embassy on Monday after seeing its plea for volunteers on Twitter.
"When I saw images of elderly men and women in Ukraine holding guns and going to the front, I felt I should go in their place," he said.
The embassy declined Kurogi's offer to fight, telling him that he lacked the necessary military experience.
As of Tuesday, 70 Japanese men - including 50 former members of Japan's Self-Defense Forces and two veterans of the French Foreign Legion - had applied to be volunteers, the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper said, quoting a Tokyo company handling the volunteers.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Embassy acknowledged receiving calls from people "wanting to fight for Ukraine," but declined to give further details.
A Feb. 28 social media post from the embassy thanked Japanese for their many inquiries about volunteering but added a proviso.
"Any candidates for this must have experience in Japan's Self-Defence Forces or have undergone specialised training," it said.
In a new post on Twitter on Wednesday, the Ukrainian embassy in Japan said it was looking for volunteers with medical, IT, communication, or firefighting experience. It was not immediately clear if the volunteer positions were remote or involved travelling to Ukraine.
Japan has told its nationals to put off travel to Ukraine for any reason, a warning reiterated on Wednesday by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, who said he was aware of the reports about the volunteers.
"The Japanese foreign ministry has issued an evacuation advisory for all of Ukraine and we want people to stop all travel to Ukraine, regardless of the purpose of their visit," he told a news conference.
"We are communicating with the Ukrainian embassy in Japan and pointed out that an evacuation advisory is in place."
Japan said on Wednesday it would temporarily close its embassy in Kyiv given increasing dangers in the capital.
JAPAN GIVES
The war in Ukraine has stirred strong emotions in Japan, which has a post-war pacifist constitution that has been reinterpreted in recent years to allow Japan to exercise collective self-defense or aid allies under attack.
Hundreds gathered for a protest against the Russian invasion last week in Tokyo, while the Ukrainian embassy said it collected $17 million in donations from some 60,000 people in Japan after it put out an online request for help.
One of them was Ryoga Seki, a 23-year-old studying computer science at a graduate school in Osaka, who donated an entire month's wages from his part-time tutoring job - 100,000 yen ($868) - to Ukraine.
"There are many people here, like me, who want to do something but can't move around right now," he said, adding that it was his first-ever major donation and the maximum amount he could transfer at one time from his bank.
As for Kurogi, he is adamant that he would volunteer again if Ukraine changed its requirements.
"I'm from a generation that does not know war at all," he said. "It's not that I want to go to a war, it's more that I would rather go than see children forced to carry guns."
Additional reporting by Kantaro Komiya and Sakura Murakami; Editing by Lincoln Feast
13. Perspective | President Zelensky’s leadership of Ukraine’s resistance is a testament to democracy
Anyone interested in resistance should read "The Moon is Down"
And we should recognize the importance of bringing together varied disciplines, different views, and contrary ideas and thoughts. And we should understand that no one can accurately anticipate the effects of information and influence operations. But it is worth the investment.
Perspective | President Zelensky’s leadership of Ukraine’s resistance is a testament to democracy
How John Steinbeck’s “The Moon is Down” inspired resistance to occupatio
“The people don’t like to be conquered, sir, and so they will not be. Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.”
These words of defiance, warning and resolve appear at the end of John Steinbeck’s short novel “The Moon is Down,” his fictional tale of a small town’s refusal to bow to violent occupation by the invading army of a large nation.
Steinbeck wrote these words in the dark days of 1941, as Europe descended into war, propelled by Germany’s destructive march across the continent. It was Steinbeck’s attempt to puncture the myth that the German war machine was invincible, to warn Europeans and Americans against succumbing to counsels of despair, to call for the international community to do more to aid the resistance fighters in Europe’s conquered lands and, above all else, to celebrate and defend democracy.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin attempts to violently subjugate Ukraine, and as President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine heroically leads his country’s determined resistance, Steinbeck’s hymn to the democratic spirit is a stark reminder that this invasion is but a new front in an old war. At its center is a battle of ideas about whether and how people should govern themselves.
The book, written first as a play and converted into a short novel, tells the story of the military occupation of a small town somewhere in Northern Europe. As the occupation becomes more coercive and more violent, members of the town begin to resist. Enraged by these shows of defiance and perplexed as to why the town’s citizens would dare fight back against an overwhelming force, the occupying army becomes ever more brutal. Resistance, both violent and nonviolent, spreads. Townspeople tear up railroad lines linking the town’s coal mine to a nearby port, sabotage the occupying forces’ machines and short-circuit their electrical generators. The invaders respond with extrajudicial killings, show trials and, eventually, attempts to starve the population into surrender. Some of the town’s people flee abroad and some collaborate with the occupiers, but most stay and fight, aided by an increasing flow of arms and ammunition from other democratic states.
At the center of the action is a clash between Mayor Orden, the democratic leader of the town, and Colonel Lanser, the head of the occupying force. Lanser, a veteran of World War I who knows how brutal war is, attempts to restrain his men and urges the mayor to accept occupation to avoid further violence. He is not depicted as evil, even though the logic of war and the totalitarian leader whose orders he follows compel him to act brutally.
Orden, the town’s longtime mayor, is not young, nor is he a man of action rallying his people to defy the invaders. As he candidly admits, he is afraid. But he possesses immense dignity and refuses, even under threat of execution, to undercut his citizens’ fight against subjugation. He knows he is not just a man but a symbol of democratic resistance to totalitarian force. “I am not a very brave man who will have made them a little braver,” the mayor tells Lanser shortly before Lanser condemns him to death. By refusing to bow, and by defying the demands of the aggressor, the mayor — in his words and actions — becomes a symbol for decency, bravery and a free people’s unconquerable opposition to tyranny and commitment to freedom.
When this work first appeared, Steinbeck was criticized for refusing to depict the invading forces as inhuman personifications of evil. Steinbeck thought that humanizing them made the work more realistic, and more compelling. During the war, he worked as a correspondent in Europe, wrote training manuals for the U.S. Army and served in the Office of Strategic Services. All of these posts afforded him access to the resistance efforts underway in Europe and allowed him to write his account by “basing its fiction on facts” and writing of “the experiences of the occupied” in a way that would bring home to Americans what was occurring overseas. “I had written of Germans as men,” Steinbeck later wrote, “not supermen, and this was considered a very weak attitude to take. I couldn’t make much sense of this, and it seems absurd now that we know the Germans were men, and thus fallible, even defeatable.”
Steinbeck wanted to motivate the American public with depictions of the invaders not as a faceless juggernaut, but as ordinary, vulnerable men, following orders grimly and unenthusiastically. “The war came on,” Steinbeck would later write, “and I wrote ‘The Moon Is Down’ as a kind of celebration of the durability of democracy.”
Although American literary critics didn’t care for Steinbeck’s work, it was abroad, in the hands of the resistance fighters who battled on in defeat, that this work had the most immediate impact. Thousands of copies of the book were smuggled into occupied territory across Europe, and translations even found their way into occupied China. Informed of these efforts after the war, Steinbeck marveled at how the novel was “copied, mimeographed, printed on hand presses in cellars, and I have seen a copy laboriously handwritten on scrap paper and tied together with twine.”
As it turned out, the book’s depiction of the courage of a people fighting to preserve their independence was not unrealistic, but factual. And dangerous. The Nazis made possession of Steinbeck’s work a capital crime. It was an extraordinary piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, delivering a message of hope and a cry of resistance. Norway’s king, leading his country’s government in exile from London during the war, conspicuously appeared at the opening of the London production of “The Moon is Down.”
But the work held more than just symbolic value. It inspired Europeans to resist and fight on. It also encouraged allied nations to send arms and ammunition to occupied territories. Winston Churchill read the book, noting that it was a “well-written story,” and sent a memo to his minister of economic warfare, underscoring the importance of smuggling arms and explosives to resistance fighters in occupied countries. After the war, and in recognition that his work had inspired the conquered people of Europe to resist, the Norwegian king awarded Steinbeck the country’s Liberty Cross. In 1955, he received the Commander’s Cross of Franco-Belgian Gratitude.
In the book’s conclusion, Orden, the democratic mayor, declares, “I am a little man, and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into a flame.” Today, the world watches in horror at another grim occupation, and is startled by the brave resistance of another people struggling for their independence against a brutal dictator.
Zelensky is not a small man and Kyiv is not a little town. But, like the mayor of Steinbeck’s work, he has stayed in his capital under significant threat of assassination or missile strike. It is his actions, and his presence, that have defined his commitment to his country’s democracy and his leadership. “We are defending our independence, our state, and we will continue to do so,” he declared in a video, holding his phone, wearing military dress and broadcasting his message. “Our army is here, our civil society is here, we are all here,” he said to the camera, the people of Ukraine, the people of Russia and the entire world.
Overwhelmed by the bravery of people who “refused to admit defeat even when Germans patrolled their streets,” John Steinbeck wrote “The Moon is Down” as a message of defiance, as a tribute to the durability of the democratic spirit and as a charge not to succumb to feelings of despair, apathy or helplessness.
“The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelensky declared Saturday in response to Washington’s offer to help him flee his capital as he fights Putin’s army of darkness. The closing words of Steinbeck’s wartime novel are the most fitting response: “Remember to pay the debt.”
14. Ukrainian brewery switches from beer to Molotov cocktails
We should continue to be inspired by these Ukrainian patriots.
But they need to strike the right balance between molotov cocktails and beer. Soldiers and resistance fighters need beer too for morale!
As my Command Sergeant Major used to say, soldiers bond in three ways: shared combat, shared hardship in training, and shared beer drinking.
Ukrainian brewery switches from beer to Molotov cocktails
Advertising
Lviv -- a bastion of Ukrainian identity -- lies near the Polish border and fears Russian tanks will at some point roll into the historic city.
"You have to wait for the cloth to be well soaked. When it is, that means the Molotov cocktail is ready," said one smiling employee.
With a cap on his head, he pushed the cloth deep into a beer bottle filled with a mixture of oil and petrol.
Two other barmen next to him, all in good humour, do the same.
They have a few dozen Molotov cocktails ready for use already, placed neatly on tables so as to protect them from the light snowfall.
While these Molotov cocktails might seem ridiculous in the face of tanks and rockets, the switch could not be more serious for Yuriy Zastavny, the owner of the brewery.
A volunteer carefully prepares the Molotov cocktails at the Pravda - (Truth) brewery in Lviv Daniel LEAL AFP
"We do this because someone has to. We have the skills, we went through a street revolution in 2014," said Zastavny, referring to Kyiv's pro-Western uprising that ousted a Kremlin-backed regime.
"We had to make and use Molotov cocktails then," he said.
He said the idea came from one of his employees, many of whom took part in the 2014 revolution.
It is not the first time that Pravda became a kind of institution in Lviv.
One of their favourite beers is called "Putin khuylo" -- an insult directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The brewery began producing the cocktails for the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces on Saturday -- made up of reservists who responded to President Volodymyr Zelensky's call to take up arms.
At checkpoints erected on the outskirts of the city of 720,000, police and soldiers who control each vehicle are already equipped with them.
The Molotov cocktails are already with police and soldiers in Lviv Daniel LEAL AFP
Pravda owner Zastavny vowed to do "everything we can to help win this war."
© 2022 AFP
15. The history of molotov cocktails, from the Spanish Civil War to Ukraine
There is a sweet irony that the Russian named Molotov cocktail is one of the most effective weapons of resistance fighters against the Russians.
The history of molotov cocktails, from the Spanish Civil War to Ukraine
The fiery weapon, named after a Russian, has been the tool of rebels, agitators and underdogs for 80 years.
The young men waited in the shadows until the Russian tank had passed them on the narrow city street. Then one jumped from a doorway, climbed on the vehicle and jammed a crowbar into its tread, bringing it to a halt.
When a member of the tank crew cracked open a hatch to take a look, another man threw a flaming molotov cocktail, while the first man jerked open the hatch and dropped in a hand grenade. Other men then clambered over the tank, yanked out the Russians and shot them.
“As long as there are old bottles and gasoline supplies and rags to serve for fuses, no Russian tank will be safe in the streets,” a member of the besieged country’s defiant government declared in the New York Times. (His name was withheld for security reasons.)
The Russian army has “met its match in the molotov cocktail,” he proclaimed.
The city was Budapest. The year was 1956. And the Hungarian dissidents, according to accounts in the Times and The Washington Post, were fighting an invasion by Soviet Russia.
More than a half-century later, the homemade weapon they hailed is the same one being mass-produced by Ukrainian citizens today to battle the Russian invasion of their country.
The molotov cocktail — or petrol bomb, or gasoline bomb — is a simple device consisting of a glass bottle of incendiary fluid like gasoline with a cloth wick stuck in its mouth.
The wick is set afire. The bottle is thrown at a target, shattering on impact into a small lake of flaming gasoline.
In Ukraine, thousands of these makeshift hand grenades have been made, using soda, wine and beer bottles. Grated Styrofoam has been sometimes added, reportedly to make the flaming liquid sticky.
The molotov cocktail — so named by Finland during its war with Russia in 1939 and 1940 — has long been seen as the weapon of rebels, agitators and citizen soldiers.
It has been used for decades during street disturbances around in world, including in the United States, where protesters reportedly threw molotov cocktails at police during recent unrest over the killings of Black men by White police officers.
But the weapon was also featured in an official 1943 U.S. Army training film explaining how to destroy Nazi tanks, titled “Crack That Tank.”
As a soldier in a foxhole demonstrates, a narrator (dressed as an army sergeant) explains: “Light the rag, heave the bottle so it busts on top of the tank and this is what you get.” The film shows a “cocktail” exploding on a simulated tank.
“The burning gas pours through cracks and crevices in the tank,” the narrator says. “Nine times out of 10, it’ll find oil or grease or more gas inside.”
The device was heavily used by the Finnish army during its attempt to repel the Russian invasion in 1939 and 1940, according to the late American historian William R. Trotter, who chronicled the war in his 2000 book, “Frozen Hell.”
Russia had attacked Finland because the Finns refused demands for Finnish territory that would help protect Russia from a potential attack by Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Trotter wrote. The Finns fought bravely but were eventually overwhelmed, despite the molotov cocktail.
“The Finnish version was … powerful, consisting of a blend of gasoline, kerosene, tar, and chloride of potassium, ignited not by a dishrag but by an ampul of sulfuric acid taped to the bottle’s neck,” Trotter wrote.
“If a sufficient amount of flaming gasoline got sucked into the turret, there was a good chance it would ignite one or more rounds of ready ammo, which was usually stored in a rack near the main gun’s breech,” Trotter wrote in a separate essay posted on the Internet Archive.
“When that happened, the result was gruesome,” he wrote. “It was not the Molotov cocktail itself that caused the destruction of so many tanks, but rather the secondary effects caused when its flames surged into the turret.”
The Finns supposedly named the molotov cocktail after Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian foreign minister at the time.
Molotov had claimed that Russian planes bombing Finland were actually dropping humanitarian supplies as the Russian army was “liberating” the country, Trotter wrote in his essay.
The Finns thus called the bombs “Molotov’s Picnic Baskets,” which supposedly led them to call their gasoline bombs molotov cocktails, Trotter wrote.
The best bottles, he wrote, were found to be the one-liter vodka bottles made at the State Liquor Factory, in Rajamäki, Finland, just north of Helsinki, the capital. There, thousands of the cocktails were made.
“Working brutally long hours, 87 women and five men hand-crafted 542,194 Molotov cocktails,” Trotter wrote. “And their product is credited with destroying approximately 350 Soviet tanks and other vehicles.”
But it was the Hungarian dissidents, rebelling against the oppression of their Russian-backed government a decade and a half later, whom Trotter says used the molotov cocktail most effectively.
“It was the Molotov cocktail that enabled them to briefly seize control of central Budapest,” he wrote in his essay.
A Budapest newspaper sent the Associated Press office in Vienna teletyped messages at the height of the fighting. “Young people are making molotov cocktails and hand grenades to fight the tanks,” one said. “We are quiet, not afraid.”
By the time the two-week Hungarian uprising was crushed on Nov. 11, 1956, the street fighters of Budapest had destroyed 400 Soviet tanks, Trotter wrote. Three-quarters of them had been taken out with molotov cocktails or similar devices.
The first reported use of the device by an organized armed force was in 1936 by the fascist forces of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, Trotter wrote.
Franco won the war, and remained the repressive dictator of Spain for the next 35 years.
16. Answer to Putin's Invasion of Ukraine Could Be NATO Expansion
Is NATO expansion a "legitimate security concern" for Putin? It would not be if he had not invaded Ukraine. Major miscalculation. Can you say blowback?
Answer to Putin's Invasion of Ukraine Could Be NATO Expansion
military.com · by Travis Tritten,Konstantin Toropin · March 1, 2022
Russia's invasion of Ukraine was not even a week old, and the lesson to many in the U.S. and the West was already crystal clear -- the NATO alliance must be strengthened even further after a major expansion over the past two decades failed to deter conflict.
"We have to lean in and get greater purpose and focus," Heather Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a nonpartisan think tank, testified to a Senate panel on Tuesday. "Now Europe understands the stakes. Its own freedoms and security are at stake as well as ours."
NATO has admitted more than a dozen new members since 1999, including Poland, Romania and the Baltic states, which border Ukraine and Russia. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has not been deterred by the alliance expansion east, and instead has spent that time destabilizing Ukraine and finally invading last week, in what he said is a bid to keep it from joining the alliance.
Now, NATO could continue to expand in ways unthinkable before Putin's invasion, analysts say, such as granting membership to Sweden and Finland, which would put another NATO member along Putin's border.
The seismic shift in countries’ interest and commitment to NATO comes only a couple of years after commentators were questioning its survival during the administration of former President Donald Trump.
Trump sought a close relationship with Putin, questioned the value of the alliance throughout his one-term presidency and accused other member nations of not pulling their weight in defense spending. He also, according to several aides, repeatedly toyed with withdrawing from the alliance altogether. He also delayed aid to Ukraine in actions that led to his first impeachment.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has kicked off a dramatic departure from any disinterest and doubt. Putin has "renewed the sense of purpose, which is that Russia is aggressive," James Goldgeier, professor in the School of International Service at the American University in Washington, D.C., said in an interview.
All indications point to the post-World War II alliance being re-energized by Ukraine after the long-running tensions with Putin's Russia finally exploded into the largest European war in generations and member states banded together on the sidelines over the past week to send security aid and condemnations.
"I feel like the West is having a moment here, and NATO is having a moment," Christopher Skaluba, the director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, told Military.com. "It feels like Ukraine has lit something that's reminding us why we have these organizations in the first place and how important they are."
With grievances dating back to the Cold War and a chip on his shoulder for the U.S. and Europe’s handling of the demise of the Soviet Union, Putin had set about elevating Russia to something resembling its Cold War glory in the 2000s.
The alliance continued to expand as Putin consolidated power and in 2008 began talking about adding Ukraine, a move vehemently opposed by the Kremlin.
In 2014, the Moscow-backed president of Ukraine was deposed in a coup, and Putin reacted by backing a separatist war in its ethnically Russia eastern Donbas region, while also annexing its Crimea peninsula, a strategic area on the Black Sea.
At the time, the alliance was growing but was also adrift, Goldgeier said.
"Absent Putin's actions since 2014, with the first invasion of Ukraine, NATO would have totally lost its sense of purpose. It would have been more divided," he said. "I think the United States would have probably lost a lot of interest in it."
The alliance called the Crimea annexation “illegal and illegitimate,” and allies reacted with a series of sanctions on Russia in 2014, including restrictions on access to Western financial institutions for its state-owned banking, defense and energy industry; on high-tech oil exploration and production equipment; and on exports of military and dual-use goods, according to NATO.
Dual-use goods are products and technology that can be used for both peaceful and military ends. One common example is rocket technology - utilized for both the launch of peaceful satellites as well as warheads.
The sanctions caused a drop in oil prices and a devaluation of Russia’s currency, according to a NATO analysis a year later, but had relatively negligible effects on Russia’s economy as a whole and seemingly did not dissuade Putin from future action.
But last month’s invasion has triggered a much more dramatic response from NATO, with some caveats. President Joe Biden and NATO members repeatedly made clear they would not send military forces into Ukraine, a non-member that is not part of the mutual defense Article 5 clause that deems an attack on any alliance member an attack on all.
Despite weeks of underscoring historic unity, NATO was unable to convince Putin to turn back before the invasion. The alliance has since activated the NATO Response Force, an elite multi-national military force that includes the U.S., for the first time in the wake of the invasion, and has continued to send security aid into Ukraine to help with its fight. Member Germany lifted a ban on sending arms to war zones and said it will contribute Stinger missiles and anti-tank weapons.
In an address to the nation at the start of Putin's invasion, Biden said that "the good news is NATO is more united and more determined than ever." The U.S. was a founding member of the alliance in 1949 in a move to counter the former Soviet Union, and has been a linchpin as the world's remaining superpower after the Cold War.
Public movements toward NATO membership have grown in both Finland, which shares a border with Russia, and Sweden in recent days, according to press reports from Europe. The two countries have been close allies of the alliance but had avoided seeking membership before the Ukraine crisis, appearing to be reversing course in a stunning development amid the Russian bombardment of Ukrainian cities.
Kosovo also requested a fast track to NATO membership and a permanent U.S. military base following the invasion, according to Reuters.
"I actually think there's a very good chance we could see NATO expansion this year," Skaluba said.
Russia had pushed more than 80% of the 175,000 troops massed at Ukraine's borders into the country by Tuesday as intense fighting and bombing continued, according to a senior defense official. Russian forces had fired more than 400 ballistic missiles, with reports and videos emerging of indiscriminate bombing with cluster munitions and the presence of thermobaric vacuum weapons that could be dangerous to civilians.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky maintained control of the country’s capital city, Kyiv, while Ukraine’s military was fighting back and still had control of the airspace in some parts of the country. The Russian advance on Kyiv had stalled, at least temporarily, amid a shortage of fuel and food for its troops, the defense official said.
In 2018, Ukraine changed its constitution to include its hopes of joining the NATO alliance, according to Ambassador Oksana Markarova. The majority of Ukrainians -- 62% -- supported the move.
That government's future is now deeply in doubt, and it remains unclear what Putin may do if his invasion overcomes fierce resistance from the Ukrainians.
"Priority No. 1 is to defend the country," Markarova told reporters in Washington, D.C. "I hope that we soon will win, that peace will return to the country, and then we will return to the discussions of so many strategic issues and items on the agenda, including the NATO membership."
military.com · by Travis Tritten,Konstantin Toropin · March 1, 2022
17. Ukrainians say they are fighting on in southern city of Kherson
It will be interesting to read today's reports coming out of Ukraine to determine the status of Kherson.
Ukrainians say they are fighting on in southern city of Kherson
- Summary
- Companies
- Kherson would be biggest city yet captured by Russians
- Ukrainians say street battles are going on
- Russia bombards other cities as its advances stall
- Centre of Kharkiv turned into bombed-out wasteland
- "They are trying to erase us" says Zelenskiy
WASHINGTON/KYIV/KHARKIV, March 2 (Reuters) - Ukrainians said they were fighting on in the first sizeable city Russia claimed to have seized, while Moscow stepped up its lethal bombardment of major population centres that its invasion force has so far failed to tame.
With Moscow having failed in its aim of swiftly overthrowing Ukraine's government after nearly a week, Western countries are worried that it is switching to new, far more violent tactics to blast its way into cities it had expected to easily take.
The most intensive bombardment has struck Kharkiv, a city of 1.5 million people in the east, whose centre has been turned into a bombed-out wasteland of ruined buildings and debris.
"The Russian 'liberators' have come," one Ukrainian volunteer lamented sarcastically, as he and three others strained to carry the dead body of a man wrapped in a bedsheet out of the ruins on a main square.
The roof of a police building in the centre of the city collapsed as it was engulfed in flames. Authorities said 21 people were killed by shelling and air strikes in the city in the past 24 hours, and four more on Wednesday morning.
Apple, Exxon, Boeing and other firms joined an exodus of companies around the world from the Russian market, which has left Moscow financially and diplomatically isolated since President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion last week.
"He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead, he met a wall of strength he could never anticipated or imagined: he met Ukrainian people," U.S. President Joe Biden said in his annual State of the Union address to Congress.
U.S. lawmakers stood, applauded and roared, many waving Ukrainian flags and wearing the country's blue and yellow colours. read more
Russia said it had sent delegates for a second round of peace talks in Belarus near the border, but Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia needed to stop bombing if it wanted to negotiate peace.
Moscow said on Wednesday it had captured Kherson, a provincial capital of around a quarter of a million people on the southern front, but Ukraine disputed the claim.
The regional governor had said overnight that it was surrounded, under fire, and Russian troops were looting shops and pharmacies. On Wednesday an adviser to Zelenskiy said street fighting was going on in the port, which sits at the Dnepr river's exit into the Black Sea.
"The city has not fallen, our side continues to defend," said the adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych.
Also in the south, Russia is putting intense pressure on the port of Mariupol, which it says it has surrounded in a ring around the entire coast of the Sea of Azov. The city's mayor said Mariupol had been under intense shelling since late Tuesday and was unable to evacuate its wounded.
But on the other two main fronts in the east and north, Russia so far has little to show for its advance, with Ukraine's two biggest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, holding out in the face of increasingly intense bombardment.
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A civilian trains to throw Molotov cocktails to defend the city, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues, in Zhytomyr, Ukraine March 1, 2022. REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi
"We are going to see... his brutality increase," British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said of Putin in a radio interview. "He doesn’t get his way, he surrounds cities, he ruthlessly bombards them at night ... and he will then eventually try and break them and move into the cities.”
In Kyiv, the capital of 3 million people where residents have been sheltering at night in the underground metro, Russia blasted the main television tower near a Holocaust memorial on Tuesday, killing bystanders.
Zelenskiy, in his latest update to his nation, said that attack proved that the Russians "don't know a thing about Kyiv, about our history. But they all have orders to erase our history, erase our country, erase us all."
Earlier, a tired and unshaven Zelenskiy, wearing green battle fatigues in a heavily guarded government compound, told Reuters and CNN in an interview that the bombing must stop for talks to end the war.
"It's necessary to at least stop bombing people, just stop the bombing and then sit down at the negotiating table."
'LOGISTICAL DIFFICULTIES'
Russia's main advance on the capital - a huge armoured column stretched for miles along the road to Kyiv - has been largely frozen in place for days, Western governments say. A senior U.S. defense official on Tuesday cited problems including shortages of food and fuel, and signs of flagging morale among Russia's troops. read more
"While Russian forces have reportedly moved into the centre of Kherson in the south, overall gains across axes have been limited in the past 24 hours," Britain's ministry of defence said in an intelligence update on Wednesday morning.
"This is probably due to a combination of ongoing logistical difficulties and strong Ukrainian resistance," it added. Meanwhile, it said, Russia was carrying out intensive air and artillery strikes, especially on Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol and the eastern city of Chernihiv.
Close to 700,000 Ukrainians have fled the country in less than a week, the fastest displacement of people in Europe for decades.
The leading Russian opposition figure, Alexey Navalny, said from jail that Russians should protest daily against the war, according to a tweet from a spokesperson.
Putin ordered the "special military operation" last Thursday in a bid to disarm Ukraine and capture "neo-Nazis" he falsely says are running the country of 44 million people. Ukraine seeks closer ties with the West, which Russia calls a threat.
Vastly outmatched by Russia's military, Ukraine's air force is still flying and its air defences are still deemed to be viable - a fact that is baffling military experts. read more
Washington and its NATO allies have rejected Ukraine's request to impose a no-fly zone over the country, arguing this would lead to direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. But they have been funnelling in weapons, including anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, to help Ukrainians fight.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said the country was set to receive Stinger and Javelin missiles from abroad, as well as another shipment of Turkish drones.
Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic in Kyiv, Kevin Liffey in London and other Reuters bureaux including Moscow; Writing by Stephen Coates, Simon Cameron-Moore, Peter Graff; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Philippa Fletcher
18. Biden rallies Congress behind Ukraine, says Putin has 'no idea what's coming'
How long can we maintain unity regarding helping Ukraine? Will the partisan political divide in the US default to tribal warfare between the extremes on the left and right?
Biden rallies Congress behind Ukraine, says Putin has 'no idea what's coming'
Reuters · by Steve Holland, Makini Brice and Andrea Shalal
WASHINGTON, March 1 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden assailed Russian President Vladimir Putin, barred Russian flights from American airspace and led Democratic and Republican lawmakers in a rare display of unity on Tuesday in a State of the Union speech dominated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
"Let each of us if you're able to stand, stand and send an unmistakable signal to Ukraine and to the world," Biden urged Democrats and Republicans
Lawmakers who are deeply divided over taxes, voting rights and gun safety stood together to applaud Ukraine, many waving Ukrainian flags and cheering in the chamber of the House of Representatives. Several women members of Congress wore the flag's colors of yellow and blue.
In a deviation from his prepared remarks, Biden said of Putin: "He has no idea what's coming."
Biden was looking to reset his presidency after a first year in office marked by rapid economic growth and trillions of dollars in new programs, but beset by the highest inflation in 40 years and a lingering coronavirus pandemic.
The annual speech to Congress gave Biden a platform to highlight his agenda, reassure fretful Americans and seek to boost his sluggish poll numbers amid dire warnings his fellow Democrats could face losses in November congressional elections.
The ovation joined by both parties marked a return to tradition for Washington. Two years ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was so disgusted with then-President Donald Trump's claims to be protecting healthcare insurance in his speech that she ripped her copy into pieces behind his back.
"The State of the Union is strong — because you, the American people, are strong," Biden said. "We are stronger today than we were a year ago."
For the first time in months, members of Congress were not required to wear masks in the chambers to guard against the pandemic, a sight that could provide helpful optics for the president.
A CNN snap poll of speech watchers showed 41% reacting very positively, 29% somewhat positively and 29% negatively.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has tested Biden's ability to respond rapidly to events without sending American forces into battle, and lead the West's response to the most tense period in relations with Russia since the Cold War ended 30 years ago.
The United States and its allies have launched withering sanctions against Russia's economy and financial system, Putin himself and his inner circle of oligarchs. Biden announced the United States will join other nations in banning Russian flights from American airspace. read more
The crisis forced Biden, whose chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last year drew wide criticism, to reshape the speech to focus on uniting Americans around a global effort to punish Moscow and support Kyiv.
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U.S. President Joe Biden hosts a virtual roundtable on securing critical minerals at the White House in Washington, U.S., February 22, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
TAKING AIM AT PUTIN
He took aim at Putin, saying the Kremlin leader had badly miscalculated how events would unfold and that now "Russia’s economy is reeling and Putin alone is to blame."
"He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead he met a wall of strength he never imagined. He met the Ukrainian people," he said. "From President Zelenskiy to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, inspires the world."
In a show of support for Ukraine, first lady Jill Biden had as her guest at the speech the Ukraine ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, who traveled in the Biden motorcade from the White House to Capitol Hill.
Biden is battling rising inflation exacerbated by the Russian crisis and has been assailed by Republicans who accused him of allowing it to get out of control. He called for companies to make more cars and semiconductors in the United States so Americans would be less reliant on imports.
The evening was not without its partisan moments. Two far-right Republican lawmakers, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, shouted "build the wall" to show their displeasure with Biden's immigration policy. "Sit down," shouted a Democratic lawmaker in response.
Biden himself offered some criticism of progressive policies in his party critical of police killings of Black men, saying: "The answer is not to defund the police. It's to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training...to protect the community."
Meanwhile, Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat responsible for blocking Biden's Build Back Better spending plan, spent the entire speech seated with Republicans on their side of the chamber.
Biden had some progress to tout: The economy grew faster than it has since 1984 with 6.6 million jobs created, the government distributed hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines, and he has nominated the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Biden and his fellow Democrats face the prospect of losing control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in Nov. 8 midterm elections. An uptick in Biden's approval ratings might help prevent that and strengthen his chances of making good on his agenda.
Americans' approval of Biden's response to the Russian invasion rose over the past week, with 43% saying they approve in a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Tuesday, up from 34% last week. Some 47% disapproved of Biden response's to the crisis, however, and his overall popularity has held near the low point of his presidency in recent weeks.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, in the Republican response to Biden's speech knocked his handling of the Ukraine crisis and inflation.
"Weakness on the world stage has a cost and the president's approach to foreign policy has consistently been too little, too late," she said.
Reporting by Steve Holland, Makini Brice and Andrea Shalal; Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Trevor Hunnicutt, Jason Lange, James Oliphant, Alexandra Alper, Doina Chiacu, Nandita Bose and David Shephardson; Editing by Heather Timmons and Howard Goller
19. What happened to Russia's Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
I wonder if the Russians are withholding their air power while Ukraine commits all its military forces and resistance. What if the Russians ground operations are really designed to expose Ukrainian forces to the maximum extent possible to support targeting and then at some date still to be determined the Russian will attemptto unleash a devastating air and missile attack.
What happened to Russia's Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped
WASHINGTON, March 1 (Reuters) - Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence had predicted a blistering assault by Moscow that would quickly mobilize the vast Russian air power that its military assembled in order to dominate Ukraine's skies.
But the first six days have confounded those expectations and instead seen Moscow act far more delicately with its air power, so much so that U.S. officials can't exactly explain what's driving Russia's apparent risk-averse behavior.
"They're not necessarily willing to take high risks with their own aircraft and their own pilots," a senior U.S. defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Vastly outmatched by Russia's military, in terms of raw numbers and firepower, Ukraine's own air force is still flying and its air defenses are still deemed to be viable - a fact that is baffling military experts.
After the opening salvos of the war on Feb. 24, analysts expected the Russian military to try to immediately destroy Ukraine's air force and air defenses.
That would have been "the logical and widely anticipated next step, as seen in almost every military conflict since 1938," wrote the RUSI think-tank in London, in an article called "The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force."
Instead, Ukrainian air force fighter jets are still carrying out low-level, defensive counter-air and ground-attack sorties. Russia is still flying through contested airspace.
Ukrainian troops with surface-to-air rockets are able to threaten Russian aircraft and create risk to Russian pilots trying to support ground forces.
"There's a lot of stuff they're doing that's perplexing," said Rob Lee, a Russian military specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
He thought the beginning of the war would be "maximum use of force."
"Because every day it goes on there's a cost and the risk goes up. And they're not doing that and it just is really hard to explain for any realistic reason."
The confusion over how Russia has used its air force comes as President Joe Biden's administration rejects calls by Kyiv for a no-fly zone that could draw the United States directly into a conflict with Russia, whose plans for its air force are unclear.
Military experts have seen evidence of a lack of Russian air force coordination with ground troop formations, with multiple Russian columns of troops sent forward beyond the reach of their own air defense cover.
That leaves Russian soldiers vulnerable to attack from Ukrainian forces, including those newly equipped with Turkish drones and U.S. and British anti-tank missiles.
David Deptula, a retired U.S. Air Force three-star general who once commanded the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, said he was surprised that Russia didn't work harder to establish air dominance from the start.
"The Russians are discovering that coordinating multi-domain operations is not easy," Deptula told Reuters. "And that they are not as good as they presumed they were."
While the Russians have been under-performing, Ukraine's military has been exceeding expectations so far.
Ukraine's experience from the last eight years of fighting with Russian-backed separatist forces in the east was dominated by static World War One-style trench warfare.
By contrast Russia's forces got combat experience in Syria, where they intervened on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, and demonstrated some ability to synchronize ground maneuvers with air and drone attacks.
Ukraine's ability to keep flying air force jets is a visible demonstration of the country's resilience in the face of attack and has been a morale booster, both to its own military and Ukraine's people, experts say.
It has also led to mythologizing of the Ukrainian air force, including a tale about a Ukrainian jet fighter that purportedly single-handedly downed six Russian aircrafts, dubbed online as "The Ghost of Kyiv."
A Reuters Fact Check showed how a clip from the videogame Digital Combat Simulator was miscaptioned online to claim it was an actual Ukrainian fighter jet shooting down a Russian plane.
Biden led a standing ovation in support of Ukrainians in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, praising their determination and mocking Putin for thinking he could just "roll into Ukraine" unopposed. read more
"Instead he met a wall of strength he never imagined. He met the Ukrainian people," Biden said.
The United States estimates that Russia is using just over 75 aircraft in its Ukraine invasion, the senior U.S. official said.
Ahead of the invasion, officials had estimated that Russia had potentially readied hundreds of the thousands of aircraft in its air force for a Ukraine mission. However, the senior U.S. official on Tuesday declined to estimate how many Russian combat aircraft, including attack helicopters, might still be available and outside Ukraine.
Both sides are taking losses.
"We do have indications that they've lost some (aircraft), but so have the Ukrainians," the official said.
"The airspace is actively contested every day."
Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Mary Milliken, Lincoln Feast and Sandra Maler
20. Russia, Ukraine and the West’s grand delusion of freedom
Russia, Ukraine and the West’s grand delusion of freedom
Liberty must be defended or surrendered -- there's no third option
OPINION:
Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a war of imperial conquest. That’s despicable but, from a historical perspective, hardly novel. Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Tamerlane and Attila the Hun are among those who did not think: “Maybe I should give peace a chance!” Mr. Putin, I submit, sees the world similarly.
Why do elites in America and Europe find this reality elusive? Because they cling to the grand delusion that there is an “international community,” and that it believes “No one wins wars!” and that everyone seeks “diplomatic solutions” to “address legitimate grievances” while rejecting armed conflicts in pursuit of territory, resources, and power.
A memorable example: In 2014, Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry exclaimed: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext!”
I imagine Mr. Putin was amused, though perhaps not as much as when he heard Mr. Kerry last week express concerns about the “massive emissions consequences” that might result from the current Russian war on Ukrainians. As White House climate envoy, Mr. Kerry reached out to the neo-czar: “I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.”
What Mr. Putin believes he needs to do is rather different, and an odd coalition is attempting to ensure his success. On the left, Rep. Ilhan Omar opposes sanctions that could “devastate the Russian economy.” The Democratic Socialists of America has called for the U.S. “to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” Code Pink is demanding that “not a single bullet or gun be sent to Ukraine!”
More than a few voices on the right echo these views. I am at a loss to understand how anyone wearing a Make-America-Great-Again cap can be indifferent when it comes to Mr. Putin whose goal is to make America irrelevant — an impotent, hapless, has-been superpower.
Take J.D. Vance, author “Hillbilly Elegy” (a marvelous book!) and a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. Last week, he made an argument that is emotionally compelling and geo-strategically incoherent. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he said. “I’m sick of Joe Biden focusing on the border of a country I don’t care about while he lets the border of his own country become a total war zone.”
Which is the same as saying: “The current administration’s policies at home are a disaster and I want a foreign policy to match!”
A more thoughtful faction on the right argues that we should let Mr. Putin have his way in Ukraine — and in Europe more broadly, and in the Middle East and Latin America, too — so we can “pivot to Asia” and concentrate on the threat China’s rulers pose.
Among the problems with that: The rulers of Russia and China — along with the rulers of Iran and North Korea, as well as the rulers of Venezuela and Cuba — have been forming what you might call an Axis of Authoritarians. Their common goal: weakening and diminishing America.
You can be sure they chuckled when former President Barack Obama, in 2015, warned Mr. Putin that if he intervened militarily in Syria, he would end up “stuck in a quagmire.” Instead, Mr. Putin propped up Syria’s dynastic dictator (at a cost of more than 500,000 Syrian lives), expanded his Mediterranean naval facility in Tartus, and restored Russia as a major force in the Middle East.
They were reassured when America and its allies gazed with bovine passivity as Chinese Communists, violating their clear commitments, stripped the people of Hong Kong of their freedoms, all the while building militarized islands in the South China Sea.
They were even more encouraged by America’s chaotic and humiliating capitulation to the Taliban — and, by implication, to its ally, al Qaeda — in Afghanistan last year.
They’re now expecting American diplomats in Vienna to surrender to the much shrewder negotiators from Tehran.
If Mr. Putin succeeds in swallowing Ukraine, he will become more powerful, which will make him more valuable to Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose goal is to conquer Taiwan and become hegemon of Asia — a steppingstone toward displacing America as global leader.
Similarly, Mr. Putin will want to move on to become the dominant European power. He is apt to think: “Since the U.S. is prioritizing the threat from Beijing, wouldn’t this be a convenient time to strike a blow against a NATO member?”
Long-term, the West needs to learn hard lessons and change failed policies. Short-term, we need to do whatever we can to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who, when offered a chance to flee, tweeted: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
As rapidly as possible, we should provide Ukrainians with Stingers, Javelins, TOW missiles — whatever they need to defend themselves. And we should do everything we can to bring Russia’s economy to a grinding halt until such time as Mr. Putin’s troops go home.
Final point: There is inspiration to be found in the streets of Kyiv and the frozen fields of Donbas where a brave nation fights against all odds for independence, sovereignty and the right to choose its leaders.
We can stand up to totalitarianism and defend freedom as we did in World War II and the Cold War. Or we can leave to our children a world in which evil empires expand and imperial conquerors enjoy what George Orwell called “the intoxication of power … the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.” There is no third option.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for the Washington Times.
21. Five Lessons Learned From Sanctions on Iran for the Ukraine Crisis
Excerpts:
To be clear, sanctions alone are unlikely to fully resolve the Ukraine crisis. But this does not imply a vindication of the argument made by sanctions skeptics in the Iranian, Russian, or broader contexts. At present, the goal of sanctions should be to impose costs on the Russian economy that either make Putin’s tactical and strategic objectives too costly to achieve, change Russia’s overall cost/benefit calculation, weaken its economy, and deter further aggression. These sanctions can support, not replace, broader American policy goals related to countering Russia, supporting NATO, as well as send a message to a wide range of actors about American resolve and economic power.
Not holding back on enforcement of sanctions against the Central Bank, pushing for a full removal of Russian financial institutions from SWIFT, imposing blanket sanctions on Russia’s key economic sectors, and exploring ways to deal with cutting off the Russian energy trade are likely to be the most effective coercive and punitive tools Washington has in its arsenal of economic statecraft that need not wait for a new multilateral consensus. The Iran case has proved at least that.
Five Lessons Learned From Sanctions on Iran for the Ukraine Crisis
The goal of sanctions should be to impose costs on the Russian economy that either make Putin’s tactical and strategic objectives too costly to achieve, change Russia’s overall cost/benefit calculation, weaken its economy, or deter further aggression.
by Saeed Ghasseminejad Behnam Ben Taleblu
Given how far U.S. adversaries are willing to go to bust sanctions, creativity should be treated as an element of national power and more welcome in the debate over enforcement measures. Bold actions, such as the seizure of Iranian tankers and forfeiture of their illicit oil cargos were a late but powerful component of the U.S. sanctions strategy against Iran. The further the United States is willing to go to enforce its penalties, the greater the transaction cost for the target state to continue its countermeasures. Psychologically, such moves signal that enforcement can be just as flexible and innovative as circumvention, thus aiming to deter future evasion efforts.
All else equal, the fourth lesson from the Iran experience is that multilateral sanctions are not necessarily more effective than unilateral ones. While this lesson does not aim to downplay the political and diplomatic costs of unilateralism and seemingly occasional irreverence for diplomacy out of Washington, it does aim to right-size such concerns given the risk-aversion of most large multinational enterprises and banks, the growth and importance of the compliance sector, the increasing use of U.S. sanctions, the position of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and other factors highlighting the outsized influence of the United States in the global financial system. While multilateral sanctions regimes can be treated as coalitions based around a “price-floor” interpretation of a perceived threat and what to do about it, reaching this consensus through international organizations like the UN Security Council or bilaterally with the European Union can be a lengthy and complex process that waters down sanctions and buy time for the adversary.
In the case of Iran, the unilateral sanctions imposed by the Trump administration were not less effective than the multilateral sanctions signed into law or imposed by President Barack Obama, which followed several rounds of UNSC sanctions. In fact, the takeaway for the 2018-2020 experience is that unilateral sanctions could be just as effective, if not more effective, and in record time. This is despite the skepticism of many U.S. policymakers and sanctions practitioners, as well as the efforts of the European Union to bypass U.S. sanctions. European governments went so far as to create a Special Purpose Vehicle for such trade, to no avail. When push came to shove, European banks and businesses broadly complied with U.S. sanctions regulations much to the chagrin and policy views of their own national governments.
In the case of Russia, European resistance against sanctioning Moscow had been stronger and better organized. But with Putin’s war continuing, considerable cracks have formed, and some European nations are reversing course by offering military aid, pausing contracts, and supporting sanctions. Rather than hide behind early European foot-dragging, as some former administration officials have criticized, now is the time for the Biden administration to lead on sanctions efforts, taking a page from the U.S. playbook on Iran and SWIFT from 2018.
There are reportedly even areas where Washington may be able to offset the political cost of any unilateral economic measures by supporting multilateral diplomatic measures that some of its allies already have underway. One example is the Canadian and European decision to close their airspace to Russian planes. As time passes and if Russia’s military operations succeed, as a result of geographical proximity, energy dependence, and pressure from varied economic interest groups, European countries may be more inclined to pump the brakes on sanctioning Russia. It is crucial for Washington to remember that should these governments pull a U-turn, it can still influence the behavior of European companies despite the directives of their governments.
Last but not least, is a bureaucratic lesson. Given the centrality of sanctions to U.S. national security, it is imperative that Washington work to support and expand its financial warfare capabilities to include fully staffing and funding elements in the Department of the Treasury including but not limited to the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. By way of example, the enacted budget for that office in fiscal year 2021 was $175 million, a figure dwarfed by the country’s $777 billion military budget. As Washington’s reliance on sanctions and related tools expands, its economic warfare headquarters should similarly expand and modernize to make sure the programs they oversee are fully serviced. Sanctions can never replace the U.S. military’s function in deterring foreign adversaries or the State Department in supporting diplomatic efforts, but they are an important, in-demand, and multipurpose foreign policy tool which complements other sources of American power.
To be clear, sanctions alone are unlikely to fully resolve the Ukraine crisis. But this does not imply a vindication of the argument made by sanctions skeptics in the Iranian, Russian, or broader contexts. At present, the goal of sanctions should be to impose costs on the Russian economy that either make Putin’s tactical and strategic objectives too costly to achieve, change Russia’s overall cost/benefit calculation, weaken its economy, and deter further aggression. These sanctions can support, not replace, broader American policy goals related to countering Russia, supporting NATO, as well as send a message to a wide range of actors about American resolve and economic power.
Not holding back on enforcement of sanctions against the Central Bank, pushing for a full removal of Russian financial institutions from SWIFT, imposing blanket sanctions on Russia’s key economic sectors, and exploring ways to deal with cutting off the Russian energy trade are likely to be the most effective coercive and punitive tools Washington has in its arsenal of economic statecraft that need not wait for a new multilateral consensus. The Iran case has proved at least that.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is a Senior Advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) where Behnam Ben Taleblu is a Senior Fellow. They both contribute to FDD’s Iran Program, Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP), and Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP). The views expressed are their own.
Image: Reuters.
22. Five Reasons Why Russia is Struggling in Ukraine
Interesting reasons. These are worthy of further investigation and deep reflection.
1: Putin told basically no one—not even his generals—his true intentions.
2: This is not the fight they planned for
3. They got over confident
4.) They have held back their airpower
5.) Europe’s surprising response
Five Reasons Why Russia is Struggling in Ukraine
From logistics to shoddy information warfare, the invasion force has made many missteps, experts say.
By TARA COPP and PATRICK TUCKER
MARCH 1, 2022 06:46 PM ET
Six days into Russia’s massive, multi-pronged attack on Ukraine, the Kremlin’s efforts seem to have stalled as Russian forces have failed to claim any major cities and have reportedly suffered heavy casualties. The Russian government is diplomatically isolated as the Kremlin’s top adversary, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wages a fierce, popular resistance. So what happened? Experts across the national security space have offered their opinions. Here are five reasons why it seems the Kremlin’s war effort isn’t going well:
1: Putin told basically no one—not even his generals—his true intentions.
“It’s pretty clear the nature of this operation was kept secret from all but a close handful of people,” Charap said. In Putin’s televised speeches before and then announcing the operation, the production quality was low, with strange angles on Putin, compared to what Russia’s high-powered state propaganda studios normally produce, Charap said.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Monday said Putin’s circle of trust is shrinking rapidly, and that is likely limiting Putin’s ability to get good, impartial advice.
“He's more and more isolated. There's less and less inputs. The inputs are mostly coming from sycophants who don't want to get the boss mad,” Warner said.
Charap called the quality of the Russian information campaign so far “haphazard… It really became clear that the people who do those things within the Russian system, even the ones who do TV production, had no idea what was going on until it already started happening.”
Michael Kofman, the director of Russia Studies at CNA and a senior adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, or CNAS, wrote on Twitter: “In a desperate effort to keep the war hidden from the Russian public, framing this as a Donbas operation, Moscow has completely ceded the information environment to Ukraine, which has galvanized morale and support behind Kyiv. Another miscalculation.”
That lack of communication has steep consequences. Captured Russian soldiers, often quite young, have been filmed calling their parents to tell them they were in Ukraine and, according to the Ukrainian ministry of defense, have reportedly told their families they thought they were on drills.
“The consequences of keeping the entire operation under such tight wraps that, you know, probably the people who could have planned this well, weren't even in the loop, is my best assessment of how we got to where we are,” Charap said. Because … the rest of general staff based on how they train, and you know how they conducted the operation in Syria…they can be better than this. Let's put it that way.”
Now, massive convoys have run out of fuel and Russian tanks and trucks have broken down along Ukrainian highways. Not only are they running out of gas, they are running out of food,” a senior defense official told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday.
Another potential clue: The 40-mile long convoy headed toward Kyiv hasn’t moved very far, and it is possible U.S. and NATO intelligence was lending more credence to the column than merited.
“A traffic jam is not a convoy,” said Eliot Cohen, former Pentagon policy staff director and State Department counselor during the Iraq War, now a professor and former dean at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Arleigh Burke chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a CSIS discussion on Ukraine on Tuesday.
2: This is not the fight they planned for
Leading up to the invasion, military analysts had cautioned that Russia’s recent investment in equipping and training a modern force could be devastating for Ukraine. But what analysts have observed over the past several years was not what they saw in the initial stages of this war.
“Russia has badly mismanaged the planning for this operation,” a senior State Department official told Defense One on Friday. “Their logistics trains are poorly organized, morale is bad, and they are totally unprepared for urban warfare in Ukrainian cities. They have many advantages over Ukraine in terms of numbers of forces and equipment, but they’re playing their hand badly and have sustained high casualties. The Ukrainians are determined to defend their homeland.”
Kofman said, “Looking at the military effort, I think Russian forces are getting some basics really wrong. But we're also learning things that are probably not true about the Russian military as well. They're not really fighting the way they train and organize for a major conventional war.”
Charap agreed. “This is not how they train to fight. This is not a combined arms maneuver operation,” he said.
Russia so far has made very limited use of its cyber and electronic warfare capabilities. Warner said he was surprised the Russian government hadn’t yet taken steps to shut down internet connectivity in Ukraine. “I've been pleasantly surprised so far,” he said.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike and the founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, told Defense One that he believes Russia has so far been reluctant to bring down the Ukrainian internet because Russian forces may be relying on local networks for their own communications.
Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has worked to bolster internet resilience in the country.
The United States is in contact with the Zelenskyy government through a separate, secure satellite communications capability, CNN’s Kylie Atwood reported. And some Ukrainians are able to stay connected through SpaceX’s Starlink transceivers.
Russia has also restrained its use of communications jamming and electronic warfare equipment, U.S. officials believe. When Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, they were able to jam cell phones and maintain near-radio silence while also coordinating well, to a degree the U.S. has not seen in the current conflict, yet .
“We have not seen what we believe the full scope of their electronic warfare capabilities brought to bear,” the senior defense official said. “I cannot give an assessment of why that would be. We do have indications that in some places they have used EW to their advantage, particularly in jamming at a local level.”
3. They got over confident
“If you look at how they launched their attacks. They clearly expected that to happen through a quick and pretty bloodless campaign,” Cohen said on Tuesday.
Putin’s possible assumption of a bloodless surrender likely did not consider opposing points of view, said Rajan Menon, the director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities, and senior research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.
“There's a lot of evidence based on studies of war that initiators expect a very quick victory and have a rather low opinion of their adversary,” Menon said. “And that is in a closed decision-making circle like Putin’s—some of you may have seen that bizarre meeting he had with the National Security Council where he was seated at a table and they were seated there, like schoolboys—they were all to the podium and made these rambling remarks, each trying to outbid they other, and Sergey Naryshkin, the FSB [Russian domestic security] boss was scolded, was trembling like a schoolboy—the whole thing was just bizarre.”
Michael Vickers, former defense under secretary for intelligence, said at CSIS that he couldn’t think of “a bigger strategic blunder and modern military history… . I mean, this is a colossal intelligence failure and vastly underestimating Ukrainian resistance, and military execution has been terrible.”
Kofman said Russia’s campaign looked like a quick run toward the capital to force a surrender in a way that allowed Russia to avoid engaging Ukrainian forces. ”They’ve been skirting major cities, going for key road junctions/smaller towns,” he tweeted. “Why did Moscow choose this course of action? A few theories: they didn’t take Ukraine and its military seriously. They wanted to avoid attrition and devastation because of consequences for [political] goals in Ukraine, costs of casualties, and they want to hide the costs from the public.”
4.) They have held back their airpower
Russia has not used the full extent of its airpower capabilities in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are still able to conduct their own air operations and launch air defense capabilities, a senior defense official told Pentagon reporters Tuesday.
“There's a certain risk-averse behavior, they are not necessarily willing to take high risks with their own aircraft and their own pilots,” the senior defense official said.
“My assumption was that there was going to be a significant depression among enemy air defense or SEED [suppression of enemy air defenses] operations, they call it in the very initial stages, and it was kind of half-hearted,” Charap said. “But that doesn't mean that, you know, the Russians rolled down all these new capabilities, and they turned out not to work. It's just they haven't really done that.”
Kofman said, “Russia's air force has largely been sitting on the sidelines, and beyond a few attack aircraft, there's been little evidence of Russian fighters flying offensive counter air or combat air patrol missions. Similarly, there have been few sightings of tactical bombers employed, most starting five days into the campaign.”
5.) Europe’s surprising response
Putin may have shored up Russian currency to some extent to withstand sanctions, but there’s no way he or anyone could have accurately predicted Europe’s strong response, several analysts said. In a matter of days, German opposition to bulking up its defense spending melted away, and the country has pledged to quickly raise its military budget to 2 percent of GDP. Russia is banned from the European Union’s entire airspace.
Countries across the European continent sped hundreds of millions in lethal aid to Ukraine,, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank missilesIn Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of citizens have taken up arms—and molotov cocktails.
“I think the Europeans have surprised themselves, they've surprised the U.S., and I'm sure they surprised Russia,” Charap said.
For Putin, it’s a complete failure of political objectives, Cohen said.
Putin’s objectives have been “to limit the spread of democratic contagion,” especially to Ukraine, and to chip away at NATO’s unity, Cohen said. “He has not only failed at each of those objectives thus far, I think he has set up the conditions for a permanent defeat on all of those in many respects.”
Warner said Putin’s diplomatic push has been so disastrous the Russian president has even started to lose the public support of some Russian oligarchs in his inner circle, such as Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska. “When you start to see oligarchy, some of the people who Putin has enriched at outrageous rates, starting to question … whether this is the right approach, I think it's got to take them back a bit,” he said.
Military officials and analysts emphasized that the war is still in its earliest phases, and they fully expect Russia to adapt its approach. Unfortunately, according to Alperovitch, the fewer options that exist for Putin to save face, the worse those options are.
On Monday he wrote “Now that the Russians have switched tactics from pursuing a rapid victory on the cheap (failed miserably) and reverted to the mean of leveling Ukrainian cities to the ground like they did with Grozny and Aleppo, the goals of the operation are likely changing as well.”
But with even Russian elites turning against Putin and the population of Ukraine utterly opposed to his rule, the idea of a long-term occupation by force looks increasingly unrealistic. “The longer it goes on, the more precarious Putin's position will become domestically. A palace coup is going to become increasingly likely over time,” Alperovitch wrote.
23. What a Russian soldier’s panicked text home reveals about Ukraine’s information war
For the information and influence operations campaign and the PSYOP professionals to exploit.
What a Russian soldier’s panicked text home reveals about Ukraine’s information war
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In a striking moment at the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, Ukraine’s ambassador read aloud text messages that were purportedly sent from a Russian soldier to his family shortly before his death.
The texts were read by Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s Ambassador to the UN, and offer insight into Ukraine’s use of information in its ongoing war with Russia.
According to the translation at the UN, the soldier’s mother asked if he was in training exercises and why it had been so long since he’d responded. When the soldier said he wasn’t in Crimea, his mother asked where he was. “Mom,” the soldier allegedly texted back. “I’m in Ukraine.”
“There is a real war raging here. I am afraid,” the soldier’s text said, according to the UN translation. “We are bombing all of the cities, together. Even targeting civilians. We were told that they would welcome us and they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass. They call us fascists, Mama, this is so hard.”
Ukraine's Ambassador to the UN read out text messages between a Russian soldier and his mother moments before he was killed. He read them in Russian.
"Mama, I'm in Ukraine. There is a real war raging here. I'm afraid. We are bombing all of the cities…even targeting civilians." pic.twitter.com/mLmLVLpjCO
— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) February 28, 2022
While it’s difficult to verify the authenticity of the texts, Ukraine stands to gain a great deal from sharing them in such a public way on the international stage.
It’s a message “going after the legitimacy of the Russian claims,” said New America strategist Peter Singer, and the author of “Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media,” and it’s being read at the UN, “the most global of arenas” Singer said.
“It’s a personal message,” Singer continued, “in that it makes real in an intimate manner both the cost of Russia’s invasion, the narrative that Ukraine is pushing on an unjust invasion, the narrative that they’re trying to push within Russia of the illegitimacy of what Putin is doing, the narrative they’re trying to push within Russia of trying to create public pressure in particular among parents of soldiers to end the war.”
According to both Singer and an Army officer with experience in information operations, the text messages read out at the UN on Monday were likely intended for multiple audiences. There were the parents of Russian soldiers, worried about their children at war. An international audience that’s hearing this text exchange at the same time that they’re also seeing reports of Russian conscripts being forced to serve in Ukraine, which suggests that Russia’s soldiers don’t want to be there. And finally, the people of Ukraine, who are deconstructing the image of the “scary Russian” soldier, Singer said. It also falls in line with reporting that Ukrainians are allowing Russian prisoners of war to call their parents.
A Ukrainian service member listens to artillery shots standing in a trench on a position at the line of separation between Ukraine-held territory and rebel-held territory near Zolote, Ukraine, late Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
The key to Russia’s operation, Singer said, was “this sense of inevitable victory,” that Ukraine and its allies shouldn’t even put up a fight because there’s “no way you can win.” But that idea of an inevitable victory has been stymied again and again.
Instead, “you’ve got counter messaging of not only are we capturing POWs but we’re letting your poor, scared POWs call their parents,” Singer said.
Ukraine’s messaging “has been masterful,” said the Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak with the media. Whereas the Ukrainian people are sharing photos, videos, and stories on social media that work to rally international support, the response from Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be to “make scarier and scarier speeches” which in turn could push more countries into the arms of NATO.
“We’ll study this,” the officer said of the U.S. military information community. “We’re all saying this in real time, that’s what’s so fascinating: We’re watching this unfold in real time.”
Soldiers of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment line up vehicles at the military airfield in Vilseck, Germany, Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022 as they prepare for the regiment’s movement to Romania loading of Stryker combat vehicles for their deployment to support NATO allies and demonstrate U.S. commitment to NATO Article V. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
The text message from Monday falls in line with a number of other viral moments that have been shared in favor of Ukraine. There’s the woman who told Russians to keep sunflower seeds in their pockets to grow into the country’s national flower when they died on Ukrainian soil; the quote from Zelensky when he reportedly told U.S. officials that he needed “ammunition, not a ride.” The list continues with the story of Ukrainian soldiers who gave the resistance its rallying cry of “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” and the conflict’s first legend, in the form of the Ghost of Kyiv, a supposed Ukrainian fighter jet pilot who won the admiration of people across the planet without being proven real.
Singer went into further detail about Ukraine’s messaging in a Twitter thread on Monday, outlining some of the key objectives, which he said were to humanize their forces, mock the Russians, push stories of heroism and civilians taking a stand, bolster Zelensky’s image as a “Man of the People,” and make the damage being done to Ukraine feel personal.
Why has Ukraine been so successful at information warfare/propaganda vs the supposed Russian masters of it?
A thread of 10 persuasion messaging themes working for them:
— Peter W. Singer (@peterwsinger) February 28, 2022
And while the Ghost of Kyiv is in all likelihood a military urban legend, the veracity of that, and other similar viral stories, may not matter in the long, or short run — at least not to those fighting the conflict on the ground. At the end of the day it’s “a powerful symbol,” the officer said, which is reinforcing the message Ukraine wants people to hear: that Russian troops are demoralized, in some instances scared; that they didn’t really know what they were supposed to be doing in the first place; and that they don’t stand a chance.
It’s something Russia has to contend with, and Russian commanders, in particular, may have to address with their own troops.
“Is there any more cynical group of people on the planet than soldiers?” the officer quipped. “So when now they’re coming to you and saying, ‘Your morale’s great right?’ to the guy sitting in a hole in the ground, eating whatever the Russian equivalent of an MRE is, being shot at by little old ladies — talk about being on the back foot.”
To what degree Ukraine’s information fight was planned, or whether it sprung up organically, is unclear. What is apparent, however, is that the strategy appears to be working, and others it’s “being followed,” the officer said, and not just by the government but by civilians who are making videos and memes and sharing them online, and watching them spread “like wildfire.”
“It’s fascinating, and it’s amazing. And the Russians just do not understand how to respond to this.”
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Haley Britzky is the Army reporter for Task & Purpose, covering the daily happenings in the Army and how they impact soldiers and their families, as well as broader national security issues. Originally from Texas, Haley previously worked at Axios before joining Task & Purpose in January 2019. Contact the author here.
24. The Impossible Suddenly Became Possible
This is probably a paragraph that every international relations and national security student, pundit, and theorist should commit to memory.
As it turns out, nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. They do not, as some academics have long imagined, have eternal interests or permanent geopolitical orientations, fixed motivations or predictable goals. Nor do human beings always react the way they are supposed to react. Last week, nobody who was analyzing the coming war in Ukraine imagined that the personal bravery of the Ukrainian president and his emotive calls for sovereignty and democracy could alter the calculations of foreign ministers, bank directors, business executives, and thousands of ordinary people. Few imagined that the Russian president’s sinister television appearances and brutal orders could alter, in just a few days, international perceptions of Russia.
The Impossible Suddenly Became Possible
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West’s assumptions about the world became unsustainable.
History has accelerated; the impossible has become possible. Shifts that no one imagined two weeks ago are unfolding with incredible speed.
As it turns out, nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. They do not, as some academics have long imagined, have eternal interests or permanent geopolitical orientations, fixed motivations or predictable goals. Nor do human beings always react the way they are supposed to react. Last week, nobody who was analyzing the coming war in Ukraine imagined that the personal bravery of the Ukrainian president and his emotive calls for sovereignty and democracy could alter the calculations of foreign ministers, bank directors, business executives, and thousands of ordinary people. Few imagined that the Russian president’s sinister television appearances and brutal orders could alter, in just a few days, international perceptions of Russia.
And yet all of that has happened. Volodymyr Zelensky’s courage has moved people, even the hard-bitten CEOs of oil companies, even dull diplomats accustomed to rote pronouncements. Vladimir Putin’s paranoid ranting, meanwhile, has frightened even people who were lauding his “savvy” just a few days ago. He is not, in fact, someone you can do business with, as so many in Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington falsely believed; he is a cold-blooded dictator happy to murder hundreds of thousands of neighbors and impoverish his nation, if that’s what it takes to remain in power. However the war ends—and many scenarios are still imaginable—we already live in a world with fewer illusions.
Look at Germany, a nation that has spent nearly 80 years defining its national self-interest in purely economic terms. If the government of some distant place where Germans buy and sell things was repressive, that was never the Germans’ fault. If military aggression was reshaping the outer borders of Europe, that was peripheral to Germany, too. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, although she talked a lot about liberal and democratic values, in practice worried far more about creating good conditions for German business, wherever it was operating. That economy-first attitude infected her nation. Not long after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, I joined a panel discussion in Germany about “the greatest threats to Europe.” Because of the timing, I talked about Russia and assumed the others would too. I was wrong. One of the other panelists called me a warmonger. Another argued vociferously that the greatest threat was a proposed trade agreement that would have allowed Americans to sell chicken washed in chlorine to German supermarkets.
I remember that detail because I hadn’t known about the great chlorinated-chicken discussion that was then engulfing Germany, and I had to go home and look it up. But I’ve had some version of that experience many times since. I was on a German television program two weeks ago, along with three German politicians who were, even then, arguing that—despite the thousands of troops and armored vehicles gathering on the borders of Ukraine—the only conceivable solution was dialogue.
On Saturday, in a 30-minute speech, the current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, threw all of that out the window. Germany, he said, needs “planes that fly, ships that sail, and soldiers who are optimally equipped for their missions”: Germany’s military should reflect its “size and importance.” The German government has done an about-face and will even send weapons to Ukraine: 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles. More incredibly, this 180-degree turn has the support of an astonishing 78 percent of the German public, who now say they support much higher military spending and will gladly pay for it. This is a fundamental change in Germany’s definition of itself, in its understanding of its past: Finally, Germans have understood that the lesson of their history is not that Germany must remain forever pacifist. The lesson is that Germany must defend democracy and fight the modern version of fascism in Europe when it emerges.
But the Germans are not the only ones who have changed. Across Europe people are realizing that they live on a continent where war, in their own time, in their own countries, is no longer impossible. Platitudes about European “unity” and “solidarity” are beginning to have some meaning, along with “common foreign policy,” a phrase that, in the European Union, has until now been largely fiction. In theory the EU has a single spokesperson for foreign policy, but in practice European leaders have given that job to people who know little about Russia, and whose fallback position when Russia misbehaves is always the expression of “deep concern.” The previous European high representative for foreign policy, Federica Mogherini, was more interested in EU relations with Cuba than with Kyiv. The current holder of that office, Josep Borrell, stumbled through a meeting with his Russian counterpart last year, and seemed surprised to be treated with disdain.
But now everything is suddenly different. “Deep concern” has been exchanged for real action. Less than a week into the invasion, the EU has not only announced harsh sanctions on Russian banks, companies, and individuals—sanctions that will also affect Europeans—but has also offered $500 million of military aid to Ukraine. Individual European states, from France to Finland, are sending weapons as well, and applying their own sanctions. The French say they are drawing up a list of Russian oligarchs’ assets, including luxury cars and yachts, in order to seize them.
Europeans have also dropped, abruptly, some of their doubts about Ukraine’s membership in their institutions. On Monday, the European Parliament not only asked Zelensky to speak, by video, but gave him a standing ovation. Earlier today the parliamentarians, from all across the continent, voted to accept his application for EU membership for Ukraine. Accession to the EU is a long process, and it won’t happen immediately, even if Ukraine emerges intact from this conflict. But the idea has been broached. It is now part of the continent’s collective imagination. From being a distant place, badly understood, it is now part of what people mean when they say Europe.
Ukraine itself will never be the same again either. Events are happening so rapidly, with moods and emotions changing every hour of every day, that I can’t guess what will happen next, or predict how people will feel about it. But I am certain that the events of this week have changed not only the world’s perceptions of Ukraine, but Ukrainians’ perceptions of themselves. In the long run-up to this war, the conversation in Washington and Berlin was always focused on Putin and Joe Biden, Sergei Lavrov and Antony Blinken, NATO and Russia. This was the kind of talk that academics and pundits liked: big topics, big countries. In this conversation Ukraine was, as the political scientist John Mearsheimer put it in 2014, nothing more than “a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia.” But the Ukrainians have now put themselves at the heart of the story, and they know it.
As a result, thousands of people are making choices that they too could not have imagined two weeks ago. Ukrainian sociologists, baristas, rappers, and bakers are joining the territorial army. Villagers are standing in front of Russian tanks, shouting “occupiers” and “murderers” at Russia soldiers firing into the air. Construction workers on lucrative contracts in Poland are dropping their tools and taking the train back home to join the resistance. A decade’s worth of experience fighting Russian propaganda is finally paying off, as Ukrainians create their own counternarrative on social media. They post videos telling Russian soldiers to go home to their mothers. They interview captured teenage Russian conscripts, and put the video clips online. Electronic highway signs leading into Kyiv have been reconfigured to tell the Russian army to “fuck off.” Even if this ends badly, even if there is more bloodshed, every Ukrainian who lived through this moment will always remember what it felt like to resist—and that too will matter, for decades to come.
And what about Russia? Is Russia condemned always to be a revanchist state, a backward-looking former empire, forever scheming to regain its old role? Must this enormous, complicated, paradoxical nation always be ruled badly, with cruelty, by elites who want to steal its wealth or oppress its people? Will Russian rulers always dream of conquest instead of prosperity?
Right now many Russians don’t even realize what is happening in Ukraine. State television has not yet admitted that the Russian military has attacked Kyiv with rockets, bombed a Holocaust memorial, or destroyed parts of central Kharkiv and Mariupol. Instead, the official propagandists are telling Russians that they are carrying out a police action in Ukraine’s far-eastern provinces. The audience gets no information about casualties, or war damage, or costs. The extent of the sanctions has not been reported. Pictures seen around the world—the bombing of the Kyiv television tower today, for example—can’t be seen on the Russian evening news.
And yet, there is a strong, consistent drumbeat of alternative information. Yury Dud, a celebrity blogger with 5 million Instagram followers, has posted a photograph of a bombed-out building in Ukraine. The YouTube channel of Alexei Navalny, the jailed Russian dissident leader, has been equally clear to its 6.4 million subscribers. Members of his team are denouncing the war alongside the extension of his prison sentence, both part of the same story of internal and external repression. Millions of Russians know, because they have friends and relatives in Ukraine, that Putin has invaded a neighbor whom they don’t consider their enemy. Some have called those friends, weeping over the telephone, to apologize.
What could happen in Russia if the story became better known, the details clearer? What if Russians are eventually able to see the same graphic images that we see? What if the price of this pointless violence becomes tangible to them too? The unpopularity of this war is going to grow, and as it gets bigger, the other Russia—the different Russia that has always been there—will grow larger, too. The Russians who flooded the streets in 1991 to cheer the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians who protested fake elections in 2011, the Russians who turned out in large numbers all across the country to protest the arrest of Navalny in 2021, the Russians, rich and poor, urban and rural, who don’t want their country to be an evil empire—maybe their numbers will expand enough to matter. Maybe, someday, they will change the nature of their state too.
25. Japan’s Possible Acquisition of Long-Range Land-Attack Missiles and the Implications for the U.S.-Japan Alliance
Japan’s Possible Acquisition of Long-Range Land-Attack Missiles and the Implications for the U.S.-Japan Alliance
by Scott W. Harold, Jeffrey W. Hornung, Satoru Mori, Shinichi Kitaoka
The growth of Chinese military power over the past three decades raises questions about deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. One widely discussed question among defense thinkers in Japan is whether Japan needs to procure long-range, conventional land-attack precision-guided munitions to preserve deterrence with China. In a February 2021 virtual conference, experts explored Japan's defense strategy within the framework of the U.S.-Japan alliance.
Summary of a February 2021 Conference
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The growth of Chinese military power over the past three decades raises questions about deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. One widely discussed question among defense thinkers in Japan is whether Japan needs to procure long-range, conventional land-attack precision-guided munitions to preserve deterrence with China. If so, what types of platforms and weapon systems would be ideal? To strike what targets and with what concept of operations or in support of what theory of victory? Is a Japanese approach to deterrence based on retaliatory kinetic military operations against China plausible, given the latter's substantially greater size and nuclear arsenal? If Japan does choose to develop and field such capabilities in support of an approach to deterrence premised not only on denial but also counterstrike capabilities, would this be likely to work?
In a February 2021 virtual conference, experts contributed to a growing debate in U.S. and Japan defense policy by exploring this issue and Japan's defense strategy. They considered the types of capabilities that Japan might procure, the concept of employment for such capabilities, and the ways these capabilities could fit within the U.S.-Japan alliance.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Introduction
Scott W. Harold, Senior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation
Chapter Two
The Case for Japan Acquiring Counterstrike Capabilities: Limited Offensive Operations for a Defensive Strategy
Shinichi Kitaoka, Professor Emeritus, University of Tokyo
Chapter Three
Japanese Strike Capabilities and the U.S.-Japan Alliance
Jeffrey W. Hornung, Senior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation
Chapter Four
Conclusion
Scott W. Harold, Senior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation
Document Details
- Copyright: RAND Corporation
- Availability: Web-Only
- Pages: 53
- Document Number: CF-A1310-2
- Year: 2022
-
Series: Conference Proceedings
Citation
Format:
- Chicago Manual of Style
- RAND Corporation Style Manual
Harold, Scott W., Jeffrey W. Hornung, Satoru Mori, and Shinichi Kitaoka, Japan's Possible Acquisition of Long-Range Land-Attack Missiles and the Implications for the U.S.-Japan Alliance: Summary of a February 2021 Conference. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022. https://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CFA1310-2.html.
Harold, Scott W., Jeffrey W. Hornung, Satoru Mori, and Shinichi Kitaoka, Japan's Possible Acquisition of Long-Range Land-Attack Missiles and the Implications for the U.S.-Japan Alliance: Summary of a February 2021 Conference, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, CF-A1310-2, 2022. As of March 01, 2022: https://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CFA1310-2.html
26. Russia-Ukraine war gives a glimpse of China’s new world order, and of Beijing’s faltering reputation
Excerpts:
Despite China’s dramatic rise and profound desire to recast the international system in its likeness, the solidarity that has already arisen from war in Ukraine may yet justify placing some faith in the prevailing world order. Ordinary people and much of the world have demonstrated surprising willingness to suffer the consequences of standing up to Putin’s war machine.
For anyone who observes international relations very closely, the response of Western countries over the last several days has been astonishingly quick and surprisingly robust; if hardly making up for their failure to do much after Russia annexed Crimea and while it was preparing its latest invasion. Assuming this solidarity does not wane, it may prevent or at least delay the arrival of a Chinese-led alternative world order.
China’s rise still has the potential to do good for the world; it also has the potential to do great harm. A question is whether the events of February 2022 will stimulate reflection in Beijing and prompt a shift away from its warrior-like view of the world, or whether the war being waged by Xi’s best friend is a sign of things to come.
Russia-Ukraine war gives a glimpse of China’s new world order, and of Beijing’s faltering reputation - Hong Kong Free Press HKFP
“At the very least, Chinese officials seem to have displayed poor understanding of Russian history and the psychology of Putin,” writes Paul G. Harris.
5 HOURS AGO
February 2022 may turn out to be an important month in Chinese and world history. It was the month when China’s “no limits” embrace of Russia was codified in a sweeping statement of mutual support, just as Russian troops were massing on the borders of Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion not many days later revealed what the world may look like if China’s leader Xi Jinping and his “best friend,” Russian President Vladimir Putin, succeed in their mission of replacing the American-led, rules-based international system with their vision of an authoritarian new world order.
A Ukrainian Territorial Defence fighter examines a destroyed Russian infantry mobility vehicle in Kharkiv on February 27, 2022. Photo: Sergey Bobok / AFP
Russia’s war on Ukraine suggests that China’s new authoritarian world might be characterized by a return to 19th-century power politics and 20th-century blitzkrieg, with strong-men autocrats unleashing their militaries to crush neighbouring countries and threatening total destruction as means of coercion.
We do not need to imagine what this new world will look like; we can see it in the pools of blood spreading across Ukraine.
We can see it in the pictures and videos of Russian tanks barrelling through towns, homes pulverized by shelling, missiles crashing into high-rise apartment buildings, plumes of smoke rising from destroyed infrastructure, people cowering underground and half a million refugees – so far – fleeing to neighbouring countries.
We can see it in the casualty statistics, including of civilians, children among them.
If Putin’s latest threats are any indication, the new authoritarian world being ushered into existence by China and its autocratic allies apparently includes preparations to use nuclear weapons.
Anyone who doubts Putin’s willingness to go to the extreme of using them should consider the widespread assumption by many experts barely a week ago that he would not be so irrational as to invade Ukraine.
If for nothing else, February 2022 will be remembered worldwide as the month when Russia invaded Europe. For Ukrainians, it may forever be memorialised as their mensis horribilis – their horrible month.
But might February also be remembered as a mensis horribilis for China’s global reputation and influence?
The world’s outraged reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine juxtaposed alongside Chinese foreign ministry officials’ mealy-mouthed parroting of Russia’s justifications for the attack, along with their flat-out refusals to even call the invasion an invasion, suggests that China’s already declining reputation is set to fall further.
What was Beijing thinking when it embraced an autocrat who had already annexed a huge chunk of a neighbouring country’s territory – the Crimean Peninsula – and deployed his war machine and mercenaries to other parts of Ukraine as well as to Georgia, Libya, Syria and beyond? At the very least, Chinese officials seem to have displayed poor understanding of Russian history and the psychology of Putin.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Photo: Pool screenshot.
Perhaps most profoundly, China’s reputation will suffer because, thus far, it has selectively ignored Russia’s violation of the sacrosanct principle of non-intervention that Xi and every leader of the People’s Republic of China before him has extolled repeatedly and forcefully, especially when the United States has violated it.
To quote one of Xi’s many public statements on the importance he gives to protecting sovereignty: “The Chinese people share a common belief that it is never allowed and it is absolutely impossible to separate any inch of our great country’s territory from China.”
If every inch of China’s territory is inviolable, why are huge swathes of the Ukraine up for grabs? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. China’s hypocrisy speaks volumes about its willingness to say one thing for decades, and do another when given the choice between condemning an unjust war and being an apologist for an autocratic ally.
Even some folks in China have spoken out against the war, pointing to their government’s obvious hypocrisy. Naturally, their words were quickly censored, apparently deemed to be “irrational.”
China’s reputation can’t be helped by its topsy-turvy official advice to its citizens in Ukraine. They were initially advised to display Chinese flags on their cars, apparently under the assumption that this would offer some protection. That advice was quickly reversed when Chinese officials presumably realised that Beijing’s support for Putin could be viewed with some hostility by Ukrainians suffering the Russian onslaught.
While other countries advised their citizens to leave Ukraine before the invasion, China told its citizens to stay put. They are now understandably cowering in fear, awaiting evacuation.
In sum, when it comes to the war in Ukraine – possibly the greatest challenge the world has faced since World War II, apart from climate change – Chinese influence has so far been shown to be utterly impotent, if not complicit.
The Chinese foreign ministry has been reduced to diatribes against the United States and feeble calls for “restraint on all sides” – hardly the robust action of a great power in a time of extreme crisis, and hardly likely to enhance its reputation globally.
For all its economic wealth, political influence and military might – all greater than at any time in its history – China is left spouting verbal nostrums while cluster bombs blast the bodies of civilians in Ukrainian cities.
To be sure, China’s failure to join the world’s condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be of the greatest historical interest, and disapproval. But other events in February 2022 may also turn out to have undermined China’s global reputation and influence.
The Winter Olympic Games in Beijing are likely to be remembered by many people around the world not for athletic feats but for the bear hug between Putin and Xi – and Putin’s prideful visage perched high above the opening ceremonies – concerns about China’s human rights record, and the audacity of choosing a Uyghur athlete from an ethnic group against which China has been accused of committing genocide to light the Olympic flame.
Not to mention the incomprehensible public statements regarding whether Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai actually accused a senior Chinese official of sexual abuse, and restrictions on athletes and foreign journalists, among other things.
The Olympics may have solidified support for the Chinese government at home, although this is by no means certain given debates on Chinese social media over whether Eileen Gu, a photogenic, gold-winning Chinese-American skier competing for China, or Xiaohuamei, a shivering woman found chained in a dirty shack, best reflects today’s China.
What seems more certain is that for many people outside China, the 2022 Winter Olympics will be remembered as the “genocide games.” For others, they will at least have left a rather bad impression of the host country.
Meanwhile, February brought China’s supposed victory against Covid-19, trumpeted repeatedly over the last two years, into doubt. Since early 2020, the Chinese government has felt warmed by the glow of its success in beating back the virus.
However, an accelerating outbreak in Hong Kong is seeing tens of thousands of people being infected each day, a climbing death toll and a healthcare system that is profoundly overwhelmed – precisely what happened in other countries that China pointed to as proof of its superior model of governance.
Hong Kong and the rest of China are shut up tighter than ever before. Beijing refuses to acknowledge that Western mRNA vaccines are superior to Chinese vaccine technologies, or even to approve their use, potentially leaving many millions of people vulnerable to infection with Omicron and no alternative to the government’s “dynamic zero-Covid” policy.
At the same time, many other countries – including those that China deems to be in decline – are opening up and “living with” Covid-19 because they invested heavily in rapid development of mRNA vaccines and got them into people’s arms.
At best, Chinese officials miscalculated, or at worst they put politics and national hubris above protecting people’s health. Either way, they are now on the back foot, with China’s borders closed and more lockdowns likely to come.
Covid-19 testing at a Hong Kong housing estate. File Photo: GovHK.
China’s initial response to the outbreak in Hong Kong – to deliver crates of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), a cause célèbre of Xi – may bring into further doubt internationally the Chinese model for subduing the pandemic. When China is offering the world TCM and the United States is offering mRNA, it is manifestly evident whose reputation is up and whose is down.
In other respects, February 2022 may be the month that the world not only woke up to the existential threat posed by Putin’s Russia but also to the potential threat of an emboldened China on the wrong side of history. China’s neighbours, especially the dozen or more with which it has land or maritime border disputes, will certainly take notice of what is happening in Ukraine.
No doubt many people in Taiwan are watching with great interest – and more than a little horror. They will be noting the reactions of the Ukrainian government, military and people to Russia’s aggression, and indeed the world’s response to it.
So far, those reactions suggest that any attempt by China to subdue Taiwan by force could elicit a much more robust response from people living there than Beijing may have been imagining until very recently, and that the world’s reaction to such an event could be far more painful for China than officials there might have anticipated.
Already, the United States has sent a delegation to Taiwan to reaffirm its commitment to the island’s defence and apparently to signal to Beijing that the attention of Taiwan’s allies won’t be diverted by war in Ukraine.
Despite China’s dramatic rise and profound desire to recast the international system in its likeness, the solidarity that has already arisen from war in Ukraine may yet justify placing some faith in the prevailing world order. Ordinary people and much of the world have demonstrated surprising willingness to suffer the consequences of standing up to Putin’s war machine.
For anyone who observes international relations very closely, the response of Western countries over the last several days has been astonishingly quick and surprisingly robust; if hardly making up for their failure to do much after Russia annexed Crimea and while it was preparing its latest invasion. Assuming this solidarity does not wane, it may prevent or at least delay the arrival of a Chinese-led alternative world order.
China’s rise still has the potential to do good for the world; it also has the potential to do great harm. A question is whether the events of February 2022 will stimulate reflection in Beijing and prompt a shift away from its warrior-like view of the world, or whether the war being waged by Xi’s best friend is a sign of things to come.
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27. Sugio Takahashi, Pitfalls in Deterring a Taiwan Strait Conflict: “Unpreparable War,”
Conclusion:
Concerns about peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait are significantly growing in the world, along with China’s rapid and broad military modernization and recent assertive and provocative behavior against Taiwan. However, there are multiple serious challenges if the United States is to reinforce deterrence. Like a “hedgehog,” China can concentrate all of its military assets against Taiwan to achieve a superior military balance in theater. Like a “fox,” the United States needs to take care of its global strategic interests and would require a certain amount of time to restore a favorable military balance in the region. This temporal asymmetry in the military balance could cause China to underestimate U.S. resolve to defend Taiwan and thereby undermine the credibility of deterrence.
Should deterrence fail and a Taiwan Strait conflict break out, the United States and its allies would face some significant pitfalls, in addition to the actual military balance. Even though a Taiwan Strait conflict has the potential of escalating to the nuclear level, war aims must be limited, because regime change in China is simply impossible. U.S. decision makers and other key participants in the coalition, including Taiwan, need to formulate realistic and achievable war aims, and these war aims need to be coordinated for effective military operations, which will not be easy. The United States and its coalition partners would need to conduct military operations without the benefit of coordinated peacetime preparation overseen by the establishment of a standing combined headquarters. This will be a challenging task.
Today, deterrence in the Taiwan Strait is under grave challenge. But to restore adequate deterrence and prepare to “defeat” the adversary is an extremely difficult job. Unfortunately, under current policy, institutional “unpreparedness” cannot be avoided, but for deterrence purposes, the politico-military questions about war aims can and should be considered now to prepare for the most effective employment of military forces and the potential for war termination on favorable terms. More serious thinking and active debate on this issue should be kicked off in an international context. Sustaining deterrence now requires this as a start.
Sugio Takahashi, Pitfalls in Deterring a Taiwan Strait Conflict: “Unpreparable War,” Issue No. 516, March 1, 2022 – Nipp
Pitfalls in Deterring a Taiwan Strait Conflict: “Unpreparable War”
Sugio Takahashi
Sugio Takahashi is Head of the Defense Policy Division of the Policy Studies Department at Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies. The views reflected here are his own.
Introduction
With the end of the Cold War, the fear of all-out nuclear war drastically declined. However, armed conflicts often break out in the world: the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War in the Middle East; the prolonged Afghanistan War in Central Asia; and multiple ethnic conflicts in Africa. Even in Europe, conflicts have been experienced in Bosnia, Kosovo, Georgia, and Crimea. Compared to these regions, East Asia enjoyed relative peace and stability in the three decades after the end of the Cold War. But this stability in Asia was an ostensible one, as the sources of armed conflicts have not been removed at all from Asia. Two leftovers from the Cold War, the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula, remain serious geostrategic flash points with the danger of nuclear escalation.
Reflecting China’s highly assertive behavior on Taiwan and reigniting the era of “great power competition,” concerns about the situation in the Taiwan Strait are growing. Because of China’s significant decades-long effort to modernize its military both in quality and quantity, the ability to deter or defeat China’s possible attempt to forcibly reunify Taiwan is getting more and more challenging.
If deterrence in the Taiwan Strait fails, the United States and its allies may engage in the war to defend Taiwan. In such a scenario, political and institutional challenges associated with fighting a major war need to be considered, in addition to a quantitative-based assessment of the military balance. This paper intends to shed light on the political and institutional pitfalls associated with a possible Taiwan Strait conflict in an effort to help policymakers reinforce deterrence.
Diagnosis of the Situation: Disadvantages for the United States and Allies
Since 1948, when the Kuomintang (KMT) Party defected to Taiwan after its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war, the United States has provided virtual security guarantees to Taiwan, underpinned by its conventional maritime and air power superiority in the Western Pacific. This military superiority underwrites the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity for Taiwan based on the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). However, with China’s rapid and broad military modernization, U.S. conventional superiority can no longer be taken for granted. As the National Defense Strategy Commission Report in 2018 pointed out, the United States may face “decisive military defeat” in the Taiwan Strait under some strategic conditions.
In addition to the military balance, which is increasingly favorable for China, there are two major disadvantages for the United States. The first one is geography. China enjoys immediate proximity to the Taiwan Strait, but the United States needs to struggle with the tyranny of distance. This asymmetry allows China to possess military superiority during the first phase of the conflict, which is discussed in the next section.
Second, the stakes are different for China and the United States. Once a Taiwan Strait conflict breaks out, that would be an existential situation for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), because if China loses the conflict, the CCP’s legitimacy for domestic governance would be fundamentally undermined. In this sense, a Taiwan Strait conflict must be an “undefeatable war” for the CCP. If the CCP leadership realizes that defeat in the conflict may lead to the collapse of the CCP regime in China, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will escalate measures to defeat the United States and Taiwan at any cost.
On the other hand, the stakes for the United States are more ambiguous and abstract. If the United States is defeated in a Taiwan Strait conflict, it would be critical evidence that the United States is no longer a “superpower” or the world’s “indispensable power.” Its demise to “normal” power status would be accelerated and a China-led regional order would be formulated in Asia. In this sense, for the United States, a Taiwan Strait conflict would be a conditional “undefeatable war.” As long as the United States intends to maintain global leadership, it must not accept defeat but rather intensify its effort to win the war, even in the face of an unfavorable military balance. However, if U.S. grand strategy embraces more isolationist-oriented tendencies, the United States may avoid serious escalation of the conflict even if it faces military defeat in the Taiwan Strait. A defeat here would not be an existential threat to the United States. The U.S. Government will survive even if it faces a “decisive defeat” in a Taiwan Strait conflict, unlike the situation the CCP is likely to face, and in the absence of an escalaing conflict, the United States will not face a direct threat to its homeland. Consequently, the U.S. interest in avoiding an escalating crisis is obvious, and such an imbalance of interests could undermine the credibility of deterrence, as Keith Payne pointed out about three decades ago.
Such disadvantages for the United States make the traditional U.S. approach to Taiwan, characterized by strategic ambiguity and a largely rhetorically-based deterrence, problematic. In this regard, China may perceive it can win the war for Taiwan. If a challenger perceives that they can win a war, deterrence is likely to fail. To prepare for such a pessimistic scenario, it is time to shift U.S. and allied thinking on deterrence in the Taiwan Strait from rhetorical and diplomatic signaling to an actual military posture and institutionalized preparation to defeat the challenger. To reinforce deterrence, such serious preparation is now vitally important.
Engaging and winning a war is a highly complex challenge. The planner needs to address strategic problems including political and institutional issues, which have been overlooked for a long time but actually can be serious pitfalls to conducting military operations in defense of Taiwan. The following sections analyze these issues.
Possible “De-coupling” Between the Present and the Future
Unlike football games, the field of war is not fair and square. In military history, major powers in conflict rarely have symmetrical military structures. In the Cold War, the U.S.S.R enjoyed quantitative superiority in ground forces while the United States maintained qualitative superiority in air forces. In the Middle East, Arab states enjoyed strategic depth which does not exist for Israel. Such asymmetries exist between China and the United States, too. Both countries have asymmetrical nuclear and conventional forces along with geographical asymmetries. The asymmetries, including their implications for the timing of operations, can undermine the credibility of U.S. deterrence.
This asymmetry comes from the characteristic of a U.S. global military posture that is distributed all over the world. Simply comparing defense expenditures of the United States and China, one can easily conclude that the United States enjoys a significant military superiority, because American defense expenditures were three times larger than China’s in 2021. However, this simple comparison of overall defense expenditures obscures other truths. China deploys almost all of its military forces on the mainland. On the other hand, the U.S. military presence is globally distributed all over the world. Therefore, in East Asia, the regional military balance in China’s favor is significantly different from the global military balance. This asymmetry is significant for the outcome of a potential conflict, and thus for the likely functioning of deterrence.
Once war begins, the military balance is determined by those in-theater forces deployed before the start of the conflict. During this time, China can mobilize and deploy all of its forces near Taiwan, while the United States must deal with China’s military challenge only with its pre-deployed military forces in the Western Pacific. Therefore, China would have some degree of military advantage over the United States and its allies when it comes to in-theater military forces. When combined with the advantage of surprise attack by ballistic and cruise missiles, China would enjoy a favorable military balance during the first phase of the conflict, which may last several months.
To remedy this situation, the United States needs to mobilize its military forces from other parts of the world and to dispatch reinforcements to East Asia, like it did during Operation Desert Shield in 1990. This may require six month or more, but once mobilization has been completed, the United States will regain a favorable military posture in the Western Pacific and can launch counter-offensive operations. In short, the military balance will shift in accordance with the timeline. The longer the conflict continues, the more likely the United States will regain a regional military advantage, although China will enjoy superiority in the short term.
This temporal dimension of mobilization magnifies the risk of deterrence failure. If China recognizes that the United States has a strong resolve to fight a lengthy war requiring global mobilization, this temporal dimension does not necessarily matter for deterrence purposes. However, China may believe that the United States will not fight a lengthy war that carries the risks of escalation, and the tremendous cost of full mobilization and potentially extensive damage to the world economy. If so, China may conclude that the United States will accept defeat by the PLA’s successful short and decisive military operations. If China’s military planners and decision makers reach such a conclusion, U.S. deterrence may well collapse. Or, if China believes that it can disrupt American full mobilization through the use of influence operations, including fake news and sophisticated propaganda, or can block the American military’s reinforcement by anti-access forces, then deterrence may also fail.
This asymmetry makes the “de-coupling” issue very complicated. In the vocabulary of alliance management, the “de-coupling” problem is about the credibility of the commitment of one ally to the other allies. But this temporal issue impacts another aspect of “de-coupling,” namely, the link between the United States at the first phase of the war and the United States after the completion of mobilization and redeployment. If China recognizes that it can “de-couple” the current U.S. posture (early phase of conflict) from the future U.S. posture (after full-mobilization and reinforcement), deterrence in the Taiwan Strait may well fail.
Throughout history, opponents of the United States often assumed that the United States would avoid fighting a lengthy war, or even engage in war at all, e.g., Japan in 1941, North Korea in 1950, and Iraq in 1990. If the United States had sent strong signals at the right time to make its opponents understand that Washington would decisively engage in war to preserve the status quo or would fight a prolonged conflict, even at tremendous cost in resources, these past challenges could have been deterred.
But in reality, in these three cases, U.S. actions that would have demonstrated American resolve were “too late.” To avoid such misfortunes in the future and sustain deterrence, the United States and its allies need to consciously demonstrate their strong resolve to deter and defeat any Taiwan Strait conflict even if it takes a long time, requires significant resources, and costs much in blood and treasure. This is a critically important pre-crisis signal to deter the actual conflict. On the other hand, rhetorical and operational signals that telegraph such a robust resolve will tend to be understood as “escalatory” by some parts of the Western intellectual community that embrace a “de-escalation first” mindset in the event of crisis. But such preferences will water down the deterrence clarity needed for China to recognize the robust U.S. resolve to defend Taiwan, even at the risk of a prolonged and costly conflict, and deterrence in the Taiwan Strait would easily be undermined. The temporal asymmetry in military forces and the fragility of deterrence that results must be mitigated to tailor the best approach for strengthening deterrence in peacetime.
Multi-Countries’ Politico-Military Coordination
Should a Taiwan Strait conflict break out, there would be differences and similarities compared to multiple post-Cold War conflicts the United States and its allies experienced.
One difference is that the conflict would be fought with limited political objectives. Unlike the Afghanistan War and Iraq War, regime change in Beijing cannot be a realistic goal. The United States and its allies need to determine achievable political objectives and any military operation must support those objectives. This means that military operations in a possible Taiwan Strait conflict must not be conducted based simply on “military rationale.” Whether military planning and its execution appropriately reflect political objectives or not will play a critical role in determining how best to effectively employ military assets and achieve war termination.
The similarity is that the coalition would be formed under U.S. leadership. Not just the United States and Taiwan, but Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France might participate in the coalition.
Combining this similarity and difference, a possible Taiwan Strait conflict would pose highly complex politico-military issues for the United States and its allies. Major participants in the coalition will need to align their contributions to the war effort with national political objectives and to seriously consider how to end the war. Again, regime change for the People’s Republic of China is not realistic, even in a scenario where China starts the war. For regime change, the coalition needs to occupy the capital and most of China’s territory, as the United States did in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003, but such occupation is simply impossible against China. Or, another possible war aim would be to restore the status quo ante, like in the 1991 Gulf War. However, in light of the expected huge civilian casualty toll and devastation in Taiwan, and the anticipated military damage to the coalition, such a minimum war aim may not be supported by the coalition partners’ publics, as they may seek some degree of punishment against the initiator of the conflict.
Thus, the possible range of war aims of the participants would be set somewhere between regime change and preservation of the status quo ante. One major issue would be the status of Taiwan after the conflict. Even if the coalition succeeded in defending Taiwan, would these countries maintain the current “one-China” policy? Can or will the United States continue the “one-China” policy after suffering a huge amount of personnel and materiel losses as a result of the conflict? What about Taiwan? Or the other participants in the coalition? Will they agree to fight to preserve the autonomy of a political entity that is not recognized as an independent state or to seek an end to the conflict without restoring its autonomy?
Or just as the 1991 Gulf War, which was fought to ensure the Iraqi military’s retreat from Kuwait and restore the status quo ante, some countries may consider the status quo ante as the war aim, but others may set the abandonment of a “one China” policy as their war aim, intending to punish the CCP if they initiate the war. At the same time, however, as long as the coalition embraces an abandonment of the “one-China” policy, China will be unlikely to terminate the war and may instead be willing to escalate it. To make China accept a change in the “one-China”policy, coalition forces would have to inflict huge costs and damage on the aggressor, which would require close coordination between war aims and military operations.
One other possible war aim of coalition participants, particularly those that have conflicting territorial claims with China, would be to include resolution of those regional issues in any agreement to end the conflict. For example, if Japan joins the coalition, enforcing China’s change of position on some issues in the East China Sea, including the Senkaku Islands may be a part of its war aim. If the Philippines participates in the coalition, the status of Scarborough shoal and other issues, such as China’s acceptance of the Law of the Sea tribunal’s Permanent Court of Arbitration verdict about the nine-dash line in the South China Sea, would be set as their war aim.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the war aims of all coalition participants would converge. As noted, some may seek to maintain the simple status quo ante, and some may seek other objectives to punish Beijing, like revising the “one-China” policy. How to coordinate the war aims of the participants and how to terminate the war would not be easy. But without this coordination it would not be possible for the political leadership to give the proper political direction for military operations. Therefore, some high-level communications channel among political leaders would be indispensable, which does not exist now.
Military Command and Control without a Standing Combined Headquarters
Multilateral coordination is not just a challenge for the political leadership. Military leadership also has a similar problem. During the early days of the Cold War, the United States established two combined headquarters that included the military forces of allies: NATO in Europe and the Combined Forces Command (CFC) on the Korean Peninsula. Both were established in different contexts, as NATO headquarters was established after the conclusion of the Washington Treaty while the prototype of the CFC was established to fight an actual war, the Korean War, before concluding a formal security arrangement with the Republic of Korea. (In military jargon, “combined” means a multinational military arrangement and “joint” implies a multi-service arrangement in one country’s military). NATO headquarters and the CFC played significant deterrent roles against the Warsaw Pact and North Korea, respectively. But not all U.S. alliances have such standing combined headquarters. The U.S.-Japan alliance does not have one, and needless to say, the United States does not have a combined headquarters with Taiwan (even when the U.S–Republic of China Mutual Defense Treaty existed, a combined headquarters was not established). Considering the potentially huge magnitude of a Taiwan Strait conflict, if war should break out, the lack of a standing combined headquarters could be a source of serious disruption and misalignment in command and control. Unlike NATO and the CFC, the United States and Taiwan do not collaborate formally at the staff level, do not prepare coordinated contingency plans (CONPLANs) and operational plans (OPLANs), and do not conduct exercises to test plans and train staff.
Since Taiwan is located inside of INDO-PACOM’s area of responsibility (AOR), U.S. military operations would be commanded and controlled from its headquarters located in Hawaii. But the primary defender in the conflict, Taiwan, and the possible provider of staging bases with some defensive missions, Japan, do not assign permanent staff to INDO-PACOM now. Other likely participants in the coalition, the United Kingdom and France, also do not. This means that the degree of peacetime preparation in anticipation of a Taiwan Strait conflict is much more nascent than that of NATO and the U.S.-R.O.K. alliance. Of course, Taiwan and the United States may prepare for conflict, but those efforts occur more in a unilateral context than preparations in Europe and on the Korean Peninsula.
Establishment of a standing combined headquarters could fix this problem. In reality, however, that is impossible under current policy. Under the “one-China” policy, no major country maintains formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and a formal military alliance cannot be concluded and therefore a standing combined headquarters cannot be established. This is a drawback of the “strategic ambiguity” policy regarding Taiwan. However, if Taiwan and the United States seek to establish a formal military alliance and a standing combined headquarters, those actions themselves may trigger a war, because China will never accept such a formal military relationship between Taiwan and the United States, and they will use every means to prevent it.
In short, under current policy, a Taiwan Strait conflict is destined to be an “unprepared war,” regardless of widespread and deep concern over China. If a Taiwan Strait conflict occurs, a U.S.-led coalition will be formed, but that coalition must operate on a highly ad hoc basis without meaningful peacetime preparation. This is a paradox. To improve the situation, a standing combined headquarters should be established in advance of any conflict by potential key participants. Without adequate military preparation before war occurs, including the formation of a standing combined headquarters, the actual deterrent effect on China would be limited. However, given Taiwan’s unique political and diplomatic status, such preparation itself could trigger deterrence failure and spark a conflict.
If a Taiwan Strait conflict occurs, the scale and intensity of the military operation would be historic. However, the military operation would be conducted with insufficient peacetime preparation and the lack of a permanent institutional setting. In addition to coordinating the war aims of the participant countries, military command and control procedures for some countries, which may have national caveats, would be highly challenging. Even between Taiwan and the United States, a military operation would be executed with less preparation compared to NATO and the CFC. Coordination with other countries will be more difficult, as the turmoil and misalignment in command and control at the time of the conflict will be unavoidable and potentially exacerbated by the “fog of war.”
Conclusion
Concerns about peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait are significantly growing in the world, along with China’s rapid and broad military modernization and recent assertive and provocative behavior against Taiwan. However, there are multiple serious challenges if the United States is to reinforce deterrence. Like a “hedgehog,” China can concentrate all of its military assets against Taiwan to achieve a superior military balance in theater. Like a “fox,” the United States needs to take care of its global strategic interests and would require a certain amount of time to restore a favorable military balance in the region. This temporal asymmetry in the military balance could cause China to underestimate U.S. resolve to defend Taiwan and thereby undermine the credibility of deterrence.
Should deterrence fail and a Taiwan Strait conflict break out, the United States and its allies would face some significant pitfalls, in addition to the actual military balance. Even though a Taiwan Strait conflict has the potential of escalating to the nuclear level, war aims must be limited, because regime change in China is simply impossible. U.S. decision makers and other key participants in the coalition, including Taiwan, need to formulate realistic and achievable war aims, and these war aims need to be coordinated for effective military operations, which will not be easy. The United States and its coalition partners would need to conduct military operations without the benefit of coordinated peacetime preparation overseen by the establishment of a standing combined headquarters. This will be a challenging task.
Today, deterrence in the Taiwan Strait is under grave challenge. But to restore adequate deterrence and prepare to “defeat” the adversary is an extremely difficult job. Unfortunately, under current policy, institutional “unpreparedness” cannot be avoided, but for deterrence purposes, the politico-military questions about war aims can and should be considered now to prepare for the most effective employment of military forces and the potential for war termination on favorable terms. More serious thinking and active debate on this issue should be kicked off in an international context. Sustaining deterrence now requires this as a start.
Quoted in, Eric Edelman, Gary Roughead, et al., Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission, November 2018, p. 14.
Elbridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021), esp. pp.110-146.
Keith B. Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), esp. pp.17-35.
Institute for International Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2021 (February 2021).
About wartime oversight over military operations by political leadership, see Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers. Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (The Free Press, 2002).
About “hedgehog” and “fox,” see John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy (Penguin Books, 2018).
The National Institute for Public Policy’s Information Series is a periodic publication focusing on contemporary strategic issues affecting U.S. foreign and defense policy. It is a forum for promoting critical thinking on the evolving international security environment and how the dynamic geostrategic landscape affects U.S. national security. Contributors are recognized experts in the field of national security. National Institute for Public Policy would like to thank the Sarah Scaife Foundation for the generous support that makes the Information Series possible.
The views in this Information Series are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as official U.S. Government policy, the official policy of the National Institute for Public Policy or any of its sponsors. For additional information about this publication or other publications by the National Institute Press, contact: Editor, National Institute Press, 9302 Lee Highway, Suite 750 |Fairfax, VA 22031 | (703) 293- 9181 |www.nipp.org. For access to previous issues of the National Institute Press Information Series, please visit http://www.nipp.org/national-institutepress/informationseries/.
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28. Here's Why a Ukraine No-Fly Zone's a No-Go
At least bring on the "nuanced option."
Here's Why a Ukraine No-Fly Zone's a No-Go
NATO officials say it’s off the table, but there could be a “nuanced option.”
By MARCUS WEISGERBER and TARA COPP
MARCH 1, 2022 06:04 PM ET
The White House this week shot down the notion of installing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, explaining that the United States will not put forces in potential combat with nuclear-armed Russia. That hasn’t stopped people from pushing for one—including the president of Ukraine and even a few former Supreme Allied Commanders Europe. So we asked someone who ran a no-fly zone about it.
“A no-fly zone is not something you just snap your fingers and it magically happens,” said David Deptula, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general who in the late 1990s oversaw Operation Northern Watch over northern Iraq. “There are a lot of moving parts and pieces.”
On Tuesday, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on President Biden to launch a similar effort to sweep the airborne component of the Russian invasion force from Ukrainian skies. The idea has been endorsed by Philip Breedlove, a former Supreme Allied Commander
But the Biden administration moved swiftly to dash the idea. On Monday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki noted that using U.S. forces to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine would mean “potentially a direct conflict, and potentially a war with Russia, which is something we are not planning to be a part of."
The Pentagon soon followed suit. On Tuesday, a senior defense official told reporters at the Pentagon, “President Biden has been exceedingly clear—U.S. troops will not be fighting in Ukraine, and that includes in the use of a no-fly zone.…There's no discussion about it here. There's no debating about it here. It's not something that we have to take to the NAC [North Atlantic Council] or NATO.”
Deptula said it would be even harder to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine than it was over Iraq. Such an effort would require hundreds of airplanes: combat fighter jets, aerial refueling tankers, intelligence aircraft, command-and-control planes, even search-and-rescue helicopters to recover downed pilots.
And long before aircraft started flying, policymakers would have to answer a host of questions, Deptula said. “What's the desired end state? What is it that you're doing this for? Who's the authorizing authority for engagement?” he said. Where, exactly, would U.S. aircraft seek to keep others from flying? When would they be able to use lethal force to stop them?
The rules of engagement must be incredibly detailed, spelling out Russian targets. This includes whether NATO fighters could strike Russian aircraft or surface-to-air missile sites on the ground.
“You need to clearly define what the prerequisites are before you put this up,” Deptula said. “Then there is the whole issue of the numbers that are required to do this.”
As Psaki said, setting up a no-fly zone could lead to NATO and Russian jets firing on one another, escalating the conflict and pitting nuclear-armed powers against each other in open combat. In 2016, such concerns kept U.S. leaders from declaring a no-fly zone over Syria.
But the ramifications go beyond the U.S. and Russia; an attack on a U.S. aircraft could embroil the entire NATO alliance.
“A no-fly zone established over Ukraine to prevent the Russians from flying over Ukraine would involve placing NATO forces directly in conflict with the Russians,” Deptula said. That could lead to NATO invoking Article 5, the treaty clause that an attack on one member is an attack on all members.
A nuanced option
But Deptula said there could be a “nuanced option” that might permit a limited no-fly zone.
“If proposed by the [European Union] or the United Nations, if there was established a humanitarian exclusion zone from conflict in western Ukraine, one might posit that one could establish a no-fly zone there,” he said. “But you'd still want to have a degree of strategic ambiguity over who's going to enforce that to get around the complication of NATO and Russian forces directly engaging one another...But even that becomes difficult.”
No precedent
Compared to the hot war now going on in Ukraine, the late-1990s no-fly zone over Iraq was established in a far less intense environment. Combat jets did not fly 24/7 missions during Northern Watch, Deptula said.
“We randomly went into northern Iraq for five to six hours, four or five times a week [and] that required about 50 to 60 airplanes,” he said. “If you're talking about covering all Ukraine, you're talking about hundreds of airplanes in a highly orchestrated and complex operation.”
Rajan Menon, a senior research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, outlined other ways a no-fly zone over Ukraine would be different from those imposed over Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya.
“What do all those countries have in common? They have nothing resembling Russia's airpower, and their nuclear weapons. And while Russia wouldn't respond to a no-fly zone with nuclear weapons, there has been a change in its nuclear doctrine,” Menon said, citing Putin’s veiled threat that intervention “will lead [the U.S. and NATO] to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”
The United Kingdom has also ruled out the idea of a no-fly zone.
“NATO is a defensive alliance. This is a time when miscalculation and misunderstanding are all too possible,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said at a Tuesday press conference in Estonia. “When it comes to a no-fly zone…in the skies above Ukraine, we have to accept the reality that that involves shooting down Russian planes….That’s a very, very big step. It is simply not on the agenda of any NATO country.”
In Ukraine, Russia has not used all of its airborne firepower, and the Ukrainian military still has a functioning air force and air defenses, the senior defense official told Pentagon reporters Tuesday.
“There's a certain risk-averse behavior, they are not necessarily willing to take high risks with their own aircraft and their own pilots,” the senior U.S. defense official said Tuesday.
While the U.S. has been able to maintain visibility on the approximate number of missiles Russia has launched against Ukraine—400 as of Tuesday, with the bulk of those being short range ballistic missiles—officials don’t know how many missions the Russian air force has flown or the number of bombs it has dropped. The Pentagon believes Russia assembled about 75 fighter aircraft to attack Ukraine and has been able to confirm both Russian and Ukrainian aircraft losses. Russia has more than 1,500 combat aircraft, according to Flight International.
“The air picture, literally, it's very dynamic, and it changes constantly throughout the course of the day, you know, on who has who has more control or less control over a given bit of airspace,” the senior defense official said.”And there’s lots of airspace that simply isn't of concern to either Ukraine or Russia and so you don't see a lot of activity there.”
Jacqueline Feldscher contributed to this report.
29. Ukraine’s drone strikes reveal Russian planning failures, expert says
Excerpts:
Russian units are usually arrayed in battalion tactical groups, BTGs, with layered air defense and anti-drone capacity, said Bendett. But the forward elements of Russian forces have failed to operate as BTGs in Ukraine, frequently leaving behind their air defense assets “in inexplicable fashion,” he added.
“[In Ukraine], Russia doesn’t seem to display the very tactics, techniques and procedures that it’s practiced for years and sought to perfect in Syria...[to provide] adequate cover to its ground forces,” he said.
Bendett also pointed towards “the mythology of the Bayraktar” and how “Ukraine is winning the information war.”
“For all the Russian military talk about winning information war, they seem to be losing, and the videos of Bayraktars striking what appears to be Russian targets is feeding into that [Ukrainian] information campaign,” he said.
Bendett believes that the days of Bayraktar strikes are limited, though, should Russia reorganize its advance.
“If the Russian military reorganizes — if it sends in the BTGs, if it sends in adequate air defense capability, if it sends in its [electronic warfare] forces...it would become increasingly more difficult for Bayraktars to operate in an uncontested fashion,” said the drone expert. “They were definitely aware of the threat. They definitely practiced against the threat.”
Ukraine’s drone strikes reveal Russian planning failures, expert says
Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a small portion of the defenders’ arsenal has had a disproportionate effect — Ukraine’s handful of Bayraktar TB2 armed drones.
Despite their small number — around 20, according to pre-war comments made to Al-Monitor — the drones have been heavily utilized, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia, on the other hand, claims it has shot down some of the drones.
According to Stijin Mitzer, an open-source intelligence analyst, the small Turkish-made drones have destroyed at least 32 Russian vehicles since war broke out last week, though it’s impossible to independently confirm the total number of vehicles they’ve destroyed.
An expert on Russian drone warfare, Samuel Bendett of the CNA think tank, explained to Military Times that even the drones’ limited successes show that Russia is failing to implement its own air defense strategies. He added that Russia studied the lessons learned by Armenia in last year’s war with Azerbaijan, which saw the latter nation decimate Armenian positions and vehicles with Bayraktar drones and loitering munitions.
Perhaps the “biggest lesson” of that conflict, Bendett said, was that slow, low flying drones like the Bayraktar are effective against outdated air defense systems. Russian planners were confident that their force structure, which prioritizes modernized, layered air defense, would be able to prevent such a massacre — but “we’re not seeing...what Russians have advertised,” Bendett said.
Russian units are usually arrayed in battalion tactical groups, BTGs, with layered air defense and anti-drone capacity, said Bendett. But the forward elements of Russian forces have failed to operate as BTGs in Ukraine, frequently leaving behind their air defense assets “in inexplicable fashion,” he added.
“[In Ukraine], Russia doesn’t seem to display the very tactics, techniques and procedures that it’s practiced for years and sought to perfect in Syria...[to provide] adequate cover to its ground forces,” he said.
Bendett also pointed towards “the mythology of the Bayraktar” and how “Ukraine is winning the information war.”
“For all the Russian military talk about winning information war, they seem to be losing, and the videos of Bayraktars striking what appears to be Russian targets is feeding into that [Ukrainian] information campaign,” he said.
Bendett believes that the days of Bayraktar strikes are limited, though, should Russia reorganize its advance.
“If the Russian military reorganizes — if it sends in the BTGs, if it sends in adequate air defense capability, if it sends in its [electronic warfare] forces...it would become increasingly more difficult for Bayraktars to operate in an uncontested fashion,” said the drone expert. “They were definitely aware of the threat. They definitely practiced against the threat.”
And even should the Russians recover and counter the drone threat, he noted, “they were supposed to eliminate a lot of Ukrainian air defense capability from the...first hours of the campaign.” That includes the air bases where the drones are stored, fueled and equipped.
A portion of that responsibility, according to other experts and U.S. officials who spoke with Reuters, lies with the conspicuous absence of the Russian Air Force over the skies of Ukraine.
“The fact that there may be surviving [Bayraktars] somewhere is an embarrassment [to Russia],” said Bendett. “Clearly.”
Davis Winkie is a staff reporter covering the Army. He originally joined Military Times as a reporting intern in 2020. Before journalism, Davis worked as a military historian. He is also a human resources officer in the Army National Guard.
30. "Oh So Social" Conversation: Dr. Robert Gates and Dr. Michael Vickers
This will be an excellent discussion.
"Oh So Social" Conversation: Dr. Robert Gates and Dr. Michael Vickers
Date and time
Wed, March 23, 2022
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT
Dr. Robert Gates and Dr. Michael Vickers talk one-on-one.
About this event
Tags
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.
